Michelangelo's Notebook Part 9

"Ancient history is what we are and where we came from. You know the old saying 'Those who forget history-' "

" 'Are doomed to repeat it.' "

"Lots of people know the quote, but do you know who said it?"

"No."

"A Spanish philosopher named George Santayana. He was born in the middle of the nineteenth century and died in 1952. Your grandfather actually met him once."

"You always go the long way to get home?"

"Your grandfather was born in Ireland but his name wasn't Ryan. It was Flynn, Padraic Flynn- which figures, because Flynn in Gaelic is O'Flionn, which means red-haired."

"Jesus wept," Finn groaned. "You mean my name is really Finn Flynn?"

"He changed it legally when he left Cork in a bit of a rush. He was part of the Easter Uprising in 1916 and had to get out of town. He came to Canada and he wasn't in business. He was a bootlegger. He got rich by taking rowboats full of booze across the Detroit River from Windsor."

"This is all very interesting, but where's it leading?"

"When he got to the American side of the river he met up with my grandfather, Michelangelo Valentini. He changed his name too. He called himself Mickey Valentine but everyone called him Mickey Hearts. He was famous for a while, like your grandfather. Patrick Ryan retired after Prohibition and moved to Ohio. Mickey Hearts was gunned down in the seventies gang wars in New York. After that, Gotti and his freaks took over."

"Okay, so we both come from criminal backgrounds-if it's true, which I'm beginning to wonder about any of this. Just what is your point?"

"The point is neither my grandfather nor yours wanted their children growing up criminals. For them it was rooted in the necessities of poverty. For their children there was the freedom of education. They both went to Yale, you know. During the war my father worked for the judge advocate general and your father worked for the OSS."

"I didn't know that," said Finn, "but I still don't see what it has to do with Crawley's murder or my boyfriend, Pete's."

"I'm beginning to think it has a lot to do with it, at least peripherally."

"So finish your story."

"After the war my father went to work for the CIA and your old man taught anthropology-which meant, in the early days, the fifties and early sixties, he did a lot of traveling, mostly to Southeast Asia and Central America. He even looked the part-horn-rimmed gla.s.ses, bald, red beard, big smile, tweed jacket with elbow patches . . . he even smoked a pipe. n.o.body paid any attention to him. He wrote papers on the Hmong and the Montagnards in Vietnam and Cambodia before most people could find the places on the map. He also correctly predicted the revolution in Cuba and pointed out Fidel Castro as a potential problem several years before he came to power."

"You're saying he was a spy."

"No. Not officially, but my father enlisted him as a freelancer-one of the best in the business-and your dad, in turn, recruited me. He was an information specialist on a human scale. I broadened out into history and . . . other specialties."

"Like crime?"

"I was connected. My grandfather was still alive then. My father had broken off any relationship years ago, just the way your father was estranged from his father, but I was always curious about my roots, and like it or not, Mickey Hearts was blood."

"Which equals murder and stolen art."

"Art theft has been a major source of income for me for the past twenty years: finding it, recovering it, authenticating it. I work for private individuals, insurance companies, museums. Anyone who needs me."

"Including brokering it for the thieves."

"Sometimes it has to be that way, or the art suffers."

"Ars Gratia Artis," Finn scoffed. "Art for art's sake. And a big fee." She shook her head again. "We're a long way from my dad."

"Not very far-or your mom either."

"Mom? She's a little old lady."

"She might surprise you. She was as deep into it as your father."

"Into what, exactly?"

"Your father wasn't killed because he was trying to destabilize some rickety tin-pot dictator in some banana republic. He was killed because he discovered that the tin-pot dictator-a man named Jose Montt-was murdering villagers by the truck-load and raping archaeological sites all over central Guatemala. The man who actually did the killing was the head of one of Montt's death squads, Le Mano Blanco, the White Hand. His name was Julio Roberto Alpirez. They were doing a hundred million dollars' worth of business a year in looted artifacts. Your father got in their way. He also made a stink about it, which was even worse."

"What happened to Alpirez?" Finn asked, her voice taut, her face even paler than usual.

"He died," said Valentine.

"How?"

"I killed him," said Valentine, his voice flat. "He had an apartment in Guatemala City, Zone Four behind the old Church of St. Agustin on Avenida Quattro Sur." Valentine took a sip from the bottle on the table in front of him. He stared at Finn but she could tell that he wasn't looking at her at all. "I went to his apartment and I found him asleep, alone, stoned out of his mind on cocaine and drunk on twelve-year-old single malt. I taped his hands and feet and then I woke him up with a lit cigarette and I talked to him for a few minutes and then I wrapped a very thin piece of piano wire around his throat and pulled it tight and cut his head off. The artifact thefts stopped after that.

"Your father was my teacher, my mentor and my friend and I come from a long line of people who are great believers in the power of revenge." Valentine finished off his beer and stood up. "It's late. I'm going to bed. You should try to get some sleep too. Your room's at the end of the hall." He gave her a brief smile, turned and left the room.

23.The residence of the cardinal archbishop of New York is a handsome one-hundred-year-old mansion at 452 Madison Avenue, directly behind St. Patrick's Cathedral and connected to it by an underground pa.s.sageway. The first floor of the mansion, generally referred to as the museum, is filled with formal antique furniture and is usually used for photo opportunities, c.o.c.ktail parties and various high-level fund-raising events. The second floor contains offices and the private rooms for the archbishop's staff, which includes a cook, three housekeepers, the two priests who serve as the archbishop's secretaries and a monsignor who acts as chancellor of the archdiocese. The two "secretaries" are both trained marksmen, have completed a number of special weapons and tactics courses at the FBI Academy in Quantico and are usually armed when accompanying the cardinal archbishop off the premises of the mansion or the cathedral itself.

The archbishop's private apartment on the third floor of the mansion includes a bedroom, bathroom, small kitchen, sitting room and a study. The sitting room is spa.r.s.ely furnished with a couch, a few chairs, a small but well-stocked bar and a very large color television set. The study has several large stained-gla.s.s windows, a cathedral ceiling and a long, old, refectory table the archbishop uses as a desk. The apartment's bedroom lies between the study and the sitting room and is small, a mere twelve by fourteen feet. There is a king-sized bed, and a single window, covered with brown-and-white draperies that match the bedspread. The gla.s.s in the drapery-covered window is bullet-proof and plastic laminated to prevent splintering in case of a bomb attack. Over the head of the bed there is a rather tasteless painting of Christ entering Jerusalem on a donkey, and on the wall opposite there is a large fourteenth-century gold crucifix that once was part of the altar of the Cathedral of Wroclaw. At the far end of the room is a tall ironwood vestry containing the archbishop's ecclesiastical garb including copes, chasubles, surplices, several scarlet-and-black mantelettas, or cloaks, edged in gold thread and ermine and an emerald-studded gold pectoral cross he favored for the evening ma.s.ses on Friday, the only day he personally offered the sacrament.

The man known variously as Father Ricardo Gentile, a priest of Rome, Peter Ruffino of the Art Recovery Tactical Squad and Laurence G. MacLean of Homeland Security moved silently through the rooms of the archbishop's third-floor apartment, his footsteps hushed by a pair of cheap black Nike knockoffs. He had hidden in a small storeroom behind the sacristy until the cathedral closed at eleven, then followed the directions he'd been given to the bas.e.m.e.nt crypt and the pa.s.sageway leading to the mansion.

For a city and a country so recently and violently attacked, the ease with which he'd reached the private apartment of His Eminence David Cardinal Bannerman had been truly alarming. The Americans were still amateurs at this sort of thing, and remarkably innocent, still refusing to accept that they could be so deeply hated by people seriously intent on doing them harm for no other reason than their being American. The Vatican had been dispatching a.s.sa.s.sins to do the Devil's work in the name of G.o.d for the better part of a millennium or more and other nations had been doing it for much longer.

There had been more political a.s.sa.s.sinations in Switzerland by the twelfth century than had ever taken place in the United States and the only country with fewer was its next-door neighbor, Canada. Even that bland and desolate country of ice and snow had suffered more distinct "terrorist attacks" in its time. It was, Father Gentile knew, mostly a matter of not learning from history-which the Americans were very good at, preferring to believe that, on a world level, all other nations revolved around them like planets around the sun. Perhaps a few more wealthy, certifiable zealots and madmen like Osama bin Laden and airliners thrown like so many sticks and stones would eventually teach them.

He reached the open doorway of the bedroom and paused to screw the suppressor onto the tapped muzzle of the ugly little Beretta Cougar he carried in his right hand. He looked into the room. Bannerman was asleep, snoring lightly, his thick gray hair on the single pillow. He slept on his back in the exact center of the large bed, hands folded across the coverlet like a corpse, sheet drawn up to his chin. Gentile could see the collar of his silk pajamas. Probably from Gammarelli's, around the corner from the Pantheon. He crossed the room and sat down on the edge of the bed. He gently tapped the cold end of the suppressor against the bridge of the cardinal archbishop's patrician Irish nose.

"Wake up," he said quietly.

Bannerman's snoring broke and he muttered something. Father Gentile rapped him on the nose a little harder. The cardinal's eyes shot open, the pupils widening, pain creasing the man's forehead.

"What the h.e.l.l?"

"Wake up," Gentile said again. "We must talk. Keep your voice down; believe me, you don't want us to be interrupted."

Bannerman's eyes crossed in a silly expression as he focused on the muzzle of the suppressor. It was now four inches away from his nose. A shot that close would blow his brains all over Jesus and his donkey.

"Who are you?" said Bannerman. He was an old man, well into his seventies, but his voice was still firm and strong.

"Vincit qui si vincit," the priest with the gun responded. He conquers who conquers himself.

Bannerman's eyes widened at the quotation. It was something every man in his position knew and also dreaded. In those few words and their response lay the seeds of a scandal of unimaginable proportions. Bannerman knew in an instant who the man was, what his authority allowed him and whom that authority came from. He also knew that he would be a dead man if he didn't give the correct answer within the next few seconds. They were words he had never expected to say.

"Verb.u.m pat sapient," he whispered. A word is enough for a wise man.

"Are you a wise man, Eminence?" asked Father Gentile.

"I know what you are here for. I can read the e-mails from ASV as well as any other man."

"What am I here for, Eminence, the Archivo Secreto Vaticano aside?"

"You're here because of the murder of Alexander Crawley. To investigate his death." The cardinal eased himself up on the pillow, eying Gentile in the half-light coming through the bedroom window.

"Only partly, Eminence. I have been charged with a much more complex a.s.signment than that. Crawley is no more than the tip of the iceberg. There will be more killings, as you well know. The more killing, the more danger to the Church and her situation. This cannot be allowed to happen."

"What do I have to do with any of this?" asked Bannerman. "This is none of my doing. It all happened more than half a century ago. This is all Spellman's doing-him and his d.a.m.n chorus boys! He was Pacelli's friend, not me."

"You are Archbishop Spellman's inheritor, I'm afraid. It comes with the proud-looking manteletta you keep in your closet over there. It is as much a part of your congregation as the people of New York."

Bannerman sat up fully, aware that the gun barrel followed his movements, its aim never far from a spot roughly between his eyes. He watched the man sitting beside him on the bed carefully. Early middle age, fit, ordinary face, the obscenity of his holy collar. He wondered if the man really was a priest at all, or whether the guardians of the ASV simply chose their operatives wherever they could. Not that it mattered. What mattered was that the man was here, now, in his bedroom and with a gun.

"What do you want?"

"I want as much information on the boy as possible."

"There is very little. All the files concerning the child were destroyed when he entered the country. It was part of the agreement to take him in the first place."

"It was an agreement made with criminals. It was an agreement made under duress. You know as well as I do that such agreements have no weight. It is my understanding that files were secretly maintained, that you have kept track of him through the years."

"This is all too dangerous."

"Of course it's dangerous. If it was a walk in the park, as you Americans call it, I would not be here."

"If the child's existence were to be discovered the repercussions would be enormous. The Church has gone through a great deal in recent years. Things have been difficult."

"Of course. If all those whining victims had kept their mouths shut none of this would have happened, right?" The priest with the gun shook his head. "Any evangelist television preacher could quote you Ecclesiastes 11:1, Eminence: 'Cast your bread upon the waters and it shall be returned to you tenfold.' What most of them would forget to tell you is that it works both ways, good as well as bad. That's what this is all about. I need the files on the boy. In addition, I will need as much information as you can give me about the Grange Foundation."

"One has nothing to do with the other!"

"Crawley's murder would indicate otherwise." The only thing he had been told by his employers was that an organization by that name would bear closer scrutiny and that Crawley's unfortunate demise was somehow involved. The cardinal's violent reaction was instructive.

"You are trifling with information that can only come to no good. This is insanity. One false move and I will be pilloried in the media."

"Then perhaps in your next ma.s.s you should pray that I make no false moves, for all our sakes. Now where can I find the files on the boy?"

The cardinal looked at the gun and then into the face of the man holding it. Lying was not an option. "They are kept in the records of the Community of Sant'Egidio at St. Joseph's Church in Greenwich Village."

Gentile nodded. Sant'Egidio was a large lay movement that did a lot of work with orphans and displaced children. "Under what name?"

"Frederico Botte."

"How do I get the files?"

"If I ask for them the office would become suspicious at my interest. Not to mention the fact that the file is very old. It will not have been computerized."

"I can deal with that. The Grange Foundation?"

"I will find out what I can."

"No intermediaries, no secretaries. I deal with you only."

"All right. How do I get in touch with you?"

"I will get in touch with you." He reached into the other pocket of his dark jacket and took out a tiny Globalstar satellite pager. He dropped it onto the cardinal's scarlet chest. "Keep this on you at all times. It vibrates. Call the number you see in the little screen. The number will change. Call from this phone." He dropped another small device beside the pager-an extremely small cell phone.

"One thing more," said Gentile, standing.

"Yes."

"Don't try to have me followed. Don't try to trace me through the machinery. Under no circ.u.mstances call the police. The one thing you must know is that I am not your enemy. You must also know that I would not hesitate to sacrifice you for the common good. Don't be foolish, Eminence. Please."

With that, Gentile slipped away, leaving the archbishop of New York shaking nervously in his own bed. Outside, over the sharp neo-Gothic spires of the cathedral, the moon began to rise.

24.She went to his bed and found him still awake in the darkened room, hands clasped behind his head, staring at the ceiling, perhaps reliving a distant violent past. He turned to her as she stood beside the bed, the moon at her back, unb.u.t.toning her shirt, staring down at him.

"You don't have to do this, you know."

"I know." She pulled off the shirt, then reached behind her back to unclasp her bra, tossing it on the floor. She slipped the b.u.t.tons on her jeans one by one, knowing that he was watching her, trying not to think about what he was thinking, trying not to think of anything at all except the moment. He said nothing more.

She slid off her jeans and the plain white cotton panties with them and stood there finally, naked in front of him, the light from behind her turning her hair into a glowing tangled halo, catching the curve of her hips and the long, strong muscles of her thighs with a soft plain glow. She waited like that for a moment, letting him see her, wanting him to see everything that she was, simple in the moonlight, and then she got into the bed with him, slipping under the covers, remembering the touch of his hand on her thigh at the colonel's house, knowing this was going to happen even then, the touch like a fist in an iron glove and also as tender as a lover.

For the second time she wondered about the abstract moments and twists of fate that could turn a person's life upside down within the s.p.a.ce of time from one sunrise to another. For a split second she thought about Peter and that final, terrible cry, and bizarrely she suddenly had an image of her mother's dressing table in the house on Doderidge Street back in Columbus and the wedding photograph in its silver frame.

Her mother and father standing together, somber-faced, her father in tweeds and tortoisesh.e.l.l-rim gla.s.ses towering over her mother-so much younger, bright-eyed in a perfect wedding dress and holding a spray of white flowers in her hand, the tall trees and the rose gardens of Whetstone Park in the background, all in that pale yellow of old black-and-white photographs. For a moment she felt very young as she brushed against the hot dry skin of Valentine's hip and then it was too late for good and all and he reached out and put his hand on her flat, taut belly and she turned to him and he slipped into her immensely as though he had belonged there from the beginning.

He began to move and she moved with him and none of the other things mattered even though she had no idea if she was doing it for him and his pain, for her father or for herself. Nothing mattered at all except right now and that was enough for both of them.

25.Lieutenant James Cornwall of the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives unit attached to the ALIU-the art-looting division of the OSS-in western Germany sat on a rock with his sergeant trying to find a way into the farmhouse hidden behind the screen of trees. He wasn't having very much success. His group was running out of food, there were dozens of retreating German patrols in the area, and according to the sergeant, they were sitting ducks if even one German tank decided to move in their direction. He lit a Lucky, pushed his metal-rimmed gla.s.ses up on his forehead and wondered how a man who'd completed two years of study at the Sorbonne in Paris and graduated summa c.u.m laude from Yale could wind up sitting on a rock in Bavaria beside a man who stank of sweat and cigarettes and who carried a Garand rifle strapped to his back. He was a.s.sistant curator of prints and drawings at the Parker-Hale Museum. Right now he should have been having breakfast at the Hotel Brevoort and palling around with Rorimer and Henry Taylor from the Met, not getting shot at in Bavaria.

"So what do you think, Sergeant?"

"I don't get paid to think, sir."

"Don't be an a.s.s."

"Yes, sir." The sergeant paused and lit a smoke from the crumpled pack he kept in the well of his combat boot and looked out over the early-morning mist that lay on the hillside and filtered in through the trees. "Well, sir, except for the sniper, I don't think we're dealing with combat troops. It's something else, sir."

"Like what?"

"Some kind of special mission. Six trucks-Opels, not Mercedes. That means they're gas, not diesel, and that means they're meant to move fast. Six trucks like that wouldn't be used to guard troops, and they wouldn't waste more gas on them lights like they were doing last night. It's maybe bigwig Krauts taking a powder, but you'd think they'd be in staff cars. The officer I saw was wearing a general's uniform but he was too young, no more than thirty-five. He's gotta be a phony."

"Your conclusion?"