Michelangelo's Notebook

by Paul Christopher

  The other wallet was filled with the Homeland Security credentials of one Laurence Gaynor MacLean. Both sets of documents were authentic and subjectible to deep background checks. As Father Gentile was well aware, despite endless denials of its existence, the Vatican secretary of state had the single-longest-running intelligence department in the world, an organization that in one form or another had existed since St. Peter came to Rome and underground Christians had chalked the sign of the fish on catacomb walls. Documents and the “legends” to go with them were never a problem. Gentile decided on the Homeland Security persona of good old Larry MacLean, working for a minute in front of the bathroom mirror to spin away his Italian accent and replace it with something vaguely Midwestern, then left the room.

  He went down to the lobby, asked for a taxi to take him into the city and half an hour later he was in Manhattan, checking into the Gramercy Park Hotel and telling the desk clerk that Delta had lost his luggage once again. He registered as Laurence G. MacLean and paid with a Bank of America Visa check card that was hooked into what was effectively a bottomless well. He spent ten more minutes in front of the bathroom mirror of his suite practicing a flat Kansas drawl, then left the hotel and began to work.

  17

  The store was called simply “Maroc” and occupied a tiny space on Lafayette Street about three blocks away, at the corner of Grand. A tinkling bell announced Finn and Valentine as they entered. It was like some kind of doorway that took them halfway across the world—the air was suddenly full of the scent of cumin, caraway and cinnamon, the walls hung with rugs of every size and color, tables piled on tables, stacks of everything from baskets to ancient muskets—all of it overseen by a fat man at the back smoking an oval cigarette and wearing a fez, dressed in a pure white linen suit that made him look as though he’d just stepped out of Casablanca. Finn expected Humphrey Bogart to appear at any minute with Ingrid Bergman right behind him. Valentine gave the man a small Islamic salutation and the man replied in kind. He looked at Finn curiously and Valentine introduced them.

  “Finn Ryan, this is my friend Hassan Lasri.”

  “Salaam,” said Finn, doing her best. Lasri smiled.

  “Actually it is Shalom, since I am a Juif Maroc as they say in that other language of my nation, but it was a good effort.” He smiled again. “I am like a well-trained dog—I answer to any number of calls, especially from such a pretty checroun as yourself.”

  “Checroun?”

  “Redhead. They are said to be particularly lucky, among other things, and since my own name brings me nothing but bad luck . . .” He shrugged.

  “Lasri means left-handed in Arabic,” Valentine explained.

  “The worst kind of luck for an African like myself I’m afraid, but maybe you’ll bring me better.” He gestured toward a pair of ornately carved chairs and they sat down. He snapped his fingers incredibly loudly and a young man appeared in a long white robe and a small white embroidered cap. He gave Finn one wide-eyed appreciative look, then turned to Lasri, who spoke in rapid-fire Arabic for a few moments. The young man nodded, gave Finn another look and then disappeared.

  “That is my nephew, Majoub. Clearly he is madly in love with you.”

  Finn could feel herself blushing.

  “Have no cause for embarrassment. You are very beautiful, it is true, and a wonderful example of a checroun, with sprinklings of freckles like stars and skin like milk, but I’m afraid Majoub would fall in love with a female chimpanzee if one came in the door. He is at that age. Harmless, believe me.” A few minutes later the young man was back with an enameled tray loaded down with three small cups, a Moroccan coffeepot and a plate of something brown, sticky and very fattening. Majoub cast a final glance at Finn, sighed and then disappeared for good. Hassan poured the coffee, spooning a tooth-aching amount of sugar into each cup and then passed around the plate of sticky brown things. “I have no idea what Majoub calls these but they are made from toffee and pecans and cashew nuts and are supposedly good for one’s prostate. You do not have to worry about such things, Finn, but we men must look to our health.” He grinned, popped two of them into his mouth one after the other and then washed them down with a swallow of coffee. Finn took a small bite out of the corner of one of the little bars and felt twenty years of careful dentistry in serious jeopardy. They were delicious.

  “Now then,” said Hassan, “what is it that I can help you with today?”

  “A man was killed yesterday. A ritual dagger was used. A koummya.”

  “Oh yes,” said Hassan, nodding. “The director of the museum.”

  “You’ve heard about this already?” asked Finn, startled.

  “Americans are Americans, Arabs are Arabs—even Jewish Arabs like me. You think the world runs one way. We know it runs another. When a koummya is used to still someone’s tongue that is Moroccan business, Moroccan news, therefore we hear about it quickly.” He smiled with a twinge of sadness. “These days it is better for people with large noses and dark skin to have their story straight before the men from Homeland Security show up at your door with your ticket to the Guantanamo Hilton.”

  “Tell us about the koummya,” said Valentine.

  “The koummya, or sometimes called the khanjar, comes from the northern part of the country. It is usually thought of as a right of passage, a sign of a boy’s admission into manhood, you know?”

  Valentine nodded. Finn waited. She thought about having another one of the little gooey pecan-cashew-toffee things and then decided against it. Just as Hassan Lasri produced a little silver box and lit another one of his oval cigarettes Finn found herself wishing she smoked. No smoking, no drinking, no pecan-cashew-toffee things and no sex—she might as well be a nun.

  Lasri took a long drag on his cigarette, blew the smoke out of his wide hairy nostrils and popped another square into his mouth. He chewed and looked thoughtfully at Finn. “Of course,” he continued, his mouth still half full, “the koummya had another purpose.”

  “What was that?” asked Finn.

  “Other than being used for circumcisions—Arabs and Jews alike circumcise their children, you know—it is only the Christian and Asian infidels who do not—other than that, the dagger was used to cut out the tongues of traitors. Traditionally, that is; I haven’t heard of it being done recently. ‘To still the tongues of traitors’ is the official terminology.”

  “Could that have applied to Crawley?” asked Finn.

  “How should I know, my dear? I never met the man. I do, however, know where that particular koummya came from.”

  “How?”

  “A policeman showed me a picture of it this morning. A man named Delaney. He was apparently aware that I was head of the local Moroccan Friendship Alliance. At any rate, I told him what the dagger was, its background and uses.”

  “And whom it belonged to?” asked Valentine.

  “He didn’t ask me.”

  “But you know.”

  “Of course. Except for the cheap tourist-quality knives they sell in the souks in Marrakech and Fez and Casablanca and the like, a properly made koummya—especially a Moorish one of great antiquity—is as personal as a fingerprint.” He grinned broadly and popped yet another square into his mouth. Finn drank more coffee. “Not to mention the fact that the owner’s name is usually embossed in silver on the hilt or the scabbard.” He smiled. “Mr. Delaney, of course, does not read Arabic.”

  Finn’s brain was beginning to cloud over from the wreaths of smoke wafting around the store from the man’s cigarettes. He swallowed, drank the last of his coffee, tonguing up a mouthful of the fine-grained grounds at the bottom of the cup and smiled again. “The grounds are very good for the colon, you know,” he said. “Moroccan men have a very low incidence of colon cancer.” He opened his silver box, took out another cigarette and lit up. Here was a classic example of what they called an oral-compulsive back in psych 101. “On the other hand,” he continued, “they have a horribly high incidence of lung cancer.” Lasri co
ughed harshly as though making his point.

  “The dagger,” murmured Valentine.

  “It came from the collection of a young men’s private school in Connecticut,” said the man.

  “The name of the school?” asked Valentine.

  “Greyfriars,” said Lasri, eyeing the last gooey square on the plate. “The Greyfriars Academy.”

  18

  He entered the room and went through his ritual with the uniform. Naked, he crossed the room to his chair and sat down. He examined the leather cover of the book as he always did when he came here and then opened it carefully, turning the pages filled with minute but perfectly clear script, pausing every now and again to whisper the words like hateful prayers: “Genus humanum quod constat stirpibus tantopere inter se diferentibus non est origine unum descendus a protoparentibus numero iisdem.”

  For it was true: all men were different, their origins different, some base, some blessed, some damned from birth. Some were born as demons, others as saints. Since the words were immutable and divine they could not be argued with and so, by their very nature, following those words would be the act of a divine. It was all so simple when the order of it all could be seen.

  He turned the page and the farm stood before him as it had been, the photographs fading now, the faces gray, but full of life in memory. He knew each one like a brother. Patterson in his glasses like that Beatle who was shot wore, Dorm, the guy they called Dormouse, Winetka, Bosnic, Teitelbaum and Reid. Pixie Mortimer, Hayes, Terhune, Dickie Biearsto. He could see them all, cold in the late winter chill, slipping up through the forest, ten guys from the forty-four playing baby-sitter to a bunch of art freaks from back home. But in the end they all smartened up, didn’t they? They were spies first and art types second and they’d all been in the fucking war long enough to know that war was for what you could get out of it once you got by the survival part. War was a game of bullies and bastards, not heroes.

  There it was, right in front of him, the Altenburg farm and beyond it the little tumbledown Benedictine abbey called the Althof, long abandoned for want of monks or nuns in a part of the world that had forgotten that God had ever existed. Rain was coming down, cold and thin, the way his blood felt and he dropped his neck a little farther down into the collar of his jacket, not that it did much good. He was soaked through, his nose was running and he couldn’t keep a cigarette lit for more than a few seconds before it fizzled out on him.

  They’d come down out of the mountains at last, moving through the trees down whatever goat paths they could find. There had been no way to stick together, and eventually the squad had come apart like a crumbling piece of old stone. There were ten noncoms, all with Garands and .45s; Pixie, the skinny fruit from Jersey City carrying a thirty-cal. across his back like he was Christ, and Dick Hayes, the wild-hair bald guy carrying the mortar and talking about what he’d really like to do—and I mean really like to do would be to slllide it into that Greer Garson babe—and he’d felt that way ever since he saw her in Mrs. Miniver. When Pixie told him she’d married the guy who played her son in the movie he almost shit and told Pixie that before the war was over he’d find an excuse to cut his fuckin’ good-for-nothing nuts off. Ten right guys and the three spooks from the ALIU, the Art Looting Investigation Unit, which everybody knew was part of the OSS and all they really wanted to do was catch Nazis with their hands in the cookie jar. McPhail, Taggart and Cornwall. McPhail thought he was some kind of big shit with his Boston accent and that funny Skull and Bones signet ring he wore; Taggart talked to himself, and Cornwall didn’t talk to anyone, he just had that notebook of his out all the time, writing. Altogether a weird crew.

  Dick Hayes, the bald guy with the mortar took the first hit. It was one of those Russian SVT-40s the Germans liked so much; it had that flat, slap-in-the-face sound that hardly left an echo, even in that kind of countryside. Hayes was just ahead of him and to the right and the sergeant saw his whole right arm blown off at the shoulder leaving nothing but some blood and bone and some white twisted things he figured were tendons. Then that sound like someone dropping the lid on a child’s desk in grade school and then Hayes just dropped and the way he was lying you could look into his rib cage and see his lung and his heart swimming around in a lot of blood and purple stuff. One shot and he was gone and that was it for him and any chance with Greer Garson.

  Everybody hit the dirt, and it seemed like everyone but Hayes made it to the ditch that ran at an angle across the meadow, more like it had been some kind of earthworks defense a few hundred years ago when they were fighting some other stupid war. Anyway they all got down behind it. The three guys from the ALIU were all lieutenants except for Cornwall, who was a captain, but none of the three of them knew shit about how to fight a fucking war, so they left it up to him because he was a sergeant and he’d also managed to keep from getting killed over here for the last few years and he didn’t think any of them had been here longer than since Christmas.

  The sergeant looked up for a second to get his bearings and the Kraut with the SVT took another shot, knocking out a groove in the dirt about three inches to the left of his head. He got what he wanted, though—the lay of the land.

  The farm looked more French than German: half a dozen buildings including a barrackslike barn probably used for cows, a big house—low, two stories, the thatched roof like a hat pulled low, heavy linteled window with the glass shot out long ago leaving black holes like dead eyes. All of this surrounded by a stone wall about five feet high and three feet wide and covered with half a dozen generations of blackberry and bramble—more effective than barbed wire. The wall ran off to the left and connected with the old abbey, two stories high like the farmhouse, the roof slate looking very dark in the light rain. The windows on the second floor of the abbey were very narrow and most of them were covered by wooden shutters. Some of them hung on one hinge, letting you look into the blackness beyond. Almost certainly where the firing had come from.

  The sergeant got out the little pair of caramel-colored binoculars he’d traded a Canadian for and took a closer look at everything. They were on the upslope of the meadow that went down to the road so from where they were they could see over the wall and even over the roofs of the farm buildings. That’s when he started figuring something was different about this whole thing because behind the barracks-type building, the big low barn, he could see half a dozen of those three-tonner Opel Blitzes the Krauts used for just about everything. These ones were closed with canvas backs. They didn’t have any unit designations that the sergeant could see except for the bumper plate on the one closest to the edge of the building. The number plate had SS lightning bolts on it but the metal pennant plugged into the passenger side ferrule was orange, which meant they were feldjager—military police. Six three-ton trucks capable of carrying maybe a hundred men out in the middle of nowhere? It didn’t make any sense at all.

  “What we got, Sarge?” It was Dormouse. He had snot running down both sides of his fat lips like a little kid and his eyes blinked all the time.

  “Wipe your fucking nose, Dormouse.”

  “Sure, Sarge.” He did, but his nose continued to run. “That Hayes who got hit?”

  “Yeah, sniper in the old church place there—the abbey, I guess you’d call it.”

  “What’s the fucking point of defending an old ruin? And if this is a bunch of Krauts on the run what are they doing with a sniper?”

  “You ask too many questions, Dormouse. One of these days it’s going to get you in the shit. And wipe your nose again. You look fucking disgusting.”

  The sergeant stared through the binoculars, looking at the trucks, wondering what the hell was inside them. It was a funny war now. Time was you picked up a gun and got moving and shot Germans and they shot back at you. Now it seemed like they were all in some kind of secret maze, looking for secrets and things that properly didn’t have a fuckin’ thing to do with fighting any war he’d ever heard of. He picked up the binoculars again and looke
d down at the farm. Military police?

  19

  Greyfriars Academy was located on the Sark River in the hilly, wooded countryside a dozen miles north of Greenwich, Connecticut. The closest civilization was the small crossroads village of Friardale on the way to Riverview and Toll Gate Pond. Passing through the village, Michael Valentine followed the signs to Oaklane and drove along beside a low fieldstone wall capped with wrought iron spikes to the main gates of the school. Directly ahead, down a slightly curving gravel drive lined with mature oaks, was the main building. It looked like a cross between a medieval church and a weathered, ivy-covered English country house. It was huge and looked very old.

  “Like something out of a Harry Potter story,” Finn commented, staring through the windshield of Valentine’s rental as they went down the sun-dappled drive toward the school.

  “More like Frank Richards,” murmured the older man.