The Medici Dagger

by Cameron West

  “So at eleven years old you became Martha Belle Tucker’s kid?”

  “No! I was nobody’s kid,” I snapped. “I just lived in her house. Kept her company. That was it.”

  Ginny didn’t seem satisfied.

  “We had the same address,” I clarified.“That didn’t make me her son.”

  “She was good to you?”

  “She was a cranky old buzzard, though it wasn’t her fault. Her body ached from rheumatoid arthritis. Terrible thing to have. Make anyone cranky.”

  “Was she strict, lenient, what?”

  “Only strict about geometry. That was her passion. Shapes. Deducing their properties. Turning postulates into theorems. She made sure I got pretty good at it myself. That’s why she was friends with Mona Kinsky, you see. Because Mona was fascinated by shapes. Now you want to know about Mona.”

  “No,” Ginny said. “What happened to Martha?”

  I sighed. “After high school, I went on to Berkeley, majored in Art History. Martha died two weeks before I graduated. That’s it.”

  “That’s it . . .”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “So when you swung your tassel, there wasn’t a single soul in the world to clap for you?”

  I didn’t answer. Couldn’t.

  A minute, then: “How did she die?”

  “Heart. She just fell over in the backyard while taking the kitchen tablecloth down from the laundry line.”

  “You found her?”

  I fidgeted in my seat. “Can we talk about something else?”

  “Martha was taking the tablecloth down and died.”

  I looked out the window, touched it. Cold. “It was draped over her chest,” I said. “The corner of it was bunched up in her hand. She looked so serene lying there in the grass.”

  “What did you do? I mean, right then.”

  I felt a flush of embarrassment. I’d never spoken about my past with anyone, not even Archie, but this girl, this quirky pain in the ass, was scooping out my innards, sifting, exploring. Me—the guy with the shaking hands.

  Closing my eyes, I was back there in the yard with Martha. The grass had needed cutting and I’d told her I’d do it on the weekend. She was lying on long grass.

  “I sat down cross-legged,” I said. “Put her head in my lap, ran my fingers down her hair, and stroked her cheek with the back of my hand. It already felt cold.”

  “Did you say anything to her?”

  I whispered, “Now you’re going to be with George.”

  I couldn’t bring myself to tell Ginny that I’d cried. Rocked and cried and stroked that silver hair I used to braid when Martha could no longer do it herself. Then after they’d taken her away, I’d cooked her favorite meal and laid it out for two and cried at the kitchen table until long after the food had gone cold.

  I dragged myself from that dark place, straightened up in my seat, and opened my eyes. “So . . .” I said, “that was that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean ‘cut and print.’ The end. Anyway, you want to know about Mona Kinsky. Graphic artist. Nice lady. Very sharp. Good calligrapher, too. Always had state-of-the-art equipment. Like I said, Mona was good with patterns. I’m sure she’s still designing things. You know how some people just never give up? Like Renoir, seventy-five, in a wheelchair with his brush strapped to his wrist? Hell, Mona couldn’t be more than mid-sixties at the most.”

  Ginny eyed me silently. “Cut and print,” she repeated. “The end of Martha. I’m beginning to understand.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. So . . . Mona. How do you know she’s even still alive?”

  “When I left Berkeley I asked her to write in her will that I be informed when she dies. What? Why are you looking at me that way?”

  “Reb, you’re not kidding, are you?” Ginny gaped.

  She leaned forward, laid her chin on her palm, her eyes probing me.“Martha died so you just deleted that section of your past? You had Mona, someone who cared about you, write that in her will?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Jesus,” she said.“How do you know where to find her?”

  “She sends me cards. They have a return address.”

  “Which you, of course, don’t answer.” There was no malice in Ginny’s tone. Just rueful comprehension. I hated the feeling of being ruefully comprehended.

  “Where are Mona’s cards postmarked from?”

  “Outside of Mendocino.”

  “You’ve never been there,” she added. It wasn’t a question.

  “Okay, now say something clever and pithy,” I said, trying to regain control. “Like you would if you were analyzing a painting. Be literary and poetic. Tell me the seeds of connection lay unsown on my barren soil.”

  There was a pause.

  “I don’t have to, Reb,” Ginny said softly. “You just did.”

  The whine of the jet engines was the only sound. Carefully removing her page of Leonardo’s notes from her bag, Ginny abruptly swiveled her seat away from me and set about her task. Lying back, I closed my eyes and pictured burning leaves and barren soil. I fell asleep.

  Somewhere over the Atlantic I heard Ginny laugh. “I ought to be bronzed.”

  She slapped two pieces of paper in my hand and clicked her compact shut, dropping it into her bottomless bag. “Now, why couldn’t I have finished this last night? Read it, Reb.”

  I blinked, shaking myself clear, and looked first at Ginny’s Italian.

  Perché non mi fanno lavorare? Perché? Colui che dovrebbe di me fare tesoro mi nega i miei preziosi studi ché si rivela debole di stomaco. E ciò m’ha fatto male e mi tormenta giacché chi è mai costui se non sa fare ciò che Dio stesso lo ha chiamato a fare?

  Per ventun anni l’ebbi con me e nessun altro neppure Giovan giammai poté vederla. Egli tornò alla polvere ora e giusto in quest’istante ho stabilito dove e come dovrà trovar riposo.

  Brucia la mia furia con la forza d’un milion di candele e il suo baglior m’illumina’l cammino. De’venti cerch’il sentier che il possente viaggiatore ed egli solo giammai potrà veggente e del passato il vero alla daga condurrà’l sapiente.

  I focused my overhead light on the second page and read her translation:

  Why am I not allowed to work? Why? He who should treasure me denies me my precious studies for his stomach is weak. And this has made me ill and how that vexes me for what is this man if he cannot do that for which God has tasked him?

  For twenty-one years I have kept this thing and no other man has seen it not even Giovan. He is gone now back to dust and in this moment I have just determined where and how it shall rest.

  My fury burns as the light of a million candles and its brilliance illuminates the way. The twenty circle path which none but the most mighty traveler will ever follow. Out then in back and forth one to the other the seer will wander the path and the truth of the past will lead the wise one to the dagger.

  I felt my skin prickle as the ghosts of Leonardo’s innermost thoughts fluttered across my mind. “The twenty-circle path,” I said. “Circles of Truth One and Two do fit together somehow.”

  “Yes they do, mighty traveler,” Ginny said. “You were absolutely right. But that’s not all. Do you get it? Do you see what I see?” She was jumping in her seat.

  “Who’s Giovan?”

  “Aaagh, Melzi, of course,” Ginny blurted. “That was his first name. Giovan Francesco de’Melzi.”

  “Leonardo’s adopted son,” I said.

  “Yes, now c’mon, move along. God, I’m so cool I want to kiss myself.”

  “Okay,” I told her, “But I’m confused. ‘Gone back to dust’? Died? Melzi didn’t die before Leonardo. He outlived him by, I don’t know, fifty years.”

  “That ain’t the meat of the matter,” she said, resting her chin on her palm Jack Benny style. “Don’t get hung up there. Melzi was obviously still alive, so we can only infer that Melzi actually went to dust— like the furniture.”

&nbs
p; “Get out. Leonardo would write about that? Right next to the Circles of Truth?”

  “This was a free-form journal,” Ginny said impatiently. “Leonardo wrote about everything. Grocery lists next to sketches forThe Adoration of the Magi,okay? So, sure, Melzi could literally have been dusting. You’re missing the big point. Move on. Look, we know Leonardo made the Dagger in 1491, and he says here it’s twenty-one years later so—”

  “He was sixty,” I said.

  “There’s the math,” she said, chiding. “And that means . . .”

  I thought hard for a minute, mentally leafing through my art history. Then I got it. “Jesus,” I said, “Leonardo was inRome.”

  “Bingo!” she said, slapping her thigh. “In 1512, Pope Leo the Tenth had Leonardo summoned to the Vatican. Leo was Lorenzo de’Medici’s son, and he wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps and usher in a newGolden Age of Art—only in Rome, not Florence—making Rome the art capital of the world with him as pope. But Leo was a hedonistic loser. Nobody wanted him to be pope, and that stirred up all kinds of trouble throughout Italy. Twelve Franciscan friars took it upon themselves to spread out over the country and preach like crazy that Leo was the Antichrist and that if he was made pope, the end of the world would come. These twelve had a profound effect on the mood of the Italians. Everyone was thinking doom and gloom, including Leonardo.”

  Excitement stirred in me.“Lust of the mighty, wanton destruction,” I said. “So we know how he was feeling when he arrived in Rome.”

  “Yes. That explains the first part of the translation from yesterday. Now add that once Leonardo got to Rome, Leo didn’t give him a single commission. That’s where this part picks up. ‘Why am I not allowed to work?’ Leonardo asks. Raphael had been givenThe School of Athens,Bramante was building everything in sight, and Michelangelo was painting the Sistine Chapel.”

  “That had to hurt. Leonardo’s archrival getting the cream of commissions.”

  “Sure,” Ginny said. “They hated each other. Michelangelo called Leonardo a man who could get nothing accomplished, and Leonardo said Michelangelo had no business painting—the Sistine Chapel notwithstanding.”

  “Right,” I said. “Leonardo thought sculptors were fools for spending-their lives hip-deep in marble chips, said they looked like bakers or snowmen, while painters walked around dressed in fine clothes.”

  “So,” Ginny said, “Leonardo, the greatest of them all, has nothing to do except dissections for his anatomical studies, and on top of everything else, Pope Leo orders him to stop the dissections because the thought of it makes him queasy.”

  I sat up straight, right in the pipe with Ginny. “So you’re saying the ‘he’ of ‘he who would treasure me’ is Pope Leo.”

  “Exactly. You can feel Leonardo’s frustration. He knows God gave him these incredible gifts, tasked him, but he’s not allowed to completehis work. Million-candle fury, Reb. Now,” she said, hunching over toward me, tenting her fingers, bouncing the tips against each other. “Any idea where Leonardo was staying in Rome when he wrote these words, when he devised the Circles of Truth?”

  I simultaneously wanted to punch her out for making me work for it and kiss her for translating the page and knowing what it meant.

  “The Belvedere Palace,” Ginny said, clapping her hands.“Anddo you know where the Belvedere Palace is?”

  I grinned and pulled by earlobe. “The Belvedere Palace is on top of Vatican Hill.”

  “My hero,” she said, holding me in her gaze.

  “So,” I cleared my throat, “we’ve got Leonardo at the Belvedere Palace, deciding where and how the Dagger shall rest.”

  “That’s my best guess.”

  “It’s a very good guess. Nice work.”

  “I know. And isn’t it slightly incongruous that we’re at this very moment flying to California. We’re going the wrong way, Reb!”

  She jumped out of her seat and headed toward the cabin. “Tell Dracco to turn around right now!”

  I grabbed her arm. “Forget it!”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Up till this second your thinking was stellar.”

  “Don’t patronize me. You’re telling me California, not Rome? Are you nuts?”

  “Ginny,” I snapped, squeezing her arm. “The Vatican. Take one. ‘Pardon me, Pope, could you please cancel the Mass, we’re checking under the pews for the Medici Dagger. Oh, and don’t tell anybody we’re here because all of Europe wants to capture us or kill us, or both.’ ”

  The color drained from Ginny’s face. She shrunk back into her seat.

  “Yes, we have to go back there,” I told her, “but not before we figure out the Circles of Truth. They’re going to tell us ‘where and how it shall rest.’ Till then, we play it safe.”

  Ginny frowned absently. I was sorry I’d reminded her of the danger.

  I picked up Leonardo’s two pages and examined the Circles of Truth. The shape of the markings triggered a memory. For my twelfth birthday, Mona had given me a book of Sherlock Holmes adventures. She’d recommended one of the stories to me and it became my favorite.

  “Do you remember Sherlock Holmes’s ‘Adventure of the Dancing Men’?” I asked Ginny.

  She shook her head.

  “The messages were written with pictures; stick figures of dancing men with their arms and legs in different positions. They were an alphabet that only two people knew. Secret messages were written in the dancing-men alphabet. We’ve got a bunch of concentric rings of lines and squiggles here. Maybe all these little marks on the Circles of Truth are some kind of alphabet, or a pictograph—broken up, cut apart.”

  “Could be,” Ginny said, peering at the Circles. “I’m an art historian, not a cryptanalyst. Look, I got us to the Vatican. Maybe we should just go there and give the pages to the pope. He could, I don’t know, call Gibraltar and—”

  “Call Gibraltar?” I shot, stunned that she would give in so easily to her fear.

  “They’d get us out of trouble.”

  I slapped my forehead.“Maybe you’re right, I should tell Dracco to turn around. Pick a spot in Europe. Any spot. I’ll let you off.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you don’t have a goddamn clue what this is all about, that’s why.”

  Tears welled in her eyes, but I didn’t care; I was boiling. “You’re saying million-candle fury—translating it for chrissakes—but you don’t get it. You know all the history, but you don’t know what this is really about.” I waved the pages at her.

  “What’s it really all about?” she said, tears falling now.“Illuminate me.”

  “It’s about getting something right for Leonardo, Antonia! One thing right! You know Leonardo’s Sforza Horse was used as target practice, the bronze melted down for cannonballs.The Last Supperhung for years in a stable, then got painted over a dozen times. And here Leonardo was in Rome at the Belvedere Palace, sick to death because he knew he was the greatest genius in the history of geniuses and everybody let him down. He creates the most amazing thing, perhaps of all time, and has to hide it from everyone for his entire life and on into the future.Thiscan’t be another Sforza Horse orLast Supper.I won’t allow that to happen. Leonardo was alone in a rotten, lousy, cruel world he couldn’t trust with his Dagger. And if that Dagger is out there somewhere . . . in the Belvedere Palace, or wherever . . . if Leonardo wrote its location down on these pages, then locating it is exactly what I’m going to do! I’m not about to let some billionaire bastard and his tattooed sidekick put the vise grips on Leonardo.” I was pumped now, pacing the tiny luxury cabin, pounding my fist in my hand. “Or for that matter some steel-haired, tea-sipping elitist with a Gibraltar ring. The hell with all of them. Nobody uses Leonardo. Not in this century, not on my watch.”

  I stopped and shot a look of single-minded purpose into her tear-laden eyes. “Let he who finds the Dagger use it for noble purpose. That was my father’s plan. And now it’s mine. Me. The ‘mighty traveler,’ that’sme!”
My hands were trembling again.

  Ginny looked from them to my face.“I see, Rollo Eberhart Barnett, Jr.”

  I turned away, took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “Are you in or out?” I said. “For Leonardo.”

  “Look at me,” she urged. I reluctantly acquiesced. The overhead cabin lamp cast a reddish hue on her dark shiny hair as the jet engines hummed through the heavens. Ginny swallowed once, her small Adam’s apple vanishing and quickly reappearing.

  “I’m in,” she said. “For Leonardo. And for you.”

  “Okay, then,” I told her. “California.”

  ten

  After landing where the smog meets the sea, Dracco slid us through customs as if we were invisible. As we parted, he told us to think of him the next time we needed special travel arrangements.We bought my Jaguar back from the long-term lot and eased onto the freeway. Up above, the sky looked cloudless and forgiving, offering grace to all the Southern California sinners. The familiar sights of the city freed my tired mind to focus on the immediate tasks ahead.

  First stop, the bank. I squirmed in my seat, keeping to myself the fear that Krell’s men might have cleaned out my account electronically and even gained access to my safe-deposit box. Another possibility: They had somebody staked out waiting to attack the minute I walked out the door.

  I parked around the corner from the bank. I asked Ginny to wait in the car and explained why. Reluctantly, she agreed. As I approached the building, I could feel my heart begin to pound. Everyone looked suspicious: the two Armani suits peering into that old Mustang; the couple whispering in each other’s ears; that shopping-cart lady. Like the maid who’d planted the bug at the Gritti, anybody could be anybody.

  I entered the building fully vigilant, my boot heels clicking noisily on the marble floor, alerting everyone to my presence. I checked for the guards. The one by the vault with a red-veined nose hitching up his belt buckle looked like a retired cop. The other, stifling a yawn, kicked something off his thick-soled orthopedic shoe. Neither seemed interested in me.