The Crown of Fire

by Tony Abbott

  He didn’t know, and if the answer was yes, he didn’t want to know.

  When they hit central Rome, the bustling capital seemed to envelop them into its chaotic streets. They parked in a garage two miles from the Vatican and waited. Forty minutes later, Wade spotted a sporty white minivan drive into the garage. A slender middle-aged woman with dark hair was at the wheel.

  “Isabella,” he said. “And Sara. We’re here. Now we can start.”

  The moment they entered the Vatican walls, the metropolis outside seemed to fly a thousand miles and many centuries away. Vatican City was a tiny patch of history and hushed calm, its buildings sparkling and old, its vast basilica—designed in part by Michelangelo himself—a giant cross-shaped footprint of faith in the center of a modern teeming city.

  They purchased tickets for the tour of the Vatican rooms, including the Sistine Chapel, and were soon wading with the throng of tourists into the first rooms. That went smoothly enough at first, but the huge number of people bogged them down. The line stopped. It was the first time since entering the Vatican that they’d had a chance to think. First, Lily showed Isabella the drawing they’d found in the Copernicus Room.

  “So many signs point to Michelangelo,” Isabella told them. “Scholars have long known that the imagery of the giant fresco contains references to Copernicus and his theories. How the artist incorporated these theories a decade before Copernicus’s monumental treatise was published is still debated. Perhaps more than this, I had just cracked the code on Michelangelo’s poem as Sara arrived to meet me, and revised my translation. Listen.”

  “My friend, I see you suffer from a wound

  And offer you my lustrous southern cloak.

  You say your life and future were marooned

  Until a kindly soul sighted a barque.

  “You say the art of numbers hides a fact:

  That one binds others to its power alone.

  And so the Master must as master act,

  And over all the others bear the crown.

  “I set these riddles down, and this again:

  You say the blessing and the frightening curse

  Scientiam temporis casts is plain—

  “That when Charon unfolds his calloused hand

  And drops our payment deep into his purse,

  He cannot make us touch the hellish land.”

  Listening to it, Wade felt the enormous crowd of tourists seem to hush and go away, if just for an instant, before returning, louder than before.

  “It’s so beautiful,” said Lily. “Haunting. The word you used—barque—what does it mean?”

  “I translated from barca a remi, meaning ‘small boat.’”

  “Small boat. Rowboat. Everything means something,” Wade said. “We need to see the fresco up close, and go over the poem line by line. If only Becca . . . she’s so great at this. Her brain would put these things together. We need to try to talk to her. Read her the poem.”

  “We will,” Sara said, putting her hand on his arm. “As soon as we get to the next Thomas Cook office.”

  “There’s one a few streets away,” his father said. “I have a list of their locations. We’ll go to one and call Becca. Terence and Julian should be here anytime.”

  “Good,” said Lily. “Becca needs to know what we’ve found out. She can help us, even if she’s not here.”

  Even if she’s not here.

  Wade said nothing as the line shifted, and bit by bit they inched up to the door of the chapel. He could glimpse the deep blue of the fresco on the far wall ahead of him. The masterpiece was huge and awe inspiring, but like much in Guardian riddles, it would be a challenge to decipher. Having the poem and fresco side by side might be the only way to understand its secrets.

  Finally, they passed through the opening.

  The Sistine Chapel was smaller than Wade had imagined it would be, and though the room was tall, the air in it was stifling and smelled of far too many people. At least half the sightseers were staring straight up at the more famous chapel ceiling. Pilgrims, tourists, families, and art students standing and sketching on small pads bumped shoulders with crowded group tours. Innumerable guides talked over one another in every language conceivable.

  Wade’s ears rang as he tried to understand the enormity of The Last Judgment. Its many writhing figures, men and women, all seemed in agony, tortured in one way or another. If Michelangelo was a Guardian, then this might be his secret prophecy—a prophecy unknown to most viewers—of what would happen if the time-traveling Eternity Machine was ever used by the Teutonic Order. Michelangelo wouldn’t have known about Galina’s plan to create a nuclear event in the Mediterranean, no. But there was a body of water depicted at the bottom of the fresco—a sea, perhaps.

  And once again there was a rowboat. A barque.

  Darrell nudged him. “Okay, look. Helmut Bern had said ‘rowboat’ to Becca when he was shot, right? We thought it was because she’d told him to take the boat and get to the Netherlands, where Kronos would take him back to the future. But now Michelangelo’s got a rowboat in his fresco, and the drawing that Bern hid in the Copernicus Room shows this boat and because of the paper could have been sketched in the Netherlands. Does that mean Helmut Bern was the ragged man in Michelangelo’s poem? Did Michelangelo meet him there?”

  Wade didn’t know if it fit together that way. “Maybe.”

  Isabella sidled over to them. “I heard what you said, but you must know that the boat is in the old story, too. The ferryman Charon brings the dead across the River Styx. In the legends, the dead must pay Charon a coin before they land in Hades to be judged. The last stanza of the poem is about this, too.”

  Wade did what he normally did when trying to understand a difficult scientific concept. He cleared away as many mental distractions as possible and focused on a small part of the problem. First of all, lost souls were falling from the boat into the sea. In the far lower right stood a grim-looking guy with a thick serpent coiled around his body. Those were easy enough to see.

  But he couldn’t make out any Copernican references. He turned to see his father staring at the fresco. “Dad—”

  Someone clapped twice loudly. “Attenzione, per favore!”

  An older man dressed in a simple white surplice and small cap stood in the doorway to the chapel. He held his hands high. “Per favore! Attenzione!”

  The room hushed as if a Silence switch had been thrown.

  It was the pope.

  “Oh . . . whoa!” Darrell whispered. “People, it’s . . . him. Him!”

  Wade felt momentarily dizzy, as if he were in the presence of a huge celebrity, but a thousand times more than a mere celebrity. His father and Sara gaped openmouthed as the pope smiled broadly to the crowd, almost like a happy uncle.

  “Grazie mille!” he said, then added first in Italian, then in German, French, Spanish, and finally English, “These children and their parents are special visitors—as you yourselves, all of you, shall be two hours from now, as my personal guests. For now, however, I must ask you to leave the chapel to ourselves for this short while. Grazie mille!”

  The pontiff blessed them with a cross-like wave of his right hand, then flicked his fingers gently toward the exit doors, very much like Rosemary Billingham did when shooing people from her office at the Morgan. The throng, still hushed, many of them craning their necks backward, filed out of the chapel.

  Wade was just then aware that his feet were frozen to the floor.

  The pope! He and his family were personal guests! Of the pope!

  “Welcome to our humble little room of prayer,” the pontiff said when they were finally alone. “Terence Ackroyd and his son are great friends of mine. And of course, I have kept Triangulum and your other relics safe. They are quite mysterious, after all, and beautiful beyond imagining. Young Julian has told me a little of why you are here. Let us study the fresco together, shall we?”

  “Yes, please!” said Lily, beaming. “Please!”

 
Examining the fresco in silence and comfort—side by side with the head of the Roman Catholic Church—was an extraordinary experience. Wade dearly wished Becca were there to be a part of it. She would have flipped. Reverently, of course. His heart ached to think about her so far away from them, and far away from this stunning moment.

  Maybe it was the pope’s presence there, but as Wade trained his eyes on the multiple figures, trying to ferret out clues wherever he could find them, he understood something.

  Though the wall’s grand scale dwarfed the tiny Deluge drawings of Leonardo and even da Vinci’s larger painting in the central chamber in the catacombs in Malta, Wade realized that this fresco depicted the same event. Leonardo had drawn the end of the physical world, while Michelangelo was depicting what happened to its souls in the afterlife.

  “Excuse me, sir, but what about Copernicus?” Darrell asked. “I don’t see him here.”

  “No,” said the pontiff, “perhaps not directly. But in fifteen thirty-three, Pope Clement had been instructed in the teachings of the Polish astronomer—the Magister, as we call Nicolaus here. Clement convened a conference of astronomers to detail what they knew of Nicolaus’s teachings. In September of that year, Clement met with Michelangelo to discuss his commission to paint the wall. Copernicus’s theories were to be included, certainly. After Clement died, Pope Paul took up the great idea. It was under him that the artist finally fashioned his great work.”

  “There’s a lot of movement,” Wade’s father said. “All swirling around the figure of Christ in the center. Is that meant to be like the solar system?”

  “Very good, yes it is,” said the pope. “You see the gold light behind him? This represents the sun. Christ himself is therefore seen as the sun—the ‘Sun of Righteousness,’ the hymn says—and all the souls gravitate to him and move like planets about him as he makes his judgment over them. Over us. Here you see the Copernican system. The sun is the center.”

  And it suddenly became clear. Wade moved up to study the lower part of the fresco. The rowboat was jammed with bodies—or souls—of the damned.

  Lily sidled up next to him. “The rowboat is important,” she whispered. “But how? It’s a key to something but . . . but . . . O . . . M . . . G!” She gasped. “Oh! I apologize, Your Holiness, but look, everybody!”

  She pointed to a face near the front of the rowboat. “It’s him! Helmut Bern. That face! It’s Helmut Bern! That’s what he meant when he said it to Becca! ‘The rowboat, remember’! It wasn’t the boat he escaped London in. It was this boat. This boat!”

  Wade stared at the small boat.

  Lily was right.

  The man in the rowboat of The Last Judgment bore the unmistakable face of Helmut Bern.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  To Wade it was a perfect likeness. The small sad man—plainly visible in the crush of people that the ferryman Charon is beating off the boat—was none other than Helmut Bern.

  “The famous barca a remi,” said the pontiff. “There is, in fact, a via Barcaremi not far from the train station in Rome.”

  Isabella frowned. “Is there?” She dug into her bag and pulled out a small tattered notebook. “Via Barcaremi . . .”

  “You know what this means?” Sara said. “The person who Michelangelo wrote his poem about, the man he met in the Netherlands and gave his cloak to, was Helmut Bern. That ragged thing he wore when he was killed in Paris was given to him by the artist.”

  Darrell edged closer to the rowboat. “Then who is that guy?”

  Standing on the shore near the rowboat was that frightening figure whose body was wrapped around its middle by a thick dark snake.

  “That,” said Isabella, “is King Minos. He ruled the underworld, at least in the legends Michelangelo took his ideas from. Minos judges the souls of the damned in the boat and throws them into the pit, which is the cave on the far side. The boat is what carries the damned souls to Minos for judgment. Perhaps . . . that is where the launch site is!”

  “In the underworld?” Lily said.

  “No, no!” said the pontiff. “One of the three judges of the underworld is King Minos. You must know the myth of Minos and the beast known as the Minotaur. The beast was said to live in the terrible labyrinth and killed those victims sent into the maze. The legendary labyrinth’s home is said to be on the island of Crete.”

  “Crete!” said Wade. “That’s the launch site! Michelangelo’s clue to where Nicolaus and Hans discovered the time machine has been sitting right here for nearly five centuries. It all makes sense. An island paradise, the diary says, with mountains, caves, ruins. If this is true, then it’s the only place in the world to launch the astrolabe.”

  “And only on one day a year,” Darrell said. “My birthday. September twenty-third.”

  “It’s when and where—according to the Frombork Protocol—the astrolabe has to be destroyed,” Lily said. “And it has to be destroyed before Galina can fly it again!”

  Silence fell over the chapel. Wade was shaking. One of the most important clues in the entire Legacy had just opened up to them.

  “We need to learn everything we can about the labyrinth,” Darrell said. “Everything.”

  Wade’s father began to pace. “So . . . as soon as she discovers the clue, Galina will bring the astrolabe to Crete. She may already know. She always seems to know.”

  “There are objects in the fresco,” said Sara. “A crown, a wheel, hammers, crosses, ladders. These are the instruments of Christ’s passion, and the martyrdom of some of the saints, aren’t they?”

  “Indeed, they are,” the pope said. “But, of course, this is Michelangelo, so they could also be references to this machine you are looking for.”

  Wade stood back and took in the entire wall. “Lily, you read that the ancient Greeks reported seeing the aurora borealis in the Mediterranean. Well, that’s where Crete is. And there are lots of crowns in constellation imagery, but Michelangelo’s writing and painting about only one of them. Right there. The crown of fiery light behind the figure of Christ. Corona Borealis.”

  He stared at the others. “People, the twelfth relic is Corona Borealis!”

  All at once, the entire chapel, the walls and ceiling of which teemed with hundreds of frescoed figures howling in agony and wonder and joy and pain, went as quiet as a tomb.

  Until Lily spoke. “Guys, Becca told Bern where to find Kronos, so he went there and met Michelangelo. We wouldn’t be here right now if Becca hadn’t made that happen. We have to tell her!”

  “Then let’s go,” Isabella said. “I believe this Via Barcaremi is a clue to something important. And there’s a Thomas Cook office nearby.”

  “Then Godspeed,” the pope said. “Your relics will be safe until you need them. For now, a blessing.” He moved his hands in a large cross over them. “Safe travels!”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Lily was amazed at the speed with which they could go from Vatican City, which was, let’s face it, a little piece of heaven, to what must have been the grungiest neighborhood this side of . . . well, the opposite.

  “You know my husband, Silvio, was a Guardian since college,” Isabella told them as she drove them away from the Vatican. “As a member of your uncle Henry’s group, Asterias, he took secret rooms in many cities. I know the last room he took before he died was near the main train station here. Number one hundred and forty-nine. No street name. When the pope said there is a street—Rowboat Street—it fell together.”

  Even in midday, the streets behind the Stazione Termini, the main railroad station in Rome, were full of shadows, eerie, sad. Why Lily happened to think of Becca right then, she wasn’t sure. Maybe it was because she wanted Becca to see everything she was seeing, to somehow make it better.

  When their car finally stopped—it had to, because the streets were overparked and too narrow for them—Lily, Darrell, Wade, Isabella, Roald, and Sara piled out and onto the street. The smell hit them instantly. Hot garbage, thick train fuel, smoke
.

  Halfway down one block, they took a cut-through to the next block over, wading through puddles of what smelled like sewer water, and stopped at 149 Via Barcaremi.

  “Wait here.” Roald entered and checked out the lobby. “Clear.”

  “Silvio always chose the top floor if he could,” Isabella said.

  There was no elevator, so they walked up a narrow set of squeaky stairs to the fifth floor. There was a single door off the landing.

  Using a key she’d discovered among her husband’s effects, Isabella unlocked the door. A whiff of train fuel hit them when she opened it. This time Sara entered first. After a few moments, she reappeared at the door, her face pale. “You have to see this.” She waved them in and closed the door behind them.

  Isabella gasped. “Oh! Silvio!”

  Pasted and tacked and taped from floor to ceiling across all four walls in the front room were thousands—tens of thousands?—of snapshots, magazine photos, old daguerreotypes, satellite images, paintings, maps, sea charts, drawings, engravings, and rough sketches of places and faces from all around the globe. They were arranged in clusters like the many solar systems of an immense galaxy, often centered on a single image surrounded by dozens or more relating to it in a mysterious collage, while hundreds of colored threads were strung from one image to another, to several others, weaving a thick web of connections completely around the room and back again.

  But one thing was consistent.

  Galina Krause dominated nearly every cluster of images.

  “This is the Galina Room,” Wade said, standing in the middle of the floor and staring. “She’s everywhere. A red thread connects her to almost every other picture.”

  “Silvio must have been working on all this for years,” Sara said.

  Lily noticed numerous references to 26 April 1794, the infamous date known in Guardian history as Floréal Muguet. There were satellite photos of Paris, Guam, Tunis, Malta, San Francisco, and Havana, along with early photographs and engravings depicting the relics suspected of being in each location.