by David Wood
Rose shrugged. “No idea. I guess we start exploring. I know there are massive archives in the lofts above the west wing of the Cortile del Belvedere. That would be this way.”
She moved on and Crowley followed, eventually climbing up steep stairs into a seemingly endless room with tightly packed metal shelves laden with boxes and files, all filled with documents. The place was dim, soft strip lighting spread far apart above the narrow passages between the shelves. Their shoes rang out on the polished cement floor as they walked. Crowley scanned the spines of manuscripts, neatly handwritten in fading ink marking histories of centuries past, featuring names like Borgheses, Avignon, and Napoleoni.
“This place is mesmerizing,” he said quietly. “So much information...”
Rose paused, looked back the way they had come. “I read that the total length of the shelves in this section is over thirteen kilometers.”
“We can never hope to cover all that in anything less than several weeks of careful study,” Crowley said, feeling lost. “But then, this doesn’t look like the place either. All the shelving is too small to house anything like the Codex Gigas.”
“Let’s try the bunkers,” Rose said. “They’re the most recent addition, commissioned by Pope Paul VI, in the sixties, I think.”
They made their way back down, through more corridors, then down again to the first of the two underground floors.
“Even more shelves here,” Rose said. “Forty-three kilometers of them this time.”
Crowley groaned. “Holy crap.” He laughed at the unintentional joke. “Literally!”
Rose laughed along. “Well, we need to check anyway. Documents pertaining to royal families are kept here, among other things, so maybe there’s info on Rudolf’s family.”
“Maybe,” Crowley agreed. “But that’s going backwards. We already know he had it and lost it.”
They walked along more shelves, thousands upon thousands of pages of information, the sheer volume of it all starting to become a little overwhelming. But still, nowhere that looked even vaguely likely to house something the size of the Codex.
“I don’t think we’ll find anything here,” Rose said. “But according to my earlier reading, the most special items are kept in a climate-controlled area adjacent to this level. I wonder if our clearance extends that far?”
Crowley shrugged. “Let’s find out.”
Chapter 31
Vatican Secret Archives
After a couple of false turns, Crowley and Rose found their way to a large red double door.
“This way?” Crowley asked.
Rose shrugged. “My research only revealed so much. We’ll have to try it and see.”
Crowley pushed the brushed aluminum door handle down and the door swung easily open. “So far so good.”
They entered a room with a set of short steps to their right leading up toward a second mezzanine level. To their left was a white wall with a heavy metal door front and center. Straight-backed wooden chairs stood either side of the door and a huge circular mural in grays and whites, a dozen feet in diameter, hung suspended above it.
“Now that looks promising,” Rose said.
“May I help you?”
Crowley jumped like a naughty schoolboy, then hardened his face, annoyed he’d been spooked. A man in robes descended the short flight of steps to their right.
“You shouldn’t be here,” the man said.
Crowley gathered every bit of his teaching experience to put authority in his voice, determined to reverse the situation and make the man in robes feel like the recalcitrant one. “We’re personal guests of His Eminence.” He thrust the quickly made badge under the man’s nose.
Crowley smirked inside as the man quailed at Crowley’s assertive tone. He glanced at the badges and frowned, but nodded reluctantly. “Ah, yes. You wish to access the climate controlled archives.”
“Yes, thank you,” Rose said, her tone entirely opposite to Crowley’s. She flicked him a look as the man in robes stepped toward the doors.
Crowley grinned and raised his hands, mouthed, What?
Rose couldn’t keep the amusement from her face, but she shook her head in exasperation. The door popped and brushed the pale floor as it swung open. Inside were numerous pale blue filing units with thin shelves, rows of compactor shelving, with three-handled wheels on the ends to move them left and right for access. The air was still and dry, a sense of importance heavy in the atmosphere. As soon as they were inside, the man in robes shut the door behind them and turned to face them, wringing his hands slightly. He was clearly uncomfortable with interlopers in his sacred space. Crowley really couldn’t blame him for that.
“What’s your name?” Rose asked him, still the embodiment of politeness.
“Lorenzo.”
“Hi Lorenzo. I’m Rose. We’re so sorry to disturb you, but we’re on very important business.”
Crowley looked at the hundreds of wide, shallow drawers. None of them looked even close to big enough to hold the Codex. He made a slow circuit of the room, wondering if any of the compactors might have deep enough shelves to hold it. Lorenzo followed him like a shadow, the man’s nerves grating and beginning to feed into Crowley’s own agitation. But Crowley did his best to ignore the man, kept up his slow tour while Rose went in the opposite direction. After a few moments they shared a hopeless glance, both obviously thinking that it was unlikely the Codex Gigas was anywhere in this sterile, neutral space. Crowley looked into the space between a couple of open compactors and decided he would have to wind the wheels and peer into each one to be sure when Lorenzo spoke again.
“What can I do for you? What are you hoping to find?” Impatience was evident in the man’s voice.
Crowley and Rose exchanged another glance and the truth passed silently between them. They weren’t going to find it on their own. Crowley decided to take a chance.
“We’re looking for a very old book. A large one.” He spread his hands as he spoke to indicate the approximate size. “Lots of fancy artwork on the inside.”
A look of alarm passed over Lorenzo’s face, but he quickly recovered. “We don’t have anything like that in here. As you can see, we don’t have the space to store something of that size.” He visibly relaxed as he gestured at the storage drawers. “We primarily have individual documents here that require special care. I'm sorry I can’t help you.” He forced a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes.
“What about in these?” Crowley asked, pointing to the wall of compactors. “You could easily store a body in there, let alone a large book.”
Lorenzo frowned, not amused by Crowley’s snide dig. “Well, you’re welcome to look in each one, but you’ll see they all have shelving that could not accommodate anything of the size you indicated.”
Crowley pursed his lips. Despite the man’s chagrin and nervousness, those words had the ring of truth. It seemed they wouldn’t be finding the Codex in this room, and Lorenzo was quite comfortable in his certainty of that fact. But Crowley hadn’t missed the man’s look a moment before.
“Where should we look for a book like my friend described?” Rose asked.
Again a flash of alarm crossed Lorenzo’s face, that look again, then a smile broke out. “I’m afraid I don’t know. I’m very sorry I can’t help you. If that will be all?” He turned in the direction of a desk in one corner and took a couple of steps toward it.
“Say, what time do you get off work?” Crowley asked casually.
Lorenzo turned back, frowned. “Why do you ask?”
“In case you and I need to have a conversation about the call you’re about to make.”
The color drained from Lorenzo’s face, his cheeks going paler than the storage cabinets all around.
Rose stepped between them, flicked a quick look of caution at Crowley, then said, “Don’t mind him. He’s a bit eccentric. May I know your family name? I’d like to tell His Excellency how you tried to help us.”
“Caballo,” th
e man stammered. “Lorenzo Caballo. And really, I’m sorry I don’t know where to find the item you seek.” He went to the door and held it open, his face a mask of discomfort.
Rose nodded to him and went out, headed for the red doors back to the corridor. Crowley followed, giving Lorenzo a sarcastic smile as he left. This whole process was beginning to grate on his patience. Unrestricted access to the Vatican’s most private places, and they kept hitting dead ends. But it wasn’t over yet. Lorenzo had maybe revealed more than he intended to.
“That was another pointless excursion,” Rose said once Lorenzo had shut himself back inside.
“Maybe not.” Crowley gestured back the way they had just come. “Let’s find out what’s directly above that room.”
Chapter 32
Vatican Archives, Diplomatic floor
After some careful back and forth, eventually finding the right set of stairs and a helpful corridor, Crowley and Rose emerged into a large set of rooms with high white ceilings and polished wooden floors. Bas relief friezes in multiple colors hung over each doorway between rooms and each room was packed with ostentatious cabinets, carved wood with brass handles. Every size and shape of storage filled the space, the aroma of old wood and incense heavy in the air.
“Blimey,” Crowley said, looking around himself and peering through a door at the far end into another, similar large space, equally full of varied cabinets.
“I recognize this from my research,” Rose said. “This is what they call the Diplomatic Floor.” She frowned as she searched her memories. “Constructed by Pope Alexander VII in 1660,” she said eventually. “It houses documents from the fifteenth century to the Napoleonic era.”
Crowley looked at her with raised eyebrows, genuinely impressed. “That’s some recall you have there.”
Rose laughed. “I told you before. We call it ‘museum brain’. You develop a skill for data retention when you work long enough in research. Besides, I only read about it this morning.” She looked around and shook her head. “But I can’t see the Devil’s Bible being here.”
“Let’s at least spend a little time checking it out. It’s not like we’ve made any real progress elsewhere.” Crowley began opening cupboards, scanning the piles of documents and manuscripts in each one. “Besides, I have a hunch...”
Rose followed him, dutifully opening a few doors here and there. “What makes you think it’s up here?”
Crowley smiled. “I’m a teacher. That means I spend a lot of time around teenagers telling tales, trying to cover up their wrongdoings! I was watching that guy’s face while we were in his sealed archive. Each time we mentioned the book, his eyes flitted directly upward for a split second. If he were being deceptive, he’d have glanced to the side. Let’s just say that if that guy has much money, I’d love to play poker with him. He’d be broke in no time.”
They continued to wander through the maze of cabinets. Crowley checked each one thoroughly, sure that he wasn’t mistaken about Lorenzo’s tell downstairs. After half an hour he began to think that maybe he was seeing things where nothing existed, so desperate was he to find the Codex. Were they chasing ghosts, stumbling around like idiots after something that might not even exist?
Two men in red robes walked toward them, both with stern expressions. Crowley stood, faced them boldly. Rose moved from behind a cabinet she had been investigating and made a small noise of surprise. She came to stand beside him as the men approached.
Crowley smiled broadly. “Bongiorno.” He wasn’t entirely sure that was the correct greeting, but it was about the sum total of his knowledge of Italian.
The men slowed, still frowning, but didn’t stop. Once they had walked past and left the room, Crowley let out a breath he had been holding. “This is so frustrating,” he said.
Rose nodded, hands on hips. She turned in a slow circle. “It’s the proverbial needle in a haystack.”
“If it’s even here.”
Rose stopped, suddenly still and focused. She leaned forward, peering between two tall cupboards designed like elaborate wardrobes. Beyond them was a smaller, squarer cabinet of dark wood with a deep grain.
“What is it?” Crowley asked.
Rose walked forward, pointing. “Look at the design on the front of that. Kinda stands out a bit, don’t you think. Are they fish?”
Crowley followed and the motif certainly did stand out. And it threw a flood of memory at him from his research years ago after his run in with the KOSS troops in Iraq. “Not fish,” he said. “Priests dressed as fish. I know something about this.” The design showed two men face to face either side of a stylized tree. The men wore entire fish bodies, the fish heads pointing up from their heads like huge hats, the open mouths not unlike a papal miter. The scaled bodies of the fish cascaded down behind the heads, lying tight to the men’s backs like form-fitting capes. The fish tails fanned out behind the men’s heels, almost brushing the ground. The two each held a bucket of some kind in one hand, their other hand raised as if in a benediction. Atop the tree motif was a large oval object, looking an awful lot like a pinecone.
Rose crouched beside Crowley to get a closer look. “Priests dressed as fish?”
Crowley chuckled, nodded. “Remember how I said I looked into all this conspiracy stuff after that weird experience in Iraq? This matches a lot of it. You see, thousands of years ago, a couple of thousand years BCE at least, there was a group of folk called the priests of Dagon. Now you’re going to have to bear with me here, because this gets a little crazy. Dagon was the fish-god of the Philistines and Babylonians and he wore a fish head hat, supposedly the origin of the Pope’s headwear today. See the open fish mouth? Looks like a mitre? In Chaldean times, the head of the church was the representative of Dagon and was considered to be infallible, was addressed as ‘Your Holiness’, and his subjects had to kiss his ring.” Crowley grinned. “This god-king sound familiar?”
Rose made a wry face. “Very papal.”
“Right. The tree there is a representation of the tree of life, or maybe the tree of knowledge. The pine cone represents the pineal gland, which is a tiny pine cone shaped endocrine gland in the brain, deep where the two halves of the thalamus join. I mean, you can take this stuff all the way down the rabbit hole. Some folk think that whole region of the brain is where the design of the Eye of Horus comes from with the ancient Egyptians. And I have to be honest, the resemblance is uncanny. Others think the god Dagon in his fish suit was actually an interstellar traveler in a space suit and so on.”
Rose blew out a derisive breath. “And this is where we start to put on our tin foil hats, is it?”
“Oh, we’ve needed to have those on for a while already. Anyway, the point is, lots of conspiracy theorists think the modern Catholic church is actually built on the cult of Dagon and all that stuff that went along with it. That’s why you so often see the pinecone shape in Catholic icons, the mitre hat and so on. So this cabinet here, with this design carved on it, is a pretty interesting find. Especially as, while I was researching the Knights of the Sedes Sacrorum, I discovered that their coat of arms bears a symbol very much like this, two fish priests face to face over a tree of life. That guy whose wound I patched up, with the KOSS tattoo? Those letters were written below a design very much like this.”
Rose swallowed, looked from Crowley to the cabinet’s strange carving and back again. “So we open this up and we find the book?”
Crowley shrugged, smiled. “It’s about the right size to have the Codex Gigas standing up inside.”
Rose took a deep breath and tried the cabinet handle. It clicked and the door swung open. Inside were shallow shelves with row upon row of small leather-bound volumes. Rose let her breath out in a rush of disappointment. “Damn it!”
Crowley narrowed his eyes, leaned past the side of the cabinet and back. “Not so fast. The depth of these shelves is all wrong.”
He began pulling the small tomes out in twos and threes, handing them to Rose to stack neatly to one s
ide. Glancing around regularly in case anyone came, working as quickly as he could, Crowley soon had all the books out. He tugged at the now bare shelves and something shifted. He moved for a better grip, took hold of the uppermost and lowest shelves, and pulled. The back of the cabinet slid forward with a slight protest of grinding wood, bringing all the shelves with it. Crowley worked the cumbersome arrangement back and forth a few times and eventually it slipped free of the cabinet.
Standing in the revealed secret compartment was a tall book, its cover pale tan with borders of intricate pressed designs around a central plate of narrow diamond lines. In the center was an eight-pointed rosette of metal, with bright blue inlays and a raised central, flat-topped cone. Each corner of the thick embossed leather cover had brass quarter plates, similar in design to the central rosette, with Celtic-styled winged horses facing each other under raised knobs like the cover’s center.
Crowley and Rose sat on their haunches for several heavily silent seconds, staring. Eventually Crowley turned to face Rose and a moment later she met his gaze.
“This is it!” He pounded his fist into his palm. “We bloody found it!”
Chapter 33
Vatican Archives, Diplomatic floor
Crowley reached for the book, then paused. He dug in his pocket and pulled out the linen gloves the archivist had given him earlier, then carefully removed the tome from its hiding place. He grunted under the weight of it, then Rose, her hands similarly covered, helped him maneuver it free.
The weight of it was almost overwhelming, as was the scent of its leather bindings and thick pages. It was three feet tall and nearly two feet across. The pages made the covers flare at bit at the edges, the book as thick as Crowley’s hand was long from the heel of his palm to the tip of his middle finger. He ran his hand over the cover, amazed to be in the presence of it at last. Something so old, supposedly so powerful. And not the fake in Sweden that everyone knew about, but had they discovered the unsullied original?