The Intelligencer

by Leslie Silbert

  “Tell me, then, how do you explainthese?” the irate speaker asked, handing several sheets of paper to a clerk.

  On the first, Marlowe saw a poem. Skimming the clumsy verses, he shook his head. “The rhythm is all wrong. You can’t possibly think I wrote this.”

  None of the men on the panel appeared impressed with Marlowe’s logic.

  “And the other?” the speaker demanded. “The document found in your former lodgings? Denying the divinity of Christ? Thomas Kyd confessed that it’s yours.”

  “Then he’s…mistaken, my lord. I’ve never seen it before, and it’s most definitely not my handwriting.”

  A new voice called out. “Your lordships, I have proof of what Marlowe says.”

  The crowd buzzed with surprise. Marlowe turned.Poley?

  “Approach!” the speaker ordered.

  Robert Poley did so. He was carrying two sealed scrolls, Marlowe noticed, and a worn piece of paper twice folded over.

  After a few minutes of review, the speaker pronounced, “Neither the poem nor the heretical document appear to be in your hand. And Thomas Walsingham swears you were at his country manor the evening of fifth May…”

  Marlowe wondered if Tom’s letter would help. Tom was no longer involved in government, but he was a well-monied property owner whose last name carried some weight.

  A moment later, however, the question became irrelevant. Unfurling the second scroll, the speaker’s expression utterly changed. “I see,” he said, passing it to other men at the panel.

  Their silent consternation could only mean one thing. Someone truly powerful had intervened. Marlowe had expected Essex—given the recent spate of assignments he’d undertaken for the earl’s network—but with Poley as the bearer, the letter had to have come from Cecil.

  The speaker beckoned Marlowe forward.

  Studying the man’s face, Marlowe saw that disgust had given way to reluctant admiration.

  “You will not be placed under arrest, young man. But due to the gravity of the charges, until this matter is fully resolved, you will be required to report daily to the Privy Council, which tomorrow will be lodging at Greenwich.”

  Marlowe nodded solemnly. Inside he was marveling at his good fortune. It seemed his luck hadn’t turned after all. Rather than relying on a risky scheme to gain entry to Greenwich’s heavily guarded royal grounds the following day—a scheme he had yet to concoct—he was nowrequired to enter. It might not be an invitation to the disguising, but it was good enough.

  “I imagine you’re here to slice out my tongue?”

  Poley laughed. “Kit, it’s been too long. Tell me, did you know your smile now hangs in the French court? I thought it was unique, but—”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Very popular Italian painter. Leonardo something.”

  “He’s tremendously handsome, I take it?”

  “Leonardo?”

  “The subject of the portrait.”

  “It’s a woman. Comely dark-haired one, as a matter of fact.”

  Marlowe was formulating a retort when he felt someone grab his arm. Turning, he saw the Puritan preacher in the fraying cloak. The man had followed them out into the hall and was thrusting a pamphlet into his hands. On its cover, Marlowe saw a woodcut of a winged man plummeting to the sea. Icarus. Squinting, he struggled to make out the faded Latin inscriptions: “Do not become proud, but stand in awe,” followed by, “What is above us, pertains not to us.”

  “Harken to me!” the Puritan urged. “The devil has led you astray, my son, but you may still save your soul. Repent! Recant your dark words!”

  “Tomorrow, perhaps.”

  “Save your soul before it’s too late! The Lord shall smite you unless—”

  “Later,” Marlowe said, returning the pamphlet and shaking free of the man’s grip. “Now, please, be off!”

  Heading up a stairwell, Poley laughed. “Kit, I can’t believe I’m to say this, but I agree with him. Not about your soul, mind you, but your person.”

  Finding an empty room on the second floor, Poley ushered Marlowe inside. “I urge you to leave town.”

  “Because of a bit of slander? Rob, you know I’ve been—”

  “This is different. Phelippes is behind it.”

  “Have you forgotten, Rob? Your tricks don’t work on me.”

  “This is no trick. Phelippes has decided that having you tortured is the surest way to discredit Cecil. I don’t think he’ll give up. I’ve worked out a way for you to leave England in secret. I’ll send word as soon as—”

  Marlowe rolled his eyes. “It is all too obvious what you’re doing. I—”

  “Cecilis, indeed, quite afraid you might confess to the coining operation, but that is not why I’m—”

  “For God’s sake, will you just admit you wish to keep me from unmasking the Muscovy smuggler?”

  “Why should I give a fig about that?”

  “Because Cecil is my primary suspect, and proof of his guilt is almost within my grasp.”

  Poley started with surprise.

  “You do know he’s just promised Ralegh fifty thousand pounds for a voyage in search of El Dorado?”

  “Fifty thousand? Impossible! He doesn’t…oh.”

  His shock appears genuine. Holy Mary, that means…“What you said about Phelippes…”

  “On my life, Kit. I swear it’s true.”

  Shutting his eyes for a moment, Marlowe sighed.

  “Cecil has a cousin in Deptford. Eleanor Bull. She runs a lodging house and is very discreet. Starting tonight, no one else will be there. She’s expecting you. Go, and I’ll meet you with everything you may need—new identity papers, clothing…. Ralegh has a privateering vesselin port leaving for the Mediterranean the day after tomorrow. The captain has agreed to take you and drop you…wherever.”

  “You ask me to trust the most distrusted man in England? Everyone else who’s done so has found himself swinging from a gallows.”

  Poley smiled. “You’ve never shrunk from risk before, Kit.” Then his expression turned serious. “And I can’t say that you’ve many alternatives.”

  “What’s in this for you?”

  “I loathe Phelippes,” Poley replied. “I despise him for what he did to Mary Stuart. I warned her myself. I warned her not to put anything of assassination in writing, and she never did. The evidence that led to her execution was false. He fabricated it.

  “He won that one,” Poley finished. “This time I intend to win.”

  Marlowe took a deep breath. “All right. But not tonight. I need one more day.”

  “Kit, I don’t think—”

  “I’ll keep out of sight, in disguise. Tomorrow night I’ll meet you. Widow Bull’s. I know where it is.”

  Reluctantly Poley nodded.

  “Can you secure Kyd’s release?” Marlowe asked.

  “I’ll try.”

  “Until tomorrow night, then.”

  As Marlowe and Poley turned to leave the room, the man in the gray felt hat took his ear from the door and hurried out of the palace. Pushing through the exit nearest the river, Richard Baines dashed to Westminster Bridge.

  LONDON—DUSK

  When Baines finished recounting the recent events at Westminster, Phelippes dismissed him. Pacing the great hall of Essex House, he considered his next move.

  Marlowe had escaped the trap Phelippes had set for him, but oddly enough, that was a good thing. To Phelippes’s great surprise, the Muscovy investigation was exceeding his fondest hopes. Apparently the man profiting from an illicit alliance with a Barbary pirate was none other than his and Essex’s enemy, Robert Cecil. And for some reason, Marlowe was determined to finish what he’d started in spite of his near arrest—was actually on the verge of uncovering evidence attesting to Cecil’s guilt. What luck! Without question, Cecil would be disgraced, perhaps executed. Essex might be secretary of state come summer.

  But there was one problem. Having been utterly determined to destroy Cecil that spring,
Phelippes had launched the campaign against Marlowe before the Muscovy investigation was complete. It was the investigation he’d considered to be a long shot and Marlowe’s torture the far more promising option. How wrong he had been. And now, unfortunately, Marlowe had learned of his betrayal at precisely the wrong moment. Who knewwhat the stubborn bugger would do with his evidence against Cecil? Well, Phelippes thought, he’d just have to take it from Marlowe by force.

  Baines, Phelippes believed, was not to be trusted with a matter of such delicacy. Who was, though? It had to be someone who worked exclusively for Essex’s network, which ruled out almost every spy he’d used lately, except…ah, yes. Nick Skeres. He and Marlowe were friendly, Phelippes recalled, but that would not pose a problem. Skeres could be bought. And he was good with a sword to boot.

  Summoning a messenger from an upper floor, Phelippes dispatched the boy to Skeres’ home in nearby Blackfriars. He then turned to the battered portrait of Cecil tacked to the hall’s north wall. Torn in several places, it was now nearly unrecognizable. Essex had said something about replacing it, but…looks as though that won’t be necessary.

  23

  ROME—10:34P.M., THE PRESENT DAY

  Hurrying along the Borgo Santo Spirito, Kate dialed Slade. She’d been impatient to leave Vatican City from the moment de Tolomei had mentioned knowing her father, but she had waited. Wanting her departure to appear natural, she had opted to stay for a cocktail at the reception following the tour. Then, after a decent interval, she’d ducked out.

  When Slade didn’t answer, she tried her father, then Max.

  “Can’t talk right now,” Max said. “Slade’s got me tracking down theSabina. ”

  “The what?”

  “De Tolomei’s yacht. It left Sidi Bou Said earlier today.”

  “Oh. Okay, I’ll let you go. But tell Slade that I was just with de Tolomei, and he said, ‘Your father’s secret is safe with me.’ I’m guessing my dad will know what that means—apparently they once knew each other. I have a recording of his voice, and I’ll get it to you all in a few minutes. My dad’s in a conference, but pretty soon, Slade should know who he’s dealing with.”

  “Got it.”

  “Call me when you’re done?”

  “Will do.”

  Taking the Ponte Vittorio Emanuele II across the Tiber, Kate mulled over her encounter with de Tolomei. It had the air of a choreographed stage entrance, complete with a carefully chosen set design. She believed he’d deliberately approached her as soon as she’d reached the Sistine ceiling’s sixth panel, the one that showed Satan—painted as a woman with a snake’s body—wrapped around the Tree of Knowledge, offering the forbidden fruit to Adam and Eve, and their expulsion from Paradise. By choosing to mention her father’s so-called secret in that exact spot, Kate had gotten the impression that de Tolomei was suggesting he possessed information that would disillusion her.

  According to de Tolomei, he and her father had known each other “long ago, in another lifetime,” which undoubtedly meant at least thirteen years ago, before he changed his identity. Her father was still in Washington’s U.S. Attorney’s office at that time. Had he prosecuted de Tolomei for something back then? Kate wondered. If so—if de Tolomei had fled the States a fugitive—that would explain why he’d changed his identity. Or did it have something to do with de Tolomei’s daughter? Could something have gone wrong with the prosecution of her murderer, for which de Tolomei blamed her father?

  Kate had left the reception before he had a chance to tell her about the “other form of art” he was after. It wasn’t a painting, he’d said, so…a sculpture? The manuscript? Or maybe it was anintangible form of art. Maybe revenge was what he’d been after for more than a decade. Revenge that would, perhaps, be made possible by an entry inThe Anatomy of Secrets? Could de Tolomei be Jade Dragon?

  For the second time that evening, Kate dismissed the speculation for seeming overly coincidental. Two separate investigations becoming one? Not plausible. Whatever was going on, though, she suddenly understood why Slade had been so adamant about ordering her off the assignment the previous evening. De Tolomei had a personal interest in her and her father, and it did not seem to be a friendly one.

  Back in her hotel room, Kate had just emailed the digitized recording of de Tolomei’s voice when she noticed a message from Max waiting for her. He’d sent it earlier that day, around the time her flight had touched down in Rome.

  “Shit,” she said, skimming it quickly. Max had been unable to make heads or tails of the numerical code on theAnatomy ’s final page—the page Kate thought had been written by Christopher Marlowe shortly before his death.

  “Bad news,” Max had written. “The number crunching is a no-go. The code’s got to involve words or phrases in a book. Or a one-time pad type of thing.”

  Kate had suspected as much, but she’d been hoping Max’s superior decryption skills would prove her wrong. She sighed. Unfortunately, she now knew, it would be extraordinarily time consuming to get at the meaning of Marlowe’s numbers, if it was even possible at all. He could have chosen any piece of written material to use as a basis for his code. Since he had access to thousands of books and countless pamphlets and poems, the possibilities were endless. And even if he’d based it on one of his own plays, she still wouldn’t be able to crack it, Kate thought. The surviving texts had undergone too many changes since Marlowe had written them, on account of transcription mistakes, printing errors, and revisions by other playwrights. Matching numbers with particular words in a scene would not be feasible.

  By no means was Kate ready to give up. Eventually, when she had time on her hands, she’d compile a list of every book Marlowe was thought to have read and see which, if any, would allow her to read his perhaps final intelligence report. In the meantime, she had a murderer to catch. Jade Dragon was still out there, had almost succeeded in having Medina killed that morning. And somewhere inThe Anatomy of Secrets —somewhere in the pages shecould decipher—was the clue to his identity. Slipping her laptop into her backpack, she set off for a café near the Pantheon that served coffee past midnight. Tonight, no matter how long it took, she would finish.

  Two hours into it, Kate was down to the last forty reports and still hadn’t found what she was looking for. Frustrated, she ordered a third coffee. Then, holding the jar of sugar aloft, she was about to sprinkle a bit into her cup when a conversation at the next table made her dump most of it in.

  Collecting herself a few seconds later, she apologized to the barista, gave him a huge tip, and hurried out.

  The two teenage girls had been discussing movies. Their favorites. It was a comment aboutTitanic that resulted in Kate’s accident with the sugar.

  “I never saw the end,” one of them had said.

  “Why?” the other had asked, astounded.

  “It wasso wonderful, I loved itso much, I couldn’t bear to watch him die. So I just shut off the machine and made up my own ending.”

  Listening to them, Kate had been reminded of a conversation she’d had with one of her Renaissance drama professors years before. They’d been discussing Marlowe’sHero and Leander. Specifically the reason it appeared to be unfinished, with Hero and Leander still alive at the end. Many scholars believed that Marlowe had been working on the poem in May of 1593 and suggested he never finished it because he was killed before having the chance to do so. Kate had accepted that as a likely scenario. Her professor had an alternative theory: that the poem was not an incomplete fragment at all. That Marlowe had kept his Hero and Leander alive deliberately because he wanted to take a story and a form in which the overwhelming expectation was punitive and end it without the punishment. Portray doomed lovers, but leave out their tragic demise.

  Jack and Rose still dancing on the ship, Kate thought to herself as she ran up the stairs to her room. Leander never drowning, Hero never diving after his corpse. The poignancy of tragedy without the heartbreak at the end.

  Connecting her laptop to the Interne
t, Kate hoped fervently that someone had put Marlowe’sHero and Leander online. Rome’s bookstores were long closed, and she didn’t want to wait another minute. She ran a quick search and—thank you, whomever!—brought one of the many copies onto her screen.

  Whatever the reason for its unusual ending, the poem was not published until five years after Marlowe’s death, which in Kate’s opinion made it the perfect key for the coded message he was writing in May 1593. If he were still working on it and kept it with him, it would have been a convenient choice, and in addition to that, no one would have been able to decipher his message without a handwritten copy of his poem. For Kate, that was the clincher. If Marlowe considered the outcome of his final assignment particularly significant, he might not have trusted Thomas Phelippes with the information.

  Scrolling through the poem, she felt pretty sure she was right. Each numerical “word” in Marlowe’s report contained between two and five digits, and began with a number between “1” and “8.” Marlowe’sHero and Leander was made up of 818 lines. No single line appeared to have more than ten words.

  Here we go.The first number in the report was 3006. Looking at the poem, Kate clicked down to line 300, then read the line’s sixth word:most. The second number was 2164.Hero and Leander line 216, fourth word:beloved.

  Then 23…second line, third word:and.

  Then 6044…line 604, fourth word:mighty.

  He’s writing to Elizabeth!

  “Most beloved and mighty Queen,” she began reading aloud, slowly making her way through the letter. “I must tell Your Majesty of a treachery…”

  After finishing a few minutes later, she dialed Medina.

  “You awake?”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “Cidro, I found it! The motive! And it’s not at all what we thought. Where will you be tomorrow—say, around noon?”

  “The City.”

  “Can you skip out for a bit?”

  “For you? Of course.”

  “We’re gonna take a cruise down the river and plot a little break-in. That cool with you?”