Michelangelo_s Notebook fr-1

by Paul Christopher

  Frederico Botte

  He knew that once, the boy had been given another name-a dangerous name-and it was his job to make sure it would never be revealed. He wrote the second name below the first:

  Eugenio

  He glanced at his watch. It was well into the afternoon but there was probably time to get back to the hotel and change into his Father Gentile garb before going off to his meeting with the good friars at St. Joseph’s Church in Greenwich Village.

  While checking out the Grange Foundation on the Internet he’d run a quick check on the staff at the Community of Sant’Egidio and discovered that there was no one working there who went back as far as Frederico Botte’s arrival in their care, but he knew he could probably find out something of use.

  He switched off his lamp and left the football field-sized room, the clouds in the frescoes far above him frozen in a perpetually blue and sun-drenched sky. Unfortunately real life wasn’t quite that simple. He went across the main lobby, his footsteps echoing on the shiny marble floor, then pushed out through the main doors and discovered that in real life it was raining hard. Ducking his head he ran down the steps, paused to buy an umbrella from one of the enterprising vendors who always seemed to forecast the weather better than the weathermen, then headed for his hotel.

  30

  Carl Kressman eased weary old bones out of bed at his normal early hour, then went up into the tower of his Florida-style beach house to take a look at the day. As usual, the weather was nearly perfect: cloudless sky, limitless azure Gulf, gentle breeze and a temperature that was somewhere in the eighties already.

  Kressman went down to his bedroom again, slipped into his bathing suit and gave himself a quick once-over in the full-length mirror on the bathroom door. At seventy-five he still had most of what he’d had at twenty, except now some of it was chemically or mechanically enhanced. Viagra and a couple of other potions kept his pecker up when it was necessary-which wasn’t all that often, if truth be told-and a pacemaker that looked like a pack of cigarettes stuck under the skin of his chest kept his ticker tocking. For some reason, unlike most of his friends, he still had all his hair-white, now, of course-and trifocal contact lenses kept his vision twenty-twenty. He was tanned, fit and in good spirits, completely in command of his senses and rich as Croesus. What else could a man want?

  The tanned old man took the circular staircase down to the main floor, went to the all-white kitchen and poured himself a cup of coffee from the automatic machine. Standing by the sink and looking out at the big swimming pool at the back of his lot he shook his head, savoring the rich flavor of the brew. Life was certainly a strange thing; there was a time when he had counted his life in minutes. The thought of living out the last of his long life in a place like this, with beach houses, swimming pools and machines that made coffee for you before you woke was almost too much to comprehend. He had come through wars, hurricanes and untold other disasters and had more than just survived-he had prospered. He laughed out loud at that. At twenty years old he had barely heard of shrimp let alone tasted one, and in the end the wonderful little morsels had made him rich.

  Kressman finished his coffee, rinsed out his mug at the sink, then put it in the rack to dry. He crossed the tile-floored living room, went out through the screen door onto the covered porch and then down the steps to the pool. More than one person had made fun of him for having a pool when his house was only fifty feet from the Gulf of Mexico but he enjoyed the convenience. The pool was filled with saltwater pumped in from the Gulf, filtered and heated to eighty degrees, night or day. There was no surf to get in the way of his exercise and no currents or riptides to deal with.

  He walked down the concrete apron around the pool, slipped out of his slippers at the foot of the diving board and picked up his goggles out of the little plastic basket he kept there. He went out to the end of the board, bounced twice, lightly, then arced into the air, slicing into the breeze-rippled water with the near professional ease of long practice.

  Kressman began his regular laps, his mind clearing as he went through his routine of alternating crawl and breast stroke. As he swam he let his mind go free, memory skittering over his life, his happy years with his wife-dead now after a short, painful battle with cancer-his two children, boy and girl, one a doctor now, the other a professor in New York. He thought of his businesses, taking half a dozen old shrimpers from Fernandina Beach, refurbishing them and putting them to work, half a dozen becoming a hundred, a hundred becoming a freezing and packaging depot, the depot station becoming one of the biggest seafood companies in the south. Investing in Alabama coast real estate and getting even richer.

  All so he could wind up swimming in his pool in the early morning, all by himself with his memories. He reached the end of his routine, did one more lap just for the hell of it, then floated on his back for a minute or two, staring up into the young morning sky, thinking about having a big breakfast down the road at the new and improved Nolan’s, recovered from the hurricane now, and back in business better than ever. Steak, eggs and pan fries and to hell with his cholesterol for once. “Liegt der Bauer unterm Tisch, war das Essen nimmer frisch!” as his papa used to tell him.

  He flipped over onto his front, treaded water for a moment and then paddled forward until his feet touched the slightly grainy gunite of the shallow end. He stepped forward, pushing through the water with a side-to-side sweeping motion of his arms, barely feeling the first spike of glass as it sliced through his foot. By the third step he was aware that something was wrong; like a lot of men his age, Kressman had type 2 diabetes and had lost a great deal of sensation in his feet, but by now the pain had gone farther up his legs. He looked down and saw that the water around him was turning pink.

  Another step and one of the deadly, invisible weapons sliced through his right Achilles tendon. He staggered, then fell, his arms outstretched. One of his hands was punctured and another piece slashed into his left calf. Kressman, already going into shock, knew that he was in terrible trouble. As well as diabetes, Kressman also suffered from a number of minor heart ailments, all of them requiring the administration of blood thinners. One of them was Coumadin-also known as Warfarin, a powerful rat poison. Multiple cuts like he’d just received and in warm water could easily result in his exsanguinating-bleeding out in a matter of minutes.

  He crawled forward, trying to reach the safety of the steps leading out of the pool. His other hand was cut, his index finger almost amputated. He gave a gurgling scream and fell to one side, and he was pierced twice more, once just below his ribs on the right, cutting through his thin flesh into his liver, the second piece of glass goring him in the thigh, opening up the femoral artery close to his groin.

  He screamed again, his mouth half underwater and he began to choke. He tried to roll over and failed, his torn hands flailing, trying to find purchase on the bottom of the pool only to meet with more agony. As the ripped artery in his leg poured out his lifeblood the water around him turned from pink to red. His eyes rolled back in his head and he slowly rolled over, his face fully underwater. A moment later he died, the battery in the pacemaker still jolting his heart with electricity every few seconds and getting no response, the organ still jerking spasmodically in the dead man’s chest.

  31

  Detective Sergeant Bobby Izzard-known inevitably as Izzy since his days playing box ball on the busy sidewalks outside his apartment building deep in the bowels of Queens-studied the long breakfast buffet on the lower level of Zeke’s Down Under, then filled up his plate with scrambled eggs, bacon, home fries, a few fried oysters, a scoop and a half of marinated Royal Reds and some dirty rice to balance things out.

  Like just about everyone else on the Gulf Shores Police Force his belly hung over his belt and it was probably killing him along with the beer, the cigarettes and watching football on Sundays instead of playing it, but frankly, he couldn’t give a good goddamn. He’d escaped his nagging wife, New York winters, a homicide caseload that never seeme
d to get any smaller and a twisting pain in his gut that was threatening to turn into an ulcer, or maybe something worse. In Gulf Shores, Alabama, of all places, he’d found paradise, and one of its fundamental joys was eating breakfast at Zeke’s Down Under.

  Paradise for sure. In the first place, lots of people died in Gulf Shores, which was why there was one full-time funeral home in the town of five thousand and two more in the town of Foley, just up the road. Died, yes-murdered, no. Almost all of the deaths were from old age, almost all the dead bodies had been under a doctor’s care, and none of them had any interest for Izzy.

  As part of a three-man detective squad, Bobby Izzard spent most of his time looking into purse snatchings, the occasional bunco beef where some jerk tried to slick an old lady’s life savings, and missing persons, most of which turned out to be people with Alzheimer’s who’d wandered off. Once in a while during the snowbird season-when the town’s population trebled and quadrupled as northerners poured into their high-rise beach condos-Izzy would hook himself up with the marine squad and go out in the big cruiser to look for floaters and annoy boaters who looked like they might be trying to smuggle in a bale or two, but in the three years he’d been on the job serving and protecting the people of Gulf Shores, Alabama, he’d never drawn his gun, only twice used his cuffs and had never had anyone lift a hand in his direction, let alone fire a shot.

  And that was just the way he liked it. This wasn’t NYPD Blue or Law amp; Order or CSI or even Kojak. This was Gulf Shores, Alabama, home of petting zoos, miniature golf courses and shark fishing charters. Gulf Shores, where the living was high-fat and who cared? Where dying was just a simple question of your heart stopping after a nice round of mini golf with your friends at Pirate’s Cove. If anyone got murdered it was in Mobile or Pensacola and that was none of his damn business.

  He picked up a pot of coffee on his way back to his table, sat down with his favorite view of the marina and the wharf and started to methodically work his way around the oversized plate. It was too early for most people. With the exception of a few hungover-looking charter boat captains and a tottering group of old tourists in yellow T-shirts and Tilly hats to guard against the sun he had the place to himself. For a minute.

  He’d just speared his first Royal Red and was swirling it around in the sugary marinade when he saw Kenny Frizell out of the corner of his eye. Kenny was a go-getter, a local, and, God help him, Kenny was his partner, the second man in the so-called investigative team that made up the Gulf Shores Detective Bureau. The third man was the K-9 end, a good old boy named Earl Ray Pasher whose only love was El Kabong, his enormous, drooling, grinning American bloodhound.

  Kabong was at his happiest when sniffing around the bloated corpse of a drowning victim, a suitcase full of cocaine, a growhouse basement full of hydroponic weed, or picking out the trailer down the bayou back roads that was actually a crystal meth lab. Kabong was so good at his job that he and Pasher were constantly being borrowed by other forces in Alabama as well as out of state, and neither one of them was around much. Anything that smelled of anything in Gulf Shores had long since been given the once-over by the Kabonger.

  Kenny looked like a cartoon character in a suit. He had carrot red hair in a marine corps buzz, a build like Popeye on steroids and a face like Howdy Doody, except he wasn’t old enough to remember the famous puppet. The only reason he was a corporal and a detective was because he’d completed a two-year associate’s degree in criminal justice at Faulkner State Community College, Gulf Shores campus. Kenny didn’t pause in front of the buffet-wasn’t even tempted. He didn’t even hook himself a coffee. Kenny just came on in those big black shoes, the freckles on his round cheeks all aglow. Unlike Izzy, who after three years was tanned a nice tea-stained color, Kenny just burned. He always looked like he’d been gone over with a blowtorch or stepped out of a pizza oven. Watching him cross the floor, Izzy began to lose his appetite. Kenny looked serious. Worse than that, he looked worried.

  The young detective sat down across from his partner.

  “We got a problem, Iz.”

  “No, you’ve got a problem. You haven’t told me what it is yet, so I’m still enjoying my breakfast.” He picked up a piece of bacon, wrapped it around one of the marinated Royal Reds and popped the morsel into his mouth, chewing and doing his imitation of Homer Simpson, which almost always got a laugh out of Kenny. Not this time.

  “We’ve got a body in a swimming pool.”

  Izzy sighed. Kenny liked to get full value for all that education, which meant it took him forever to get to the point.

  “Presumably a dead body.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Old person?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So old people drown in pools all the time.”

  “Except he didn’t drown. I don’t think anyway. It looks as though he bled to death in the pool. He’s floating faceup and the water’s red.” Faceup was a little strange. Natural flotation usually made bodies flip onto their fronts.

  “He in the deep end of the pool or the shallow?”

  “Shallow.”

  That explained it. He was probably grounded on the bottom of the pool.

  “Somebody call Maggie?”

  “On her way.”

  Gulf Shores was lucky enough to have a county coroner who was not only a doctor but also a pathologist, working out of the morgue at the Baldwin County Medical Center up the road in Foley, a ten-minute drive away down Route 59. Maggie was in her early fifties, like Izzy, but she had an ass like an eighteen-year-old and she knew it, which was fine with Izzy.

  “Hemorrhoids, maybe?” Izzy ventured.

  Kenny’s mouth twisted up into a cross between a scowl and a simple look of distaste. Somebody with an associate’s degree didn’t joke about possible murder victims. Izzy, on the other hand, even made jokes about the extraordinary number of pedestrians killed crossing Gulf Shores Boulevard-most of them half blind or carrying walkers or canes-referring to it as the annual roadkill count. Men were squirrels, women were beavers. For Izzy violent death was a job; for Kenny it was a calling.

  “I think it was murder,” said Kenny, his voice heavy with doom.

  “Why?” said Izzy. “People bleed for all sorts of reasons. Maybe he had lung cancer or an embolism or something.”

  “I don’t think he could see too well, or his goggles got clouded up.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “There’s broken bottles all over the bottom of the pool.”

  “Bottles?”

  “Yeah, like you’d take a bottle and smash it and then put the bottom of the bottle on the bottom of the pool. I’ve got twenty-twenty vision and I could barely see them. There’s hundreds of them. It looked like he was swimming and started walking up the deep end and got cut, badly. Not to mention this big long sliver of glass that’s sticking out of his mouth. That was no accident.”

  Izzy took a sip of coffee and fished out his Zippo and his Marlboros. “A sliver of glass?”

  Kenny nodded, somber. “About a foot long, like a dagger. Looks to’ve cut his tongue just about in half.”

  Izzy snapped open the Zippo, fired up his Marlboro and took a deep drag. He stared down at his breakfast plate. He felt a bubble of gas moving painfully through his system. He should have had something simple, maybe just the oysters. He sighed again and let out a cloud of smoke.

  “Well, you’re right there, Kenny boy. A foot-long piece of glass sticking out of an old man’s mouth sure doesn’t sound like an accident, even in Gulf Shores.” He pushed himself away from the table and heaved himself upright. The gas bubble gurgled. “We better go take a look.”

  32

  Finn Ryan pushed away from the computer in the Ex Libris office, pinched the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger and squeezed her eyes shut. At her right hand there was a ragged pile of scribbled sheets from a yellow pad representing her efforts over the past few hours. She sat forward, yawned and tapped
the pages together, trying to concentrate. Half her thoughts kept wandering back to the warm liquid feeling in the pit of her stomach and the faint iron memory of Michael as he’d slowly pushed into her, neither of them able to wait for the bed, her legs wrapped around his waist as she sprawled back over the table in the kitchen. Wonderful enough and enormously satisfying, but always with the feeling of distance and loneliness, of someone who could never quite give all of himself. A dark, cold anger that was as much the source of his sexuality as simple passion. Perhaps it was only the age between them but she knew that whatever they had together was not going to last for very long, one way or the other.

  “Fiona Katherine Ryan, you think too goddamn much.” She stared down at the yellow sheets in her hand, focusing. Who else would start up an intimate relationship with a man at least twenty years older than her in the midst of investigating a murder or two and trying not to get killed in the process herself? And all because of a sheet of parchment inked by the hand of a genius five hundred years ago. It didn’t seem quite real, but then she remembered the copper tang of blood in the air that signaled Peter’s killing and the black insect helmet of the homicidal bicycle freak as he spun through the air to his death. Very real.

  She’d started her research by looking for a Greyfriars Web site. For some reason she’d been a little surprised to find that it was slick, graphic-based and very sophisticated. She’d been expecting something a little plainer, an austere page in Times New Roman with a crest in the corner. The crest was there, the faintly sinister image of a shield split by a bar running left to right with three thistles on the right and a black swan with two Maltese crosses on the left. The word Greyfriars and the Latin motto Mens Agitat Molem sat over the shield. A scroll ran below with a second obscure verse in Latin: Aut Inveniam Viam Aut Faciam. The first motto meant: Mind Over Matter and the second, roughly translated, meant: I Shall Find a Way or Make One.