I glance at Millen. He’s sitting up straight, arms crossed over his beefy chest.
“Okay,” I concede. “Now that you’ve got my attention, how can I help?”
The monitor lights up again, this time with a map of Northern Italy.
“First let’s order more coffee,” Andrea says, “and then we’ll get down to brass tacks.”
***
The Poseidon Brothers bring more coffee for everyone and, this time, remain in the room with us, their backs against the glass wall by the door, thick forearms crossed over barrel chests. In the meantime, Andrea and Millen give it to me straight, no whiskey chaser.
My assignment, should I choose to accept it, goes something like this:
Find da Vinci’s cave (if it indeed exists) before Soleimani and Putin do. For my trouble, I’ll be paid handsomely and, who knows, maybe I’ll get a novel out of it. In any case, I’ll be doing my country, and the entire world, a great service.
“And where exactly do you expect me to start looking?” I ask. “The cave could be anywhere between Florence and the Austrian-Swiss borders. I need something more to go on than just, find the cave before the bad guys do.”
Millen stands, smooths out his jacket with his open hands.
“Have you ever heard of the Book of Truths?”
I shake my head.
“I’m not a historian,” I say. “I’m a trained sandhog. A digger.”
“A digger who is very resourceful,” Andrea interjects. “Which is why we called upon you. Your skills for locating precious antiquities is unmatched in this part of the world, Chase.”
“Now I’m all choked up,” I mock. “And here I thought you loved me for my body.”
“The book,” she goes on, “is perhaps the only autobiographical account of da Vinci’s life that we know of.”
“He didn’t keep a diary?”
“Indeed,” Millen says, “he kept a library of sketch books. But almost nothing exists of his personal life, other than a line here and there. But the sketchbook, it’s said to contain an accounting not only of his life but, far more importantly, of the cave and its precise location. If the book exists, it might even contain a detailed map.”
“So, what you’re saying is, find the Book of Truths, which might not exist, and I find the cave, which also might not exist.”
Millen smiles. “Or you could walk the woods for a decade like Hansel and Gretel.”
Andrea raises her hand, her face a patina of seriousness and alarm.
“Deputy Inspector Millen jests,” she says. “But we also have reason to believe that the cave does indeed exist, and that Soleimani and Putin are close to locating it.”
“How can that be if they don’t have this Book of Truths you talk about?”
“It’s possible they have come upon pages of it … copies or pages even torn out of it by someone in its possession.”
“Money talks,” I say. Then, “Any idea where I might be able to find this so called someone who just might be in possession of the book that might not exist? The jerk who could be assisting the evil elements?”
Andrea back-steps toward the door. “A good place to start is in Florence, where da Vinci lived and worked for so many years. Surely, if the Book of Truths exists, it will be found in the city where the Renaissance was born.”
She opens the door. Tossing Millen a nod, I go to it. But I stop before exiting through the opening.
“Question,” I add. “Why not go after the book and the cave yourself? You’re MI16. Surely, you have many more resources at your disposal than I do, no matter how great you think I am.”
“To answer your question, Chase,” Millen says. “We send an army of spies into those woods and into downtown Florence, Soleimani and Putin will find out immediately, and things will get very messy.”
It hits me then … the reason they’re subbing this one out to a sandhog-slash-tour guide-slash-pulp fiction writer.
“In other words, the Italian government doesn’t know what you’re up to. Because if they did, it would fall within the jurisdiction of their antiquities authority, and that would shut you down. Or, the red tape would shut you down anyway. Perhaps for years.”
“And the bad guys, as you call them, will have taken over the world by then.”
What I also want to mention is that finding both the Book of Truths and the cave, plus the treasures that might be stored inside it, would be the find not only of a lifetime, but a century of lifetimes. But I decide not to get into the financial aspect of things quite yet.
“Our associates here will see you back to your apartment and that you have everything you need for finding the book and the cave, as well as for keeping in close contact with us.”
I glance at the Poseidon Brothers. “Shall we stop for quiche on the way home, fellas?”
I get a scowl from Poseidon Bear.
“Watch your mouth, mate,” he growls.
“Gonna be a long drive home,” I say.
No one laughs.
6
Naturally, I’m blindfolded prior to being shoved back into the van. I feel like a puppet minus the strings. When the Poseidon Brothers stop outside of what I can only guess is my apartment, some twenty minutes later, and open the back doors of the van, they rip my blindfold off and unceremoniously tell me to get out. They don’t have to tell me twice or even kindly, for that matter.
Before I leave them, they hand me a parcel that contains a smartphone encased in thick, heavy duty plastic, like something the military or a construction crew might carry. The parcel contains a couple thousand Euros. If this were the old days, it would contain a physical map upon which I would draw a big X once I located the cave. Because, after all, X marks the spot. But nowadays, a GPS-equipped smartphone application will do the trick. The digital age is no fun. Chase the cynical.
I thank the big brothers for their kind service while they get back into the van, but they don’t so much as shoot me a second glance before peeling out on their way back to HQ, wherever the hell that is.
Once inside, I set the smartphone and the money on my writing desk in the dining room and put on some coffee. When it’s done, I take it with me back to my desk and set myself in front of my laptop. Opening Google, I type in “da Vinci’s cave” just to see what I can see.
What I discover is a whole lot of sites devoted to ancient conspiracy theories and UFOs. One site does raise my eyebrows when it mentions all the major disciplines da Vinci contributed to—from botany, to art, to medicine, to engineering—and that we’re still utilizing his contributions today all these centuries later. So what does this have to do with the mysterious cave? I can see how people might think some kind of divine intervention must have touched da Vinci for him to have become a genius of such inhuman— or superhuman—proportions. Like the narrator of the web page attests, “The most important man of the first millennia was Jesus Christ. The most important man of the second millennia was Leonardo da Vinci.”
A chime and a vibrating buzz. My cell phone. Not the military grade phone MI16 provided me. I’m talking my own, beat up, energy sucking Android that should have been replaced a couple of years back. But who’s got the money or the time to purchase a new phone every few months? Lawyers maybe. Bankers. Real estate moguls. People with real jobs and real money coming in consistently.
I get up and head into the living room where my phone is plugged into the charger and stored on the bookshelf. My heart lifts when I see it’s a text from Ava. At the same time, my stomach muscles tighten wondering if there’s an emergency. How would I handle it half a world away? That’s my constant problem, isn’t it? Being half a world away from my child. Rather, it’s her problem and I wish to God it weren’t.
I click on the text.
“Hi Daddy … I miss you.”
Heart melts …
“Hi Angel. Isn’t it very early in the morning?”
“Can’t sleep.”
I picture the brunette-haired beauty lying in
her big bed, in her big bedroom, in her big townhouse on Gramercy Park. The fact that she lives very well with her well-to-do investment banker stepdad does little to ease my guilt over not being there for her consistently.
“Bad dream, kiddo?”
“No … Mom and Brian had a party last night. Lots of drunk people in suits and gowns.”
Stomach grows tighter. I don’t know why my ex, Leslie, and her new husband hosting a house party should bother me like it does. But it does.
“Is everything all right? You need me to call?”
“No, I just miss you. I was secretly wishing you’d show up at the party and take me away from all the drunk assholes. J“
“Language, Angel! You know what happens when you swear.”
“You take one hundred dollars out of my college account and give it to the homeless. L“
“I’ll let this one slide. How’s that?”
“Okay good. Thanks! J“
“How’s Lulu?”
“Asleep right next to me. When are you coming back home to New York? We miss you.”
The stomach, growing as tight as it possibly can. The heart melting and breaking.
“Soon. I promise. I have a new job I have to finish and then we’ll do dinner at my place. How’s that sound?”
“Cheeseburgers and fries and lots of ketchup.”
“It’s a date. I’ll buy a case of Heinz 57. Now get some sleep. It’s a school day.”
“Okay Daddy. I love you J XXXXXXXXXXXXXXOOOOOOO”
“I love you too Angel XXXXXXXOOOOO”
In my head, I see Ava slipping deep under the covers while swimming in a sea of down pillows, a little smile painted on her divine face, my pit bull asleep beside her, protecting her. The image makes me want to shutter the Florence apartment and hop the next flight back to JFK. Breathing in deeply, I feel a tear run down my cheek.
I’m wiping the tear with the back of my hand when I hear footsteps outside the door, and then the undeniable sound of something being slid under the door—a piece of mail or a note. Setting the phone back down on the shelf, I quickly go for the door, but not before pulling out my Colt .45 Model 1911 from its holster hanging on the wall-mounted coat rack.
Peering down at my feet, I spot the folded note. I bend at the knees, pick it up. But rather than take the time to read it right away, I throw the door open, peer out into the narrow vestibule and the stone steps that lead up to it. No one there. Bounding down the steps, I run to the exterior door, open it. Stepping out onto the cobbled street, I look both ways.
The street is empty.
But how can that be? It took me only a few seconds to make it down the stairs to the building’s exterior. The pistol gripped in one hand and the note in the other, I head back into my building, up the steps, and into my apartment.
Holstering the .45, I step into a living room that also serves as a library, with its far wall filled with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that contain more than a few relics from my sandhogging days beside a thousand or so volumes. And yes, I’ve actually read them all.
I peer down at the handwriting and the sketch that accompanies it. Not only is the paper thick and almost antiquated, like an old papyrus or parchment, the handwriting is something from another age. Letters are scrawled artfully like calligraphy, not in ballpoint or No. 2 Ticonderoga pencil either—more like a feather quill.
.dees a htiw nigeb ot deen lliw uoy ,tuo ti kees tsum uoy fi tuB .htaed htiw dellif si ti rof evac eht eraweB
Since the note is impossible to read, the letters and the words they form seemingly jotted down at random, I focus my energy on the sketch instead.
At closer inspection, it’s not so much a sketch but a map. A map of Florence, in fact. The streets depicted emerge from the Piazza del Duomo almost like the spokes on a bicycle tire. A small circle surrounds one specific location on the map, as if that’s where its creator intended me to concentrate my attention. But why? What the hell does this note have to do, if anything, with my new assignment to locate da Vinci’s cave? Maybe it has nothing to do with it. Maybe it’s some person’s idea of a joke. Florence is full of drunks and crazy people, the sort who have been attracted to this city for centuries. For all I know, every apartment in my building has received a note just like it.
Stepping into the dining room, I toss the note onto the writing desk. But that’s when something catches my attention. The blank, almost glossy black screen on my laptop reflects the writing from the note just enough for me to make out a word.
Seed.
I pick the note back up. Pulse picking up in my temples, I stand and hold the note in front of the wall-mounted mirror.
Beware the cave for it is filled with death. But if you must seek it out, you will need to begin with a seed.
Well, I’ll be damned. Despite the location of my Florence apartment, I don’t know a hell of a lot about da Vinci. But, I do know some things. And one of the things he liked to do was mirror write. Meaning, he would right backward from left to right, rather than the other way around like a normal person would. Da Vinci was largely uneducated and left-handed, so some have speculated that he developed the mirror writing out of habit. Other, more conspiracy-minded authors, however, have stated that the master did write like that on purpose to fool the Vatican and the religious authorities who would have accused him of heresy had his observations, ideas, and thoughts not been somewhat hidden by the backward scrawl. I tend to lean toward the former suggestion because it wouldn’t have taken a papal authority much time to figure out what I just figured out—that all one has to do is place the writing in front of a mirror and there you have your message as clear as the noon daylight.
But, what of the note and the accompanying sketch?
It comes with a warning to stay away from the cave. So, whoever wrote this somehow knows about my assignment. Is there a spy in our midst? Almost certainly. But who? And why the warning? I’m thinking of the cave as being home to a divine entity, not one that will kill me as soon as I ring the doorbell.
My built-in shit detector continues to speak to me.
I’m to beware the death inside the cave, but knowing that I’m going to pursue it anyway, it says to start with a seed.
“A seed,” I say aloud.
It comes to me then. The map sketched on the note.
Sitting back in front of my computer, I open Google maps. For the hell of it, I once more type in Leonardo da Vinci. A couple dozen red location dots appear on a digital map of downtown Florence. That’s when I place the sketch beside the computer screen and attempt to match the roads with those depicted on the note.
It doesn’t take me long to see that the place marked so prominently on the map matches up with the Leonardo da Vinci Museum which is located between the Academia, where the statue of Michelangelo’s David is housed, and the Florence Cathedral. With that mystery solved, I sit back, sip some of the now cool coffee, consider the use of the word seed.
“Seed,” I repeat aloud, as if this will help my mind spin a little faster. “Sprout, grow, plant, bush, tree, flower. Seed grows into a tree. A true tree … a seed of truth.” Slapping the note back down on the desk. “The Book of Truths.”
I push out my chair, stand, glance at my watch. Ten in the morning. The exact time when museums open in Florence.
“Da Vinci’s lost sketch book,” I say, grabbing my pistol off the coat hook, wrapping it around my shoulders, the weight of the .45 pressing against my left rib cage. “Could it possibly be located inside the Leonardo da Vinci Museum? The book would have to actually exist for that to happen.”
I grab my leather coat, slip it on over the gun, shove the MI16 smartphone into the interior pocket. I leave my apartment entirely optimistic that I am already making progress in the hunt for da Vinci’s long-lost, all-knowing cave.
7
The Leonardo da Vinci Museum is housed in an old storefront located directly beside the Florence Museum of the Dark Ages. A museum that stands in stark contrast
to the brightly illuminated, pleasant da Vinci museum interior with its dark cavernous space accessible by a staircase that leads underground into what is billed as one of Florence’s only surviving Dark Age dungeons.
Entering into the da Vinci Museum, I quickly realize I am more than likely the first customer of the day. There’s a man standing behind a counter that also serves as a book rack, filled with various da Vinci histories and books of his art and even some miniature versions of his inventions that double as kid’s toys. The man’s maybe a little taller than me, and thinner. He’s wearing a dark sweater over a white shirt, the collar tabs hanging out like bat wings. His salt and pepper hair is cut like someone put a bowl over his head, but it doesn’t hide the center of his scalp that’s exposed when he lowers his head. His face is covered in a seven-day shadow and his teeth bear the brown stains of a pack-a-day smoker.
“Buongiorno,” he says, a half smile planted on his face like it’s presently an effort to make a full one for me.
I have a choice here. I can either pound this guy with questions right away about the Book of Truths, or I can play it cool, not arouse suspicions, take a look at the museum, maybe scope the place out. The note was slid under my door by someone who is watching me . . . watching my employers. It led me directly here. There must be a reason. That in mind, I go with the latter.
Bowl Haircut asks me for ten euros, which I pay him. He then hands me a ticket and pamphlet that explains the displays and exhibits I’ll be encountering inside the museum. He fakes another smile, tells me in English to enjoy myself.
I head through the entrance to the general exhibition area—a wide open space filled with a few dozen miniature recreations of da Vinci’s inventions. The famous ones like the giant pair of wings that, at present, hang from the ceiling and look like they could take flight at any moment. There’s the war machines—the tank, the mortars, the machine gun. There’s even a replica of the scaffolding the Florence contractors used to construct the cupula that graces the top of the Florence Cathedral Duomo.
Chase Baker and the Da Vinci Divinity (A Chase Baker Thriller Series Book 6) Page 4