Securing the box itself became utterly unnecessary, as he came to see over his years of preparations; still, he had commissioned a woodworker in the Hebrides to fashion him a reasonable replica. Rosewood was the closest this woodworker could get to the original acacia, and that was fine. A box, a satire, a secret shelf for housing the ancient fragment—the re-creation pleased him in terms of his own sense of completeness. He told himself he didn’t need the actual box for Robus Christi—it was mere adornment.
For at the heart of Robus Christi was the ancient Hebrew fragment.
As he pursued the fulfillment of the prophecy he discovered accidentally eight years ago at the Morgan Library, he trembled at his sudden role in human history. He had been forty-three and healthy and just another Catholic who attended Mass from the same kind of unquestioning, fond habit as giving a great-aunt a peck on her wrinkled cheek. He was also a librarian at the Morgan—really more of a hobbyist librarian, what with his independent means—where his job was to field questions about the holdings, provide research materials to credentialed scholars, and make sure nothing met with any gum or Diet Coke in the process.
It was a day of stultifying heat late in June when some female grad student came headlong into the Rare Books and Manuscripts room, with an officious way about her, and presented him with three items on the proper Requested Materials form. Back in the No Admittance area, he had found the biography of Hernán Cortés written by a descendant in the early 1700s, the collection of three brittle maps of New Spain…and a charming acacia wood box that contained what was catalogued in the Inquisition materials as a satire.
A quick scan told him that not only was the document untranslated from the Spanish, but that the eighteenth-century orthography was a nightmare. He’d wish stuck-up missy good luck with this one. As he returned too quickly with the three items she’d requested, he stumbled and the biography started to slide out of his hands. To forestall a disaster of rare documents and maps in a heap on the floor, he gripped the stack tightly with his fingers, and then—something rather remarkable happened.
He felt the tiny, high pop of a spring releasing…
A small, shallow drawer slid out from the base of the acacia wood box that contained the satire in Spanish. And in it…ink on leather, very old—no, very, very old—in what at first glance appeared to be Hebrew. Back in his seminary days, before he left because life felt too constricted, he had learned a year’s worth of Hebrew. In the very first line, as he tried to read from right to left, the words Gat Smanim sprang up at him through the centuries. Gethsemane. And in that moment, he knew one single thing for certain: this was his find. He couldn’t account for how this fragment had come down through time, or how it became secretly berthed with a satire from the Inquisition, but it was now in his hands. And no one living had any knowledge of it—had anyone found it in its sliding drawer, it would now be translated, copied, published, studied, coveted, and housed in the Vatican.
This was his find.
And in the moment it took him to set the box on a high shelf temporarily, behind a stack of fresh cheesecloth, he knew he would present the student with only two of her three requested items, telling her apologetically that the third item was currently unavailable since it was undergoing restoration by the museum’s conservators. He marveled as he passed back into the room that was suddenly seeming especially well lighted, wondering if he himself was the source of the light. At forty-three, he was in his prime, with half a lifetime still ahead of him. Who knew where it would take him, this prize. What heights. It was enough to make him, failed seminarian, hobbyist librarian, convinced that whatever had come down to him through the ages was meant for him alone.
Stealing the fragment from the Morgan Library two days after he discovered it was a matter of nearly giddy ease. But then, over the next several weeks, he felt a deep disquiet. If anyone actually tripped the spring and the little shelf slid open, its emptiness would be a mystery that might lead to an investigation. As a librarian in that section, he could be questioned. And the prospect of questioning became intolerable.
Finally, one day in a tiny explosion from the overthinking that was getting him nowhere, he did the first thing that came to mind to put an end to it: he made a copy of his translation of the Hebrew fragment and slipped it into what was now the empty secret drawer. To the casual finder, it would look either like a partial translation of the satire itself, or a scrap of some other piece of…well, fiction. How could it ever be linked—on Office Max paper and written with a PaperMate ballpoint pen—to an original two-thousand-year-old fragment of divine prophecy? It couldn’t. And, as the librarian in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Room, he could steer patrons away from that particular holding.
No cause for concern.
He rarely touched the rosette in the replica that released the spring to the drawer.
For guidance and inspiration, he had his translation, which he smoothed lovingly with the backs of his bony fingers. And tonight, as always, he had his port. There was a soft knock at the door. “Come in, Millard.”
A shaft of light from the hall backlit his housekeeper, still in his light plaid jacket from an evening off. “I saw the light,” he managed to say with great effort. “Is there anything you need?” His one good eye caught sight of the half-finished glass of wine. “Top off your port?”
Animus suddenly remembered the night shortly after Millard had come to work for him, what must have been nine years ago. Certainly before he made the accidental discovery in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Room of the Morgan Library. He had found Millard through the Wounded Warrior Project and then found it odd that the veteran he hired made it very clear, when Animus had brought it up in his smoothest politically correct voice, how he felt about that term. “I was wounded,” he told his new boss with as straight a spine as he could manage. “I’m not now,” he added. “And I was a soldier, not a warrior.” Finally, Millard Mackey brayed, “It was my job.” The effort at coherent speech exhausted him for the rest of the day.
Now, nine years down the road, in the employ of a spiritual empire, Millard still had some of the homelier practices of the military. And it was during that time Animus recalled Millard standing in just the same way in a soft triangle of light in the doorway to the study. Asking then as now if he could top off his employer’s port. And that time, moved by this hardworking, honest Hoosier from Terre Haute, Indiana, the head of Robus Christi had whirled expansively, arms outstretched, showing off his eccentric study to the help.
His only help, but one was all he needed. Before his discovery of the inscribed prophecy. Before the onset of disease that forced him to be more ingenious, planning out meticulously even his smallest movements in his quest. Before this near and inevitable moment when he would cheat death forever. He grabbed his port that night and spun, crying expansively, Millard, this will all be yours someday. Shall I call you my heir? (Too much port?) He remembered clapping a hand on the veteran’s shoulder, pleased to bestow the strange and wonderful contents of his favorite room in the house.
Soon, as it turns out, he would have no need for an heir.
But in recent weeks, he had become consumed with anxiety over one single loose end.
The translation he had set cavalierly into the secret drawer that day, years ago.
It had been nothing short of hubris, really. And he had never figured on getting fired.
He remembered the day last month he had finally managed to switch his copies of the translation at the Morgan Library. He had ordered an EZ Lite Cruiser wheelchair online for $2,400 and had labored over an altered facsimile—key words changed—of his translation of the fragment that had been shut up tight in the original box for these last few years. When the altered translation was ready, he practiced motoring around in his Cruiser. Millard, red in his half-ruined face, declared it “Sensible, sir,” believing, it seemed, that the boss was looking ahead to the need as his i
llness progressed.
With the altered translation folded and tucked into his breast pocket, Animus parted the pedestrians and the traffic as he motored up the east side of Fifth Avenue the thirteen blocks to the Morgan, where he prayed no one would recognize him, that enough time had passed, enough employee turnover had occurred, that he could do what he had come to do. Betting that the security guard would simply wave through the invalid, he pressed the button for the automatic door at the front entrance. He was in. And nearly ecstatic to meet the wan glances of others at the admirable pluck of this disabled scholar. How people in wheelchairs must hate it…
For him, it was the first time he had been back inside the Morgan Library since he had lost his job rather dramatically seven years ago—the day when he raged at a patron who pointed out that the gentleman in charge of the Rare Books and Manuscripts room always seemed to find some excuse for making some of the Inquisition documentary holdings—the blowsy old tugboat of a female actually said those words “documentary holdings”—unavailable every time she requested them. She then smugly went on to tell him she had queried one of the conservators who looked into the matter and discovered half the official procesos from the year 1595 plus some ephemera—here again, the self-important sow’s word—including a satire and two affidavits were not actually undergoing restoration. She then demanded the items on her Requested Materials form and crossed her arms in the ugly lavender jacket she must have snapped up last season on the clearance rack at Talbot Outlet.
With that, and for the first unfortunate time in his life, the librarian believed he had lost his mind. “Get out! Get out, you officious cretin!” Truly it was as much a matter of punishing her airy vocabulary as the chance she could trip the spring on the secret compartment of the precious acacia wood box. Ephemera, queried, documentary holdings. Even the promise of the prophecy from that final night in Gethsemane was too good for the likes of this imbecile.
Too good by half. His agent, Alaric, was off globetrotting on a modest expense account, hunting down the three key relics from the Crucifixion. The search would take years. Years! And here was this imbecile with bad taste and glasses provided by some glass block manufacturing company calling his bluff on a strictly library matter.
It was intolerable.
He found himself breathless from his own invective at her, while she gaped at him, most of which he would never remember, and he was finally swiping away at some frothy spittle when two security guards clamped him on either arm. Whereupon he was escorted to the director’s office, fired on the spot, banished from the Rare Books and Manuscripts room, not permitted to retrieve anything from his desk, and shown the front door.
There he had stood gibbering on the street while pedestrians gave him a wide berth. Banished. When he came to his senses he found himself, oddly enough, on a subway train headed for Coney Island. Banished. Riding to Coney Island aside, he would have thought he had wandered into a particularly unsatisfying fairy tale where life was especially cruel and the worst curses all had to do with exile from the Rare Books and Manuscripts room at the Morgan bloody Library.
That was his thinking for the first few years after he had been escorted from the premises while that self-satisfied harridan with no credentials worth a damn was left behind, groveled to by the staff, and practically made a present of the priceless “documentary holdings” on her Requested Materials form. Was she building a spiritual empire on Earth with virtually no help? Was she altering the future of humanity with virtually no help? No, not her. But in those first few years afterwards, he contented himself with how things stood. He had a priceless document in a pretty little rosewood box made to order. Even a Xeroxed copy of the satire that had mysteriously accompanied the fragment down through the ages.
He had all he needed. A grand blueprint for the kingdom of God among living men.
22
From Bale’s room at The Iroquois Hotel on W. 44th Street, Val called Cleary and left a message on her voicemail. The drink together at BXL East turned into a bottle of Chilean Malbec Val and Bale shared over an hour and a half at a corner table in the back, next to a framed print of Bosch’s “Peasant Wedding.” No carefully packaged revelations were exchanged. No generic stories about monastery life were exchanged. In the soft, steady candlelight, it became shop talk, after all—where they stood in their investigation into Adrian’s murder. Bale filled her in on his Norfolk leads, a young monk named Eli and an American college student, Melanie. From the boy Bale had figured out how Fintan had expertly tailed him and then stolen the Crown of Thorns.
And from the American girl the most important piece of information was about the phony birder who had been meeting secretly with Fintan McGregor. Spotted in a field, spotted at the brew pub where she worked. From there the trail went cold, but Bale was sure this was the likeliest candidate for the job of killing a pious young monk who had bought some line from the killer about how indispensable he was to…something. Something of staggering importance. Bale had opened his hands helplessly at Val, who could only gnaw at her lip. They fell silent at the dangerous credulity of the very young. And then they fell silent all over again at the dangerous credulity of anybody at all, knowing that at any given moment it could include the two of them as well.
Was she completely out of her league? Val wondered as she turned down the sleek, neat covers of Bale’s bed. How could she ever be sure? As she slipped out of her work clothes and set them on the chair, she felt a little frisson of fear. In disposing of the bug so deftly, Bale had bought her some time, but there was no way of thinking the break-in was caused by anything other than her final voicemail from Adrian. And the fact that Bale linked the two murders—a botched theft of the holy relic that resulted in the deaths of both Adrian and the thief—pointed to a killer who acted swiftly at even the possibility of failure or exposure. If Adrian herself didn’t know a damn thing and was shot to death, what kind of chance did Val stand? With this killer…this phony birder…there was absolutely no wiggle room. Did that signal his utmost confidence in whatever was driving him? Or did it signal an acidic doubt? No wiggle room for a boy hurled off a cliff, no wiggle room for a hapless curator who had gained possession of the Crown.
But it struck Val that when it came to her, when it came to any possible involvement of the one called Val Cameron in the sequence of events, some chances had been taken. Some odd restraint had been shown. Hadn’t it? Adrian’s voicemail had been a little cryptic, sure, but the killer for one had known the finest example of Euphorbia milii they’d ever in this lifetime see really referred to the holy relic. Would he make the leap that Val, the recipient of Adrian’s message, would also make the same reference? Or did the killer call it just right: the one called Val Cameron couldn’t possibly have known what Adrian Bale was inviting her to see firsthand was anything other than a thorny plant.
It was suddenly a reasonable assumption for someone who had shown no restraint when it came to eliminating anyone who—unknowingly—threatened him, and Val sank onto Bale’s bed when she realized it was an assumption that had probably saved her life. So far. Hence the break-in. Hence the bug. She was on trial. Up for inspection. Under consideration. Now that the killer had the Crown of Thorns, he might be feeling more secure. But he had rifled through the contents of her desk, and he had thumbed through the loose papers under her mother’s Millefiori paperweight, looking for any indication that Val had come too close to the secret. And he had bugged her apartment in the hopes of recording any conversations that could identify her as a threat. Where was the line, and when would she cross it?
With shaking fingers, Val pulled together the sheer curtains, watching the street three stories below disappear behind the gauze. She wanted it to disappear. Last summer in the Canadian wilderness, when it came to confronting a killer, she had been strangely serene—because she had a slight edge, and the killer did not. As completely out of her element as she had been in that place of deep, vast w
aters and towering thick trees, and animals always out of sight that she had only ever seen in the Bronx Zoo. Not for a minute in that week had Val expected to feel at home, and she hadn’t. She had only ever learned a few skills to get her through, and ones she truly never planned on using again in this lifetime. Running a motorboat, washing moose muck out of her clothes, paddling, paddling, paddling in the bow of a canoe, her only way to her quarry, and finally…cocking a rifle at a ruthless killer. All circumstantial skills in a place she would never visit again.
But in the final gap between the sheer curtains in the beautiful hotel room Bale had lent her for the night, Val narrowed her eyes at the shadowy figures moving on the sidewalks below, narrowed her eyes at cabs that obscured their drivers, stared unseeing at the lights bleeding red and white and yellow into a haze that suggested, for the first time in her thirty-five years, this was a place Val Cameron didn’t know. She was no less out of her element here than she had been last summer when the possibility of running into a bear felt like a calamity. It was suddenly a terrible truth that she stood a better chance against the bear than she did against a killer here in her hometown who was contemplating whether Val Cameron posed a risk. He was stealing Manhattan right out from under her, showing her that it was a mistake to believe this place was home. That she knew it. That she had made a life here.
A Killer's Guide to Good Works Page 16