Eric van Lustbader, page 34
Wait, a voice inside her head whispered, there’s a better way.
She remained where she was, her head on her forearms, and continued to weep. All the while, her mind was working in fifth gear. If they thought her weak, then let them believe it all the more, for once let their perception of her work to her benefit. This was what Arcangela would do, she was sure of it. Arcangela, who had used the means forced on her, the means no one else wanted, to achieve extraordinary ends.
She began to sob, her shoulders hunched and trembling visibly.
“Look at her.” One of the guards laughed. “Better bring her a handkerchief.”
“A towel is more like it,” the other guffawed.
She heard the scrape of boot soles on the worn stone floor, the creak of old wood as one of the Guardians bent over her chair. She could smell him and knew precisely how close he was to her.
“Here, take this,” he said shortly, “before you bring on the acqua alta, ha ha—”
She flung out an elbow, putting all her physical strength and her outrage into it. The cocked elbow landed square in his eye socket and he gave a cry, muffled by the hands clasped to his face. The second Guardian started toward her, but she had the first one around the throat, had his throwing knife out, and she brandished it.
The second Guardian checked only for a split instant. Then he grinned.
“Don’t make me use this,” Jenny warned.
The Guardian lifted his bladed weapon, the scimitar curve gleaming in the candlelight. “Do I look worried?” he said with a smirk. He came on, his weapon swinging back. “You don’t have the guts.”
Jenny threw the knife butt first. With expert precision, it found the place just above his nose. As he fell, unconscious, Jenny smashed the first Guardian’s face into her upraised knee and he, too, collapsed.
Jenny ran through the darkness. As soon as she had cleared the seawall, she could hear the lagoon lapping at the shingle-Overhead, the sky had cleared. Stars, brilliant as Byzantine lamps, blazed down in splendor through the last wispy tendrils of mist. A stiffening breeze lifted stray tendrils of hair from her face, streaming them behind her. Her heart beat fast, but she felt lighter than she had in some time. She had her mission, and for the first time, it seemed, she was sure about who she was.
She ran toward the light that streamed from the cabin, toward the sharp odor of diesel fumes that billowed into the night. The motoscafo was still there. She saw Zorzi and several others in the last stages of preparing for its departure. For some reason, they had transformed the motoscafo into a police vessel, complete with decals and flag flying from the bow. As she entered the black water, the lines were cast off, and the burbling of the engines deepened in pitch.
She swam powerfully, her arms reaching out, her legs scissoring, and she came up alongside just as the engines produced a throaty roar. The bow lifted and she grabbed hold of one of the bumpers on the side as the boat got under way. She felt the sudden pull on her shoulder sockets and compensated, relaxing. She should have been out of breath, but she wasn’t. She had taken control of her own life, just as Arcangela had meant her to do, and she was exhilarated.
* * *
Chapter 20
Bravo and Rule came ashore on the jutting square of Lazzaretto Vecchio that was fully forested. The night was very dark, but some stars were out, and to the west a cloud was illuminated from behind in theatrical fashion by the moon. The cloud looked veined and muscled, like an ancient god awakening from the sleep of eons.
“The traitor has laid low for quite some time,” Rule said, “funneling information slowly but surely to the Knights of St. Clement. But now, with you on the hunt for the Testament, he’s had to show his hand.”
“You mean Zorzi.”
Rule nodded. “I’m afraid so.” He switched on a flashlight he had found in the cabin of the boat. “He was one of your father’s closest associates. He knows almost as much about Dex as I do. He’s after you now. He’s cunning, devious and extremely dangerous. In fact, there’s mounting evidence that he’s quietly turned all his Guardians against the Order. They obey him and only him. I’m afraid you can’t trust any of them.”
Rule spread a tarp used to protect the foodstuffs the Franciscans brought to the island over the motoscafo.
“We were lucky on the way over here,” Rule continued. “The monks surely must have reported the theft of this boat to the police. We’ll have to keep a sharp eye out for them when we leave.”
They turned away from the motoscafo. It was sufficiently hidden from a cursory sighting from a passing patrol boat but certainly would be found by a closer search. They would have to be well away from here before that happened, Bravo knew, which meant he had very little time to find his father’s next cipher.
“I’ll show you where the ruins of the old church are,” Rule said as they struck out for the interior.
“How did you know where I’d been taken?” Bravo said.
“I followed my suspicions. I’ve had my eye on Paolo Zorzi for some time.”
“Now this is just like old times.”
Rule smiled, his eyes briefly touching Bravo in that familiar way.
The trees were thick in this area, a lush wetness spread beneath them. The rich air smelled dank.
“I want to thank you,” Bravo said.
“I should thank you for saving my skin with Zorzi.”
“You would’ve found your own way out,” Bravo said, “but that’s not what I mean.”
Rule shot him a quizzical look.
“The winter Junior died I was royally pissed off at you.”
“As I recall, you made no bones about it.”
“I’m sorry about that.”
“Old news.”
“No, it isn’t. I was angry at you for taking my father away.”
“Yeah, well—”
“No, listen, Uncle Tony, I need to say this. I was a kid then, I was only thinking of myself, my own pain. I wasn’t thinking of how bad it must have been for my father.” There was a small silence. He wished Uncle Tony would say something, add an affirmation. “You knew he needed to get away, didn’t you? You knew he would break down if he didn’t.”
“He sounded so bad when he called I knew I couldn’t let you see what might become of him. A child shouldn’t see his father in such grief, it was hard enough on you as it was.”
“Where did you go?”
“Norway. We went hunting, moose and red deer mostly. Your father was some crack shot. One day—it was snowing, I remember—we came across some tracks that were unfamiliar to me. Very fresh they were, otherwise the snow would’ve covered them. Anyway, Dex got excited. He made us track the damn thing until the snow grew blue as the sun neared the horizon. Just for this one look we got of it—a wolverine. Even in those days they were rare enough.”
“Did you shoot it?”
“Are you kidding? Dexter was in awe of it, he put up his gun and just sat in the snow like a little kid, watching. And you know I think the beast knew we were there—or at least that Dex was there, because once it looked in our direction and flinched. But it never bared its teeth and it didn’t run.” They were in a small grove of slender, wind-whipped pines now, and Rule pushed a springy branch out of their way. “That was one memorable trip. I saw your father sink down to the depths and then rebound. Out there in the whiteness, communing with that wolverine, he found the salt of life again.”
Bravo felt once again the terrible weight of his father’s passing, but this time it was leavened with a brush as if from the wings of a great bird that had swooped out of the blackness of the night. I guess you could call us outsiders—it’s far more difficult for us to find ourselves. Sometimes I ask myself what I have to do in order to be saved. Revealed to him now was yet another layer of what his father had told him that summer afternoon in Georgetown—the difficult truth that he himself had learned about human connection and the world of the outsider.
“You were always a good friend,” he said, his throat and his heart full, “to my father and to me.”
Rule cuffed Bravo affectionately. “Sometimes you remind me so much of Dex it’s uncanny.” He paused, then, sobering, “I know how Junior’s death affected all of you—especially you. You did everything you could. It wasn’t your fault.”
Bravo shivered, hearing an echo of Jenny telling him the same thing. For a moment, he flashed on her as she had been in Venice—the hotel room, the shower, the bed. He heard again the voices of the deliverymen, floating up from the canal like morning vapor. He felt her caress, heard her whispering in his ear. Then he heard again the eerie, evil report of the ice cracking beneath his feet. She had caressed his father, had whispered in his ear just as she had with him. He felt a certain horror, a creeping along his spine, and he shivered again as they pressed on.
They came to the crumbling stone foundation of the church without seeing another soul. Part of the building had latterly been turned into the dog kennel. One wall of the old church reared up, black and glistening, as crevassed as an old soldier’s face. It had been broken in two.
“Now what? There’s not much here,” Rule asked as they surveyed the scene.
Bravo stared at the wall. Remember where you were the day you were born. Remembering St. Mary of Nazareth Hospital had brought him this far. Where was the hospital in Chicago? He strained to recall. Then he had it: 2233 West Division Street.
He went to the break in the wall—the division—and walked ten paces west, ten being the sum of the four numbers of the hospital’s address. He knelt on the grassy ground at the base of the wall. Rule joined him and together they began to dig with their hands. Three feet down they found a parcel wrapped in oilskin.
Far out across the water, trembling lights from the Lido pointed like a crooked finger toward them. A gull cried several times, the plaintive sound diminishing into a sudden rush of air.
Mindful of the police search that had doubtless already begun, they headed back to the motoscafo at a quickened pace. Bravo unwrapped the package. Inside was a small silver Greek cross. Wrapped around it, like a beehive or a wasp’s nest, was a skein of red threads.
“What do you make of it?” Rule said, peering over his shoulder.
Bravo shook his head.
They reached the boat without incident. The tarp was in the same position in which Rule had left it. Quickly, they stowed it and cast off. Rule handed Bravo the flashlight. While he maneuvered the motoscafo away from Lazzaretto Vecchio, Bravo switched on the flashlight and holding the Greek cross in its beam unwound the short lengths of red string. There were twenty-four. The area on the body of the cross that was now revealed had three words etched into it. Bravo knew that this was a two-key fractionation system cipher. One of the most famous field ciphers, it had been employed by the German Army during World War I. The first two words were the keys, the third word was the encrypted text. He opened his father’s notebook to a blank page and began to work.
The cipher system was based on the ADFGVX cipher, which used a 6¥6 matrix to substitute-encrypt the twenty-six letters of the alphabet and ten digits into pairs of the symbols A, D, F, G, V and X. The resulting biliteral cipher was only an intermediate cipher, however. It was then written into a rectangular matrix and transposed to produce the final cipher.
What Bravo came up with was a single word: sarcophagus.
“Where are we headed now?” Rule said at length. “Do you know?”
“Back to Venice,” Bravo said, pocketing the notebook and cross. The red threads he dropped into the dark, ruffled water as if they were the last vestiges of his father, who had been here and, by this gesture, was here again.
Dawn was extending its long pearly fingers across the flat expanse of the lagoon. For a few moments they were alone on the water. The oblique light turned the surface into sheet metal through which their boat cut cleanly, like a honed knife. Birds called and circled, roused from the sleep by the dawn and the hunger in their stomachs. They swooped and called to one another as they hunted, submerging themselves briefly to snatch a fish between curved bills.
There were other hunters on the lagoon. As the motoscafo rounded the end of the Lido, they saw the police launch, and immediately Rule cut his speed.
Bravo came up alongside him. “What are you doing?”
“You’ll see.”
Rule had not changed course. In fact, so far as Bravo could tell, he was pointing the bow of the boat directly at the police launch. And now, though Bravo knew that the flatness of the lagoon in certain light could fool the eye and even create mirages, just like in the desert, he was certain that the police launch, having spotted them, had put on speed. He could see the bow lift and the new charge of foam fountaining behind it.
“Uncle Tony—”
“Have faith, Bravo. Have faith.”
The police launch rocketed toward them, its speed and noise scattering what was left of the breakfasting birds. Bravo could make out the men aboard, though not yet their individual faces or their uniforms.
He heard a sound then, like the noise wind makes when it catches the rigging of a boat and tautens all its sails. But of course the motorboat had neither rigging nor sails, and then he realized that it was Uncle Tony, who was humming happily to himself. He was in his element, commanding a fast boat, about to go head to head, as it were, with adversaries. This is what he lives for, Bravo thought This is why the Voire Dei drew him like aflame.
The police launch was closing at what Bravo considered alarming speed.
Rule stopped his humming long enough to say, “Hold on,” out of the side of his mouth.
Bravo clutched the railing with both hands as Rule shoved the throttle forward and the motoscafo leapt forward. He had an instant’s glimpse of the astonishment in the eyes of the policemen aboard the other vessel as the motoscafo suddenly bore down on them, and he felt a shock go through him. Then Rule had turned the wheel hard to starboard. He had threaded the needle with an expert’s hand, and the motoscafo veered off with a breathless rush, its port side lifted as it slashed through the water, creating a wave that swept aboard the police launch like a shipload of pirates.
Then they were away, headed northeast, in the general direction of Venice but more closely aimed at another islet whose northern flank presented itself to them to starboard. Bravo, glancing behind them, saw the swamped police launch swinging around, and with a roar it put on all speed to follow them.
“There’s something about that boat,” Rule said. “It’s longer and lower in the water than the launches used by the Venetian police.”
“You’re right. I recognized a Guardian. That isn’t a police launch at all.”
Rule nodded. “Zorzi’s picked up our trail.”
The islet was coming up fast on their right. It was deserted, full of reeds and birds and the clean-sweet smell of decay. They had to be careful now because the water was shallow enough in spots to ground the boats. Long sandbars rose here from the depths of the lagoon to provide feeding grounds for birds as well as natural platforms for clamming.
The sun was fully above the horizon now, looking red and bloated, as if ill with a fever. The light, stronger, shot across the water in wavering lines, making the islet seem farther away than it was. The air was warming quickly, creating a period of disorienting perspectives and bewitching mirages.
“We can’t let him stop us,” Bravo said, leaning in so he could speak over the engine’s heightened bellow. “You’ve got to get me to Venice.”
Rule swung the wheel hard over. “Don’t worry,” he said grimly. “I mean to take Zorzi out of the picture once and for all.”
If Paolo Zorzi were any other kind of man he would have blown a blood vessel by now, but he hadn’t worked his way into the upper echelon of the Gnostic Observatines by being impatient or impetuous. “All things in their season” was his unspoken motto, and even in this chaotic moment when the tenuous future hung in the balance, he remained deathly calm. He neither cursed himself nor his crew for having failed to respond adequately to Anthony Rule’s kamikazelike tactic, but he did resolve not to allow Rule to surprise them again.
Now, as they once again raced after Rule, he took the wheel himself. Instead of following directly in Rule’s wake, he quartered in from the port side, effectively pinning Rule into the shallow passage of water between his oncoming motoscafo and the northernmost corner of the islet up ahead. He grinned as he came on. With each second that passed Rule’s options were becoming more limited. Soon, he’d be out of options altogether.
“You see what he’s trying to do,” Bravo said. “Pin us into grounding ourselves on the shoals close to the islet.”
“In this as in all things, he is bound to be disappointed.” Rule’s voice was low and fierce. The wind had got between his open lips, pulling his cheeks back from his bared teeth.
“But you’re heading right for the shallows,” Bravo said.
Rule said, “Zorzi will be well pleased for the same reason.”
In the deceptive light, he could not make out the distinctions in the color of the lagoon that in late morning through late afternoon mariners used to differentiate the deepwater channels from the shoals that could wreck them. Charts were all well and good elsewhere, but the combination of the changing light and the treacherous tides often rendered the maps useless in all but the few major deepwater passages.
Ahead, Bravo could see the islet coming up fast—the sea fields of quivering reeds, the glistening tide pools, a dark wave, the rising and falling of the birds over their nests, and just beyond, like a series of wavecrests, a pair of barene, salt flats that were actually sandbars, pale as a woman’s throat, the smaller one closer. On the one farther from them a dozen or so men stooped, their feet and ankles hidden beneath the water as they went about their morning’s work, gathering clams that would be consumed that afternoon and evening in Venice’s restaurants.
