Eric van Lustbader, page 38
But no, that abandonment was nothing to the one she had felt when Dexter had left her. Her fall from Eden, the destruction of dreams, the end of all things. As for Anthony, he was gone from her bed, from between her warm thighs, from her web, but she had to admit that the thrill his lovemaking brought her was due not to his own skills but to the hot gush of revenge she enjoyed against not only the Order but Dexter each time he thrust into her and let go. Anthony was the mailed fist she wielded against the Gnostic Observatines. Anthony had belonged to her, only her. Even Jordan, who knew of Anthony’s existence, had not known his identity. How well she had deceived Anthony—deceived everyone, including her own son. But then deceit was what she lived for…
All at once, she felt Jenny’s arms around her, the vibrant twanging of her nerves. Misery and pain, Camille’s meat, the psychological state off which she feasted. Yes, Anthony was gone, but she wasn’t alone. She had Jenny to gull and manipulate.
“It’s all right, it’s all right,” she whispered. “I’m here now.”
She rose, the weight of her new instrument against her.
“Jenny, what happened?”
With muscular aplomb she hustled Jenny out of the Church of San Georgio dei Greci, out into a muddled late afternoon glaze and the frenzied fanfare of approaching sirens. The police launches began arriving. She and Jenny needed to be gone before the operatives of society began swarming. “Michael Berio called me, frantic.” Michael Berio was the alias Damon Cornadoro had used with Jenny and Bravo. “When you gave him the slip outside your hotel. Good thing, too. If he’d called Jordan, my son would have sacked him without another word.”
She hurried with Jenny to a small cafe, where she ordered them double espressos and pastries layered with chocolate, to give them a quick energy boost.
When Jenny returned from cleaning herself up in the ladies’ room, Camille took her hands, cold as ice. “Now tell me,” she said softly. “I know today has been monstrous, a terrible ordeal. Just do the best you can.”
Jenny told her what had happened—how she’d been framed for the murder of Father Mosto, how Bravo had been captured, how he believed her to be a traitor working with her mentor Paolo Zorzi, how she’d learned that Anthony Rule was, in fact, the traitor.
When she came to the part about Bravo not believing any of it, Camille said, “Of course he doesn’t. Rule was like an uncle to him. Rule partially raised him.”
The espressos and pastries arrived, and for a while the two were silent. The cups were painted porcelain, the plates chased silver. Inside, rosy-cheeked angels romped across billows of pink clouds. People came and went, voices were raised in laughter or in brief quarrels. On the far side of the canal, they could see the flash of the police launch and the dark shapes of uniforms, blocking out the fiery sun that slowly sank through the western sky. There was an efficiency about their movements, as if each was a cog in a machine. The thought lightened Camille’s heart. She had been quits with society for years, but it was always pleasant to have her decision reaffirmed.
Seeing Jenny push aside her uneaten pastry, she said, “What’s the matter, don’t you like the sweet?”
“It’s fine, I’m just not hungry.”
“But you must eat.” Camille took up Jenny’s fork, handed it to her. “You must keep up your strength, we have a long road ahead of us.”
Jenny’s head came up. “What do you mean?”
“I mean we—the two of us—will go after Bravo.”
Jenny’s expression was bleak. “He said he’d kill me if he saw me again.”
“You let me take care of Bravo, darling.”
Jenny shook her head. “Camille, I’m so grateful for your help. This trip has turned into a nightmare.”
“I understand, your friend—”
“No, you don’t understand. I was assigned to protect Bravo, and now I’ve failed.”
“Assigned? By whom?”
Jenny bit her lip. All her training cautioned her to keep her mouth shut. But under these circumstances, cut off from everyone and everything that had been her support system, she saw Camille as her only chance to redeem herself, to succeed in the vital mission Dex had assigned her, to stay close enough to Bravo to keep him safe from those who would kill him. In halting sentences, she told Camille a basic outline of the Order, and of their mortal enemies, the Knights of St. Clement.
“I knew there was more to this than Bravo was willing to tell me.” Camille briefly gripped Jenny’s hand. “I’m grateful you’ve confided in me, darling. Now I’ll have a better idea of how to proceed.”
How well she deceived Jenny, she mused, just as she had deceived Dexter—at least as well as she had deceived Anthony Rule. It was simply that Dexter had proved the tougher man to crack—too tough for her. He had melted, but only for a little while. She’d had hopes—real hopes—that the plan she had conceived would work, that she would seduce Dexter from his marital bed and from the Order, that he would divorce them both, Stefana and the Gnostic Observatines, that he would marry her, that he would turn over the cache of secrets. And she had come within a hairsbreadth of keeping him. Only the untimely death of his younger son, Junior, had turned him back to his wife and his two remaining children. If not for a crack in the ice, Dexter Shaw would have been hers.
“I see what I’ve done,” he’d told her three months after Junior’s death.
They lounged on a bench in Pare Monceau, amid the expensive landscaping that would soon turn lush. He had bought her chocolates, as if they were sweethearts, young as she felt in her mind. Spring was coming, she recalled, the cherry blossoms in first pale pink blush. But not for long; in a matter of days they, like Dexter, would be gone.
“Anthony took me hunting in Norway.” His voice contained an odd note, she remembered, as if strained. “One day we came across the track of a wolverine—very damn rare creature. We tracked him all day in the snow, I couldn’t let him go, I was half-crazed with the need to find him. But was it to kill him? No.
“I saw him, and in the same instant he saw me, and we recognized each other. And it was as if someone had held up a mirror to my face, I knew that an intimate connection existed between us. I knew that we were both dangerous, both capable of rending flesh, of inflicting enormous pain, and I knew that this was what would happen if we went on, Camille.”
“What about me?” she’d cried. Now she knew, she’d heard it coming—that strained note in his voice—but she hadn’t wanted to acknowledge it. She hadn’t wanted to entertain the notion of failure. “What about the plans we’ve made together? The life—what about Jordan?”
“It was a risk, Camille. You knew it and I knew it.”
When she had begged him to reconsider, he had landed his most stinging blow: “You’re dangerous to me, like poison. Stay away from me, Camille. I mean it.”
In retrospect, she recognized the studied coolness, with each word spoken the intimacy draining out of him like sand through an hourglass. With the confidence offered, he was already distancing himself from her. It was an old trick, one she’d used many times, and so later she cursed herself for letting him blindside her, because he was the one, the one for whom she might have given up everything—abandoned the Knights, her ambition, all that had sustained her. For him, and only him, would she have deviated from her meticulously designed plan. Only for you, Dexter…
She had told Jordan how Dexter had cruelly abandoned her as soon as he was old enough to understand. She had him trained, sometimes by her own iron hand, and together they had schemed. Unsurprisingly, he was a clever boy—more clever, by far, than any of his classmates. He had outshone them like the sun outshines the moon.
After Dexter left it was Anthony Rule who became the object of her rage. If only Rule hadn’t taken Dexter hunting, if only Dexter hadn’t seen the wolverine… All she wanted was to turn back time, to return to the moment before the ice cracked, before Junior dropped through and never reappeared.
And so with her mind fixed, Anthony Rule became her next target, and what a sweet prize he turned out to be! She’d had to go slowly—so slowly, in fact, that more than once Jordan lost patience with her. But then Jordan was always impatient. Where did that trait come from? she wondered. Surely not from her and not from his father, either.
Camille once again turned her formidable attention on Jenny.
“Don’t worry now. We’ll be like the angels,” she said, “watching out for him and guarding him from harm.”
On the other side of the canal the police launch had begun to move off, the investigators had finished their business. The tiny cafe had become more crowded. It was very hot. Twilight had come to Venice.
It wasn’t by chance that Bravo found Father Damaskinos; he saw the priest flee the church, as if having seen a ghost. Bravo couldn’t blame him. There was a bloodbath on the checkered marble floor of his house of God. And it had been the priest who had given the gun to Anthony Rule.
Bravo stalked him as he would a petty criminal—a pickpocket or sneak thief. With his mind rattled by shock and grief, it was all he could think of to do. Much like a wounded animal, he was running on pure instinct. His higher functions, torn apart by what they had witnessed—Jenny’s unimaginable betrayal, the life spurting out of Uncle Tony, the light going out of his eyes, the power and the solace he represented dimmed to ash—now ceded control of his movements and thoughts. Terror, disbelief, rage, revenge all bowed down before the necessity for survival.
Keeping the hurrying figure of Father Damaskinos in sight, he staggered through a small campo, where a clutch of old men leaned against the ancient stone wellhead in the center, a monstrous Cyclopean eye clouded by their cigarette smoke; over a severely arched bridge, reflections moving in mysterious and vaguely ominous ripples across the surface of the canal; down a narrow, crooked alley through which wafted unseen voices, a brief twist of an aria, an abrupt, harsh laugh, the gods of Venice commenting on his plight.
As he proceeded, he clutched Lorenzo Fornarini’s dagger in a death grip. He felt marooned on an ocean from which there was no sight of land in any direction. A blind man in the Voire Dei, he had only this dagger and his father’s last coded message to guide him, all else was deceit and lies, questions he couldn’t answer.
He needed to leave Venice as quickly as possible, this was an imperative that stuck in his mind like a declaration of war. And he needed to take Lorenzo Fornarini’s dagger with him. He had an idea, but he required the services of Father Damaskinos.
The hiding place Father Damaskinos chose was the Scuola San Nicolò. Founded at the end of the fifteenth century to protect the rights of the Greek community in Venice, it had latterly become a museum. Bravo followed the priest inside and was immediately surrounded by hundreds of religious icons, displayed on the walls in tiers and in glass cases.
Father Damaskinos was standing in front of a vitrine housing the icon of a twelfth-century saint. The gold-leaf halo shimmered above a long, heavily bearded face. Father Damaskinos’s hands rose and clasped at his breastbone, and his bloodless lips moved in silent prayer so that, save for the halo, there was little to differentiate between the priest and the saint.
Bravo moved silently toward him. At this hour there was virtually no one else in the museum. Watery light filtered in through windows high up in the walls, casting cubes of pallid light, waking the icons from their long slumber.
Though Bravo spoke the priest’s name under his breath, Father Damaskinos started as if pinpricked. He whirled, his eyes showing whites all around. He was clearly terrified.
“Bravo,” he said, “you’re alive, God be praised! I was so afraid—I didn’t see—”
“It was a fiasco, Father. A complete disaster. Uncle Tony was killed, shot to death by…” He shook his head. His chest hurt as if it had been he, not Uncle Tony, who’d been shot. He wanted to scream until his throat bled. “Traitors. I’ve got to get away from the traitors.”
“Yes, I understand.” But Father Damaskinos seemed preoccupied, and he looked furtively around, as if at any moment he expected someone to burst through the museum doors. He had a pale, hunted look.
“But I must take Lorenzo Fornarini’s dagger with me,” Bravo went on quickly. He had his own terrors to deal with. “Father, I can do that if you write a letter affirming it as a religious antiquity being repatriated to Turkey.”
“That is where you’re going?”
“Yes, to Trabzon.”
The priest nodded, but in a vague, preoccupied way that caused Bravo to speak his name once again.
The priest started, staring at Bravo as if he were an apparition.
“Father, what is it?”
Father Damaskinos’s eyes snapped into focus. “Yes, yes, I will do as you ask, of course. But—”
Bravo looked at him enquiringly. “Yes, Father?”
For a moment, something dark appeared to pass before the priest’s eyes, then like a cloud it was gone. “Nothing.”
“Father, you did the right thing.”
“What?” The one word escaped his lips like a gasp. It seemed his terror had tightened another notch.
“The gun, Father. Giving the gun to Uncle Tony.”
“I don’t know. God will forgive me, but I don’t know…“Father Damaskinos put his hand on Bravo’s shoulder and with an effort pulled himself together. “Just be careful, my son. Be very careful. You’re up against… the most dangerous opponent.”
Bravo’s brow furrowed and he shook his head.
Father Damaskinos wiped his lips free of the spittle that had formed there. “It’s the devil, you see,” he said with a soft exhalation of sour breath. “The devil has entered the field of battle.”
* * *
Chapter 23
At the Trabzon airport, where Bravo stood waiting for the suitcase into which he’d packed the dagger, the air was filled with a blinding hail of Turkish and Arabic, falling on his ears like soft hammer blows, like someone chopping cabbage, like the ten million grains of a sandstorm. He eavesdropped on nearby conversations, attuning his ear to the harsh, rapid-fire music of the East. He hadn’t heard Turkish spoken in some time, and as he thought of answers to questions posed by the men, women and children crowding around him at the baggage carousel, he spoke them in Turkish and Arabic under his breath.
He snatched his bag off the carousel and took it into a stall in the men’s room. After assuring himself that the dagger lay undisturbed just as he had packed it, he washed his face and hands. Looking up into the stained mirror, he wondered who was staring back at him. A death’s-head, it appeared, as haunted-looking as Father Damaskinos in the Scuola San Nicolò. He turned away, a bit frightened by what had happened to him, what he was becoming.
Back in the crowded, echoing terminal, he took a long, lingering look around with what he felt was a thoroughly justified knife-edge of paranoia. No one appeared to be paying him the slightest attention. With his bag clutched in one hand, he went out into the humid night.
He took a wheezing, skeletal taxi into the city, which was built on a steeply sloped shelf of rock that rose from the scimitar harbor front up into the foothills of the hazy blue and ocher mountains that for centuries had acted as a miraculous natural barrier against a landward invasion. As Trebizond, the city had been tucked securely behind thick walls, modeled after those that protected Constantinople.
Looking upward into the dark heart of the lamp-lit mountains, Bravo could feel the shape, the weight of Trabzon’s history. When Constantinople fell to European armies in 1204 as a result of the Fourth Crusade, three smaller Greek empires emerged from the wreckage: Nicaea, Epirus, and Trebizond. Alexius I, a grandson of the Byzantine emperor Andronicus I Comnenos, made Trebizond the seat of the grandest and richest of the three. What the Comneni emperors understood the moment they and their army landed at Trebizond was the city’s almost magical location. Situated at the beginning of the road that connects the southern Black Sea coast to Iran, as well as sitting at the gateway to the Zigana Pass through Erzurum and thence into the interior of Anatolia, its strategic importance could not be overstated. Thus the Comneni became the architects of Trebizond as a major East-West trading nexus, where Christianity met—and, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, famously clashed with—Islam, for Trebizond was intensely coveted by the Greeks, who developed “the Fortunate City,” the Latins, who traded through it, and the Ottomans, who considered it stolen from under their noses.
Through the cleft in the dark mountains he imagined the long, jangling train of tawny-gray camels snaking into the city through the narrow, well-defended valley of the Pyxitis, bringing untold riches to the anxiously waiting merchants and entrepreneurs of Venice, Florence, Genoa, as well as the Vatican, for in its day Trebizond had been home to many a warrior-priest.
The rattletrap taxi dropped him at the Zorlu Harbor Hotel, where he had booked a room overlooking the placid Black Sea. The night itself was inky with low-hanging clouds, starless, moonless. The unseen cries in Turkish and Arabic mingled with the desperate barking of the lean street dogs. Outside his window, boats slid past as if across a theater stage. He unlocked the glass door and went out onto the balcony, stood at the edge, inhaled the exotic scents of sumac and myrrh, turmeric and mint, absorbed the strange cacophony of the city. From an open doorway of a seaside club, the trill of Turkish music, the authoritative strum of oud and balzouki. The staccato bass of diesel trucks, the hyperventilating percussion of the motor scooters. Then could be heard the alto and tenor voices. In the ululations, the rise-and-fall toccata of the languages, he could hear hints of Venetian arias, Byzantine twists brought westward across the watery divide by caliphs and sultans, terrifying Seljuks and Mamalukes. He heard what might have been a call to prayer and lifted his head. The black leviathan of an oil tanker was lumbering west. Across the sea lay Ukraine, a country more foreign even than this one.
