The Medici Dagger

“He was sixty,” I said.

“There’s the math,” she said, chiding. “And that means . . .”

I thought hard for a minute, mentally leafing through my art history. Then I got it. “Jesus,” I said, “Leonardo was inRome.”

“Bingo!” she said, slapping her thigh. “In 1512, Pope Leo the Tenth had Leonardo summoned to the Vatican. Leo was Lorenzo de’Medici’s son, and he wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps and usher in a newGolden Age of Art—only in Rome, not Florence—making Rome the art capital of the world with him as pope. But Leo was a hedonistic loser. Nobody wanted him to be pope, and that stirred up all kinds of trouble throughout Italy. Twelve Franciscan friars took it upon themselves to spread out over the country and preach like crazy that Leo was the Antichrist and that if he was made pope, the end of the world would come. These twelve had a profound effect on the mood of the Italians. Everyone was thinking doom and gloom, including Leonardo.”

Excitement stirred in me.“Lust of the mighty, wanton destruction,” I said. “So we know how he was feeling when he arrived in Rome.”

“Yes. That explains the first part of the translation from yesterday. Now add that once Leonardo got to Rome, Leo didn’t give him a single commission. That’s where this part picks up. ‘Why am I not allowed to work?’ Leonardo asks. Raphael had been givenThe School of Athens,Bramante was building everything in sight, and Michelangelo was painting the Sistine Chapel.”

“That had to hurt. Leonardo’s archrival getting the cream of commissions.”

“Sure,” Ginny said. “They hated each other. Michelangelo called Leonardo a man who could get nothing accomplished, and Leonardo said Michelangelo had no business painting—the Sistine Chapel notwithstanding.”

“Right,” I said. “Leonardo thought sculptors were fools for spending-their lives hip-deep in marble chips, said they looked like bakers or snowmen, while painters walked around dressed in fine clothes.”

“So,” Ginny said, “Leonardo, the greatest of them all, has nothing to do except dissections for his anatomical studies, and on top of everything else, Pope Leo orders him to stop the dissections because the thought of it makes him queasy.”

I sat up straight, right in the pipe with Ginny. “So you’re saying the ‘he’ of ‘he who would treasure me’ is Pope Leo.”

“Exactly. You can feel Leonardo’s frustration. He knows God gave him these incredible gifts, tasked him, but he’s not allowed to completehis work. Million-candle fury, Reb. Now,” she said, hunching over toward me, tenting her fingers, bouncing the tips against each other. “Any idea where Leonardo was staying in Rome when he wrote these words, when he devised the Circles of Truth?”

I simultaneously wanted to punch her out for making me work for it and kiss her for translating the page and knowing what it meant.

“The Belvedere Palace,” Ginny said, clapping her hands.“Anddo you know where the Belvedere Palace is?”

I grinned and pulled by earlobe. “The Belvedere Palace is on top of Vatican Hill.”

“My hero,” she said, holding me in her gaze.

“So,” I cleared my throat, “we’ve got Leonardo at the Belvedere Palace, deciding where and how the Dagger shall rest.”

“That’s my best guess.”

“It’s a very good guess. Nice work.”

“I know. And isn’t it slightly incongruous that we’re at this very moment flying to California. We’re going the wrong way, Reb!”

She jumped out of her seat and headed toward the cabin. “Tell Dracco to turn around right now!”

I grabbed her arm. “Forget it!”

“What are you saying?”

“Up till this second your thinking was stellar.”

“Don’t patronize me. You’re telling me California, not Rome? Are you nuts?”

“Ginny,” I snapped, squeezing her arm. “The Vatican. Take one. ‘Pardon me, Pope, could you please cancel the Mass, we’re checking under the pews for the Medici Dagger. Oh, and don’t tell anybody we’re here because all of Europe wants to capture us or kill us, or both.’ ”

The color drained from Ginny’s face. She shrunk back into her seat.

“Yes, we have to go back there,” I told her, “but not before we figure out the Circles of Truth. They’re going to tell us ‘where and how it shall rest.’ Till then, we play it safe.”

Ginny frowned absently. I was sorry I’d reminded her of the danger.

I picked up Leonardo’s two pages and examined the Circles of Truth. The shape of the markings triggered a memory. For my twelfth birthday, Mona had given me a book of Sherlock Holmes adventures. She’d recommended one of the stories to me and it became my favorite.

“Do you remember Sherlock Holmes’s ‘Adventure of the Dancing Men’?” I asked Ginny.

She shook her head.

“The messages were written with pictures; stick figures of dancing men with their arms and legs in different positions. They were an alphabet that only two people knew. Secret messages were written in the dancing-men alphabet. We’ve got a bunch of concentric rings of lines and squiggles here. Maybe all these little marks on the Circles of Truth are some kind of alphabet, or a pictograph—broken up, cut apart.”

“Could be,” Ginny said, peering at the Circles. “I’m an art historian, not a cryptanalyst. Look, I got us to the Vatican. Maybe we should just go there and give the pages to the pope. He could, I don’t know, call Gibraltar and—”

“Call Gibraltar?” I shot, stunned that she would give in so easily to her fear.

“They’d get us out of trouble.”

I slapped my forehead.“Maybe you’re right, I should tell Dracco to turn around. Pick a spot in Europe. Any spot. I’ll let you off.”

“Why?”

“Because you don’t have a goddamn clue what this is all about, that’s why.”

Tears welled in her eyes, but I didn’t care; I was boiling. “You’re saying million-candle fury—translating it for chrissakes—but you don’t get it. You know all the history, but you don’t know what this is really about.” I waved the pages at her.

“What’s it really all about?” she said, tears falling now.“Illuminate me.”

“It’s about getting something right for Leonardo, Antonia! One thing right! You know Leonardo’s Sforza Horse was used as target practice, the bronze melted down for cannonballs.The Last Supperhung for years in a stable, then got painted over a dozen times. And here Leonardo was in Rome at the Belvedere Palace, sick to death because he knew he was the greatest genius in the history of geniuses and everybody let him down. He creates the most amazing thing, perhaps of all time, and has to hide it from everyone for his entire life and on into the future.Thiscan’t be another Sforza Horse orLast Supper.I won’t allow that to happen. Leonardo was alone in a rotten, lousy, cruel world he couldn’t trust with his Dagger. And if that Dagger is out there somewhere . . . in the Belvedere Palace, or wherever . . . if Leonardo wrote its location down on these pages, then locating it is exactly what I’m going to do! I’m not about to let some billionaire bastard and his tattooed sidekick put the vise grips on Leonardo.” I was pumped now, pacing the tiny luxury cabin, pounding my fist in my hand. “Or for that matter some steel-haired, tea-sipping elitist with a Gibraltar ring. The hell with all of them. Nobody uses Leonardo. Not in this century, not on my watch.”

I stopped and shot a look of single-minded purpose into her tear-laden eyes. “Let he who finds the Dagger use it for noble purpose. That was my father’s plan. And now it’s mine. Me. The ‘mighty traveler,’ that’sme!”My hands were trembling again.

Ginny looked from them to my face.“I see, Rollo Eberhart Barnett, Jr.”

I turned away, took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “Are you in or out?” I said. “For Leonardo.”

“Look at me,” she urged. I reluctantly acquiesced. The overhead cabin lamp cast a reddish hue on her dark shiny hair as the jet engines hummed through the heavens. Ginny swallowed once, her small Adam’s apple vanishing and quickly reappearing.

“I’m in,” she said. “For Leonardo. And for you.”

“Okay, then,” I told her. “California.”

ten

After landing where the smog meets the sea, Dracco slid us through customs as if we were invisible. As we parted, he told us to think of him the next time we needed special travel arrangements.

We bought my Jaguar back from the long-term lot and eased onto the freeway. Up above, the sky looked cloudless and forgiving, offering grace to all the Southern California sinners. The familiar sights of the city freed my tired mind to focus on the immediate tasks ahead.

First stop, the bank. I squirmed in my seat, keeping to myself the fear that Krell’s men might have cleaned out my account electronically and even gained access to my safe-deposit box. Another possibility: They had somebody staked out waiting to attack the minute I walked out the door.

I parked around the corner from the bank. I asked Ginny to wait in the car and explained why. Reluctantly, she agreed. As I approached the building, I could feel my heart begin to pound. Everyone looked suspicious: the two Armani suits peering into that old Mustang; the couple whispering in each other’s ears; that shopping-cart lady. Like the maid who’d planted the bug at the Gritti, anybody could be anybody.

I entered the building fully vigilant, my boot heels clicking noisily on the marble floor, alerting everyone to my presence. I checked for the guards. The one by the vault with a red-veined nose hitching up his belt buckle looked like a retired cop. The other, stifling a yawn, kicked something off his thick-soled orthopedic shoe. Neither seemed interested in me.

I stepped over to a familiar-looking woman sitting at a customer-service desk. She had me sign the register, and then I followed her into the vault, checking over my shoulder.

It looked like business as usual, but it was hard to tell. I hadn’t suspected anything at the Gritti or at the Four Seasons. Self-doubt pawed at me. The customer-service woman left. I watched her go, half-expecting the door to close, the spoked steel handle to spin, locking me in for eternity.Get a grip.

I opened the safe-deposit box. The satchel was there. I pried its jaws apart. Wads of cash.Yess!I closed the beat-up case without counting the money. I knew how much was in there: one million nine hundred and fifty thousand dollars. I took the satchel with me and left the bank.

Outside, I looked for the young whispering couple. Gone. Nobody by the Mustang. The shopping-cart lady. Still there, sitting on a bench now, holding out a paper cup to a man in a suit who was giving her spare change.

I hustled around the corner back to Ginny. Just as my anxiety was starting to dissipate, I spotted the two Armanis standing on the curb leaning against the passenger door of my car, talking to her.Shit!

The car was facing away from me and one of the guys partially obscured my view of her. I picked up my pace, moving a little closer to the shops in the hope that they wouldn’t see me in their peripheral vision. They had to be armed. All I had was a satchel of money.

I stayed low, gaining speed. Throwing the satchel to the sidewalk, I sprang up right behind them, balling my fists and raising my elbows, and dropped down hard on each of their shoulders. They both yelped and fell to their knees.

“Oh man!” one of them moaned. I threw a forearm into the side of his head and he went down silently.

“Reb!” Ginny screamed as the other guy grabbed me by the back of my jacket. I spun around, took his hand with both of mine, and twisted. To keep his arm from breaking, he went with the force of themomentum until he was facing toward the back of the car with me behind him. I let go of his wrist with one hand and pushed on his elbow. He groaned again and fell back to his knees.

“Where’s Tecci?” I shouted, wrenching his arm higher. “Tell me or I’m going to break it right off!”

“Oh, shit, no, please!” he moaned.

“Where’s—”

“Reb!” Ginny yelled, jumping out of the car. “Let go of him! They were just asking about the car. Jesus, you’re hurting him!”

“We were just looking at your fucking car, man,” the guy groaned. “Lemme go.”

I did. He crawled away, sat against a light pole, and massaged his shoulder, glaring at me. His buddy started to come to and held his hands over his ears, shaking his head as though something very loud was happening in there.

“I’m at UCLA Law, pal,” the lamp-post boy threatened. “You just committed assault and battery on two people. It’s just a fucking car. She called you Reb? Give me your last name now, you animal.”

“Animal,” I gulped, comprehending what I’d done. I removed two ten-thousand dollar packs from the satchel and handed them to the law student. “Here,” I told him. “Take these. One is for your friend. Consider it an out-of-court settlement.”

I threw the bag in the trunk and opened the door for Ginny, whose expression had changed from astonishment to veneration. I had saved her, again, or at least thought I was saving her.

I hated feeling unhinged.

“Where are you taking me now, animal?” she asked as I pulled into traffic.

“I’m not taking you anywhere,” I said flatly. “And please, please don’t call me— Hey, that’s Archie’s car!”

“Where?”

“Four cars up,” I said, pointing. “The black Humvee. He’s just turning on Wilshire. Goddamn!”

I threw on my blinker to follow.

“How do you know it’s his?”

“I know. Can you see the license plate?”

“HOO-AH!” Ginny read.

“That’s the name of his business,” I told her as we got caught at a red light.“He’s heading there now. I can’t believe this.”

Archie’s specialty gun shop,Hoo-ah!,was in a small, freestanding purple building off Wilshire Boulevard. It had at one time belonged to a movie production company that started off big, but went toes-up after a couple of major flops. Inside, among the standard assortment of guns and paraphernalia, were glass cases with memorabilia and a couple hundred signed pictures of movie bozos, including me, although it was hard to tell it was me because I was wearing a motorcycle helmet and sliding under a burning semi-tractor-trailer on a police motorcycle.

In the store the opening credits ofThe Philadelphia Storywere running on a big-screen TV that usually played action films. Archie sat in a steel and leather chair wearing his customary getup—battle fatigue pants, jump boots, and a green army T-shirt that was a size too small. He had a bottle of Orange Crush in one hand and a fistful of popcorn in the other.

I approached him while Ginny hung nervously by the door, taking in the spectacle of the place. Archie didn’t see us.

“Hey,” I said.

Archie jumped out of his chair, looking like a parent who just spotted his lost kid at the mall. He lunged for me, his face bunching up as though he was going to cry. He hugged me so hard I could barely breathe, the popcorn in his huge fist crunching behind me.

“Jesus, Rebsky,” he whispered in my ear, “I’ve been so worried.”

I finally got free, picked up the remote, clicked it off, and tossed it on the table.

Ginny approached cautiously.

Archie looked at his mashed handful of popcorn, then stuffed it inhis mouth. He offered his buttery hand to Ginny and mumbled, “Hi. Ahee Feh.”

“Don’t tell me you don’t recognize me,” Ginny said.

He chewed the popcorn as fast as he could, washing it down with a slug of Crush. “Uh . . . no,” he said to the bottle. “I’d remember seeing you. Who are you?”

“Archie,” I said. “What the hell’s going on here?”

He jabbed a thick finger at me. “You first.”

I was getting angry. “The bump into Ginny outside the Danieli? The note in her bag? The box full of guns? Shooting the guy when I did the bus gag in Milan? Dracco’s card?”

Archie looked at me like I was crazy. “You’re Ginny?” he said, smiling at her.

She nodded.

“What’s he talking about, Ginny? Notes, guns. What bus gag? Who’s Dracco?”

“Archie!” I shouted. “Iknowit was you. Wasn’t it you?”

Archie pointed his thumb at his massive chest.“Thisis me.”

I was totally baffled. “You didn’t set up the guns?”

“What guns?”

“Come on. Two Sigs. Mini machine pistol.”

“Mini machine pistol?”

“We’ve known each other a long time,” I said. “I know my phone call got you thinking about Danny. I can picture you hanging up after turning me down, replaying what happened to him over and over. Don’t tell me my call didn’t stir up all kinds of stuff.”

Archie swallowed.

“Please tell me the truth,” I implored.

He plunked down in his chair, took a big swallow of soda.

“I did the guns,” he confessed to his jump boots. “Had to. Ginny, I hope I didn’t hurt you in the square. I never put the bump on someone your size before.”

Ginny said,“How did you know to give it to me?”

“I could tell Reb was searching for somebody. And you, well, you were dressed like . . . the scarf and goggles, head down, scoping everybody in the piazza? I used to be a cop. Come on. Stevie Wonder couldn’t have missed you.”

“Why didn’t you just come to me?” I asked.

Archie spat, “You’re damn right you stirred things up, asking me to make that kind of decision in a second. The whole flight over, I didn’t know whether to help you out or shoot you myself. I got you the guns, didn’t I? Sue me. But what the hell are you talking about? Who got shot? Reb, you shot somebody?”

“No,youdid!” I shouted, confusion digging into me like barbed wire.

“The hell I did! I’d remember if I shot somebody.”

“That’s the same phrase you used about seeing Ginny! And five seconds later you confessed. So what the hell?”

Archie sprang out of his chair. “Look,” he snapped, “I decided to help you out. I made a call to somebody I know from a long time ago. I got the guns stashed. I tracked your ass, put the bump on her, planted the card, said two Hail Marys, and caught the next plane out of there.”

“Why didn’t you follow us?”

“I didn’t, okay? I just didn’t. May Moses smash my nuts with the Ten Commandments if I’m lying. I’ve been holing up at my place in Big Bear two days grinding down my fillings, thank you very much. I don’t have a damn clue what you’re into. And then what happens? Your place gets torched.”

“What?”

“Oh my God!” Ginny gasped.

“Your house burned to the ground yesterday.”

My heart froze.

“Oh . . . Jesus, Reb,” Archie said. “Gimme a hand, Ginny. He’s losing it.”

I felt the room telescope. I was slipping down a funnel.Mom’s on fire. Who’s gonna put her out? Where’s Dad? I’m just a kid. “Jump, Reb! Save yourself.” Oh no . . . Mom. . .

My eyes came into focus.Ginny’s hand’s on my chest. She’s saying my name.

I struggled to a sitting position, took two deep breaths. Archie and Ginny knelt by me, the air heavy with their concern. “I’m all right,” I said as calmly as I could. “Really.”

“You just had a flashback, is what you had,” Archie said. “I’m a combat veteran. I know.”

Ginny checked my pulse. I shook my hand free of hers and got to my feet, feeling acrid and defensive.

“I’m all right,” I said with vinegar. “Tecci . . . he burned my house down.”

“Who’s Tecci?” Archie said. “What the fuck is going on here?”

In a burst of rage I grabbed Archie by his shirt, bunching it in my fist, getting right in his face. “That’s what I want to know, Archie!” I screamed. “What the fuck is going on here? Are you telling me you weren’t in Milan? You didn’t shoot that asshole by the bus?”

“Reb,” Archie said quietly, covering my hands with his much stronger ones.“My boy—”

“I’m not your boy!” Instantly I regretted saying that.

Archie closed his eyes for a few seconds, as if in prayer. “Myfriend,”he corrected. “Please let go of me.”

I smoothed out his T-shirt, shivering from cold sweat trickling down my back.

A moment later Archie said, “Now . . . tell me about the asshole I didn’t plug in Milan.”

An hour later we had told him everything. He had listened carefully, staring bug-eyed at Leonardo’s notes and the Circles of Truth. When we finished, he shook his woolly head.

“I’m one of those people who didn’t thinkAlice in Wonderlandwas strange. The Mad Hatter? No problem. But the Medici Dagger andGibraltar? Beckett and Tecci? And you have some guardian angel in Milan puts you onto some guy named Dracco who drops you in L.A. for forty big ones? Tell me you don’t take drugs.”

I showed him Dracco’s card.“He knew what I did for a living.”

“He called him ‘Hollywood Reb,’ ” Ginny added.

“And he knew I could come up with a lot of cash, Archie. You’re the only person I told I had money. You and Ginny.”

Archie shrugged. “So? What’s that worth? If he knew you were a stuntman, he’d know you’re the best. So he’d figure you’re not working nights at Chuck E. Cheese.”

“Mm-hm. But how’d he know I’d be carrying it?”

Archie shrugged again. “C’mon. I didn’t tell anybody anything about any money.”

I mulled that over.

Archie raised a brow. “A guardian angel’s a handy thing to have.”

I rested my elbows on the table, wondering who it was.

Archie broke the silence.

“Here you are back in California to see Mona. I tell you, that’s somehow fitting. You know what I mean? It’s . . .” He turned to Ginny. “What’s the word I’m looking for?”

“Symmetrical?” Ginny said.

“Symmetrical, sure. Like these circles. So, Reb, you gonna call her or just show up on her doorstep?”

The hanging lamp’s light cast shadows on Archie’s and Ginny’s faces. I left the room to make the call.

Thirteen years. Three presidents. How many unanswered cards? What would Mona say? What would she think? What would she sound like?

She answered on the fifth ring, out of breath.

“Whew! I hope it’s a client because if this is a sales call I’m going to be very petulant. I was outside at the car just about to leave.”

I took a deep breath to calm myself.“Don’t be mad, Mona. It’s a client.” Silence.

Then, “This voice sounds familiar. Where do I know this voice from? The past, that’s where. Oh my . . .”

I told her it was me.

Silence came from her end. All the anxiety was mine.

“Martha’s Reb . . .” she said softly.

I didn’t reply. My throat felt tight. I massaged it with one hand, aware of the pressure of the receiver against my ear.

“I can feel your hesitation,” Mona said. “There is nothing casual about this call. Something’s brought you to me. Something powerful.”

“I . . . need your help.”

“Help,” she repeated. “You’re saying I’ll get to see you?”

“Right away, if possible.”

“What about?”

I hesitated to answer.

“It’s all right. It can wait till you’re here. Are you coming alone?”

I told her no.

She asked if I was coming with family. That threw me. I had no family. I closed my eyes, sensed the moat I’d built around my life.“No,” I confessed.

“Well,” Mona said. “I’m a ride up from anywhere. If you plan on staying over, you should go to the Hollister House Inn in Little River, just outside of Mendocino. I’d offer you my couch, but the last person who slept on it woke up needing a chiropractor.”

The Hollister House sounded faintly familiar, but I didn’t know why. “What’s a good time?”

“Tomorrow. Eleven. Ask directions from the man who owns the inn. His name’s Pop. He’ll send you my way.”

I wanted to say something, but didn’t know what. “Mona . . .” I began. “I’m sorry for—”

She interrupted. “Whatever it is that brought you to me, it’s something to be thankful for. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

She rang off.

I kept the phone to my ear for a moment, surprised by the calming effect her voice had had on me. I rubbed my eyes too hard so when I opened them everything was slightly out of focus. Now I was off-center again. That was better.

I reentered the room where Archie and Ginny were waiting expectantly.

“I want guns, Archie,”I announced.“Same stuff you got me in Venice.”

Ginny slapped the table. “Just a minute!”

“What?” I asked, surprised.

“I’ll bet that’s pretty much the same way you asked Archie last time.”

She was right. His silence confirmed it.

“Take two, Reb,” Ginny said. “This time with a little respect. Maybe even open with telling us if you reached Mona.”

“I reached Mona,” I answered.

“Would you like to embellish that?”

“What I’d like is guns and to get going. We’ve got some driving to do.”

I turned to Archie. “I apologize for being abrupt. I’d very much appreciate if you’d please loan me some handguns. Preferably of the same variety as the ones you planted in Venice.”

Archie stood up. “The Sigs I can do. But that mini, that was a special-thing I got as a favor. A prototype. It’s a bitch you lost it to that Buckett guy.”

“Beckett,” I corrected. “And I’ll get it back.”

“I bet you will,” he said, walking into the storage room. He returned a minute later with the weapons.

As I was strapping on the Sigs, Archie said to me, “This time I’m coming along.”

“I don’t want you involved.”

“Don’t want me involved? You’re wearing weapons licensed to me, for chrissake. I’d say that’s involved.”

“Arch, I know you went way out on a limb for me, and you’re still out there. That means . . . much more than I can convey to you right now. Much more. Maybe I shouldn’t have come here today.”

“What are you talking about? Your house got burned down. There are some bad-ass motherfuckers out there.”

“Yeah?” I said, my anger fanned. “Well the baddest-ass motherfucker that ever drew a breath is standing right in front of you. Now I’m telling you, lay out.”

Archie’s face flushed. “Step in here any time, Ginny,” he urged. “He seems to listen to you.”

“That was manners,” she said. “This is . . . personal. I don’t think I can influence him about this.”

“I need to do this alone,” I told Archie.

“Then what the hell are you doing with her? Answer that.”

“I . . . I don’t know how to answer that.”

Ginny looked disappointed.

“I can’t answer any more questions today,” I said.“Not one.”

He didn’t reply, just stood in the doorway and watched us walk over to the Jag.

We slowly pulled out of his lot. When we hit the interstate I leaned on the gas.

After fifteen minutes of eighty-mile-an-hour silence, Ginny said, “So . . . aren’t we festive.”

eleven

Cruising up I-5 at warp speed, I pulled my portable phone out of the glove compartment, called information for Little River, and got the number for the Hollister House Inn. As I dialed, I recalled where I’d heard of the inn. My mom had taken me to see the movieSame Time, Next Year,which had been set in a quaint cottage that stood off by itself on a bluff overlooking one of the choicest views of the California coast.

She’d grabbed my small hand in the theater while we watched. “Dad and I went there in ’65,” she’d whispered. “The Hollister House. Stayed in that very cabin. We ate smoked oysters and thought big thoughts, and, Reb, it was the ultimate place to rejuvenate.”

Mom, Dad, and the Hollister House in ’65. Mom, me, and the Hollister House in ’78. Ginny, me, and the Hollister House, tonight. Big thoughts.

With one hand gripping the wheel and both eyes on the road, I rang the inn. A pleasant woman answered the phone. I asked her for two separate cottages. She reserved White Pine and Beechnut, just across from each other, under “Arthur Holmes.” Giving my real name didn’t seem prudent.

I checked Ginny for a response. “You know what I think, Art?” she asked.

“What’s that?”

“I think you’re the most enigmatic man I’ve ever encountered.”

“I don’t want to hear this.”

“We’ll bookmark that for later. Do you want to know what else I think?”

“Does it have to do with the Medici Dagger?”

“I think your friend Archie may be our guardian angel—not just for the guns but in Milan as well.”

I tromped on the gas till the speedometer read 92. Interstate 5 didn’t care. The Jaguar didn’t care. None of the L.A. motorists seemed to either.

Ginny grabbed the dashboard. “Slow down. We’re illegally in the country and you’re wearing guns registered to Archie.”

I backed it down to eighty although I really wanted to punch the pedal through the floor. “You may be right about him being the angel,” I said. “Damn it. He was disturbed enough to plant the guns, write me a note, and then lie about it when we showed up at his office. I made him lie to me, Ginny.”

“Guilt. Good. A little introspection is a good thing.”

“Oh Christ. I’m talking about Archie, not me. I told you how his son got killed. I put Archie’s tail in a crack the second I asked him to fix me up with a gun in Venice. I don’t feel good about it.”

“I’m guessing Archie doesn’t want you to know that he killed someone to save you. We are alive right now because of that man.”

“He’s my best friend.”

“Say that again.”

We were passing vineyards, miles of them. I wished I were one of those billion dusty grapes. “What the hell do you want from me?”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Ginny watching. “Have you ever told Archie he’s your best friend?” she asked.

I thought about it.“No.”

“Why not?”

“It’s complicated.”

“That’s a given. Can you think of a single relationship that really meant something to you that wasn’t?”

“No,” I admitted. “I love Archie as a friend, though. I do. I’m telling you I would do anything for him.”

“I believe that. You’d spend your only day off for a year to help him fix that goofy car he drives.”

“It’s a Humvee. You’re heading to the bookmark, aren’t you?”

“So you’re lifting up the front of his Jeep with one finger while he’s under it with the wrenches and the two of you are talking about stunts . . . women. And everything is great until the conversation turns personal. At that very moment you drop the car on him, without even knowing it. Drop it right on his feelings.”

“I don’t have to listen to this.”

“Well, you can block your ears and scream, ‘Woop, woop,’ but I’m saying it anyway. On one hand you have all these amazing capacities— you can squash tall cities and leap locomotives—and on the other hand, you’re utterly and completely out of touch with human emotions. It’s not your fault,” Ginny added. “I’m not attacking you.”

“Oh really? Because that’s exactly what it feels like to me.”

“I hoped you’d say that.”

I felt trapped. I was driving through Ginny Gianelli’s hall of mirrors and I couldn’t find my way out. “Why’d you hope I’d say that?”

“Because you’renotbeing attacked. You just believe you are—that you’re going to get hurt at any moment, especially by people you care about. Right down to your bones, you believe it. It’s written all over you. Can you see it, Reb?”

I was doing eighty on the interstate, but was stopped dead in front of Ginny.

“I can see it,” I admitted.

Ginny sighed with relief.“Now . . . you won’t like what I’m going to say next.”

I gripped the wheel.

“For a boy who lost his parents so violently, it was totally natural and even helpful for you to expect to be hurt at any moment. But tell me . . . how well has it worked for you as an adult?”

I took a deep breath. Ginny did the same. I considered her question for another billion grapes.

“You’re not to blame any more than Archie is for lying about being in Milan,” Ginny said. “Look at him. Here’s this resourceful person, a Vietnam vet. At eighteen, nineteen years old he probably saw and did absolutely atrocious things. When the war was through with him, he came out a changed man. Maybe got involved with some disreputable people. Somewhere down the line he had a son whom he probably didn’t know how to father, but whom he loved with all his big heart. Then, in a senseless tragedy, he lost him. And ten years ago, through a set of circumstances that involved nearly killing someone with his car, he began to project all of his unspent parental love onto an enigmatic young stuntman orphan. I ask you, can you blame him?”

Ginny pulled her hair back and stretched in her seat as I considered her insight into Archie, and me.

She looked out her side window and said, “My God, that’s a lot of wine.”

Clicking on the radio, she started scanning stations. She stopped on Aretha singing “Respect,” and joined in for the backup vocals. Damned if she didn’t hit all the “sock it to me”s with soul. Awful lot of soul for an Italian girl from Staten Island. Sang in tune, too.

As we crossed over to the coast road nine hours later, an untroubled moon illuminated the landscape. Redwoods reached toward the pinpricks of yellow in the distant galaxies, and crickets and crows scratched and swooped. We rolled on, ignored by all except for the odd raccoon whose retinas reflected our passing headlights.

Finally, Little River appeared on the bluff, the shiny black ocean bobbing behind it. Though the full effect was lost in the darkness, it was still spectacular—the Mendocino coast.

We pulled down a long tree-lined road to the Hollister House andstaggered out of the Jag. We checked in at the main building, a little dazed and buzzing from the ride.

A jovial old man with a yellow Ben Hogan cap, a weatherworn face, and tan hearing aids welcomed us warmly.

“Rodney Norcross,” he said, brushing dandruff off one shoulder of his brown sweater, “but everybody calls me Pop. Even the codgers who’ve been coming here since just after the war. That’s World War II, Harry S. Truman’s triumph, or his catastrophe, depending on how you look at it.” He inspected the registry log. “You must be . . . uh . . . Arthur Holmes,” he said to me.

“That’s me,” I replied. “Art Holmes, sir.”

“Thanks for the sir, son, but just Pop’ll do. Popadoodledoo.” He laughed a grab-your-suspenders laugh, showing well-made false teeth. Turning to Ginny, he asked, “And you are . . .”

“Watson,” Ginny offered, filling in the blank. “Ginny Watson.” Pop slapped the book and laughed again. “How ’bout that? Holmes and Watson. You two answer an ad in the personals?”

Pop winked at me. “I ’spect you’re gonna pay me in cash, Art, aren’t ya?”

“Yup,” I said, pulling out my wallet, sharing the laugh. It was hard not to like the old barnacle. I handed him a thousand dollars. “We don’t know how long we’ll be here, Pop. Will this get us going?”

“Sure, sure,” he said, taking the money. “I’ll hang on to it for ya. But what are you getting two places for anyway? Did you have an argument? Hell, I shouldn’t be asking. At least get a little closer while you’re here. How about Same Time and Next Year?”

“You named them after the movie?” I asked excitedly.

“What, you think I’m a dope?” Pop answered. “Course I did. Used to be one cabin, then I separated it down the middle. Now there’s two of ’em. One’s Same Time and the other’s Next Year. They’re adjoining. Real nice. Way off over there by themselves on the cliff overlooking the water, and they just happen to be vacant. Only four hundred a night each. For you, seven-fifty for both.”

Ginny gnawed her finger, waiting. She sidled six inches closer to me.

Pop threw me a grin. “She’s hooked,” he said. “You got no choice, Holmes.”

I agreed.

Pop slapped the register again. “I’m a born salesman,” he said to the world. “P. T. Barnum got nothing on me. Better heavy up the down payment, Mr. Holmes. Another grand ought to do it, just in case you stay a while or wreck the place. You wouldn’t do that, would you?”

“Which one?” I asked.

“Course you wouldn’t. We haven’t had trouble here since Baby Face Nelson hid out in the old cabin.”

Ginny’s eyes widened. “The gangster?”

“Oh, I was a rooster back in those days,” Pop said, reminiscing. “I let him hole up here for a while just for the fun of it. Hell, he couldn’t have set foot on the property without me knowing about it, though naturally I never said that to the buttons. Yep, this place is Fort Pops, all right, the whole thirty-seven acres of it.”

I handed him another thousand, which he fanned out like a card-sharp before stashing it with the other cash in his pocket.

“That’s two thousand down for Mr. Holmes,” he said, making a note in the book. “I’ll get your keys, not that you need ’em. Nobody disturbs anybody in my sphincter . . . I mean my sector,” he chortled. “Must have forgot to take my Metamucil with lunch.”

He escorted us to the front door, handed us a map with our adjoining cottages circled, tipped his hat, and wished us a very good night.

Ginny and I hopped in the Jag for the last time that day and slowly wound our way down the gravel driveway to our rooms; I gripped the wheel tighter than normal, feeling a much-heightened awareness of her presence next to me.

We extracted ourselves and our belongings from the car to the sound of pounding surf. The cottage was set among the trees, dividedin two, with weathered siding, a split-level roof, and brick chimneys on each side. An Abe Lincoln special, or a Cape Cod condo.

I’d left the headlights on so we could see what we were doing. A cool breeze rustled the foliage, blowing a wisp of hair across Ginny’s moist lips. The thin fabric of her dress clung to her, showing the outline of her hips. I imagined tossing the keys into the woods, tearing her clothes off, and ravaging her right there in the headlights till the battery went dead, or I did.

I extended my palm, both sets of keys in it. “Which will it be, Ginny,” I said as casually as I could, “Same Time or Next Year?”

Ginny covered my hand with hers, a question in her eyes.

I stepped back involuntarily. She closed the distance, sliding the fingers of her free hand into my pocket, pulling me closer to her. Her knuckles pressed against my hip. My pants felt too tight.

I raised my eyes skyward, saw moonlight, dappled leaves.Stay clear. Get to the jungle.

My eyes met Ginny’s.“No,” I uttered, pulling away.

Her face pinched down. Tears welled up in her beautiful eyes. She wiped them away.

“Give me Same Time,” she demanded, sticking a hand out. “I don’t know if I’ll be alive next year.”

I couldn’t breathe. Just stood there stonelike.

Silently, I let go of the key.

twelve

Iwas wrong about the Abe Lincoln thing. For one, the cottage had electricity. Running water, too. Half-shell sconces and brass lamps. Light-blue wallpaper, Berber carpet, and cushy chairs with braided piping. The place was furnished with a king-size bed and a velvety couch with embroidered pillows positioned in front of a black marble fireplace. Old books and stubby round candles were parked on the white wood mantel on either side of a rectangular wicker basket of silk flowers. An oval tin wood bin near the fireplace was stocked with split and seasoned birch. Abe would have liked it here.

I called Mona, waking her up to tell her we’d arrived safely. She asked if I’d met Pop. I said yes and inquired how she knew him. She laughed a laugh that has no age.

When I apologized for rousing her, she said the stars would have anyway, and besides, she wasn’t dreaming yet. We rang off. I washed up, feeling confused and ungrounded. After climbing into bed, I lit a candle.

The image ofThe Repentant Magdalenflashed before me, making me melancholy. I thought of Ginny next door.

“Swell dreams and a peach, Ginny,” I whispered, my eyelids falling.

The next morning I awoke to rapping on my door. My eyes pried themselves open and squinted across the sunlit room. Out the slidingglass doors to my back porch, I viewed a small Renoir-like flower garden and what looked like the entire West Coast.

We were on a bluff, all right—about two hundred feet up. And below it, deep blue—blue-whale blue—as far as a gummed-up eye could see. It was stark and serious, as if God had looked down his nose over his half-glasses, waved a finger, and thundered, “Okay, now put that there,” and sploosh, the entire Pacific Ocean got dropped right at the border of Little River.

“You awake?” Ginny yelled.

My candle had burned down in the night, leaving a hole in the middle surrounded by a vampire’s cape of wasted wax. Gone was my candle and the comfort of sleep.

My mind flashed on the hang-glider stunt I’d done a few days earlier,diving unparachuted and unafraid. For a second I wished I could fly off the back porch and sail out over the vast Pacific, a faceless shadow to a lounging whale, too distant for it to know or care what I was.

It was eighta.m.I pulled my pants on and stumbled to the door, the coarse carpet tickling my bare feet. I hesitated for a second before letting Ginny in. One more knuckly knock. The flip of a latch, the turn of a knob, and there she was, freshly scrubbed, keen-eyed, and lovely.

She thrust a bacon and egg sandwich and a container of coffee at me. “I assumed you hadn’tgottenany,” she said sardonically.

I didn’t answer, just stood there devouring the food. We stared uncomfortably out the sliding doors at the view. The only sound was the surf below and my occasional swallowing.

“Tell me something,” Ginny said. “When you think of isolation, what painting comes to mind?”

“The Mill,”I replied reflexively, referring to the Rembrandt of a lonely windmill up on a bluff overlooking a dark river.

“Mmm,” she said.“The Mill.I’m not surprised.”

I tossed the paper cup in the wastebasket, my stomach strangling my breakfast. “Ginny,” I said. “About last night . . .” I reached for her. She pulled away, turned her back to me, and started sobbing.

I handed her a tissue from the box on the nightstand. She snatched it, leaving me with a torn piece.

“You hurt me,” she said.

“Please . . . let me explain. The last thing in the world I want to do is—”

Ginny slapped me across the face. “Wake up!” she cried, as I stumbled back two steps. The sting of shame hurt more than my cheek.

“What a waste of mascara,” Ginny sniffled, inspecting her Kleenex.

Then she looked past me out the open front door. “There’s Pop. Let’s get the directions to Mona’s.”

I slid the big Baggie with the two Leonardo pages and the translation under my T-shirt, tucked it into my jeans, threw on the double gun rig and my leather jacket, and followed her out.

Pop was standing in front of the main house with a woman dressed in waitress garb. He spotted us and waved us over, shouting, “Holmes, Watson, front and center.

“This is Sue Ann,” Pop announced. “Help me out. She’s bringing up two kids by herself. What do you think, I should give her a nice raise, right? Of course.”

He noisily chewed a piece of candy from a gold box of Godiva chocolates. “She gave me these to butter me up and it worked.” He grinned. “Smart broad. I mean girl. Aw hell, I don’t know.”

“Broad,” Sue Ann jumped in, smiling at Pop. She looked sturdy, but worn. Up near her collar, she wore a stickpin—a ceramic pig in a black top hat, smoking a stogie. I asked her where she got it.

She told me she made them, sort of a side thing. “I sell them for twelve-fifty,” she said.

“Will you take twenty bucks for him?” I asked.

“Um. . . sure.”

I handed her a bill. “Andy Jackson says hello.”

Sue Ann passed me the pin and I carefully threaded it through Ginny’s lapel. She actually blushed.

“Well,” Sue Ann said to Pop, tucking the bill in her vest pocket. “Must be my lucky day.” She strolled off toward the restaurant.

Ginny pulled on her collar and went eye to eye with the pig. “Is there some cruel significance to your choice of gift?”

“Not at all,” I said with utmost sincerity. “I may be a lot of things, but cruel isn’t one of them.”

“I coulda told you that, Watson,” Pop said to Ginny. “Look at his peepers. It’s always in the peepers. Now have a chocolate. Both of you. Go on. Who cares if it’s morning.”

Ginny fished one out of the box and popped it in her mouth.

“Chewy, huh?” Pop said.

“Mmm.”

“Holmes, pick one out for yourself. The ones with the Rice Krispies are good.”

I did as he instructed.

“Now, how about a stroll through the garden. I’ll go fix a fire in Watson’s room.”

“Good idea, Pop,” I said. Ginny looked undecided.

“Have it cracklin’ in fifteen minutes,” the old codger added, ambling away.

“But we need directions, Pop,” Ginny shouted after him.

Pop pointed toward the garden. “Elementary, Watson. You can’t miss it.”

Ginny peered at me thoughtfully, a smudge of chocolate in one corner of her mouth. I headed into the garden. She followed.

The path was bordered by large, pink-blossomed trees interspersed with just about every kind of flower a person could imagine. Pop’s garden was lush and sweet-smelling, a place where a hummingbird could make himself a good living, with a path just wide enough for two people to walk next to each other, arm in arm.

The morning light blanketed us, its warmth soaking through the back of my jacket, massaging my tense shoulders. Underneath, I felt the cool steel of guns, waiting. In the distance, a lawn mower started up.

Ginny stopped about twenty feet in and knelt down to smell a cup-shaped, pinkish flower. I took two steps past her and turned around.

“I want to know about the fire,” she said to the flower.

The taste in my mouth switched from sweet to acrid. I inhaled deeply, deliberately, hoping the perfume of the garden would overpower the olfactory memory of curling smoke. A moment passed. Ginny pivoted, still kneeling, and looked up at me, her vitreous brown eyes owning me.

“No you don’t,” I replied weakly, my energy focused on prying myself from memory’s grip.

Ginny held out her hand and I helped her up. She pulled me close.

“Why are you doing this to me?” I whispered.

“Because I need you whole,” she answered.

Whole. My hand began to shake.She needs me. Whole.

We stood silently among the flowers, each one an offering to the caterpillars and the calendar. My eyes wandered over Ginny’s beautiful face.

A flock of birds flapped by overhead. She looked up for a second, then back at me.

“I know you’re scared,” she said. “Not as much of what’s out there, but of what’s in here.” She firmly placed her palm against my heart.

“There’s nothing in there,” I uttered, my eyes misting up.

“That July night in 1980,” she said softly. “You let go of that windowsill and never touched ground. You’ve been orbiting in the gravity of your own past, too terrified to reenter your own atmosphere. But, listen to me, Reb. This journey has forced you down. The Circles of Truth—they areyourtruth.You’rethe traveler. The twenty-circle path isyourpath. Wherever Leonardo meant for it to lead, it’s led you to me and it’s leading you back to you. I don’t know why, but I’m your Ginny, your earth.”

She closed her eyes and tilted her head back slightly. “Kiss me, Reb.” Her moist lips parted expectantly.

She was my ground—my soft place to fall. This . . . girl from the crowd outside the Danieli, the girl driving the boat in the lagoon, the da Vincian translator, the snorer, the drooler, the voracious Venetian.

My chest was warm where her hand had touched me. I felt giddy and grateful. I kissed her—a slow and gentle kiss; the tips of our tongues touched and the sensation lit me brighter than a shooting star.

“Un bacio,”Ginny whispered.

“One kiss,” I answered.

“I want to feel you inside me,” she said.“Now.”

The warmth in my chest spread south. Still holding my hand, she led me back down the path toward Same Time. I pulled my earlobe and grinned.

We emerged from the garden. A Japanese pickup truck with a metal mesh trailer full of landscaping equipment idled off the side of the main road, twenty yards away. Its doors were open, the back gate down, and two men were loading up a big John Deere riding mower. A new black Suburban with tinted windows was parked at an angle in front of the main house. Suburbanites checking in.

Seventy-five yards down the private road to Same Time and Next Year, I noticed white smoke streaming skyward from Ginny’s brick chimney. I was figuring out how I was going to shoo Pop out of the room politely when I saw a man passing inside my open doorway; it wasn’t Pop.

My mind drew into focus. I glanced at Ginny out of the corner of my eye. She was looking at the ocean, humming the theme fromBeauty and the Beast. I unsnapped my jacket.

The landscapers’ tailgate slammed. The two cab doors closed one after the other and the truck pulled onto the road, slowly descending the hill toward the exit. I grabbed Ginny firmly by the upper arm; she quit humming midphrase.

“Ouch!”

“Ginny,” I said,“run to that truck right now and jump on the back.”

She looked at me, confused. “What?”

“Right now. Run as fast as you can.” I pushed her hard. She stumbled into a jog as the truck pulled away, her look of puzzlement morphing into fear. She lifted her skirt and began to run.

I crisscrossed my hands inside my jacket and drew out both guns, then moved across the lawn in the direction of the cottages, keeping one eye on Ginny.

She was hauling now, closing on the truck as it picked up speed. Twenty yards, fifteen. A few feet from the trailer, she took two big strides and jumped for it. Grabbing the top steel rail, she vaulted over it onto the springy tractor seat. The truck vanished around the bend.

I scrambled behind some high bushes, my pulse throbbing in my ears, fingers tingling against the curves of the triggers. I sucked in sea air, filling my lungs for the fight. How many in the cabin, I wondered. After the party in the lagoon, after Milan, there’d be more than two, for sure.

How’d they find us? Damn! I made the reservation from the car phone. I wasn’t thinking. Think now. Money’s in the car, notes under my shirt. Get out of here.

I was a few feet from the Jag when I heard Pop’s voice cry out from the cottage. “You peckers are in a heap of trouble!”

I couldn’t let them hurt Pop.

“Shaddap, old man!” a gravelly voice yelled in a German accent. Glass broke with that shrill sound it makes when it hits a fireplace.

“That lamp cost two hundred smackers in ’68, sonny!” Pop shrieked.

I heard an “ooofff,” followed by Pop’s muffled, “Ho boy.” Two male voices chuckled.

A dark figure passed in front of the open side window of the other cabin—a balding man with an Aloha shirt, sporting a scrawny yellow ponytail. I recognized him from Venice: the guy piloting the yacht. Was Tecci in there? I hoped so.

I ducked low and reached the side of the cabin, pressed my body against the shingles, and tried to listen to the voices over the crash of the surf.

Somebody spoke in German to someone named Rolf. Another voice, a high one, said something I didn’t understand.

I slinked around back and squatted by the deck. The sliding glass door was closed, the drapes drawn. I eyed my boots mournfully, slipped them off, wishing they were sneakers. I crept up the stairs, hoping Rolf and his buddy wouldn’t see my shadow through the curtain and open fire.

I plastered myself against the house between the edge of the sliding glass door and the deck rail. With my guns shoulder-high, I reached a stockinged foot out and gave an Adirondack chair a tiny shove, then waited.

One of the men approached the door, mumbling. I held my breath. He pulled back the drapes and slid the glass open. He wasn’t holding a gun.

Stepping out onto the deck, his eye immediately took in the view.“Ser schön, Hans!”he shouted, admiring the panorama.

I stuck a Sig in his ear, whispered into it,“Guten tag, Rolf.”

He stiffened. I spun him around and stepped behind him. Hans was kneeling on the far side of the bed, the mattress jacked up in front of him. All I saw were two hands with dirty fingernails. I aimed my other gun midway between them.

I thumbed the hammer. Hans exposed a pockmarked face.

“How do you say ‘bang’ in German?” I said.

Then a third guy—a real muscleman—stepped from the bathroom, an Uzi slung over his shoulder. He caught sight of me and retreated. A second later, a barrage of bullets cut through the bathroom wall, taking out Hans, two framed watercolors, the telephone on the nightstand, and just about everything along the front half of my cozy cottage.

I yanked Rolf back onto the deck. He stumbled and threw his hands up, knocking one of the Sigs from my grip. It scuttled along the wood floor onto the lawn.

Pivoting, he threw a good right hook that landed on my chest andknocked me against the deck rail. He followed it with a left, but I blocked it, smacking him with the other Sig on his nose. He cried out in agony, blood spurting from both nostrils.

Mr. Muscles emerged from the bathroom, letting loose another burst from the Uzi which splintered the Adirondack chairs and caught Rolf in the back. As his chest erupted, he plunged forward with a look of total surprise, smashing into me, sending me right off the deck.

Muscles ran toward me, a look of maniacal joy on his chiseled face. Rolling to my right, I heard Pop yell from inside Same Time, “ Goddamn you peckers!”

The big man fired another short burst, weeding the yard right next to me. I kept rolling. When the shots stopped, I aimed at his center and squeezed off three rounds. He fell back, crashing through the sliding glass door.

As I scrambled to my feet, I heard Pop’s assailants leave Ginny’s cottage and bang open the front door of mine. Before they could see me, I dashed up the steps to Ginny’s porch. Tucking the Sig into my pants, I hopped on the narrow wooden rail and boosted myself to the roof. Crawling like a lizard up the asphalt shingles, I crouched by the smoking chimney, assessing. Three down. Off in the distance, guests and employees were running in every direction. To my left, the Pacific yawned at the drama, spitting surf at ancient rock.

Duckwalking across the roof, I moved silently toward the hubbub emanating from my shot-up cabin.

I was at the edge when the two guys who’d laughed at Pop stepped onto my deck, side by side. The one on the left had a shock of red hair with a lot of goop in it. He gripped an Uzi with both hands, poised to fire.

The guy on the right wore wraparound sunglasses and a porkpie hat. He was packing a silver automatic with a black rubber handle. Though I had the edge on them, I didn’t want to shoot them. Not yet. I needed to talk to them first.

Just then, someone near the main house shouted, “There, on the roof!”

The two guys looked off toward the source of the sound, then started to turn toward me. I jumped, and the three of us tumbled to the deck floor, amid the remnants of chairs and broken glass.

I scrambled to my feet. Red stayed down, but Porkpie was made of strong stuff. He’d lost his gun, but took a swing at me that landed square on my jaw. I fell back and tripped over Mr. Muscles’s legs sticking out from the living room. My shoulder blade hit the jagged glass of the broken sliding door.

I lurched forward and threw a straight jab at Porkpie’s grim face. Blocking it with a forearm, he spun to back-kick me in the stomach; I saw it coming and lunged at him to close the distance.

His kick was still partially in the chamber, but the force of it, combined with my forward motion, sent us through the railing onto the grass.

I leapt to my feet and reached for the Sig, but it had fallen onto the ground next to Porkpie. Behind me on the porch, Red was on his knees pointing his gun at me. I saw his finger squeezing the trigger, knew I’d had it.

Then I heard the sound of a gunshot from off in the woods and Red collapsed. Three more rounds kicked up the grass and dirt around Porkpie as he rolled over and out of the line of fire.

He picked up my Sig and pointed it at me, grinning.

A millisecond later, a yellow streak smashed him in the back of the head with a fireplace poker. Porkpie crumbled like dry cake, his hat flopping off when he hit the turf.

Pop flashed me his pearly white dentures. “Better’n Mickey Mantle,” he chuckled.“Huh, Holmes?”

I looked back to the woods where the shot had come from. Nothing but the diminishing rustle of retreating feet on leaves and branches.

Thanks, Archie.

thirteen

Ifelt Porkpie’s wrist for a pulse. He had one.

“Did I crack his melon?” Pop asked.

I checked and shook my head.

“Aw shucks. You know that bastard punched me right in the pancreas? And look at my place. Jeepers! What the hell did these fellas want, Holmes?”

“Pop, Ginny’s gone and the cops are going to be here any minute.”

“Damn tootin’, if they don’t get lost on the way over. Now what the Sam Hill . . . ?”

“I’ve got to get out of here,” I said, heading for the Jag, forgetting my boots and guns.

Pop grabbed my sleeve, stopping me cold. “Holmes,” he said gravely. “You look me in the eye.” He gave me the discerning gaze of a wise old man—a good man who’d carved maybe sixty Thanksgiving turkeys, seen wars, buried friends. He said sternly, “Tell me something good. Right now.”

“There’s almost two million dollars in the trunk of my car,” I said.

Pop raised his wiry silver brows, held my stare and my arm.

“No,” I told him. “I’m not a thief.”

He let go of me. “Well, then I’m stumped,” he said, smoothing my sleeve.

“Here it is fast, Pop. I’m trying to do the right thing for Leonardo da Vinci.”

“Leonardo da Vinci! Why, he’s older than me! You joshing me?”

“I’m telling you the truth, and I’ll tell you the rest later if you help me get out of here.”

He peered at me a half-second, then grinned. “Well, that’s gotta be a hell of a story. Hot damn! I guess you’ll be needing the Baby Face Nelson Suite now. Get your stuff—what’s left of it.” He looked down at my stockinged feet. “Starting with your hoofs.”

My boots were waiting for me by the deck steps. I slipped them on and searched the yard for my guns. I located them in the freshly mown grass.

I raced into Same Time and Next Year and grabbed our belongings, while Pop stayed outside to guard Porkpie. I had everything in the trunk in less than a minute.

“What about this pecker?” Pop asked, kicking him.

“He’s coming with me,” I answered. I picked up his brown hat and stuck it on his head. “We’re going to have a little chat.”

Pop helped me drag my still-unconscious prisoner over to the Jag. Together we hefted him into the passenger seat.

Pop gave me the combination to a lock that barred a road leading to a cabin at the far end of the property. He said he’d keep an eye out for Ginny and point her in my direction, and he’d come by later after ironing things out with the police.

I pulled down the driveway, leaning forward to keep my sore shoulder blade away from the seat. As I made a left onto Highway 1, I could hear the sound of sirens wailing from the south. I worried about Ginny, wondered where she was.

Following Pop’s directions, I headed north a quarter of a mile, then pulled off to the left by a chain suspended between two moss-covered trees that blocked what looked like an old logging path. I got out of the car and opened the combination lock. It was just like the one on every gym locker in the world.

The rounded steel in my hand, the ridged black plastic dial and small, indented white lines and numbers, felt so familiar to me.Touching them stimulated something more powerful than school memories, but I couldn’t stop to let the thought coalesce. The lock opened on the first pull.

Back behind the wheel again, I drove twenty feet down the overgrown path, stopped, then ran back to replace the chain.

Porkpie was slumped against the seat, just coming to, when I returned to the car. I pulled out one of the Sigs and stuck it in his face, keeping one eye on the barely discernible road and the other on him. I wanted to pounce on him, break his neck with my teeth, tear him apart, and howl with fury.

For a full five minutes I drove through weeds, shrubs, and assorted fauna at a pace that barely kept the speedometer needle bouncing off zero. Porkpie was fully awake now, eyeing me like a rabid Doberman.

We emerged from the woods and entered a little field, at the edge of which stood a small, one-story, split-log cabin. Tiny porch, one window on either side of the low door, fieldstone fireplace, and a lopsided lean-to shed. An inch behind the cabin was a hundred-foot cliff and the cold Pacific—the classic Hollister House view. I stopped the car and turned off the motor. The surf resounded against the rocks below.

“I’m going to get out and come around,” I told Porkpie. “Put your hands on your head. If you move, I’ll shoot both your knees.”

His contemptuous eyes followed me to the passenger door. Opening it, I stepped back and instructed him to get out. He obliged. The crook of my arm was stiff from holding it in one position.

I told him to put his hands down.

He lowered them, clenching and unclenching.

“Tell me where Krell and Tecci are,” I demanded.

Porkpie reached behind his head to touch the lump, winced, and hunched down like he was going to be sick. He dry-heaved once, and, as he straightened back up, threw a lightning-fast front-kick at my hand, knocking the gun into the web of tall grass.

Positioning himself in a karate stance, he whipped a roundhouse kick that I barely pulled away from. In a fluid move, he shuffle-steppedin and launched another right at my chest. This time he connected, sending me flying backward about six feet past the house, knocking half the wind out of me.

I grabbed my gut and felt for the other Sig, but before I could get it out he was on me, driving a heel into my ribs.

I covered up, rolled, and scrambled out of the way and to my feet. He closed the distance again and threw another kick that connected, propelling me closer to the cliff and the angry ocean below.

“A kickboxer against a stuntman,” he hissed, grinning at me through yellow teeth. “Let’s see some stunts, boy.”

Again I reached for the gun; again he drove his foot into my aching gut. I stumbled backward almost to the edge of the precipice, arms out, gasping for breath. Slipping on the rocks where the field gave way to the cliff, I struggled to regain my balance. I couldn’t catch my wind; my diaphragm was paralyzed.

“Ready? Action!” Porkpie shouted, setting up for the kick that would send me over the edge. As he threw his leg out, I dropped to one knee, ducked, and punched him right in the sack with everything I had. He grabbed his crotch and cried out. I put a hand on the ground for support and swept his feet out from under him. He fell back, his hat falling off, and slipped on the same rocks that had almost gotten me the moment before.

Arms flailing, Porkpie tried desperately to stay upright. I reached for the gun. As I pulled it from the rig, he slipped and tumbled silently off the cliff.

I lay back on my elbows and stared, saucer-eyed, at the cloudless sky until I was able to draw a steady breath. I continued to lie there, half in the tall weeds, half on the cold rock, for maybe ten minutes before I finally sat up.

My stomach hurt, my shoulder blade hurt, I’d killed two guys, my would-be informant had just turned into pâté, and Ginny was starring inGone with the Landscapers.All I had was an aching heart and a crunched-up porkpie hat.

With a quivering hand, I picked the damn thing up, inched over to the edge of the precipice, and tossed it over the cliff.

I shrugged out of my jacket and inspected it. There were two four-inch tears to the left of the mid-back. I reached over to feel my shoulder blade where it hurt. Two big slivers of glass protruded.

Painfully, I plucked them out with my thumb and forefinger. Each piece was triangular, from the sliding glass door Mr. Muscles had shattered. I flung them at the ocean.

I couldn’t very well cruise into town looking for Ginny; if the cops got me, I’d be no good to her. I had no choice but to wait for Pop. I trudged up the stairs to the Baby Face Nelson Suite.

I entered the cabin, expecting to walk into a faceful of cobwebs. Instead, I found Pop’s quaint private little hideaway.

In the center of an oval, braided rug stood an old easel with an amateurish watercolor of a bird in a tree taped to it. A padded piano stool—the kind you can lower or raise by screwing or unscrewing— stood in front of the easel.

A well-made rocking chair sat in the corner by the fireplace, a neatly folded Mexican blanket draped over its back. A handsome oak pirate’s chest was placed next to the chair; on top of it sat a tall kerosene hurricane lantern and an open box of kitchen matches. In the far corner of the room was a sink with an iron-handled pump.

I cranked it a few times to get the water running and splashed some on my face and the back of my neck. The cool water refreshed me. I pulled Leonardo’s notes out, soaked my shirt, and dabbed my wounds.

I didn’t see a mirror so I went outside and looked over my shoulder-at the reflection in the window. I crossed my arms as if I were doing some chest warmup exercises to see how far the cuts opened. Both needed stitches. Though I kept a fully stocked first-aid kit in the trunk of my car, it wouldn’t do me much good by myself.

I slipped my jacket on and sat down on the front steps and pulled Leonardo’s pages from my pocket. To my relief, they didn’t look any worse for the wear.

I peered long and hard at the drawings. A hoisting system? A harness? What about those nested tubes? They could be connected to each other, or to the Dagger. But maybe not. Probably not. And those Circles. Twenty rings of what? And would they lead to the Dagger?

The afternoon sun bowled its lazy way across the western sky while Leonardo and I camped on the porch, rocking back and forth together, alone at the edge of the earth.

I was ruminating over how cruel the moon looked as it rose in the gold-spotted heavens when Pop appeared, driving a golf cart through a narrow clearing I hadn’t even noticed. As he pulled up in front of me and parked, I tucked Leonardo’s notes back in my jacket.

“Pop!” I shouted. “Did you hear anything about Ginny? Have you seen her?”

“Nope and nope,” he said, extricating himself from the vehicle.

I felt crushing dismay.

“Saw a bunch of coppers, though,” he added. “They had a regular party scooping up the stiffs. Don’t get much mayhem around here that isn’t on TV.”

“What’d you tell them about me?” I managed.

He pulled a brown paper grocery bag out of the floor well of the cart, shot me a grin. “Oh, forty-five, five-eight, two-ten. You know, short and squat. Now come around here and get these sleeping bags.”

I did. They were the green ones with the red flannel liners.

“Where’s that pecker who punched me? You find the rope in the shed? Got him tied up there, or what? I’m gonna kick his ass.”

I told him what had occurred.

“You’re kidding me,” Pop said, hobbling up the steps and into the house.“He tell you what you wanted to know first?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s too bad,” Pop said, setting the groceries down on the pirate’s chest.

I dropped the sleeping bags, lit the lantern, and slipped off my jacket.

“Whoa, Holmes,” he said. “Those cuts need attention. I better go get some stuff to fix you with. I patched a few guys up in my day, you know.”

I told him about the kit in the car and stepped out to get it. The firewood must have been well seasoned; Pop had a blaze going when I got back.

He had me pull the piano stool over in front of the rocker and sit down with my back to him, while he broke out a bottle of Cuervo Gold and two shot glasses. He poured me one.

“Drink this,” he urged. “It won’t make your back hurt any less, but it’ll take your mind off of Watson.”

“Nothing could do that,” I told him.

“Then drink it ’cause you’re sitting on my piano stool.”

I took it and knocked it back while he poured one for himself. Then he cracked open the first-aid kit and went to work.

“Gee,” he said, sitting down on the edge of the rocker seat. “ Betadine, sutures, Lidocaine, syringe . . . What are you, a spy or something?”

“Actually I’m a stuntman.”

“Well that clears everything up, don’t it. You were just practicing over there at the inn. Now let me see here, I’m gonna poke you with the needle and then stitch you up like a mattress. You pour us each another slug of apple juice. It’ll boost our doctor-patient relations.”

I did as he requested. Pop took a snort. “Ooh, that’s tasty,” he said. “Okay now, Sherlock, I’ll knit and you’ll tell me the tale like you promised.”

Pop took his time sewing me up while I told him the wholestory—my parents, Greer, Tecci, Krell, Venice, Archie, Ginny, Beckett, Gibraltar, Leonardo, and the Circles of Truth.

When I got to the part about Mona, he let out a hoot. “So you’re the one she was talking about! You’re Mona’s Reb.”

He dressed the wounds with sterile pads and adhesive tape.

“As far as I can tell there’s three possibilities,” Pop said. “One, my hearing aids have been picking up an Orson Welles broadcast; two, you just laid twenty miles of the sweetest-smelling shit that ever came out of a pucker; or three, this is a genuine case of truth being a whole lot stranger than fiction. I can’t come up with a reason why it’s not number three.”

I fished the Leonardo notes out of my jacket.

Pop regarded them carefully, squinting to bring them into focus. “By goddamn jingo . . . Number three it is.”

By the firelight I saw his smiling eyes taking in the mystery and wonder of it all, like a kid looking at a Buck Rogers comic book.

“Leonardo da Vinci,” he uttered slowly, the tequila making each word glisten. “Mona have the slightest inkling the kind of hellacious pandemonium’s following you around?”

“Haven’t told her a thing. Just that I was coming.”

“I didn’t figure, because she would have said more than ‘oh baby’ when we were in the sack night before yesterday.” He wiggled his eyebrows at me. “Yup,” he said.“Me and Mona. Right over Viagra Falls. No barrel.”

The old guy pulled out some roasted turkey sandwiches. “Have one of these,” he offered. “Fresh bird.”

I refused; the nagging worry over Ginny wrung out my stomach like a wet mop. I slugged another tequila.

“Some people are diamonds and some are glass,” Pop said, taking a bite. “The average Joe wants to tell them apart, he just hits ’em both with a hammer. Me, I’m a specialist. I can feel a fine-cut facet through an oven mitt, see the real thing shining through the blackest night. It’s a gift, I guess.”

He turned his gaze from the fire to me. “After hearing your story, seeing these pages, and watching you in action, I figure you weigh in at about forty-six carats. That’s a half-carat more’n the Hope Diamond.

“Now, Watson, I can’t say how many she is, but I figure a lot, by the way she’s shimmering in your eyes. I’m telling you she’s out there somewhere right this minute, safe and sparkling. I’d bet my eyeteeth on it—if I still had them.”

Pop took another bite, his cheek stretching out over it as he chewed. “Now here’s the thing, Reb,” he mumbled. “You don’t have to turn off Ginny’s shimmer to eat.”

He shoved my sandwich at me.

I took it and munched it down, grateful for his words. He was right about Ginny. She was precious. And I was going to find her, and keep her.

We sat in our respective seats and ate by the fire, wading further into the Cuervo.

After a while I said, “I apologize for bringing this on you, Pop. About your place getting ruined, and you getting hurt.”

“Aw hell, kid,” Pop snorted, “I liked it. You think I’d be here if I didn’t? And about the money, I don’t want a goddamn nickel. As far as I’m concerned, that sumbitch Krell owes it to you for what happened to your folks.”

I poured him another shot. He sipped it like nectar. “You know, I’m an orphan, too.”

A lump rose in my throat.

“Yup,” he said, “my old man was in the bootlegging business. You know what that was, bootlegging?”

“Transporting black-market booze when it was outlawed.”

“Uh-huh. Made a nice dollar doing it. Lot of bad seeds, though, in that line of work. My dad was one of ’em. He had some wheat in him, I suppose, but he was mostly chaff. That’s what my mother said. Her name was Beatrice. She had a bakeshop in town—doughnuts, pastry, cinnamon buns that smelled so good they’d make you pant. Everybodywanted those buns. Bing Crosby even came through one time when he was getting to be real popular. Said he’d heard about ’em from somebody down in Hollywood. Bought eight boxes.”

Pop sipped some more tequila. “Mm, I like this stuff,” he said. “Anyway, where was I?”

“Bing,” I reminded him.

“Oh . . . you see, my old man was using the back of the bakeshop for stashing booze. He had a guy named Drymouth Dan Hollister helping him, would keep things sorted out when my dad was making deliveries. Dan always sounded like he’d been sucking on a Sugar Daddy for two weeks. Made a clicking sound like he was out of saliva, ya see? That’s where he got his moniker. But he was a handsome bastard, maybe as good-looking as you, without all the muscles. How’s your back, anyway? You sore?”

“No,” I lied, and prodded him on. Pop’s voice and the rhythm of the rocking chair had a soothing effect.

He continued. “Old Drymouth, he got a taste for my mom’s buns, too, only not the ones came out of the oven, you understand. And I guess she liked the way he combed his hair. He had wavy hair slicked back with lots of Vitalis, like Victor Mature, remember him?”

“Yeah,” I said, sipping, “wavy hair, lots of Vitalis.”

“That’s the one. So, my dad walks in on them while they’re docking,so to speak, near the deep-fat fryer, and surprises the living piss out of them. In a fury he lunges at them and knocks over the hot oil and it splashes right in my mother’s face. She screams and grabs the nearest thing she can find, which is a kitchen knife, and stabs my old man. He stumbles out of the room and into the front of the store where everybody’s lined up for the sweets, and croaks right on the floor next to the cruller case. My old lady realizes what she’s done and that her face is ruined so she grabs Drymouth’s Saturday-night special and blasts herself right in the ticker. And that was that. Put a dent in the bakery business, I’ll tell you.”

Neither of us laughed.

“So, anyway, Drymouth felt sorry for me and ended up taking me in. I saw my share of shot-up guys—that’s how I knew how to stitch you up. Like a bicycle, you never forget. Or is that an elephant? Anyhow, Dan went legit in the liquor business when prohibition was repealed. Over the years, he stashed away a bundle, which he passed on to me and I used to buy the inn when I got out of the service. Named it after him.”

“What’d you do in the service?” I asked.

“Engineer. Army Corps of Engineers. Bridge builder.”

He picked up a log, poked the burnt ones with it, and tossed it on top. The crackle of the revived fire and the distant pounding surf made me long for Ginny.

Pop eyeballed me for a second, reading my face.“So,” he said, picking up the notes, “you’re back on Watson. I mean Ginny. Damn! Antonia.”

“All three of ’em,” I answered. “I’ve got to figure out the Circles of Truth. Without Ginny’s help. I’ll need Mona more than ever now.”

“I could go for Mona myself right now,” he said. “Or a doughnut.”

“Ginny’s a mountain tiger.” My tongue was thick with alcohol.

“Mountain tiger? What kind of bullshit is that?”

I was in the clouds with Ginny when Pop mumbled, “Doughnuts and mountains.” Then he hiccuped. “Nerts!” he swore. “I hate the hiccups.”

“What’d you say?” I asked, picking up one of the pages of Leonardo’s notes.

“I said, ‘Nerts, I hate the hiccups.’ ”

“No,” I said, staring at the Circles of Truth. “You said ‘doughnuts and mountains.’ Doughnuts and mountains . . .” Searchlights flickered in my mind, illuminating what?

“Yeah, well, you know, tequila’s good,” Pop said, his speech slurred.

I pointed to the Circles, excitement prickling as the outline of a concept emerged. “Say these rings here were tossed onto a mountain; you know, like that Fisher-Price kid’s toy with the different-colored plastic doughnuts in graduated sizes?”

“Yeah, sure. Look like dildoes with the rings off.”

“The point is that the plastic rings are parts of a puzzle. A simple puzzle. In order to solve it, the kid has to line them up in the right order so they’re touching. Do you get me? The doughnuts . . . have to touch. They have totouch.”Thrill radiated through me.

“Hold it,” he said, trying to catch my wave of Cuervo insight. “What’re you saying?”

“Here,” I said, tapping the page. “Maybe Leonardo’s rings are all pieces of the same circle, only sliced apart and shrunk to ever smaller sizes, and each set of ten of them makes up one complete Circle of Truth, whatever that is—a code or something. So in order to solve it you have to blow each inner ring up until they all touch, forming one circular message. Two in this case, because there are two sets of them. I’m on to something. I know it.”

Pop let out a gush of air that smelled like turkey and tequila.

“I think maybe you are. Hard to tell, though. I’m pretty much in the bag.” He closed his eyes, laid his old head back. “In the morning I’ll take you to Mona’s.”

“Do you know if she has a scanner?” I asked.

Pop folded his hands over his belly. “Course she’s got standards, Holmes. Got high ones. She’s seeing me.”

fourteen

Idreamt I was a fresh cruller in a brightly lit case in a doughnut shop, clad in nothing but a sugar glaze, lying back, feet crossed, hands covering my groin, in a line of other crullers. Outside the case, a crowd of people looked in, pointing at me, singling me out. Mean-looking, wavy-haired men in zoot suits; women with full lips and hats with netting over their faces; children with comic books and cowlicks, eyeing me with lip-smacking hunger.

The crullers to my right were perched up on sugary elbows, gawking at me: Krell, the maniacal treasure hunter; Tecci with his wriggling wraparound snake; ring-polishing, coldhearted Beckett.

To my left, Mom and Dad reached glazed hands out to me. Next to them was Ginny, also reaching—to take me in her arms. And next to her was Leonardo—the only one not looking at me. The Dagger was between his teeth, and he was wearing a harness attached to a long rope. He slowly pulled it, eyes on something above him at the top of the case. I tried to see what it was, but couldn’t make it out. It surprised me that he didn’t seem to care he was a cruller.

I heard the sound of water splashing and momentarily panicked. If you’re a cruller and get soaked, it’s all over.

More water, like the drip from a turned-off hose. Then singing— terrible singing. A cross between Ethel Merman and a wounded raccoon. It was Pop crooning “It Had to Be You.”

I opened one heavy eyelid, facedown on the sleeping bag. The doorwas open, Pop standing at the edge of the front porch, zipping his pants. He’d been serenading his dick. Behind him, the morning coastal fog spread out like dingy carpet.

“Top of the floor to you, Pop,” I croaked.

“Morning, Reb. You hungry? I brought some breakfast from the inn.” He waved a finger at a round picnic basket.

Springing up, suddenly fully awake, I asked him, “You went to the inn? Any sign of Ginny?”

“Afraid not. Manny the landscaper, he said him and Kurt just about crapped in the truck when she jumped onto the tractor. They pulled over right away to find out what the heck she was doing up there, and while they’re pumping her for information, they hear gunfire. So they hop in the cab and take off, and don’t look back for a couple of miles. When they do, she’s gone.”

“Damn,” I said. “She could have spent the night in the woods, for all we know. Or Tecci could have snatched her.”

“Don’t go thinking the worst,” Pop said. “It won’t help.” He sat down in the rocker beside me, handing me a biscuit. I chewed it absently.

“Do you think it’s possible she could have found her way to Mona’s?” I said.

“Shit, no. I’d have heard about it. Did she have any money?”

“Some.”

“Well, see, that’s good,” he said.

“Yeah,” I agreed, my brain clearer now. “If Tecci or Krell were up here, they wouldn’t be lurking around on Highway One. They’d be in some hotel nearby, not cruising the coast road, right?”

“I suppose so,” Pop said. “They’d be waiting for word from those peckers you laid out. You’ve got to think positive. Now turn around so I can check my knitting, make sure you’re not getting infected.”

I let Pop take off the bandage. “Looks clean. I believe I missed my true calling. Should have been a tailor.” He removed fresh dressings from the first-aid kit and applied them.

Think positive, Pop had instructed. I was positive I didn’t knowwhere Ginny was. I was also sure I’d had some sort of insight into Leonardo’s Circles last night. I desperately wanted to find her, but didn’t know where to look. I had to do what I could, not what I wanted. And what I could do was try to unravel the code.

That meant Mona.

Pop had driven back from the inn in his Range Rover. I slipped into the rear seat and lay down out of sight, knowing better than to show my face. We headed down Highway 1, me feeling a tad queasy. I never liked riding in the backseat, even sitting up, and certainly not with a hangover. When we got off the main drag, Pop instructed me to hop up front, which I gladly did.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“Ukiah Road on the way to Comptche. Be at Mona’s in a minute.”

“How’d you get to know her, anyway?” I asked, watching the scenery—tall, wise trees, happy squirrels with plenty of holes to climb into and not many tires to get squashed under.

“I know all the babes around here,” he said, with a sideways grin. “I was a regular Sir Galahad. Plenty of steel in the little jouster. You know, making merry with the old maidens. Dispatched ’em all forthwith at one time or another. But none of ’em come close to Mona. Now she’s a diamond, all right. I mean a night-sky-star kinda winker. That doesn’t quite get the point across. She’s celestial. That’s it! Mona’s celestial. Don’t you think? Even if you were a youngster last time you saw her, you must have known that.”

I remembered Mona, clogs clopping up the streets of the old neighborhood. She always paused at the house next door, if the lady was outside, to compliment her on the scrawniest yellow rosebushes in all of Berkeley. There was definitely something celestial about Mona. And I was the guy who hadn’t responded to her cards.

“Yeah, Pop,” I agreed. “Celestial.”

“Damn tootin’,” he said. “Okay, here we are.”

He pulled up a steep gravel driveway within feet of a tiny sky blue house with dark shutters. The front screen opened and out cameMona, plumper than before, with long silver hair that used to be brown. She wore a flowery dress and cork-soled denim sandals.

I felt a flutter in my belly, a tug on my heart.

Pop jumped out of the car like he was eighteen and made his way up the porch with a sprightly step. Mona kept her eyes on me as I followed. Pop hugged her tenderly, then stepped away from her as I approached.

“Reb,” she said, hands on her full hips.

“Sorry I’m a day late,” I said self-consciously, stopping in front ofher.

She cupped my face with age-spotted hands.

“You’re not late,” she said. “You’re right on time.” Then a look of sorrow crossed her face. “I feel guilty, as though I let Martha down. I tried to—”

“I saved your cards,” I told her. “Every one. You didn’t let Martha down. I did.”

“Well . . . now is no time for regret. You’ve come to me with great urgency. And after some terrible trouble at the inn. Tell me how I can help.”

Her little house was filled with the scent of freshly baked cookies. Mona guided us upstairs to a small, brightly lit office adorned with framed logos of what I guessed were local businesses. I pulled the two pages of Leonardo’s notes from my backpack and handed them to her without a word.

She held them gingerly, staring at them with a puzzled look. “Oh my Lord,” she gasped, her eyes opening wide. “Are these what I think they are? Am I holding something of Leonardo da Vinci’s? Is this . . . could it be . . . the Circles of Truth . . . the Medici Dagger?”

“I can’t explain the whole story now, but—”

“You owe me no explanation,” she said, studying the Circles. “Just tell me what you know about them.”

“They’re some sort of code Leonardo devised to send a message. They go together somehow. I know that. Maybe they’re a symbolic alphabet. Remember your Sherlock Holmes?”

“The Dancing Men!”

I told her about the insight I’d had the previous night and explained that I wanted to eliminate the spaces between the rings, enlarging each one until they all touched, forming a solid image.

Mona understood instantly. She examined the pages, looking from one to the other. Then, spinning in her chair, she switched on her computer and flatbed scanner.

“Let’s find your dancing men, shall we?”

First Mona scanned Ginny’s translation and each page of notes just to have them on disk, then captured the image of each Circle. Next, focusing only on Circle One, she scanned the rings of the design individually and put one within the next. I watched carefully as her fingers worked the mouse, clicking and dragging.

When Mona finished, all the rings touched. We sat shoulder to shoulder searching for a pattern, an obvious design, symbols— anything. No dancing men. Nothing distinguishable.

I was surprised at the level of my disappointment. As if Leonardo would invent something simple.

Mona didn’t seem to mind. “They could still go together like that,” she said. “But maybe they’re in the wrong order. Maybe it’s not outside ring to inside ring. Maybe it’s inside to outside. Some other pattern. I think Leonardo was having a little fun.”

Her eyes shone like blue beach glass. “You know what we’ve got to do now, don’t you?”

“We’ve got to scan each ring and blow it up to every possible size so that each ring could fit in any position in the bull’s-eye.”

“Exactly!”

We set about printing out ten transparencies for each ring, one for each position in the circle, labeling them #1 through #10 and dividing them into piles by size, so each could be fitted together with the others in every possible way. When we were done, we had a hundred sheets each for Circles of Truth One and Circles of Truth Two. The first combination, outer to inner, hadn’t worked. So, next we lined up the ringsinner to outer, with the original smallest circle on the outside, largest on the inside.

Nothing. We continued to try different combinations as Pop sat nearby with a yellow pad and pencil, making copious notes, recording the results.

An hour later and still nothing. Frustration crackled in me.What am I doing? Ginny’s out there somewhere, and I’ve got a couple hundred Circles of Truth and no clue how they go together.

Pop said, “I could very well be the hungriest bastard ever been to Comptche. I’m going downstairs, fix us all something.” I looked at him, overwhelmed with anxiety. He patted me lightly on the shoulder. “She’s sparkling out there, Reb. She’s sparkling.”

Mona looked at him quizzically. “There’s tuna in the cupboard,” she said.

I heard him hobble out and down the stairs. Mona laid a hand on my knee. Emotion spiked.

“Look at me,” she urged.

She peered into my eyes, her gaze caressing every crevice in my rocky cave.

“Martha was a good woman,” she said softly. “I knew her for a long time before she adopted you. Knew her husband, George, as well, and how you filled in the space after he died. I knew all about you and your parents. I watched you grow and then you were gone and I wondered what path you chose.”

I started to choke up. “Leonardo laid a path for a mighty traveler to follow, Mona. I’m that traveler.”

After a moment of hushed silence, she breathed, “I appreciate what it took for you to come to me after all these years. I feel your desperation. I want to help. It’s my duty to help you. We’re not making sense of Leonardo’s shapes and we’re missing his pattern. If these are Leonardo’s dancing men, we must let them dance.”

Her face next to mine, she whispered, “Close your eyes, young man, and tell me what their next step is.”

I let my lids fall. Mona moved behind me. She whispered again in my ear, “Now try to clear your mind of all the past and all the future. You are alone with Leonardo. What do you see?”

I felt her fingers massage my temples and let my mind wander.

No clue. The past and the future. Leonardo. No clue.

Suddenly the master’s words flashed before me. Ginny’s flowing script of Leonardo’s notes. “Out then in back and forth one to the other the seer will wander the path and the truth of the past will lead the wise one to the dagger.” Out then in. Outer inner. Mona’s fingers massaged my temples. In circles, back and forth. And there I was at the combination lock by the road to the Baby Face Nelson Suite where I saw a white-haired Leonardo kneeling, turning the dial. Something profound clicked inside. When I’d touched the lock, more than school memories had been triggered. I hadn’t known what. Now I did.

“The Circles rotate.”

A big smile crossed Mona’s lips. “Of course,” she said crisply.

She quickly marked a page with an X, printed it out on a transparency, and handed it to me along with a plastic-tipped pushpin.

Out then in. Outer inner.

I grabbed two transparencies from Circle One: #1 the largest, and #10, the smallest, but in the second-ring size so that it would butt up against #1. Placing the X transparency over them, I stuck a pushpin through dead center and slowly started rotating #10. Mona leaned in, her warm breath on my ear.

“Stop there,” she gasped. “Do you see?”

The ice of recognition chilled me like a polar wind. The two rings lined up. They connected.

“Oh my God,” I said, “they fit together. But what are they?”

“I know exactly what they are,” Mona said. “It isn’t symbols. Not dancing men, but calligraphy! It’s Leonardo’s alphabet. This is a circle of words! You picked the biggest then the smallest, #1 then #10. How did you know to do that?”

“Um . . . this is going to sound weird, but I don’t know how else tosay it. Leonardo told me. I don’t mean I heard his voice say it to me. That would be crazy.”

“Not to me. But I understand. You received the information.”

“Yes.”

“How far did you spin it? This can’t be haphazard.”

“Of course not. This is Leonardo.”

“Right. Each Circle of Truth is comprised of ten rings.”

“That’s it, Mona!” I shouted. “Ten rings, three hundred and sixty degrees. One ring, thirty-six degrees.” Another flush of excitement tingled my toes. “What’s next in the layout if they’re outer inner?”

“Well, outer inner would be one, ten, two, nine, three, eight, four, seven, five, six. The next would be number two in the third from the largest size.”

I fished through the transparencies until I found it, stuck it under the pile, poked the pin through the center and spun it clockwise, thirty-six degrees past where the first one had stopped. The marks connected with the others. I swallowed hard, feeling my Adam’s apple rise and fall like a pile driver.

Mona sat down next to me, a look of fascination on her wrinkled face. “Leonardo wrote a message, sliced it in horizontal pieces, put them in a circle, and spun them.”

To Pop she shouted, “Rodney Norcross, get your old self up here. Don’t miss this!”

I heard Pop creaking up the stairs as I rifled through the transparencies till I found the fourth-largest ring. I attached it to the others, spinning it another thirty-six degrees. It fit!

Pop entered the room carrying a tray of sandwiches. I started singing to the tune of “La Cucaracha”: “I’m a gen-ius, I’m a gen-ius, I’m a really coo-ool duuude. I’m a gen-ius, I’m a gen-ius, and that’s a winning attitu-u-ude.”

Pop and Mona laughed as I fished out the fifth-sized ring with a clammy hand, stuck it on the back, and spun it what I thought was thirty-six degrees past the fourth ring, or one hundred and forty-fourdegrees. Yow! I sang my little tune again. Pop grabbed Mona and danced to it.

I was doing it. It was working out.

I dug out sixth-position #8, laid it on the back, fanned it out so it was at one hundred eighty degrees and . . . and . . . nothing. I moved it back and forth in small increments. Still nothing.

Pop and Mona stopped dancing.

“I only have the top half of the words,” I said, thoroughly deflated. How fast I had fallen from grace. Pluto to Pittsburgh at the speed of stupidity.

Mona picked up the pad and read, “One-ten-two-nine-three, rings one through five, top half of a line. Try the same thing with Truth Two.”

They went together as the others had.

“By jingo,” Pop howled, “you got the outer halves of two messages. Nice work. Now all you have to do is solve the inside.”

I puzzled it out. “The inside of Truth One should be eight-four-seven-five-six, but number eight doesn’t work. They obviously go together some different way. What way?”

“Reb,” Mona said, “what were you thinking about when I told you to close your eyes?”

“The combination lock.”

“Go back there. Say aloud what you see, any pattern you detect.”

I shut my eyes and drifted.

Up and down, light and dark, high and low. Happiness and sadness, strain and relief, man and woman, lift and separate.

Antonyms rained on me like wedding rice. My mind arrived back at the chained-off road to the Baby Face Nelson Suite as I unlocked the padlock. “Right, left, right, pull down, success,” I said. “Right, left, right. Leonardo said ‘back and forth, one to the other.’ ”

I opened my eyes. “Back and forth. That’s it! Number eight from Truth One, Mona. I need it in the sixth size.”

She quickly handed it to me.

Back and forth.

I attached it to the five sheets of Truth One already connected with the pin, but this time I spun itcounterclockwise. Nothing. “I’m wrong,” I said, dejection dripping from my tongue. “I can’t get it. I’m not the mighty traveler. I’m nothing.”

“Shh,” Mona said, kneeling down next to me. “You also said ‘one to the other.’ ”

I listened to her words—Leonardo’s words. Of course. It had to be. Onecircleto the other.

I grabbed #8 from Circle of Truth Two and attached it to the sheets of Truth One. I spun it counterclockwise, making little adjustments. The piece fit! I quickly attached rings 4-7-5-6 from Truth Two to Truth One, fanning them out counterclockwise. They all connected. I was holding a circle of Leonardo’s words.

Somewhere in the distance I heard Pop say,“By jingo,” but I was no longer in the room. I was on the path with Leonardo.Wewere the dancing men. I repeated the process with Truth Two. The inner circles of Truth One fit counterclockwise with the outer circles of Truth Two.

I was holding a second complete circular sentence.

I had done it! Two sentences in Leonardo’s backward script, from two separate notebook pages. Two circles, twenty rings, 720 degrees, outer inner, back and forth, one circle to the other. Leonardo’s complex mind, his stunning intellect, at play. The twenty-circle path. The path to the Medici Dagger.

“Iamthe mighty traveler,” I said to Leonardo.

“But what do they mean?” Pop asked.

“I’m going to find out. And when I do I’m going to tell you. Ginny,” I said, my mind suddenly filled with her.

Pop said, “Oh nerts, where’s my memory—Iowa? I just talked to Mary at the inn. Said she got a weird call from a dame who said nothing but ‘Tell Pop A.F.B.B.’ Said it sounded like she was in a phone booth. That ring a bell?”

“Jesus!” I said, jumping out of my chair. “It sure does. Archie Ferris. I knew it was him in the woods.”

“Who the hell’s Archie Paris?” he asked.

“Ferris,” I said, “like the wheel at a carnival.”

“Oh yeah, your buddy,” Pop said. “Your guardian angel. How come he sounds like a broad?”

“He picked her up. Thank God.”

“What’s B.B.?” Mona asked.

“Big Bear,” I told her, relief flooding my heart. “Archie Ferris, Big Bear. Why the hell’d they go all the way to Big Bear?”

“And who’s Ginny?”

A smile crossed my lips. A hopeful smile. A Hope Diamond smile.

“Your sparkler,” Mona said.

I nodded.

“I’d say it’s time for you to go,” she told me, packing the transparencies in a box. She handed them to me along with the original notes and asked if I wanted her to assemble the rings into the completed Circles on the computer.

“No time,” I told her. “Just make a backup disk of the files. Besides,” I said, waving the box, “I’ve got these.”

Mona copied the files and gave me the disk. I wrapped her in my arms. She reminded me that it was still in her will to let me know when she died. “White it out,” I said. She pressed her cheek to mine.

“Thank you, Mona,” I said, brimming with emotion.

I turned to Pop. “The Baby Face Nelson Suite. And step on it.”

We left Mona standing on the porch, grasping her hair in one hand to keep it from blowing in the breeze and waving to us with the other. Pop winked at me and said it would be inconsiderate of him not to go back there later to personally show his appreciation for what she’d done.

On the ride back to Little River it occurred to me that I didn’t have Archie’s address in Big Bear, nor was there a phone in the cabin.There’d be no message leaving me directions; Archie was too smart for that. His cell phone number was in my car. All I could do was head for Big Bear and hope he had it with him. Worst case, somebody would be able to direct me to his cabin.

At least Ginny was safe.

Back at the Baby Face Nelson Suite I quickly packed. I removed fifty thousand dollars from the satchel and tried to force it on Pop, but he wouldn’t have it. I stashed the money in the trunk of the Jag and had one foot in the car when I looked up at the old guy. There were tears in his eyes.

A rush of gratitude welled as my own eyes got misty. Pop held his arms out to me. I crunched across the gravel and hugged him. He patted me right on the stitches.

“Pop,” I said, ignoring the pain. “Pop . . .”

He took out a hankie and blew his nose so hard I figured a flock of geese was on its way. “I like you way better’n Baby Face. And about you not having a place to live? Well, here ain’t so bad.”

fifteen

Imade my way back down the rugged path and did the thing with the chain, stopping to plant a kiss on the combination lock. Easing out onto Highway 1, I pulled into the first gas station I spotted and filled the tank. I rang Archie’s cell phone, but the call didn’t go through.

At the fastest speed prudence would allow, I drove down 128 to 101, every fiber in my being yearning to streak through like a Japanese train, ripping up mailboxes and tearing down clotheslines with the sheer force of my wind drag.

The earth slowly rotated out of daylight. I pressed on through San Francisco and San Jose, down 101 to Highway 5, fighting off the inevitable effects of mental and physical overexpenditure. As my eyes grew heavy, thoughts began to flow like sailors’ whiskey.Noble purpose, Pop and Mona, Circles of Truth, Ginny and Archie, Big Bear, curly hair, Fred Astaire, debonair.

Suddenly the ride turned bumpy and I jerked awake. I had crossed the breakdown lane and was barreling down the slope of a canyon doing seventy-five. I tugged the wheel, hoping to change direction without fishtailing, but I was going too fast at too sharp an angle and lost control.

One option left. I countersteered hard right and yanked the hand brake, locking the back wheels, throwing the Jag into a spin. When the car was halfway around, I tromped on the gas. The tires smoked. Dirt and gravel kicked up all around me as the full force of the big engine battled my rearward momentum.

Don’t blow, I prayed to the tires as I headed backward down the embankment, rubber squealing, motor growling. In three frantic seconds the tug-of-war ended, the Jag winning out over the sloping ditch.

I sat perfectly still, the smell of burnt rubber wafting through the window. My heart thumped like in a Betty Boop cartoon. I reached for the key; my hand was shaking. I had the heights, two feet from the ground.

Ginny’s hand had steadied me in the garden—before I’d unraveled the secret of the Circles. Just a little tremor, I thought. I turned the key.

The big engine purred as if nothing had happened; the muffler masked the angry boom of sparking gasoline. I threw the Jag into first gear and edged back into the night as the radio played the Beach Boys singing “California Girls.”

Pulling off at Magic Mountain, I ducked into a Safeway, used the facilities, bought a Boulder Bar and some juice, slammed them down, and tried Archie again.

Still no connection.

A well-groomed man carrying a bag of groceries passed by. His pager went off. Something in my head went off, too. Of course. Archie’s pager!

I dialed, punched in the number of the pay phone, hit the pound sign, and slammed down the receiver. Now all I had to do was stand there and wait, maybe get an empty coffee cup and hold it out to the Magic Mountaineers. Alms for the idiot.

Twenty minutes later, the phone rang. I just about yanked it off the wound metal cord.

“Archie?”

“Gagmaster?” he answered in his familiar baritone. “Sorry to be so long. We had to get to a pay phone.”

“Is she with you?” My heart beat fiercely.

“Affirmative.”

“Is she all right?”

“Of course,” he said. “She’s withme.”

I sagged against the side of the phone booth, bursting with feelings I couldn’t comprehend.

Archie said,“Hey . . . you all right?”

“I am now.”

“Where are you?”

I told him.

“Okay,” he said, “take Five to Fourteen North to Pear Blossom Highway to Eighteen to Thirty-eight to Fawnskin. We’re at 2116 Fawn Skin Drive, just past the four-thousand-feet elevation mark. Look for the bear I made out of a tree. Got it?”

I said I did.

“Good,” he said.“Here.”

I heard the muffled sound of two voices, then one that made my knees weak, questioning, “Reb?”

“Ginny,” I breathed.

“Thank God. What happened at Pop’s?”

“Didn’t Archie tell you? He was there.”

“He was? That doesn’t make sense.”

“How did you hook up with him?”

“I’ll explain when you get here. Hurry.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’m getting on the road.”

“Wait. Have you still got the Circles?”

Pride swelled in me. “I most definitely do.”

“What are you saying?” she asked, incredulous. “Are you telling me you actually figured them out?”

I let my silence answer.

“Oh my God, I can’t believe you did it!”

“I’m coming to get you,” I told her, my mouth suddenly dirt-dry. “Be there in a couple of hours.”

“I’ll be waiting for you,” she whispered. “Bye.”

I hung up, gently this time, totally intoxicated with emotion, but thirsting for more, dying to drink from her well forever, to gulp quenching heartfuls of her.

There was plenty of gas in the Jag, too much blood in my veins, and exactly enough grit in my soul.

Drive, Traveler, drive.

I passed roving headlights and billboards advertising blue jeans and breakfast specials. Satellite dishes prayed to the licorice sky, red-eyed fruit bats swooped, teenage lovers sweated, and me, the son of the museum curator and the woman with the acorn eyes, steered to where nature intended.

I felt a pull on the stitches in my back, triggering images of Pop and Mona—their tears and kindness. The two of them, maybe right this moment, under a well-worn quilt. Soft old skin touching soft old skin. Pop making merry with Mona the maiden. And afterward, chocolate-chip cookies. The stuff of Comptche, the husk of human life.Life.I was sticking my toe in the pool and it felt good.

Before long I was bucking and dipping on the ridiculous Pear Blossom Highway, a two-lane shortcut to Big Bear. The San Bernardino Mountains were on my right, the dead-flat desert on my left. The road was so wavy, the highs and lows so extreme, that cars driving toward me looked like they were sending signals in Morse code.

I clicked on a classical station. Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 25 lilted on the radio and a strange chaotic sensation contrasted with the sweeping harmonious music. My breathing became shallow, my thoughts as coarse as a cat’s tongue. Disconcerted, I mentally administered a self-exam.

My back was definitely sore where Pop had sewn me up, my buns were barking, my knee ached from smacking the dashboard during the spinout, and my underwear had been up my crack for a hundred and fifty miles. Exam results: mental melee, physical foundering. Therapist’s recommendation: Change life and underwear.

Archie’s directions were precise. A hundred yards past the elevation marker, I saw his sculpted bear. It looked more like a fat woodenmonkey. I could picture Archie out there on a summer day with the McCullough, yanking the saw cord, brrrrmmm, bup bup bup, bzzzzzzzzzz, whoops, fuck it, bzzzzzzzzzz, whoops, fuck it. Hacking on the helpless pine, sweat dripping onto the saw’s rubber grip. Not exactly Michelangelo chipping away everything that wasn’t David.

I drove down the long driveway till I spotted Archie’s Hummer parked in front of a big A-frame cabin. The lights in the house were out; smoke drifted up from the chimney toward the pregnant yellow moon. I parked, grabbed the box of transparencies and notes, and groaned my way out of the car.Why are the lights out?Although the air wasn’t brisk, I suddenly got goose bumps.

Then someone grabbed the back of my jacket and put a gun to my head. Instantly I dropped to the ground like a sack of stones, catching my assailant by surprise. I scissored his legs and he went over, his silver gun glinting in the moonlight.

Grabbing his gun hand, I twisted hard. I heard an ugly snap and a cry just before a bolt of lightning hit my neck and time stopped.

When I came to, I was sitting in a steel and leather chair in front of the hearth in Archie’s living room. A nicely built fire crackled on the grate. When the heat reached a little air pocket in one of the split logs, it made a pop and sparks flew against the glass fireplace doors. The sound echoed in my head like a boom from the “1812 Overture,” and was accompanied by considerable pain, which flared from my left eye back to what I assumed was a good-sized lump behind my ear.

Off to my right a familiar throaty female voice uttered, “Reb.” I felt comfort, as though a soft blanket had been fluffed over me.

I painfully inched my head toward the sound. Only four feet away, Ginny sat in an identical chair.

A hand with manicured and polished fingernails touched her shoulder. She shivered in response.

“See, honey?” an ominous voice said. “I told you he’d be back.”

My eyes followed a black kidskin sleeve up to a shoulder, to a collar,-to the tattoo of a serpent. The snake seemed to undulate with each carotid throb.

I elevated my gaze to meet a harsh chin, then a sneering mouth and the tip of a Roman nose, then two black eyes seizing my stare.

“Flame Boy,” Tecci called out, like a long-lost pal. “We meet again on terra firma.”

The sound waves rippled down my spine, shuddering me fully awake. I took in the sight of Nolo Tecci, his disturbed face angular and Picasso.

Memory’s ghosts sprang from their cots, their long arms reaching-—the blaze, the screams, the falling ceiling. The sea horses on the doctor’s tie reared, whinnying at the sight of the serpent in their path. Liquid fury flash-flooded my senses. I lurched forward, but my wrists and ankles were tightly bound to the chair with box twine.

Tecci let out a pull-the-wings-off-a-fly laugh. Ginny wasn’t tied down. She made a move toward me, but he squeezed her shoulder harshly, forcing her back into her chair.

I steeled myself, sucked in a long breath through my nose and let it out slowly.

“Where’s Archie?” I asked.

“Taking a little nap,” Tecci answered. “He’s a big one. Made a nice heavy-bag for my men. Gave them an excellent workout. By the way, my guy out in the driveway? I think you broke his wrist. He’s in the kitchen, wrapping it in ice. He doesn’t like you as much as I do. Hey, Jocko,” he yelled, “are you a little upset with Flame Boy?”

An angry voice from the other room called, “I’m gonna break his fuckin’ neck, Mr. Tecci. Just give me a minute.”

Ginny gasped. Nolo dug into her shoulder again and turned his head toward the doorway. “Quiet now, Jocko. You’re upsetting Ms. Gianelli.”

I noticed the reflection of the flickering fire on Tecci’s polished loafers. He looked down at them, too.

“You know, Flame Boy, labor’s pretty cheap. The Krauts, the Wops, everybody’s cheap. That’s because they’re ignorant.” He shouted in Jocko’s direction again, “You’re incredibly stupid, aren’t you?”

There was no answer from the kitchen. Nolo stomped the floor twice like a stage manager giving a cue. Jocko appeared in the doorway, a strong-looking guy with a blocky chin and male-pattern baldness, wearing a white Polo shirt smeared with dirt. His wrist was wrapped in a checkered towel. He cradled it delicately.

“Aren’t you stupid?” Nolo prompted.

“Yeah,” Jocko acknowledged reluctantly, eyes downcast. Then he disappeared into the kitchen.

“That was a very good answer, don’t you think?” Nolo said, smiling at me. “Do you think that was a good answer, Ms. Gianelli?”

Ginny looked at me with fear. “Yes.”

“It was a good answer, wasn’t it, Joey?” Nolo spoke to someone behind me.

“Good answer,” a deep voice replied.

“Do you like it, Lon?” Tecci said to someone off to my right, just out of view.

“I like it,” he answered, sniffling like he had a cold.

Nolo picked up a handful of transparencies from a small pine table next to Ginny. The sheets were a total mess, most of them bent. They must have gone flying when I hit the ground.

“By the way, Flame Boy,” Nolo said, sifting through them, “I really appreciate these righteous rings. The question is, how do they go together and what do they mean? Look at all of them.”

I saw the killer’s hands touching Mona’s transparencies—my work, Leonardo’s genius—leaving infernal imprints on everything, visible only to me through the infrared of my hatred.

“How did you find us?” I asked defiantly. “I got the Hollister House bit that you had my car phone, but how’d you get here?”

“Ma Bell. We checked out the main phone at the inn right after you had the party with the Germans. I told Krell we shouldn’t usethose boys, but he’s a patriot, you know. I guarantee he never had a Nathan’s hot dog in his entire life. Anyway, we misplaced you for a little while until the dear sweet cannoli here called with the A.F.B.B. business. That didn’t sound like a reservation to me. And, of course, as you might expect, I have a source who’s got the spread on you and everyone you ever met. So A. F., that was Archie Ferris in a heartbeat. And

B. B . . . well, not too difficult. Tell him, honey,” he said to Ginny, “how you got all the way down here from the North Coast.”

“Don’t call me honey,” she snapped.

Nolo smiled at me. “I do like her,” he said.

Kneeling down on the carpet, he placed his chin on Ginny’s shoulder.-She flinched.

“When I say do something,” he whispered in her ear, “you must do it. Now tell him.”

Ginny nervously licked her lips. “I took a cab,” she said softly.

Nolo stood up and laughed. “She took a cab! The girl took a four-hundred-mile taxi trip. I love that.” He stomped the floor.

Jocko came back to the doorway, as if on cue.

Nolo stopped laughing. “Get out,” he snarled. “I didn’t call you.”

The man withdrew.

Nolo waved the transparencies at me. “All right,” he said. “I repeat, Flame Boy. How do they go together?”

I let my face hang loosely, showing apparent ease while inside thoughts crashed into each other like bumper cars.

“I’m a stuntman, Nolo,” I said. “What do I know about this kind of thing? I was just trying to figure it out myself.”

“Well, that’s good, Flame Boy, that’s exceptionally good. Of course you don’t know what it means. How could you? But you, darling,” he said to Ginny. “You know what it means.”

“I’m an art historian,” she said. “The designs may have historical significance, but I have absolutely no idea of what.”

Nolo mimicked, “I have absolutely no idea of what. You’re quite a hot little condiment, aren’t you? Here’s what I think. Flame Boy wasplaying Dick Tracy and somehow he uncovered some sort of code that Leonardo da Vinci made up five million years ago.”

Nolo brushed the edge of one of the transparencies against his closely shaved chin. “I’m going to get a dollar for every one of those years, once Krell’s analysts crack the code. That’s where you come in, art girl. In case whatever the eggheads find out needs some artistic interpreting.” He caressed Ginny’s hair.

I futilely twisted my wrists against the twine.

“Relax, Flame Boy,” he said. “I’m just toying with her. We’ve got the two pages of da Vinci’s notes and all these nice circles on translucent paper. Herr Krell is going to be blissful.”

“By the way, where is Krell?” I asked. “I’d like to meet him, share the bliss with him.”

“In his jet.” Nolo shrugged.

“Well,” I said, “if Wiener’s at the airport, what are we waiting for? Let’s go.”

“Wiener . . . You’re a card, a regular joker.”

My stare hardened, the molten pool of loathing solidifying in my gut.

“I’m the Ace of Spades, Tecci,” I uttered. “I always turn up.”

“Oooh,” he taunted, “I’m trembling like a twig in a twister. That’s not bad, twig in a twister. Do you think? Ah, I have the muse in me.”

Keep him talking.

“Hey, Nolo. How did you know we were taking the taxi to Torcello Island?”

“Ah, money talks, Ace. In fact it screams,” Tecci said with a malignant leer. “Now the question is, will you?”

Nolo set the clutter of transparencies down on the table, reached into his inside jacket pocket, and withdrew something that looked like a silver garage door opener with a little gooseneck attached to it. A surgeon’s laser.

“You won’t be turning up, Ace. You’ll be burning up. You and your pal,” he said, stroking the apparatus like a piece of velvet. “But first, I’ve got to sign off on you.”

I swallowed hard. The signature “N” in the nape.

“Not her,” I said, my eyes locked on Tecci’s.

“That’s very touching,” he smirked. “I really think he’s soft on you, sweetheart. One never knows. It’s conceivable I might even get stuck on you, myself. Ms. Gianelli comes with us. She’s not a roaster, she’s a coaster. A coast-to-coaster. For now.”

Tecci pulled a two-pronged electric device for zapping muggers from his pants pocket and casually zapped Ginny with it; instantly, her arms and legs splayed out and she collapsed, limp as a scarecrow. So that was the lightning bolt that laid me out in the driveway.

Tecci replaced the zapper in his pocket and clicked on the laser. He took a step toward me. “Joey, Lon,” he called to his goons.“Hold Flame Boy’s head back for me. Are you ready to scream, Ace?”

I gripped the metal rails of the chair, bracing myself for the pain.

Somebody grabbed my hair and pulled. I heard pops as my neck bent back, gas escaping from between cervical vertebrae, like at the chiropractor. Tough hands with callused fingers held my forehead. I smelled Nolo’s breath as he exhaled. It was oddly sweet—toothpaste-sweet.

“Now don’t move,” Tecci said. “I like to be neat.” Dread surged in me as I felt the first sting of the laser on my neck and smelled the unnatural scent of burning flesh.

I stubbornly clung to a thimbleful of resolve not to howl in agony.

“Nice cursive N,” Nolo said, like a grammar-school kid, “loop, down, and up and over the mountain.” I pictured him with the tip of his tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth, focused.

“I did it just like this to your father in his study while you and Mommy were upstairs sleeping,” he whispered in my ear.

My mouth went bone dry. I shut my eyes.

“I was just making sure he didn’t have the notes,” he continued. “Actually, it was his time anyway. And it was my pleasure to take him. He wasn’t as tough as you. He cried.”

I pictured my dad, downstairs at his desk that last night; he never did come up to kiss me.

Nolo started singing to the tune of “Jingle Bells”: “What fun it is to laugh and sing a . . . ‘slaying’ song tonight.”

I inhaled deeply, the smell of my own singed tissue filling my nostrils. I swallowed, surprised that my throat still worked.He’s just signing me.A whiff of hope drifted in with the noxious vapor. Then it occurred to me: the knife is next. Tecci is a stabber—a gasher. I wondered where I’d get it.

“Almost done,” Tecci said. “There, A-plus. Let go of him.” I leaned my head forward and peered at the man who had burned his initial into my throat. He winked at me. “You’re very brave,” he said sarcastically.

Tecci turned to the goons. “Okay, boys, drag Miss Venice out to the car, get the gas, do the hokey pokey and shake it all around. Jocko, collect all the artwork and try not to trip and break your other wrist. Come on, we’ve got a plane to catch.”

So he wasn’t going to stab me; he was going to let me burn.

Tecci and his men moved about the room in a menacing choreography, transporting my sagging Ginny out the door. I understood that they’d have no use for her after she translated the Circles of Truth. The thought crawled over me. I watched Lon and Joey reenter with gas cans, spilling clear foul fluid along the edges of the floor.

I fought the burning pain in my throat and heart, and quested for that place where the rhythm of my swift feet skimming the forest floor opened my eyes to everything. Low branch, fallen tree, slippery leaves, the jet black panther.

“Arrivederci,Flame Boy,” Nolo said, standing at the open front door with a gold lighter in his hand.

He sparked it, knelt down, and touched it to the floor, igniting the gasoline fuse. As he closed the door behind him, the trail of flame instantly whooshed around the room.

Smoke began to fill the place. I yanked at the cord cutting into my wrists.

“Archie!” I called. “Archie!” No human sound, just the deadly gust of fire.

The drapes ignited; flames traveled up to the pine-beamed ceiling. A windowpane burst.Glass. The fireplace door!My ankles were tied as tightly as my wrists but I could still move my feet.

I shifted my weight against the back of the chair and got on my tiptoes, lifting the front legs a little way off the ground. Carefully balancing so as not to tip over backward, I lurched forward, scraping the chair several inches toward the fireplace. I did it again. The chair moved again.

Black smoke billowed toward the ceiling. Dry, angry heat whipped me like a slave. I sucked in the thick air, coughed, and repeated my move, one, two, three more times.

One more shuffle and the tips of my boots touched the hot glass. I kicked one of the panels as hard as I could with the tiny bit of freedom the ropes allowed. The glass rattled against the brass supports. I sucked in more air, clenched my teeth, and kicked again. This time the panel shattered.

Sweat poured down my face, stinging the incision in my neck. I stuck my foot right into the fire. I felt intense heat through the back of my boot and the leg of my jeans as the orange flames viciously chewed at the twine. I tugged with every ounce of strength in my quadriceps. The rope burned through just as my pants caught fire.

I stood on my free leg, hopped over to the kitchen, and frantically rubbed my jeans against the doorjamb till the flame went out. Then I hobbled to the butcher block next to the sink. I grabbed a long knife and cut into the cord at my wrist.

The goons hadn’t doused the kitchen, but it was quickly filling with smoke. In two frantic seconds I sliced through the tight bonds.

“Archie!” I shouted. Nothing but the roar of the fire. I turned on the tap full-blast, soaked my head, grabbed a dish towel, drenched it, too, and threw it over me. Then I ran through the smoke-filled house in a crouch, looking for Archie.

I found him in a bedroom down the hall, faceup on the floor, tied at the wrists and ankles. Tossing the towel over his head, I grabbed himby the arm and moosed him up onto my back—all two hundred and twenty pounds of him—tearing out every one of Pop’s good stitches.

Dashing down the narrow hall, I staggered through the roaring flames in the living room to the front door. I grabbed the scorching knob and flung it open. The fresh air combusted behind me, erupting like a volcano. I stumbled out to the driveway and laid Archie down in the grass.

I checked him over. No burns. I held my fingers to his thick neck, felt a steady pulse. His face looked pretty busted up, though, and he was still out cold. I cursed myself for what I’d put him through.

The back of my right leg stung, my hand was blistering, my shoulder-blade was raw and wounded, and my throat and lungs felt like I’d swallowed flaming swords.

At the Jag, I used my cell phone to dial 911. I gave the operator Archie’s address and said one more word: “Fire.” Then I grabbed the satchel from the trunk, removed ten thousand dollars, and stuffed it in my wallet.

Fifty yards into the woods, I buried the bag behind a tree under some soft dirt, leaves, and pine needles. Then I forced my way back to where Archie lay, still unconscious, as his house was rapidly consumed.

They’ve got Ginny,I thought, then collapsed on the cool ground.

sixteen

When I awoke, I was in a hospital room with light pink walls. A nurse stood next to me, taking my pulse. Her watch read 9:18a.m.Good, I’ve only lost a night.

I reached for the large bandage at my throat. The movement surprised her; she took an involuntary step backward.

“Oh,” she said, “you’re awake. I’ll get them.” She hooked the clipboard at the end of the bed. I saw that my right leg was elevated at the knee by pillows.

Daylight streamed in around flowery curtains I could see through a veil of pale nylon that separated me from the patient in the next bed. From his size, it looked like Archie. His face was heavily bandaged, and an IV dripped something into his left hand. Next to him a machine monitored his heart rate with a steady blip, blip, blip.

“Arch,” I called. My throat felt as though someone had reamed it out with a wire brush.

“Mmm,” he muttered.

“Are you all right?”

“Mmm.”

“Thank you.”

“Mmm.”

“Arch, I’ve got to know something. That was you up there in the woods, wasn’t it?”

“Mmm.”

“I knew it.”

Just then two men entered my room, one of them obviously a doctor,-wearing a white coat and stethoscope, the other a gray-haired policeman with a big gut and aviator glasses. A young officer in a tan uniform appeared behind them and remained by the door.

The doctor picked up the clipboard, studied it for a moment. From his unshaven chin I guessed that he had worked the late shift.

“Mr. Barnett,” he said, “I’d say you had one heck of a night.”

“What are they doing here?” I asked.

“I’m sure the sheriff will explain that to you in a moment.”

“What’s my condition?”

“Well, you’ve inhaled some smoke, so your lungs may be sore for a while. You have first- and second-degree burns on your hand and on the back of your right leg, and a slight laceration on the underside of your right forearm. I restitched two recent wounds by your left scapula. You have what appear to be rope burns on each wrist and something extraordinarily puzzling on your throat. Either you’re a precision masochist or someone burned the letter N into your skin with some sort of highly accurate tool.”

Not someone, I thought bitterly. Something.

“How did you handle it?” I asked.

“I cleaned it and stitched it. I’m afraid it will leave a substantial scar, although plastic surgery may diminish that.”

I indicated Archie. “What about him?”

“I wasn’t his attending physician, but I’ve conferred with his doctor.-He suffered multiple facial contusions, broken nose, several fractured ribs, concussion. He may have bruised internal organs, although there’s no evidence of that.”

“He’s going to pull through, then?”

“I would say so, yes, in time. But he’s not my patient, you are. How are you feeling?”

“He’s my friend,” I said. “I want the best for him no matter what it costs.” I leaned forward painfully, looking the doctor in the eye. “Doyou understand what I’m saying? Best care, full-tilt, soup to nuts, all the clichés. That man gets supreme attention and care.” I checked the doctor’s name tag. “I want your assurance, Dr. Kluver, okay?”

“Yes, I understand. I promise you I’ll pass that along. You have my word. Now . . . please tell me how you are feeling, other than resolute.”

I didn’t answer. I was thinking about how to get away from the police.

The doctor prodded,“May I ask you, Mr. Barnett, are you a member-of some kind of cult?”

“That’ll be it, Doc,” the gray-haired cop said sternly, moving a step forward. “We’ll take it from here.”

“Yes, certainly, Sheriff.” The physician retreated past the young cop who guarded the door like a boot-camp Marine.

“Excuse us, O’Toole,” the sheriff said to his subordinate. “And close the door behind you. Nobody comes in.”

“Yes, sir,” the young officer replied, with military precision.

The sheriff swaggered over.“Mr. Barnett,” he announced in a grave tone, “you are in a truckload of trouble. Someone matching your description, driving your Jaguar, participated in a shootout at a resort in Little River that resulted in the deaths of four persons. A fifth washed up on the shore nearby, but we can’t pin that on you . . . yet. In addition, the Malibu Fire Inspector is interested in questioning you about the possible arson of your private residence.

“For icing,” he continued, “at three o’clock this morning,” he pointed in Archie’s direction, “this gentleman gets the spanking of a lifetime, and his place lights up, and, what do you know, you—Smokey the Bear’s worst enemy—are on the guest list for that, too. And the ten grand in your wallet. You didn’t win that arm wrestling.”

I heard another “mmm” from Archie.

“Now I checked you out,” the sheriff said. “Occupation: stuntman—granted that doesn’t come up every day—California carry license, no priors, not even a ticket for jaywalking. Till about a week ago, you’re Dudley Dooright. I would really appreciate knowing just what in the solar system is going on here.”

The sheriff cinched his belt a sixteenth of an inch and pushed his glasses back up his bulbous nose. “You’re on my turf here,” he said, jabbing a chubby finger at me. “And you’re not going anywhere—not even to the toilet—till I get some reasonable answers. I’ve got a small jail cell and a big temper. You with me?”

As far as both of us were concerned I’d been apprehended.

The door opened behind him. Without looking, he barked, “I told you, no interruptions, Charlie.”

“The name is Beckett,” a voice from behind the sheriff said in an exquisite British accent. The sheriff turned around, and the inspector took a step in my direction.

He wore a charcoal double-breasted suit with a faint blue pinstripe, his Borsalino rakishly cocked to one side of his perfectly coiffed head. A cobalt tie and matching pocket hankie completed the look. He carried my suitcase in one hand and my jacket in the other.

“You’re not allowed in here,” the sheriff blustered. “I’m questioning a prisoner. O’Toole!”

He opened the door hesitantly.

The sheriff said, “Didn’t I tell you—”

“Silence, Sheriff Gullerson,” Beckett said, raising his small but immaculate hand. An emerald parallelogram cuff link glistened on his French cuff.

Sheriff Gullerson probably hadn’t heard that before. “And just who the fuck are you, the Prince of goddamn Wales?”

“I would say, sir,” Beckett said, “that if one added an ‘h’ to Wales, the title would be more fitting of you.” He removed an immaculate leather ID holder from his pocket, flashed it in front of Gullerson’s face, closed it, and replaced it in its home.

Then he pulled a neatly folded paper from his breast pocket and handed it to the sheriff. Gullerson’s brow furrowed. From my vantage point, I could see an embossed blue and gold seal at the top of the letter.

“The White House . . .” Gullerson said with astonishment.

“Neither this man,” Beckett said, pointing at me, “nor I have everset foot in this hospital. Your total cooperation is expected, as is that of your assistant.”

That sounded good to me. Not to the sheriff. His plug of seniority had been pulled.

“You will be rewarded for your silence in due course, sir,” Beckett said. “And I must apologize for my earlier remark. That was unkind. I only wish I could regain a small percentage of the girth you would most likely give away with enthusiasm.”

Gullerson eyed the official paper. “I don’t suppose I can keep this.”

“Correct,” Beckett said, taking the letter back. “Now will you please excuse us, sir.”

“Uh, yeah, sure.” The sheriff glanced at me one last time before ushering O’Toole out the door.

When they were gone, Beckett took a step closer. Our eyes swapped as little as they could. I realized he wasn’t after me; he needed me. My concern lessened. I wasn’t the big fish, I was the minnow. I just needed some room to wiggle.

I struggled to a sitting position, dangling my feet over the side of the bed. I could tell I wasn’t ready to stand yet.

“Liked my coat, did you? I recovered it at the Four Seasons.”

“She’sgone,Beckett. Tecci kidnapped her.”

“I see. Listen to me. I’ve gone to considerable personal risk to free you. Think of it as a very magnanimous gesture on my part following the thrashing my underlings and, particularly, I took in Milan. I ask for no apology, but at least acknowledge your misjudgment.”

“What you told me about Krell, that was all true.”

“Your cynicism got the best of you. Me as well, I admit,” he added, rubbing his chin where I’d nailed him.

“You know about the gunmen in Milan?”

“You mean the bus incident? You are remarkable.”

“How would Tecci have known where we were?”

“An excellent question,” Beckett said. “But I’m afraid I can’t answer that for you. Consider it a mystery.”

I wanted to smash him for toying with me, but then I’d have to deal with Gullerson.

“Okay. How did you find me here?”

“Originally I placed a tracking device under the lapel of your jacket when we collided at the Accademia. That led us to the Gritti and then to Milan, although we lost you when you slipped out of the country without going through customs. Neat trick.

“We were watching out for you and learned of the fire at your residence. So unnecessary. We guessed you had returned to California, which is where we picked up your signal at the Hollister House.”

“People change jackets. What made you think I’d keep mine on?”

“People do change coats, don’t they, but when they’re on the road they generally keep their belongings with them. We found the bloody transmitter in the grass by a cottage in serious need of repair. It must have come off during your fracas.”

“We could have been killed there,” I said angrily. “And now Tecci’s got Antonia.”

“Yes, that is unfortunate. However, don’t forget who abandoned whose ship. And watch your tone with me. I’m your life preserver, so to speak.”

He pulled the backup disk Mona made for me from his pocket. “Found this in the glove box of your car. Had a chance to look over your work—the two hundred separate rings—and Leonardo’s notes. I know you’re on to something exceptional, although I confess I’m utterly mystified at this point.”

“That’s why you’re here,” I said, stretching my neck, which tugged at the bandages on my throat. I heaved my suitcase onto the bed, dressed, then pulled back the curtain and went to Archie’s side. Beckett followed, his gaze bearing down on me. I wasn’t going on Gibraltar’s hook. But I was going back in the water, and I knew which direction to swim.

“Archie,” I called. “You’re going to be all right, my friend.”

He opened an eye and grabbed the front of my shirt with surprising-strength.

“Wha haffen Ginny?” he mumbled.

“They took her,” I said, gently placing his hand on the bed. “But I’m going to get her back. And you’re going to help me,” I said to Beckett. “I know how the Circles work.”

Beckett’s eyebrows raised slightly. He smacked his lips.

“Splendid.”

We stepped through the Medical Center’s automatic doors into the fresh air.

“Tell me you have a jet nearby,” I said.

“Of course. At the Big Bear Airport,” he answered. “One of the privileges of being well funded.”

“You saw the files. You must have a computer handy.”

“My laptop in the car is loaded with CorelDraw and all the files that are on the disk.” He pointed to a silver sedan in the parking lot, Mobright at the wheel.

“Then all I need is a program that’ll translate Italian into English,” I told him. “You wouldn’t happen to have that in the car, too, would you?”

“Actually, I am an expert Romance linguist. My Italian is flawless. So you see, Gibraltar is your friend.”

“I’m not doing this for Gibraltar.”

“I’m clear on that,” Beckett said as we reached the car. “Your focus has shifted—you are after Ms. Gianelli, and the Dagger is your bargaining power.”

“Exactly. You and I still have different agendas.”

“Quite. Nevertheless, I dazzled the sheriff so as to extricate you from his meaty clutches. Quid pro quo. Getting into the car instead of mugging me, stealing the disk, and vanishing in the mist will be a good start.”

He held the rear door open and I climbed in. Mobright squinted his beady eyes at me in the rearview mirror.

“Now,” Beckett said. “Let’s find the Dagger, shall we? Any idea where to begin?”

“Rome,” I told him.

seventeen

At Big Bear Airport we boarded a private plane that looked similar to Dracco’s. Beckett and I buckled into presidential-class leather seats in a large private compartment. I snugged my belt with shaking hands. It was one part heights, ninety-nine parts pulling away from the continent where I’d last seen Ginny.

That was a particularly cruel kind of torture, finally having someone-to live for, but not knowing if she was still alive. The Dagger was a ransom I would gladly pay to free her. I had to follow it and work with Beckett to unravel the mystery of the Circles of Truth.

Once we were airborne, Beckett said, “Well, then . . . I suspect we have some work to do over the course of the next thirteen hours. Please begin with an explanation of the Circles.”

I plugged the laptop into an AC bar just above the bird’s-eye maple table in front of me, and turned it on. Beckett watched with keen interest as I opened the CorelDraw files, located the proper rings of Truth One, put them in the correct order, and rotated them to fit together, repeating the process with the second circle. Beckett studied the results carefully.

“So,” he stated, “inner and outer alternations, thirty-six degrees per ring, flip flop from one circle to the other. Positively ingenious. How the devil didyouarrive at this?” He heard his tone of superiority and blanched. “Do forgive me,” he said. “Let me rephrase that. How did you arrive at this?”

“Tecci’s got these, too,” I said, ignoring his question.“Krell’s people will figure this out. And they’ve got Ginny to translate them. Can’t you find out where they are?”

“I’ll have Mobright extend Gibraltar’s reach, but Krell will most certainly wish to remain behind the curtain for now. Not only are we on his tail, but of course there is also Soon Ta Kee. Krell is a slick fish, albeit a sick one. And Tecci . . . well, there is only one Nolo Tecci.”

I took stock. Just because I had the Circles of Truth laid out didn’t mean they were directions to the Dagger. What if they were some cryptic message or a laundry list or a love letter to Ginevra de’ Benci, for that matter?

I wiped the sweat off my upper lip with the back of my unbandaged hand and pulled up the scan of Ginny’s translation on the computer. Beckett peered at the document as I explained how the notes led to Rome.

“Absolutely brilliant,” he said. “Belvedere Palace, the Vatican. I believe you’re right.”

“You believe Antonia’s right. All I did was the ring toss, here.”

“Honorable of you to say so. Yes, of course, Ms. Gianelli is to thank for the Rome connection, but do not sell yourself short on the Circles. What you’ve done is miraculous.”

Beckett smoothed his Windsor-knotted silk tie.“Now bring up the Circles again and let’s find out what they say.”

I shifted my focus to the computer screen and the drawing program. Opening the file containing the completed Circles, I mirrored each image. Truths One and Two were now written left to right and presumably legible, except that they were still circular.

“Excellent,” Beckett said. “I trust you can utilize the program to break them apart.”

“I think I can do that, but where?”

Beckett studied Truth One carefully for a full minute, tracing it with a slim finger. Then he pointed to a place where one of the letters had a tiny handle sticking off it.

“Try here,” he said.

I broke the circle at that point, clicked a few commands, and snapped it into a straight line. Watching Mona work had paid off.

Beckett took a pen and a small leather-bound notepad out of his pocket. He started jotting.

“What does it say?” I asked impatiently.

He ignored me and kept writing. Several more minutes passed.

Finally I said, “Can you do this or not?”

Again he ignored me, deep in thought. He continued to avoid me for another half hour.

I settled uncomfortably back in my chair. There was nothing to do but wait and think.

I pictured Tecci and Krell and Ginny on Krell’s jet. That was an image I couldn’t allow myself to linger on. I looked out the window. We were above the clouds. No birds, no bugs, no lost balloons. Just freezing cold hypoxic air. Killing air.

“What have you got?” I finally asked.

He scribbled one last note, shaking his head in puzzlement, then tapped the page with his pen. He frowned. “Are you ready for this?”

“I’m more than ready.”

“All right then, here it is,” he said, taking a deep preparatory breath.

“Soar with love me my each friend and thing you will of be the this new guardian world of the for dagger above you the tangle all of the are sleeping carver’s its mighty whorl keepers.”

I said nothing. What could I say?

Beckett repeated the garbled sentence.

I let out a sigh. “Mighty whorl keepers? Who taught you Italian— Dr. Seuss?”

“I accurately portrayed my skills at translation,” Beckett replied confidently. “The message Leonardo wrote is the one I just read to you.”

“Are you sure you broke it in the right place?”

“I believe I did,” he said, pointing out the little knob again. “This is a marker. I chose the break based on my substantial experience with cryptanalysis. The question now is, what the devil does he mean?”

We looked at each other silently for a moment; then I leaned my head back and ran my tongue back and forth across my teeth.“Mighty whorl keepers . . . mighty whorl keepers,” I repeated.

“This is obviously a scrambled message, Reb. A transposition code.” Beckett rhythmically tapped the pad. “Perhaps every other word drops out or every third, but of course that would be in Italian, and we’ve already got the correct English.”

“I’m thinking here,” I said.

“This is no time to be silent,” Beckett urged. “Share your ideas. So far, with the exception of punching me in the jaw, they’ve been good.”

It was my turn to ignore him, and I took it. “Mighty whorl keepers,” I mumbled to myself. “What the hell’s he talking about, ‘soaring with love’?”

The phone on the maple table beside Beckett rang. He answered it without hesitation. “Yes, bring it.” He hung up. “Lunch.”

In short order, Mobright pushed an elegant cart into the cabin.

“Bravo,” Beckett said.

“Yes sir,” Mobright answered deferentially. “May I ask whether you’ve made any progress?”

“You may, but you won’t get an answer yet. Be a good chap and close the door behind you.”

Neither Beckett nor I made a move for the cart, although the aroma of Mexican food emanated from the table. The image of Beckett in a sombrero entered my mind, providing me with a temporary respite from the burden of thought. I pictured him and Mobright strumming guitars and singing “Guantanamera.”

Beckett pointed at Truth Two on the computer screen. “Since you choose to be silent,” he said, “be a good man and break this one here and straighten it out for me.”

I did as he requested, then got up to check out the trays on the cart. One plate of tamales with refried beans and saffron rice. The other, filet mignon. Beckett looked up from his work.

“Which one do you want?” I asked, hoping he’d pick the steak.

“One moment, one moment,” he cautioned, holding the notepad six inches in front of his face, fingers gripping the tip of his pen. After a few seconds he mumbled, “Mobright cooked the tamales for you.”

“He did? Mobright?”

“Yes. At my instruction. Vegetable. Your favorite.”

“How do you know they’re my favorite?” I asked, carrying my plate back to my seat.

“Please . . .” he said, annoyed.

“Mobright, a chef?” I muttered to myself.

“No one is merely who he seems to be,” Beckett said. “No one. There, I’ve got it!

“ The lion I God and offer the languid future man share people the secret my the bearded heart man will and never know soul.

“Equally cryptic,” Beckett said. “Just as I’d suspected.”

“Wonderful,” I muttered. “Languid future man.”

“Yes, quite.”

My companion poured himself a glass of water from a silver pitcher, pulled out his pill organizer, and swallowed some capsules. He chased them with a sip and picked up his meal.

I watched him carefully tuck a corner of the white linen napkin into his collar, then slice off a small piece of the meat. He put his knife down, placed his free hand in his lap, and chewed inconspicuously, as though he’d gone to finishing school with the Queen. He pushed his plate aside, apparently through with his meal.

I cut off half a tamale with my fork and stuffed it in my mouth so my cheeks puffed out. Beckett eyed me.

I studied the garbled messages on his notepad.

“Listen to both of them,” I instructed.

“Please finish chewing first,” Beckett said.

I swallowed and read the two lines aloud. Then I inhaled the second half of my first tamale. The son of a bitch Mobright could cook.

“You know what I think?” I said, looking at Truth Two.

“Mm?”

“I think there is no such thing as a bearded heart man, that’s what I think.”

“Good point.”

“Uh-huh. So we’ll take that ‘heart’ out of there.”

He thought about that. “All right then. We’ll do that.”

“You know what else? ‘Share people the secret’?”

“Yes?”

“Take ‘people’ out and you’ve got ‘share the secret,’ ” I said. “What do you think of that?”

Beckett regarded the notepad with growing enthusiasm. “You’re really quite amazing.”

His flattery didn’t touch me. What I felt was gratitude for having gotten as far as I had, and determination to push on further.

“I’m going to finish this tamale,” I said, “and use the facilities while you type these sentences. Then we’re going to start tugging words till we find out what is exactly what with the Circles of Truth. How much time before we touch down? Eleven, twelve hours?”

Beckett checked his Oyster Rolex. “About that.”

I shoveled the last chunk into my face. “Well,” I said, standing up, “start typing.”

When I returned, Mobright was in the room staring over Beckett’s shoulder with a pad and pen.

“No one is who they seem to be,” I told him.

Mobright looked taken aback.

“You’re not only a smirking prick,” I offered, “but you make a very nice tamale.”

The look of puzzlement faded, replaced by his familiar glower.

I pushed past him. “Aren’t you supposed to be coordinating the search for Krell?”

“But I’m only—”

“Get back to it,” I interrupted, taking my seat. “We’re busy.”

Mobright retreated and Beckett slid the laptop toward me. “You don’t like him, do you?” he said. “The man is a tad squirrelly, I think.”

“Forget that. Truth Two. We took ‘people’ and ‘heart’ out of there. Let’s see what that leaves.”

Beckett turned the screen in his direction and read it. “ ‘The lion I God and offer the languid future man share the secret my the bearded man will and never know soul.’ Take ‘my’ out of the ‘secret my the bearded man.’ ”

I clipped it out and pasted it down between “people” and “heart.”

“That’s good,” Beckett said. “ ‘The secret the bearded man will and never know soul.’ Never know soul . . .”

“I’m taking the ‘and’ out of there,” I said. I clipped it and pasted it down after “heart” in the same order as the sentence.

“Take ‘soul’ out, too,” Beckett commanded.

“Why?”

He pointed at the four words I’d pasted at the bottom. “ ‘People my heart and.’ Tell me ‘soul’ doesn’t follow.” His gray eyes gleamed.

“You’re right,” I admitted. “Heart and soul, just like the tune.”

“Look at this now, Reb,” he said, pushing my hands away from the keyboard. “What at the beginning of the sentence would Leonardo do to ‘people my heart and soul’? If this is the correct order, then a verb would naturally precede those words, would it not?”

“Right,” I said. “The verb is ‘offer.’ ”

“So take ‘offer’ and put it in front of ‘people my heart and soul.’ Now what have we got up top?” We both looked down and saw:The lion I God and the languid future man share the secret the bearded man will never know.

I said, “Somebody has to offer people, right? There’s only one word that’s singular and that’s ‘I.’ I offer. Are you certain ‘offer’ is singular?”

“Positive.Offro. Singular. You needn’t question my skills.”

“Okay, then, ‘I offer people my heart and soul.’ What’s sticking out here?”

“The lion God?” Beckett asked.

“Yes, that, but also ‘future’ is sticking way out. This is a message. Leonardo wasn’t talking to his peers in the present. This was meant for the future.” I cut “future” and pasted it before “people.”

“Absolutely,” Beckett confirmed. We stared at the two lines.

The lion God and the languid man share the secret the bearded man will never know.

I offer future people my heart and soul.

“What the devil is ‘the lion God’?” Beckett mused.

We both puzzled over that for a minute and then it occurred to me. A smile crept over my face as I felt the thrill of discovery. “It’s not ‘the lion God,’ Beckett,” I blurted. “It’s ‘the lion, comma, God, comma, and the languid man.’ Leonardo didn’t use punctuation.”

“By Jove, you’re right,” Beckett said. “Then who is the lion?”

Tingles of excitement tap-danced on my stomach. Back and forth, in and out, I was walking the master’s path.

“It’s Leonardo himself,” I stated with certainty. “Leonardo is the lion. Leonardo, God, and the languid man share the secret the bearded man will never know. I’m sure of it.” A wave of sadness washed over me as I read the next line.

“He’s offering us his heart and soul,” I whispered.

“So he is,” Beckett said, shaking his head in amazement. “So he is.”

I took a deep breath. “Now who the hell are the languid man and bearded man?”

“Excellent question, my good man. Perhaps it’s in with the mighty whorl, eh? Incidentally, how in the world did you get so bloody good at this?”

“I’m enigmatic,” I said.

“Quite right,” he replied with a smile. “I suppose the same could be said of me.”

With Truth Two solved, we stepped into Truth One, side by side, ready to explore the rest of Leonardo’s lush and mysterious path.

Beckett read it out loud.

“Soar with love me my each friend and thing you will of be the this new guardian world of the for dagger above you the tangle all of the are sleeping carver’s its mighty whorl keepers.”

“ ‘Soar with love me my’ doesn’t sound right,” I said. “ ‘Soar with love me’? I’m pulling ‘love.’ ”

“Why? ‘Soar with love’ sounds right.”

“Not with ‘me my’ after it,” I said. “Watch this.”

I clipped “love” out and put it below. Now it read “soar with me my.”

“Granted, the lack of punctuation would allow it,” Beckett said, “but it still looks strange.”

“I’m grooving here,” I said. “Watch this.” I cut “each” and pasted it to the right of “love” below.

“Now read it,” I told him. “Please.”

“ ‘Soar with me my friend,’ ” Beckett read. “Good show.”

“ ‘Thing you will be,’ ” I said. “Sorry ‘thing,’ it’s moving day.” I dropped it down next to the words “love” and “each.” The bottom line now read “love each thing.”

Beckett began to read what remained on the top line.

“ ‘Soar with me my friend and you will of be the.’ ‘Of’ has to be next,” he said.

I pasted it below.

“Now ‘this,’ ” I said, moving it.

Beckett read the bottom line excitedly. “ ‘Love each thing of this . . . world’—it has to be ‘world,’ Reb.” He removed his handkerchief from his coat pocket and mopped his brow. “My word . . .”

I clipped “world” and pasted it at the end of the bottom line. “ ‘Love each thing of this world,’ ” I said softly.

Beckett read the top line. “ ‘Soar with me my friend and you will be the new guardian of the’ . . . ‘for,’ Reb, pull ‘for.’ ”

I was already doing it.

“ ‘Soar with me my friend and you will be the new guardian of the dagger.’ Goddamn,” I said. “We are getting into the sweet stuff now. Can you smell it?”

“With both nostrils,” Beckett said exuberantly, pointing at the top line. “ ‘Dagger above you the tangle.’ Dagger above you? ‘Soar with me my friend and you will be the new guardian of the dagger above you.’ That makes sense somehow.”

“No,” I said. “Look further. ‘The dagger above you the tangle all.’ ‘All’ shouldn’t be there. I’m pulling it.” I moved it to the end of the bottom line, which now read, “Love each thing of this world for all.” “Hmm,” I said, “I’ve lost it. ‘For all’ what? After that we’ve got ‘of the are sleeping carver’s its mighty whorl keepers.’ We’re in the mud here. Give me a second, give me a second. ‘Are’ would have to come next, right? ‘All are’?”

“Definitely,” Beckett said. “Do that.”

I dropped the word “are” down below next to “all.” Then I read the remaining top line.

“Soar with me my friend and you will be the new guardian of the dagger above you the tangle of the sleeping carver’s its mighty whorl keepers.”

Beckett and I looked at each other blankly.

After a concentrated moment he pointed at a line on the screen and said, “What if we have a sentence break here? Then it would read, ‘Soar with me my friend and you will be the new guardian of the dagger above you. The tangle of the sleeping carver’s its mighty whorl keepers.’ Doesn’t hold up, does it?”

I shook my head. “What if we clipped the second ‘you’ out of the first line and stuck it in the bottom? Then that would make it ‘you all are.’ That would be okay.”

“My dear American friend, I’m afraid Leonardo wasn’t from Alabama,” Beckett chuckled.

“I’m serious.” I took the “you” out of the first line and laid it in before the word “all.”“Now read the top line.”

Beckett complied. “ ‘Soar with me my friend and you will be the new guardian of the dagger above.’ ”

“Continue,” I prodded, “don’t read it as two lines.”

Beckett sighed. “ ‘Soar with me my friend and you will be the new guardian of the dagger above the tangle of the sleeping carver’s its mighty whorl keepers.’ Goodness,” he said. “Take ‘its’ out of there.”

I did, pasting it into the bottom line. I read the new line, my pulse quickening. “ ‘Love each thing of this world for you all are its.’ ” My eyes met Beckett’s.

We both whispered, “Keepers.”

I clipped that word from the top line and placed it at the end of the bottom one. I read it.

“Love each thing of this world for you all are its keepers.”

I looked at what remained on the top line with a mixture of awe and concern—that I wouldn’t get it, that I wouldn’t grasp Leonardo’s meaning.

I read.

“Soar with me my friend and you will be the new guardian of the dagger above the tangle of the sleeping carver’s mighty whorl.”

Beckett and I sat back, enthralled, exhausted, and bewildered. The stitches in my back hurt. So did my leg and hand, not to mention my mind. Outside, red and orange scarves of sunset unfurled as daylight faded into early evening.

After a moment, Beckett said,“I understand the second part of each line, lines two and four, if you will. They are quite straightforward.

“Love each thing of this world for you all are its keepers.

“I offer future people my heart and soul.

“Both very powerful messages,” he said. “Without question. But the first two:

“Soar with me my friend and you will be the new guardian of the dagger above the tangle of the sleeping carver’s mighty whorl.

“The lion God and the languid man share the secret the bearded man will never know.

“I am baffled by them,” Beckett said. “My brain is porridge at the moment. I’ll just jot this down and confer briefly with Mobright. Perhaps the stretch will help.”

“How much time do we have?” I asked, my eyelids putting on weight.

“Roughly five hours. In the interest of prudence, I’ll make some preliminary demands in Rome. Isn’t power intoxicating? I wonder what progress Krell’s people are making.”

I laid my head back on the soft leather seat and began to fade. “No one outpaces the mighty traveler.”

“Yes, well, we will see, won’t we?”

I dreamt I was a slice of Wonder bread lying on a tile counter. A beautiful girl in sunglasses appeared with two jars and placed them next to me, the glass of the jars clinking against the ceramic glaze of the tile. I listened with interest to the familiar sound of lids unscrewing. The girl took a whiff of each, a grin crossing her full lips. She picked up a silver knife.

From the jar on the left she scooped out a slab of peanut butter and spread it all over me, sweeping the knife neatly back and forth the way they do on Jif commercials. The peanut butter felt cool and soothing.

Then she dipped the knife into the second jar, digging out a glob of marshmallow which she spread on top of my peanut-butter blanket like a skier carving fresh sweet snow.

As the girl looked down at me, her waiting “fluffer nutter,” a slice of pumpernickel bread—shaped just like me only dark as a crow—flew into the room. My anger made me hot and my peanut-butter-and-marshmallow spread began to melt. Suddenly the slice of bread landed on me, suffocating me.

I struggled against its force, heard its perverse laugh. I couldn’t speak or scream because I was bread. Then it occurred to me that I wasn’t ordinary bread, I was Wonder bread.

The evil slice laughed again and pressed harder, squishing my peanut-sugary coating till it spilled over my crust and onto the white tile. I peeked around the enemy and glimpsed the horrified girl. Not to worry. I’ll save you. I began to spin myself, clockwise then counterclockwise, the thick spread a welcomed emollient.

My anger and confidence swelled with each gooey turn, generating more and more heat. Giving myself a final clockwise spin, I roared to life like a propeller, rotating with such speed that centrifugal force flung my wicked attacker off me, across the room, and into a dog dish. I heard the four-legged clicking of a hound’s nails on linoleum as I hovered in front of the astounded girl. “Soar with me,” I said.

Then I awoke, panicked, desperately wanting to stay in the dream state, to follow where my unconscious might lead. I knew Ginny was the fluffer-nutter girl. We were about to soar.Where?Above the tangle, came the response.What tangle?Of the sleeping carver’s whorl, of course.

Then I was lost.The sleeping carver. Carver of what? Wood? Marble? Could it be marble?Leonardo used to say that sculptors covered in their marble dust looked like bakers covered in flour.Oh my God.I remembered Ginny’s translation:“He is gone now, back to dust.” I’d thought it was Francesco Melzi, going to dust the furniture—just a simple note about a common task. It wasn’t. In a blast I knew who the sleeping carver and the bearded man were. They were one and the same.

My eyes popped open. “The sleeping carver, the bearded man. It’s Michelangelo!” I shouted.

Beckett was back in his seat. Mobright stood behind him.

“Oh my . . . how in the blazes did you arrive at that?” Beckett asked.

I told him.

“Fantastic!” he exclaimed, practically dancing in his seat. “Now go on. The exact location is above the tangle of the mighty whorl, Reb. Whereisthe mighty whorl? Where did Michelangelo go back to his marble dust from?”

A prickly second, then another blast. “The Sistine Chapel. The tangle-of the mighty whorl is the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. I know it.”

Beckett gasped. I continued.

“Michelangelo interrupted his work on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to do the statue of Moses for Julius’s tomb.”

“Reb, you’ve brought us to the brink of discovery,” Beckett exalted. “Now where is it in the Sistine Chapel? Don’t dally. We have less than two hours till touchdown.”

I began massaging my temples.

“What are you doing?” Beckett asked.

“It helped me think once before when somebody did this.”

“Here,” he said, quickly stepping behind me. “Allow me.”

His gesture surprised me. So did his gentle touch. I imagined his fingertips were those of the silver-haired Mona. Instantly I envisioned her, urging me to clear my mind of both the past and the future. “You are now with Leonardo da Vinci,” her voice echoed in me. “You are now with Leonardo . . .”

Sandals on the Sistine Chapel floor, eyes lifted to the ceiling. I scanned the frescoed sea of color and serpents and ancient people, twisting and fleeing, perching and hovering.

“Where are you, languid man?” I demanded, my mind wide open, scrutinizing Michelangelo’s tumultuous whorl. “Who are you?” Then the enormous ceiling went blank, with the exception of one spectacular scene—the apogee of Michelangelo’s masterpiece—God reaching his awesome hand out to touch the extended fingers of . . . a languid man.

“It’s Adam!” I shouted. “Adam is the languid man!”

“TheCreation of Adam,” Beckett uttered. “That’s it!”

“Yessss!” I replied with steely certainty. “The Dagger is between the outstretched fingers of God and Adam. Just above it. In the ceiling. I’m positive.”

“My Lord,” Mobright gasped. “The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel!”

Beckett pulled out his hanky again, dabbed his brow. “I’m awestruck,” he whispered.

I grinned and winked at him, giving my earlobe a little tug.

Mobright departed to get us some tea.

“I have just one question for you, Reb,” Beckett said. “How the deuce did Leonardo get the Dagger up there? The ceiling is nearly sixty-five feet high. Did he use Michelangelo’s scaffolding?”

“No, he couldn’t have. That was taken down immediately after he suspended work so the ceiling could be viewed.”

“Well it’s not possible that he went up from the ground. He must have gone down through the floor above.”

“You mean the roof?” I asked. “How would he do that?”

“No, not the roof. Though you know your history, you’re obviously unaware of the layout of the chapel. It has four levels. Two below, the chapel itself—which is designed rather as a fortress, with high windows—and then above it a guards’ room which leads to a machiolated gangway.”

“What’s machiolated?”

“Walls with holes cut in them, firing slits. The point is, Leonardo could have first paced off the exact spot below God and Adam and then gone above to the guards’ room, paced it off again, and dug down.”

“That’s very good. But how would he do that if the guards were there?”

“My question, exactly,” Beckett sighed, tapping his pen against the tip of his nose. “Even at night, and we can be sure he must have done this at night because—”

“He called Michelangelo ‘the sleeping carver.’ ”

“Right. And the ‘gone back to dust’ bit. If Michelangelo had stopped his work on the chapel to take up a sculpture, that would have given Leonardo the opportunity. But if he took it, he most certainly would have had to go after dark.”

“Still,” I said, “that leaves the problem of the guards. No chance they would have taken the night off, huh?”

“Guarding the pope? Thiswasthe Vatican in the Renaissance. No one turned his back on anyone. Swiss guards and all that.” Beckett chewed on the end of his pen for a minute.

“So, then,” he said, “how did he do it?”

Mobright entered carrying a tray of Danish and tea. “A selection of pastry, sir,” he announced, then retreated once again.

“Blueberry twist?” Beckett asked, offering me the plate. I declined; then it smashed me—the dream I’d had at the Baby Face Nelson Suite. Leonardo on the floor of the cruller case, staring up, in a harness attached to a long rope. Of course.

I pulled the laptop to me, furiously tapped the computer out of sleep mode, and opened the two files with Leonardo’s pages. My eyes darted to the drawings—not the Dagger, not the Circles, but the harness, the nested tubes, and the hoisting system.

“Include me, please,” Beckett said.

“What if these particular drawings aren’t randomly placed on these pages like so many of Leonardo’s other sketches?” I said.

“Go on. I’m with you.”

“What if these three nested triangular tubes with the rope and pulleys are really a telescoping mast that could be mechanically raised to the ceiling?”

“Of course! Then the harness was for him, the hoisting system a differential he used with a rope attached to the mast to raise himself to his rendezvous with God and Adam. Brilliant! You do lift your mental weights, don’t you?”

I barely heard Beckett’s words. Time stripped away and I was there with Leonardo in the dark chapel as he raised the mast, with the aid of the differential. I watched him step into the harness and pull himself arm over arm, up the long rope, carrying in his cloth backpack a drill, a bag of wet plaster, his paints and brushes, and a dagger.

Who else could have done this but Leonardo? Who else could have conceived of it? Melzi could have helped him carry the equipment. Short hop across the courtyard from the Belvedere. Maybe they took an underground route.

Leonardohadcarefully paced out the floor. He knewexactlywhere to go. In the black of night, in the hollow stillness of the Sistine Chapel, by the singular light of his massive genius, he ascended to the ceiling, cut the hole, and slid the Dagger vertically between the outstretched fingers of God and Adam. Then he sealed the opening and repainted it, supremely confident that not even the brilliant Michelangelo would ever know.

Finally, he descended, while the guards above the thick ceiling paced in their uniforms, slapping their thighs to keep warm in the chillnight air. They never learned of the intruder below. Neither did Michelangelo—the sleeping bearded carver.

“Well . . .” Beckett said, patting his lips. “My goodness. I guess I’m on again. I suppose I should grease the Vatican wheels, shouldn’t I? Do excuse me.”

I was rebandaging my leg and contemplating the odd juxtaposition of pain and the electrifying tingle of discovery when Beckett returned.

“Have you gained us access to the chapel?” I asked.

“Naturally, albeit with significant difficulty. The pope’s away just now. We’ll go in from above, of course.”

“Of course,” I repeated. “There’s no way Krell’s people could know this. Even if they do, they’d have to make arrangements to get Tecci into the guard room. You’d know about that.”

“We’d know, yes,” Beckett concurred. He removed his hanky, mopped a few beads of sweat from his brow. “How is your leg, anyway?”

“It’ll be all right.”

“How about your neck? The middle of the bandage is dark with blood. It doesn’t look very good.” He looked genuinely worried. Tired, too.

“Neither do you,” I said. “What about all your pills? You said they don’t help. With what?”

“Tennis elbow,” he replied with a half-smile. “Afraid I won’t make Wimbledon this year. Now, about your neck . . .”

“I’ve been hurt a lot worse than this. Tell me, please, any word on Ginny?”

“Nothing so far, I’m afraid. Mobright has our best men on it.”

“This is terrible, Beckett. All of this is meaningless if she’s hurt, if she’s . . .”

“I understand your concern, but you simply must not think the worst. Where would you have gotten if you’d been preoccupied with her when you were soaring? You’d have crashed for certain.”

“All right. So . . . we get the Dagger and then what? We let Krell know that we’ve got it, that we want to trade it for Ginny?”

“You want the Dagger, too,” Beckett said, strapping himself in. “Your father wanted it, you want it. Remember the noble purpose.”

“If she’s alive and there’s a breath left in me, I’ve got to save her. That’s my noblest purpose. Everything else comes next.”

“Of course. I comprehend you now much better than I did before,” he sighed, patting my hand lightly. “You’re not the crass ruffian I first believed you to be.”

“And you,” I said, “are not the arrogant . . . well . . . yes you are.”

Beckett laughed. “That’s the spirit. A little jocularity. Now, I’ve given this some thought,” he said. “I believe we can meet both our objectives. Once we’re in possession of the Dagger, we’ll make it known to Krell. He will have to respond. He’s trapped. The man is an angstrom away from acquiring the Medici Dagger, the very thing he believes will ultimately save him. He’ll have no choice but to negotiate. And when he does, we will have him, and then you will have Ms. Gianelli.”

Beckett sat back in his seat and smiled. “Relax, young man,” he said. “You’ve done the impossible. We are now in the golden chair.”

eighteen

Fear and excitement had been my daily bread since I’d become a stuntman. But yearning, caring, passion, purpose, connectedness, they were all new to me. Something extraordinary was happening-—the reweaving of my torn fabric, thread by thread.

I looked at Beckett. One thin leg was draped over the other. He bobbed it confidently. The bottom half-inch of an ankle holster was intermittently visible below his pant cuff.

Weapons. I needed them.

“I want my guns back,” I said.

His leg stopped bobbing. “Oh yes. I’ve been meaning to ask you about that small one. Very interesting.”

“Where are they?”

Beckett turned away, leaned toward the window to catch the view. “You’re an unofficial guest. No name, no nationality, no guns. There is no latitude with this.”

I heard the usual shrill sound of tires hitting tarmac as we touched down at Leonardo da Vinci Airport.

We were met by a black Mercedes sedan chauffeured by the wide-shouldered Pendelton, whom I had last seen when I stripped off his blazer in Milan. Mobright climbed in the passenger seat. The two exchanged a brief blank glance.

No baggage claim, no customs, no waiting. The A12 Highway along the Tiber, left on the GRA, right on Via Aurelia to Mussolini’s

wide road into St. Peter’s. Past the basilica, Michelangelo’s monstrous dome, and Bernini’s four-deep colonnade, we zipped with grave officiousness around the throng to the Sistine Chapel.

Pendelton parked in a place where it seemed you’d either get a million-dollar ticket or be condemned to eternal damnation. He exchanged words in fluid Italian with a man wearing the cassock of a high-ranking official.

The priest shook hands hesitantly with Beckett and introduced himself in English as Cardinal Gaetano Lorro, the Vatican secretary. In his worldly eyes was the look of anguished anticipation, which no amount of formality could disguise. I was not introduced.

Pendelton waited by the car as Lorro led us through a huge doorway-up a staircase to the large guardroom. The sounds of our footfalls on the marble reminded me of the resplendency, the immeasurable importance, of the surroundings. I rose closer with every step to the imminent future and my appointment with Leonardo.

A thin man sporting wire-rim glasses and work clothes stood a few feet from the center of the floor, where nine blue chalk lines intersected. He held a translucent schematic in one hand.

A ten-inch-square marble tile had been pried up where the snap lines crossed and a high-powered, five-inch hole cutter stood over it mounted on a precision drill press.

We converged on the spot. “You’re sure this is the location, Elverson?” Beckett asked.

Elverson held up the schematic. One side showed a detailed outline of the ceiling below, the other displayed the layout of the room in which we stood. “Absolutely,” he said.

“And there is no possibility of causing structural damage?”

“None whatsoever. The area you wish to expose is right next to a floor joist.” He pointed to a dot where the fingers of God and Adam met. “There is approximately a two-foot space above the arc of the ceiling, which is itself rather thin. We won’t touch the ceiling though. As you see, I did some minor preparatory work in the interest of saving time, but Cardinal Lorro refused to allow me to drill until your arrival.”

“Hah!” Beckett laughed. “No drilling till the inspector’s arrival. I like that. Most excellent. Let’s proceed.”

Elverson fired up the drill. Mobright and the cardinal stepped back as Beckett and I inched closer.

Angular morning sunlight cut through the galaxy of mortar dust that instantly surrounded us as Elverson carefully drilled down.

I waited impatiently, totally focused on the bottom end of the bit as it disappeared into the antiquated floor. I prayed to God—a last-chance prayer.

Then, with the sudden loss of opposing force, the drill poked through. Beckett said, “Be a good man, Elverson, and step aside.”

I knelt down and peered into the hole. Total blackness.

I carefully reached into the opening, almost elbow-deep, until my fingers brushed the ceiling. My saliva evaporated.

Mobright and the cardinal moved in.“Sia accurato,”the holy man pleaded,“per la causa di Dio.”

“He’s telling you to be careful for God’s sake,” Beckett translated, hovering over me.

I tried to moisten my lips with a dry tongue.“Glielo prometto,”I said softly. “I promise.”

The ceiling felt cool and rough against my fingertips as they lightly brushed the surface, moving right then left, then a little farther left, and right again. Then my pinky made contact with something metallic. I crept my other fingers over and touched hammered metal. Then a corner. A box.

“Anything?” Beckett whispered.

I could smell his Old Spice, could feel his breath on my ear, but I couldn’t speak. My fingers ran along the side of the box. A clasp. I walked them over the top. Irregular surface. I grasped the box and lifted it. It was surprisingly light. I pulled it up through the hole and laid it on the floor.

A beat-up, hammered-tin box.

“Mio Dio!”Cardinal Lorro gasped as he, Mobright, and Elverson crowded in.

I opened the latch. Inside was something wrapped in a piece of finely woven red cloth. Lifting it by its thicker end, I was shocked at its near weightlessness. I felt cool sleek metal through the delicate fabric. With the thumb and forefinger of my bandaged hand, I pinched the cloth at the narrow end and in one quick move disrobed the artifact like a magician.

I was holding the Medici Dagger.

Though faintly aware of the utterances emanating from the small crowd huddled tightly around me, I was not with them. I was with Leonardo, somewhere in a velvety fold in time where we two had kept our strange, preordained appointment. I had found him. He had called to me and I had found him, to repay some inexplicable debt—to the world, to him, to my mother and my father.

I slowly rotated Leonardo’s creation in the dust-sprinkled light, noticing how quickly the intricately molded handle warmed in my hand, how the faultlessly symmetrical double-edged blade rose to a miraculously sharp point eight inches from the shaft.

I turned it till it glinted in the sunlight that spilled in through the square openings in the brick walls, walls by which smartly dressed guards in steel helmets had dutifully marched so long ago, to protect Pope Leo and all his treasures—none more valuable than the man he ignored in the Belvedere Palace.

I gently touched the metal tip; a tiny drop of blood instantly appeared, as though I’d been pricked by a Red Cross lancet. I marveled at the incredible precision of the almost weightless object.

“Reb,” Beckett said from somewhere very close by. “Reb,” he said again, this time touching my shoulder.

It was a touch through time, a ripple in the universe, nudging a solitary star out of its tiny galaxy. I felt myself pulled slowly toward the sound of his voice, felt the slight sting in my finger, the gauze on my hand, my knees on the tile, the stretching of burned skin at the back ofmy right calf. I heard my breathing, and faint voices, and shoe leather pivoting on dusty tile as the others in the room shifted positions. I slowly turned my face to Beckett.

“You have indeed done it,” he beamed.

A door clicked shut across the room behind us and a familiar voice said, “Yes you have, Flame Boy.”Everyone spun around to the sound; I crash-landed back in the present. Nolo Tecci stood just inside the door wearing his kidskin coat, black gloves, and a vicious grin. In his hand was a Glock 17—leveled at us. He was flanked by Lon and Jocko, who also had guns with silencers drawn and pointed in our direction. Jocko’s wrist was in a cast. Everyone froze.

“Nolo,” Mobright uttered. “You’re early.”Mobright the confederate? Shit!

“What exactly do you mean, he’s early?” Beckett asked.

Mobright cleared his skinny throat. “I meant . . . that . . . I just didn’t expect him so . . . soon.” He flashed me a worried glance before returning his gaze to Beckett’s.

“Do you have something you’d like to share with us?” Beckett said coldly.

“No, sir. I was merely saying—”

Tecci sang, “That’s liffffe, that’s what all the people sa-ay,” snapping his fingers like Sinatra, taking two casual steps into the room. He pointed his gun at Beckett. “Those are nice words, don’t you think? Here come four other nice words: Hi honey, I’m Rome.”

Beckett stood, dusting off his hands. Tecci strolled over to him.

“Arlen . . .” Tecci said dispassionately. “No kiss?” He ran the barrel of his gun down Beckett’s cheek.

There was a moment of taut silence; then Nolo jutted his chin at me. “Ah, Flame Boy . . . you are the fucking ace. I thought you died.”

“I rose,” I replied, starting to get up.

“Ah, ah, ah. Stay where you are.”

I put my knee down.

“I see you kept my autograph,” Tecci said.

“I’ve been meaning to thank you for that,” I said, glancing down at the Dagger. Cool steel in my hand. A quick toss . . .

“Easy there, Ace,” Tecci cautioned, “don’t go getting magnificent on us.” He jerked his head at Jocko. “Get the knife from him and whatever else he’s got. Lon, relieve these other citizens of their guns.”

Lon passed by Beckett and collected Elverson’s handgun. Cardinal Lorro wasn’t carrying. Jocko stepped over to me and frisked me quickly, then held out his hand.

I gripped the Dagger tightly, muscles tensed. Jocko and I exchanged a long fierce look. He reached for the Dagger.

“I know you two have a little thing going between you,” Tecci said offhandedly.“You annoy everyone, Flame Boy. Be brave, don’t be brave, it’s all the same to me.”

I broke away from Jocko’s gaze, looked over at Tecci. “Where is she?” I said between clenched teeth.

“She’s tart, that one,” Tecci chuckled. “Very smart, too. Tart and smart. She was busy as a bee unscrambling da Vinci’s poetry when we got the call. You should have seen her.”

Mobright must have called him from the plane. He dies. Then a thought snagged me: Tecci had said, “Sheistart.”Is.Present tense. Ginny was alive. Sounds of tourists drifted up from the streets below.

I slowly opened my hand and let the Dagger rest freely in my palm. Jocko picked it up by the shank and presented it to Tecci.

Tecci pointed the Dagger at Beckett’s breast, a half inch from his suit coat, then patted him down in a strangely sensual way. Tension bristled through the room. Beckett didn’t flinch when Tecci slid his hands down his thighs. Nolo didn’t reach his ankle holster. I wondered when Beckett would make a move for it.

“This is a very nice suit,Arlen,”Tecci said.“Just as nice as your sheets. I like nice sheets, don’t you Flame Boy? You know, I wonder what happensto freshly pressed sheets when their owner doesn’t come home? Do they get lonely or do they just lie there like cats who don’t care?”

Tecci flicked the Dagger, catching the inspector’s monogrammed pocket handkerchief with the tip. “AB, now that is dashing,” he laughed, wrapping the blade in the fine silk.

He stashed it in his coat pocket, his eyes never leaving Beckett’s. Then he grabbed the knot in the inspector’s tie, leaned in, sniffed him, and kissed him gently on the lips like a lover.

“There,” he said, then stepped back toward the door.

Beckett stood perfectly still, arms at his sides, with a slightly bemused expression. I figured he must be calculating the right moment to make his all-important move. We were dangerously close to now-or-never. If he went for the gun, I’d follow his lead, make the most of it . . . somehow. Seconds ticked to the throbbing pulse in my ears.

To Lon, Tecci said,“Lei ragazzi ammazzare tutti.”

I recognized the words“ammazzare”and“tutti.”Massacre everybody.

“We meet on the rolling palace as planned,” Nolo said. “Then everybody gets their cash. Now if you’ll excuse us, we’ve got a helicopter to catch—at the papal helipad, no less. Any last words, Arlen?”

Beckett turned to me slowly.

“Reb,” he said sadly. “You were indeed a mighty traveler.”

Then he casually smoothed his lapels and stepped over to Tecci. “And a devilishly handsome one, too,” he added with a smile as he walked past Nolo and out the door.

I felt as though a switch was flipped, the light blazing me blind. I was stunned, from my aching knees on the tile to the sweat-soaked brow on my hollow skull.Beckett and Tecci? How did I miss that?

Nolo winked at me, turned, and strolled out of the room singing to the melody of Streisand’s hit “People”: “Papal . . . papal who need papal . . .” I heard him cackle as his voice faded down the stairs.

Cardinal Lorro’s knees quivered, shaking the folds of his elegant robes. His lips moved in silent prayer, racing for salvation after a life spent in service of Christ, or art, or both.

Jocko looked comfortable. Lon chuckled. Mobright gaped at me, shaking his head, and I knelt, the heat from the core of the earth on a one-way trip through the floor beneath my knees, to power my thighs, my balls, my belly.

Jocko grinned at me through crooked teeth. Then he stuffed his gun into the front of his pants. He reached into his back pocket to pull out a switchblade, flicked it open, and approached me, rubber Wal-Mart soles squeaking on the cold tile. I watched his movement, preparing for either a stab or a kick.

Jocko leaned forward, low, for a punt. Too close for the face. I tensed my abdominals. He kicked me. I faked like it knocked the wind out of me and fell forward clutching my stomach.

I rolled to my right and grabbed the loose tile Elverson had pried up, came out of the roll, and flung it at Lon’s face. It caught him high on the cheekbone, leaving a gash, and he stumbled backward against the wall. Cardinal Lorro sprang for the door and Lon shot him in the back.

Elverson sprang for Lon, but a second too late. Jocko fired. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Elverson crumple. I scissored Jocko’s legs and he went over. I threw him in a full nelson and rolled him on top of me as another gunshot split the air.

I felt the shock of the blast through his body; he shuddered, then went limp. I grabbed his gun, aimed vaguely at Lon, and fired off three quick shots, missing each time. Mobright dove for him.Mobright on Lon? Why?

Then two shots rang out from behind me. Lon buckled, leaving a smear of red on the brick wall. As I turned to look at the shooter, Mobright picked up Lon’s gun and dropped into a crouch. I took two wild shots at him, missing him in the gun smoke and the urgency.

“No, Reb!” Mobright shouted, dashing to take cover behind an oak desk. I flashed on the drill four feet away. I snatched up the heavy toolas a voice from behind me shouted, “You’ve got the wrong man, Reb!”

Already in full motion, I heaved the drill with all my might at Mobright. Just as he reached the desk, the tool smashed him in the side, knocking the wind out of him.

“Stop!” someone shouted.

I spun around in total confusion. Inside the far door a man who looked oddly familiar pointed a smoking handgun loosely at the floor. He was the one who had shot Lon.

He dropped his gun and raised his hands.“Don’t shoot, Reb. Please don’t shoot.” He turned to Mobright. “Are you all right, Timothy?”

“No,” Mobright gasped.

“Who the hell are you?” I shouted at the man.

He moved swiftly toward me, his arms still raised.

Stopping three feet from me he said, “You know me as Henry Greer—the courier.”

“Greer?” My mind reeled. I saw an image of the withered, dying man at The Willows, heard the rasping voice. The person in front of me was sixty, full head of gray hair, lean, clear-eyed. But Greer had died in the nursing home, hadn’t he? “Greer?” I repeated.

“Yes,” the man said in the rasp. “Henry Greer.” He cleared his throat. “But my real name is Arlen Beckett.”

Jangling shock. “What are you talking about? Arlen Beckett just left with Tecci.”

“No he didn’t. Beckett just arrived, because I am he.”

This was too much too fast. “Everybody’s a goddamn liar here!” I shouted. “Jesus, if you’re Beckett, then who—”

“His name is Jack Heath,” Mobright groaned. “He was Inspector Beckett’s second-in-command. He’s been using Beckett’s name with you for some twisted reason.”

Keeping my eyes on the new Beckett, I said, “You think I’m listening to you, Mobright? A minute ago you drew on me. You were going to shoot me.”

“No, I wasn’t. You tried to shootme!God, Reb. The inspectorshouted to you that you had the wrong man. I think you broke my ribs. And after I picked off that redheaded German for you in Mendocino.”

“What?” I desperately tried to cling to unchallenged facts. There was me, there was Ginny, there was Archie. I thought it was Archie in the woods in Mendocino. He said it was him when I asked him in the hospital.

“I saved your ass in Mendocino,” Mobright groaned. “Took him out a second before he was going to plug you.”

“What the hell’s going on here!” I shouted.

“Give me two minutes to explain,” Beckett said.

“Make it one. Talk fast.”

The man took a breath.

“I met Heath at Oxford when I was on a fellowship. He was biding time until he could take over the family empire. We became friends. One night over too much brandy he confessed he’d had a homosexual encounter, something that wouldn’t have been approved of by his father or British society at that time. He made me swear never to tell anyone.”

“So what?”

“After completing my studies, I returned to the States and was recruited into the Central Intelligence Agency. Not long after, Heath called me, literally out of his mind, screaming that his father had found out about his secret and that he’d been totally disinherited. He accused me of breaking my oath. I reiterated my loyalty to him and offered my help.

“I arranged for his emigration to the U.S.; then, at his request, I sponsored him into the organization. As Mr. Mobright said, Heath moved up the ladder right behind me, and we moved together to Gibraltar. While investigating Nolo Tecci’s part in Krell’s organization, I discovered that Tecci had been implicated in blackmail years ago. One of the victims was Jack Heath’s father.”

“You’re telling me Heath’s college affair was with Nolo Tecci? Jesus.”

“Gibraltar doesn’t allow for skeletons in closets, Reb. The bones tend to rattle. I had to investigate Jack—privately. I found journals in his house, dating back to just before he joined me in America, detailing his hatred for me, his unwavering belief that I was the one who had betrayed him, though it had to have been Tecci.