“What do you think, darling? You think the old boy believes we got something?”
The three of us had reached a fair distance from the cardinal’s office when Wes Barnes asked Niki the question.
“His face,” Niki said, “it was quite difficult to read, but I would say that the cardinal is at least intrigued.”
“He thinks we’ve got something, all right,” I interjected, still uneasy with the issue of legality. “He thinks we’ve got a one-way ticket into a Greek prison.”
Barnes chuckled. “Adams here, he’s worried about going to prison, becoming the love slave for some convicted Mafia hit man. Hell, Adams, just get you a soap-on-a-rope. That way you won’t have to worry about bending over in the shower.” He cackled like an insane man.
I pulled off my jacket and went to work loosening the top button of my shirt. “Say what you want, Barnes, but the only bars I want to be looking at are the kind that serve a cold beer.” I glanced at my watch. We had three hours to pack before heading to the airport. “In fact, I think I’m gonna start looking for one of those now.” I freed the button and jerked the tie from around my neck. It snapped like a whip.
“May I join you?” Niki asked. “I know of a quiet sidewalk café. It is a short walk from here. For me, a glass of wine would be a good thing.”
“Sure,” I said, pushing aside the image of Marion that suddenly crowded into my mind. “Come to think of it, I don’t even know how to order a beer in Rome.”
“Birra. Italian for beer.”
“Birra.” I repeated the word, minus the elegance.
When we approached the limousine, I mustered the courtesy to invite Barnes to join us. “What about you, Barnes? You up to a birra?” I hoped he’d say no.
“I’m afraid not. Dern stomach’s still giving me fits. Think I’m gonna head back and have myself a nap.”
“You are ill?” Niki was suddenly concerned. “I will go back with you.”
“No, darling, you’d better keep an eye on Adams. Make sure he gets to the hotel on time. Hold his hand when he crosses the street. Mountain boy in a big city like this could get himself in trouble real fast.”
“You never know,” I agreed. “Hell, I might accidentally fall in with a ring of smugglers.”
The hour spent in Sorrentino’s cloistered office had given me a fresh appreciation for the cloudless blue sky that stretched over the warm afternoon. I inhaled the humid breeze laden with the aromas of baking breads, coffee, and the tantalizing tang of sauces cooking. I watched hunched drivers of mopeds thread dangerously through honking traffic. Dark-suited businessmen with cell phones glued to their ears passed in a stiff hustle. We walked by cigarette-smoking vendors haggling with their customers in a shop-lined piazze. We passed lines of people, young and old, standing before baroque churches waiting for buses to take them to places they needed to be. Students with headsets clamped over bright red or purple spiked hair skated past a beret-clad old man feeding pigeons from a park bench.
The freedom of the open air outweighed the guilt I felt for the fact that it was an attractive woman from Santorini, not Marion, who shared the experience of a casual stroll through streets lined with more history than I could imagine.
However, it was recent history, not ancient, that I was thinking about when I hoisted the backpack over my shoulder. I was captivated by Niki’s confidence in an arena that should have given Sorrentino the home field advantage. What made this Greek archaeologist tick?
“You did a pretty impressive job back there,” I said.
From the corner of my eye, I watched her remove the clasp that held her hair. She shook it down her back, a sensual, potent signal that she appreciated the compliment and that she was ready to toss the barriers that stood in the way of our prospective friendship. It was a simple act, but it made me feel as if I’d just stepped into privileged territory.
“I was raised Catholic,” she said, passing fingers comblike through her fluid hair. “They did not promote Bible study. My father, he was the one responsible for sparking my interest in a critical study of the scriptures. Always he said that if you understood how the Bible was put together, if you could get some feeling for the various intentions and beliefs of the many writers, then you could discern the difference between truth and the theological teachings of the church.”
“Well, I think you made quite an impression on the cardinal.”
Even as I said it, I had to laugh remembering some of the cardinal’s blank and befuddled expressions. I’d never be able to grasp the impact that a gorgeous, intellectually superior woman would have on an old celibate like Sorrentino. We lived on two different planets, he and I.
“Not a good impression, I am afraid. I do not think the cardinal appreciates a mind that is theologically free—especially if that mind happens to belong to a woman.”
“Ah, but now your guilt is turning into victimization. I’d put good money on a bet that we’re not talking gender issue, here. Sorrentino wouldn’t have appreciated your argument if it’d come straight from St. Peter himself.”
She flashed a blushing smile. “You are too kind.”
“Maybe you’re just too modest.”
She looked at me as if that would be impossible, and until that moment, I would have agreed. Beautiful was the type you hit on in the bar. Modest was the type that would listen to you spill your guts when you got snubbed by beautiful. I had a feeling that I’d have to invent a new paradigm if I was going to communicate with this woman. For now, it was a lot easier to just change the subject.
“Is Sorrentino really worried that some off-the-wall teaching’s gonna pop up and lead their flock astray?”
She fell right in step. “The Church has always had a preoccupation with this concern. The cardinal, he is obviously of the old school, a man that wishes to keep things as they have always been.”
“I just can’t shake the feeling that the old guy’s overreacting. Maybe there’s something more—something he’s not telling us, some secret stashed behind his door number ten.”
“And now you begin to sound like one of the conspirators that the cardinal has so much difficulty appreciating. Perhaps you have some thoughts about who might have produced this scroll?”
“Me?” I was never good at substantiating intuitive feelings. “No. I’m just having a hard time believing that an entity as powerful as the Church is worried that something like this scroll might siphon off their people.”
Niki explained. “When it was first suggested that Thera was a plausible location for Atlantis, that the ruins at Akrotiri may have been the very capital of the fabled continent, a great surge of visitors followed that continues to this day. People want to believe in a lost civilization. They want to believe in a golden age, that someone has solved life’s many struggles, that things can be better for them than they are now. If they can somehow connect to it, touch the very spot where it happened, it can change their lives. You will see this in places like Machu Picchu in Peru or the great pyramids of Egypt. Visitors from all over the world come by the tens of thousands, often with the hope of connecting to some vortex of power that they believe emanates from these places. From what I have seen at Akrotiri, I can easily appreciate the cardinal’s concerns.”
We reached a sidewalk café. A smiling waiter with a lot more hair in his mustache than on top of his head greeted us enthusiastically and led us to a table for two. There, with the care of a collector examining a rare piece of china, he assisted Niki into her chair. She was gracious with the extra attention, obviously well practiced in the art of handling gawking Italian waiters.
The first two swallows of beer were exactly what I needed, so I took a third. “This is the kind of thing Barnes is counting on with Pialigos? People flocking to the island so they can see the original charter of their new world order?”
“Would you rather he build a casino?”
“What do the Pialigarians think about it?”
“They know they have to do something. They have been adapting for thousands of years. They are a resourceful people, eager to maintain their ways but realistic in how that may be done.”
“Well, if they’re going to open their doors to twenty-first-century tourist trade, they’d better be able to adapt.” I took another swallow of beer. “But what do I know? I’m just a novelist who’s being paid to write a story. Thank God that saving endangered cultures doesn’t fall into my jurisdiction. They’d all be in trouble.”
Her eyes lingered on mine for a moment before dropping to her glass. I sensed that my lack of concern was a mild irritation to her, but she dismissed it with a sip of wine. “May I ask you a question that is well within your jurisdiction?”
“Sure.”
“This morning, you said something about an ex-wife? How is it that a tall and handsome man like you still escapes the clutches of a woman?”
The compliment surprised me. After another swallow of beer, I shot a question back to her. “What makes you think I’ve escaped?”
She held up her left hand and wiggled an empty ring finger.
“I could ask you the same question,” I said.
“But I asked you first.”
“Fair enough.” I toyed with the condensation on the side of my mug. “I guess it’s pretty simple, really. I’m not interested in making the same mistake again.”
The instant I said it, I thought of Marion. The words I love you had come easily, maybe too easily. Did I even understand what they meant? I’d said that magic line to Alyssa clear up to the end—pleaded with it, actually, as though the utterance of the words every woman longs to hear would make everything work out. I could have said it ten thousand times more, and it wouldn’t have made a difference. Alyssa and I were just two very different kinds of people. Was the same thing happening with Marion?
“Mistake?” Niki said. “You … you fell out of love with your wife?”
“Can you fall out of love, or do you just fool yourself into thinking that you’re in it in the first place?”
“I am not sure I understand what you mean.”
“It’s one of the mysteries of life that I’m trying to solve—a door-number-ten conspiracy. We tried everything: books on communication, counseling, even Bible study.” I laughed, thinking how I’d tried to convince myself that a washrag like Reverend Albert Johnston could use the Bible—the product of a male-dominated culture—to unravel, even decipher, the mysteries of feminine behavior. I had the feeling that his own wife, Betty—stoically stuffy, pious as an Inquisition priest—ruled her roost with chains, black leather, and a whip. “Anyway, to make a very long and boring story short, it just didn’t work.”
“You divorced her?”
“Yeah. After I caught her in bed with the choir director.”
“You did not.”
“I did.”
I’d come home early from a trip and walked in on them in our bedroom. I couldn’t grasp what I saw; it didn’t sink in until Alyssa gasped, pushed the guy off her, and scrambled to pull up the sheet. I just turned and walked out, too devastated to hear Alyssa screeching out explanations.
Fingers shot over Niki’s lips. “Oh my god, the choir director? The one that leads the singers?”
“Apparently teaching church folks how to sing wasn’t his only God-given talent. Anyway, that was that, and I guess I’m still sorting through the wreckage trying to figure out what I learned from the whole thing.”
Leaning forward, Niki asked, “And what about love, Stuart Adams, have you learned?”
I let one of those nasal wisps pass for a laugh. “I’m not sure there’s anything to learn. I don’t think love should be like … like skiing.”
“Skiing?”
“Yeah. What could be more unnatural than strapping a couple of six-foot boards on your feet and sliding down a mountain at forty miles an hour—standing up? You have to really work on that, overcome your biological aversion to dying. Love shouldn’t have to be that way.”
“I see. No tutoring necessary.”
“That’s right. No one has to teach a mother how to love her baby. Why shouldn’t it be the same way between a man and a woman?”
With a finger, Niki slowly circled the rim of her wine glass. “Then, am I to assume by this question that you have no, how do you Americans say, other significant?”
“I believe you mean significant other. Her name’s Marion.”
Niki appeared puzzled as she took her next sip of wine. When she returned her glass to the table, she asked, “Then you are telling me that you have not found with your Marion this natural love of which you speak? Or, am I prying?”
I leaned back in my seat and crossed my arms. An answer to a question of this magnitude deserved a lot more preparation than a mere two-thirds of a beer. With Niki’s probing eyes suddenly resting on mine like the plotting pens of a polygraph, I didn’t figure this was the time to start fishing for a definitive distinction between loving Marion and the possibility that I might be using her to fill a void. I was sure that our relationship ran deeper than that, but Alyssa had shown me how easily a pretty face and a perfect body could subjugate intuitive warnings, at least temporarily. After all, I hadn’t asked Marion to marry me until I was faced with the possibility of losing her.
I took another swallow of beer. “Prying,” I decided.
The polygraph pens scribbled their response, reminding me that, to a woman, there was no such thing as an evasive answer. In that moment of transparency, I found myself wondering if my half-grin looked as lame as it suddenly felt.
“Forgive me, please,” Niki said, laughing at herself. “I am the nosy one, no?”
“Pushing the envelope,” I suggested, upgrading my grin to a smile. Anxious to shift the focus away from myself, I said, “What about you? I take it your knight in shining armor hasn’t come in and swept you off your feet.”
She lifted her glass with the fingertips of both hands and let it dangle a few inches from her lips. “No, he has not, but I do not give up hope.” She peered at me, and her lips moved slightly, as if there was something more she wanted to say. Instead, she smiled and raised her glass to offer a toast. “Shall we drink to untutored love?”
Fascinated by her evasiveness, I wanted to push her, turn up the heat a little, but I decided to let her slide, at least for the moment. I hoisted my mug. “To untutored love.”
Wineglass to beer mug—a ringing clunk.
When I drained the mug, I noticed that Niki’s eyes had suddenly locked on something behind me, her smile turning to a frown. I turned to see a boy—ten or eleven—approaching our table. He had frozen in mid-stride, his eyes shifting nervously.
“Are you okay?” I asked, realizing at the same instant that the boy probably didn’t understand English. When I turned to Niki for help, I only heard the scuffle as the boy bolted, snatched my backpack, and dashed off in a dead run.
In the next few seconds, I was in a full sprint pursuing the little weasel through an alley. I followed him into a piazza filled with a colorful maze of milling humanity—shoppers, young lovers kissing, friends sipping lattes, old men casting glances at the open sky, speculating, no doubt, on the capricious nature of the weather. No face revealed anything of a disturbance, nothing beyond life as usual in the eternal city.
Niki, clutching my sport coat, emerged from the alley as quickly as her high heels had allowed. Breathless, she handed me my jacket. “The boy, he got away?”
“Slick little bastard,” I grumbled, still scanning the crowd.
“We should go to the police.”
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”
“But why? Your notes. Your camera.”
“It’s the notes I’m worried about. Jesus, I detailed our intentions to smuggle the scroll out of Greece. Add the photograph, the translation, and the account of the Seagull episode I started sketching, and it’d be safe to say that you, me, and Barnes could make pretty likely candidates for surveillance.”
“Surveillance? From whom? We will not be looking for the scroll in Rome. What would the Roman police care about what happens in Greece? Besides, do you forget that you are a novelist? Your notes, you simply say they are fiction. Who can dispute this?”
The uneasiness that stirred in the pit of my stomach didn’t need specific names or faces of disputing parties. Replacing the backpack would be a lot safer.
Just then, a black Mercedes pulled to the curb. A man in a suit and dark glasses stepped from the rear door—Inspector De Santis, from the Vatican.
“Is there a problem?” De Santis asked as he approached.
“Stuart’s backpack,” Niki said. “A thief has stolen it.”
“Petty thieves,” De Santis said, shaking his head. “They prey on the unsuspecting tourists.” He leaned close, shifting his eyes between Niki and me. “I trust the scroll was not in the bag.”
“Of course not,” Niki assured him. “The scroll is in a safe place.”
De Santis looked at me. “And the notes of your meeting with Cardinal Sorrentino?”
I nodded. “They were in there.”
“I see,” De Santis said. “In all confidence, the cardinal has earned his share of political enemies within the Vatican. In the wrong hands, your notes could prove an embarrassment.”
De Santis stepped away from us, removed a cell phone from an inside pocket, and punched in a set of numbers. He spoke quietly, urgently, his stiffness, I figured, reflecting the grave concern that must have been in the cardinal’s voice.
When the inspector clicked off the phone, he said, “The cardinal, of course, regrets the theft. And now, he worries that word of the scroll will get to the street. There is no question; your backpack must be recovered. The chief of police is a personal acquaintance of Sorrentino. The cardinal has instructed me to take you to police headquarters and make a report. Chief Lo Bianco will see to it that every effort is made to retrieve your valuables.”
“It’s not that big a deal,” I said, hoping to dissuade De Santis. “I’m sure I can replace it. Besides,” I glanced at my watch, “we need to get back to the hotel. We’ve got a plane to catch.”
“I am afraid you do not understand, Mr. Adams.” De Santis lowered his tone. “The cardinal is prepared to offer Mr. Barnes ten million dollars for the scroll. He would rather the existence of this artifact remain unknown.”
I think I managed to suppress the wave of shock that threatened to distort my face. Wes Barnes had his answer. The Vatican was willing to pay ten million for a scroll they’d never seen. I was right. Something in the translation had gotten Sorrentino’s attention.
“To Cardinal Sorrentino,” De Santis continued, “this is a matter of utmost urgency. I will assist you in filing your report. I promise, my driver will return you to your hotel in less time than you can make the walk.” He pulled open the front passenger door and motioned to Niki to take a seat. “Please, I insist. This is too important a matter to neglect.” Niki slipped into the car. Then, looking directly at me, De Santis added, “Concerning the contents of your backpack, I advise you to be very general with Chief Lo Bianco. Where the police are concerned, a single wrong word can become the pebble that starts an avalanche of suspicion.”
He’s worried about a pebble, I thought, slipping into the backseat of the car. It felt more like I was on the verge of tipping a damn boulder.
Niki and I followed De Santis through the bustling corridors of police headquarters. Ceiling fans stirred the smell of scorched coffee into the air. Ringing telephones, the quiet clatter of computer keyboards, and a steady murmur of voices tightened the atmosphere. De Santis, obviously no stranger to the place, nodded gestures of recognition to deskbound personnel at every turn.
We entered a reception area where a woman—fifties, trim, pleasant smile, conservatively dressed in a white blouse and blue skirt—sat at a desk. Across the room, I noticed two gorilla-like men in black suits and dark glasses sitting on either side of a door I assumed led to the office of the police chief. It could have been my imagination, but the presence of the two men seemed to bother De Santis.
The woman looked up from a maze of paperwork spread across her desk. “Inspector De Santis,” she said in a harried but pleasant greeting. “Cardinal Sorrentino just called. Chief Lo Bianco is expecting you.”
“I see he has business with Greece,” De Santis said, glancing in apparent recognition at the two gorillas.
“I believe that Mr. Giacopetti is just about to leave,” the woman said, picking up her telephone.
Giacopetti? A blast of adrenaline detonated like a keg of powder in my stomach. I was one office away from Santorini’s agent for the Department of Antiquities. I turned to Niki. The flare of her nostrils reflected something more than shock at the unexpected encounter. She was about to come face-to-face with her father’s murderer.
The receptionist gave us the nod. “Chief Lo Bianco will see you now.”
I had a real bad feeling as I followed De Santis and Niki across the lobby toward the office. The gorillas, possibly twins, stood from their seats, stiff and menacing. Both men nodded respectfully to De Santis as he ushered Niki through the door. But when I started to pass, one of them grabbed me at the upper arm.
I had slipped on my jacket to make a respectable appearance before the chief of police. The gorilla had, without explanation, stopped me, pulled open my jacket, and slipped his hands around my waist to pat me down for a weapon.
In a knee-jerk reaction, I grabbed the wrists of the big man. The second gorilla immediately stepped in and clamped a vise-grip on my forearm.
De Santis saw it and quickly intervened. “Vito, Apollo, it is all right. This man is not armed.”
The man De Santis called Apollo hesitated and then relaxed his grasp of my arm. Vito turned his wrists slowly, freeing them from my suddenly clammy hands. Even through the dark lenses of the glasses, I could see that Vito’s eyes had narrowed into a pair of reptilian slits. I’d just ticked off a killer.
“Do not be offended, Mr. Adams,” De Santis said apologetically. “Rome, as you might suspect, is on heightened alert from constant threats of terrorism. These men are trained to take every precaution. They are the bodyguards of Gustavo Giacopetti, Santorini’s agent for the Greek Department of Antiquities.”
I summoned a shred of calm bravado. “Maybe these gentlemen could use a little training in the art of asking.” I pulled open my jacket, but Vito’s eyes never left mine. “Suit yourself,” I said, suppressing the effects of the chill that crawled down my spine. I buttoned my jacket, nodded to the bodyguards, and stepped into the office.
J Douglas Bottorff 