Cut off his head, although he may be head of his family, cut off his head!
– Girolamo Savonarola
I HAD A LOT to think about.
With the discovery that the Corbizzi family had been opponents of Savonarola in the fifteenth century I had found another link between the estate on the shore of Lake Couchiching and an Italian city thousands of kilometres away across the Atlantic Ocean. This was no coincidence. The professor was an expert on the Italian Renaissance, had lived and taught in Florence, and had made Savonarola the centre of his studies, especially the friar’s attempts to set up a government that would rule according to Christian morality, as interpreted by him. The prof had written a new book warning against theocracy, a book that devoted a whole chapter to Savonarola, using the friar’s career as an alarm bell-the chapter Raphaella would be reading next.
Savonarola had contacted me through my dreams, had shown me how much he had suffered. He had made me watch his inhumane execution. Was he trying to win my sympathy? Who wouldn’t have compassion for a man who had undergone imprisonment, torture, hanging, and burning? The trouble was, he had urged that others get the same cruel treatment. And yet he had genuinely wanted Florence to take better care of its poor and underprivileged.
He seemed a brilliant but complex man, one minute inspiring admiration and sympathy, the next contempt. I was no theologian like Savonarola, but I believed that you should treat other people the way you wanted them to behave toward you. I had sympathy for him, but I was revolted by his contradictions-the willingness to torture and burn others, the hatred that soaked his words when he talked about his opponents. It was all symbolized on the medal in the secret cupboard-the friar’s profile on one side, on the other the Lord’s sword jabbing from heaven, warning of swift, certain punishment. When it came right down to it, I saw the friar as a dangerous man who, if you crossed him, would toss you into the fire without blinking, then tell himself he was doing God’s will. For him, that was the ultimate excuse. That was what made him so lethal. And that was what Professor Corbizzi had understood.
Long ago the Corbizzi family had crossed Savonarola by standing against him. For his entire life Professor Corbizzi had opposed what the friar stood for. It seemed clear to me that this visitation by Savonarola’s spirit was revenge, pure and simple. The professor had died under mysterious circumstances that involved a fire. His new book was a focal point of the visitation. The medal was, I thought, just that-a “souvenir” of sorts. The cross? Maybe there was something there, something Raphaella and I had missed.
But with the professor dead, why did the spirit hang around? Why involve me? That was the part of the puzzle that just wouldn’t fit. That was why I needed to take a break from the estate and its library, so I could think things through.
MOM WAS SITTING on the sun-splashed steps of the verandah lacing up her trainers when I sauntered out the door next morning.
“You’re up early,” she said, turning and squinting up at me.
“Lots to do,” I replied vaguely. “See you later.”
In the kitchen I prepared ingredients for a Spanish omelette and set them aside to await Mom’s return, then poured a second coffee and carried it outside to the driveway. I collected my toolbox, an old Dutch oven, some rags, and a few litres of motor oil from the garage, then rolled out the Hawk and pulled it up onto the centre stand. I set a low stool beside the bike, took a sip of coffee, and set the mug on the bike’s saddle.
Working on the Hawk was a little like cabinetmaking. It took my mind away. It required some knowledge and skill, asking me to think and remember. I puttered away in the shade of the ancient maple that stood beside the driveway, entertained by rustling leaves and the conversations of robins and sparrows.
I drained and replaced the crankcase oil, then spent half an hour or so adjusting and lubricating the chain, the clutch, and the brake cables. I wiped the bike down from front to back, taking extra time to polish the aluminum frame and swing arm. A motorcycle was like any machine-it liked to be clean, lubricated, and properly adjusted-but more so, because it operated outdoors in all weather, under conditions like yesterday’s, with dirt and dust and a certain amount of abuse.
Some people liked hard saddlebags on a motorcycle, but I preferred my old black leather bags with their chrome-plated lockable buckles. I polished them once in a while and cleaned them out with every oil change. Fetching the portable vacuum cleaner from its rack on the kitchen wall, I opened the right-side bag, half-surprised at what I found there. With everything that had been going on lately I had forgotten the bagged cellphone I had tossed inside in a panic to get away from the paintball camp.
I set it on the saddle beside my coffee and finished what I was doing. Up in my room, I took the phone from the bag and looked it over. It was a common, slightly upscale model you’d see anywhere. It was Internet-capable, but a quick look for emails or a search engine history proved that function had been unused. The call list contained a lot of city exchange numbers, but there were no photos stored in the unit.
What to do? Arriving at a decision took less than a second. I rejected calling a random number from the list and reporting that I’d found the cell. How would I explain my snooping around the paintball camp, trespassing, and discovering the phone? No, the phone would share the same fate as the GPS and end up in a garbage bin.
It was then that I remembered I hadn’t erased the photos I’d snapped out at the camp from my own cell. I turned it on and activated the camera and reviewed the few images I had of the camo-boys in the clearing. There was something about the picture of the leader that intrigued me.
I hooked the phone to my laptop and uploaded the pictures. On the bigger screen the details were much clearer. I focused on the leader, standing in the clearing, the cabin off his left shoulder, the tents to the side, his paintball gun hanging from a strap diagonally across his chest.
“Wait a minute,” I heard myself say.
I looked closely. I wasn’t an expert, but I could see that was no paintball marker. It was a machine pistol. A real gun. A lethal-and illegal-weapon.
I sat back in my chair, thinking, wondering what I had stumbled into out there in the bush. Downstairs, the front door opened and closed. Mom was back after her run.
“Anybody home?” she called out.
And then, like the pins and tails of a dovetail joint slipping into place, interlocking smoothly, a plan came together in my devious little mind.
BY THE TIME MOM padded into the kitchen on bare feet, a towel at her neck, I was placing her omelette on a plate beside a slab of toast. She poured a coffee and sat down. I slipped her plate in front of her and sat opposite, steeling myself for the conversation ahead.
“You’re not eating?” she asked.
I shook my head. “I ate earlier.”
“Umm.”
“Dad’s off giving a music lesson?” I asked.
Mom eyed me with suspicion. “You know he is.”
“Yeah, true. Guess I forgot. Temporarily.”
I lost the offensive after that. I was up against a pro. A pro journalist and-what’s even more intimidating-a pro mother.
She carved a wedge out of her omelette and chewed it slowly. “So,” she said, “what is it? You smashed up the car?”
“What? Smashed the-?”
“Emptied our bank account and sent the money to the Cayman Islands?”
“I-”
“You were arrested for peddling drugs to the kids down at the skateboard park?”
“Mom, I-”
“Because if this carefully staged intimate mother-and-son tête-à-tête is about me going to Herat…”
She raised her eyebrows inquiringly, her eyes boring into mine, then broke contact, pushed another bite of omelette into her mouth, and chewed silently.
“Mom, how could you? I just thought… no, it’s nothing to do with Herat. Not directly. Maybe marginally.”
“Very articulate,” she said, spooning blueberry jam onto her toast.
“What I mean is-” I tried again, but she cut me off.
“Not that I’m complaining about this wonderful breakfast and the rare opportunity to share it with my eldest son-”
“Mom, I’m your only son.”
“But I get the sense that there’s an ulterior motive at work here. An agenda.”
She popped a bit of toast into her mouth.
“There may be… there is. Sort of. An agenda, I mean. But not about Herat.”
“Umm-hmm.”
“At least, not directly.”
“Umm-hmm. You’re beginning to repeat yourself.”
“Mom, just let me talk, okay? You’re making me nervous.”
Mom leaned back in her chair, hooking one arm over the back. “I’m all ears.”
“I think you’re going to like this.”
“No sales pitch, okay? Just spit it out.”
“But first you have to promise to keep what I’m about to tell you secret.”
“Oh, please.”
“Listen,” I tried again, “you’re a reporter-er, journalist. I’ve got information that I know will interest you, but I have to be a whatchamacallit-an unidentified anonymous reliable source.”
“Fine. I promise.”
She wasn’t taking me seriously, but she would in a few minutes if I could lay out my information temptingly and clearly. Gaining confidence as I went along, I described finding the GPS on the shore. I reminded her about the drowned man we had read about in the morning paper a couple of days before. I told her about my visit to the hunt camp or whatever it was. The paintball splatters on the cabin. I fed her the facts without speculating. I knew she’d put it all together in a fraction of the time I had taken. And I kept something back-the two aces up my sleeve.
When I was done, I watched her face. She would have been a good poker player. Her features gave away nothing-another reason she was a killer interviewer. But I was her son. I’d been looking into that face since my cradle days. I paid attention to her eyes.
And I knew I had her.
“Let’s go into my study,” she said.
I GOT THE FULL-BORE professional interview. Mom opened her pad, leaned forward, and fired questions like nails, fixing times, places, facts, with no invitations to guess or suggest hypotheses. She took notes in her personal shorthand, which nobody else could decipher.
“Let’s talk about these men you saw,” she said after we’d exhausted the basics. “You said there were ten.”
“Yup.”
“About ten or exactly ten?”
“Exactly. I counted them.”
“All dressed alike?”
I nodded. “And the clothing seemed, if not new, certainly not well used.”
“And they spoke a language you couldn’t identify. So we can rule out French, German, Italian-most of the European languages. Any others?”
“Latin.”
She almost smiled, but the poker face slipped back into place. “Polish, Ukrainian, Russian?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Okay, let’s leave it at that. Now, don’t take this the wrong way but… skin colour?”
“Dark, but not black. Brownish.”
“All of them?”
“Yup.”
“Age?”
“The leader thirty-ish, or a little under. The others in their early twenties, a couple not even that old.”
“Teenagers. Maybe minors.”
I nodded.
She closed her pad. “Well, this looks like it’s worth a couple of hours’ investigation.”
That wasn’t quite the reaction I was hoping for, but I still had my aces.
“Speaking of Latin…” I began.
Mom nodded, and this time she allowed a smile. “Go on.”
“You’ve heard of quid pro quo?”
“Of course. Something for something. You want something in return.”
“Yup.”
“Let me guess. I turn down the Herat assignment and work on this instead.”
I nodded. “The assignment you haven’t agreed to accept, yet. Or have you?”
Mom shook her head slowly.
“So it’s not like you’re cancelling a commitment.”
“Maybe not, but let’s be realistic. You don’t have much.”
“What I’ve given you is promising, though. Admit it.”
“Yes, it is. But it isn’t enough. It may all come to nothing.”
I reached into my pocket, then placed my cellphone on the desk beside her notepad.
“I have pictures. One of them shows the leader. And you’ll see it’s not a paintball gun hanging around his neck. I checked it out on the net. It’s definitely a machine pistol.”
Her eyes widened, then immediately returned to normal. “But I don’t get the pictures unless I take your deal.”
“You don’t get anything. I clam up.”
Mom looked over my head. A shadow crossed her face.
“What?” I asked.
“I’m trying to decide if this is a dirty trick,” she said sadly.
“It is a dirty trick. And I hate what I’m doing. But I have no choice.”
She threw down her ballpoint and watched it bounce off the desk.
“Mom,” I pleaded. “Listen, will you? This isn’t about Dad and me telling you what to do. He doesn’t even know about this, and I’ll never tell him no matter what you decide. Dad and I know how brave you are, Mom. More than the two of us put together. And we know you’re committed to showing the world what’s going on in the places you go to-especially what’s happening to the women. It’s your vocation. Mine is designing furniture. Dad’s is… well, old stuff. And you and me. If something happened to you, people would admire you. But Dad and I would have to live the rest of our lives in a different world, without you in it.”
She moved her gaze to the kitchen doorway.
“Do you know what I’m afraid of, Mom? I’m terrified that if you go there and get killed, I’ll spend the rest of my life hating you. So, yes, I’m bribing you.”
Slowly I took the cellphone, still in the sealed plastic bag, from my pocket and laid it beside my own. Mom’s eyes fixed on it.
For a few minutes, we sat as if someone had sprinkled fairy dust on us and frozen us in time. Mom thought her thoughts; I prepared myself to make the final pitch.
“See, Mom, I think your confidential source-me-stumbled on some kind of para-military group, or a militia, or whatever it’s called. I think I discovered their training camp. I’ve got a few photos. I’ve got a cellphone here that one of the soldier boys kept hidden from the others. I’ll bet it’s full of phone numbers and email addresses and other stuff that a renowned journalist could easily track down and use to flesh out a story. And you’ve got a whatchamacallit-an exclusive.”
She turned her face toward me. I focused on her eyes. They had softened. She leaned back in her chair, linked her fingers behind her head, and gazed up at the ceiling, puffing her cheeks and letting the air out slowly.
“My own son,” she said.
“Don’t try the guilt thing on me, Mom. I’m too old for that. Besides, Dad’s better at it than you.”
She tried not to, but she smiled.
“And you’re better at it than both of us,” she said.
MOM AND I SPENT the next hour discussing the implications of what I had told her. With her experience, she mentally hunted down what she called “ramifications” like a fox after chickens.
“The phone’s a bit of a problem,” she said. “If these guys are up to something deeply illegal, especially activity that touches on national security, then it’s evidence and our possession of it is a crime-even for a journalist. Withholding information is a crime. We could both end up in jail.”
“But we don’t need the phone or GPS after today.”
“Explain,” she demanded.
“I copied the GPS files onto my laptop and my own GPS before I junked it. Do you have software that will copy the data card in the phone I found?”
“No, but I can get it.”
“Okay. Problem solved. Download the data card onto your computer. I’ll take the phone back where I found it and leave it there.”
I would rather have stuck my hand into a blender than go back to the camp, but I had to persuade her.
“No, that’s too dangerous, especially if you’re right about the machine pistol.”
“Not really,” I argued, not quite honestly. “I can go out there, and if there’s anyone around I’ll take off and try another day. If there isn’t, I’ll replace the phone.” Recalling some of the crime movies I’d seen, I added, “After wiping it clean of prints, of course. And remember, those guys probably don’t even know about the phone. It had been hidden.”
“All this assumes that the GPS belonged to the drowned man, and that the phone was his, too.”
“True. But it’s a solid assumption. Whoever owned the GPS made a lot of visits to the place where the phone was stashed.”
“In any case, I need to have a long gab with Mabel Ayers, a lawyer I’ve worked with in the past. She’s up on all the national security implications for journalists. I may need to protect myself, and you. I’ll get back to you. In the meantime, let me download your pictures, then I’ll erase them from your phone and give it back to you. The mystery phone stays here. Okay?”
“Okay, Mom.”
“And let’s keep this between the two of us for now.”
“The two of us?” I repeated, meaning I shouldn’t even mention it to Dad.
“Yup.”
As I was leaving her study, she called me back.
“Thanks, Garnet,” she said.
When I walked outside I felt like I was floating.
I TOOK ONE LOOK out the window the next morning and groaned.
The sun was off somewhere in a sulk. Drizzle seeped from the sullen grey sky and dripped off the limp leaves of trees and bushes. It was the kind of day that made me grumpy and tempted me to crawl back under the blankets.
But I forced myself through my morning rituals. Dad was out somewhere and Mom had been self-exiled behind her office door since yesterday afternoon, researching, writing, making calls, and recording interviews-a good sign that what I thought of as the “paintball gang” story had pushed Herat off her agenda. While I was making toast, she called me into her office.
“I’ve finished with the phone,” she said, nodding to the cell, back in its plastic bag. “I’d like you to take it to your workshop and leave it there.”
“Okay, sure.”
“Do you have a place where you can lock it up?”
“Yeah. Well, I can improvise something.”
“And for the next little while,” she added mysteriously, tucking her hair behind her ear in a transparent effort at nonchalance, “you should leave your laptop there as well, okay? Keep them away from here.”
“Um, sure. What’s this all about?”
“I’ll let you know.”
After breakfast I drove through wet streets toward Raphaella’s house, wondering what-if anything-was waiting for us in the Corbizzi library. I couldn’t shake off a sense of foreboding as gloomy as the sky over my head. I hoped the rain that began to lash the windshield wasn’t an omen.
When she climbed into the van, Raphaella’s forced smile did little to brighten my mood.
“Lovely day,” she muttered, shoving her pack between the seats. “How did things go with your mom?”
I had updated Raphaella on my trip to paintball heaven and shared my plan to tempt Mom with the story.
“So far, so good. I think she’s hooked.”
Raphaella nodded. We drove in silence to Wicklow Point and exchanged a worried glance as the estate gates closed behind us. I parked by the coach house. The grounds looked as if some bad-tempered sprite had crept around during the night, draining the colour from leaves, lake, and grass. Even the flower beds looked bleached. The mansion’s dagger-shaped upper windows reflected the grey light, like blank eyes squinting at nothing. I went inside the shop and put the phone in my toolbox and spun the dial on the combination lock.
Mrs. Stoppini opened the kitchen door to us and I saw my second strained smile of the day. Her haggard features and more-than-customarily pale skin suggested that she had had a rough night.
“Good morning, Miss Skye, Mr. Havelock. You’ll take tea before you begin your day’s work.”
The kitchen was warm and fragrant, a welcome contrast to the outside. I smelled biscuits baking in the oven and there was a stockpot on the stove giving off a savoury aroma. A cup of tea around the kitchen table sounded good to me. Before long Raphaella and I were spreading butter on hot steaming biscuits and sipping strong tea.
“How are you feeling today, Mrs. Stoppini?” I enquired.
The protruding eyes widened. Her teacup clunked into its saucer. “Why do you ask?”
Raphaella’s hand on my knee under the table stopped me from answering.
“It’s just that you look a little tired,” she replied for me. “It must be difficult at times, running a big house like this alone.”
“To tell the truth, Miss Skye, my sleep has not been very restful of late,” she said, dropping her eyes as if she’d just confessed to a crime.
“This weather…” Raphaella suggested.
But our hostess sidestepped the invitation to explain further.
“Indeed” was all she said.
We ate and sipped in silence for a little while, then I got to my feet. “Well, hi-ho, hi-ho,” I said.
“It’s off to work we go,” Raphaella finished.
Mrs. Stoppini looked confused. We collected our packs, thanked Mrs. Stoppini for the tea, and headed for the library. As soon as we turned into the hallway, Raphaella stopped in her tracks. She looked at me, an unasked question in her wide eyes. I nodded. I had felt it, too. As if the atmospheric pressure had suddenly dropped, the air felt heavy and menacing. Raphaella’s shoulders tightened as we pressed forward, side by side, the floor creaking under our reluctant feet. We stopped at the pocket doors. The odour of smoke was powerful and repellent.
“He’s in there now,” Raphaella murmured, wrapping her hand around her ankh.
My heart drumming, I placed my hands on the brass lion’s heads, then hesitated for a moment before opening the doors. In a way, I was relieved. Everything Raphaella and I had experienced since I first set foot in the Corbizzi mansion pointed to a confrontation between me and the spectre of the man who had invaded my dreams like a virus, infected my waking life and then spread to Raphaella’s. I had known this moment would come, and now it was here.
I felt Raphaella’s hand on my shoulder. I rolled the doors aside.
I may have thought I was ready for a showdown, but nothing could have prepared me for what was waiting on the far side of the room.
Covered from head to foot in a tattered black robe whose hood kept his face in shadow, Girolamo Savonarola stood before the alcove, his attention fixed ahead of him. He was as unsubstantial as a shade, but he gave off a frightening aura of willpower, malevolence, and dark purpose made even stronger by the nauseating stench of scorched wood, singed cloth, and decayed flesh.
I closed the doors firmly behind us without taking my eyes off the creature across the room. When the doors thumped together, the monk in black turned slowly in our direction.
How can I describe the indescribable? The pitiful, horrifying face framed by the heavy black wool of the hood. The hawkish nose protruding like a blade between eyes swollen and bulging, each pupil a black marble in the centre of an ash-coloured egg. The charred skin of his cheeks and forehead, seamed with cracks, blistered and withered. The fractured yellow teeth showing where the flesh of his lips had burned away.
He fixed his grotesque bloated eyes on us and raised his arms like a dark angel, the crisped skin of his skeletal hands and forearms cratered and ravaged by fire, exposing charred bones. His hideous mouth opened in a prolonged, silent howl more terrifying than any noise.
Raphaella and I shrank back. I felt the door against my shoulders, heard Raphaella’s rapid gasps and my heart battering my rib cage, fought the urge to fling the doors open and run.
I realized we were seeing him as he was the moment he died, choking and gagging as he twisted at the end of the hangman’s rope, his windpipe smashed closed, his feet and lower legs already beginning to burn. But he wore the white tunic and black cape of the Dominicans’ daily life. The power of his presence was like rocks piled on my chest. Now I understood the spell he had been able to cast over his audiences in church and cathedral. He stood with his arms raised in command, as if delivering one of his prophesies.
He had sent those he called sinners to the torture chamber or the fire. What would he do to us?
“Don’t take your eyes off him,” Raphaella whispered, her voice shaking. “Don’t back down.”
His attention bored into her, the freakish eyes radiating hostility as they focused on the ankh around her neck. It wasn’t until then I realized that to him she was an unbeliever and no better than an adulteress. Like Mrs. Stoppini, she was not married to the man she loved and shared her life with. They were women he would have had publicly thrashed, or worse.
I stepped toward him, arms chest high, palms facing him.
“Stay away,” I said, my mouth dry with fear. “Leave us!”
Savonarola stopped. He lowered his arms. Then he began to… dissolve, like salt in warm water, into the air around him.
And he was gone.
MY KNEES WERE SHAKING so badly I dropped into the nearest chair, certain that the spectre had disappeared but not left. Raphaella did the same. I looked over at her. Her eyebrows rose and fell in silent comment.
“You don’t look so hot,” she said.
“Bad choice of words.”
She giggled, releasing pent-up tension, and I laughed with her. I went over to the windows, winding the casements open as far as possible to ease the overpowering stench. Then I crossed the room toward the escritoire. As I passed her chair, Raphaella grabbed my hand, pressed it to her cheek, let go again. I bent over and kissed her on the mouth.
“Hey, admit it. I really know how to show a girl a good time,” I joked.
She smiled. “Were you as scared as I was?”
“More. But it was too easy, wasn’t it? I told him to go and he went.”
Still trembling, I dug the keys from their hiding place and went through the elaborate process of getting into the secret cupboard. The objects-which I was beginning to consider a curse-seemed in place and intact. I hauled them out onto the table.
Raphaella came to stand beside me. “One of these is the reason he’s haunting this house,” she said.
She took the medal out of the box, held it on its edge against the tabletop, and flicked it. It spun for a moment, wobbled, and quivered to a stop. She picked up the heavy cross and set it down again, turning it toward the window so the sombre light dimly illuminated the jewels. Brushed the leather cover of the Compendium with her fingertips. Untied the string on the manuscript file, took out the stack of pages, and carried it to her work station. She had touched each of those things as if she was receiving a secret message from it.
“I feel like I know less and less each day,” I commented.
“It was this manuscript that seemed to attract all his attention last time he dropped in to say hello,” she said from her seat, holding up the scorched sheet we had found on the floor. “But… well, I just don’t know either.”
She sighed and pulled open her backpack.
Before long we were hard at work-Raphaella reading and taking notes on the Savonarola chapter of the professor’s book, me cataloguing volume after volume of history books, my computer on the wheeled stand I had made in the shop. I had copied and synched Raphaella’s database so that any addition either of us made would show up on the other’s file. As I pushed forward with the tedious job of recording the author and title of each book, reading the spine and tapping keys, occasionally taking down an old book and checking the title page because the words on the spine were illegible, I tried to put the image of the friar’s ravaged face out of my mind. But it kept slipping back, insisting that I note every macabre, loathsome detail.
At the same time my typically divided mind was telling me this was nuts. I was in a room lit by electric lights, not torches or candles, typing on a computer, not writing with a quill pen. It was the twenty-first century! How could I also be thinking about a ghost?
I gave up, my concentration shattered. I saved my work and wandered over to the alcove table, idly picked up the medal, with its image of a fist wielding the dagger of heavenly anger and punishment, its profile of Savonarola, whose revolting smell still lingered on the damp air in the room. I put the medal in its box and closed the lid, running my thumb over the cross.
I rested my hand idly on it, rotated it this way and that, watching the flat light wink in and out of the jewels and make patterns on the gold. On the heavy base of the cross the light seemed to form a little sphere inside the blown-glass dome. Tiny jeweller’s clips fit tightly into indentations around the dome, holding it in place. The wavy nature of the glass with its tiny bubbles almost obscured whatever it was meant to protect.
By the window, Raphaella turned a page, looked over and smiled, went back to her reading. I fished my penknife out of my pocket and opened the smaller of the two blades. Working slowly and cautiously I pried up the six clips until the dome came free. The bent clips poked up into the air like little cranes. It was easy to slide the dome out from under them.
I got the magnifying glass from Raphaella’s table and examined the object that had lain under the globe for who knew how many years. It was medium brown in colour, blackened a little along the outside edge, roughly circular, with a protruding bit on each side, and hollow in the centre.
It rested loosely in an indentation that had been carved into the gold alloy of the cross’s base. With the help of the magnifying glass I could make out the marks left by a carving tool.
“Raphaella?”
“Mmm?”
“Can you come over here and look at this?”
I handed her the magnifying glass. She bent and squinted at the mysterious article.
“Recognize it?”
“Nope.”
“Wait,” I said.
I slid the knife blade under the object and lifted it out of its place and set it down on the table.
Raphaella inspected it again. “Could it be some kind of shell or animal bone?”
“It isn’t wood. Or stone. Or plastic. So, yeah, maybe. Coral? No-wrong colour.”
Raphaella was thinking. “Why does the shape look familiar? Hmm. Something tells me I’ve seen this before.”
“If you can’t remember, it doesn’t matter if you’ve seen it before.”
“Don’t be technical,” Raphaella replied, taking a page of the manuscript she had been reading, turning it print side down on the table, and sliding the object onto the paper with her fingertip. Using the PIE, she took a picture of the thing, pressed a few buttons, and waited, eyes on the screen. She shut off the phone and put it down.
“I emailed the photo to Mother. If it’s animal or human, she’ll probably know. What are you doing?”
“Putting this thing back where it came from. Have you noticed a change in here during the last few minutes?”
“Yeah, it’s warmer all of a sudden,” Raphaella said. She sniffed. “And-”
“Right.”
Fighting the urge to hurry, I set the object back into its resting place in the base of the cross, fitted the dome into place, and bent the clips into their seats. The dome was tightly held again.
“Okay,” I said. “That should-”
My cell vibrated in my pocket.
“I shall serve lunch indoors today. In eight minutes.”
Raphaella and I locked away the artifacts, closed and locked the windows, and gratefully left the library.
LUNCH WAS MINESTRONE SOUP, thick and deep red, with beans, vegetables, little chunks of beef, shell pasta-all topped with freshly grated Parmesan cheese and sending off a mouthwatering aroma so wonderful that I held my face over the bowl, inhaling, for so long I upset our hostess.
“Is the zuppa quite all right?” Mrs. Stoppini asked in alarm.
“It’s great,” I replied. “Smells heavenly.”
“A nice change,” Raphaella put in, aiming a meaningful glance in my direction.
I almost choked on my soup, spluttering and holding off a laugh. Mrs. Stoppini looked confused.
“Don’t mind us,” Raphaella said. “We’re just being silly.”
“Indeed.”
“Mrs. Stoppini, you ought to open a restaurant,” I said in admiration. “Your cooking is fantastic.”
Her lipsticked-in lips betrayed the beginnings of a smile. “One does one’s best.”
Since I met her I had been trying to find a way to pump Mrs. Stoppini for information. Up to now she’d been a dry well. On the few times she’d looked as if she might share something of her life, she seemed to catch herself and hide behind a stern demeanour. Confidentiality was important to her. I had no argument with that, but her attitude didn’t help Raphaella and me with the central question: how much did she know about the goings-on in the library?
She had thawed out a bit in the short time I’d known her. She was still formal, if not flinty, most of the time, but I had learned that was a kind of defence that came from living alone after her “companion’s” death. Under the black wrapping beat a kind heart. I knew she was growing fond of Raphaella, so I thought this might be a good time to ask her a few things.
“It’s sure nice here on the estate,” I began, pretty subtly, I thought.
Nothing. Raphaella looked at me as if I had a geranium growing out of my head. Mrs. Stoppini merely nodded and ate some more soup in her ceremonial way, pushing her spoon away from her across the bowl, raising it at right angles to her mouth, and delicately sipping the soup off the spoon.
“It’s really quiet here at night,” I said to Raphaella.
Sip, from Mrs. Stoppini. An eye-roll from Raphaella, which told me what she thought of my disarming questioning technique. She took a different tack.
“Mrs. Stoppini, do you mind if I ask what will happen to the library collection when Garnet and I have finished our work?”
“Not at all, Miss Skye. The more valuable volumes, the late professor’s academic papers and the manuscripts of his published works, are bequeathed to his former employer, Ponte Santa Trinita University in Florence. The balance will, I suppose, be sold to a dealer. Mr. Havelock has already kindly advised me to have them appraised first.”
I saw my opening. “You said ‘manuscripts of his published works.’ What will happen to any unpublished manuscripts?”
“I have read no such papers. But should something be discovered, it will go to the university. They may do with it as they see fit.”
“So,” Raphaella said, “eventually the library won’t be a library anymore. It will just be a room.”
Mrs. Stoppini replied firmly, “That is correct. It will be an empty chamber, closed up and unused.”
Abruptly, she stood and began to gather our empty bowls. I wanted to ask her if she knew about the cross and medal, but I let it go. Our hostess had obviously had enough chit-chat for now.
Before getting back to work, Raphaella and I went for a walk along Wicklow Point Road. The trees on either side were wreathed in mist so thick it obscured their tops, forming a clammy tunnel. We walked silently, holding hands, putting off our return to the mansion.
“Do you still think we’re close?” I asked.
“Yes. Soon-maybe even this afternoon-everything will be clear.”
WITH ONLY TWENTY PAGES or so left to read, Raphaella went back to the Savonarola chapter in the prof’s manuscript. I started on a new column of books. We had opened the windows again to freshen the room as much as possible, but no breeze crossed the foggy grounds of the estate.
I was replacing a thick old volume on somebody named Dante Something when I heard Raphaella sigh behind me. I turned to see her slumped in her chair, her arms dangling, like a rag doll. I went over to her, not sure if I wanted to hear what she had discovered. I stood beside her and put my hand on her shoulder. She looked up at me, her eyes tired.
“The cross,” she said, tapping the manuscript. “It’s mentioned in here.”
I pulled a chair close to hers and sat down.
“What do you mean?”
“He talks about it.”
An insistent buzz broke into our thoughts. The tabletop vibrated.
I started. “What the-?”
Raphaella suppressed a smile. “My cell,” she said, pushing books and papers aside and picking up the PIE.
“It’s Mother,” she said, thumbing a button to activate the speakerphone. “Hello, Mother.”
Mrs. Skye’s voice was curt and hurried. “I’m reasonably certain it’s an atlas. The bone, not the book. But the transverse processes-the projections on each side-are missing. Broken or maybe worn off. Got to go. Mr. Tremblay is waiting for his arthritis prescription.”
“Thanks, Mother,” Raphaella said, but the connection had already been cut.
“Hmm,” Raphaella mused.
“I didn’t really follow what your mom was saying,” I told Raphaella.
“Hang on a second.”
She thumbed more buttons, and after a few moments she handed me the PIE.
“Take a look.”
There was a photo on the screen. “It’s like the picture you took,” I said after a quick glance. “The thing I took off the cross. But different.”
Raphaella nodded. “I went online to an encyclopedia site and looked up ‘atlas bone.’ You’re looking a picture of one.”
I paid more attention to the image. This one was lighter in colour and there was no black along the edges. And as Mrs. Skye had said, there was a bump, like an ear, on each side.
“Never heard of an atlas bone. A book of maps, yes. A god from Greek mythology, certainly. Atlas holds up the world. But a bone?”
“Scroll down a bit.”
I read the brief description below the illustration. The atlas is the topmost bone in a human spine, the one that cradles the skull. I handed the PIE to Raphaella and sat back.
“Why is this bone embedded in the base of that cross?” I wondered.
“It’s a relic.”
“We know it’s old, an artifact, but-”
“Not relic as in ‘artifact.’ A holy relic is something owned or maybe worn by a dead holy person. Or a part of the person’s body. It’s an object of veneration. People pray to it.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope.”
“Pray to a fingertip or a scrap of cloth?”
“Or to an atlas.”
“Wow.”
“And the place where the relic is kept is called a reliquary,” Raphaella continued.
“Which is what the cross is. But what did the prof want with it? He wasn’t religious in the formal sense. We know that.”
“It’s all in his book. And your old pal Savonarola is at the centre of it.”
“Somehow I’m not surprised.”
“Get comfortable. I need to tell you a few things.”
I settled back in my chair. “Okay, shoot.”
“IN HIS RESEARCH into the after-affects of Savonarola’s life and death,” Raphaella began, “the prof discovered the existence of a sort of underground cult that started right after the friar’s execution. A few of Savonarola’s supporters continued to meet secretly and to work toward putting his ideas into practice by influencing the government through whatever means they could. This cult kept going for over five hundred years, and still exists. From then until now, one thing bound the cult together and ensured its continuation-a relic.”
“ ‘Let there be no remains to tempt the relic hunters,’ ” I murmured.
“Pardon?”
“In my vision-dream of Savonarola’s execution three men shovelled the burned remains of the gallows and the dead Dominicans into a cart and dumped them into the river. At least, that was what was supposed to happen. But I saw one of the men sift through the ashes and pick something up before they got to work. I didn’t realize until now what I had witnessed. The hangman had specifically ordered the men, ‘Let there be no remains to tempt the relic hunters.’ His bosses in the government and the Church were afraid that Savonarola would become a martyr. That’s why they dumped the ashes in the river-no grave, nothing to dig up and worship. But they missed a piece! The atlas!”
“Of course!” Raphaella exclaimed, energized again. “Everything you’ve said jibes with what the prof wrote.”
“Finish the story,” I said, pointing to the manuscript.
“The cult continued down the years, held together by the belief that the friar was an unacknowledged martyr who had died for a Christian theocracy-Savonarola-style, of course. They continued the commitment to influence government in that direction whenever and however they could. The prof wrote that he couldn’t pinpoint when the cross was made, but it’s been dated by experts to within a hundred years of Savonarola’s death, which makes it more than four hundred years old. How he got his hands on it, he doesn’t say.”
Raphaella paused and pulled her backpack toward her, rummaged around, and came up with a bottle of apple juice. She offered it to me.
“You first,” I said.
She took a long drink and handed the bottle over. I finished it as Raphaella took up the story.
“Anyway, the prof’s book is a warning that there are always people at work, in democratic countries as well as undemocratic ones, pushing to set up a theocracy of one kind or another. He calls these people fanatics, hence the title of his book, because they only see one side of things and close their eyes to other viewpoints, and that leads to intolerance and persecution of any who disagree. A theocracy is an enemy of democracy.
“He uses the Savonarola cult as one of his strongest arguments. The reliquary is physical proof that the cult exists, which is important because there’s very little documentary evidence of it.”
“This,” I put in, “is beginning to sound like one of those conspiracy novels with secret religious brotherhoods and paintings with hidden messages.”
“The prof wrote that the Savonarola cult is always small-no more than a dozen or so extremely religious Catholic men. Needless to say, women weren’t allowed-and still aren’t. It’s not like he thinks these guys will take over the world. It’s more like he uses the cult as an example of a trend he sees all through history, in more than one religion-various denominations of Christianity, Islam, and others.”
We fell silent for a while, slumped in our chairs. I looked around the library. The thousands of books resting on their shelves seemed to mock me. The professor’s learning seemed to have been as deep as an ocean.
“It’s the cross-or rather the relic-that brought the spectre,” Raphaella replied. “It’s part of him, part of his body. And until the prof’s death, it was in the hands of an unbeliever.”
“It still is.”
Raphaella looked terrible-pale, her shoulders stiff with stress, her eyes with that otherworldly brightness I had seen before. She was tuned to the spirit world, felt the vibrations rattle through her, shaking her to the core. Until today I hadn’t worried too much about her-not as much as she did about me-but today we were stumbling toward a fierce reckoning, and it was taking a toll on her.
After listening to her, I believed that now I saw things clearly.
“The spirit probably tormented the prof without mercy, glad to get revenge on the descendant of his old enemy, Corbizzi,” I began. “It definitely came after Professor Corbizzi on the night of his death. What you’ve read and told me explains why. He was a descendant of the Arrabbiato Corbizzi who stood against Savonarola all those years ago in Florence. In a way, the professor inherited a mission from his Renaissance ancestor. He lived in Florence for most of his life, taught university there, wrote books. But he hadn’t yet written the book that would expose the Savonarola cult and what it represents. He wrote that book here, in this library.”
“And at the same time he knew the spectre was after him.”
“Right. The professor acquired the cross somehow and brought it to this house. The ghost comes with the reliquary. Move the cross and the ghost must go with it. Maybe the spirit appeared to the professor and maybe it didn’t-we don’t know. But he was at risk, especially once he began to write the book. That’s what raised the stakes. That’s what the spectre couldn’t accept-the anti-theocracy book. Savonarola’s reaction fits with his life. He was a book-burner. He torched hundreds of books he considered immoral when he was alive. Like all book-burners, he couldn’t tolerate a different point of view.”
Raphaella nodded wearily. “It all fits,” she said. “It all makes sense. Savonarola had two reasons to haunt Professor Corbizzi-to silence him by burning his book, and to wreak revenge on him.”
“I think the fire in this room that night started before the prof died-and guess who started it? The official explanation of the events was that the prof had a seizure and the force of his body hitting the floor dislodged a log from the fireplace, starting the blaze. That’s what Mrs. Stoppini believes. But that doesn’t explain the books hurled all over the place, the upturned table, the knocked-over chair. No, what happened was that the spectre appeared, maybe not for the first time. But because the prof had finished the book, it came with furious vengeance. The prof got up from the table where he was editing the manuscript. He knew what was about to happen. Flames broke out near the fireplace-maybe that’s where Savonarola was standing. The prof’s terror brought on the beginnings of the seizure. He experienced dizziness. Loss of control, loss of strength. He gathered up the manuscript, struggled toward the open secret cupboard, clutching at the walls as he lurched along, displacing books. He got to the fire-proof cupboard-which, remember, is insulated metal-and shoved the manuscript inside and locked the door. When I found it the pages were loose, piled on top of the file folder. With the manuscript safe he staggered toward the spectre and fell to the floor, knocking over the chair. And he died.”
We were silent for a little while, picturing Professor Corbizzi’s last moments of life.
“What an incredibly courageous man,” Raphaella said.
“He sure was.”
“But there’s one thing that isn’t explained,” Raphaella said, her brow wrinkled.
“The keys.”
“Right. How could Professor Corbizzi have had time to lock the cupboard, cross the room, and drop the keys into the desk drawer?”
“He didn’t.”
Raphaella smiled. “Mrs. Stoppini?”
“Indeed.”
AFTER LOCKING THE CUPBOARD and windows, Raphaella and I dragged ourselves along the hall and into the kitchen. Mrs. Stoppini stood at the table, her hands and forearms white with flour, kneading a fat roll of bread dough, her narrow body leaning into the task. I saw her in a different light now. She knew a lot more than she pretended, but how much she was aware of was still an open question.
We said our goodbyes and I remembered to leave my laptop in the shop. Then, under a sky that still refused to brighten, we climbed wearily into the van. I started the engine, turned around, and drove down the foggy lane.
“I feel like I’ve been dragged behind a train for an hour,” Raphaella sighed, stifling a yawn.
“Me, too.”
And I meant it. We were both emotionally beaten up, brain-whacked, and mauled by fear.
“But you have to admit, life with me isn’t boring,” I added as the gates closed behind the van.
“Should we have left Mrs. Stoppini there alone?”
“I was thinking the same thing-and not for the first time. But I think that if anything was going to happen to her, it would have by now.”
“I guess.”
“The only way to be sure she’s safe is to get the spectre to leave the mansion permanently. And that means moving the reliquary to another location. If we’re right in thinking that he’s bound to the cross, shifting it should solve the problem temporarily.”
“The bigger problem being to have him move on permanently,” Raphaella added. “But where could we put the cross? The workshop? Maybe the friar could help you repair antiques.”
I laughed.
“But you’d have to keep him away from flammable liquids.”
“Lame joke. Do you know that ‘edible’ and ‘inedible’ are opposites but ‘flammable’ and ‘inflammable’ mean the same thing?”
“You’re being evasive.”
“Okay. There’s too much fire hazard in the shop to take the risk of having a firebug Dominican in there. Unless…”
Raphaella turned toward me in her seat. “What?”
“If we remove the manuscript, maybe we accomplish the same thing. He wants to incinerate it. That’s his goal. No manuscript means he’s stuck in the library with the reliquary.”
“But then we’d have a totally infuriated murderous spirit in the house.”
“Well, there is that.”
“Incandescent with rage,” Raphaella added.
“Inflamed with anger.”
“Hot under the collar.”
“Fuming.”
I turned on to Raphaella’s street.
“How did we get into this mess?” she asked, her exhaustion colouring every word.
“I went to the Half Moon for a coffee one morning-what?-three weeks ago? But the truth is, I fell for a business deal that was too good to be true. I signed a contract with a very strange old lady who is a mystery cloaked in another mystery. And I talked you into helping me.”
“My normally excellent judgment was undermined by your magnetic charm.”
“Hah.”
“Or it could have been the Thai stir-fry that got to me.”
“You know what? I think it’s time Mrs. Stoppini came clean. I think I need to confront her.”
“I should go with you.”
“That would help. Mrs. Stoppini likes you. But I got us into this mess.”
“Will you go back and talk to her now?”
“No hurry,” I said.
FOR THE FIRST TIME in a long while I got a good night’s sleep, and the cloudless blue sky that greeted me when I got out of bed gave me a welcome lift.
Dad was at the breakfast table when I entered the kitchen, reading the paper and drinking a cup of coffee. A bowl sticky with the streaky remains of porridge sat beside his cup. Dad made it the old-fashioned way, with real rolled oats. No instant stuff for him.
“How you can eat that glop is a mystery to me,” I greeted him.
He lowered the paper and folded it, putting it aside. “Like most things nowadays, it’s a lost art.”
“Hah.”
“Porridge is the food of the gods. It sticks to your ribs.”
“And the pot, your spoon, and anything else it comes into contact with.”
“Did I tell you the joke about the Englishman and the Scotsman arguing over the benefits of oatmeal?”
“Not this week. Interested in a grilled cheese sandwich?”
“No, thanks. By the way, my customer was very pleased with the job you did on that pine table.”
“I’m glad,” I said, searching the fridge for a block of cheddar.
“And there was a young couple in the store looking over the walnut cabinet you made. Spent twenty minutes there. They said they’d be back.”
“Let’s hope,” I replied. “I could use the money.”
I turned on the broiler and grated cheese onto two buttered baguette halves, sprinkled them with pepper, and popped them onto the broiling pan. Sitting down opposite my father, I nodded toward the newspaper.
“Anything in there about that dead guy they found up the shore a few days ago?”
Dad shook his head, then got up and topped up his coffee and tilted his head in the direction of Mom’s study. “I think she’s given up on the Herat assignment,” he said, taking his seat again.
“Really? That’s great.”
“She hasn’t actually said so, but she’s working away on something big. She told me last night. It’s very hush-hush. It could be huge-international, even. She didn’t even mention Afghanistan.”
“That’s a relief,” I replied, keeping up the pretense that I knew nothing about it. I got up and turned off the broiler, then slid my breakfast onto a plate.
“So what’s on your agenda today?” Dad asked.
“Back to the estate, I guess. More inventory to do.”
He checked the clock on the wall above the sink. “Well, I’d better skedaddle. See you later, alligator,” he said, pulling open the back door.
“Skedaddle?” I could almost hear Raphaella ask.
I HAD RUMMAGED THROUGH my brain and couldn’t come up with a good reason why Mom or I should hang on to paintballer’s cellphone. Mom had copied all the data from the cell’s memory card and backed it up, so she had call lists, messages, the whole works. We had the information. The device itself was a liability.
Being the son of a journalist I was familiar with a few cases over the past couple of years where vindictive cops had hassled uncooperative reporters with search-and-seizures, carrying off files, computers, cellphones, and anything else they thought would cause grief to men or women forced to stand by while the law combed through their lives. The spies, as Mom called the Mounties’ security branch and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service types, were worse. I wasn’t sure what progress Mom was making with her investigation or with her lawyer, but I decided on my own to get rid of the evidence, as they say in the crime movies.
But first the little electronic instrument needed to be sanitized. Wearing rubber dishwashing gloves, I took it apart and wiped down every component-battery, data card, the casing-with a mild cleaning solvent, then reassembled it before dropping it into a fresh sealable plastic bag.
I had concluded that the cell belonged to the drowned man, and that nobody in the paintballer crowd knew about it. Mom had agreed with my deduction. But just in case, why not put it back where I’d found it? Mom had thought about turning it on and waiting to find out if anyone called, but she decided that would not be wise. Phone signals could be traced or monitored. Why invite cops or spies or criminals to our house? No, if the phone was dropped back into the hole under the juniper, we’d be free of it.
I got into my jacket and helmet and fired up the Hawk, already nagged by second thoughts.
BUMPING ALONG the Swift Rapids Road-if a narrow, rock-strewn track can be called that-I followed the dust cloud thrown up by two ATVs, grateful for the rise and fall of their engine noise, like two furious bees in a can, which would make the Hawk’s low rumble less conspicuous on an otherwise quiet sunny afternoon.
After I parted with the ATVs I rode into the cool green woods and turned off on the leaf-covered path, torn up now by my panicky escape last time, and stopped a hundred metres or so from the end, just in case the paintballers had a lookout posted there. Struggling against the Hawk’s dead weight, I pushed it backwards into a patch of saplings alongside the path. I remembered to save the location on my GPS, then took off my helmet. Before calling up the waypoint for my destination I stood motionless for a short while, listening for any sign of the boys in camo, but heard only bird-song and the wind in the treetops.
It was rough going and I made slow progress, but I reached the rock outcropping after twenty minutes or so. I scanned the little clearing from the safety of the trees before I ventured into the open, then climbed onto the granite cap, followed the fissure to the juniper, and took the bagged cell from my pocket. To avoid any possibility of fingerprints-Mom’s caution about the cops hassling her had sunk in-I had wrapped it in a supermarket sack. Careful to touch only the sack, I dropped the sealed cell into the hole, exactly where I’d found it a few days before. I rolled up the sack and stuffed it into my pocket. Mission accomplished. I slipped back into the trees, eager to return to my motorcycle.
But once again curiosity inspired the impulsive angel on my right shoulder to nudge into my consciousness. “Why not just take a quick look at the cabin?” it whispered innocently. “Just to see if anything’s changed. Come on. It’s not far.”
True, I told myself. And I could take more photos for Mom. The more info, the more she’d be hooked by this camo-boy story.
With my stomach doing the jitters, my ears tuned to pick up the slightest human sound besides mine, every nerve tingling, I crept toward the cabin until I could make out the open space through the foliage, flooded with morning sunlight. The pile of cordwood along the cabin wall was lower now. Three three-man tents-I guessed that the leader slept apart in the cabin-stood in their places, their flies undulating in the fitful breeze that swept the clearing, the weather flaps on the front entrances tied closed. Good, I thought. The paintballers have gone off somewhere. Fire rings, one for each tent, had been set at a safe distance, each with a grate laid across the stones and a blackened tripod over it for cooking.
I got out my cell, checked that the ringer and camera flash were disabled, and snapped a couple of photos. I kept to the cover of the trees and crept farther around the perimeter of the clearing until I had a clear view of the cabin’s front, with its verandah and cracked window. The door was padlocked, the weathered frame and wall stained by fresh paintball hits. The boys had been making pretend attacks again. I shot a few more pictures.
Aware that I was pressing my luck, I made my way toward the place off to the side of the cabin where the chewed-up ground indicated they parked their ATVs. It was empty. Or so I thought at first glance. Streaked with dried mud that blended perfectly with its camo finish, one ATV stood nose-in to the trees. And I could just barely make out the little licence plate. I took a picture of the machine, zoomed in, and captured the plate. I pocketed my cell.
And froze when I heard the sound of water striking dry leaves.
I held my breath, scanned the trees around the ATV for movement. I finally saw it. Sparkling with captured sunlight, a stream of water arched from the leafy ground to the camo trousers of a figure standing near the ATV, legs splayed, hands at his crotch. A two-way radio hung from his belt. Little wires connected his ears to the lump in his shirt pocket, and his head bobbed as he played the stream of water back and forth on the ground.
“Can you write your name in the dirt?” I almost shouted. If this character was the camo-boys’ idea of a sentry I figured I didn’t have much to worry about. But then I remembered the chase a few days before, when I could taste my fear at the back of my throat. I began to retrace my steps, stopping every few metres to look back and listen. When I was fairly sure I’d gotten away unnoticed I walked more confidently, sweeping the forest with my eyes as I walked as silently as I could. The sentry’s presence proved the paintballers were out and about, and I couldn’t let down my guard.
Time to boogie.
SOMETIMES I WONDERED if Mrs. Stoppini ever left her kitchen for anything other than writing letters or sleeping. When I got back to the mansion, she was making fettuccini noodles.
“Mrs. Stoppini, I need to have an important conversation with you,” I announced as soon as I had come in the door.
She turned and regarded me with a mixture of severity and curiosity.
“Indeed? And what is it about?”
“I guess it’s about my job here. And our contract.”
She searched my face for a moment, her dark brows forming a V, her mouth pursed, and seemed to come to a decision. Brushing flour from her hands and pulling her apron strings, she replied, “If this is to be a business meeting, perhaps we should hold it in the parlour. I shall join you presently.”
I walked through to the formally furnished parlour and dropped into an armchair. Sheer curtains on the north window muted the light, making the room feel cool, although a thermometer might say otherwise. There were paintings on the walls-landscapes with rolling hills, stone villas, and spear-like cypresses pinning the earth to clear blue skies.
I psyched myself up for my task. I had confidently persuaded Raphaella that I should do this on my own, but now I didn’t feel so sure. The stork-like Mrs. Stoppini could be intimidating at times. Because I wasn’t sure how much she knew, I was worried about upsetting her. I might blunder into territory that was none of my business, or trample on her grief.
She glided into the room with a silver tray holding a bottle of clear liquid and two small stemmed glasses. For a split second she reminded me of the spectre, the way her dark form seemed to cover ground without touching it.
“We shall talk over a glass of grappa,” she said in her don’t-contradict-me tone, setting down the tray and pouring from the bottle. “It was the late professor’s favourite aperitif.” She sat, perching her angular frame in the centre of the green leather couch opposite me.
“Now, Mr. Havelock, it appears you have something significant to impart. Please go ahead.”
I did my best to use a businesslike tone. “Mrs. Stoppini, the lease I signed for the workshop required that I do a full inventory of the library.”
Her eyes squinted slightly. Her posture straightened a little, if that was possible. What are you up to? her body language demanded.
“And, um, I would feel better if I was confident that you are aware of… well, everything.”
“Everything?” she repeated in a wintery voice.
“Not long ago I showed you a hidden cupboard-no, please let me go on,” I said hastily when she showed signs of bolting, “so skilfully built into the bookshelf that it was invisible. The workmanship was top-notch.”
“The late professor never did things by halves,” she stated, reluctantly staying put.
“I want you to know, Mrs. Stoppini, that I discovered it without intending to. I was taking out the things in the, er, visible cupboard when one of the vellum sheets caught on the edge of the recess where the release catch is.”
“You haven’t touched your aperitif.”
I lifted the little glass to my mouth and barely allowed it to touch my lips. An unusual fragrance, an unexpected taste.
“Once I found the cupboard and saw what was inside, I tried to show you. But I failed. I think it’s important that you know about the… er, contents. Or are you already familiar with the items? No?” I asked when she didn’t respond. “Then I think I ought to tell you. Raphaella agrees,” I quickly added, hoping that would persuade her. “Okay?”
She nodded and finished off her drink without confirming or denying that she knew about the exotic objects in the professor’s secret cupboard.
“There are some very old manuscripts on vellum,” I began. “I can’t read them, so I can’t tell you what they are. There is a small handmade wooden box containing a medal with Girolamo Savonarola’s image on it.”
Her frown deepened.
“You’ve heard of him?”
“Every Florentine has heard of him,” she replied, shakily refilling her glass and clutching it in both hands, as if afraid it would fly away.
“There is a large cross of gold with gems set into it. I don’t know anything about jewellery, so I can’t say what they are. They might even be glass, but I doubt it.”
I had decided to leave out the glass dome and the atlas for the time being.
“Mrs. Stoppini, that cross might be a priceless antique.”
“Good gracious,” she murmured-to herself, not to me. “I didn’t realize.”
“There’s something else.”
The intense woman sitting across the room from me began slowly to come apart. Her severe expression ebbed away as signs of grief-a softening of her brow and the set of her mouth-crept in. The rigidity of her back and shoulders gave way, and she gradually settled into her chair. Her chin quivered.
“I’m sorry,” I said quietly, regretting my decision to press her. But she surprised me.
“Please continue, Mr. Havelock.”
I swallowed a bit of grappa. “There is a complete typed book-length manuscript. Written by Professor Eduardo Corbizzi.”
She gaped as her thick brows rose in surprise. “Did you say ‘complete’?”
I nodded.
She began to cry silently.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Stoppini,” I said again.
“Tell me about it,” she said, pulling a lace hanky from her sleeve and dabbing at her streaming eyes.
“The title is Fanatics. Professor Corbizzi had been editing it when he… when he stopped.” I hesitated. “Raphaella has read it.”
“Good. The late professor would have been most gratified to know that an intelligent young woman like Miss Skye had read his book.”
She blew her nose and continued to pull herself back together.
“Well,” she sighed, making a final dab with her hanky and stuffing it up her sleeve, “an interesting conversation to be sure.”
“It’s not over yet.”
“In that case.” She held up the bottle to ask if I wanted more, and reading my refusal in my face, she topped up her drink.
“I have a few questions, if you don’t mind,” I said.
She took a slug. “Please go on.”
“This may sound strange, but have you ever noticed the odour of smoke around the house? Or even outside?”
I kept my eyes on her face, certain that if she tried to be evasive or dishonest I’d notice.
“Not since the library was cleaned and the draperies and rugs laundered.”
It was possible. Her activities in the mansion were mainly confined to her bedroom, the kitchen, and the room where we were sitting now. The spectre could reveal himself when he wanted. And to whoever he wished. Did the odour he left behind follow the same rule of ghostly physics?
I pushed on. “You’ve told me that toward the end of his life the late professor was very secretive, and that he asked you to stay away from the library. I get the impression that he was acting… um, in a way that was uncharacteristic.”
I had almost said “acting crazy” but caught myself just in time.
“I…” She paused momentarily. “I used to love that library,” she said sadly. “It was-is-such a beautiful room, so full of light. It was our custom each morning to take our coffee there before our breakfast. We would chat or read contentedly, surrounded by our books, discussing our plans to return one day to Italy and retire to a small village outside Florence. Our house there has been in the Corbizzi family for three hundred years. There is a small garden and a few olive trees on the rise beyond the yard. I regret to say it passed into other hands when the professor needed to raise money quickly last year for his research.
“There was a time, Mr. Havelock, when I would not have shared with you what I am about to relate. But you have proved to be a reliable and, may I say, a caring young man, and I feel that I can confide in you.
“During the last few years the professor began to act in a way that was, as you say, uncharacteristic. He was frequently agitated. He had begun a new project, his last book, he promised, his best and most important. I saw immediately that it was not like the others, which he composed at an orderly pace, working an hour or two each morning after breakfast, then again after lunch. He became obsessed, as if his life would have been rendered meaningless if he didn’t finish the project.
“He grew increasingly secretive, retreating to the library behind closed doors. He made me swear to keep confidential all facts pertaining to his most recent work. Eventually he requested, then demanded, that I stay away from the room in which we had passed so many pleasant hours. He worked feverishly, often long into the night, as if desperate to reach some self-imposed deadline. Occasionally I would open the doors to see him asleep at his work.
“I feared for his health. He lost weight and his colour was not good. Sometimes I heard him talking to himself, at times remonstrating, as if he was arguing with someone. I looked forward to the day when that accursed book would be finished for good and all. But of course, he passed on before… I was about to say, ‘before he brought the book to a conclusion,’ but you’ve said it is finished.”
“Did his change in behaviour begin as soon as he started the book?”
“Shortly thereafter. He was conducting preliminary research and drafting the outline when he told me excitedly that he had made some sort of breakthrough or discovery and it was imperative that he go immediately to Florence. It was subsequent to his return that he… changed. For some reason, the journey altered him, and he evolved from a kind and gentle man to a person possessed. He was frantic to finish the project.”
“Did he bring anything home with him?”
“Papers. Notes from his research. Books. And something he refused to let me see. He kept it in the library, out of sight.”
“So you don’t know what it was.”
“Not until today. I know now. It had to have been that cross.”
Everything Mrs. Stoppini had told me fit with what Raphaella and I had deduced. Now I had to proceed cautiously. I couldn’t let slip anything about the spirit haunting the library. If I did, Mrs. Stoppini would think I had flipped my lid.
“Mrs. Stoppini, there are two important-crucial-suggestions Raphaella and I want to make.”
“Very well.”
“But you can’t ask why we’re making them.”
“Indeed. Well, Mr. Havelock, you are mysterious when the spirit takes you.”
You’re not kidding, I almost said, not realizing at first that she was using the word “spirit” in a different way.
“About the cross. If it is bequeathed to the university”-she nodded as I spoke-“please don’t take it to Italy yourself. Don’t let anyone take it. Send it. The second thing is that Raphaella and I are certain there is only one copy of the professor’s manuscript. There should be a backup copy. We’d like your permission to take it out of the house to have it photocopied.”
I had decided not to tell her that Raphaella had photos of each page, taken without permission.
“We hope you’ll have it published,” I said.
“Yes, Mr. Havelock, I agree. As I said, I was not aware that the late professor had completed the book. That fact alters my original intention to include it among his papers and add it to the bequest. I shall not do so. But I see no need to hurry publication. The manuscript will keep, I am sure.”
Not if it burns first, I wanted to say but couldn’t.
“In addition,” she went on, “you are quite correct about making a photocopy. I shall lodge the second copy with my lawyer. He keeps a safe in his chambers. I would be most grateful if you and Miss Skye could attend to that task as soon as is convenient.”
I relaxed a bit and took another sip of the grappa. We sat together for a few minutes in what Mrs. Stoppini would have called a companionable silence. I heard her sigh, then she spoke softly.
“In a way, Mr. Havelock, the late professor gave his life to that manuscript.”
She didn’t know how right she was.
IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON when I got home to find Dad assaulting the hemlock hedge that borders our yard, his electric clippers buzzing and clattering as he slashed away like a cavalier. Mom was relaxing in a chaise longue on the patio, spooning boysenberry yogurt into her mouth.
“How was your day?” she asked.
“Eventful.”
“How so?”
“Tell you later. I gotta hit the shower. Make sure Dad still has all his fingers when he’s done.”
I stood under the hot water a long time, letting the shower sluice away the day’s sweat and tension and trying to decide what had been more intimidating, the testosterone-charged atmosphere of the paintball camp or the mournful face of Mrs. Stoppini. I was pleased that she had opened up a bit. When I thought about it, I recognized that she had placed a lot of trust in me from the start-in certain areas. Not that I blamed her for guarding her personal business. It was her unexplained behaviour concerning the secret cupboard that had weakened my trust in her and led me to wonder if, in a way, I was being used and purposely kept in the dark. Now I believed in her, and that made me both glad and relieved, because I liked Mrs. Stoppini.
I was getting into clean clothes when my cell rang.
“It’s your companion,” Raphaella said.
“Nice to hear your voice, Ethel.”
“Hah-hah. What did she say?”
I sat down on the edge of my bed and replayed my conversation with Mrs. Stoppini.
“It must have been hard on her, going over the events of the prof’s death again,” Raphaella remarked.
“Yeah. There were lots of tears. But I got the feeling she was relieved, too, like she was unburdening herself.”
“She’d been holding it all in since he died.”
“Right.”
“But you’re certain she knows nothing about our favourite ghost?”
“I’m pretty sure.”
“Good. And you got her permission to take the manuscript away and get it copied?”
“Yup.”
“You’re brilliant.”
“Come over for supper. We can pick up a movie and flop in front of the TV for the evening.”
“Okay. Who’s cooking?”
“Dad.”
“Oh.”
“Come anyway. It’s barbecue.”
“Barbecued what?”
“I don’t know. Some dead animal or other. I’ll try to get Dad to throw some veggie burgers on the grill while he’s at it.”
WHEN I CAME DOWNSTAIRS Dad was still raising mayhem in the yard, a clutter of hemlock cuttings at his feet. I dragged a chair beside Mom and sat down.
“How’s the research going?” I asked.
“You haven’t explained your cryptic answer to my question when you came home.”
“You first.”
“Are you still my confidential source?”
“Yup.”
“Meaning anything I tell you can’t be shared.”
I nodded.
“Even with Raphaella.”
“No dice, Mom. I tell her everything. Besides, she already knows most of it.”
“All right. I’m not surprised. Anyway, I’ve contacted the Mounties through my lawyer. The laws relating to terrorist activity and suspected activity are pretty broad, so someone like me has to be careful about even possessing information affecting national security, because that can be interpreted as a crime. Protecting an anonymous source is very difficult. The old rules about reporters refusing to divulge a source don’t really apply. It’s all very unclear, and if it’s unclear, the practical result is that the security forces have very wide powers to make my life hell.”
“So you think these guys are terrorists?”
“I think it’s possible. I know the Mounties will think it’s likely. I can’t tell the authorities about the cellphone-not yet anyway-without getting into legal complications. In the meantime, my lawyer has worked out a deal with the cops. My position is that an anonymous source warned me about some suspicious-looking guys at a hunt camp near Orillia. I followed up and got enough info for a story, and I want to go ahead. But I understand the cops’ position that I can’t compromise an investigation. So I’ll agree to hold off. When the cops break the story, the basic facts will go out via the usual press conference. Once it’s announced, I have the exclusive on all the details.”
“That’s great, Mom. You can continue your research so you’ll be ready when you get the green light.”
“Exactly.”
“Will it go worldwide, d’you think?”
“Probably. For which I have you to thank.”
“True,” I replied, smiling.
“Even though you bribed me.”
“If you want to play in the big leagues, Mom, you gotta be tough.”
She laughed. “Right. My son, the hard rock.”
“Anyway, go on before Dad finishes.”
“The phone was the key,” she continued. “By tracking down many of the numbers I’ve been able to identify some of the men. Most of them live in the Scarborough area. A lot of the calls were made to a particular mosque in the same locality. I’m beginning to piece together a scenario, but I have lots more research to do, including a trip to the city to confirm a lot of what I have.”
“How does the drowned guy who was found up on Cumberland Beach fit into all this?”
“I’m coming to that. You were right about the link between the cellphone, the GPS, and the drowned man. There’s been an information blackout on the corpse. Since the body was discovered there has been no further information about him-no name, no cause of death, no autopsy report. When I made enquiries I was stonewalled. The Mounties won’t confirm or deny that there was an autopsy.”
I remembered one of Mom’s reporter’s maxims: if the authorities refused to tell you something, it was because they had something to hide. Which demanded the question…
“Why?”
“Good question. One of the first things I did was follow the links. The dead man owned the GPS you found. The GPS took you to the camp, where you came across the cellphone. The info on the phone’s memory card led me to the Scarborough mosque and the men I mentioned before. But there’s more. It turns out that whoever owned the cellphone made dozens of calls to a certain very interesting telephone number. I pulled in a few favours and discovered that telephone number belongs to a cop. A Mountie.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I’m not kidding. The Mountie was the drowned man’s controller. The dead guy must have been undercover.”
“Meaning he was also a cop.”
“Or working for them as an informer. Feeding them intelligence. Or helping them to set up a sting. Everything you and I know-and more-the cops are also aware of.”
“Meaning,” I added with a shudder, “there’s a good chance the undercover was found out by the gang and killed.”
I recalled the night at the mansion, when I stood at the window and watched the thunderstorm tear up the sky. I had thought I heard a motorboat. Were the paintballers dumping the body of the murdered undercover man, not realizing that somehow his GPS had floated away?
“I wonder what the paintballers are planning,” I muttered.
“You should stop calling them that. It makes them seem like innocent sportsmen. These guys are serious characters. They’re in training. They were considered dangerous enough for the cops to infiltrate the group.”
I thought of the paintball hits around the door and window of the cabin out at the camp, and of the leader, with his commanding air and the machine pistol hanging across his chest. But then I saw in my mind’s eye the so-called sentry I had come upon that very morning. He didn’t seem dangerous. He was a joke, playing at soldier with his music-player buds in his ears.
“The Mounties still don’t know about the GPS and the cellphone,” Mom said. “That’s why I had you take the cell to your new workshop. It’s evidence. If the cops turn on me and get a search warrant for the house to take away my files and computer and so on-and they’ve done it before to other journalists with pretty flimsy cause-I need the cell to be off-site where the search warrant won’t apply.”
“No worries on that score, Mom.”
She pinned me with her eyes. “Why do I get the impression there’s something you’re not telling me?”
“The GPS is gone, like I told you. The phone is back where I found it.”
Mom’s pretty features clouded over. “That’s what you meant by ‘eventful’ when I asked you about your day. I thought I told you-”
“Like I said, No worries.”
“Please don’t go near that place again.”
The sound of Dad’s hedge clippers died and we watched him trudge across the lawn, winding the extension cord into big loops on his way to the garage.
“Anyway, Mom, you haven’t shared your theory. What are these guys planning?”
Dad came out of the garage and walked down the flagstone path toward us.
“Stay tuned,” Mom answered.
NEXT MORNING, Raphaella and I went through the familiar routine-taking compulsory tea with Mrs. Stoppini, anxiously opening the library doors, every nerve vibrating-releasing locks to get into the secret cupboard. But this time, the spectre didn’t appear. We left the mansion with the professor’s manuscript at the bottom of my backpack.
With Raphaella riding pillion, I piloted the Hawk through the cool morning, turned in to the big mall, and parked near the front door of the office supply store. We walked inside, filled in an order form, then waited while a man wearing green braces with his purple trousers ran off a copy of the manuscript.
While Raphaella was paying for the service I dropped a few dollar coins into the shrinkwrap machine and sealed up the original manuscript. I slid the photocopy into the professor’s file box. We left the store and rode to Mrs. Stoppini’s lawyer’s office on Colborne Street. We explained to the secretary who we were.
“Ah, yes,” she said. “I was speaking to Mrs. Stoppini myself.”
We handed over the package and made our way out the door-but not until we had watched the secretary put the package into the safe.
The sun had climbed toward noon by the time we pulled through the mansion gates. Raphaella and I went directly to the library and put the photocopy where it belonged. We sat down in the chairs facing the fireplace.
“One last duty,” I said with no confidence whatsoever.
“Finding a way to make the spirit leave.”
“For good.”
We threw a few ideas around, including Raphaella’s joking suggestion to hire a priest to conduct an exorcism. She was laughing when she said it.
“I don’t think you can hire a priest, anyway. Besides, you’re not Catholic.”
No matter how many scenarios we spun, we ended up with the same problem-the gold cross.
“How about we separate the relic from the cross?” I suggested.
“Thereby accomplishing what?”
“Did you just say ‘thereby’?”
“Sorry. Must have been the influence of the lawyer’s office. But answer my question anyway.”
“If we remove the atlas we dissolve the cult. No reliquary, no secret movement.”
“But they don’t actually need the reliquary. They can still hold meetings and worship the friar and hatch their plans. And really, none of that is our business. They have a right to believe what they want.”
“True. Okay, why don’t we post the atlas on an online auction. ‘One fanatical monk’s atlas bone. Previously owned. Slightly marked by events.’ ”
“ ‘Be the first kid on your block to have your very own holy relic,’ ” Raphaella added, and began to giggle. “If we separate the relic from the cross, what do we do with the atlas?” she asked, suddenly serious again. “I don’t believe it’s holy, but it is part of a human being, however evil he was sometimes.”
“Could we bury it?”
“Where?”
“A Catholic cemetery?”
“But would that solve anything?”
“I don’t know.”
“Me either.”
“So,” I summed up, “we’re agreed.”
“Yeah. We don’t have a clue what to do.”
“Exactly.”
OVER THE NEXT WEEK a lot happened in the part of my life that had nothing to do with the Corbizzi estate or the Renaissance ghost that had taken up residence there.
Raphaella was in constant demand. MOO was gearing up for opening night, with a full rehearsal schedule. The show was coming together well, she told me. It was looking and sounding good. Mr. and Mrs. Director were getting along. Between MOO and her responsibilities at the Demeter, Raphaella was run ragged.
I was bouncing down the stairs from my room one morning when my cell rang. A man introduced himself as Derek and said he and his wife had been looking at the walnut cabinet I had made and put on display in the Olde Gold showroom. My father had given him my cell number. Would I be able to come to their house and discuss a commission?
I rode out to their century home on Maple Drive, where we sat by the lake in wicker patio chairs and worked out a deal for the cabinet and three more custom-designed pieces-two chests of drawers and a bookcase with glass doors. I agreed to come back with an estimate and preliminary drawings in a couple of weeks-they weren’t in a hurry, they said-and left the patio with a deposit cheque in my wallet.
I practically sang out loud as I rode home. Finally, a real customer-and some cash flow. Finally, I could realistically hope that not too far in the future Raphaella and I would be able to find a place of our own and move in together. We had talked about getting married. The conversation lasted about five seconds, as I had expected. Raphaella thought marriage was an outmoded institution based on the idea that women were property or second-class citizens. “We don’t need a piece of paper,” she had said. “We know how we feel about each other.” I didn’t care one way or the other, as long as I was with her.
I came back into the house to hear a strange sound coming from the living room. Our TV set never saw action until at least six o’clock. I walked down the hall and got my second shock. My mother was watching TV. In the middle of the day.
Before I could say, “What’s wrong?” she asked, “Heard the news?”
At the bottom of the screen a white banner crawled, almost shouting “Breaking News,” while an overly made-up woman sitting behind a huge kidney-shaped desk was talking.
“… confirmed that at least six men, including the imam of the Scarborough mosque all the suspects attended, were arrested early this morning in a coordinated series of raids in Scarborough and Mississauga involving security services and two police forces. The men, all Pakistani-Canadians, ranging in age from juveniles to mid-twenties, have been detained in connection with possible terrorist activities. More on this after the break.”
Mom hit the Mute button on the remote.
“It’s started,” she said.
“Did you know it was coming?”
“I knew it would be soon. That’s why I went to the city and checked out the mosque and some of the addresses I had acquired by using the phone numbers on the cell you found. I just drove by and took pictures. I already had their names.”
“So you’re all set to go?”
The sparkle in her eyes said yes. “I think so. There might even be a book in this.”
On the TV screen, where the news reader had just been talking about suspected terrorists, a woman was earnestly demonstrating the wonders of a new brand of paper towel to her husband. The “more after the break” claim turned out to be a repeat of the announcement. Additional information was promised.
By the time the six o’clock news came on the kitchen radio, the arrest count had risen and the media had already dubbed the detainees “The Severn Ten,” continually referring to them as Muslim men. The training camp had been discovered, thanks to an anonymous source, near Orillia.
“That’s us, Mom,” I exclaimed, earning a scowl from her and a confused glance from my father. He put down his knife and fork and calmly aligned them beside his plate of fish and chips.
“Why do I have the feeling I’m the last one to get the joke?” Dad asked.
Mom took a sip of her white wine and began to explain. She emphasized the reasons why she couldn’t tell Dad what she had been working on. Now that the story was out, she could. Our plates were empty by the time she finished.
Dad looked at me, then at Mom, then he smiled.
“So you’re not going to Herat, then,” he said.
By eleven o’clock the training camp was being called “jihadist” and the men “Islamists.” They had been plotting, the police said, to attack one or more targets in the city, including Union Station and CSIS headquarters. A huge cache of firearms, ammunition, and explosives had been captured during the raids. In addition, each of the detained men carried a copy of a manifesto calling for the establishment of an Islamist state and strict rule according to Sharia law.
“In other words, a theocracy,” I murmured. “There’s not much news left for you to break, is there, Mom?” I asked.
“Oh, we’ll see,” she said mysteriously.
AFTER DINNER I FLOPPED in front of the TV and flipped through channels mindlessly, unable to give my attention to anything on offer. I tossed the remote aside without turning off the set. On the screen two ego-warriors in black jumpsuits and watch caps were going through the classic Hollywood “suiting up” scene-buckling buckles, zipping zippers, cinching drawstrings, slamming ammo clips into wicked-looking weapons, eager to shoot or blow up anything that got in their way-all this as uptempo music pounded in the background. It wasn’t clear to me what they were fighting for, other than their own egos. As sparks flew and mangled bodies fell, my mind was constantly drawn back to reality and the radio newscast at dinner.
I was relieved that the whole issue had been resolved. The bad guys had been rounded up and Mom was staying put-for the time being, anyway.
Raphaella hadn’t taken the camo-boys seriously, but now she’d have to. Mom had it right. There was nothing funny about them. I figured some of them-like the one I had seen taking a leak at the camp-were losers, but even losers can be dangerous. An explosion in an enclosed underground train depot like Union Station, with thousands of commuters packed onto the platforms or streaming up and down the stairways, would be a bloodbath, ripping countless bodies to shreds. If the terrorists had been able to carry out their missions there would have been blood on the walls in other parts of the city, too.
And all for what? An Islamist state based on Sharia law? In North America? How realistic was that? The camo-boys must have left their sanity out in the bush somewhere.
Of all the revolting, cowardly acts humans were capable of, planting a bomb and walking away to safety had to be one of the most despicable. Killing was bad enough. Murdering without even knowing or caring whose blood you spilled was worse. And suicide bombers? A bunch of cowards brainwashed by soul-dead manipulators. They boarded a bus or walked into a crowded market and thumbed a button, vaporizing themselves and tearing dozens of strangers to bloody fragments. They didn’t even have the guts to stay around and witness the carnage.
Guys like the Severn Ten were not freedom fighters or soldiers of God. They were vermin who crawled out of the woodwork when the sun went down. They wanted a theocracy. Professor Corbizzi had warned that Savonarola had wanted a theocracy, too. Government according to the will of God. Different religion, same objective. As far as I knew, Savonarola had never planted a bomb and beetled home to wait for the body parts to fly, but he had called for the death of his political enemies, and the burning of “sinners” and their “vanities.”
I picked up the remote and shut off the TV, recalling Raphaella’s question in Professor Corbizzi’s library not long ago. Was it the religion that was to blame or the people who practised it-the songbook or the singers? She had wondered if evil people used their religion as a cover for their own immorality, an excuse to kill and maim. The pope who signed the order to torture and hang and burn Savonarola would have said he was doing the will of God. He was also snuffing out a personal enemy who had urged reform of the Church and removal of corrupt men like him. If the camo-boys had succeeded in bombing Union Station they’d likely have shouted, “God is great!” but they would have meant “Aren’t we wonderful!”
The news reports had harped on about the Severn Ten being Muslims, as if every Muslim in the country was a terrorist. It wasn’t religion or holy texts that killed. It was people who read the books and used bits of what they picked off the pages to justify their deeds, the way the ancient Greeks in the old blue book of myths on my bookshelf had used the Fates.
“God made me do it” or “God wanted me to do it” was a lie.
FOR THE TIME BEING, MOO had taken over Raphaella’s life. As stage manager she had to be on hand for each full rehearsal and every performance-a responsibility I’d have run from but Raphaella enjoyed. The show had a three-night run. Opening night found me backstage, sitting on a chair out of everyone’s way. Although I hated musicals, I was energized by the performers in early-twentieth-century costumes who entered and exited according to Raphaella’s cues and sang their comical songs with more enthusiasm than skill. In her all-black outfit and wire-thin headset, holding a clipboard in one hand and a mechanical pencil in another, she reminded me of the day soon after we had met. Frustrated by her ignoring me, I marched across Mississauga Street, bashed through the backstage door, found her working a rehearsal of the Sound of Music, and declared that I had loved her since the moment I first saw her. Amazed at myself for blurting out such a terrifying admission, I was even more thunderstruck when she dropped her clipboard and kissed me on the mouth in a way I’d never been kissed before.
MOO’s opening night was a smash. The following shows sold out. As the cast and directors had hoped, they were invited to give a benefit performance for the World Youth Congress at Geneva Park, the conference centre on the east shore of Lake Couchiching. The producer consulted the two directors and the cast, who all agreed, and after a day’s rest, Raphaella, the directors, and the musicians went out to Geneva Park in the morning to set up and do a thorough sound check.
“Want to come with me for the performance?” Raphaella asked me on the phone that afternoon. “You can give me a ride out and back.”
I picked her up after an early supper and we rode out to Geneva Park, motoring through the Chippewas of Rama territory and past the busy casino. We turned off Rama Road, followed a tree-lined lane to a gatehouse, where we signed in and received photo-ID badges from blue-clad rent-a-cops, and parked in the lot nearest the conference centre, where the performance would be held. I noticed several security personnel in similar outfits near the main building.
Inside, teenagers of all sizes and shapes and wearing a wide variety of dress styles wandered around in small groups, obviously on a lull between laid-on activities, chatting in languages I didn’t recognize. Chairs had been arranged in front of the stage. Music stands stood skeletally off to the side. Raphaella and I went backstage, where Mr. and Mrs. Director were arguing about something.
“I’d better get out of your hair,” I said. “Maybe I’ll go for a walk.”
Handing me the PIE, she replied, “Take care of this for me? I forgot to leave it at home.”
Raphaella had a rule that no cells were allowed backstage. People said they’d turn them off, then they’d forget. I shoved the PIE into my pocket and gave Raphaella a kiss.
“See you later,” I said. Then, nodding toward the warring directors, “Good luck with the children.”
A crew of groundskeepers were tending to the lawn and shrubs in the open area beside the main building, cutting and trimming and raking, looking overheated in their brown uniforms and baseball-style hats. According to the map in the pamphlet I had picked up at the gate, the centre occupied a forested peninsula intersected by pea-gravel trails connecting tennis courts, sleeping cabins, outbuildings, patios, and the beach. I followed the path toward the lake. At the shore I came to a boathouse and dock, where a security guard who looked as if she’d rather be just about anywhere else stood sentry. I continued along the edge of the water until I got to a stand of white pines. I walked a few steps into the green grove, the mantle of fallen needles springy under my feet, and sat down, leaning against one of the trees. The lake was bright with late-afternoon sunlight, shimmering in the still air, the green water along the shore fringed with spiky grass and sand.
Chiefs Island lay off to the southwest, between me and Wicklow Point, where Mrs. Stoppini was probably writing letters in her study or reading over a glass of Chianti, alone in her big empty mansion. No, not quite alone, I reminded myself, and shivered. The friar was there, too, lurking. I asked myself again how Raphaella and I could force the spirit to slink away for good, and as always I was stuck for an answer.
I opened the pamphlet I had picked up at the gate, curious about the World Youth Congress just under way. The teenage participants had come from all over the world, representing more than two dozen countries. No wonder there were rent-a-cops around, I thought. The congress brought the kids together to inspire “mutual understanding and cooperation between cultures,” through activities like “team-building” and “goal-oriented tasks that encourage and reward collaboration.” I hoped that meant the kids could have fun together and get to know one another by sailing, swimming, playing games, and generally horsing around.
I looked up when I heard boots scraping on the footpath. A man in a sweat-stained brown uniform made his way along the shore. Grass clippings clung to his trouser cuffs. He glanced at me and continued on without saying anything. He looked familiar, in a vague way.
I folded the pamphlet and slipped it into a back pocket, thinking the congress was a terrific idea. I liked it when people from different countries and cultures mingled. Lazy in the heat, I settled back against the tree and idly picked up a clump of dry brown pine needles. Dad had tried to teach me some arithmetic once, long before I started school, using pine fascicles. We were hiking the Ganaraska Trail, west of town, in a blaze of autumn colour, and he was rambling away about white and red pines, how their needle clusters were different. Five white, two red, he chanted, not realizing that I was barely paying attention. He plucked one fascicle from each kind of tree and pointed out that the red pine fascicle held two needles, the white five.
“Remember, the word ‘white’ has five letters, and the white pine has five needles. The word ‘red’ has three letters-two less than five-therefore red has two needles. And white times red makes ten.”
How he imagined this convoluted logic would help me remember anything was beyond me-for a while, until I realized it had worked.
I checked my watch. The show would be starting soon. I got up and ambled back, using a different route. The trees threw long shadows across the trail. I passed through a cluster of sleeping cabins-old log structures that had been updated. The cabins were scattered across a pine grove. Whitewashed rocks delineated the paths leading from the gravel walkway to the ground-level platform at each cabin door.
White times red makes ten popped into my mind again. Ten divided by white equals red. Ten divided by red equals white. I chanted as I walked.
Ten.
At the edge of my vision, a brown blur. I whirled around in time to see a man hurry into the trees behind the cabin nearest the lake. It was the groundskeeper I had met at the shore, the one who had looked familiar. He was carrying one of those small foldable shovels. He hadn’t noticed me.
Ten.
What kind of task would take a landscape worker into the bush? I wondered. Keeping the cabin between him and me, I worked my way around it until I could see movement in the maples beyond the pine grove. Where the ground sloped away to the lake he stopped, got to his knees, and began to dig. I crept back to the front of the cabin, my shoulder brushing the log wall.
Ten.
I ransacked my memory, frustrated. I couldn’t place the man’s face. Why did that number and the image of the face chase themselves around my brain box? Were they linked? I allowed my vision to play across the grounds and the tall white pines that striped the area with shadows. Around me, all was quiet. No one stirred in any of the cabins or along the walkways. Everyone was in the audience, waiting for the show to begin.
Ten.
In a dark corner of my mind, something clicked as a connection was made.
Ten.
The news reports about the suspected terrorists associated with the paintball/jihadist training camp called the men who had been apprehended by the police the Severn Ten.
And I hadn’t paid enough attention to the details.
Ten had seemed right. I had seen exactly that number of camo-boys at the camp, and I had taken photos of some of them, including the leader. Ten men had been arrested in Scarborough and Mississauga.
But one news report had stated that an imam had been taken into custody as part of the conspiracy. Was the imam one of the men at the camp? Or should the total number of arrests have been eleven?
Had the cops missed one? Had one of the paintball-camp terrorists slipped out of the net?
Frantically, I snatched Raphaella’s cell from my pocket. My hands shook so violently I could barely thumb the keys.
“Hello?”
“Dad, put Mom on. Hurry.”
“What-?”
“Do it!”
My mother’s voice came on a couple of seconds later. “Garnet?”
“Mom. You have the photos from the paintball camp on your laptop.”
She caught the excitement in my voice.
“Yes, I still have them.”
“Email the picture of the guy with the machine pistol to Raphaella’s cell. Right away.”
“Got it.”
I disconnected. I stole a look around the corner of the building. The man was still at work, deep in the trees, digging. I stood quietly, listening to the air flowing in and out of my lungs. Once more I scanned the cabins, each with its path neatly bordered by white rocks, each with its single window and low platform before the door. I visualized another cabin, colourful paintball strikes around the door and windows, like acne.
The PIE vibrated.
I punched buttons. Opened the email. Mom had sent the photo. I zoomed in on the face of the camp leader. Take away his moustache, exchange the camo field cap for a brown groundskeeper’s hat, and there he was.
I erased Mom’s email and called her back.
“Listen carefully,” I said in a low voice, trying and failing to hold back the adrenaline buzz. “He’s here-at Geneva Park, at the World Youth Congress. I saw him.”
It all made sense, I rushed on. Why did the terrorists access their camp by water, from Lake Couchiching down the Trent system to the landing? Because they intended to attack by water. Their target was Geneva Park!
And what had they been doing out on the lake during a storm that night? Rehearsing. Practising. Getting their timing right. Maybe landing at Geneva Park in the middle of the night, in a storm, when they wouldn’t be seen, and burying arms and ammo right on the grounds. But they ran into trouble. A violent thunderstorm. An overloaded boat, maybe. A boat pitched around by savage waves. One of them-the undercover-fell out of the boat during the thunderstorm. Or his cover was blown and they killed and dumped him. His GPS floated free and washed up on the grounds of the Corbizzi estate.
“They planned to assault Geneva Park during the youth summit all along, Mom! I-”
“I’m phoning my contact at the cops. Hang up, Garnet. Right now. And get the hell out of there!”
I thumbed the Off button and shoved the PIE into my pocket. Then I heard a twig snap behind the cabin.
I FLATTENED MY BACK against the logs and held my breath.
The terrorist in the brown uniform walked purposefully past the corner of the building, heading down the main walkway, his feet crunching on the gravel. He held the shovel in one hand and a gym bag sagging from its handles in the other. What weighed down the bag was easy to guess. Thoughts flicked on and off in my mind like camera flashes in a stadium crowd. A man twisted with hate carries a rifle into a Montreal school and massacres more than a dozen women. A couple of Colorado teenagers zoned out on self-pity make war on classmates, leaving a dozen dead. It seemed every country had its school shooting or equivalent, where twisted minds saw murder as a form of self-expression. But this guy was different. He was a fanatic calmly carrying out his version of Allah’s will. Within minutes he would stroll into the main building, pretending interest in the show-your friendly lawn-care guy attracted by the crowd and the music. He’d find a good vantage point in the semi-darkness, put the bag down, whack a bullet clip into the machine pistol, lay out the extra clips in a neat line for rapid reloading, and let the gun make a statement that would ensure he’d be remembered for decades-and so would his cause. He’d open up on the crowd, screaming that God was great as bullets tore into flesh and bone, filling the air with a fine mist of gore. Within minutes the auditorium would be a slaughterhouse strewn with corpses, the floor a lake of blood. When the cops came for him he’d keep tossing grenades until he was shot dead. He’d be a martyr.
And Raphaella would be among the dead.
“Hey!” I called out.
He stopped about ten paces from me. His broad shoulders bunched. He turned slowly, his dark eyes hard and calculating.
What to say next? I scrabbled for words. Blanked. Stood like a fool, mouth open like a startled fish.
“Er, have you seen Mary?” I blurted, my heart battering my chest wall. “I… she told me this was her cabin. Number… whatever. But nobody’ll answer. See?”
Moronically, I demonstrated by rapping on the screen door. I ransacked my brain for a way to delay him, but I had run out of ideas. He took a step toward me. He still hadn’t uttered a word. Behind him in the distance I heard the opening cymbal bash of the overture for Merrie Olde Orillia.
“Don’t,” I pleaded. “They have nothing against you. They’re innocent.”
His eyes flared. His fingers tightened on the looped handles of the bag. Something came over his face-a shadow-and I could almost hear him asking himself how I knew that he was about to make the auditorium an inferno of gunfire and smoke. The dark unyielding eyes widened again. Did he realize I was the intruder who had come upon him and his followers in the forest outside Orillia, who had caused the arrest of his accomplices and the destruction of his plans?
“Think about it,” I said desperately. “You can’t do this.”
He strode determinedly toward me. The hand gripping the shovel’s handle relaxed and allowed the tool to slip through his palm until he could grasp the end of the shaft. I readied myself to shift quickly at the right second. But he fooled me. In one lightning-fast circular motion he flung the shovel. It whickered end over end across the space between us, small lumps of earth flying off the blade as it spun.
I flinched instinctively, twitching my head back and to one side a split second before I heard the sickening pang of metal on bone. Light exploded inside my head and I dropped like a stone to the platform. He was on me in a second, snatching up the shovel, lifting it high, and striking down toward my skull. I rolled onto my back and he grunted as the shovel crashed into the plank beside my head. He snarled, eyes smouldering with hatred and frustration. I brought one knee to my chest, and as he raised the shovel overhead, I gathered what strength I could and jabbed my heel into his balls.
He cried out and fell to his knees, desperately groping for breath. The shovel clattered to the planks. I scrabbled away from him and, struggling dizzily to my feet, stood swaying like a drunk, my vision blurred, my head ringing. Something streamed down the side of my face like hot syrup.
The terrorist fell forward onto one hand, the other clutching his crotch, choking as if the air around him had been sucked away. He turned his head, fixed his eyes on the gym bag. As if in slow motion I picked up the shovel, stumbled out of his reach. I had no doubt that if he got the tool I’d be dead in seconds.
“Don’t move,” I croaked.
Gasping and groaning, he crawled toward the bag.
“I said stop.”
Still he fought his way across the bare ground, his fingers scratching at the soil. I raised the shovel and slammed the rounded side of the blade down on the back of his head. There was the clang of a frying pan hitting a stovetop. The terrorist collapsed and lay still.
I stood beside him, panting, searching for balance. Threw aside the tool and fell to my knees. Pressed my fingers against his neck. Found a pulse. Crawled clumsily across the dirt, blood dripping off my cheek, leaving a trail. Unzipped the gym bag and pulled it open. A machine pistol similar to the one in his photo lay on a bed of full bullet clips, a cluster of grenades at each end.
I staggered back to him as if struggling through thigh-deep water, my legs continually swept from under me by the roar of surf in my ears. I leaned close, caught the faint rasp of his breathing. Heard playful music in the distance, and crashing waves. Zipped up the bag, dragged it to a tree, and dropped it behind the trunk, desperate to hide it from him. Slogged back toward the cabin platform. Lowered myself to the planks to rest, just for a minute. No. Can’t rest. Gotta find Raphaella. But I couldn’t get up. I teetered on the edge of the deck, then toppled into the waves. Plunged beneath the water and down, the tiger-striped green bottom of the lake shimmering, lit by bursts of coloured light.