The Testament, page 32
"On the contrary, I think we know her quite well." The South African stepped forward, placing a thick dossier on the table. He watched Jordan as he opened its cover. Inside were a series of surveillance photos of Camille and Cornadoro locked in amorous embrace.
After a moment, the MP said, "This is a dangerous cocktail, Grand Master. Surely you can understand our concern."
Indeed he could, better by far than any of them. Damn her to hell! With a hand he scarcely felt he pawed through the mess of photos, one more explicit than the next. Careful to keep his expression neutral, he said, "I appreciate your diligence, gentlemen, but I already know about my mother's indiscretion." This was a lie, but a necessary one. These men must never know they knew more about his family than he did.
"Surely you can see it's more than an indiscretion," the MP said.
The American stepped forward. "I think what you smelled, Grand Master, is a conspiracy between the two of them."
"I have the situation well in hand," Jordan said, "I assure you."
"Excellent," the MP said. He was beaming now. "That's all we needed to know, Grand Master. We'll leave the rest to you." He pointed to the dossier. "Rest assured all copies have been destroyed."
Spagna opened the double doors, the murmur and aromatic smoke drifted in from the larger room, and the four, their business completed, headed briskly for the door. The last of the group was the American. As the others departed, he turned back as if in afterthought and, strolling back to Jordan, whispered so only he could hear: "You know what you have to do, don't you? What is it the English say?" He grinned. "Oh, yeah, 'Off with her head!'"
Chapter 19
"So how is it with you, son?" Dexter Shaw said.
Bravo looked down, then away. "Oh, you know. The same."
"We haven't seen each other in over six months. You've been at Stanford and I've been away."
Father and son were sitting at an outdoor Burmese restaurant off M Street. It was summer, and Georgetown was cooking. Bravo had come up to see him, and Dexter had taken the afternoon off. That evening, they were scheduled to hear the Washington Philharmonic, sitting in the president's box.
"Anyway," Dexter went on, "what I meant was girls." He sought to catch his son's eye. "Do you have one-a special one, I mean?"
"I don't know."
"You don't know?" Dexter cocked his head. "Surely you can't mean that." Then, after a long beat, "Ah, I see. You don't wish to tell me. It's all right, Bravo, if you don't want to share-"
"Share? Why should I share?" Bravo blurted out. "When have you ever shared anything with me?"
Dexter blinked. "I can think of any number-Anything important, Dad." Bravo had been unable to keep the exasperation out of his voice, "And, come to it, when have you ever come out to Stanford-"
"A year ago October, I believe it was."
"Sure, you were on your way to, where was it?"
"Bangkok."
"Right, Bangkok. We were going to have lunch, go to the theater. I got tickets, and then-"
"My schedule changed. I told you, Bravo. I'm very sorry, but there was nothing I could do."
"You could have stayed."
"No I couldn't," Dexter replied, "I don't have that sort of job, I never have."
Lunch came then, and they both fell silent, grateful for the distraction of eating. Fragrant smoke from the charcoal oven wafted through the leafy garden, strung with colored paper lanterns. Laughter and the murmur of other voices, the clink of tableware against plates, traditionally garbed waitresses silently coming and going.
At length, Dexter put down his fork and said, "Honestly, I would be interested to hear about anyone special in your life."
Bravo looked up, and his father smiled at him, an expression that brought him back to when he was younger, to the best days of their relationship. Still, doggedly, he said nothing. He felt keenly the spite his father's on-and-off attention brought out in him, the disappointment at his long absences, his father's refusal to talk about them.
"All right," Dexter said, "then I'll tell you about my first love." He took a sip of beer, his expression turning even more thoughtful. "She was smart and quite beautiful, but the main thing about her was that she was going out with my friend. I'd met her at a party-a pretty drunken affair-and we'd started talking while my friend was in a stupor, head in the lap of another girl who was also unconscious.
"Anyway, we hit it off. We were both so embarrassed we didn't know quite what to do, for days after walking around in a painfully pleasant haze-you know the sort I'm talking about, neither of us could sleep or eat. All we could think about was, well…
"Finally, we couldn't take it anymore and we met on the sly. Afterward, I wondered whether that was what poisoned the relationship. It was rather fierce, not that it lasted very long, but it felt like forever."
Dexter's ironlike hands sat atop the table. "One might have thought that the deceit necessary to sustain the relationship would have worn me out, but, really, that was no problem for me. But what I found out… you see, as a young man I was lonely as only young people can be. I had temporarily-and rather thoughtlessly-severed my relationship with my parents, I was never a joiner, and so I was alone. This girl-I saw in her a way to make a connection, to come in out of the cold, as it were." He laughed. "Human beings are so stupid sometimes, they think that sexual intercourse will alleviate their essential loneliness. In fact, sex only reinforces reality-it's a vivid reminder of how truly alone they are.
"You see, Bravo, it's not a question of whether one is alone or not, it's a question of what one does with one's aloneness." He cocked his head again. "Does one give in to sullenness and despair, or does one begin to learn about oneself? Without that knowledge, how can one begin to make connections with anyone else?"
"Is this another lesson?" Bravo said boorishly. "I'm not ten anymore."
"No lesson intended or implied, Bravo. I was only trying to tell you… to do what you wanted me… to share."
Bravo looked away, biting his lip.
"What I mean to say, Bravo, is that you and I… we're different from other people. We're… well, I guess you could call us outsiders-it's far more difficult for us to find ourselves. Sometimes I ask myself what I have to do in order to be saved."
"Saved?" Bravo's head swung around to engage his father's eyes. "Saved from what?"
"From evil," Dexter said. "Oh, I don't mean the kind of evil encountered in the Crusades, at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, Hiroshima, in Angola and Bosnia, I don't mean the astonishing cruelty of mankind. This evil grips the mind and won't let go. It is a nausea of the soul, when you think nothing you possess can save you. 'What am I doing here?' you think. 'What is my purpose?'"
He held his glass of beer between his powerful hands as if it were a stalk of wheat. "You and I, Bravo, are not what we had assumed ourselves to be. It's natural, I suppose, to ask, Why? The answer is: because there is a power inside us. Are we supermen? No. But perhaps we are like artists; we are not hollow men, as Eliot so accurately termed them, though that may be our first reaction. Like all artists of every stripe, our desire, then, is to escape-escape the horror of the mundane, to become something better, to lead others along the same path-to, in a sense, save them from themselves."
Bravo was held spellbound. He understood every word his father said, understood it with every fiber of his being, understood down to his very soul. The knowledge shook him to his core.
Dexter shrugged. "If you don't get it now, I trust that one day you will."
But I do get it, Bravo thought, and was about to tell his father as much, when Dexter glanced down at his watch.
Jesus, Dad, no. Don't do it…
"I'm sorry, Bravo, but I have to get to the airport. I'm afraid I'm off again." Dexter pushed over two tickets along with a pass richly embossed with the presidential seal. "You take your girl-the one you won't tell me about-to the Philharmonic. Trust me, she'll love sitting in the presidential box."
Fuck the presidential box, don't leave me again…
Glimmers on the water seemed to follow them in the gray churning wake. Sky and sea were painted the same shades of purple and black. The low islands of the lagoon were strung out like a gigantic cipher. It seemed to Bravo now, standing beside his Uncle Tony, the motoscafo's engine thrumming through the soles of his shoes, moving through this dark and misty lagoon of antiquity, that Venice belonged to his father. Lights of unknown origin played over the water, refracted and reflected into shapes of cold flame that illuminated the shallow inky waves, smooth as glass.
Bravo took out the SIG Sauer. He tried not to think of Uncle Tony snatching it from him, firing at Zorzi point-blank. Perhaps in the Voire Dei it had been the right thing to do, he didn't know. "I don't understand," he said, wrenching his mind away from black thoughts. "I checked it after Zorzi gave it back to me."
Rule glanced over. "Didn't fire it, though, did you? The trigger won't go all the way back. Zorzi sabotaged it before he gave it back to you."
Bravo had been so sure that the gun was working properly, but then he heard the flat, shivery crack of the ice breaking and he shivered. The last thing he needed now was a flight of fancy or an echo from the past. Setting his mind on the job at hand, he sat on the gleaming varnished mahogany deck bench and carefully laid down each part of the weapon as he dismantled it. When he got to the trigger mechanism, he discovered something that had escaped his first cursory inspection-something was stuck there, jamming the mechanism.
"You see?" Rule said.
Bravo unfolded the object, examining it carefully. "This isn't Zorzi's doing. My father left it for me to find. He taught me to break down a gun before you use it, that was rule one. I just never had the time."
Rule peered at it. "All I see is a ball of old cloth."
"Not any cloth." Bravo unraveled it. "Linsey. It's a very low-quality linen and wool mixture which was said to be the material used for both Mary's head scarf and Lazarus's cloak." He was remembering the cipher his father left for him in the steel beggar's purse: Remember where you were the day you were born. St. Mary of Nazareth Hospital.
Not Mary of Nazareth, he thought now. "Isn't there an island in the lagoon that has a church named after Mary of Lazarus?"
Rule nodded. "It was used as a way station for pilgrims on their journey to the Holy Land. The church is long gone now." He thought for a moment. "Lazzaretto Vecchio lies due south, just below the Lido." He turned the boat in that direction. "In the old Venetian dialect, Mary's name became nazaretum and eventually, in the way of all languages, further distorted into lazaretto. Over the centuries, the island has had many incarnations. In the fourteenth century, for instance, it was used to quarantine plague victims during the city's first great epidemic." Moving out of the channel into the lagoon proper, he put on speed. "It's still quite lovely, but nowadays, it's only a center for stray dogs."
Remember the name of your third pet. Bark.
Bravo laughed out loud.
Jenny, in the company of Paolo Zorzi's emissary, arrived on San Francesco del Deserto to find her mentor with a bandaged head and in a foul mood. She was nervous and upset, but by far her overriding emotion was one of guilt.
They sat in the refectory, which she found oppressive and gloomy. Candles guttered all around her, and there was soot in the air. To her surprise, there were four other Guardians in the room. She waited for Zorzi to speak, but he did not acknowledge her presence in any way. Instead, he stared down at a message he had apparently just been given. Jenny would have given anything to know what was in it. As her gaze redirected itself to Zorzi, she noticed his red-rimmed eyes. He looked like he hadn't slept in two or three days.
At length, he said, "Father Mosto was murdered."
"And Bravo disappeared," she blurted in response, "more than four hours ago, and you've kept me waiting all this time. How else will you punish me?"
Zorzi looked up, impaling her with his implacable eyes. "Speaking of Braverman Shaw," he said softly, "you never delivered the message I ordered you to give him, did you?"
"That Anthony Rule is the traitor? No."
"Why?"
She knew that velvet voice, and she winced thinking of the iron fist behind it. "Because I don't believe it."
"It's not for you to decide these matters!"
Already on edge, she started at the sharpness of his voice.
"I was right when I counseled Dexter Shaw not to assign you to guard his son."
"And you were the one who trained me." Jenny was unable any longer to hide her bitterness.
"Precisely my point."
"You were harder on me than you were with your male pupils, you made damn sure of that."
Zorzi ignored her outburst. "I never should have listened to Dexter. Every instinct at my command told me he was making a mistake."
He regarded her with a look he reserved for those who had disappointed him. She could feel that he had removed himself from her sphere, that whatever she might tell him-whatever excuses she might put forward-would now fall on deaf ears. He was done with her.
Jenny, absorbing all this, was filled with despair. She stood, her head pulled into her shoulders, which were slightly hunched, as if she needed to protect herself from the assault of his words. She had always thought that he'd believed in her; now she knew that had it not been for Dex's intervention, Zorzi would have rejected her as the others in the Order had wanted to do. His belief had been in Dexter, not in her.
Still, she was not yet prepared to give up. "Why are we siting here when we should be trying to find Bravo?"
"I'd rather talk about you," Zorzi said. "Tell me what happened."
"I was guarding the rectory where Bravo and Father Mosto were talking. I was attacked from behind, overpowered. The next thing I knew, I woke up in a utility room. When I went out into the corridor, I found Father Mosto with his throat slit and my knife beside him in a pool of blood."
"Your knife."
"Yes."
"How do you suppose it got there?"
"That's obvious. Whoever assaulted me took it."
"How would they know you had it on you?"
Jenny's heart skipped a beat. She glanced around at the four other Guardians, who were hanging on every word that was said. For the first time she viewed her situation in another light.
"Is this an interrogation? Do you think I murdered Father Mosto?"
Zorzi rose, paced back and forth in front of her. "As you know, there is a traitor in our midst. Lately, as the death toll has mounted, it has occurred to me that there may be more than one traitor." He stopped and leveled his gaze at her. "You see what I mean."
"All I see is that I've got to go after Bravo," she said doggedly. "I screwed up; it's my responsibility-"
"I'm afraid I can't allow that."
"You think I'm a traitor," Jenny said in a strangled voice.
There was that look again, reasserting the distance he'd put between them, and when he spoke, his tone was cold and unforgiving. "You failed to protect our most important asset; that is unforgivable. As if that weren't enough, consider the situation from Bravo's point of view. He finds the body, the throat slit, your bloody knife beside the corpse, and you gone. What would you think if you were him?" Zorzi crumpled the message in his hand with a kind of cold fury that terrified her. "His position is the same as mine, he can't afford to trust you."
She stood up. "You can't just-" She stopped, turning as the four other Guardians came toward her. "This isn't right," she said weakly, and felt immediately foolish, because if she were in Zorzi's place she knew she'd do the same thing he was doing.
"Now I must leave," he said, "to try and clean up the mess you made." He turned back. "Pray for me. Pray that I find Braverman Shaw before it's too late."
With that damning accusation, he and two of the Guardians swept out. The heavy wood and iron door of the refectory slammed shut behind them.
Another wave of despair filled her, fueled by her sense of outrage and helplessness. She had lost the confidence of her mentor and was being detained by her own people, all because she had been implicated by her inattention, her schoolgirl crush, her own stupidity. Why hadn't she taken a page from Anthony Rule's book and kept herself free of emotional entanglements?
The two remaining Guardians stared at her with looks of mixed pity and hostility. She turned away. The hostility she could handle-she always had. It was the pity that unnerved her. To compound her stupidity, she took a wild couple of steps toward them. One backhanded her across the face while the other moved away, so he could cover her from a different angle. She staggered back, and the Guardian pushed her down into a chair and told her to stay there.
She glared up into his sneering face.
"This is how I always knew you would end up." He looked at her as if she were a cockroach he was about to grind beneath his boot. "You're a failure-worse, you're a disgrace." He spat onto the patch of floor between her knees before stalking away.
Jenny swiveled around and put her arms on the table. She thought of the mess she had made of her life. She thought of Ronnie Kavanaugh and of Dexter Shaw. She thought of the other path that might have been, the path that had been snatched away from her, in whose terrible aftermath Dex had appeared to save her. But had he saved her? she thought bitterly. For what? For this?
She put her head down on her forearms. Last of all, she thought of Bravo. She hadn't wanted to think of him, but now in her misery she could not help herself. He could have been the one to save her, truly and finally, as in the end Dex had been unable to do. She thought she understood now why Dex had wanted her to guard his son. With his uncanny prescience, he knew-he had to have known, she was certain of it.
All at once, she heard the low derisive laughter of her guards-her former compatriots-and the sound cut through her like a knife blade. She was immediately ashamed; they could see for themselves the weakness they had always suspected would one day lay her low.
Then, into her mind appeared the image of Arcangela-and with it the memory of the life she had led, of the almost insupportable deprivations she had endured so that her charges could carry out their work. Sacrifice seemed inadequate for the path she had chosen. Either way, though, it was her courage now that seemed to wind through Jenny's veins and arteries like a vine that, though abused by frost and axe, refuses to die. Instead, it grew green in the springtime of her emotions. And now she realized that Arcangela had given her something more precious even than the advice and support she had taken from Dex-the Anchorite had given her a chance to take back her life.
