The History Thief: Ten Days Lost (The Sterling Novels) (46 page)

“Doc?”

“What is it, kid?”

“You never finished your story about the Catholic Monarchs.”

Michael stopped moving and stared straight ahead. Before the two men was an unassuming if not plain façade, given everything that surrounded it—even more plain with respect to whom was inside.

York spat out in surprise, “That’s it? That’s the church?”

“Mausoleum, kid—it’s not a church.” Michael quickly walked through its doors.

Under his breath, York sarcastically mimicked Michael: “Mausoleum, kid—it’s not a church.”

Michael either didn’t hear him or didn’t care.

York followed him inside.

Vertical emphasis and light: the hallmarks of Gothic heritage. Michael soaked in the complexity of the interior: spatial, baroque, renaissance, and gothic influences. It was filled with rich elements of architectural and art history. He would have loved to study it more—religious history was more than just the basis of his doctorate, it was his hobby—but he had no time to enjoy any of it. Not even the eclectic paintings by Botticelli and Boccanegra or the impressive Torrigianis would warrant a glance. His focus was tunneled in one direction.

Ignoring the quaternary naves, he headed for the fifth and most dramatic of them: the principal chapel—the tombs of the Catholic Monarchs.

The men were standing between two rows of ten Corinthian columns each. Prodigious statues of the twelve apostles rose in dominating fashion. The apostles seemed to float above the men and either reached magnificently upward in an effort to touch the endless colors of the stained-glass depiction of the Passion or looked ready to fall in on them.

Laid beneath the ten gothic arches, the tomb of the Catholic Monarchs was uniquely military and in the typical Spanish pyramidal frustum shape.

The Florentine figures of the monarchs were carved so that their images were recumbent. King Ferdinand was in his armor, and his queen—Isabelle—was dressed simply. At their feet, two stone lions—symbols of their royal blood—rested.

Michael eyed the impressive tombs. It was there somewhere; he knew it.

“Hey, Doc,” York shouted out, “what do you think this thing next to the fat kids says?” York was pointing to a carved epitaph inside of a cartouche.

“Putti, York, they are called Putti—we Americans have it wrong when we call them cherubs”—
or fat kids
. Michael eyed the small, carved figures. Plump little boys: they bore wings and were holding weapons—a bit contradictory—and, as an art form dating back more than two thousand years, had been revived for use in Italian Renaissance art in the fifteenth century, particularly with sarcophagi.

Michael bent in lower and roughly translated the Latin carved into the epitaph: “Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, unanimous husband and wife, called the Catholics, are buried in this marble burial mound.”

“Doc,” said York, “now what?”

Michael stood up and slowly circumambulated the tombs; his trained eyes were focused. He studied the lines of the voluminous marble and the edges of the tiled floors. He was looking for a way in.

“Kid,” Michael answered as he continued to walk around the tomb. “Whatever it is we were sent to find is here. And my hunch is that it’s in the crypt.”

York thought curiously about this for a moment. “In the crypt?” he asked. “I don’t know what’s going on in your head, Doc, but there’s no way we are getting whatever is inside of those things. They have to weigh a couple of tons at least. We’ll need a wrecking ball to crack them open.”

“You don’t really listen all too well, do you? I didn’t say that it was in the
tomb
; I said it was in the
crypt
.”

Michael stopped walking. He had found it.

York didn’t understand.

“Get over here, kid! Help me with this. Quickly now, we don’t have much time!”

York ran to his mentor’s side. Michael was already kneeling to the floor; there, where he knelt, was the simple outline of a small trap door. The outline was hard to see; its edges blended nearly seamlessly with the surrounding marble. A handle was recessed neatly, the only thing that gave away its location.

Michael struggled to lift it; York leaned in to help. Together, the two men lifted it from its place, exposing a narrow flight of stone stairs. The smell of damp, rotted air rushed across their faces. The unlit passageway sunk into the earth and was as equally uninviting.

York looked uneasily at Michael and said, “You first. You’ve got seniority.”

Michael went first.

As the two men disappeared into the floor, Charney emerged from behind an ornamented statue of St. John the Evangelist. He had been watching the two men from the shadows.

Striking a match against the tiled wall, he lit a cigarette and waited. He knew that the only way out for the two men was the same way that they had gone in.

Beneath the floor, Michael and York traced the wall with their hands as they continued further into the ground. The air was growing colder and the walls slightly wetter.

Michael pulled a small magnum flashlight from his coat pocket and illuminated the way. At the bottom of the stairs, the ground leveled; not far from the base of the stairs the small passageway ended, opening to a large room. It was unfortunate for York that the iron gate, which secured the contents of the room, blended in nicely with the darkness.

A loud, dull thud resonated in the narrow confines of the passageway. York yelled out, “Son of a bitch!”

Michael shined the small flashlight on York’s face. With the light in his eyes, York was holding his forehead. He couldn’t see Michael’s face but was sure there was a smile on it.

“You all right, kid?”

York didn’t answer as he pressed hard on his forehead: his look said it all.

Shining the flashlight away from York’s face, Michael traced the beam of light along the iron frame—the wall—that separated them from the other side; that separated them from the room. He studied it, looking for a way in, and was disappointed when he saw the iron rods were firmly mortared into the wall. There was a small door at its center; it, too, was made from crossed bars of iron.

York watched as the light flickered through the striated bars and into the room on the other side. The unique shape of coffins emerged as his eyes adjusted to the low light.

Michael continued to study the iron barrier; along the edge of the wall, near one of the flashing points of the iron frame of the gate, was a small, round button.

Michael pushed it.

A lone, low-watt light bulb crackled on; it dangled at the end of a single electrical cord hanging from the ceiling. It buzzed slightly as it hovered in the middle of the room on the other side of the iron gate. A slight cascade of light struggled to brighten the space.

York and Michael both peered into the crypt through the iron bars. A stone bench circled the interior upon which three old coffins rested. Michael knew these were not the coffins of the king and queen. At the front, on the wall, hung a simple wooden crucifix in the Gothic style. Underneath, in the room’s center, was a raised stone platform with two additional royal coffins: the coffins of the Catholic Monarchs.

Michael studied the framing of the iron bars that kept the two of them from getting in; he knew there had to be a way. With the help from the light, he eyed the old keyhole of the door, wondering if he could pick its lock. He reached into his inside pocket to grab his utility knife.

The sound of grating metal pierced the dank air. Michael looked up and saw a smiling York standing on the other side of the once-closed iron door. “Rule number four: it never hurts to see if the door is unlocked.”

There was a slight bit of solipsism in York’s tone, but he supposed the kid deserved it. Michael put away his utility knife and wondered if the light was low enough to hide the slight shade of crimson that had rushed into his cheeks; he walked into the crypt and past the smug young Green Beret.

The two lead coffins were rough to the touch; time had weathered their exteriors. Set slightly at an angle from one another, the heads the coffins were near one another, and the foots were further apart, putting the coffins into the slight shape of a “V.” Between them, one solitary, long-stemmed white rose lay alone and dead. Its petals had dried long ago, and its stem was browned from time.

Michael brushed the dust from one of the coffins. On it he saw the faint etching of Isabelle’s initials.

“Kid, help me with this.”

Together the two men struggled as they pushed at its lid. It took slightly more than a moment; the lid felt as if it were pushing back at first. With a stronger shove, they felt it slowly slide away from them.

York had readied himself for the smell. But there was none. The body of the queen had centuries ago decayed well enough that nothing organic existed. If anything, the aroma from the inside of the coffin was slightly sweet.

Michael shined his light in, and York stepped back.

At one point, when first laid to rest, Isabelle’s hands had been laid one atop the other and crossed over her midsection. The effects of time on the changing composition of her flesh into solely bone had sent her left arm sliding downward and in apposition to her left side.

Michael’s eyes became large. He could hardly believe it.

“What?” asked York as he stepped in closer to Michael. “Did you find something?”

Michael reached in and, not wanting to show irreverence to any part of the queen’s remains, gently pulled the wrapped vellum from the palm of her right hand. He was surprised at how easily it was freed from her grip.

York said quietly, “Well, I’ll be goddamned—you were right!”

Michael laid the parchment on the lid of Ferdinand’s coffin. He studied it carefully; York edged in closer. A thin tie was around the parchment—frayed and deteriorating, but still bound to it.

Michael eyed York through his periphery and let out a slow breath. He pulled the tie by one of the ends underneath the bow and was not surprised that it crumbled at his touch. Quickly, he pulled back his hand and closed his eyes. He saw his father’s horrified, scowling face.

Dr. Michael Sterling Sr.—his father—was a renowned, if not slightly eccentric professor at Denver University; his specialty was no different than Michael Junior’s—religious studies with an expertise in the Middle East. Had he been in the crypt, he would have slapped Michael’s hand for his impetuousness, for putting his oily fingers to an ancient artifact, for disrespecting a piece of history.

Michael knew that his father would salivate to be standing where Michael now was: Granada, through Moorish conquest and expansion, was once a part of the Middle East and very much the elder’s field.

Unfortunately, Michael did not have a pair of the thin, white cotton gloves used for handling ancient pages of parchment.

Sorry, Dad, it has to be done
—there was no time for pedantic concerns. Michael slowly pulled away the rag that covered the parchment; he was careful to not put too much skin to vellum. Underneath the wrapping were old eucalyptus leaves. Peeling them away, he opened the parchment, aware that this was not split calfskin vellum. This was more modern, some kind of leather—but certainly not calfskin. This type was sturdier and less susceptible to aging—in particular, when stored in an underground crypt where the relative humidity was near perfect and the temperature rarely varied.

The document was not handwritten; its words looked as if they had been typed. The ink was red and severely faded.

Michael tried to read the document, frowned, and thought to himself:
of course.

Not only did the low light make it difficult to read, but the letters were too faded and in an older form of Italian.

At the top of the vellum, Michael easily made out the first few words:

Revelation 14:9

The rest was more difficult.

York watched intensely. He saw the look on Michael’s face morph; the creases around the corners of his eyes etched deeper in consternation. “What? What is it, what does it say?”

Michael didn’t respond but glanced at his watch—time continued to count down, the one thing that he could count upon.

“Well? What does it say?” York’s impatience was clearly growing as he repeated his question.

“I’m not sure; it starts with a citation to a biblical passage. I need some time, a better place to translate. The words are faded, and there isn’t enough light. My Italian is marginal, kid, but with the right resources, I can translate it. Just not here.”

“But you translated the Latin upstairs! You speak Latin, but not Italian?!”

“Kid, that one was easy. Most of the words were either names or cognates. This is a bit more complicated. There’s a lot here, and I want to get moving. Now, let’s beat feet; we still have our tail to shake.”

Michael turned to leave but nearly fell. York reached out and caught him mid-stagger. “Jesus, Doc, how bad is this going to get?”

Michael straightened himself, ignored York, and continued to move.

York didn’t.