O’Brien carried his laptop in one hand and Max in the other.
Dave’s computer was set up at his small office work desk. He typed in a few words and said, “I’m going to use the split-screen function to help illustrate this. For a moment, I’ll leave the left side of the screen black. On the right side is the image you had Detective Grant send me of the drawing Father Callahan left. In a minute, I’ll fill in the other side of the screen with an enhanced image that you snapped of the moon the other night and emailed to me.” He looked up at O’Brien, over the top of his glasses. “You happened to be at the right place at the right time, have the right atmospheric conditions-”
“You mean clouds?”
“Much more than that. It’s quite remarkable that you saw it and managed to capture it. A passage of seasons, planets, and time.”
“What?”
“The equinox-the unique moment in the year when day and night, or black and white, if you will-are equal on earth. The moon rises at a point exactly opposite the sun. When the moon rises, coming up from the east, like it did over the ocean, you see an optical illusion. It will appear the moon is much larger at the horizon than it is at other positions in the sky. The ground effect, or in this case, the ocean relative to the moon, gives the moon an illusion, a false perspective, of being larger than it will be later that night in any other spot in the sky.”
“What I saw, what I caught on the camera phone, is real.”
“So here we have a nice artist’s canvas, a big harvest moon, and then along comes a moving image in black-a cloud-that sort of does a freeze-frame long enough for you to capture it. It’s no Mona Lisa, but the image is striking. You hear people say when ‘planets align,’ well you had the atmospheric conditions, the time of the year, and the moon at the right place above the ocean to give you a perfect opportunity for this…”
Dave tapped the keyboard. On the left side of the screen appeared the image of the moon O’Brien had captured. Dave said. “Take a look at that. Your equinox moon and cloud, as you thought, have an uncanny resemblance to what Father Callahan drew.”
O’Brien sat next to Dave and studied the two images without saying anything. Max trotted over and sat beside him. O’Brien said, “When I saw that cloud rise in front of the moon, it triggered something I’d seen at some point in my life. I didn’t make the connection earlier when I found Father Callahan’s body and saw the drawing he’d left. But when I saw that image in the moon, I felt the two were somehow related. In a dream I saw an image of…the Virgin Mary. She was coming out of the moon. It was overlooking a bay, ships, maybe one ship on fire in the harbor. A hawk flew in and out of an old cathedral. There was an elfish figure there and an angel. Then the angel was pointing toward the Virgin Mary. I saw a man in a flowing robe reading a book, maybe the Bible. I remember reaching out to touch Mary, and I touched a wet painting.”
Dave nodded. “I combed the halls of every museum that has its art online, and most do. If not, the work of the masters can be found hanging on plenty of cyber walls.”
“Masters?”
“Indeed, Sean. You’re not dreaming schlock nightmares, my friend. You’re picking pieces of memory paint up from one of the best, perhaps most overanalyzed painters in the history of renaissance art.”
“Who?”
“Today, he is just as misunderstood as he was in his day, around the late fourteen hundreds. When Columbus was discovering the New World, this artist was painting a tortured world. A place revealing a garden of earthly delights, seven deadly sins, the last judgment…and I present to you, Sean O’Brien, the painting done by Hieronymus Bosch that brings together the puzzle pieces.”
Dave typed in few keystrokes. Both images on the screen faded to black and then a painting appeared. It was an old painting-one depicting a man sitting on a hillside overlooking a harbor. In the harbor, a ship was burning. A hawk was sitting in the left side of the frame. The right side showed a gnome-like little man tiptoeing. An angel was descending down a hill in the background pointing to an image of the sun or moon with the Virgin Mary in the center of it sitting on a crescent moon and holding an infant.
O’Brien leaned in closer to the image. “This is it! I remember seeing this as a child in a museum in Spain.”
“Bosch’s painting is called St. John on Patmos.”
O’Brien looked at Dave and said, “Patmos. Now I know what Father Callahan was referring to with the letters P-A-T.”
SEVENTY-SIX
Gibraltar moved. “We have company,” said O’Brien.
Dave looked at his watch. “It’s Nick, we’re supposed to be heading down to the tiki hut about now for dinner.”
Nick Cronus entered the salon. He grinned, the thick moustache rising like a cartoon drawing on his face. “Sean, what happen to you, man?”
“Long story. The short side is, to save a life of a man on death row, you have to step around or over people who don’t want that life saved.”
Nick snorted, popped the knuckles in his calloused hands. “Man, you got to call me before you get yourself in those situations.”
“Believe, me, Nick. I had no idea I’d wind up in a sport boxing ring where the sport ends in death.”
“What? Like hell, man. What happened?”
“I’ll tell you when I have more time. Dave just showed me a picture of a very old painting. The artist was a guy named Bosch. He painted a lot of art depicting the forces of good and evil. Look at this.”
Nick stepped over to the computer. O’Brien said, “This is one of his paintings. It’s called St. John on Patmos. What do you know about this Greek island?”
Nick studied the painting and said, “It is a holy island. A big monastery is there. Many people in Greece go there at least once in their lives. It is where Saint John was exiled. He survived with the help of God. He lived in a cave, lived there for almost two years, man. Listening to God and foretelling the apocalypse…Armageddon.”
“The Book of Revelation?” asked Dave.
“Yeah, man. He was chosen by God to tell it like it is, you know. You screw up…I mean screw up a lot and you don’t enter the kingdom of God. Good triumphs over bad. The place where the Saint lived, in Greece, we call it the Holy Grotto.”
Dave looked at the painting. “Bosch was apparently influenced by all of this. I was trying to figure out the reason Father Callahan drew the Greek letter Omega, too.” Dave hit a few keys and another painting appeared. “This Bosch painting is called Temptation of Saint Anthony. Let me pull up an isolated section, see right there.”
O’Brien and Nick leaned in closer. “Yeah, man,” said Nick. “It’s there, Omega.”
“This,” said Dave, “look carefully above the piece of cloth he painted over here, next to the fellow in the top hat. Above it you can see a shackle, a spot where a prisoner could have been chained…and right there is the perfect depiction of the letter Omega.” Dave typed in another key and another painting appeared. “This Bosch painting is called Ship of Fools. Some in the art world theorize the flapping sail off the mast, if you look at in a horizontal position…” Dave touched a key and flipped the painting into a horizontal perspective. He continued, “Now you can see the sail makes a perfect Omega.”
Nick chuckled. “This dude, Bosch, looks like he ate too much of his paint.”
O’Brien said, “It looks like he left it up to the viewer’s interpretation.”
“Exactly,” said Dave. “Bosch was an allegorical painter. He dropped all kinds of symbols, things that might depict hidden meanings, maybe not. He straddled the art border somewhere between medieval and renaissance, and he straddled the lines between the age-old conflict of good and evil. Salvador Dali was influenced by Bosch.”
“And it appears that Father Callahan was too,” said O’Brien. “But why? What is the significance of the Omega sign, the Bosch painting of Saint John and the six-six-six?”