"Then I'll get the damned ledger myself," said Holliday. He fiddled with the computer, found the number he wanted again and jotted it down. He stood up and headed for the door leading back into the archive stacks. Sister Meg followed.
"Nobody's forcing you to come," said Holliday brusquely. "If I see the little punk I can wring his scrawny neck on my own."
"That's exactly why I'm tagging along," answered the nun.
"Suit yourself," said Holliday. He pulled open the door and stepped through. Sister Meg was right on his heels.
Beyond the doorway the long cloister was a labyrinth of floor-to-ceiling racks of documents and papers, some loose and some in slipcase binders. Other fonds were in boxes and crates, some plastic, some wood and some cardboard. The shelves themselves were made out of wood or steel and were of varying lengths, creating little alleyways through the stacks at intermittent points like dead ends in a garden maze.
There were also varying numbers of aisles, some abruptly ending, others looking as though they went on forever. There seemed to be no order to any of it-codes on one section of shelves appeared to be alphabetical, while the next set of shelves was divided numerically, or even by date or with some Italian version of the Dewey decimal system.
"This is nuts," said Holliday. "I used to think the British Library system was a nightmare-this is truly insane."
"It is confusing," agreed Sister Meg.
"It looks like there's elements from every era of the archives' existence, bits and pieces that were popular at the time. It's incoherent."
"Just like Italian politics, from what I understand," said Sister Meg.
"Don't go wandering off," cautioned Holliday. "It would be like getting lost down Alice in Wonderland's rabbit hole."
Sister Meg smiled at the reference.
" 'Oh my ears and whiskers, how late it's getting!' " quoted the nun.
"Pardon?" Holliday said.
"It's from Alice in Wonderland," she explained. "The White Rabbit who leads Alice down the rabbit hole."
"I never read it actually," confessed Holliday. "I saw it on my friends the Corbett twins' TV when I was seven or eight. They had the only TV in the neighborhood, color too; a twenty-one-inch RCA Aldrich model. Teddy loved Alice, Artie hated it. They were like that about everything. The only other thing I remember is the Jefferson Airplane song, 'Feed your head' and all that."
"You should be ashamed of yourself," chided Sister Meg. "It's a literary classic."
Holliday clasped his hands in front of himself, bowed his head and recited the entire Mea Culpa "apologia" in droning Latin.
"Impressive," said Sister Meg, "and in Latin no less." She paused. "Although it lacked something in the way of sincerity."
"I was an altar boy. Have you ever met an altar boy who enjoyed having the priest box his ears when he flubbed his lines?"
"Your experience with the Church wasn't the best, was it?"
"Nuns who whacked you, priests who whacked you and sometimes worse, various Popes who told you your genitalia would rot if you had premarital sex or masturbated, going to confession and having voyeuristic old men listen to your most private thoughts, and to top it all off, being forced to watch Bishop Sheen instead of Milton Berle on Tuesday nights at eight. Yeah, you might say my experience with the Church was pretty lousy."
"Nothing more anti-Church than a lapsed Catholic," sighed the nun.
"Being a lapsed Catholic has nothing to do with it," snorted Holliday. "I dislike any religion that believes it's the only true word of God. Catholic, Muslim, Jew and Evangelist alike." He shook his head. "This isn't the time for theological discussion. Let's find the little jerk and get out of here."
They found him in the N 24 stack under a sign hanging from the ceiling that read simply Navi-Ships. He was sitting on his knees in front of the bottom Z21 shelf looking down at a ledger he'd laid out on the floor, its slipcase neatly put to one side. The young man's glasses had slipped down onto his nose. If it weren't for the trickle of blood dripping steadily from his right ear down onto the ledger, everything would have looked quite normal.
Beside Holliday, Sister Meg made a gentle noise in the back of her throat. When she spoke there were tears in her voice.
"The poor boy!" she whispered quietly. "A cerebral hemorrhage?"
"A hatpin," answered Holliday, who'd seen a wound just like it once before. The ear that time had belonged to a gold smuggler named Valador. "Plastic, so it goes through airport metal detectors. She pushes it into the middle ear and then through the temporal bone to the brain via the internal auditory nerve canal." Holliday squatted down for a better look. "Apparently it takes a great deal of skill."
"She?" Sister Meg said.
"Her name is Daniella Kay, the Canadian spouse of a Czech assassin-for-hire named Antonin Pesek. They're a husband-and-wife team."
"The boy was murdered?"
Holliday pushed his hand into the open neck of the young man's shirt and pressed his palm against the bare skin over his heart. It was still warm to the touch. He withdrew his hand, forcing himself not to reach up and close the kid's staring, still bright eyes. The dulling and shrinking of the eyeballs hadn't even begun yet.
"Murdered, and not too long ago. Ten minutes, maybe fifteen."
Sister Meg stood there, stunned, staring at the kneeling corpse.
"Why would anyone want to kill an archive clerk?"
Holliday leaned forward and looked at the ledger on the floor. Blood had pooled into a sticky mass in the center of the page, staining the spidery handwriting on the facsimile, but it was still easy enough to see the ragged tear running down the spine.
"Someone's torn out a page," said Holliday. He pushed himself up.
"They killed him for a ledger entry?"
"It's about the third or fourth page in the next Zeno ledger," said Holliday. "It's almost certainly the entry for the return of the Santa Maria Maggiore to Venice."
"Someone knows what we're researching?"
"Not someone. The Peseks. They got the kid because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but someone hired them to kill us. We're the target."
"We have to tell the police."
"Not on your life, Sister. We'd be in the glue for days, maybe weeks if we call the cops. They generally follow the line of least resistance in an investigation, which means us. We've got to go back to the workstation, wipe it down for prints, then find a back way out of here and a taxi to the airport. When they find this kid it's going to hit the fan with a bang. I want us on a plane to London before nightfall."
12
They barely got out of the building undetected, let alone to the airport. Eventually Holliday and the nun found what must have been one of the original winding narrow stairways in a distant corner of the big rambling convent cloister. The dust on the worn stone steps had been recently disturbed. A woman wearing low- heeled shoes; Holliday could see the outline of the square heel and the pointed oval of the sole clearly in the dust. The shoe prints were coming and going. She'd left the way she'd come in.
Holliday could visualize it easily enough: a young man sees a good-looking woman where she really shouldn't be, but he doesn't get angry because her smile is so friendly. It wouldn't have taken her much to get close enough. They would have talked for a moment, standing over the ledger he'd pulled from the shelf.
Daniella Kay would have flirted with him mercilessly. She'd be good at that, hypnotic as a snake. The young man would have barely noticed her slipping the deadly plastic stickpin from her hair, and by then it would have been too late. He'd have died almost instantly, the stickpin skewering into his brain, his head full of the glorious fantasies of older women that only young men believe in.
Holliday and the nun reached the bottom of the narrow spiral staircase. It ended in a tiny dusty alcove and a door that had obviously been recently jimmied, the old wood around the latch splintered and white. Pushing out through the doorway, they found themselves in a small overgrown patch of garden between the wall of the cloister and the building next door.