The only good thing you could say about it was that it was twice as sound as the jerry-built modern crap they sell nowadays.
I must have taken about an hour. I was on schedule.
Time.
CHAPTER 24
The Vatican places great faith—charmingly quaint, really— in the reliability of mankind.
As I say, it takes all sorts. There are the pilot lights at each of the corridor intersections, set high by each of the main doorways.
They indicate the security time clocks where the patrolling guards clock in. No hidden infra-red sensitor beams, unless you include the sets indiscreetly built into the walls near the Viale Vaticano entrance and between the Cappella Sistina and St Peter's itself.
You mustn't know about them because they're secret. And the secret cameras which connect with the screen-outs in the security room which I mentioned can be seen quite clearly from the galleries. They're not quite archaic, but striving hard for obsolescence.
They're about as secret as Mount Palomar. Anna had mapped out the camera blind spots, and I had them by heart. Anna had reported that there were more magic rays to trap unwary burglars at St Anne's Gate. Big deal. That's the trouble with museums.
They're crazy about entrances.
Nervous as a cat, I locked the store-room door with a horrible loud click and walked in silence up the stairs to Signora Faranada's office. There were two risks: a wandering guard, and some unexpectedly simple alarm system like a bell on a door.
The office door came apart at a waggle of my comb. The top filing-cabinet drawer was locked, but they all have that fatal flaw of a spring-loaded catch, and old Joe Bramah showed civilization the way round that in the 1880s, so I hardly paused. The box inside was unlocked, and held the set of master keys the manageress had used earlier in the day. I was worried about the light from my pencil-torch and did all I could to shield it.
The trouble was, I was going into places where windows would be a constant risk. The Vatican has more windows than a mill.
Outside the signora's office a narrow corridor ran about ten yards to end at a door. The fourth key worked. With my hand clutching the rest of the bunch to avoid jingling, I turned the lock. My stupid heart was banging loud enough to wake the dead as I pulled the door open and waited a second for the alarms and sirens to sound off. Dead silence. A brief dizziness swirled in me. God knows how long I'd held my breath.
Unsteadily I clung to the door a moment to recover and had to close my eyes for about a fortnight until the nausea passed.
I stepped out nervously. I knew where I was. To understand the layout of the Vatican Museum you have to think of a huge letter H, except that now with the new wing it has a double crosspiece with the great library between the two struts. From Anna's drawings I was somewhere underneath the Paoline Room and the Biblioteca. One floor up and across, and I would be in my favourite gallery beside my least favourite museum showpiece. To the right and along.
Stairs are the ultimate risk. You can peer down a corridor, count doors, watch for shadows at the far end. But staircases are a swine because you can't see who's having a crafty smoke in cupboardy alcoves beneath.
I reached the top stair on hands and knees. I squirmed flat and squinted at right angles down the long gallery. The ranged series of long rectangular windows, the slanting shadows from the outside lights in the grounds, all there in frozen gloom. And no glow of a cigarette.
Opposite the faint white blobs of the odious stuffed doves the shadows thickened. That would be the blue-and-gold double cupboards, full of stored early Christian figurines.
Happily, ancient cupboards with natty antique locks. They sound and look impregnable, but believe it or not they were my one stroke of luck.
I eeled out into the main chamber a yard or two. Not much light from the Stradone.
Mercifully no curtains at the long gallery's windows, not since that time ten Popes ago when His Holiness had done his nut and the drapery was retired in disgrace, which served them right for mixing maroon and blue. Nothing moved. Better still, it felt right.
Silence everywhere and that precious feeling of loneness. The football was probably midway through the second half by now, maybe twenty minutes before the security round. Yet… there was something wrong. Nothing to stop me, but definitely a wrong vibe somewhere. Still, no time now for imagination.
I got up and practically sprinted back the way I had come, flitting along the camera blind lines, snicking past Signora Faranada's office and through the cafeteria. I reached the store room excited and a little breathless, but it felt good. Really great. Except…
again there was something vaguely wrong, but I couldn't put my finger on it. The rip was on. Scramble, Lovejoy, and worry about vibes when celebrating afterwards.
Inside my bag were two slender coils of silk rope. It costs a fortune—at least, it would have if Anna hadn't nicked it. Both were exactly the right length. The longer one stretched double, over and under my great polygonal table top so it lay on my shoulders like a set of clumsy wings. A top loop to put round my forehead. Indian style, leaving my hands free, and my pedestal easily carried by the smaller length of rope slung over my shoulder. Clumsy, but with care not to bump I could do it. My toolbag I looped on my wrist.
Creeping along in the semidark hunched under my tabletop like a tortoise, pausing for breath at corners and manoeuvring my pieces slowly round them, I switched between panic and exasperation. Shuffling along the gallery towards those pale blurs, I was pouring sweat and burning at the unfairness of it all.
It took about ten minutes and seemed a month. Close to, the stupid white birds' glass case was a good landmark. Wheezing with the strain, I lowered the pedestal and then slipped the table top off my back. The relief made my head swim and I had to shift, and fast. My bag of tools.
Looking along the gallery to check, I slid across to the cupboards which stand on the Stradone side of the chamber. There are six double ones, each about six feet wide, though other galleries have as many as twelve. Two minutes to pick the lock and I creaked one cupboard door open.
'Jesus,' I muttered. My pencil torch revealed scores of small terracotta figurines staring back at me. Lovely and nearly priceless, but in the circumstances a real bloody nuisance. Feverishly I began lifting them haphazardly from the middle shelf and stowing them on the other shelves. God knows how long it had taken the curators to arrange them. I thrust them anywhere, scooping their labels up and rammed them towards the back of the lowest shelf. That feeling of sickly confidence had evaporated in my sweat.
Now this whole dig felt bad and that depressing sense of wrongness enveloped me, but I'd no idea why. I began to feel I was being watched from somewhere further down the long silent chamber, which was impossible. I knew that. But I was starting to shake.
Maybe it was all those unnerving terracotta eyes.
My sense of time deserted me. I don't know how long it took to clear the middle shelf, six long feet of valuable early Christian figurines. I'd been quite prepared to saw out any middle divider to give me room to lie down, but the cupboards are without vertical divisions, as sensible cupboards ought to be. I hate those modern coffin shapes they call cupboards nowadays.
By the time I'd cleared the shelf I was close to babbling with fear, feeling invisible avenging angels closing ominously about me. Without looking about, I slid across to that glass-cased monstrosity and lifted it clumsily to the floor. There was a nasty moment when my foot entangled itself in my carrying ropes. I rammed the two lengths into my toolbag out of the way and carried my pedestal over to the cleared shelf. End on and pushed to the shelf's extremity, it still gave me room to lie down— as long as my feet were stuffed down the hollow pedestal's interior.