The Devil's Own Crayons Read online

  ISBN: 9781626753693

  For my family.

  PROLOGUE

  Garlic. Onions. Old Spice stick deodorant. Sweet waft of Chanel No. 5 overpowered by the sweat of too many tourists shoehorned into the long, narrow box. Shuffle of feet on a marble floor, inlaid mosaic more than five centuries old. But no one gives a damn about the floor. The meadow of heads, all tipped back with noses pointed up, is there to see the most famous ceiling on the planet.

  So many faces crammed so tightly together, a child could hopscotch across the flesh carpet. The occasional, forbidden flashbulb lights up the living, breathing, sweating rug.

  “No pictures! No pictures! Signora!”

  “No photos, signore! Please!”

  Dull hum of low talking and sharp hiss of Italian guards admonishing, only adding to the noise.

  “Silenzio! Signora! Per favore!”

  “Quiet, please!”

  “Shhhh!”

  “No speaking!”

  The newest and youngest guard stood against one of the long walls. High above him, near the ceiling, was one of the dozen arched windows that allowed natural light to pour into the chapel. Though it was a Monday in September, the place was as crowded as any Saturday during the summer season. Since he’d started the job over the summer, he’d learned that mornings were the worst. Every turista conceived the same brilliant scheme: Get to La Cappella Sistina early and beat the crowds.

  So here they all were, a room full of geniuses, stepping on each other’s heels and jostling for position to sneak a photograph. When it was this packed, the guard concentrated on stopping the most blatant rule-breakers. One of them – a tall, heavy man in a football Americano jersey - backed up into him and aimed a video camera above the heads of the other sightseers.

  “Signore, no video!” the young guard barked to the wide back.

  The man spun around and aimed the lens at the guard’s face. “What?”

  He put a hand out in front of him. “No! No movies!”

  “Give me a break. What about all the phones?” He nodded to the crowd. “You think people aren’t taking them with their cells?”

  “Please,” said the guard. “No pictures. These are the rules.”

  “Fine, fine.” The American lowered the camera. “Parla inglese?”

  “Si, si.”

  He pointed a fat thumb at the ceiling. “What’s with Adam and Eve and the tree?”

  Was the American that ignorant? “Signore, I do not have time for telling Bible stories. If you wish, there are guided tours at the...”

  “For the love of God, I know about the apple and the snake and all that.” He squinted heavenward. “What’s wrong with the painting?”

  The guard blinked.

  “Here,” said the man, trying to pass him the camera.

  The guard raised his palms. “Signore, we cannot film...”

  “Don’t tape shit.” He shoved the camcorder into the young man’s hands. “Use it to look at the fresco close up. Zoom in and check it out.”

  “Sir...”

  “Look!” Then in clumsy, halting Italian: “Uh...guardare!”

  “Prego, prego.” Releasing an exasperated breath, the young guard raised the lens to the ceiling.

  “Do ya see?”

  What he saw made the camera turn to a block of ice in his fingers. Trembling, he lowered the recorder and stared at the American. “Santo cielo.”

  “Enzo!” snapped another guard, pushing his way through the crowd to come up to the pair.

  After shoving the camcorder into his colleague’s arms, Enzo pointed up to the fresco. “Dio mio!”

  “Che cosa non va?” asked the older man. Then in English: “What’s wrong?”

  “Guardare!” said the big American, pointing up. “Check out Adam and Eve in the garden.”

  The instant the gray-haired guard aimed the camera at the fresco, his mouth dropped open. “Merda!”

  “Shit is right,” translated the American.

  The guards began herding the tourists to the exits. “Out! Out!”

  “What’s going on?” a woman asked. “What’s happening?”

  The same questions were posed in a half a dozen other languages, but the only responses were shouted orders from the guards.

  “Out now, signore! Capisce?”

  “Everyone must leave!”

  “Is it a bomb?” asked a man.

  A collective scream and a surge toward the exits.

  “No bomb! Calm down! Don’t run!” The gray-haired guard’s pleas were drowned out by the noise. “No bomb! No bomb!”

  As she bolted for an exit, a young woman tripped and fell on her face. People walked around her and stepped over her to get to the door. A man who tried to help her to her feet was knocked to his knees. A child began crying, followed by another and another. Dogs answering each other’s howls.

  “What the hell is going on?” bellowed the big American with the video camera.

  Enzo climbed onto a bench along the side and clapped his hands together. “Please, please. Calm down! Calmati! Leave slowly through the doors. There is nothing wrong. Everything is fine. Tutto va bene.”

  “Why do we have to evacuate?” yelled someone.

  “Il Papa...The Pope...He is...” Enzo looked down at one of the older guards and back to the crowd. “The Pope is coming to the chapel and we must clear his way. For security.”

  The human carpet rippled and bunched up with another wave of emotion. Excitement rather than panic.

  “He’s coming!”

  “Il Papa!”

  “I want his picture!”

  “No photos!” Enzo said. “Everyone, please. You must go.”

  “What time do you open tomorrow?” a man asked on his way out.

  “We do not know when we will open,” Enzo said over the heads of the crowd.

  “We are closed indefinitely!” the older guard added loudy.

  Twenty minutes later, the crowd was gone and the doors were locked. A man in a black cassock and red skullcap stood alone into the middle of the Sistine Chapel. He raised his binoculars to the ceiling and fidgeted with them until one panel in particular came into sharp focus.

  Adam and Eve reaching for the apple, and then in the same fresco, being banished from the garden. The two events were divided by a single tree, a serpent twined around its trunk.

  At least, there should have been one tree.

  Bleeding through Michelangelo’s masterpiece was a second tree. A ghost tree.

  Twin trees. A portent, but of what? The man in the cassock did not know. He – and the rest of the world - would have to wait until the next morning to find out. He checked his watch to mark the time the twin tree appeared, and noted the date:

  September 10, 2001.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Spring in Beijing, years later.

  The Great Wall Shop was out of ice cream bars, and there was hell to pay.

  “Daddy, no!” wailed the girl, tossing down the ice cream cup that had been offered in lieu of the bar.

  With a tired sigh, the middle-aged father chased the rolling cup, picked it up and threw it into a trashcan. Lugging a kid to one of the Seven Wonders of the World could prove to be a mistake of historic proportions.

  Out of the blue, his wife’s boss had sent her on a tour of injection-molding plants, offering to pay for the whole family to go to China. While she was tied up with work, he was assigned with entertaining their daughter. At the suggestion of the hotel concierge, he and the girl had taken a tour bus from their Beijing hotel to the Great Wall. He’d hoped climbing would tire her. They’d go back to the hotel and sneak in a nap before dinner, when his wife was due back from her factory tour. For his secret, evil plan t
o even begin to work, however, he had to hustle his daughter through the gauntlet of shops and kiosks planted adjacent to the tour bus parking lot.

  “Memory of the Great Wall. If you climbed to Great Wall, you are a hero,” read the sign in front of a shop selling certificates verifying visitors made the climb.

  Tugging at the hem of his sweater, his daughter tried to pull him toward a kiosk peddling playing cards, baseball caps, snow globes and crayons. He wrestled his wallet out of his khakis and withdrew a two-Yuan banknote. That wasn’t going to go far. He’d used all his coins on the ice cream cup and didn’t want to break out his Visa for a box of crayons.

  “Colors, Daddy!”

  “We don’t need any of that junk, honey,” he said, stuffing the wallet back into his pocket.

  “Colors!” she wailed, and stomped her foot.

  “You’ve got more crayons than God.”

  “They’re broke.”

  “They’re fine.”

  “You’re not my daddy!”

  She used that line when she was particularly perturbed; it was usually a precursor to a major hissy fit. “That’s enough, Baab,” he said, calling her by her nickname as he tried to pull her forward.

  “You’re not my daddy!”

  An older couple turned and stared. The father smiled pleasantly, pushed the bridge of his glasses tight against his face, and bent over his daughter. “Do you want to go back to the bus, young lady?”

  “I hate you,” she announced, and crossed her arms in front of her while keeping her eyes on the prize, the kiosk loaded with crap.

  She was usually well behaved, acting more mature than her age. During the fourteen-hour flight from Chicago, she’d slept, watched movies and colored. From the minute they’d stepped off the plane, she’d reverted to infantile behavior. He blamed it on jet lag.

  “Let’s go climbing,” he said, grabbing her hand. “We’ll buy crayons when we’re done.”

  Her face brightened, and she started skipping. “Go to the top, Daddy. I want you to go high. How high can you go, Daddy?”

  He skimmed the brochure handed out by the tour bus operator. It read: “As a Chinese saying go, ‘you’re not a true man if you do not climb the greatwall’ so indeed Now It is the time.”

  “Now it is the time,” he repeated with a crooked grin, and shoved the flier in his pocket.

  As they stood at the bottom of the stairs, she jumped up and down. A pint-size cheerleader. “Go, Daddy! Go!”

  Scrutinizing the steep steps, he exhaled a silent curse. This was going to be a bitch. He’d had heart problems for years, but his cardiac doc had approved the trip. Since their little family had arrived in Beijing days earlier, however, he’d had trouble filling his lungs completely. It was as if he were trying to inhale with weights sitting on his chest. The layer of noxious fumes hanging over the city couldn’t be helping. Something else was bothering him, too. A haze hanging over his psyche. A sense of impending disaster.

  “Come on, Daddy!”

  They started the climb together, but he soon allowed her to run a few yards ahead of him. Every so often, he made her stop moving so he could snap a photo of her with his digital.

  The place was jammed with vacationers – the bulk of them Chinese families – and he didn’t want to lose sight of her. He’d dressed her in an outrageously yellow rain jacket so he could keep track of her.

  On this portion of the Great Wall, it was all up hill from the tour bus parking lot. Steep, uneven stone steps - broken up by a series of watchtowers - topped the structure. A few flat landings and straight-aways gave hikers a break, but mostly it was steps. The higher up one went, the fewer people could be found. After a while, only the jocks with serious shoes and aerobic abilities moved ahead. In the distance, he could see their tiny figures atop the wall. Here and there were low cutouts, with safety bars running across them and warning signs in Chinese and English: “NO CLIMBING.” “BE CAREFUL.” At one landing, he spotted his favorite of the day and pulled out his digital to take a picture of it: “SPEAKING CELLPHONE IS STRICTLY PROHIBITED WHEN THUNDERSTORM.”

  Partway up a particularly treacherous set of stairs, the father had to stop. As he hung onto a handrail and panted, he squeezed as far to the right as he could so others could go around him. Humiliatingly, a set of seniors jogged ahead of him. He pushed his glasses against his face, put one foot in front of the other and continued.

  Upon reaching the next landing, he was cornered by a young English couple. They were staying at the same hotel as his family and had ridden the same tour bus to the site.

  “Could we trouble you?” asked the woman, extending the camera to him.

  His daughter had dashed to the next set of stairs and was waiting for him at the bottom of them. “Daddy...hurry. I want to go to the castles.”

  Castles. That’s what she called the towers. “One minute, honey,” the father said. “Stay there. Do not move.”

  The couple posed with their arms around each other. He angled the shot so the background showed the Great Wall in the distance, a gray snake slithering through the hills. As the father snapped, he noticed the sky. The darkest clouds he’d ever seen were collecting directly over them. Lowering the camera, he scrutinized the black, bulbous masses. They were gathering so quickly, he could see them moving.

  The Englishman tipped his head back. “Appears we’re in for a spring shower.”

  The father stepped over to the couple and turned the digital around to show them the screen. “How’s that?”

  “Lovely,” said the woman, taking the camera back.

  “Cheers,” said the man. “Should we take one of you and your daughter together?”

  “That’d be...” He looked toward the steps.

  She was gone.

  “Baab?”

  The father ran his eyes around the landing, a large stone square crowded with people shooting photos and catching their breath. No bright yellow dotted the throng. She must have started for her castle. Overhead, the sky rumbled.

  Heart in his throat, he ran for the steps. Halfway up the steep flight, the father stumbled and fell on his knees. The impact of bone against stone sent a rush of searing pain through his body. As he straightened, he spotted a wedge of yellow between the legs of two women. They moved to the left and he could see his daughter on the top step.

  “Baab!” He hobbled up the remaining steps as quickly as he could, pushing people out of the way. “Baab! Stop!”

  Upon reaching the landing, he could see yellow amid the crowd at the other end of the stone expanse. Next to her was a snowy-haired woman dressed in a long, white coat. Relief washed over him. An old lady had found her and taken her by the hand. He yelled to their backs: “Wait! Baab!”

  His heart was pounding so hard, he wondered if those around him could hear it. Sweat beaded his forehead and his knees burned. He fell against a wall and his glasses flew off his face. Patting the ground with both hands, he found his glasses and slapped them back on his face in time to see a flash of lightening rip across the black sky. Thunder drummed so loudly, he could feel it shake the stone beneath him. The Great Wall had come alive, and was trying to shudder everyone off its back.

  “Wait!” he wheezed, keeping his eyes on his yellow daughter and the white woman. They were a half a dozen strides from him, standing under the arched entrance to the tower.

  Releasing the old woman’s hand, his daughter pivoted to face him. Turning around at the same time was his daughter’s rescuer. It wasn’t a woman; it was a freaky man. His brows and lashes were as white as his long hair and his face lacked emotion. An expressionless mannequin in a store window.

  Baab and the white man turned back around and stepped into the darkness of the tower. A chill washed over the panicked father. A stranger had snatched his daughter. He pushed himself off the wall. “Stop! That’s my kid! Someone stop that guy! Baab!”

  A bolt jagged across the clouds, followed by a crack as loud as a cannon. Tourists started running dow
n the steps, trying to get off the wall. A group clustered in front of him, blocking his way and impeding his view. “Move!” he said, elbowing them out of his way.

  When he cleared the crowd, he stumbled forward and lost his glasses again. As he reached down for them, he felt the ground come up to meet him. He fell face forward onto the stone walkway. Another flash, and rolling thunder.

  “Baab,” he breathed to the cool hardness beneath him. His torso felt wrapped in tight straps. Something warm collected under his mouth and around his eyes. He lifted his head and through the blur of his own blood, saw a wall of legs. The air vibrated and cracked, but the show overhead couldn’t chase gawkers from the drama on the ground.

  The English couple knelt by his side. His next words were gurgled to them. “Baab...my kid...he stole my kid.”

  “Call an ambulance!” the Englishman yelled to the crowd.

  “Can anyone speak English?” hollered the woman.

  A clack of thunder answered her question.

  The Englishman eyed the afternoon sky, as black as night. “His little one. Yellow slicker. Where is she?”

  “I saw her walking into the garrison,” said his wife.

  “Nooo! The white guy!” the fallen man moaned. The father pulled his knees under him and returned to a standing position. He swayed wildly and the couple tried to steady him, but he pushed the helping hands off. “Baab!”

  The gawkers stepped back, keeping the human circle intact but enlarging it.

  “Baab! Baab!”

  He was certain he heard her small voice in the distance:

  “Daddy!”

  Barreling through the bystanders, he stumbled forward and tripped into the tower, his way illuminated by the lightening. “Baab!”

  A human pinball, the father ricocheted from one corner to the other. Outside, an inky darkness had settled on the land and he could hardly see his hand in front of his face. “Baab! Talk to me! It’s Daddy!”

  Lightening cut across one of the tower windows, and the father saw the white man standing in the opening. No more flashes brightened the sky behind him, yet the stranger was so pale, he seemed illuminated by his own light. White clothes. Snowy hair. Alabaster face. A life-size Christmas tree angel.