The Devil's Own Crayons Page 8

  The Scotsman sat stiffer and taller in his seat. “You got that right.”

  Nardini nodded at Rossi. “I am told that you are the most tenacious of your agency’s people, and that you are willing to take risks. Willing to sacrifice for your work.”

  Rossi smiled tightly. “In other words, they sent me because I don’t have a life.”

  The cardinal looked at the priest. “Father Rayyan Khoury is recognized inside and outside the church as an expert on...”

  “Excuse me.” Rossi pulled a bagged document out of her pocket and slapped it in the middle of the desk. “Someone slipped this under my door.”

  The cardinal’s eyes flitted down to the plastic and back to her face. “Si,” he said sadly. “We know about this.”

  “A man is dead,” she said. “One of your own.”

  “We know who murdered him,” said the cardinal. “There is nothing to be done. Exposing them would mean exposing this project.”

  “The police think it was a suicide. They should know the truth.”

  “Those who need to know already do,” said the cardinal.

  “What’s this project?” she asked. “Why was he killed, and why was I led to his death scene?”

  The cardinal rubbed his forehead with the tips of his fingers. “There are individuals who want us to fail. His murder was designed to slow us down, and to terrorize you.”

  “Who are these people? Am I next?” she asked.

  “No, no,” he said. “Killing an FBI agent would attract great attention. It would be too...How do you say it?”

  “High-profile?”

  “Si. Yes.”

  The men on either side of Rossi were wide-eyed. MacLeod stood up and pulled down on his vest. “Cheerio.”

  “Signore, please,” said the cardinal.

  “Your Eminence,” said Rossi. “Tell us what’s going on.”

  Nardini rose from his chair. “Come with me. It is easier to show than to tell.”

  The three Vatican visitors and their red-capped host stood under the most famous ceiling on Earth. What really amazed Rossi, however, was the fact that the four of them were the only souls in the Sistine Chapel. The major tourist site was a must see for thousands of visitors daily, yet on that morning not even a guard was visible. She checked her watch.

  “Sir...Eminence...Aren’t you open to the public this morning? Where is everyone?”

  “Today, we are the only ones allowed inside.”

  Whatever was going on, it was huge. As she walked into the middle of the chapel, she got dizzy trying to take it all in. Robed and nude figures painted with such detail, they seemed to be swirling and moving. Flowing hair and fabric. Famous faces and moments from the Bible. On the south wall, stories of Moses, including the crossing of the Red Sea. On the north wall, stories of Christ ending with the table of Apostles gathered for the Last Supper. She tipped her head back and admired the big prize: The ceiling. The curvaceous Eve and her beautiful Adam, both of them hunched over and naked as they’re banished from the Garden of Eden. The devil - a snake with a woman’s torso - twined around the tree of good and evil. In another ceiling panel, a mighty Lord – a whirl of gray hair and beard – points at the sun and the moon in the heavens.

  “You are aware the chapel was restored, the frescoes stripped of hundreds of years worth of grime,” said Nardini.

  “During the 1980s, right?” Rossi noticed several floodlights on tripods positioned along the walls, and assumed some other sort of work was taking place.

  “It was not completed until the 1990s,” added the priest.

  “After the cleaning, certain things began revealing themselves,” continued the cardinal.

  She contemplated the ceiling again, and figured he was speaking metaphorically.

  Behind her, the priest verbalized something close to what she was thinking. “Your Eminence, I visited this holy place before the restoration was completed. The colors are brighter than before, revealing Michelangelo’s true...”

  “I do not speak of the artist’s palette.” The cardinal handed out small binoculars.

  “I don’t need these,” said the Scot.

  “You do for this, signore.” Nardini went over to the far end of the chapel, to the wall opposite the altar. He flipped a switch. With a blinding flash, the floodlights were activated.

  All three visitors raised their binoculars to the ceiling.

  Rossi heard someone in the group gasp. Perhaps it was her own breath leaving her body. A numbness overtook her, and she heard the scuffle of the others’ shoes as they made their way around the space. Like she, they had to be overwhelmed.

  The room was drenched in a bright light from which no secrets could hide. Beneath the vibrant colors of Michelangelo’s artistry were faint but definite shadows. The serpent-wrapped tree had a dark twin in the background. Behind the majestic Lord was a horned figure pointing at the heavens, copying God’s outstretched arms in an almost mocking way. In the panel depicting The Flood, a creature with a man’s torso and a fish’s tail was circling a boat containing struggling survivors. Everywhere were these menacing secondary figures, spirits captured in paint so barely perceptible, it did indeed take the bright lights to make them visible.

  “This is why we allow no photographs. The secret could be revealed with computer enhancements. The world will know one day soon, but not yet. It is not ready. The body is strong but the soul is weak.”

  Excited by the news, the Scotsman and the priest lowered their binoculars and fired off questions so rapidly and loudly, they seemed to be trying to shout each other down.

  “Did Michelangelo do the paintings beneath the paintings?” asked MacLeod.

  “Were these mistakes that he made and tried to cover?” asked the priest.

  “Or were these ghosts part of his original work?” asked MacLeod. “Did he do an earlier version of the ceiling and was forced to paint over it because religious authorities didn’t approve?”

  “Was he trying to send a message to future generations?” asked the priest. “Did he hide it beneath the art, knowing someday we would possess the tools to read it?”

  MacLeod: “If so, it was pure genius!”

  “Ispirazione divina,” the priest said solemnly. “God moved the artist’s hands. Through Michelangelo, the Lord speaks to us.”

  Rossi wanted to skip the hyperbole over the frescoes and get back to why she’d been brought to the Vatican. “What does this have to do with me? Bring in the art experts, not the FBI.”

  “You must understand how these were first revealed.”

  She was getting impatient. “You already explained: After the cleaning.”

  “Not all at once.” Nardini waved toward the ceiling. “The shadow tree in the garden, you see it?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Of course.”

  “It appeared in the year 2001 - on the tenth of September.”

  Each struggling to process the shocking information, the three visitors were silent for a full minute. Finally the priest spoke, and even the man of faith couldn’t hide his disbelief.

  “You’re saying it predicted the attack on the World Trade Center?”

  “Si, Father Khoury. Twin trees. Twin towers.”

  Rossi: “That’s impossible.”

  The Scotsman made a scoffing noise. “Niver, niver. It’s bletheration.”

  The cardinal walked toward the chapel’s entrance wall while pointing up and ahead of him. “The panel with the flood. The serpent appeared in the waters in 2004, on Christmas Day. The next day, an earthquake occurred under the Indian Ocean off the coast of Indonesia.”

  “The tsunami disaster,” said the Scotsman. “A quarter of a million people were killed.”

  “What about the figure behind God?” asked Rossi, inspecting that fresco with the binoculars.

  “The monster appeared on the first day of May, in the year 2008,” said the cardinal.

  “Cyclone Nargis made landfall in Myanmar on May 2,” said the priest.
“I don’t remember the death toll. More than a hundred thousand. We had a vigil on campus.”

  “How long has this been going on?” asked Rossi. “When did the shadows start appearing?”

  “After Holy Father John Paul II unveiled the completion of the final stage, restoration of the wall frescoes. That was in December 1999.”

  “Shortly before the new millennium began,” noted the priest.

  “Even before the year two-thousand, the first disaster was announced by the frescoes.” Nardini walked toward the altar and pointed at a triangular painting at the end of the row of ceiling masterpieces. “Behold Jonah.”

  The trio clustered around the cardinal and raised their binoculars.The muscular Jonah was seated while bending off to one side, looking heavenward. A large fish was next to him. Behind the man and the fish were a couple of cherubs. Muted streaks marred all the creatures.

  “So what?” asked Rossi.

  “An inferior cleaning job,” added MacLeod.

  “Jonah was in the belly of the whale for three days before God rescued him. Three days after Pope John Paul II inaugurated the newly restored chapel, rain began falling in Venezuela. For three days in mid-December, it stormed. Over three days, the dark lines appeared over the frescoe. By the time the rains and the lines were finished, thirty thousand people in Venezuela were dead from mudslides.”

  “Interesting,” said MacLeod.

  Nardini: “We cannot explain how...”

  “Who is this we?” snapped Rossi, lowering her binoculars. “The Vatican leadership?”

  “No, signora. The Holy See. The American government. Other governments from around the world. They have all sent their own experts. None can explain these changes to the ceiling. And it has gone beyond predicting natural and manmade events.”

  The three visitors came together. Safety in numbers again. “Yes, Eminence?” asked the priest.

  “We thought the two newest shadows were random, and that the ceiling had lost its ability to predict.” He walked into a corner and pointed up to a triangular painting.

  All three visitors followed him, and looked with their binoculars. Two robed women – one carrying a man’s head on a platter while another was covering it up with a cloth. “Judith and her maid with the severed head of an Assyrian general,” said Khoury.

  Nardini: “To the right of the two women.”

  “A headless guy on a bed,” said Rossi. “The aforementioned general?”

  “Behind him,” said Nardini.

  Rossi could make out the shadow of another figure, a man standing behind the corpse. “After he showed, what blew up or fell down?”

  “Nothing. No earthquake. No explosion anywhere in the world,” said Nardini. “However, weeks after the standing ghost appeared, the Vatican received a belated report from a diocese in Brazil. A man, a bricklayer killed in a construction accident, had risen from the dead.”

  Rossi lowered the binoculars: “You mean he was very, very sick and...”

  “Dead,” said Nardini. “He was very, very dead, signora. Medical doctors and police there confirmed it. He had fallen off a roof and into some rubble. Dead.”

  “The doctors and constables made a mistake,” said MacLeod.

  With his index finger, Nardini motioned across his own throat. “He was nearly...how do you say?”

  “Decapitated?” asked Rossi.

  “Si.”

  “Who was responsible for this...healing?” asked Khoury. “Who brought this man back?”

  “The bricklayer himself cannot explain it, but at the moment of his death, his wife was in church and swore the statue of the Virgin motioned to her.”

  “What does any of this have to do with the shadow bloke?” asked MacLeod.

  “The man’s death and resurrection. The Marian apparition. All of it occurred the day after the standing ghost appeared in the Judith painting.”

  “I’m not even going to try to argue,” said Rossi. “A bunch of superstitious...”

  “There is more.” Nardini pointed straight up, to a painting in the middle of the ceiling not far from the Judith triangle. “A ghost appeared behind the sleeping Noah, but nothing followed...we thought.”

  All three visitors looked with their binoculars. Behind the nude, reclining Noah was the shape of another person, hunched over but seemingly in the process of straightening. The figure, slender and with long hair, seemed to be female.

  “Let’s hear it,” Rossi said.

  “A young woman from a wealthy family was completely paralyzed in a horse riding accident in your country, in your Los Angeles.”

  “I suppose she got up and did a jig,” said MacLeod.

  “After stigmata appeared on her hands and feet – while she was in the hospital, surrounded by surgeons,” said Nardini.

  “Why haven’t we heard about any of this?” asked Rossi. “Why hasn’t it made the papers or television? I worked in L.A. I would have heard.”

  “All the governments – including your own – are working to keep this secret,” said Nardini. “Even with their efforts, too much has gotten out. The church where the Blessed Mother appeared in Brazil – a small chapel in Sao Paulo – cannot accommodate the pilgrims. There have been riots and three people were trampled to death. The young woman and her family have been forced to go into hiding from the paparazzi.”

  “Eminence, reports of miracles are nothing new.” Khoury turned to the two lay people and explained. “Vatican investigators examine the holy works attributed to candidates for sainthood.”

  Nardini nodded. “Si, si. But we believe these miracles are different because Michelangelo’s masterpiece is predicting...”

  “Look!” interrupted the priest, pointing up.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The most famous and beloved of the Genesis paintings: God, his figure draped in pale fabric and his face surrounded by a flurry of gray hair, extending his arm to create Adam.

  Few images were more universally recognized than that of the Lord’s finger reaching toward but not quite touching the hand of man. Something dark and ominous was seeping through Michelangelo’s iconic masterpiece: Two additional hands – disembodied shadows – poised above those of God and Adam. As with the original work, they were extended toward each other, nearly touching fingers. The ghost hands were so faint, they could have been mistaken as a trick of the eye, the result of staring at Michelangelo’s fresco for too long.

  “There is a rhythm to these appearances,” said the cardinal, watching through his own binoculars. “The ghosts always begin showing in the morning. When we see them, we close the chapel to the public. The images darken as the day goes on, then begin reversing themselves in the evening. By the next morning – the day of the event - they are faded.”

  As he took in the haunting image materializing above the hands of Adam and his creator, a chill traveled down Khoury’s spine. He lowered the binoculars and uttered the one word that seemed an appropriate label: “Miraculous.”

  “Non necessariamente,” said Nardini.

  “How can it be anything else, Eminence?”

  “Why are they being revealed to us in this manner? Perhaps it is indeed the work of God himself, but we do not know.”

  Rossi: “Regardless, if the pattern holds true...”

  “Something happens tomorrow,” finished MacLeod.

  “Si,” said Nardini. “Domani.”

  All four fell silent as they continued to watch the shadow darken, like a photo from an instamatic camera developing before the taker’s eyes. Far from perfect silhouettes of the originals, the ghosts were dark cutouts done by a sloppy amateur. The fingers were too long for the hands. The wrists, too fat. The rendition was juvenile. Primitive. That made it all the more ominous.

  Khoury took his eyes off the ceiling. “Eminence, forgive my ignorance, my impertinence, but I must ask: What are we three to do about this impending...event?”

  “You don’t expect us to stop it, surely?” asked the Scot. He nodded to
ward Rossi and Khoury. “Are you buying into any of this?”

  “This is insane,” said Rossi. “Pazzo.”

  “To do nothing is pazzo,” said the cardinal.

  Walking the width of the chapel, Khoury folded his hands behind his back and kept his eyes turned to the floor. He needed to think, and the sight of the disfigured frescoes was too unnerving. Khoury couldn’t understand how the ghost images were related to anything in the Bible. The Book of Revelation described terrible holocausts – hail and fire mixed with blood, creatures of the sea dying, a star falling - and certainly the destruction that followed the appearance of the shadows could be interpreted as versions of those events. The catastrophes could also be nothing more than nature or man acting out. And what of the miracles? Were they genuine, or had doctors simply erred? How do you misdiagnose a decapitation?

  Khoury stopped moving and faced the cardinal. “Eminence...”

  “Si.”

  Afraid of offending his superior, Khoury spoke slowly and selected his words carefully. “Is it possible that you...that we are looking too hard for unusual occurrences the day after these shadows materialize? Could it be...coincidental?”

  “Thought I was the skeptic,” said MacLeod. “Taking my job, are you?”

  Khoury ignored the crack and continued. “And if these events are indeed miracles, what license does anyone possess to interfere with God’s plan? Is it not God’s will that these things happen?”

  “You have identified the fissure, the divide. Most of those knowledgeable of these shadow figures and the resulting events believe God wants us to investigate and learn from each one. This would be a demonstration of our faith, and a celebration of the human need to explore.”

  “I agree,’ said Khoury.

  “A minority thinks we should believe nothing, and that anything predicted by the ceiling is the work of the devil.” Nardini looked from one face to the other. “They have proposed that we destroy the frescoes.”

  “No,” said Rossi.

  “Terrible,” said MacLeod.

  “Worse, there are a few – a violent few – who want to capture and use the people involved in the miracles. Use them for their own gain.”