We watched a lone sea gull swoop down near the boat and quickly flap away.
“I wonder if my father and Krell ever met,” I said. “Maybe not. Maybe Krell just sent Tecci to meet him. To exterminate the competition.”
This had happened when my only dream was to be Luke Sky-walker as I waved my Toys “R” Us lightsaber at a three-dollar poster. Now, here I was, six feet from a dead man; Fausto Arrezione, the bookseller, was also dead; and others had died, some of them at my hands.
Antonia’s face had turned ashen. She grabbed her stomach. “Oh, God, I’m going to throw up.”
She got to her knees and vomited off the back of the boat, then wiped her mouth on her sleeve. “God, they were trying to kill me! They’re
“No,” I said, “they would have been glad to kill me, I think, but not you. You heard Tecci. He thinks you know something. Now tell me. What is it he thinks you know?”
I heard nothing but lapping waves while she stared at me for what felt like a week. Then she reached for her big leather bag, pulled out a blank manila 9 x 12 envelope, and handed it to me. Between two pieces of heavy cardboard was a cellophane sleeve.
Inside was a yellowed page that looked very much like the one Greer had passed on to me. My face flushed, the sensation rippling across the rest of my skin. The sound of the waves slapping the creakingboat dissipated until they vanished, leaving Antonia, Leonardo, and me in the yawning breadth of time.
I opened my mouth to speak. My tongue felt dry and I had to clear my throat.“This . . . is . . . the page the bookseller found.”
It was definitely different from mine. To one side, a large bull’s-eye of tiny marks in concentric rings similar to the one on my page and a drawing of what looked like an astonishingly sophisticated system ofpulleys. And on the other side, one line of Leonardo’s backward handwriting and a picture of a harness, like the kind of thing infants bounce up and down in to amuse themselves.
“Fausto Arrezione is my uncle. Was,” Antonia confided. “He called me the day he found the page. Leonardo is my specialty. I told Corta about it right away, and we set up a time the next day for Fausto to bring in the notes. It would have been a major acquisition for the Gallerie. I wasn’t really thinking much about the Dagger itself. But then something must have spooked Fausto, because he brought the page to me. He seemed unusually nervous and asked me to hold it for him. And later that night . . . oh God . . . Corta must have told . . .” She started to tense up, fear grabbing her, folding her in like a strand of rope. “Corta told Krell and Tecci and they . . . oh God. It
Antonia held her palms together, the tips of her index fingers just brushing her nose. She began to rock back and forth, staring intently at nothing, accepting that her uncle had been killed for the notes she’d been carrying in her bag.
“What am I going to do?” she muttered. “They want these notes and they’ll kill me for them.”
I wanted to grab her small wrists, feel her throbbing pulse, and tell her, “I’ve got you.” But I didn’t; I couldn’t.
Instead I extracted the leather portfolio from my red bag and carefully handed her my own page of Leonardo’s notes.
Antonia’s eyes went as wide as rainbows. Mouth hanging open, slowly shaking her head from side to side, she removed it from the large Ziploc Bag I had placed it in, turning the page over and back, the way I had with hers. She looked at me quizzically, awestruck.
It was my turn. I told her everything—Greer, Tecci, the Georgetown fire. I held the two pages of notes side by side. We sat silently, comparing what we hoped were the Circles of Truth.
“These pages could lead us to the Medici Dagger,” I said.“Leonardo wrote that the key to the Dagger was in the Circles of Truth.”
“They’re definitely not duplicates,” she said.
“No. They’re obviously different. Two Circles of Truth. We’ve got them both and Krell and Tecci must have nothing.”
“What should we do?” Antonia asked.“Should we go to the police?”
“Are you kidding me? Did Tecci sound scared of the police to you? Krell is connected. Besides, if you wanted to go to the police, why didn’t you call them after the fire?”
“I . . . because it’s Leonardo and I thought maybe I could . . .”
“Jesus,” I said. “You didn’t hand over the notes because you were working on them. You were hiding out and scared, but you didn’t want to let them go, did you?”
“Well . . . no,” she admitted.
I was impressed. I asked her if she’d translated the line on her page.
She nodded. “ ‘Let he who finds the dagger use it for noble purpose.’ ”
A shiver traveled through my body.
“He’s talking to me,” I whispered. “I can’t explain it, but I know Leonardo is talking to me.”
I could feel Leonardo’s strong hand on one shoulder, my father’s gentle one on the other.
I took a deep lungful of sea air.
“Well,” Antonia said, “what do we do now?”
