“He was sixty,” I said.
“There’s the math,” she said, chiding. “And that means . . .”
I thought hard for a minute, mentally leafing through my art history. Then I got it. “Jesus,” I said, “Leonardo was in
“Bingo!” she said, slapping her thigh. “In 1512, Pope Leo the Tenth had Leonardo summoned to the Vatican. Leo was Lorenzo de’Medici’s son, and he wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps and usher in a newGolden Age of Art—only in Rome, not Florence—making Rome the art capital of the world with him as pope. But Leo was a hedonistic loser. Nobody wanted him to be pope, and that stirred up all kinds of trouble throughout Italy. Twelve Franciscan friars took it upon themselves to spread out over the country and preach like crazy that Leo was the Antichrist and that if he was made pope, the end of the world would come. These twelve had a profound effect on the mood of the Italians. Everyone was thinking doom and gloom, including Leonardo.”
Excitement stirred in me.“Lust of the mighty, wanton destruction,” I said. “So we know how he was feeling when he arrived in Rome.”
“Yes. That explains the first part of the translation from yesterday. Now add that once Leonardo got to Rome, Leo didn’t give him a single commission. That’s where this part picks up. ‘Why am I not allowed to work?’ Leonardo asks. Raphael had been given
“That had to hurt. Leonardo’s archrival getting the cream of commissions.”
“Sure,” Ginny said. “They hated each other. Michelangelo called Leonardo a man who could get nothing accomplished, and Leonardo said Michelangelo had no business painting—the Sistine Chapel notwithstanding.”
“Right,” I said. “Leonardo thought sculptors were fools for spending-their lives hip-deep in marble chips, said they looked like bakers or snowmen, while painters walked around dressed in fine clothes.”
“So,” Ginny said, “Leonardo, the greatest of them all, has nothing to do except dissections for his anatomical studies, and on top of everything else, Pope Leo orders him to stop the dissections because the thought of it makes him queasy.”
I sat up straight, right in the pipe with Ginny. “So you’re saying the ‘he’ of ‘he who would treasure me’ is Pope Leo.”
“Exactly. You can feel Leonardo’s frustration. He knows God gave him these incredible gifts, tasked him, but he’s not allowed to completehis work. Million-candle fury, Reb. Now,” she said, hunching over toward me, tenting her fingers, bouncing the tips against each other. “Any idea where Leonardo was staying in Rome when he wrote these words, when he devised the Circles of Truth?”
I simultaneously wanted to punch her out for making me work for it and kiss her for translating the page and knowing what it meant.
“The Belvedere Palace,” Ginny said, clapping her hands.
I grinned and pulled by earlobe. “The Belvedere Palace is on top of Vatican Hill.”
“My hero,” she said, holding me in her gaze.
“So,” I cleared my throat, “we’ve got Leonardo at the Belvedere Palace, deciding where and how the Dagger shall rest.”
“That’s my best guess.”
“It’s a very good guess. Nice work.”
“I know. And isn’t it slightly incongruous that we’re at this very moment flying to California. We’re going the wrong way, Reb!”
She jumped out of her seat and headed toward the cabin. “Tell Dracco to turn around right now!”
I grabbed her arm. “Forget it!”
“What are you saying?”
“Up till this second your thinking was stellar.”
“Don’t patronize me. You’re telling me California, not Rome? Are you nuts?”
“Ginny,” I snapped, squeezing her arm. “The Vatican. Take one. ‘Pardon me, Pope, could you please cancel the Mass, we’re checking under the pews for the Medici Dagger. Oh, and don’t tell anybody we’re here because all of Europe wants to capture us or kill us, or both.’ ”
The color drained from Ginny’s face. She shrunk back into her seat.
“Yes, we have to go back there,” I told her, “but not before we figure out the Circles of Truth. They’re going to tell us ‘where and how it shall rest.’ Till then, we play it safe.”
Ginny frowned absently. I was sorry I’d reminded her of the danger.
I picked up Leonardo’s two pages and examined the Circles of Truth. The shape of the markings triggered a memory. For my twelfth birthday, Mona had given me a book of Sherlock Holmes adventures. She’d recommended one of the stories to me and it became my favorite.
“Do you remember Sherlock Holmes’s ‘Adventure of the Dancing Men’?” I asked Ginny.
She shook her head.
“The messages were written with pictures; stick figures of dancing men with their arms and legs in different positions. They were an alphabet that only two people knew. Secret messages were written in the dancing-men alphabet. We’ve got a bunch of concentric rings of lines and squiggles here. Maybe all these little marks on the Circles of Truth are some kind of alphabet, or a pictograph—broken up, cut apart.”
“Could be,” Ginny said, peering at the Circles. “I’m an art historian, not a cryptanalyst. Look, I got us to the Vatican. Maybe we should just go there and give the pages to the pope. He could, I don’t know, call Gibraltar and
