“I have some things to tell you. Important things.”
“What are you talking about?”
“There’s a ticket waiting for you at the American Airlines counter at LAX.”
“A ticket? Look, you’d better just tell me what this is all about.”
“It’s about the fire,” he said.
Bitter-tasting bile rose in my throat. My mother’s screams echoed through two decades.
“What about the fire?” I managed.
“At the counter,” the voice rasped, “under Rollo Barnett. Open ticket, but you’d better come first thing tomorrow.” The line went dead.
I stood for a moment with the receiver to my ear, looking blankly out at the backyard, confused and frightened.
A squirrel scampered up a tree by my deck. My eyes followed it.
I got the number for American Airlines and made the call. A sales representative named Kayla told me I had an open-ended, round-trip, first-class L.A.-to-Denver ticket waiting for me.
“Does it say who purchased it?” I asked.
“A Mr. Harvey Grant,” she answered.
“Harvey Grant,” I mumbled. “Who the hell’s Harvey Grant?”
“Sir?”
“Sorry. I was talking to myself.”
“Would you like to make a reservation?”
I finger-combed my hair; an uneasy tingle spread down my neck and shoulders.
“Sir?”
“Um, I’m just not that gung-ho a flyer is all.”
“Actually, me neither. Can I help you with a reservation?”
“Well, Kayla,” I answered slowly, “I guess you can. What’s the earliest-flight tomorrow?”
At eight-fifty the next morning, my car was parked in the short-term lot and I was in the terminal, with a ticket tucked in the back pocket of my jeans and an American Airlines envelope clasped in my hand.
I stood against the wall next to a nut stand with a red-and-white-striped awning and opened the envelope. My hand was shaking a little—early heights? Inside there was no note, just two faxes: directions to a Denver address and a photocopied article from the previous day’s
Venice, ItalyIn what is being called an extraordinary tragedy, Fausto Arrezione, the owner of an antiquarian bookstore, was killed today in a fire that destroyed his shop and all of its contents, apparently including a priceless page of Leonardo da Vinci’s notes. Earlier this week Arrezione had placed a call to the Gallerie dell’Accademia, a venerated museum and art school, to report his discovery of the page that purportedly included a drawing of what Leonardo described as the “Circles of Truth,” which he has, in several of his notebooks, referred to as the key to the whereabouts of the legendary Medici Dagger.
Mystery has surrounded the Medici Dagger since 1491 when Lorenzo de’ Medici commissioned Leonardo to produce the piece to commemorate the death of Medici’s younger brother, Giuliano, fatally wounded by enemies of the Medicis in an attempt to overthrow the family from Florentine power. Leonardo never delivered the Dagger. The legend surrounding it began with the discovery in 1608 of a manuscript called the CodexArundel, in which Leonardo wrote the following words next to a drawing of a magnificent dagger:
Through the din of the bustling airport I heard my father’s voice speaking Leonardo’s words in my head—words I’d memorized at my dad’s side, elbow to elbow on the living-room floor, his oxford cotton sleeve touching my flannel pajama top.
“Something has occurred which I cannot explain. While casting the dagger for Il Magnifico I have chanced upon a mixture of metals which once formed became almost as light as the air. Try as I might I could not return it to liquid form nor could I cause it to be deformed or dented in any way. And there is an edge to this blade which is sharper than any man has ever seen. The world is little prepared to receive a material that could be transformed into indestructible weapons of death. No good purpose could come of it. War is bestial madness. But I see beyond us to a glorious future with science the benevolent ruler, when man, unencumbered by ill intent, could utilize this extraordinary discovery for the noblest of purposes. So I will hold the dagger for that man of the future. And the Circles of Truth shall lead him to it.”
“The Circles of Truth,” I repeated aloud. The man from Vinci, who’d bought caged birds only to set them free, had discovered an indestructible alloy and felt a responsibility to keep it a secret for a man of the future. He’d hidden the Medici Dagger somewhere, almost five hundred years earlier, and had left the secret to its whereabouts in some sort of cryptic message he called the “Circles of Truth.”
I glanced at the remaining paragraph of the article, although I’d already guessed its content.In 1980, another page, found in Amboise, France, thought to contain the “Circles of Truth,” was tragically destroyed when the private plane transporting it to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, killing the courier who was piloting the plane, traveling alone. Since that incident, all hope of recovering the legendary Dagger had been lost until this recent find, which experts say might have included a duplicate of the “Circles.” A spokesperson from the Gallerie dell’Accademia maintained that while the notes had been viewed by one staff person, a photocopy had not been made. Apparently the notes were lost in the blaze.
I fingered the envelope. There was nothing else in it but air. I folded the directions and the article, tucked them into my jeans pocket, and bought a small bag of roasted cashews. The bag was red and white, like the awning. I drifted over to a deserted gate, took a seat, and popped a few of the salty nuts in my mouth, grinding them into paste till my jaw hurt.
