The Medici Dagger

I touched Leonardo’s notes to my cheek.

“Venice,” I said to nobody.

four

Near morning, I dreamt I was playing checkers with Julius Caesar in the middle of the Piazza San Marco. He was wearing a black toga and had a snake around his neck that kept whispering in his ear, telling him what moves to make. And Julius, the son of a bitch, was winning—getting kinged all over the place, stacking checkers up like a bunch of Oreos while the tourists and pigeons watched.

I sat there, red-faced, in the middle of the vast square, trying to grab the snake’s tongue when it stuck out and wiggled. Julius was throwing his head back, going “mwa-ha-ha” each time I missed.

It was a rotten dream. I woke up way too early, frustrated and pissed, thinking what the hell was I doing playing checkers.

The morning paper had the same article that had run in theDenver Post. I threw it out, fixed my usual breakfast of oatmeal with dried cherries and banana, and ate robotically at the kitchen table.

An hour later I was jogging through the foggy Malibu hills, moist, cool air filling my lungs, clearing my mind.Breathe in, breathe out. Focus. Don’t forget to laugh. At what? Life, death, fire, daggers, revenge, pain . . . searing pain. You’ve got a purpose. Get Nolo Tecci.

“Hah!” I yelled as the beams of an oncoming car flashed through the murky whiteness.“Hah!” I yelled again, the sound of the tires dissipating as the car vanished around a bend in the road. Then I stopped thinking and things got still and clear; I finished out the run in the jungle.

After a shower, I called my travel agent, Leah, who had a sexy voice that hardly matched her size-sixteen body. She booked me on a flight that night to Milan—first class—with a jumper to Marco Polo Airport in Mestre, just outside of Venice.

I put on a Credence Clearwater Revival CD and listened, while I packed, to John Fogerty howl about being born on the bayou. A bunch of socks and Jockey underwear, jeans, shaving and tooth stuff, some black T-shirts, running gear, and a dripless candlestick in a small brass holder.

No matter where I am, what hotel, what country, I always light a candle on my way to bed. The softness of the flickering light reminds me of a painting in the National Gallery by Georges de La Tour calledThe Repentant Magdalen—a picture of Mary Magdalen sitting at a desk in a room lit only by a candle.

Leaning on the table, chin resting in one hand, the delicate fingers of the other caressing a barely illuminated skull, Mary stares into a mirror, absorbed in thoughts of mortality and forgiveness. The softness of the light playing on her pensive face and billowing sleeve has entranced me since I was a kid.

Lying in hotel beds that have been dreamed in by countless strangers, I watch my candle flicker and search for comfort in my nightlight. Happy dancing shadows in Reb’s sleep-tight light. I can barely remember the sound of my mother’s voice.

I closed the suitcase, turned Fogerty off, and called Archie Ferris. Archie owns a specialty gun shop calledHoo-ah!that caters to the film industry. He knows how to use every kind of weapon ever made and owns most of them, too.

In addition to running the store, Archie makes a good living as technical advisor on action films, providing weapons as props and showing stuntmen and -women how to look authentic. He’s late fifties, five-ten, two-twenty, and stocky as a gorilla, with hairy arms and knuckles to match, and a five-o’clock shadow at elevenA.M.

Archie started out in South Boston. Joined the Army out of highschool. Went into Special Forces and made sergeant. Did two tours in Nam. He was a victim of that war, that was obvious to me, though he never took a bullet in hundreds of firefights. He’d come back to a country that spit on his loyalty, almost the worst thing that could happen to any veteran, but particularly Archie. Archie Ferris and loyalty mean the same thing.

After returning to the States, he drifted out to L.A., became a cop, and married the first girl who didn’t look sideways at the khaki T-shirt, battle fatigues, and jump boots he always wore. He wouldn’t tell me her name. Couldn’t say the word. All he’d said was “She was an empty-hearted woman who couldn’t love anybody, not even her own son.” This while sobbing into an Orange Crush.

The son he was referring to was Danny, who’d been raised mostly in the custody of Archie’s ex-wife and a succession of losers.

Archie loved Danny more than anything or anybody, even though the boy had inherited most of his personality from his mother. There was nothing Archie wouldn’t give him, even on the policeman’s salary he got after leaving the service. Actually, he’d never really left the service; he’d just swapped protecting the people of the United States for the people of L.A. County. He was a born protector, and would have kept at it, but Danny got shot dead in a bar fight. That was when Archie quit the cops, after taking the one bullet he couldn’t dodge.

He’d faded into security work on movie sets for a couple of years, his generosity, loyalty, and professionalism masking his depression and earning him nice credentials. At first, people were intimidated by him. His body was like a block of concrete and he had a look in his eyes that told the world he’d stood the watch few could stand.

A star-stalker pulled Archie out of his depression by making it through the rest of security and onto one of his sets—an action set with plenty of guns, all of them loaded with blanks except for Archie’s and the stalker’s. A foot chase, a screaming celebrity hostage, real gun-play, real heroism—a combat pro showing how it’s done.

Everybody got rescued, including Archie. He ended up with a newjob: teaching movie stuntmen how to use weapons. He had a new life and some of himself back, but not enough to fill the hole Danny had left in his big heart.

Archie got me started in the business by almost running me down in the street as I munched a vegetable burrito from La Cantina. I’d been thinking about getting into the movies and not getting salsa on my T-shirt when I’d caught him out of the corner of my eye, barreling down Santa Monica Boulevard in his black Land Rover, cell phone pressed to his ear. I was midstreet with the burrito sticking out of my face when I’d realized there was only one way to go to avoid becoming a tortilla myself, and that was up.

Archie had tromped on the brakes two feet from me. I’d jumped and rolled over his hood and down the back of his buggy, hitting the street in a crouch—all without dropping the burrito. Our eyes had met in his side-view mirror —his in horror, watching me chew and grin and pull my earlobe. He’d grinned back.

Over some blue drinks and a pu pu platter at The Golden China, he’d discovered I had a number of useful