From the Ashes (33 page)

Wednesday

The tallest church in the United States, Riverside Church soars 22 stories above the streets of Morningside Heights, its Neo-Gothic form towering over even the high-rises surrounding it. The bell tower, visible from New Jersey across the Hudson River, houses the largest carillon in the world, 74 bells, including the 20-ton Bourdon, the largest tuned bell ever cast, rung to indicate the top of the hour for the hundreds of thousands living within earshot. This impressive, record-shattering carillon was named the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Carillon after the tremendous sum of money that her son, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., had donated to fund the church’s construction. The deep resounding bass of the Bourdon rang overhead as Jon and Mara approached the entrance to the church, reminding them that, it already being eleven o’clock, they had gotten a rather late start.

Not wanting to deprive themselves unnecessarily of sleep or food, both of which would be needed for the mental hurdles they would have to tackle and for any more physical challenges – like evading Ramirez or dangling off the ledge of another Manhattan icon – they had slept until 9:00. Following a hearty breakfast at Lindy’s, they had taken the Number 1 line north to the 125
^th
Street Station, a journey of nearly one hundred blocks that had eaten up the rest of their morning. If Rockefeller’s clues had remained hidden for the past seventy years, they could afford to stay hidden a few more hours while Jon and Mara prepared properly for their pursuit, they had surmised.

Once inside the imposing structure, the engine roar and horn honk and hustle and bustle of typical New York life dissolved away. The hallway Jon and Mara walked down seemed to be in a world of its own, a passageway between the secular and the sacred, between the stressful chase of this life and the reflective peace in the promise of the next. Down the hallway, and past the information desk, they climbed a stone staircase, following signs for Christ Chapel.

At the top of the stairs, two memorial placards set into the wall caught their attention. One was in memoriam for Rockefeller because of his “generous gifts” that “made possible the construction and endowment of this edifice” and his “personal devotion to the work of the church as a member, teacher, and trustee.” The second was “in loving memory of my mother,” the dedication by Rockefeller himself of the bell tower and carillon that would become the trademark of the church, donated in 1930, two years before he started down the ill-fated path that had, in turn, set both Michael and his brother on their own troubled paths. Truly, Rockefeller felt a connection with this church, a place where he would not only feel compelled to confess his secrets, but where he would also feel they were safe. But, perhaps more importantly, a place that respected him enough to give him relative free reign within the building, enough freedom to create and use a hiding place to conceal his darkest secret.

When Jon and Mara finally reached the Christ Chapel, they were struck by the even more peaceful, even more reflective atmosphere that seemed to pervade within the solemn Romanesque room. Jon had been to the main sanctuary a few years before – on a weekend sojourn from his undergrad days at Harvard – and in contrast to the soaring Gothic heights and elaborate stained glass of that room, this chapel was far more subdued. Perhaps Rockefeller felt it was more genuine, more personal.

The worshippers were few at this hour on a Wednesday morning. An elderly gentleman wearing a faded brown suit sat on the end of one pew, his head bowed either in prayer or in sleep. A young couple in their early thirties admired the artistry of the altar, the woman sneaking a photograph of the beautiful carvings every once in a while, then covering her camera with her hand at her side, as though she were ashamed to be taking snapshots in this sanctified place. Jon and Mara’s entrance into the room brought the total number of patrons to five.

As the newcomers slowly made their way through the dimly lit barrel-roofed chapel toward the altar, the young man glanced at them, then back at his wife, who was still snapping covert photographs of Christ and the apostles. He grabbed her hand and lightly tugged, indicating that they should see what other wonders the magnificent building held. She took one last picture as she started to back away from the altar toward the entry door, then turned around and walked hand in hand with her husband out of the chapel, leaving Jon and Mara with the nodding old man, his head still bowed in what was starting to look more like sleep than reverence. Stepping closer to the altar, Jon and Mara began to study the artistry themselves.

High above the altar, a rose window stood sentinel, the Eye of Heaven keeping watch on this holy place. The stone altarpiece itself had all the iconography one would expect from an elaborately carved altar: Christ, the apostles beatified, the cross, worshippers and seekers, angels, the hand of God, a dove descending, lambs, and open scriptures, among other symbols and decorations common to religious sculpture. Two of the figures that caught Jon’s eye were pointing, motioning with their hands. One, at the top left corner, pointed to the opposite side of the altar, looking over his shoulder at his companions to see that they understood. Another, the saint standing just to Christ’s left, the viewer’s right, also pointed,
away
from Jesus and toward the right-hand side of the altar.
Look over there,
the miniature stone figures seemed to be saying to Jon. And the legend spanning the top of the altar, boldly chiseled in all caps and sandwiched between two sun crosses, the aptly chosen words of Jesus proclaiming the very thoughts of Rockefeller and Rickner alike: “THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU FREE.”

“’Read right of saints,’” Jon quoted in a whisper to Mara, still eyeing the old guy with a slight suspicion. Mara caught his glance.

“I don’t think we have to worry about him. Even if he did try something, I think you could take him.”

Jon returned her teasing smile and nodded. “I don’t know, though. He looks like a tough character. Old folks these days, they can be feisty.”

The first part of a laugh escaped Mara’s lips before the echo reminded her of where she was. “So right of saints, huh?
Which
saints, though? The altar’s full of ‘em.”

“All of them?” Jon offered. “Let’s just explore.” He walked around to the right-hand side of the altar, eyes fixed on the sculpted figures and scrollwork, scanning left, right, up, down, trying to find anything that might be hidden in plain view. An aperture leading to some hiding place, a lever to reveal some secret chamber holding the next clue.
Shift thrice,
the last clue had said. Shift what? Was that crucial to finding the clue, or to interpreting it? Shifting one’s vantage point? Shifting some mechanical device, a primitive combination lock that would betray its secrets when properly set? He glanced at Mara, standing next to him and scrutinizing the stonework with her eyes, looking just as lost as he felt. Turning his gaze back to the altar, Jon noticed all the
other
outstretched hands of the stone figures before them. Pointing not just to the right of the altar, as Jon in his knowledge of the clue was prejudiced to notice, but left, up, down, and any combination of directions, hands pointing, questioning, beckoning in every direction, in too many directions. Was there a pattern? Perhaps some path created by the hands, waypoints to a covert location imbedded in the sculpture. Starting with Christ, the most logical starting place, Jon surmised, he followed his hands... and already ran into a problem. Both of Jesus’ hands were motioning in different directions.

Jon closed his eyes, shook his head and took a deep breath. He was going about this wrong. Rockefeller didn’t design the altar, just, supposedly, hid some message here. Added something, maybe, but he had to work with what he had. And if the directions to the next clue were already hidden within the sculpture, why even have
Prometheus’
clue? No, he needed to focus on the clue he had.
That
was what Rockefeller had intended the seeker to follow.

“Jon,” Mara’s voice came at his side, startling him. “I might be grasping at straws here, but do those look like letters to you?” He moved closer to the wall she was staring at, her fingers tracing letters in the air between her and the ornately decorated pattern at the right-hand edge of the altar.

“Letters?” he looked hard. He supposed you
could
see letters there, much as animals and faces could be seen in clouds on a summer day, but...

“Right there. Q-L-W... um, V...”

“Mara, what did you just spell?”

“Uh, ‘kluh-wuv’?”

“Do you have your camera?” he asked, inspiration suddenly glimmering in his eyes.

“Yeah,” she answered, taking it from her purse and handing it to him. He turned it on and zoomed in, training the lens on the section of decorative edging Mara had been pointing to. He snapped a few shots, then checked the images, zooming in the display to more closely study the artistry.

“Ingenious,” he said automatically.

“What?”

“Rockefeller, or whomever he commissioned to hide this, managed to hide these letters right into the natural shape of the carvings. Look,” he said, showing her the zoomed-in image. “‘Kluh-wuv.’”

“How about that. What does ‘kluh-wuv’ mean, though?”

“It’s probably in code.” Jon was snapping more and more pictures, making sure he caught every square inch of the carved border from top to bottom. He fished a pad of paper and a pen from his backpack and placed both of them on the rail of the prayer kneeler before them. The two of them went through every picture and wrote every letter they found in its corresponding position on the original border. Two lines of letters, relatively parallel and running down the side of the altar, were transferred to the paper. When Jon and Mara were satisfied that no hidden letter had evaded their detection, the letters they had found were:

“Oh, well that helps!” Mara moaned.

Then they both jumped as the old man behind them began snoring. Loudly. Jon let out a deep breath. They were both on edge, and had all but forgotten about the old man. But at least now they had a little extra sound cover for their conversation.

“Don’t forget the code,” Jon said to her. “Look at the last few letters of each line. RVW. And the last clue was a rhyming couplet. It looks like a simple substitution cipher. Probably a Caesar cipher.”

“A what?”

“Julius Caesar used them to relay messages to his commanders in the field,” Jon explained, “encoding them to protect their sensitive contents should the message be intercepted en route. ‘Shift cipher’ is another name for it. You have the key, say A=16, and you would know that ‘A’ would be encoded as the sixteenth letter in the alphabet: ‘P.’ So every ‘P’ in the code corresponds with an ‘A,’ every ‘Q’ being the seventeenth letter, corresponds with a ‘B,’ and so on. It just shifts the alphabet a certain number of spaces to encode it, and you shift it back to get the original message.”

“So what’s the key for this one?”

“‘Shift thrice,’” Jon quoted. “So instead of A=l, the message is written so that A=4. Shifting each character three spots back in the alphabet decrypts the cipher and leaves us with the original text. So the first ‘P’ becomes an ‘M,’ ‘H’ becomes an ‘E...’”

“‘G’ becomes ‘D...’” Mara continued.

“Exactly.” He continued to scribble on the pad, rapidly deciphering the code. “Until we have this.”

He held up the notepad for Mara to see.

Mara’s eyebrows shot up. “Wow. That’s better.”

“Add a few spaces in the logical spots, and... voila!” Jon showed her the new version of the clue, holding it so it caught sufficient glow from the dim lighting around them:

“Urgell?” Mara inquired.

“Some province or duchy from the days of yore, I’d guess. The key word is ‘medieval.’”

“What, we have to go to Europe for the next clue?” Her eyes squinted in the dim light as her mood seemed to instantly sour.

“I don’t think so. Remember, everything through the lens of Rockefeller.”

“Wait, isn’t there a medieval art museum in Manhattan?”

“Yeah, I think that’s gotta be it, Mara. The Cloisters, property donated and funding provided by...”

“I’m gonna go out on a limb here, and say ‘Rockefeller?’”

“Ding ding ding!”
Jon smiled, reminding himself to keep his voice to a whisper but exuberant nonetheless. “We have a winner. I think our next stop is where the Metropolitan Museum of Art houses their medieval collection: The Cloisters, a little ways north of here.”

Mara gave Jon a confident smile before the two of them walked as casually as possible out of the chapel, through the corridors and into the bright of day. There was still a chill in the air, but somehow, their excitement had managed to warm their spirits, as they realized they were getting closer and closer to the end of their journey, to the truth that they sought, to the ability to finally breathe easily again, knowing that Michael’s memory was preserved and their own lives were safe.

Climbing onto the northbound subway when it finally arrived at the platform, Jon and Mara were so caught up in their victories and in the promise of more to come that they didn’t even notice the dark-clad man who got onto the train one car down from them, pretending to study the day’s
Times.
But in contrast to their obliviousness of his presence, not a word or motion of theirs escaped his attention.

Lunch was conducted in a considerably breezier atmosphere than that of the previous day, buoyed by their recent discoveries and tethering their hopes onto the successes of the past twelve hours. Three codes down, two to go. And then: the Dossiers, the finish line.

Mara’s chicken salad sandwich was already half gone, and the juice from Jon’s Philly cheesesteak sandwich kept trying to dribble down his chin until he would corral the leakage with a swipe or two of his napkin. Despite their relatively recent breakfast, the pair had voracious appetites, devouring their sandwiches and their individual bags of Sun Chips at their window seat in the small streetside cafe.