I Am Pilgrim (55 page)

marble and stone. Moving between them were silent, battery-operated forklifts, small mobile cranes

and dozens of supervisors and specialists in white scrubs. Some workshop – it looked as if NASA had

taken over the catacombs.

Almost directly beneath me a Titian was being cleaned and, not far away, men and women were working on a set of bronze doors by Bernini which I had once seen at the Vatican. But most spectacular of all was a group of panels which had been joined seamlessly together and fixed to one

wall. Produced from the huge photographic plates used in its restoration, it had been put there either as an inspiration or a memento of the facility’s outstanding work.

It showed da Vinci’s
The Last Supper
.

It was life-size and as vivid as if it had been painted yesterday, and I had a fleeting sense of what it must have been like five hundred years ago to have entered the convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie

and seen it for the first time.

The director, putting on a wireless headset, pointed out two gilt frames standing against the wall.

The mirrors had been removed and both of them were hanging from an overhead crane. As we watched, it lowered them into a tank of blue liquid – a solvent which they were hoping would separate the film from the glass without damaging it. If it failed, or the silver nitrate fell apart, we could all go home.

Almost immediately, a large tent was lowered over the tank, blacking it out. ‘If they can get the silver nitrate off, it has to be treated like a film negative – it can’t be exposed to light,’ the director said.

I was consumed by doubt. What hope was there really? Sure, the Uffizi had restored

Michelangelo’s marble Pietà after a deranged Australian had taken a hammer to it, but even they didn’t believe you could tease an image out of old mirrors.

The director clamped the headset to his ear, listened for a moment then turned to the rest of us: ‘It worked – they’ve got the film off intact.’

As the others smiled and clapped, he turned to me: ‘They’ll encase the film in a frozen slab of gelatin to stabilize it, then move it into the darkroom for processing.’

Two minutes later, men in white scrubs wheeled a large trolley out of the tent and pushed it into a

glass-sided freight elevator. I watched the two mirrors, wrapped in foil blankets, rise up.

The elevator stopped at a block-like room, cantilevered over the vaulted space, which I guessed was the darkroom.

‘It could take a while,’ the director said, ‘but once they’ve “developed it” the technicians will be able to tell if the film has captured anything.’

Chapter Twenty-eight

I WAS SITTING in the uffizi’s staff canteen with the rest of the team, picking at a meal of espresso and more espresso, when the call came.

The director took it on his cellphone then turned to me, but spoke loud enough for everyone to hear: ‘There’s something on the film.’

We ran down white, silent corridors, past a startled group of wealthy donors being given a behind-

the-scenes tour, into a freight elevator and towards the conference room.

Through its glass wall we saw the technicians huddled round one of their two large computer screens, one of them at the keyboard while the water-cooled hard drives spun fast.

The director had kept up with me all the way. ‘Whatever they found on the silver nitrate will have

been digitized and put on to disk. That’s what they’re looking at.’

We sprinted through the doors. The image of two people – just two people standing in the room –

was all I needed. Anything to identify the visitor would be a bonus.

There was nothing on the screen. Well, that wasn’t exactly true – there was a darkness of varying

shades, like looking at a pond on a moonless night. The director must have seen the distress on my

face.

‘Don’t panic – not yet,’ he said. ‘They’ll use the software to force the image, then try to fill in the missing microscopic dots from the surrounding fragments. It’s the same method we use on damaged

frescoes.’

But I was panicking – he would have been too if he had known how much was really at stake. The

young tech at the keyboard, his skin as white as the walls, was entering command after command. I

looked at the intense, almost religious concentration on his face: he certainly hadn’t given up, and that was comforting.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly at first but gathering pace as the hard drives spun even faster, a shape emerged from the dark ocean. I could tell from the warning lights blinking amber on a series of controllers that they were pushing the system close to its limits, but those guys weren’t for turning either. I saw part of a room surface from the pond: fragments of a chandelier, the outline of windows looking out on to a view, the side of a fireplace. It was definitely the library in the French House, or
La Salle d’Attente
or whatever other damned name anybody wanted to call it. I could barely believe it.

‘I think we’ve got a person,’ the pale technician said over the clapping. He pointed at a section of the pond water – darker than the rest but containing a shadowy outline – cordoned it within an electronic grid and poured in a constant barrage of light and pixels and there was the leather armchair

– I could see it!

Hands sweating despite the constant and relentless air-conditioning, I could make out a blurred head, the crook of an arm, a part of the neck of a man in the chair. It was almost certainly Dodge. The techs kept going, the warning lights drummed out an even faster beat and the dark water surrounding

the armchair sprang into sharper relief.

Dodge was alone.

Even so, the director and his team turned to me – elated, calling out in celebration. The plan which they had designed and implemented had been successful: they had recovered an image from an almost

unheard-of medium. There was no doubt it was an outstanding achievement. Equally, there was no doubt it didn’t help me at all.

‘What’s wrong?’ they asked as they saw my face.

‘I knew there was a man sitting in the chair. I’m looking for another person. I need two people.

What about the second mirror? It’ll show the room from a different angle.’

We turned: the pale guy and his colleague already had the second image on the screen. You didn’t

need to be an expert in computer graphics to see it was far more degraded – the ocean of blackness

was deeper and the available light thin and full of shadow. We might as well have been underwater.

The technicians moved faster. The darkness disappeared and the guy at the keyboard once again dragged fragments of the library out of the depths. Parts of the chair and table emerged, but their shapes were far less distinct and already the warning lights had hit the amber and a few of them were starting to blink red. My hopes nosedived.

The techs themselves looked disheartened, frequently glancing up to see more of the warning lights

crossing over and yet achieving no real improvement in the image.

That was the trouble with luck, I figured – it runs out. I felt the director and other members of the team shoot glances at me, knowing how disappointed I must be, wondering how I was going to take it.

All the lights were red and I realized the techs had stopped trying to enhance the image – they had

reached the limits of the technology. The half-formed image of the library hung on the screen like a quiet reminder of failure. The pale tech leaned closer to it, pointed at one section of the darkness and said something in Italian I didn’t understand. The director and the rest of the team peered at the spot he was indicating, but it was clear nobody could see anything.

The tech – not very confident because he was doubting his own eyesight – dropped a grid over the

section. Ignoring the red lights, he zoomed in on it, manipulated the pixels and tried to coax the truth out of them.

Nothing.

His colleague stepped in and hit a command. The area under the grid inverted – the black becoming

white, as if it were now a negative image. Suddenly we could all see something – a vertical shape almost out of frame. The two techs worked together fast, pushing the software and the hard drives beyond their operating limits. Warning boxes popped up, but the guys cancelled them out as soon as

they appeared. The red lights weren’t flashing – they were a solid bar.

Still the guys kept going, but there didn’t appear to be any discernible improvement – a solid shape teasing us, that was all. Then they turned the image back from the negative and removed the grid and the zoom.

It was there! Indistinct, spectral-like, but the shape had become a person standing in front of the fireplace. It was impossible to distinguish anything specific – even if it was a man or a woman – but that didn’t matter. There were definitely two people in that room.

The director and his team stared at it for a moment then cheered, while the two technicians got to

their feet and hugged their colleagues.

I pulled my eyes away from the screen, smiled, put my hands together and applauded them all: they

didn’t know it, they would never know, but the Pathfinder was back in business.

Chapter Twenty-nine

I STEPPED THROUGH the oak doors and into a night so crisp and clear that the old cobblestones and Renaissance facades seemed almost too vivid, like the landscape of some strange video game. Only

the crowds on the streets and the complete lack of taxis convinced me it was real.

I had two calls to make and was waiting for the first to pick up as I headed past the workshop’s exterior cameras and into a wide thoroughfare.

Leyla Cumali answered and, without any preamble, I told her I had a photo showing that Dodge and

another person were in the library six minutes before he was killed. There was a stunned silence at the other end.

I filled the empty space by telling her that the director of the Uffizi workshop was preparing a full report which he would send to her with a copy of the photograph.

‘I’ll let my colleagues know,’ she said finally, unable to keep the defeat out of her voice. I was sure SpongeBob and his buddies were going to be overjoyed.

‘It doesn’t look like we have any choice,’ she continued. ‘We’ll open a homicide investigation tonight.’

‘Good,’ I replied. ‘Good.’

‘How did you know Dodge wasn’t alone?’ she asked, a little of the old disdain creeping back.

‘It was the drugs – and the binoculars. Nobody needs binoculars to look at fireworks.’

‘Then why did he have them?’

‘You have to take it step by step. Somebody obviously knew how to get on to the estate in secret,’ I told her, still trying to find a damn cab.

‘They entered the house and found Dodge in the library. It was a friend of his, or at least an acquaintance – if it was a stranger he would have raised the alarm.

‘I’m almost certain the visitor was feigning distress. They told Dodge something that alarmed him

enough to cut through his wild libido and the swirling craziness of the drugs.’

‘What did they tell him?’ she wanted to know, impatient.

‘If you reread the interviews you carried out with his acquaintances, at least six of them volunteered that he loved his wife very much.’

‘That’s right,’ Cumali added.

‘Cameron was out bar-hopping in the JetRanger that night. I think the visitor told him that the helicopter had just crashed in the bay.’

Silence. Cumali didn’t respond – there was just a sharp intake of breath.

‘Dodge would have believed the visitor without question,’ I continued. ‘There’s a landing pad on the estate and he would have thought she was on her way home.

‘Trying to sober up, he grabbed the binoculars to search the bay and he and the visitor ran on to the lawn. He wasn’t looking up at fireworks, he was looking out at the water – and the further he went on to the headland, the better chance he had of seeing something. That’s why he chose the spot four yards from the gazebo: there wasn’t any foliage, the only tree was the one he hit halfway down – and he had a much better view of the bay.

‘When he couldn’t see anything – why would he? there was nothing out there – he either stood on

the railing or climbed over it.

‘He would have had the binoculars to his eyes when he felt a push on his back. To the killer it probably didn’t even feel like murder – just a gentle helping hand.

‘So gentle, in fact, that when you did the tests with the dummy it was totally consistent with a man falling.’

I let my voice trail away: there was no point in recounting his plunge down the cliff face and the hit on the rocks – there was no dispute about any of that.

Cumali didn’t respond and finally I had to ask: ‘Are you still there?’

‘I’m here,’ she said. ‘I’ll make sure nobody’s passport is returned. We’ll start now. I’ll draw up an expanded list of everyone he had contact with. Like you said – the visitor had to be somebody he knew.’

‘You can discount Cameron or the others in the helicopter – they couldn’t have visited him in the

house, they were supposed to be fighting for their lives in the water. And you were right – I don’t think anybody was paid to do it. The answer lies in the circle of friends.’

There was another element to the murder she didn’t know about, one she could never know. Call it

a tiny signature, but it had made me really angry. I was certain that the thread from Dodge’s chinos had been planted on the railing to make sure the cops would come to the right conclusion.