The Shroud Key (2 page)

“Don’t you dare hurt my husband you big bully!”

Her face is a combination remorse, fear and hatred for herself over what she’s done.

I know the look all too well. I’ve seen that face before on a dozen other too-attractive-for-their-own-good girls whose husbands have just discovered the worst thing they can possibly imagine: That their pretty little trophy wives are also pretty little cheats.

My head is ringing like the Duomo bell. I feel slightly out of balance. So much so that I don’t see yet another punch coming. This one connects with my other jaw. The crowd roars in approval.

If the first wallop triggered a survival mechanism, this one sparks rage.

“Sorry, Mr. Doyle,” I say, “but you leave me little choice.”

Taking a step into the bigger man’s body, I lead with an uppercut that travels through the math teacher’s soft underbelly all the way to his spine. I then quickly follow up with a left hook to the lower jaw and just like that, it’s lights out for Mr. Doyle on the cobblestones of a breathtaking Renaissance treasure.

It’s also precisely when the polizia arrive.

They jump out of their white and blue Fiat squad car, grab me by my weight-trained arms, demand that I drop to my knees. How’s the old saying go? It’s not the angry man who punches first who gets caught. It’s the sucker who punches last who eats the crap sandwich.

“Hey, he started it!” I shout. But what I really should be doing is pointing at Mrs. Doyle, insisting,
She started it!

The polizia don’t want to hear it anyway. This isn’t the first time they’ve picked me up for brawling and it certainly won’t be the last. They push my arms up over my head in the opposite way God intended for them to be pushed. The pain causes little flashes of white light to explode in my brain as I feel the steel cuffs being slapped over my wrists.

“You big bully!” shouts Mrs. Doyle as she slaps me across the face. Then, dropping to her knees over her out-cold husband, “Oh my sweet darling, are you okay?”

“Let’s go, Chase,” one of the blue-uniformed cops insists in his Italian-accented English. “You’ve got yourself a front row audience with Detective Cipriani…Vai, vai.”

“Does this mean I’m under arrest, officer?” I say as they painfully yank me up onto my feet.

“Si,” the other cop says. “It means your ass is glass.”

“Grass,” I say. “It’s ‘ass is grass.’ Why don’t you learn to get it right, Pinocchio?”

I feel the quick fist to the gut, and it’s all I can do not to double over.

“Why don’t you learn to shut up, Chase?” the cop says. “Silencio.”

“Good idea,” I say through gritting teeth. “I should learn to shut up and you should learn to speak English…The international language of choice the world over.”

Together the cops drag me to the squad car where they thrust me into the back seat, slamming the door closed. An EMT van arrives on the scene then, the medical technicians immediately exiting the vehicle and going to work on the still prone Doyle. Meanwhile, the cops hop back into the front of the cruiser.

As the cop behind the wheel pulls away from the piazza, I catch one more glimpse of Mrs. Doyle. She’s still kneeling over her husband. I shoot her a smile, like,
Thanks for last night
. But she returns my glance with a glare that would ice over Dante’s Inferno. When she raises up her right hand and flips me a manicured middle finger, I realize I should have listened to my dog, Lu, and not my other head.

“I’ll never learn,” I whisper to yourself. “Oh well, at least Detective Cipriani has nice cigars.”

I contemplate smoking a fine Cuban cigar all the way to polizia headquarters.

CHAPTER ONE

“Signor Chase Baker!” shouts the guard sergeant as he approaches the iron bars of this dark, dank, basement holding cell. “You are free to go! Andare!”

I shove through a pen that’s filled mostly with drunk, piss-soaked vagrants who’ve migrated from Peru. Why they cross over the big drink to Italy instead of heading north to America, which is far closer, beats the hell out of me. Maybe they get better health care here. Or maybe it has something to do with a higher alcohol content in the beer…Yeah that’s it, more alcohol in the beer.

The barred door slides open.

I step on through, offer the uniformed guard sergeant a smile like,
Top o’ the mornin’ to ya!
Or,
Top o’ the late afternoon anyway.
He doesn’t smile back. Go figure.

“Su,” he says, nodding at the staircase before me.

Su
…That’s Italian for “up.” As in,
Get the hell up those stairs!
It’s also something an American redneck might shout at an old dog before kicking it in the ass with his Redwing-booted foot.

“Up the stairs, Chase. Detective Cipriani would like a word with you in his office.”

“He asking or telling?” I say.

But the short, stocky cop just glares at me like he has no idea how to answer my query. And he doesn’t. The guard sergeant on my heels, I climb the concrete steps as ordered, like an old dog being led around by his master.

A minute later I’m granted my private audience with Florence’s top cop. If you want to call him that. Detective Federico Cipriani closes the door to his office, asks me to take a seat in a wood chair set before his long dark wood desk. Set out on the desktop is a translucent plastic baggy that contains my personals: my belt, the laces to my boots, my wallet, my passport, my cell phone, my cigs, my Saint Christopher’s medal, my gun, my bullets … I go to reach for them.

“Not yet!” barks Cipriani, from across the room. “We need to talk first, Chase.”

I sit back, my eyes peeled on the internationally licensed 9 mm Smith & Wesson.

“Looks like the Doyles aren’t pressing charges,” I say. “How sweet of them.”

The fifty-something Ciprinai goes behind his desk, sits himself down. He’s a big man with a barrel chest and a pleasant looking face mostly hidden behind a thick but well trimmed beard. His eyes are brown as is his hair, and the dark blue suit he wears was no doubt purchased in Florence, probably at the department store across the street from the Piazza Della Republica.

“It’s true they have dropped their case of assault against you,” he nods, picking up my handgun, staring down contemplatively at it. “But that doesn’t excuse you from punching the merda out of an American tourist.”

“You detaining me further, Cip?” I say, pronouncing the nick name like “Chip.”

He shakes his head.

“No, just trying to somehow get it through that thick skull of yours that the time will come when I can no longer keep you out of trouble. Eventually you will be asked to leave Italy for good.”

I force my eyes wide open.

“Never,” I say. “Who will guide all those lovely lost women who’ve just arrived from America and England and Australia and Japan and China and Russia and…?”

“I’ll never understand it why a bestselling author like you still insists on providing guided tours or working as a private detective or even a, what do you call it, sand dog? Doesn’t make sense.”

“Three reasons,” I say, slipping my hand inside my bush jacket for my cigarettes, but then quickly realizing that they are stuffed into the plastic bag along with my lighter and my bullets. Oh well, I’ve been trying to quit on and off for years now. “One, writing is a solitary existence. It gets mighty lonely. Second, guiding, detecting and sand
hogging
—not sanddogging—provides me with badly needed human contact and it also makes for good story material now and again. Third, the money is good and on occasion great. Royalties are good too but not always so consistent. You with me here, Cip? Just think of me as a Renaissance man living and thriving in the home of the Renaissance.”

He spins the gun on his thick index finger like a little boy and his plastic six-shooter, bites down on his lip.

“You know I don’t like that you are able to carry this in my peaceful town of art and culture.”

“Money talks,” I smile. “Especially in Italy. Just ask the American GIs who saved your ass from Nazi enslavement during World War Two. And you personally signed off on my permit, don’t forget. Besides, this isn’t your town anyway, Cip. It’s Brunelleschi’s town, or haven’t you noticed that big giant marble dome occupying the center of the city?”

“You’re not getting any younger, Chase. Soon you will not be so attractive to the young women who travel to this beautiful country. Perhaps you will now consider spending more time with your daughter in New York City.” Working up a smile. “You know, grow old gracefully. With dignity.”

“The food is better here. So is the wine. And I’m forty something. I’m not even close to old, yet.”

Cip sets the gun down on top of his desk. Opening the small wooden box set beside it, he pulls out a cigar, cuts the tip off with a small metal device he produces from his jacket pocket and gently sets it between his front upper and bottom teeth. Firing the cigar up with a silver-plated Zippo, he sensually releases a cloud of blue smoke through puckered lips. Then, slowly straightening himself up in his swivel chair, he reaches across the desk with his free hand, pushes the box of cigars in my direction.

“Thought you’d never ask,” I say.

Stealing a cigar from the box, I bite off the tip, spit it onto the wood floor. Leaning over the desk, I allow the cop to light me up.

“You always were a class act, Cip,” I say, sitting back. “When do I get my gun back?”

“Not yet,” he says. “I have a favor to ask of you first.”

I exhale the good tasting and very smooth Cuban-born smoke. If silence were golden, we’d be bathing in the stuff.

Finally I say, “Okay, Cip, you’ve got that look on your face like we’re going to be working together again whether I like it or not. What do you need? You want me to dig up some dirt on someone? Maybe follow some cheating hubby around Flo for a while?”

He shakes his head, smokes.

“Not exactly,” he explains. “But you’re right. It’s possible I have a job for you.”

“I’m listening, so long as it pays.”

He gets up, comes around the desk, approaches the set of French windows behind me, opens them onto the noises of the old city.

“I need you to find a missing man for me,” he says after a time.

I turn in my seat, looking at his backside as he faces out onto the cobbled street below.

“Find him where?” I say, knowing the question sounds like a silly one since if Cip knew where the man was he wouldn’t be asking me to find him in the first place. But it’s a good place to start.

“Somewhere in the Middle East would be my best guess. Egypt, perhaps.”

I smoke a little, visions of my sandhogging days in and around the Giza Plateau pulsing in my brain.

“Egypt,” I repeat. “Not the safest of places at this point in modern global history.”

“Especially if you’re an American. And the man I want you to find is indeed an American.”

“What’s his name?”

Cip backs away from the window, returns to his desk. Only instead of reclaiming his place behind it, he takes a seat on the desk’s edge, left foot dangling off the edge, the right foot planted.

“His name is Dr. Andre Manion. A biblical archeology professor from a small Catholic college in your Midwest. An expert on the historical Jesus of Nazareth and said to have discovered some relics belonging to the Jesus family.”

The name strikes home. So much so that a lesser man would allow the small electrical shock of the name to show on his face. But I’m not a lesser man. Or so I pretend.

“Did you say relics? Jesus relics?”

“Yes I did. Priceless antiquities, which no doubt stir your juices, perhaps more than Mr. Doyle’s wife did last evening. Manion’s over here on a teaching sabbatical at the American University. Or supposed to be here teaching, I should say. Early last month he went missing and hasn’t been seen or heard from since.”

Cip is right. The name Manion when combined with relics and antiquities does indeed stir my juices.

“Fact of the matter is this, Cip: I worked as a sandhog for Manion eight years ago in and around Giza where we were in search of some prized Biblical treasures. Perhaps the most prized Biblical treasure of all. But we never did find much of anything, and truth is, Manion ran out on me, leaving me hopelessly hung over and alone.”