Midnight Angels (13 page)

“That doesn’t help explain why I’m still trembling like a child with a fever,” Marco said. “I have never been as frightened in my life as I am at this very moment, and I’m not ashamed to admit it.”

“Neither am I,” Kate said, moving away from the wall. “Maybe we should start looking around. Help get our minds off what’s outside and focus on what’s in here.”

“There’s nothing in here, Kate,” he said. “I’ve been trying to tell you that ever since you came up with this idea. There’s nothing but dust, discarded portraits of mediocre noblemen, and a ceiling that looks like it will cave in at any moment.”

“And let’s not forget about the rats,” she said. “There must be a few hundred of them living inside these cracks.”

“I
had
forgotten them,” Marco said, “until now.”

Kate moved slowly and with careful steps deeper into the corridor. She was surprised to see that this portion of the corridor was nearly as well-maintained as the main piece—the walls were painted with a fresh
coat of white, and older, less recognizable portraits lined both sides, giving the enclosed space the look and feel of the adjoining sections. The ceiling did have thick round patches of water damage, and there were a number of areas that were in visible need of upkeep, but otherwise there was little to separate this section from the central hall. Unlike the main corridor, the sealed-off portion was designed to be hidden from view, and the historical rumor had always been that it was built in a manner to allow the Medici family to hide their most secret and valuable possessions.

Kate stepped over a large crack in the floor’s foundation and ran a hand against one side of a wall. There were a number of thick white stones jutting out, edges sharp enough to draw blood, and when she rested her fingers across the top ridges of one of them, she felt it come loose.

“These bricks and stones could all come free with just a tug,” she said, running her hands up and down the wall.

“They’ve been here forever,” Marco said, taking a quick glance behind him. “Add in the humidity and moisture and I’m surprised they’re still even holding up the wall.”

“Or maybe they were designed to be moved without a struggle,” Kate said, shaking one piece of stone free and clutching it in her hand. “This is still fresh, can’t be more than two, maybe three years old.”

“Which tells you what?” he asked. “Maybe the work crews repaired it. They seem to be working on the ceiling and parts of the floor. No one’s ever in here, so they can fix what needs to be taken care of at their leisure.”

Kate took a step back and gazed up at the wall, her eyes tracking every nook, every corner of stone and brick, tracing it as if it were a map. Marco stood off to her side, watching closely.

“Let’s take it down,” she said after a long moment. “All of it.”

“Why?”

She gave him a smile. “Just a hunch,” she said.

“You understand, it may be one thing to sneak in here,” Marco said. “That’s trouble enough if we’re caught. But to do damage to a national landmark, I can’t even imagine what will happen to us if we’re found out.”

“It’s worth the risk,” Kate said.

“And if your hunch is wrong,” he said, “will you promise me this will be the end of it?”

“Scouts’ honor,” she said. “I’ll be the most law-abiding resident in Florence.”

“They might hear us,” Marco said. “The noise could echo through the other side of the wall.”

“I don’t think so,” Kate said. “The bricks and stones have been layered in gently, just dirt and some spackle at the edges to hold them in place. They will come out with a slight tug. We don’t need to pound at them to set them loose.”

“How much of it do you want to take down?”

“We need to see what is behind the wall,” she said. “When we can do that, we should stop.”

“I just pray we don’t find ourselves staring at the inside of the gift shop,” Marco said.

IT TOOK THEM
forty-five minutes to clear away enough of the wall to be able to look into the darkness beyond a circular opening. Kate peered into the hole, brushing aside dust and cobwebs, her face hit with a blast of cold air, her nose recoiling from a thick and acrid odor. She could hear rats squeal and scurry clear of the light infiltrating their once private lair and see the outlines of a small wheelbarrow and two shovels resting against one of the side walls.

“Give me a boost,” she said to Marco as she lifted her right foot onto the side of a sharp edge of stone.

Marco bent to one knee and cupped his hands under the sole of her left shoe to lift her. Within seconds Kate was scooting over the side of the broken wall, her skin scraping the chunks of stone and mortar. She soon stood in the middle of a room that was much larger than it appeared from the outside, its solid walls made of a substance from another century, thick and coated with a pinkish hue due more to the passage of time than choice of color.

She walked the corners of the room, gazing through the mist, cool wisps of moisture flowing across her ankles, absorbing all that she could see, a wide smile stretched across her face. She turned a tight corner and came to a dead stop, looking down at a thing of raw beauty, mere inches from the edges of her feet, close enough for her to touch, feel, embrace.
She dropped to her knees, closed her eyes for a brief second. She thought of her mother, father, and the professor, and knew how thrilled they would have been to have witnessed this sight. This was their moment, and she wished more than anything they could be by her side to share in its discovery.

She had stepped into another time.

She could feel her heart beating wildly, the coolness of the room mixing sharply with the icy sweat running down her neck and back. She had never known such a feeling of pure joy and exhilaration. She turned toward the opening of the wall at her back and saw Marco peering in.

“Come in,” she said to him in a surprisingly calm voice. “You’ll want to see this.”

She waited while Marco struggled to make his way over the wall, grunting and groaning as he maneuvered across sharp rocks and mounds of dust and debris. He landed hard on one knee, stood, glanced quickly around the room and then walked over to her. She was pointing toward a darkened corner, the walls around it chiseled and hollowed out, three stone sculptures resting in the open alcove. He wiped the soot from the edges of his mouth and moved closer to the sculptures—three Angels, each about four feet tall and weighing less than a hundred pounds. They were perfectly proportioned, chiseled by the hands of a master, free of any of the dust or dirt that littered the rest of the room. “They can’t be real,” Marco whispered. “The Midnight Angels are not even
supposed
to be real. All the books I read claimed they were just another part of his legend, nothing more than myth.”

“The books were wrong,” Kate said.

Marco leaned down and placed a gentle hand over one of the Angels, his fingers stroking the perfectly chiseled shoulders and muscular arms, the angular face, the determined eyes, the proportioned wings.

“How did you know?” he said in a whisper. “How did you know they existed and that they would be somewhere in here?”

“The books follow history,” Kate said, her eyes focused on the three angels. “It’s how most people are taught. I followed the artist.”

“Are there only three Angels?”

“I think so,” she said. “One of the unproven rumors was that Michelangelo planned and sculpted the seven archangels in secrecy,
trusting no one other than maybe one or two of his closest assistants. They were meant to be a gift, a surprise, a gesture of love and admiration to someone he claimed had ahold of his heart.”

“Do you know who?”

“A woman named Vittoria Colonna,” Kate said. “The only woman Michelangelo ever claimed to love.”

“That’s another part of the myth of Michelangelo,” Marco said. “All indications are he was either gay or asexual.”

“More unproven rumors,” Kate said. “Michelangelo lived his life shrouded in them. It was how he preferred it. The less people knew about him, the greater his legend grew.”

“So what do we do now?”

“You mean with the Angels?” she asked.

Marco nodded. “We should let someone know we found them. The museum, our school, somebody needs to know they’re here.”

“Somebody already knows,” Kate said.

“Who would that be?”

“Whoever hid them here,” she said, “and kept them hidden for God only knows how many years.”

“You do this all the time,” Marco said, his voice cracking. “Just when I’m starting to relax around you, gears switch and you start talking in a way that scares the hell out of me.”

“Just look at the Angels,” she told him. “In a place mired in dust and soot, they are free of both. They’re kept in the coolest corner of a sealed-off room, free of any prying eyes. But they can be checked on easily and often, judging by how little time it took for us to spread open the wall. They are in here for a reason. I just haven’t figured out what that is.”

“To sell them, maybe?” Marco asked. “The Midnight Angels would be worth millions on the open market and millions more on the black.”

Kate shook her head. “I don’t think so,” she said. “That could have been done anytime they wanted. It’s not like people were out there looking for the Angels to be put up for sale. No one even knew they existed.”

“You
did,” he said. “There could have been others.”

“I was working off a little girl’s dream,” she said. “Art thieves and hunters require more than a dream to put them to the chase.”

“So, if they weren’t kept in here to eventually be sold, then why bother
hiding them?” Marco asked. “They’d be much safer inside any one of our museums.”

“To protect them, maybe,” Kate said. “You can steal from a museum. It happens all the time. But in here, wedged behind a wall, in a sealed-off part of a corridor with few visitors, they would seem extremely safe.”

“Not that safe,” he said. “We found them, didn’t we?”

“Right now, we’re asking questions we don’t have the answers to,” Kate said. “And until we get to the people who have those answers, we need to do what we can to make sure the Angels stay as safe as they were when we found them.”

“Easy enough,” Marco said. “We just reseal the wall and find our way back out of here.”

“That’ll work for now,” she said, “until I can think of a safer place to store them. In the meantime, we need to find out who it is who knew the Angels were in here, and who else is out there looking for them.”

“What makes you so sure someone else is?”

“When it comes to lost or hidden art, there’s always someone else,” Kate said.

“You sound as if you already know who it is,” Marco said.

Kate shook her head. “I only know who he might be. But I need to be one hundred percent certain.”

“How are you going to do that?”

She looked across the room at Marco. “By calling in the cavalry,” she said.

CHAPTER
16

C
LARE JOHNSON STOOD ON THE FIFTH FLOOR TERRACE OF HER
two-room Excelsior Hotel suite, gazing down at the heavy brown tug of the Arno River as it rumbled through the heart of the city. It was early morning, a good twenty minutes before sunup and church bells would waken the citizens of Florence to a new day, and she was already on her third cup of espresso, her inner clock still tuned to New York hours and revved to run at that city’s wild pace. She was dressed in a Karl Lagerfeld tailored jacket and skirt, the outfit highlighting the shapes and angles of her workout-buffed body.

Clare was thirty-three years old, had a B.A. in Art History, an MBA from Harvard, and had been one of McBain International Securities’ top investigators four years running. She was McBain’s principal art retriever, the one agent most often chosen to chase down stolen works covered under the company’s golden seven-to-ten figure policies. She approached her work with a passion not often seen in the pristine world of high-end art, preferring to operate in the heat of the action. She worked best on the road, where she was fed daily doses of information by a vast network of sources, working under the theory that it was also best to think like a thief in order to capture one.

Clare Johnson was born on the run, growing up in cities large and small, in both towns that were nondescript and places that would be on any traveler’s map if only money were no object. She was thrust into this whirlwind environment out of necessity, the daughter of James Johnson, who everyone called “Cat” and who was one of the most infamous art thieves of his time. Cat Johnson was a unique figure in the criminal underworld,
a man with a gift for the grab and an ability to plan a heist in any gallery or museum in the world with the care and studious dedication a combat general would bring to an upcoming battle. The fact that he was a black man born in a Bacon County, Georgia, one-room shack made his exploits all the more remarkable and gave added weight to his legend.

Cat had learned about crime on the dusty streets of a grubby childhood, while his taste for art was honed through the many books he borrowed from a public library less than a half mile from the interstate he would later use to escape his surroundings and embark on his criminal adventures. He devoured the books, staring at each magnificent portrait or sculpted work until his eyes stung, his mind absorbing all that he had read and learned. He grew up savvy enough to know he would never have the means to purchase even the most modestly priced works he admired, but shrewd enough to understand that a young man with a fast mind and the skill set of a top-tier thief had all he needed to at least try to reach for what had been drawn or chiseled by the masters. All someone in his position needed was a little bit of seed money and a whole lot of luck, and from the way he liked to look at the world and the problems they presented, he felt life owed him both these as payback for dealing him a poor set of cards from the start.

“You want to get lower than Bacon County, you need to dig yourself a ten-foot hole and jump in head first,” he once told a friend. “It’s not saying the world owes me a living for throwing me out in the dust to spend my days on the scratch for money and the sniff for food. But it does owe me some luck, and I intend to cash in on that.”