The Mona Lisa Sacrifice (6 page)

I went to Victory for help because we have a history together. We met in a dungeon under the Vatican well before it was ever called the Vatican. That was back in my early days, when I was still learning how to use the powers Christ had left me.

I was in the dungeon because of a brawl with some drunks in a tavern. I can’t even remember where it happened these days, other than it was someplace in the south of what’s now known as Italy. I’d travelled to the area because there was a good deal of rioting and burning of villages and such in the region at the time. I figured maybe there was a chance Judas was behind it all and still lingering around. Whatever time I didn’t spend scouring the countryside for him I wasted away in wine and women.

Imagine Christ’s grace taken away from you, but you can still feel it, or at least its absence. What can I compare it to? Imagine your wife or husband or kids killed but their ghosts haunting you every day. Imagine living your life in the rain and dark with only the memories of sunshine. Imagine having that epiphany in church, the one where you know God exists, that Christ really was here—only they’re never coming back again. All right, that one’s not so hard to imagine.

Sometimes, the only thing you can do is drink. So that’s what I did.

I’d had a few too many of this particular tavern’s homemade ale, and they had gone to my head. And every other part of me. For some reason I started comparing battle scars with a few of the other drunks. We tried to outdo each other with longer, nastier wounds. I was expecting to win, given all the times I’d been knifed and hacked and stabbed and such over the years. My scars fade with time, thanks to my miraculous body, but I was always adding new ones, so I had a pretty good collection to show off. But then the tavern keeper himself, a big, bald brute of a man, lifted his tunic to show a vicious red line running from his throat to his groin.

“I lay on death’s doorstep for an entire winter,” he said, “but the bastard wouldn’t let me in.” He laughed. “If you think this is bad, you should see the other poor soul.”

My new drinking partners all toasted him and agreed that he’d won. But I wasn’t ready to give up yet.

“Piss on your scar,” I told the tavern keeper. “I’ve had far worse wounds than that. I just heal better than you sickly lot.”

The tavern keeper snorted and poured himself a victory drink. “If you’d ever had a worse wound than mine, you’d be dead.”

“I’ve been dead plenty of times,” I said. I tried to drain my cup in a dramatic fashion, but it was empty. Story of my life. I smashed it down on the table instead. I forgot my usual caution about revealing too many personal details because of all the drinks I’d had. “But they haven’t made a weapon yet that can kill Christ for good,” I said. I thought about that for a second, then added, “Or me, anyway.”

For some reason they took offence at my words, and one of the other drunks hammered me with his stool a couple of times. I threw my goblet at him but hit someone else, and then suddenly the whole tavern was involved. It was everyone against everyone, because that’s just the kind of place it was.

And then he came out of the crowd at me. I’ve never known his name. He was old, hunched in a robe and cloak, with grey stringy hair that covered half his face, over the eye socket that had been melted shut. To this day I wonder who did that to him, or if he did it to himself.

As soon as I saw him I felt that familiar hollowness inside. For a few seconds, I thought it was fear. But then I found myself stumbling toward him instead of away.

He stopped and looked at me as the mayhem continued around us. “You are Christ?” he asked.

“Christ is dead,” I said. “So the world’s going to have to make do with me.” I threw a punch at him that he caught with one hand and held there in the air. He showed no signs of exertion. A charge ran down my arm at his touch. I wanted to pull him into an embrace, but I settled for spitting at his feet. “And what mockery of nature are you?” I asked.

“I’m an abomination,” he said. “Just like you.”

And then one of his hands lashed out from underneath the cape with a knife, and then I had the best scar in the room.

I resurrected chained to the wall of a cramped dungeon cell. I was hungry as hell, and no idea where I was, or why I was there. I wondered if the one-eyed bastard had been a friend of Judas’s, sent to warn me off his trail, but then the guards came in with the pope, and I knew I was in an entirely different sort of trouble.

I didn’t know he was the pope at first, of course. He had to introduce himself to me and explain we were in a secret dungeon. I’d tell you his name, but to do so runs the risk of raising him from the grave. Let dead popes lie, I say.

Even then, I thought perhaps that he was Judas in disguise again. I went so far as to suggest as much, which earned a few well-placed blows from one of the guards. But then the pope asked me how I’d managed that resurrection trick, and I realized he didn’t know anything about me. Which I guess explained the chains. When you’re in the pope business, it’s probably better to play it safe when dealing with things like me. For all the good that it did him in the end.

“I’m Christ,” I told the pope. “Or at least I used to be. Now I don’t know who I am.” I didn’t see any point in withholding information at this point. Maybe if I was honest with them they’d free me. Or at least give me a drink. Or maybe he’d find some way to put me out of my misery for good.

“I don’t think so,” the pope said. He held a cloth to his nose while he studied me. I guess I must have soiled myself in my death. Hey, it happens. “I don’t think Christ would return in such a lowly vessel,” he added.

I shrugged as best as I could in chains. “It’s kind of hard to explain,” I said, “but in some ways I never really left.”

That obviously wasn’t good enough for him, because he waved at his torturers to start setting up their equipment. “Tell me what you really are,” he said.

“And here I was hoping you could tell me,” I said.

He nodded at his men and they went to work on me. They crossed themselves before they started. Tough spot for them to be in, I suppose.

What to say of that time? They did their thing and I did my part by screaming a lot and adding more stains to the floor. At the end of our little session, nobody was really satisfied.

“I will give you time to rethink your answers,” the pope said, and I skipped my usual witty response on account of what they’d done to my tongue.

It was while I hung there in my chains that I first noticed Victory. My cell door had a hole with bars in it, and I could see into the cell across the hall. Victory was chained to the wall in that cell, although she was a statue even back then.

“Help me get out of here and I’ll take you with me,” I called out to her when I could speak again, but she didn’t say anything in response. I figured she was more than just a statue if she was locked up in the pope’s dungeon, but I had no idea at the time exactly what she was. Life’s full of little surprises.

The torches in the hall had nearly all burned out when the pope returned with his torturers. They lit new torches, but I couldn’t decide if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

“Could you at least give me something to eat before we start again?” I asked. I was desperate for something, anything, to fill the emptiness inside me. It had been a long time since I’d killed the angel in the arena, and everything I’d taken from him was gone.

“Whatever you are, I doubt it’s earthly sustenance you need,” the pope said and settled himself onto a stool one of his guards carried. I hadn’t been through a lot of torture sessions at this point in my life—okay, any—but I figured it didn’t bode well when the guy in charge makes himself comfortable.

“Let us begin with a fresh page,” he said. “Who are you?”

“I already told you I don’t know,” I reminded him. But this just wasn’t one of those times honesty paid off. His men did their thing again, and I did mine, and then the pope called a break.

“If you were the real Christ, you would have borne this suffering with dignity,” he said to me.

“If I were the real Christ I would have had you crucified by now,” I said. “And I would have added a hot poker up your ass for good measure.”

And then he got up off the stool and took the tools from his men and went to work on me himself. And I was forced to concede that if the pope thing didn’t work out for him he had an excellent future as a torturer.

At the end of it all he brought in the one-eyed man who’d stabbed me in the tavern.

“Find out what this thing is,” the pope told him, “and I will put an end to your suffering.”

I never did find out what the one-eyed man’s suffering was, because he came at me then and I used a little trick a fellow gladiator had shown me in the pits and caught him in my chains. He was old or weak, or maybe both, otherwise I never could have held him. Or maybe he just wanted to be caught.

I twisted the chains so hard a little gasp escaped his lips. And in that breath was a bit of grace. Just like what I’d taken from that angel in the Colosseum. When I breathed it in, my body screamed for more. I may have even screamed aloud. Every part of my body yearned for what was in his. And the grace made me stronger, so I twisted the chains even more, until the skin on his neck tore open as he struggled, and the grace poured out.

It filled the cell with light, but a light only I could see. The pope and the torturers just stared as I strangled the life out of the angel. I guess it wasn’t the sort of thing you saw every day, even in a pope’s dungeon.

And then a bit of grace splashed out of the cell and onto the statue across the hall. And a spectral face formed there above the stone body. Victory, although we didn’t know each other by name at that point. She began to shriek in Greek, and the pope and his men turned white when they looked across the hall into her cell. And then they fled and didn’t return.

I finished killing the angel and taking his grace. Then I sundered the chains and stood there for a moment, just savouring the feeling of the light in me. I didn’t feel hungry anymore. I didn’t feel empty anymore. I’d forgotten what it felt like to be whole.

I went out into the hall to the other cell and kicked down the door. That spectral head shrieked some more, but I didn’t know enough Greek to make sense of it.

“I don’t know what you’re saying,” I said, “but I’m a man of my word.” That was a bit of a stretch, but I figured no one deserved to be in this dungeon, no matter what they’d done. No one except for Judas.

I dragged Victory out of the cell and up the stairs, into a small fortress filled with soldiers. But they all ran away too when Victory screeched at them. I realized she must have been someone special indeed in her day.

So we went back out into the world. Her head eventually faded away and she was a statue again, but I knew how to summon her now. I took her to a special antiquities dealer and blew a bit of grace into her to call her back. I was learning how to use the grace. And she came, shrieking once more, but she calmed down when she saw she was in a shop instead of a dungeon cell. The dealer just nodded like he’d seen this before and dropped some coins into my hand.

“I’ll check up on you again,” I told Victory, and waved at her in case she didn’t understand. I tossed a couple of the coins back to the dealer. “See if you can teach her a language that people actually still use,” I told him, and then I gave her enough grace to keep her around for a while.

Because you just never know who your friends might turn out to be.

And then, because I knew who my enemy was, I went back outside and after Judas once more.

I walked until I hit the Champs-Élysées, and then I wandered down it until the rain turned into a grey mist.

When dawn burned the mist away, I found a café that had opened early—not an easy task in Paris—and went in for another croissant and espresso. I was hungry for more, for a proper meal, because it had been a while since I’d had one of those. But I was used to being hungry.

I could see the top of the Eiffel Tower from my table. Most people think it’s just an old communications tower. It is, but most people have no idea what it was used to communicate with. It’s probably better if they don’t know, but who am I to say?

I drank my espresso and ate my croissant and thought about Victory’s request.

I understand what it is to be separated from your spirit. I don’t mean Christ—he’s more like a fading dream to me these days.

I mean Penelope.

I wasn’t entirely honest earlier when I said the only things that make life bearable for me are grace and death. There’s also Penelope. Or rather, there was Penelope.

Penelope who raised me from the dead, in her own way, and who’s dead now herself.

I finished my breakfast and made my way to the Montparnasse graveyard. I wandered it for a while and listened to the sounds of the city fade. I thought of the last time I’d been here, with her. It was after the Nazis had been driven out of the city and everyone thought maybe that had been the war to finally end all wars.

This day was sunny, with clear skies, but that day had been grey and wet, more of a Copenhagen day than a Paris postcard. We were looking for angels, but the only angels we found were on grave stones. I revisited them all now. They didn’t have any more to say to me this time than they did back then.

I stopped in front of Baudelaire’s grave and nodded my hello to him. Penelope and I had kissed there that day, in this same spot. Our breath was visible in the air, and a breeze lifted her hair around our heads. It was a moment that could have lasted forever.

That’s the way I like to remember it now, anyway. The truth is I don’t really know what happened when we kissed in Montparnasse, because that memory has been taken from me. I know there was a kiss in the cemetery. It’s just that I can’t remember where or even when. But a made-up memory is better than no memory at all.

Just let me have this one.

It was time to see Alice. I couldn’t put it off anymore. I left the cemetery and waved down a taxi. I asked the driver to take me to the nearest library. He eyed me a little, because I guess his fares didn’t usually want libraries, but I threw some money on his lap and then we were friends again.

When he dropped me off at the library I patted the stone lions flanking the stairs to its entrance. You never know. If they were really something other than sculptures and came to life some day, I’d like them to have fond memories of me.

Then I went up the stairs and inside in search of Alice.

Here’s the thing about Alice. You can only find her in libraries. Well, and sometimes bookstores. But that depends on the bookstore. She’s a little moody about them. She likes most libraries, though, so that’s where I tend to look for her first.

This is the way you summon Alice: You find the right book in the library and start to read it. That’ll bring her to you from wherever it is she hides in libraries. Simple, right? So what’s the right book? Well, that’s the hard part. It depends on the library. Sometimes the book even changes in the same library. In the New York Public Library it had been a biography of Lewis Carroll for years, and then one day I tried it and it didn’t work. It took me three weeks to find the new book, a copy of Alberto Manguel’s
History of Reading
. Also, the book has to be misshelved. Did I mention Alice was moody?

And yes, I said summon. Alice is a lot like a demon in some ways, except she’s not a demon. And she doesn’t have any grace in her, which is why I’ve never tried to kill her and we’re still friends. But she’s definitely not human. In fact, I’m not even sure she exists. It’s a strange little world we live in sometimes.

I’d never been in this library before, so I had nothing to go on. At least it was a small neighbourhood branch. It would probably only take a few hours to skim the stacks, looking for the books out of place.

I started in the fiction section. Whenever I found a book that wasn’t where it was supposed to be, I took it from the shelf and read a few pages, then looked around. When Alice didn’t appear, I put the book back and moved on. I’d been doing this for about 45 minutes when a woman wearing a librarian’s name-tag came over and asked me if I needed any help. I was reading a passage from Donald Barthelme’s
Snow White
at the time, but she had a look on her face that said we both knew I wasn’t there for the great literature.

“I’m looking for an old friend,” I told her. “Only I’m not sure where to find her.”

She folded her arms across her chest and gazed at me. It was a look I recognized well from all the time I’d spent in libraries. She was trying to decide whether she should go back to her mystery novel or call the police. They usually went back to their mystery novels, because reading a book is always better than filling out paperwork. But some had read too many of those mystery novels and saw danger everywhere.

While she was still making up her mind, a chorus of young voices wailing together came from the children’s literature section.

“Never mind,” I said, putting
Snow White
back on the shelf. “I think I know where she is.”

I went over to the other side of the library and found Alice sitting on a stool in an open area in the children’s literature section. She was wearing a dress with stains on it that could have been blood, as well as a top hat. Today her hair was blonde, although there were streaks of mud in it. She looked like she was barely out of her teens, which was the same way she’d looked when I’d met her many, many years before. She was reading from an ancient leather tome to the weeping children seated around her. At least I think it was leather. It could have been human skin. And the stool was a giant mushroom that looked like a real giant mushroom.

“And that’s how the world will end,” Alice said as I walked up. She closed the book and slipped it into one of the shelves beside her and the children cried even harder and ran for their parents. None of the librarians seated at a nearby desk even looked up. I think Alice casts some sort of charm on them, so they recognize her as one of their own. They’re a mysterious bunch, librarians.

When Alice saw me, she clapped her hands together and ran over to give me a hug. I tried to think of the last time I’d seen her. Athens, maybe? When she had sported the shaved head and the military uniform?

“Cross!” she said. “Have you come to tell me you’ve finally found what you were looking for? I hope so. I want to see what it is.”

“Hold on,” I said. “I want to know how the world ends.” I looked for the book she’d been reading to the children, but now I didn’t see it on the shelf. It had vanished.

Alice giggled. “You should know how it ends,” she said. “You were the one who wrote the book.”

I shook my head. “I’ve had the good sense to never write anything more than a few lines of romantic drivel,” I said. “I’ve certainly never tried anything as ambitious as a book.” And I would never try. The novelists I’ve known over the centuries have all been drunks and vagabonds. Or insane. It’s best to stay clear of that business.

“You didn’t write it in this story, silly,” she said, ruffling my hair. “You wrote it in one of the other ones.”

“Oh,” I said. “Of course.”

She looked around and then leaned close to whisper in my ear. “But I like you better in this one,” she said. “You’re too mean in the other one. I think running all those armies and torturing all those people is getting to you.”

“I can only imagine,” I said.

I once found Alice by reading an article in a magazine about multiple universes. When I finished the article, Alice was sitting in the chair beside me, wearing a bridal gown and knitting a hat for someone who had a head at least three times the size of mine.

“They have it all wrong,” she’d said that time. “There aren’t any other universes. There are only other books.”

Make of that what you will.

Now she stepped back and twirled her hair with a finger. “So,” she said, “what brings you here?” She looked around. “Where are we anyway?” she asked.

“Paris,” I told her, and then I added the year. Just in case.

“Ohhh, I like Paris,” she said and smiled. “You should see the things people do in the stacks sometimes.”

“I need to find out something,” I told her and pulled her into one of those stacks.

“Me too,” she said, nodding. I waited, but she didn’t say anything else. That was Alice. So I carried on.

“I don’t suppose you know where Judas is?” I asked.

“Of course I do,” she said, pulling some of her hair out of her head with that same finger. “He’s where he always is.”

“And where’s that?” I asked. I tried not to get my hopes up.

She tapped me on the forehead. “In here, of course,” she said. Then she noticed the hair wrapped around her finger. She stared at it like she didn’t know where it came from.

I always asked Alice about Judas, and she always gave me an answer like that. Maybe she was trying to be philosophical. And you thought the
Wonderland
books were hard to read.

Right, next.

“You know the gorgon in the Louvre?” I asked her.

She nodded again. “I’ve read everything about her,” she said. “Even her diaries. She just needs to find the right man.”

“That could be tricky,” I said. “And it’s not my problem. But I do need to find her head.”

“Oh, that’s easy,” she said. “It’s where it’s always been. Well, not always of course. Because once upon a time it was on her neck and shoulders.”

I waited. Patience is a virtue and all that, especially with Alice.

“And after that, of course, it was at the bottom of the sea until the kraken found it and wore it as a charm for one of its tentacles. But then Ahab cut that tentacle off when he fought the kraken. So I guess it wasn’t that good of a charm.”

“I thought all the krakens were dead,” I said.

“Not the ghost krakens,” she said, rolling her eyes at me.

“Of course,” I said. “Pardon me.”

“And then what happened to it?” she asked, scrunching her eyes tight. “Hmm, let me see.”

I watched a mother try to pull her son into the children’s section, but he screamed and ran away at the sight of Alice.

“Oh yes,” Alice said. “Then a sea diver found it and took it back to his tribe. They all thought it was the skull of one of their gods, but she’s not really a god, you know, she’s—”

“Condensed version?” I suggested.

Alice pouted at me. “What will you give me for my library?” she asked.

I’d already figured that one out. “A memory of Xanadu,” I said. “Back before the phoenix destroyed it.”

Alice made a face. She brushed the hair from her hand. She pulled off her hat and looked inside it, then pulled out the bones of some small creature.

“I already have memories of it,” she said, dropping the bones behind some of the children’s books on the shelf. “There was a man with a secret library who used to make me the
best
tea. It tasted like spider webs. Do you have anything better?”

I thought of Penelope, of our kiss in the Montparnasse cemetery, but I didn’t want to offer Alice that memory.

It was too late though.

“That’s a nice one,” Alice said. “I’ll take it.” I tried not to cry out and wail like the children. And just like that, as what felt like a cold wind moved through me, my memory of that moment with Penelope in that Paris graveyard was gone. That’s why I can’t remember the details now. I remember having the memory of her, I know what happened, but I can’t bring back the memory itself. So I try not to think about it too much.

Alice closed her eyes for a moment. “That’s lovely,” she said when she opened them again. “I’m keeping it in a secret box in between a dream of Anaïs Nin’s and a book idea that Fitzgerald thought up while drunk but forgot about when he was sober.”

“Keep her safe,” I said. It was all I could manage.

Alice nodded and put her top hat back on. “The British Museum,” she said.

“What about it?” I asked.

“The gorgon’s head. It’s in the museum,” she said. She considered the ceiling. “Don’t you think it’s odd that museums don’t have muses?” she said.

“Where in the museum?” I asked.

She smiled at me. “Why, where it’s supposed to be, of course.”

“All right,” I said. I wasn’t going to get anything else out of her. I kissed her on her cheeks, in the French way.

“Until next time,” I told her. “Hopefully it won’t be as long a wait.”

“You can’t have things worth waiting for without the wait,” she said.

She turned and walked off into the stacks, disappearing behind a display of Tintin comics. I went back out into the street. I had a train to England to catch.

Back outside, I tried to summon up the memory of Penelope again. I knew it had something to do with us in Paris, something I desperately wanted to never forget.

But it was gone. It was as gone as she was.