“You have a philosophy of life?”
“Absolutely,” he said and nodded. “Whenever possible say something nice to the person who’s helping you. What’s wrong with that?”
“But only if it’s a pretty girl helping you.”
“I like looking at pretty women.” He shrugged. “What’s wrong with that? You can’t have something against pretty women since you’re one yourself.”
“You’re insufferable,” snapped Sister Meg, her face reddening. She was even prettier when she blushed.
Holliday smiled.
They reached the end of the hall and began to trudge up the narrow flight of stairs. Like the floors the steps were worn, especially in the center. At each landing there was an arched narrow window that looked out onto a courtyard in the cloister below. There was obviously access from the main floor because there were people sitting on benches, smoking, eating, drinking coffee or simply sitting on the scattered benches and looking at the plantings in the flower beds as they soaked up the dappled sunshine filtered through the trees.
They reached the top of the stairs and went through an archway into another small foyer. Sunlight poured through another arched window. A young man in a white shirt and wire-framed spectacles was tapping furiously at a computer keyboard. Behind him were four computer workstations, each one with its own partitioned carrel. It was like being back in the library at Georgetown, thought Holliday.
Holliday and Meg stepped up to the desk but the young man kept typing, ignoring them.
“Mi scusi,”
said Holliday. “But can you help us?”
Irritated, the young man looked up briefly, then gestured to his right.
“La Stazione a sinistra,”
he said.
“Grazie,”
said Holliday.
The young man went back to his typing.
“He’s not very polite,” said Meg as they walked over to the carrel on the far right.
“Ah, well,” sighed Holliday. “They can’t all be pretty girls.”
Meg glared at him but said nothing; glaring seemed to be her most common expression, like a grade school teacher whose class is in a constant uproar.
“Did you ever teach grade school?” Holliday asked.
“For a short time, as a novice,” answered the nun. “Why do you ask?”
Aha!
“Just curious,” answered Holliday mildly, sitting down on a hard plastic chair in front of a Zucchetti brand computer. He followed the instructions given to him by the multilingual information lady downstairs, chose the little Union Jack flag for his preferred language and began navigating through the system.
“Find anything?” Sister Meg asked after a few moments.
“I’m afraid so,” Holliday said.
“What?”
“Zeno Nautica—financial records: 1156-1605. Fifteen thousand pages, a hundred and fifty-seven ledgers.”
“Maybe they break it down ledger by ledger, or year by year,” suggested Sister Meg.
“So I should try 1307 to 1314?”
“Makes sense, don’t you think?”
“Let’s give it a shot,” said Holliday.
He typed in the appropriate dates and waited. A moment later he had his answer.
“What does it say?” Sister Meg asked.
“One thousand and eight pages and fourteen ledgers. Busy people, these Zenos.” Holliday sighed. “It would take forever.”
“We know they came back in 1314, or at least the Blessed Juliana did. Wouldn’t there be a notation when they brought back the ship?”
“I knew there was a reason for having you here,” said Holliday, smiling.
“I’m not taking the bait,” said Meg disdainfully. “So just get on with it.”
Holliday typed in the date.
“One hundred and sixty-four pages, one ledger. Available in facsimile.”
There was a pen on a chain and a pad of scratch paper at the workstation. Holliday jotted down the fond number for the ledger and took it to the young man at the desk, who was still typing furiously. He looked up at Holliday, pushed his glasses back up onto the bridge of his nose and scowled.
“Cosa c’e?”
said the young man petulantly. What do you want?
“I want you to do your job instead of sitting there on your fanny writing romantic poetry to your girlfriend, or maybe it’s your boyfriend. Pal,” snapped Holliday, using his best West Point bracing tone. He dropped the slip of paper onto the boy’s keyboard.
“Diciannove euro,”
muttered the young man without looking Holliday in the eye. Holliday brought out his wallet and dropped a twenty-euro note on the desk.
“No denaro,”
said the young man, sweeping up the money with one hand and putting it into his drawer.
“Keep it,” said Holliday.
The young man ostentatiously locked the drawer, picked up the slip of paper and went through a closed door at the other side of the room. Holliday went back to Sister Meg and the workstation.
“Now what?” Meg said.
“We wait,” answered Holliday.
11
“Where the hell is he?” Holliday said, looking at his watch. The sour-faced young man at the desk had been gone for forty- five minutes. “This place is big, but it’s not
that
big.”
“Maybe he’s having a nap somewhere,” said Sister Meg, standing at the window and looking down into the courtyard below.
“More likely a smoke in some stairwell,” grunted Holliday. Stairwells were always the cadet favorites at the Point. He frowned a little, surprised at himself. He missed teaching a lot more than he thought he would. West Point had been his first real home in a lot of years, and now it was gone and he was a wanderer again, plagued by an incurable and inevitable restlessness.
“Maybe you should go and look for him,” said Sister Meg. “Give him a demerit point or whatever it is you do at West Point.”
“You sound like you’re on his side,” said Holliday.
“You were awfully mean to him.”
“I told him what he needed to hear.”
“He’s very young.”
“He won’t be any different fifty years from now. He resents the job he has to do too much to do it well. He thinks he’s better than the work. You can bet your last dollar he thinks his boss has it in for him and is preventing him from getting a promotion. Nothing is ever his fault. I’ve heard it all a million times.” Holliday shook his head. “He’s probably a budding movie director or a novelist just waiting for his big break.”
The door at the end of the room opened and the boy reappeared, lugging an enormous cardboard slipcase. He carried the heavy box over to the workstation and dropped it heavily on the table.
“Mi dispiace, Signor,”
apologized the archive attendant, his cold, unpleasant expression at odds with the words coming out of his mouth.
Holliday shrugged.
“Per me va bene,”
he answered. He handed the young man another slip of paper, this one with the number of the next fond in the series on it. Then he took out his wallet and gave the archive attendant another twenty-euro note.
“Mi dispiace,”
said Holliday.
“Realmente.”
His expression was a model of sincerity.
The young man looked at the twenty-euro note, looked at Holliday, and looked as though he was about to say something and then thought better of it. Holliday might seem like a grizzled old man in the boy’s eyes, but he was a grizzled old man who stood six-two in his bare feet and could still do an easy hundred one-armed push-ups without breaking a sweat. Not to mention the slightly intimidating patch over his ruined eye. The kid wisely kept his mouth shut. He turned on his heel and went back through the door on the far side of the room.
“What was that all about?” Sister Meg asked. “He looked furious.”
“I sent him back to get the next ledger in the series,” explained Holliday. “The one for 1315.”
“That was cruel!” said the nun angrily. “You’re just punishing him!”
“It has nothing to do with punishment!” Holliday barked, annoyed. “After the little twerp went off the first time it occurred to me that they’d probably been using the Julian Calendar back then. The Gregorian Calendar was instituted in Venice sometime during the sixteenth century. The dates would have been way off by the year 1315—Christmas would be sometime in February. If your Blessed Juliana or whatever her name was didn’t get back until late in the year it might be in the ledger as 1315, not 1314. The answer may well lie in the next ledger, not this one. We really do need to see it.”
The nun looked at him, still angry, but said nothing. She rejoined Holliday at the workstation as he pulled the facsimile ledger out of its slipcase. Unlike a regular accountant’s ledger, each entry was written in longhand across the entire page, beginning with the number for the transaction and the date of the entry, followed by the name of the person making the entry, then the name of the person the entry was about, then the name and destination of the ship involved and finally the amount paid and the expected date of return.
The name of the entrant, the lessor, the ship and the dates were all underlined. Each entry was effectively a longer or shorter paragraph according to the complexity of the transaction. An odd way of doing things, but efficient enough. Scattered through the entries were notations on separate lines for the return of ships and the final disposition of payments. The last notation on the final page of the facsimile was one of these. The handwriting was archaic and the Italian was obscure, but Holliday’s command of Latin made it comprehensible. It read:
13th December, 1314. Giorgio Zeno. Seen at Gibraltar, the Barca
Santa Maria Maggiore,
leased to Cavaliere Jean de St. Clair, en route from St. Michael’s Mount.
“Do you think they mean Mont Saint-Michel?” Sister Meg asked, reading over Holliday’s shoulder.
“Why would they translate the name into English? The notation is in Italian,” said Holliday.
“So he stopped at St. Michael’s Mount in Cornwall on their return?” Sister Meg said.
“Apparently,” said Holliday. “It may have been a staging base for the outward leg as well.”
“Why would that be the case?” Sister Meg asked. “Jean de Saint-Clair was French.”
“What was France and what was England back then is a toss-up,” explained Holliday. “Eleanor of Aquitaine didn’t speak a word of English but she was the mother of Richard the Lionheart. Brittany and Aquitaine were both British possessions in France. He could have very well been English and with a previous alliance with Mount St. Michael rather than with Mont Saint-Michel. There’s no way to know without going there.”
“Then we don’t need to see the next ledger,” said Sister Meg.
“I’d like to see it anyway,” said Holliday. “The closing entry might have some more information we could use.”
They waited for almost a full hour but there was no sign of the young man.
“This is ridiculous,” fumed Holliday.
“You sent him on a wild-goose chase and he knows it,” said Sister Meg.
“Wild-goose chase or not, he should do his job,” answered Holliday stubbornly. Another twenty-five minutes went by but still the young man was a no-show.
“Maybe we should just go,” suggested Sister Meg.
“Not until I see that ledger,” answered Holliday. “I paid to see it.” He looked at his watch. It was past noon.
“There has to be another way out of here. Maybe he’s gone to lunch,” said Meg.
“Then I’ll get the damned ledger myself,” said Holliday. He fiddled with the computer, found the number he wanted again and jotted it down. He stood up and headed for the door leading back into the archive stacks. Sister Meg followed.
“Nobody’s forcing you to come,” said Holliday brusquely. “If I see the little punk I can wring his scrawny neck on my own.”
“That’s exactly why I’m tagging along,” answered the nun.
“Suit yourself,” said Holliday. He pulled open the door and stepped through. Sister Meg was right on his heels.
Beyond the doorway the long cloister was a labyrinth of floor-to-ceiling racks of documents and papers, some loose and some in slipcase binders. Other fonds were in boxes and crates, some plastic, some wood and some cardboard. The shelves themselves were made out of wood or steel and were of varying lengths, creating little alleyways through the stacks at intermittent points like dead ends in a garden maze.
There were also varying numbers of aisles, some abruptly ending, others looking as though they went on forever. There seemed to be no order to any of it—codes on one section of shelves appeared to be alphabetical, while the next set of shelves was divided numerically, or even by date or with some Italian version of the Dewey decimal system.
“This is nuts,” said Holliday. “I used to think the British Library system was a nightmare—this is truly insane.”
“It is confusing,” agreed Sister Meg.
“It looks like there’s elements from every era of the archives’ existence, bits and pieces that were popular at the time. It’s incoherent.”
“Just like Italian politics, from what I understand,” said Sister Meg.
“Don’t go wandering off,” cautioned Holliday. “It would be like getting lost down
Alice in Wonderland
’s rabbit hole.”
Sister Meg smiled at the reference.
“ ‘Oh my ears and whiskers, how late it’s getting!’ ” quoted the nun.
“Pardon?” Holliday said.
“It’s from
Alice in Wonderland
,” she explained. “The White Rabbit who leads Alice down the rabbit hole.”
“I never read it actually,” confessed Holliday. “I saw it on my friends the Corbett twins’ TV when I was seven or eight. They had the only TV in the neighborhood, color too; a twenty-one-inch RCA Aldrich model. Teddy loved
Alice
, Artie hated it. They were like that about everything. The only other thing I remember is the Jefferson Airplane song, ‘Feed your head’ and all that.”
“You should be ashamed of yourself,” chided Sister Meg. “It’s a literary classic.”