The Vatican Rip l-5 Page 18

  But as I sat on, hunched and fretting and dozing, some little gremlin in my head kept sniggering and saying, I'll be frigging kind all right. You see if I'm not.

  As long as my homemade winch was strong enough.

  * * *

  Eventually the cafeteria noise settled to a steady muffled banging as the servers gave the counters an end-of-day scouring. It was poisonously familiar. I'd dishwashed often enough to recognize that sound anywhere. Twenty minutes later some heavy-footed bloke stopped by the loo, presumably the security, banging the doors of the other cubicles back and giving my door an experimental rap. I heard him spinning the stopcock on the ascending water main, obviously a security man of the most careful and pestilential kind. His footfalls receded and the outer door went again.

  I listened to my sanctum's silence, holding my breath as I did so. Presumably I was now alone and the whole loo empty. Just in case I counted slowly to a hundred and listened again. Nothing. I did another hundred.

  Nothing, not a sound.

  You feel better with your feet on the floor instead of dangling. I lowered them carefully, put my briefcase down and slowly stretched. A quick peer underneath the door made me feel even better—no nasty boots waiting motionless for poor unsuspecting intruders to emerge whistling. I was alone.

  Nobody's had more practice than me at being scared witless. The trouble is, every time's the worst. With the caution born of a lifetime's cowardice, I gauged the time.

  Anna said the security shift of eight officers signed on at seven o'clock. The international football came on the television at half-eight, a live screening from West Germany which meant two untroubled spells of forty-five minutes, briefly intersected by that worrisome fifteen-minute interval. Some conscientious nuisance could trot out of the telly room for a quick listen for burglars in that gap. I couldn't repress a surge of irritation at weak-kneed footballers actually needing a rest between halves. Soft sods.

  When I was a kid we simply switched ends and carried on. You get no help when you need it.

  I'd planned a couple of hours' calm reflection at this point, but being calm doesn't work for some blokes and I'm one of them. I just can't see the point of serenity. My inner peace lasted three minutes. After that I sat and sweated.

  * * *

  Anna had assured me that the Vatican Secret Police were mythical. There's no such body. Security guards, yes. Secret cloak-and-dagger artists, no. I'd believed her. Alone in the gathering gloom, I wasn't so convinced.

  In fact I was shaking as I peered into the deserted cafeteria. Empty places are really weird. Not bad in themselves, but you're used to seeing them filled with people, aren't you.

  The cafeteria was spotless, shining and neat. And silent. Long curtains were drawn across the long curved picture windows. Through them a weak light diffused, presumably the floodlights which played along the Stradone di Giardini, the low road which runs straight as a die between the four hundred metre stretch of the Museum and the Vatican gardens. The central security possessed eighty closed-circuit TV

  monitors arranged in banks five screen high before a control console. They needed light. I had to trust Anna's map of the security electronics.

  Slowly I stepped out into the cafeteria, feeling curiously exposed though I made no noise, almost as if I were performing on a stage with some vast silent audience watching my every move. Absurd.

  The downstairs store room was locked, which meant an irritating ten-second delay while I pressed my plastic comb through the crack. A quick lick to stick my suction-pad coat-hook on the door, a series of rapid push-and-pull motions, and the lock snicked back. The delay was minuscule but worrying. That it was locked meant some bloody guard was doing his stuff, and that was bad news. I wanted them all cheering and booing in that staff telly room between the Museo Paolino and the Sala Rotunda.

  No windows in the store room, thank God. I locked the door, took the thin towel from my toolbag, rolled it into a sausage and wedged it along the door's base to prevent light leaks. My krypton bulb beamed round the room. Two spare batteries weighing a ton were the heaviest items in my toolbag, nearly, but I couldn't risk working blind for a single second. They'd be worth the effort before the night was out. A rectangular black cloth to hold the tools, a swift unpacking, jacket on the floor and I was off.

  My cafeteria table on which I'd laboured so much was the same as all the rest, except that its top was thicker, and an X-shaped strut reinforced the tubular steel legs. A security man might pass it over at a glance as an average modern nosh bar table. To me it meant ripping the Vatican.

  I inverted the table and levered off the gruesome shiny edging strips. The main section I wanted was held on the underside by eight mirror brackets with their flat-headed screws. For one frightening second I thought I'd forgotten my favourite screwdriver, but I'm always like that when I've a job on. It was there all the time, beside the hand drill. The wooden section was only a series of oblique triangles. To fold a polygonal surface you can only hinge it along three lines. (Experienced forgers will already know this. You beginners can work it out.) I'd done this by linen hinges, for flatness, and now I unfolded the wood. It was a lovely Andaman surface. Some call it Tadouk' wood, a rich rosewood-like Burmese wood which has been with us since the eighteenth century.

  Now I took my prepared rectangular blocks and made a quick swirl of the resin adhesives. I hate these modern synthetics, but a lovely old-fashioned smelly gluepot was a wistful dream in these crummy circumstances. I laid the inverted polygonal disc on the floor and glued the little blocks across the linen hinges, which had now served their purpose. In thirty minutes the disc would be rigid, and would become the

  'Chippendale' rent table's top.

  Meanwhile I unplugged the tips of the four hollow legs and from two drew out the slender steel rods carefully packed inside. The tissue paper could stay in, to save telltale mess. From the other two legs I shook out a dozen pieces of quartered wooden doweling. The glued blocks had holes to take the rods which slipped in easily, to my relief, though I'd rehearsed this a million times. The polygonal rent table top was now reinforced.

  The cafeteria table's steel legs themselves and my added cross-strut came apart once the screws and clasps were undone, which only shows what modem rubbish stuff is nowadays. I had long ago dissected away the thin formica layer back in Adriana's workshop. Now I simply pulled it off and leaned it against the wall behind some stacked chairs.

  That gave me the cafeteria table's rectangular chipboard top. One of my most difficult pieces of work had been cutting the rectangle into four so that it could become an elongated cube. The tubular steel legs would hold it rigid enough to carry practically any weight. They already had screwholes, made three days ago with a noisy electric drill. I'd veneered the exterior, of course, but the travelling had done it no good and I wasted time worrying about the shine. Anyway, the top central spot would be covered by that monstrous case of stuffed doves. The pedestal's lock keyhole was phoney but looked good.

  The real rent table upstairs had a base plinth as deep as the drawers—always a good sign in an antique of this kind, because the plinths got deeper as fashions changed, the narrower the plinth, the earlier your antique. This place of honour was reserved for the last bit of chipboard which I screwed along the base. It was only stained African white wood and the colour was too dark compared with the thing upstairs, but it was the best I could do.

  The metal X-shaped strut I placed across the centre of the polygon. By now the adhesive was setting well. I turned the huge wooden polygon the right way up and screwed it to the strut through the six holes I'd stencilled there. Solid and lovely.

  Sweating badly in that confined airless room, I found my jacket and carefully removed the six tiny circles of Andaman veneer from the top pocket. I'd pencilled a number on the underside of each to show which screw-hole it came from. A touch of synthetic glue, and the shiny screws were covered precisely by the matching veneer.

  I was having
to hurry now. The false drawer fronts were the weak spots. If people fingered underneath the edge of my table, nosey sods, they would realize the game instantly, because there'd be only a sharp edge instead of a lovely smooth underface.

  I'd have to risk that. Once the rip was over they could laugh their heads off at my folding copy—because a million miles off I'd be laughing too.

  The drawer fronts had come fitted easily between the undersurface of the cafeteria table's top and the folded polygonal section, being only veneered three-ply. My pieces of quartered doweling rods came in handy now to hold the drawer facades completely rigid. It had to be glued, though my heart ached for a small brass hammer and a supply of fixing pins. I hate doing a job by halves.

  So, in total silence, I completed the table margin with rotten modern adhesives and stood the polygonal top on its facade of drawers to set firm.

  Looking at it, I was quite proud. It looked really great, even in the harsh beam of a krypton torch. Once the gleaming top was plonked on the pedestal it would be indistinguishable from the real thing, unless you looked underneath or pulled it to bits.

  The only good thing you could say about it was that it was twice as sound as the jerry-built modern crap they sell nowadays.

  I must have taken about an hour. I was on schedule.

  Time.

  CHAPTER 24

  The Vatican places great faith—charmingly quaint, really— in the reliability of mankind.

  As I say, it takes all sorts. There are the pilot lights at each of the corridor intersections, set high by each of the main doorways.

  They indicate the security time clocks where the patrolling guards clock in. No hidden infra-red sensitor beams, unless you include the sets indiscreetly built into the walls near the Viale Vaticano entrance and between the Cappella Sistina and St Peter's itself.

  You mustn't know about them because they're secret. And the secret cameras which connect with the screen-outs in the security room which I mentioned can be seen quite clearly from the galleries. They're not quite archaic, but striving hard for obsolescence.

  They're about as secret as Mount Palomar. Anna had mapped out the camera blind spots, and I had them by heart. Anna had reported that there were more magic rays to trap unwary burglars at St Anne's Gate. Big deal. That's the trouble with museums.

  They're crazy about entrances.

  Nervous as a cat, I locked the store-room door with a horrible loud click and walked in silence up the stairs to Signora Faranada's office. There were two risks: a wandering guard, and some unexpectedly simple alarm system like a bell on a door.

  The office door came apart at a waggle of my comb. The top filing-cabinet drawer was locked, but they all have that fatal flaw of a spring-loaded catch, and old Joe Bramah showed civilization the way round that in the 1880s, so I hardly paused. The box inside was unlocked, and held the set of master keys the manageress had used earlier in the day. I was worried about the light from my pencil-torch and did all I could to shield it.

  The trouble was, I was going into places where windows would be a constant risk. The Vatican has more windows than a mill.

  Outside the signora's office a narrow corridor ran about ten yards to end at a door. The fourth key worked. With my hand clutching the rest of the bunch to avoid jingling, I turned the lock. My stupid heart was banging loud enough to wake the dead as I pulled the door open and waited a second for the alarms and sirens to sound off. Dead silence. A brief dizziness swirled in me. God knows how long I'd held my breath.

  Unsteadily I clung to the door a moment to recover and had to close my eyes for about a fortnight until the nausea passed.

  I stepped out nervously. I knew where I was. To understand the layout of the Vatican Museum you have to think of a huge letter H, except that now with the new wing it has a double crosspiece with the great library between the two struts. From Anna's drawings I was somewhere underneath the Paoline Room and the Biblioteca. One floor up and across, and I would be in my favourite gallery beside my least favourite museum showpiece. To the right and along.

  Stairs are the ultimate risk. You can peer down a corridor, count doors, watch for shadows at the far end. But staircases are a swine because you can't see who's having a crafty smoke in cupboardy alcoves beneath.

  I reached the top stair on hands and knees. I squirmed flat and squinted at right angles down the long gallery. The ranged series of long rectangular windows, the slanting shadows from the outside lights in the grounds, all there in frozen gloom. And no glow of a cigarette.

  Opposite the faint white blobs of the odious stuffed doves the shadows thickened. That would be the blue-and-gold double cupboards, full of stored early Christian figurines.

  Happily, ancient cupboards with natty antique locks. They sound and look impregnable, but believe it or not they were my one stroke of luck.

  I eeled out into the main chamber a yard or two. Not much light from the Stradone.

  Mercifully no curtains at the long gallery's windows, not since that time ten Popes ago when His Holiness had done his nut and the drapery was retired in disgrace, which served them right for mixing maroon and blue. Nothing moved. Better still, it felt right.

  Silence everywhere and that precious feeling of loneness. The football was probably midway through the second half by now, maybe twenty minutes before the security round. Yet… there was something wrong. Nothing to stop me, but definitely a wrong vibe somewhere. Still, no time now for imagination.

  I got up and practically sprinted back the way I had come, flitting along the camera blind lines, snicking past Signora Faranada's office and through the cafeteria. I reached the store room excited and a little breathless, but it felt good. Really great. Except…

  again there was something vaguely wrong, but I couldn't put my finger on it. The rip was on. Scramble, Lovejoy, and worry about vibes when celebrating afterwards.

  Inside my bag were two slender coils of silk rope. It costs a fortune—at least, it would have if Anna hadn't nicked it. Both were exactly the right length. The longer one stretched double, over and under my great polygonal table top so it lay on my shoulders like a set of clumsy wings. A top loop to put round my forehead. Indian style, leaving my hands free, and my pedestal easily carried by the smaller length of rope slung over my shoulder. Clumsy, but with care not to bump I could do it. My toolbag I looped on my wrist.

  Creeping along in the semidark hunched under my tabletop like a tortoise, pausing for breath at corners and manoeuvring my pieces slowly round them, I switched between panic and exasperation. Shuffling along the gallery towards those pale blurs, I was pouring sweat and burning at the unfairness of it all.

  It took about ten minutes and seemed a month. Close to, the stupid white birds' glass case was a good landmark. Wheezing with the strain, I lowered the pedestal and then slipped the table top off my back. The relief made my head swim and I had to shift, and fast. My bag of tools.

  Looking along the gallery to check, I slid across to the cupboards which stand on the Stradone side of the chamber. There are six double ones, each about six feet wide, though other galleries have as many as twelve. Two minutes to pick the lock and I creaked one cupboard door open.

  'Jesus,' I muttered. My pencil torch revealed scores of small terracotta figurines staring back at me. Lovely and nearly priceless, but in the circumstances a real bloody nuisance. Feverishly I began lifting them haphazardly from the middle shelf and stowing them on the other shelves. God knows how long it had taken the curators to arrange them. I thrust them anywhere, scooping their labels up and rammed them towards the back of the lowest shelf. That feeling of sickly confidence had evaporated in my sweat.

  Now this whole dig felt bad and that depressing sense of wrongness enveloped me, but I'd no idea why. I began to feel I was being watched from somewhere further down the long silent chamber, which was impossible. I knew that. But I was starting to shake.

  Maybe it was all those unnerving terracotta eyes.

  My sense
of time deserted me. I don't know how long it took to clear the middle shelf, six long feet of valuable early Christian figurines. I'd been quite prepared to saw out any middle divider to give me room to lie down, but the cupboards are without vertical divisions, as sensible cupboards ought to be. I hate those modern coffin shapes they call cupboards nowadays.

  By the time I'd cleared the shelf I was close to babbling with fear, feeling invisible avenging angels closing ominously about me. Without looking about, I slid across to that glass-cased monstrosity and lifted it clumsily to the floor. There was a nasty moment when my foot entangled itself in my carrying ropes. I rammed the two lengths into my toolbag out of the way and carried my pedestal over to the cleared shelf. End on and pushed to the shelf's extremity, it still gave me room to lie down— as long as my feet were stuffed down the hollow pedestal's interior.

  I made myself stare down the gallery. No sign of movement. My confidence began to creep back when something intruded into my consciousness. In the distance I could hear motor-horns in regular cacophony. For one horrible second they suggested police sirens. My mouth went dry from fright till I recognized it. Dah-dah-dadadadadadada-dah-dah. The universal rhythm of the soccer fan's applause. I turned to jelly. This was it. The televised match from West Germany must be over, and jubilant fans were parading Rome on their way to a celebratory beer-up. Lucky I'd heard the racket, but how long had it been going on? Was that what felt so wrong? No chance of calm now.

  My worksheet to protect Arcellano's rent table, then three wobbly goes to lift my phoney antique table top on top. My measurements were too generous if anything. I'd allowed three extra inches, which turned out plenty. A little sliding adjustment of my phoney top, and I could replace that glass case of doves. In a sweat of relief I stepped back. Done. Only an expert would realise that the precious table had widened slightly.