Bonus chapter ... a rough draft from the David Parker book
4
It was after midnight when I pointed the Mercedes down the bluff toward the downtown.
The city was in the midst of a massive riverfront redevelopment project, leaving the downtown looking like Beirut midway through Lebanon’s civil war. Here and there old buildings were being torn down or were already demolished, leaving rubble-filled open spaces to await new construction. New buildings in various stages of completion were being built across from the levee, where a vulgar floating casino that supposedly looked like a 19th century Mississippi River steamboat was moored.
Just beyond a new, multi-story faux art deco parking garage, an enormous glass structure was rising up out of the ground, as if a long-buried alien spacecraft were emerging from beneath the ground to take flight for a galaxy beyond the reach of Earth’s telescopes. The façade was a series of cantilevered planes rising a dozen stories over River Drive, interrupted in the middle with a dramatic set of stairs that would be about as exhausting to climb as the steps to the summit of the Mayan pyramid at Chicen Itza.
Traffic was light on the streets and sidewalks. The downtown had its share of street people, but late at night they congregated near a few notorious flophouses and taverns at the downtown’s far edge, an area several dangerous blocks beyond the reach of the present gentrification. Though casino never closed, not even on Christmas Eve, though the gamblers still hoping to beat the odds were busy at the slot machines and blackjack tables.
I wheeled into an alley and parked behind a semi-size dumpster that hid the car.
The rear of what the city’s new art gallery didn’t look like a space ship so much as an urban construction zone. The project was surrounded by temporary chain-link fence and protected by a rent-a-cop slumped against the door of a white Cherokee belonging to one of the local security companies.
I skirted the sleeping guard and jumped the twelve-foot fence, landed silently on my fingertips and the toes of my Nikes atop the construction company’s mobile office. I next leaped to an air compressor suspended from a crane to prevent it from being stolen, hanging there a few moments before dropping to the third-story balcony that serve as the terrace for the museum’s café.
The glass was in the windows and doors, but the doors were not locked, not that locks could stop me.
The interior was cavernous and empty. I tried to imagine Renaissance paintings of ruthless Italian princes and shrewd Dutch merchants hanging on the walls. The floating casino’s carnival lights glittered through the specially manufactured UV-proof glass front wall. The night was starless, the Mississippi mostly unseen, a river of darkness between the downtowns one either shore that nevertheless conveyed the sense of power and motion.
The main staircase had not yet been carpeted or tiled. I walked down the naked concrete steps, finding my way into the part of the building that was divided into offices and rooms for meetings, classes, storage and caring for the collection. The walls were up and doors hung, but tendrils of wire and HVAC tubing drooped down from above, yet to be hidden by the ceiling tiles.
Through a pair of glass doors was the sculpture garden at the center of the gallery’s education wing. Pallets of pre-poured concrete slabs – the walking surface textured with river gravel – were stacked against one wall. The installation had already started along one wall. I found a spade and began to dig in the dirt near a cement mixer, where the foundation had yet to be poured.
The air was still and thick. Thunder rumbled in the distance. I needed to finish before the rain came.
The hole I dug was three feet across and a little more than six feet long. I dug it six feet deep, the prescribed depth for a grave. When I was finished I dropped the shovel and stood there, looking down into the dark hole in the ground. A vampire had never before died like this – not from violence or the terminal ennui of a life eternal, but from poison that slowly leached through the blood until it could silence the slow beating of an ancient heart. I wouldn’t have believed it possible if I hadn’t watched the life run out of him with my own eyes.
The steel gate behind the mixer leading to the alley was chained shut. I turned the tumblers with my mind until there was a click and the Masterlock fell open.
There was no sign of the security guard or his Jeep in the alley. I walked the hundred feet to the Mercedes and opened the trunk. I gently lifted the crumpled form inside, still wrapped in the tapestry. The body was not as pliable as it had been only a little earlier. Rigor mortis was setting in. Apparently once a vampire died, his no-longer-immortal shell at last became subject to the same corruption and decay as a mortal’s corpse.
Feeling overwhelmed with a sadness bordering on despair, I returned to the sculpture garden gently lowered the body into the hole. It thundered again as I put him there, the volley loud now, the storm close.
I took up the shovel and put the dirt back, feeling as if I were planting a great seed that was doomed to never push its way back to the sun. I spread the extra dirt around the unfinished part of the sculpture garden, assuring myself that no one would know the difference, and that in day or two the work would be complete. Before long they would bring in the sculptures, and they would be the only thing to mark the true final resting place of Leonardo da Vinci.
I stood over the grave with folded hands, thinking I should say something, but what? A prayer? I tried but the words wouldn’t come. I had forgotten how to pray. And so I stood there, saying nothing, thinking nothing, stunned to numb nothingness by grim significance of Leonardo’s death and what it might portend for the Vampiri and the world.
A flash of lightning ripped across the night, illuminating for a moment the swirling blue-black belly of an angry sky. Thunder exploded a second later, a cannon that roared and echoed against the manmade canyons of the surrounding banks and office buildings.
Leonardo’s dying words had been to warn me watch for a sign.
The lightning flashed again, the almost simultaneous thunder making me flinch.
Perhaps this was the sign, I thought, staring up into the night.
It started to rain.
Posted by Michael on 07.16.04 @ 03:19 PM CST [link] [3 Comments]
