The God Machine (2 page)

Da Vinci admired the pattern of fine lines, the rectangles and squares, the circles that danced in exquisite proportion.

He lifted the blank page in his notebook, across from “Vitruvian Man.” The parchment was thin enough for him to see the other drawing beneath. Then, he began to add his own imbroglio of fine lines, circles and rectangles, extending the pattern, adding on.

It was almost noon when Duke Ludovico Sforza started banging on his door. The sound was so disturbing that it tore da Vinci from the spell which had been riding him all morning. He felt it shedding like a second skin, a spent cocoon, the remnants of another self still dangling from his shoulder blades and fingertips and
hair. He shook himself, he looked about the room, but he could not for the life of him remember how he'd gotten there.

“Leonardo! I know you're in there. I can hear you. Open this door instantly!”

Da Vinci hurried over to the door and swung it open.

Duke Ludovico Sforza glowered in the corridor. His liquid coal-black eyes looked bottomless. His dark hair hung about his face. It was no wonder he was called
Il Moro—
The Moor. “As long as I remain your patron, this is
my
house,” the duke sputtered, striding forward, eyeing every object with suspicion. He wore a coat of the deepest iridescent purple, like the wings of a butterfly, and Leonardo made a note to remember the color. “These are all
my
doors,” continued the duke, “to lock or unlock, as
I
please. As
I
will.”

“Of course.” Da Vinci leaned forward in a kind of bow. “As
you
will.”

“Where is my father's masterwork?”

“I wish you'd stop referring to it in that manner, my Duke.”

Ludovico Sforza, Regent and Duke of Milan, son of the great Condottiere Francesco, waved his left hand and said, “If you'd have the world believe in you, Leonardo, you must first believe in yourself.” He hovered for a moment by da Vinci's desk.

No, not a butterfly, thought da Vinci. More like a moth.

Sforza tugged at the studies of his mistress, Cecilia Gallerani, pulled them out and scanned them quickly in succession. “Is this it? Is this all you've been working on? I saw all of these pieces weeks ago. What about my father's masterwork? ‘Il Cavallo,’ Leonardo. The bronze horse, twenty-four feet high, which—as you wrote in your letter—shall endue with immortal glory and eternal honor the auspicious memory of the prince, my father,
and of the illustrious house of Sforza.” The duke's eyes settled on da Vinci's notebook, the sketch of “Vitruvian Man,” and that strange drawing on the other side. “What's this? Another study? Another commission, perhaps? Some thing from Florence?”

Da Vinci snatched the notebook from Duke Sforza's grasp. “For another time, my Duke. Another lifetime, really.” He smiled and tucked it away. “Unworthy of your attention. But you are in luck.”

“Don't patronize me, Leonardo. I'm tired of waiting. Enough of your studies, your exercises, your sinewy deadlines and tiresome delays, your procrastinations and excuses—”

“For today is the day I begin…” said da Vinci. And he felt the knowledge descend upon him like an imponderable weight. “… your father's masterwork.”

1738
Philadelphia

B
ENJAMIN
F
RANKLIN WAS AWAKENED BY THUNDER.
H
E HAD
been walking with Franky through an apple orchard, the one behind Bishop White's house. And they had been kicking the apples together down the swale, which ended at Dock Creek. And Franklin had kicked one particularly hard, and had turned toward his son with a great smile on his face, as if to say “You see? See how far?” But Franky was no longer there. And then that thunderclap unrolled through the city like a wave on the strand, and Franklin was alone in his nightshirt, lying in bed, sweat-soaked and stinking of fear.

Someone was knocking, not on his door, but somewhere below. Franklin could hear it. At the front door, no doubt, facing Market Street. Then the banging stopped,
and someone was standing outside of his bedroom, in the corridor, right there on the landing, moaning and moving about by his door.

“Mr. Franklin, sir?” Peter offered up querulously.

Franklin rolled out of bed. He put on his spectacles. His clothes had been laid out with punctilious care, following a tested system linking joint movements to articles of clothing, and he started to dress with great speed and efficiency. Franklin was thirty-two. He still retained much of the muscular physique he had engineered for himself through his passion for swimming as a youth, abetted by his dynamic nervous energy, but his vegetarianism had failed the test of time, and he was growing soft about the middle.

Ever since his appointment as Postmaster General the previous year, Franklin rarely ate at the house that he rented on Market Street. He loved his Deborah—in his own way, to be sure—but her stews, made with a paucity of ingredients, no doubt meant to impress upon him her frugality, were singularly unexpressive, devoid of flavor. In a word: dull.

Franklin simply couldn't help it, despite his espoused penchant for moderation, and much to his chagrin. He enjoyed fine food and drink. While his bastard son William should have been a constant reminder of the price of his unfettered passions, Franklin still tried to disregard the knowledge that his stupendous appetites would—one day, at some great age, no doubt—come back to haunt him.

The result was he had grown used to taking his meals about town on most evenings, at the homes of friends, associates, or acquaintances, being feted by vendors, a visiting dignitary in some alien province, doing business as Postmaster General.

He was already losing his hair—a source of great dismay to Franklin, so much so that he flaunted his baldness,
and ofttimes refused to wear wigs wherever it might prove most explosive not to do so. But to be losing his figure as well!

It was all going to hell, he thought, all falling apart. Since Franky.

“Mr. Franklin?” said Peter.

“Yes, I'm coming,” snarled Franklin. “Who's calling at this unholy hour?”

“The old Jew,” Peter said.

In the middle of the night, and in inclement weather? It was too late for cards and too early to argue philosophy. Unless… Franklin opened the door. “Is he alone?”

“No, Mister Franklin,” said Peter. The middle-aged house slave glanced nervously down the corridor, as if hunting about for the answer. “He has a gentleman with him,” he added, still averting his eyes. “A foreigner.”

Franklin grabbed Peter by the shoulders. He spun him about, as though he meant to attack him. Then he laughed, stepped around him and bounded away down the stairs.

Simon Nathan, the chief rabbi of Philadelphia, stood on the stoop facing Market Street. At his side, Franklin noticed a stranger, a dark man in a dark cloak with a hood. They huddled together in the rain like a pair of hunting dogs.

“Come in. Come in,” Franklin said.

“Forgive us for intruding upon you at this hour, Benjamin,” said the rabbi, as he passed through the door, “but since you …” He shook the rain from his hat. “Since we …” He watched as it fell in a stream to the floor.

“You found it?” said Franklin.

The rabbi smiled. He was an old man with dark brown eyes ringed by years of hard service. “Yes, we found it.”

“Where?”

“In Cairo.”

As if performing a magic trick, the stranger reached under his cloak and removed a leather-bound codex, a loose binder of cinnamon paper.

“This is my friend, Haym Solomon,” the rabbi said. “He arrived on the night boat from Spain. Before that, on foot and by camel from Cairo, across the Sahara.”

Franklin glanced about the foyer. “Peter,” he called. “Warm up some brandy for our guests. Peter? You're soaked to the skin. Peter! Where did he go now? He was right on my heels.”

“No, no brandy for us, thank you, Benjamin,” said the rabbi. “We can't stay. But I wanted to deliver this to you personally as soon as it reached me.” The rabbi took the codex from Solomon and gave it to Franklin. “In truth, I didn't want to keep it at the temple.”

Franklin stared down at the book in his hands. It was impossible to believe. After all this time. He cupped the leather spine, feeling the age of the codex seep into his fingertips. “You're sure it's the one, the Gospel we wanted?”

The rabbi fingered his
payots
. “The one you were seeking,” he said, with a sigh. “But not what you wanted, I fear, Benjamin. Listen to me. I tell you this as your friend. There is a reason it has been hidden from the world for seventeen hundred years. It will bring you no good. It will visit upon you the wrath of your enemies. They will rise up and strike you.”

The rabbi put on his hat. “Let it go, Bennie. Franky's dead.” Without another word, he took his companion by the arm and, together, the pair made their way through the door, down the street, until they vanished into the falling rain.

Franklin folded the codex in his arms. He closed and bolted the door. Then he took the lamp which Peter had left in the foyer and made his way back upstairs.
Deborah still slept in her chambers. The house was dead silent.

Franklin's study was at the rear of the house. It was a small room, paneled with books and littered with half-built inventions. Maps and portraits hung from the walls, but he did not look at them this night. Instead, he put the lamp on his desk and sat down. With a sigh, he opened the codex. It consisted of hundreds of brittle pages of dusty papyrus, most already shattered on the edges like slate.

And there it was. On the very first page. Right there. On the frontpiece itself! That pattern of lines, quadrangles and circles, rectangles and squares in a dance of exquisite proportion.

After all this time, the legends were true!

Franklin leaned back in his chair and laughed. He reached over for that small carafe of medicinal rum which he kept on his desk. He poured out a dram in a simple tin cup. Then he rose to his feet and made his way to the wall across from his desk. To that painting. To Franky.

His son was still smiling. Still full of joy. And still dead from the pox, at age four, two years earlier.

“You should have seen how I kicked that apple, Franky. All the way to Dock Creek,” Franklin said. “Of course, we'll have to do something about it eventually.
A stitch in time…
Lazy servants from all over the neighborhood empty the fruits of our necessaries right into Dock Creek. Not to mention the tanneries along Harmony Lane. One day it will bring down the cholera. Mark my words.” A flash lit the room for an instant. A thunderclap followed.

Franklin lifted his cup. “Soon, Franky.” He toasted the painting. “As I promised you. I'll be there, beside you, and I'll rock you to sleep in my arms once again.”

T
OM
M
OODY WAS WORKING AT THE FAR END OF THE BASEMENT
, kneeling on a plastic tarpaulin, when he first spied a corner of the box in the wall. It was nestled in a small depression, immediately beside the joist. It was made out of wood. Moody worked his trowel around the edges, and the dense compacted dirt, trapped for two hundred years, came undone, tumbled down. He wiggled the box from the hole.