“Here, find out what you can,” Milly said, handing him the small digital recorder which had been running as Abelard told his tale. “You’ve complete discretion to do whatever is needed to get me some answers. I think Abelard is hiding much more than he’s telling. Indeed, everything on that small device may turn out to be no more than pure fabrication. He does talk a lot about a small jeweled cross. There might be something there. That reminds me, any news on the crooked cross?”
“We might have something, but I wanted to be sure before telling you,” Shakespeare said, a little nervously, not wanting to raise Milly’s expectations. He knew how Milly could easily elevate a ‘maybe’ to ‘almost sure’ and, inevitably, to ‘without a doubt’ all in the space of a single sentence, which was often unusually short.
“Out with it man, I’m paying you to keep secrets from others, not from me,” Milly bellowed, loudly slapping onto his desk the thick report he had been scanning while waiting for Shakespeare.
“I’m not sure quite what to make of it,” Shakespeare began, hesitantly, worried that if he had later to recant because the information did not stand up to closer scrutiny, Milly would become prejudicially unhappy with him. His hope had been that Milly would not ask. A slim hope he knew. But movement was like an opiate for bosses. They liked to see progress, to sense that their orders had consequences. Shakespeare knew this and had prepared his fallback position. “We have a match for the cross. It seems to have been part of the crest of a Florentine condottiere family going back to the thirteenth century. The Donatello were very successful at the mercenary game and established an excellent reputation as reliable assassins, soldiers, military suppliers and bodyguards. They were even used by the most famous of all the condottiere, Sir John Hawkwood, to clean up the trail of enemies his line of work often left in its wake. But by the end of the fourteenth century they seem to have left the mercenary trade.” A very safe report, completely verifiable.
“Surely you’ve checked out all the living Donatello,” Milly asked with uncharacteristic hesitation?
Shakespeare had detected the change in Milly’s attitude. He wasn’t quite sure what it meant and began to shuffle in place. If he denied doing so, and Milly later discovered that he had, he would pay dearly. He had no more options. He would have to take his chances that the information he was about to give Milly would hold up to closer scrutiny.
“Yes we have and there are matches with reasonably high probabilities of some connection to the medieval family. But even if we traced a direct line to someone living today, it might not mean a thing. Anyone could have been taken by the crooked cross symbol and simply adopted it as their own secret sign. And if the same family is still operating, they would hardly be using their known names. Maude is taking a closer look at the data.”
Milly needed no more evidence. His senses were alive with strong signals from a prey he knew to be close at hand but not yet in sight. He would follow the Donatello trail and felt certain he would also come across his star executive, who was still doing his best to reach the top, when the final chase began.
Milly kept his counsel to himself for a moment, not at all in keeping with his usual quick parry and thrust style. He knew the Donatello and his mind was now sweeping across all the memories he had of the clan. Dona Maria provoked particularly vivid neural activity as he recalled her showy beauty and ruthless pragmatism. He had dealt with both her and Gianni, the family patriarch. They had extensive business holdings whose activities in some areas inevitably touched those of VBI. What he didn’t know of was their connection to The Society. Clients never dealt with an identifiable criminal organization, only with individuals who acted as its discreet agents. Direct dealings had stopped when such activity became a state monopoly, towards the close of the fifteenth century. It was then that The Society and other similar alternative business enterprises reorganized around a loose connection of intermediaries whose activities were sustained by word of mouth. They would quietly bring their business to The Society. The agents would receive, in lieu of monetary compensation from their clients, insider information, which they passed on to The Society and which ultimately found its way to the Donatello who would put it to profitable use.
He had been to the family’s Florentine palace for a celebratory dinner at the conclusion of a deal which saw a Donatello finance subsidiary take over a small bank branch network that VBI had inherited when it purchased the assets of a bankrupt Mexican conglomerate. He was mightily impressed that this family had an unbroken history going back more than 700 years. There crest had captivated his imagination and drew his thoughts to his own crest of more recent vintage, which he imagined would also endure through many future centuries.
“Shakespeare,” he said, breaking the long silence, “I need a picture of the Donatello family crest, now. Can you do that,” he asked, derisively?
Shakespeare knew no answer was expected and he immediately left to carry out his orders. He went directly to Maude Cumber’s small cubicle and asked her to locate the crest, which she did very quickly at one of the many heraldry sites that had sprung up on the WEB. The crest was quite a busy affair, with four quadrants and much detail in each one. Although he was sure Milly would be looking for the crooked cross, which he had spotted in the bottom right corner, he also knew that Milly hated to be second guessed. He would bring along Maude Cumber to pull up the entire image on Milly’s computer so that the boss could then look at whatever he wished.
The upper left quadrant showed a wolf stalking sheep watched over by a shepherd with the head of a vulture. The bottom left and top right quadrants were more traditional with couchant lions in one and religious profession in the other. The bottom right scene was more evocative of the times with a brightly garbed knight in full armour riding between what appeared to be two encampments. This was obviously the Donatello intermediary.
“Maude,” Milly asked with unnatural solicitousness, “would you be kind enough to zoom in on the knight at the bottom right, on his pendant?”
“There, that’s it, the crooked cross,” Milly whooped, but did not elaborate why he was pleased, guessing that Maude would have been kept in the dark about its provenance; from around the neck of a dead man at the VBI hunting lodge.
Chapter XIII
The incident