The El Greco Enigma: A Trina Piper Thriller
Date: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00
Rights: Copyright 2023 Steve Ruskin. All rights reserved.

THE EL GRECO ENIGMA

A TRINA PIPER THRILLER

STEVE RUSKIN

ALPINE ALCHEMY PRESS

The El Greco Enigma copyright © 2023 by Steve Ruskin. All Rights Reserved.

No part of this Work may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

Author reserves the right, and grants no rights to anyone, to reproduce and/or otherwise use the Work in any manner, including sublicensing, for purposes of training artificial intelligence technologies to generate text, including without limitation, technologies that are capable of generating works in the same style or genre as the Work, without Author’s specific and express permission to do so.

Cover design by David Berens.

Interior images are in the public domain. Niche sketch by author.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

NOTE TO READERS

The El Greco Enigma is a shorter Trina Piper thriller that takes place after the events of Scepter of the Sun King.

This book was written as a way to introduce new readers to Trina and her adventures, even though it occurs between books two and three of the main series.

It contains no spoilers for the earlier books.

CONTENTS

Prologue

Part One: The Puzzle in the Painting

1. Train from Madrid

2. Toledo

3. Santo Tomé

4. The Letter

5. An Unexpected Proposal

6. Strange Words

7. Closer Look

Part Two: A Song of Spanish Steel

8. The Swordsmith

9. The Tower

10. Deception

11. The Alcázar

12. Courtyard

13. News from Afar

14. Churros con Chocolate

Historical Afterward

Ready for More?

Acknowledgments

Signature of Doménikos Theotokópoulos,
known in Spain as El Greco (“The Greek”)

PROLOGUE

May 30, 1588

Church of Santo Tomé

Toledo, Kingdom of Spain

Father Andrés Núñez approached the artist quietly, wary to disturb him, yet having little choice in the matter. The Church of Santo Tomé was silent save for the dabbing of the painter’s brush on the large canvas. The artist worked rapidly, moving his brush back and forth between the palate of colored oil pigments in his hand and the canvas in front of him, working like a man possessed.

Núñez shuffled his feet over the stone floor, trying to announce his presence. The sound had no effect. The painter was oblivious, wholly absorbed in his work. Numerous candles illuminated the small space. In the light, Núñez noticed a chisel near the painter’s feet. Fine dust covered the toes of the man’s boots, almost as if he had been carving stone in addition to applying paint.

Why was he here? Not now, or this late at night… but here at all?

Núñez resigned himself to waiting, biding his time by scanning the painting. The wall-mounted canvas was as tall as three men, and nearly as wide. He had to lean back to take it all in, starting at the top, where Christ and the heavenly host waited to receive the soul of the artwork’s subject, the burial of Don Gonzalo Ruíz de Toledo, the former count of the nearby town of Orgaz. In the lower half of the painting, the Count of Orgaz was being laid to rest by Saint Stephen and Saint Augustine, surrounded by a community of mourners.

The figures were all tall and slender, their faces elongated in a way that, in the hands of a lesser artist, would be grotesque. But under the skill of this man, each and every one of them was utterly divine, from the saints in the upper half of the canvas, to the earthly figures attending the burial in the lower.

The painting was, even to Núñez’s untrained eye, a work of spiritual and artistic perfection.

And it was complete—or at least he thought it had been, until the painter arrived again this evening just after dusk, demanding one of the younger priests let him in to make some changes. The artist was quirky in this way, always wanting to alter and fix things. A perfectionist. Two years ago, before Núñez commissioned the painting, others had warned him that, in exchange for the painter’s genius, one must accept his eccentricity.

Two years later, Núñez understood what they meant. Among other quirks, the painter had a habit of constantly repainting and retouching his work. Even so, tonight’s visit was particularly unusual. The painting had officially been completed months ago.

But now, Father Núñez and the painter were in the middle of a lawsuit over how much the painting was worth. There were two different values given by experts, and, of course, the painter wanted to be paid the higher value, while Núñez and the Church of Santo Tomé could barely afford the lower.

Which was why this was so awkward.

Núñez’s eyes flicked here and there over the canvas, looking for some imperfection that might have been missed, a reason for the painter’s unexpected reappearance. He found none. The work was a masterpiece. He couldn’t imagine what more needed to be done.

And yet, the artist continued. Finishing work on the sleeve of Saint Stephen’s elaborately embroidered dalmatic, he dragged a nearby pew to the base of the painting and stood to reach a higher section. In that moment, Núñez could have interrupted, asking the painter if this was all really necessary. Or even appropriate, given their ongoing… legal situation. Was the painter going to expect even more money now? How did one put a value on something so sublime?

But Núñez didn’t say a word. He was enraptured by simply watching the man work.

The painter stretched upward, his brushstrokes applying new form to the set of keys dangling from the figure of Saint Peter, who waited in silvery clouds to hear Christ’s judgment on the Count’s ascending soul. Would the gates to Heaven be unlocked to Orgaz? The painting didn’t say. Given the presence of the heavenly host, it seemed likely.

The Count of Orgaz had been a great benefactor in his day, so much so that—according to legend—Saints Stephen and Augustine appeared here, in this very church, to assist in his entombment.

Finally, the painter climbed down and stepped back until he and Núñez stood nearly shoulder to shoulder. That was when the priest realized the painter was aware of his presence.

Perhaps he’s been aware of me all along, Núñez thought. Perhaps I should say something now.

In that moment, however, as they stared together at the heavenly masterpiece hanging on the wall before them, Father Núñez knew there was nothing to say. Despite their differences, and the unfortunate matter of the lawsuit between them, the priest and the painter stood silently together in the presence of perfection.

Finally, the artist, Doménikos Theotokópoulos—known throughout Toledo simply as El Greco, the Greek—turned to address him.

“Now it is finished.”

Núñez couldn’t form words. He simply nodded.

El Greco gathered his paints and brushes, blew out the candles, and walked halfway to the church’s main doors. Then he turned, as if in afterthought.

“I ended our lawsuit today. I informed the Council of the Archdiocese I would accept the lower assessment for this commission. I hope that is satisfactory.”

“Y-yes…” Núñez stammered in disbelief. “That is most gracious, señor. B-but why…?”

El Greco departed Santo Tomé without another word. Father Núñez stood alone with the painter’s vision of Heaven, offering a silent prayer of thanks for what could only be the miracle of God’s intervention.

PART ONE: THE PUZZLE IN THE PAINTING

The Burial of the Count of Orgaz

El Greco (1588)

1

TRAIN FROM MADRID

September 27, 4:11 P.M.

Toledo, Spain

The high-speed AVE train slowed as it approached its destination, stirring Trina Piper from her daydreams. It had been a quick trip from Madrid, little more than half an hour. During that time, she watched the Spanish countryside pass by at nearly one hundred miles an hour, little towns and olive groves zipping past like a movie on fast forward.

It was barely enough time to relax, but she had relished it. She’d been going non-stop since that morning, when she left her little flat in Cambridge and caught an early flight out of London Stansted Airport. She flew on one of those budget airlines—her ticket cost about the same as the espresso and croissant she bought in the airport café. Two hours later, she was navigating Madrid’s metro stations, catching the AVE—the Alta Velocidad Española—from the main train station, settling in as it whisked her toward a city she’d wanted to visit since, well… forever.

Her first glimpse of Toledo took her breath away. Stacked on a hill, crowned by an old fortress called the Alcázar, Toledo looked—from the window of her speeding train—like some fantasy wedding cake, iced with toffee and caramel. Its buildings, battlements, and bridges reflected the cultures that had defined it over the millennia, from its Roman beginnings to its long, medieval history and brief Muslim occupation, then its Christian reconquest and strong Jewish influence. Toledo’s history was written in its architecture and its art.

A historian herself, currently getting her doctorate at Cambridge University, Trina couldn’t wait to explore it. Best of all, she was visiting on someone else’s dime. Or, rather, euro. Yesterday morning, she had received an email with a job offer of sorts. Before she moved to England the previous year, Trina had taught history as a graduate student. She also earned money freelancing as a forensic document analyst, offering her opinion on “questioned documents”—documents whose authenticity was in dispute—for courts, corporations, and other organizations. But those side gigs rarely involved really old documents, the kind that drew on her familiarity with ancient manuscripts.

However, when this email came through, Trina nearly jumped out of her chair. She was in her office in the basement of Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum, scanning emails before heading out for dinner. The subject line caught her eye.

IQDEA Alert: Member Lead

She’d seen that line many times before. These opportunities were sent to all members of the International Questioned Document Examiners Association, and they were first come, first served. The gigs were usually snatched up pretty quickly. Especially when they involved going somewhere beautiful or exotic. By the time Trina saw this opportunity was in Spain, she figured it was long gone. She logged into the IQDEA web portal anyway, and, to her surprise, it was still available. After a quick glance at the offer, she knew why. There was no travel included, and no real pay. Just a small stipend for food, and lodging in a sparse apartment. It started immediately, with details to follow upon acceptance.

No travel. No expenses. Barely enough pay to cover meals.

Trina almost hit Decline in the IQDEA portal. But she didn’t.

The job was in Toledo. Not the Toledo in Ohio, or Illinois, or even Uruguay. The Toledo in Spain, the country of castles and cathedrals, bullfights and beaches, flamenco and Picasso, and tapas and wine.…

She thought it over, just long enough to open a web browser to search flights. Cambridge University’s autumn term, Michaelmas, didn’t start until the first week in October. That gave her another week, and she’d been thinking about taking a little vacation before things got busy. When she saw the cheap tickets out of London Stanstead, she clicked Accept.

Toledo, here I come.

The AVE pulled into Toledo’s railway station. Trina grabbed her small rolling suitcase from the overhead rack, tugged her backpack over one shoulder, and hurried through the station’s Neo-Mudéjar hall into the warm air of a Spanish afternoon.

Taxis waited to speed tourists into the oldest part of the city, but the walk was less than a mile, and the afternoon was sunny, with just a hint of autumn crispness. With summer over, there weren’t many tourists, anyway.

She pulled off her light coat and wrapped it around her waist, then readjusted the small metal pebble she wore on a chain around her neck that had come free of her t-shirt.

She crossed the Puente de Alcantara, an arched bridge dating back to Toledo’s Roman founders. Halfway across, she looked down over the Tagus river. Languid and murky, it surrounded the city like a natural moat. The far side of the bridge delivered her into Toledo through a medieval tower, and one of the first things she noticed was the streets, which seemed impractically narrow by modern standards. She tugged her suitcase over cobbles that were centuries old, navigating between two- and three-story buildings. Drying laundry hung from windows overhead, and wrought-iron balconies were laden with flowerpots spilling out a riot of summer’s final blooms. She followed the winding lanes ever upward, their steepness a reminder that Toledo had long been a strategic town because of its hilltop location.

She passed cafés and gelato shops, bakeries and butchers, and a surprising number of stores selling swords and knives. For over a thousand years, Toledo had been a center for sword making, its blades prized for their strength and beauty across Europe and as far away as Asia. Even Japanese samurai had reportedly made the trip to Toledo to buy their swords.

With the rise of firearms, however, the demand had decreased, and now these shops—whose windows were filled with replicas of blades Trina recognized from blockbuster fantasy movies—seemed geared mostly toward tourists looking for unique souvenirs.

I can’t imagine getting one of those on a plane, she thought, eyeing a five-foot-long reproduction of Excalibur. I doubt I could even lift it, much less get it through security and into an overhead bin.

It was just before five o’clock in the evening when she reached a high point and found herself staring across the top of the city. To her left, the bulky Alcázar—a fortress of Moorish origin, now apparently a military museum—stood stolid and imposing, its blocky construction and four imposing towers dominating the skyline. To her right, the far more delicate tower and spires of the gothic Cathedral of Saint Mary reached gracefully into the sky.

As she caught her breath and took in the view, she thought about the job she’d come here to do.

2

TOLEDO

September 27, 5:01 P.M.

Toledo, Spain

Moments after she’d hit Accept in the IQDEA portal, she received the email with the details of the gig.

Job: Autentificar un documento breve que se cree que fue escrito por el pintor renacentista El Greco.

Employer: Iglesia Parroquial de Santo Tomé, Toledo, España.

Pay: Somos una parroquia humilde y solo podemos proporcionar un pequeño estipendio para alimentos y gastos menores. Sin reembolso de viaje. Alojamiento en el albergue parroquial. Bendiciones al que nos pueda ayudar.

Contact: Álvaro Sainz, párroco.

Like most Americans from the western United States, Trina had learned some Spanish in school. But growing up in Wyoming, her father’s ranch often hired workers whose native tongue was Mexican Spanish. She’d spent many summers working alongside them and had picked up enough to get by, so she could translate pretty well.

Hmmm…

Authenticate a document possibly written by the Renaissance painter El Greco for the Church of Saint Thomas in Toledo, Spain. We are but a humble parish and can provide only a small stipend for food and minor expenses. No travel reimbursement. Lodging provided in a parish hostel. Blessings to the one who can help us.

Yeah… that sounds about right.

The genuine surprise was the mention of El Greco—Doménikos Theotokópoulos. Known as “The Greek” in Spanish, he was regarded one of the great Renaissance masters—an artistic genius.

With a bit more research, Trina learned some of his personal history. He was born in Crete in 1541, and studied art in Italy before ending up in Toledo in 1577, where he developed a unique style that emphasized spiritual drama over classical descriptive techniques. Today, he was one of Spain’s most celebrated artists—right up there with Picasso. She also learned that the Church of Saint Thomas—or Santo Tomé—in Toledo was home to El Greco’s most revered painting, The Burial of the Count of Orgaz.

Maybe I’ll even get to see it, she thought, pulling out her phone and opening her email.

Once she accepted the job, she’d emailed the contact, a parish priest named Father Álvaro Sainz, and told him she could be on a plane the next day. She received an almost immediate reply in excellent English, telling her how excited he was and yes, there would be a room waiting for her at a hostel at the address in his email. A woman would greet her at the address no matter how late she arrived, and the following morning he would meet her at the Church of Santo Tomé and show her the document. He then wrote gracias about half a dozen times.

Now, looking up the location of her room on her phone’s GPS map, she saw it was quite close to Santo Tomé, and that both were but a twenty-minute walk from where she now stood.

With an evening ahead of her to spend as she wished, and no hurry to get to the hostel, she made her way lazily through Toledo. Her first stop was the enormous Cathedral of Saint Mary. She wandered the elaborate colonnades of the garden-like cloister for a while before entering the cathedral itself. Once inside, she was awed by the towering stone columns and gothic arches, the acres of stained glass, and—at the front of the nave—the magnificent golden altar. Even the handful of tourists wandering around with her seemed to disappear into insignificance.

Almost.

As she tried to get a better view of the altar, Trina backed up a few steps. That was when she bumped into a man standing close behind her.

“Sorry!” she said softly, conscious of how even a whisper echoed through the cathedral’s cavernous interior.

“No hay problema,” he said gruffly, then turned and hurried away. She caught the faint smell of bergamot as he left, perhaps from his aftershave, and remembered learning somewhere that citrusy scent was derived from the rind of fruit related to Seville orange trees.

How very Spanish, she thought.

Soon her rumbling stomach drew her back out into the city. She wandered the streets, passing open-air bars and bistros. It was past seven o’clock now, but they were all nearly empty, and she recalled that Spaniards really didn’t start eating dinner until nine.

I feel like I’m out for the early bird special, she thought. Her stomach didn’t care, and she decided to have dinner the Spanish way—eating one or two dishes at one bar, before moving on to the next.

The tradition of tapas—“small plates”—was glorious. She sampled green olives and smoked fish, aged cheese and pickled eggs, and, best of all, paper-thin slices of cured ham. A small glass of wine accompanied each dish.

At the third bar, as she washed down folds of ham with sips of crisp white wine, she noticed a familiar face a few tables away. It took her a second to recognize the man she’d bumped into at the cathedral. He was in his forties, dressed in an impeccable gray suit with a saffron yellow tie. She almost nodded at him, a continuation of her earlier apology, but he didn’t seem very pleasant. He stared intently in another direction, scowling and picking at a dish of olives. He had the demeanor of a man on a business trip just trying to pass the time. She couldn’t imagine being so sulky in such an incredible city as Toledo, but that was his problem, not hers.

She finished her wine and moved on to a few more bars, each one bringing her closer to the address the priest had sent her. After two more rounds of tapas, she concluded that if she could only eat in one country for the rest of her life, she would choose Spain.

As she wandered down the Calle de Santo Tomé, the street that would take her to the hostel, she saw a confectionary that specialized in marzipan. In its window was a four-foot-high sculpture of the cathedral she’d just visited, made entirely of a candy-like paste of almonds, eggs, and sugar. Feeling indulgent, she stopped in and bought a small treat.

It was delicious, the delicate taste of sweetened almond coated in luxuriant chocolate.

Back out in the street, staring into the window at the marzipan church while munching her dessert, something on her chest felt warm. The sigil around her neck, a gift from a friend, which had the inexplicable trait of warning her of danger. The hair on her neck and arms prickled. That was when she noticed a face in the reflection, staring directly at her.

It was the man from the cathedral. And the bar.

Trina spun, ready to face danger, but the man was gone.

Hmmm.

As a woman traveling alone, Trina knew she needed to be cautious. But she’d been in far riskier situations. Hell, over the past year—in London, Paris, and Cyprus—she’d nearly been killed by members of a Russian secret society.

This circumstance didn’t feel quite like those.

But the first rule of staying safe was avoiding situations where she might need to handle herself. So she picked her rolling suitcase off the ground and hurried down the calle. Her smartphone’s map showed the hostel was just a few minutes’ walk away.

When she finally reached the door of a three-story apartment building, she checked behind her. Many locals were out for the paseo, the evening stroll—for them, the night was still young—but she didn’t see the man from the cathedral.

Relieved, Trina knocked softly. After a moment, an old woman answered.

“Señorita Piper?” the woman asked, her lined face in a wide smile.

“Yes,” Trina nodded. “Sí.”

The woman led Trina through an interior courtyard, past a burbling fountain and walls decorated with pretty tiles, to her room. She didn’t even bother to unpack. Within five minutes, she was sound asleep.

Once, during the night, she woke, thinking she heard someone rattling her door. But when she mustered the courage to get up to open it, she saw only a shaft of moonlight falling on the fountain in the courtyard, and felt a cool breeze that smelled faintly of olives and orange trees.

Just the wind, she thought, before returning to bed and falling into a deep and glorious sleep.

3

SANTO TOMÉ

September 28, 8:00 A.M.

Toledo, Spain

The bells of a distant church chimed eight o’clock.

“Dammit!”

Being awakened in the middle of the night must have caused her to oversleep. Trina had intended to be up by seven and at Santo Tomé by eight, giving her time for breakfast and, most important, coffee. She heard the Spanish took their coffee seriously, too, and if there was one thing Trina was serious about, it was a good espresso.

Instead, Trina had a sixty-second shower and threw open her suitcase, pulling out her jeans, boots, and a long cardigan. Hurrying down a cobbled side street, her backpack bouncing on her shoulder, she reluctantly bypassed a handful of bakeries and cafés while nibbling a dry protein bar she’d found at the bottom of her bag. As a consolation, she promised herself two coffees later that morning.

Santo Tomé was, not surprisingly, located on the same street she’d followed the night before—the Calle de Santo Tomé. The church was easy to find. The Mudéjar-style bell tower was easy to spot, its distinctive Gothic-Islamic architecture rising like a beacon above the surrounding apartments and shops.

The entrance was just off a narrow square, the Plaza del Conde. She passed a small line of tourists waiting to get in, ignoring their raised eyebrows as she knocked on a large wooden door. It opened tentatively, and a man—a little older than her, in his late thirties—looked out. He wore black, down to the buttons of his robe-like cassock and his slightly scuffed shoes. The lower part of the cassock hung over his legs almost like a skirt, and was bound by a sash at his waist—a cincture, if she remembered correctly. It was the garb of Catholic priests in many parts of the world. Only the white collar at his neck broke up the monotony.

“We open at ten o’clock, to view the painting,” the priest said, in accented but excellent English. “Unless you have cita... an appointment?”

Trina nodded. “I am looking for Father Álvaro Sainz. My name is Trina Piper, I’m here to—”

Before she could finish, the priest’s smile widened, as did the door. He ushered her inside, shaking her hand vigorously. Oddly, he used his left hand. At first, she assumed this was some strange Spanish custom. Then she noticed the right sleeve of his cassock tucked limply into his sash and realized he was missing an arm.

“Trina Piper, we have been expecting you! We are honored you agreed to help us. Please, please, come in and let me show you our humble church.”

As her eyes adjusted to the church’s interior, she realized he wasn’t just using the royal we. Another priest, older and heavy set, stood behind him.

“This is Don Pedro Zorilla,” Álvaro said. “The parish priest of Santo Tomé.”

“Oh,” Trina said, confused. She wasn’t Catholic, although she had taught at the largest Catholic university in the United States, Notre Dame. “I assumed you were the parish priest.”

Álvaro smiled again. He was handsome, if a little awkward, his youth and enthusiasm contrasting with Zorilla’s elderly, lethargic reserve. “I am, how you might say, a second-in-command. But my English is much better than his.” He winked. “I enjoy speaking to the tourists who come here. Especially the British and Americans.”

The older priest shuffled forward, shaking Trina’s hand. His grip was limp, uninspired.

“Father Zorilla will observe us, but you and I are working together on this project. Before we examine the El Greco document, would you like to see the painting?”

He said this offhandedly, as if there was but one painting in the entire world. Trina knew, however, what he meant. It was Santo Tomé’s claim to fame, the reason people were already lining up outside.

“I would love to,” she said.

“This way.”

Álvaro led her past a ticket kiosk to an alcove of the main church. It contained a small side chapel, its entrance blocked by a low metal gate.

On the opposite wall, above a tomb embedded in the floor, was El Greco’s The Burial of the Count of Orgaz. It was larger than she’d expected, rising nearly sixteen feet high, and stretching roughly twelve feet across.

“It is glorious, is it not?” Even Álvaro seemed awestruck, though he saw the painting many times a day.

“It is,” Trina said, unable to take her eyes off it. “Especially what I read about El Greco’s unique style, with his subjects so elongated—they look almost ethereal. No wonder tourists are waiting for hours outside. And here I am, getting a VIP tour!”

“It’s the least we can do, Señorita Piper.”

“Please, call me Trina.”

“Okay, Trina. Would you like a brief explanation of the painting?”

“Yes, please.”

The young priest took on a somewhat flat and pedantic tone, as if rehashing a speech he’d given hundreds of times. “Although El Greco painted this from 1566 to 1568, it actually depicts a scene from the fourteenth century. Back then, Gonzalo Ruíz de Toledo, also known as the Count of Orgaz was a great man, a benefactor of his people and this church. In the eleventh century, this was a mosque, and then a church. But it fell to ruin. Orgaz had it completely rebuilt, and its old minaret turned into the current bell tower. When he died in 1323, it was said that Saints Stephen and Augustine both descended from Heaven, dressed in their glorious golden robes, to personally lay him in his tomb.”

Álvaro indicated the crypt in the floor.

“As you can see,” he continued, “El Greco divided the painting into two parts—earth and Heaven. Below, you see the body of the Count himself, dressed anachronistically in sixteenth-century armor, in the arms of the two saints. Around him are others: monks, nobles, even a little boy.”

Trina frowned. “Like the count, they’re dressed in clothes from the sixteenth century, not the fourteenth. Why is that?”

“Buena observación! Because in 1588, El Greco followed the conventions of his day by using, how do you say, contemporáneo…”

“Contemporary?”

“Yes, contemporary styles and people. Even though El Greco was being paid by the priest of this church, a man named Andrés Núñez, to paint a scene from the fourteenth century, many of the faces in the painting were actually well-known figures from Toledo in the late sixteenth. Lords, merchants, and so on. One saint in the upper half is none other than Phillip II, the King of Spain. The powerful and wealthy of the day, immortalized forever. Quite prudent, don’t you think? Although”—Álvaro leaned in, as if telling a secret—“do you see that man?” He pointed to a figure mostly hidden behind others—a face staring directly out at her, the only one in the entire painting that did so, save that of a small boy.

“Yes.”

“That is a self-portrait of El Greco himself! And the little boy, there on the left, pointing toward the body of the Count? That’s El Greco’s son.”

“Fascinating.”

Nearby, Father Zorilla cleared his throat. Álvaro, seeming to sense the older priest’s impatience, hurried his explanation along.

“As El Greco draws our eyes to the upper half of the painting, you see what’s happening in the heavenly realm as the Count of Orgaz is laid to rest below. Just above his body, an angel guides what looks like a ghostly infant. That’s the Count’s soul, being directed between Mary and John the Baptist toward Christ himself. To the left is a heavenly choir, where Saint Peter holds the keys to Heaven. To the right are cherubs and a full complement of saints.”

“There’s a lot going on,” Trina said.

“Sí. The overall idea was to show that the many good works the Count performed during his life resulted in the entire host of Heaven receiving him in death. And although his soul is yet to be judged, the appearance of Saints Stephen and Augustine to bury him is a pretty good sign that Christ will receive him. Even Saint Peter has his keys out, as if he knows where this is headed.”

Trina laughed. “I see. It truly is amazing. But I know it’s not why I’m here.”

“Sí, y no,” Álvaro said. “It’s not the main reason you are here, but I suggested to Father Zorilla that some understanding of it may help you with the document we’ve asked you to authenticate, because it appears to have been written by El Greco at the same time he finished this painting. Would you like to have a look?”

“Yes, but before I do, may I have a closer look at the painting?” She set her backpack on the ground and withdrew a small magnifying glass. “Specifically, at El Greco’s signature? All artists sign their works, and seeing known samples of his signature and other writings can really help. If I’m not mistaken, that’s his signature there, on the pocket of the little boy—I mean, his son.”

Father Zorilla sighed impatiently, but nodded at Father Sainz. The young priest opened a small gate in the metal barrier and let Trina approach.

In the lower left corner, a folded handkerchief stuck out from the boy’s pocket. On it was El Greco’s signature, in Greek, and the date 1578. Although brushstrokes were not the same as pen strokes, this was still an authentic sample of El Greco’s writing.

“Why 1578?” she asked as she peered through her magnifying glass. “I thought he completed the painting in 1588.”

“Another excellent observation, Trina. 1578 was the year El Greco’s son was born.”

“Ah. A personal homage. El Greco was clever.” She held up her smartphone. “May I take a picture?”

“Of course. No flash, please.”

She nodded. Like most historians who worked with artifacts, she knew camera flashes could damage old paint and paper.

“Got it. Okay, I’m ready to have a look at the document. Let’s see if El Greco did in fact write it.”

4

THE LETTER

September 28, 8:45 A.M.

Toledo, Spain

Father Zorilla led them on hurriedly, as if their time with El Greco’s masterpiece had been nothing more than an unfortunate delay. Soon, Trina found herself inside Zorilla’s office, a small, converted vestry with stone walls and high, leaded-glass windows that probably dated back to the church’s fourteenth-century reconstruction.

A bookshelf teetered out from one wall, and a small desk occupied the center of the floor. Zorilla took his chair on one side, offering her one of the two smaller chairs on the other.

On the desk was a delicate piece of paper, not much bigger than a page from a paperback novel. Stained and faded with age, it had been folded in quarters and likely stored that way for centuries. Now it lay unfolded, and those creases had become cracks. Despite its fragility, it was whole, and legible, and that was all she needed.

Father Zorilla spoke in broken English. “Can you say… it is… writing from El Greco?”

“I will try.”

“We’ve already read it many times,” Álvaro said. “Would you like to know what it says?”

“I’d prefer to have a look first without any input that might bias my examination, if that’s okay.”

The younger priest nodded.

First, Trina took a sealed pouch from her pack, and withdrew a small needle, capped plastic vial, and small, special flashlight. She scraped a flake of ink from the letter, dropped it in the vial, and swirled it around. Then, she shined the UV flashlight at the vial.

“Iron gall ink,” she confirmed. “This helps date it. But the signature is the key thing.”

The two priests said nothing, watching her intently.

Next, Trina pulled out her laptop, onto which she’d downloaded known samples of El Greco’s writing from verified databases, including a proprietary system maintained by the IQDEA. She set it and her smartphone next to the document, slipped on a pair of thin cotton gloves from her pack, and sat down. With both hands, she raised the fragile paper into the light, inspecting first one side then the other.

The Spanish she’d learned growing up was helpful, but there were words she didn’t understand. She’d passed her grad school competency exams in French, Italian, German, and Spanish. Students were permitted to use foreign-language dictionaries, emulating how a historian would do research while working in an archive.

Here, her job wasn’t to translate, but rather to authenticate.

It was obvious right away the document was a private letter. Though undated, it was addressed to a blacksmith—no, a sword maker, and a soldier? Something about a song, and a crusade…very odd. Trina struggled with the exact words, though it referenced the recently completed painting of the burial of one caballero Don Gonzalo Ruíz de Toledo—the Count of Orgaz, which she knew El Greco completed around the same time. This helped date the document to the spring of 1588. And whoever wrote it claimed to be the painter.

Interesting.

Next came a section she couldn’t make much sense of. Her training in foreign languages as a historian was almost entirely textual, not spoken, but this had the feel of a rhyme, or poem.

Turning it over, there was some sort of calculation on the back. Numbers. A receipt, perhaps? Yes, it was definitely a receipt, for approximately four thousand four hundred reales, the Spanish currency of the time.

Is that a lot of money? It seems like a lot of money.

She worked in silence, only vaguely aware of the two priests waiting nearby. Father Álvaro did so patiently, while Father Zorilla shuffled and sighed.

She ignored them, absorbed in the analysis of this old document, a pleasure only historians seemed to understand.

On the reverse side, there was a signature at the bottom. It certainly looked like the samples she had of El Greco’s signature. Although he worked and lived in Spain at the height of his career, he apparently kept to his native Greek when signing his name, Domḗnikos Theotokópoulos, using Greek letters: Δομήνικος Θεοτοκόπουλος. Occasionally, as with this letter, he added Κρής after his name—“Cretan”—as he’d been born on the island of Crete.

Ah—there, by the signature. A date, of sorts. Jueves Santo. Holy Thursday?

Glancing back and forth from her laptop to the fragile document, Trina next compared the signature to others from the databases she pulled, as well as the image on her phone from the painting in the church.

Accounting for the usual minor alterations in pen stroke, and that her samples were digital, the signatures were a perfect match.

She looked up.

“I don’t fully understand the context,” she said, leaning back in her chair. “As this document appears to be more like a contract or agreement, not just a letter. But it looks legitimate, and—”

“Excelente!” Zorilla interrupted. It was as enthusiastic as she’d seen him.

“And what, Trina?” Álvaro said, more calmly.

“I can’t be one hundred percent certain without comparing it to other known physical samples of his writing. The only samples I have are digital.”

Zorilla’s face fell.

“Fortunately,” she continued, “I think I can accomplish that quickly and easily. I understand there is an El Greco Museum nearby?”

Álvaro nodded eagerly. “Sí! It’s only a few minutes’ walk away.”

“They appear to have archives with some of El Greco’s account books, letters, and so on. Do you think they would let me see them?”

“I don’t know,” Álvaro said. “We’ve exhibited some of their El Greco pieces here in Santo Tomé, and it was a lengthy process. They are quite formal, requiring letters of introduction, advance notice, forms to be signed…”

Trina rummaged in her bag. “I have my IQDEA card, and a letter from my department at Cambridge showing I’m an advanced research student in history. Certainly, that could convince them to give me access to their archive? It really would be the most expedient way. I could complete my authentication of this document and be on my way this afternoon.”

Álvaro closed his eyes, as if in prayer. In that moment, Trina saw not just a young Spaniard, but also a faithful man of the cloth. When Father Álvaro Sainz opened his eyes, he seemed serene.

“Yes. Let’s try it.”

“Can we bring the document? I have an archival envelope we can carry it in.” She pulled a large, clear sleeve from her pack.

Zorilla looked ready to protest, but Álvaro engaged him in rapid-fire Spanish that Trina couldn’t follow. After a moment, the old priest relented.

“Don Zorilla agrees, as long as I keep it with me at all times.”

“Deal.” Trina slid the manuscript inside the envelope and handed it to him. “Before we go, may I ask a few questions—”

Zorilla cleared his throat, glaring at Álvaro.

The young priest gave Trina an apologetic shrug. “Of course. But perhaps we should talk while we’re walking, no? To save time.”

* * *

Trina followed Álvaro out of the church and back into the Plaza del Conde. Just then, the church’s tower chimed ten o’clock. They passed the line of tourists now filing in to see the El Greco painting.

Father Sainz led her through a labyrinth of cobbled lanes with the unconscious ease of a local. On her own, she would have gotten lost in the medieval maze after the first few turns.

“You’ll have to forgive Father Zorilla,” he said. “He’s uncomfortable with outsiders when it comes to the El Greco.”

“Yeah, I noticed. Why is that?”

“Despite the fame of the painting, the income it brings from tourism is still barely enough to maintain the church. We get some revenue from the sale of posters and postcards, and the occasional grant from the archdiocese or Spanish government, but like many parishes, we’re always struggling to find funds. Between you and me, Father Zorilla is embarrassed to employ outside help, and to offer so little compensation. This is why we could offer you only a small stipend, and a humble room to stay in. It hurts his pride. Yes, pride is said to be a sin. But he’s a good man, and his pride stems from his love for our little church.”

“It was a fine room. And I’m happy to help. It’s a great opportunity to visit this incredible city.” Then she added, “For a priest, Father Zorilla sure lacks faith in me.”

She worried her joke might be beyond the pale for a priest, but Álvaro laughed boisterously, casting his eyes heavenward. “Don’t misunderstand, Trina. God provides. But, sometimes, His provision requires patience. And as you’ve noticed, Father Zorilla could use a little practice in that area.”

Now, Trina laughed. “As it’s just us now, may I ask a few questions about the El Greco document?”

“You may ask any question you want.”

“Thank you. You said you’ve read it, and your Spanish is obviously better than mine. Who found it, and what exactly does it say? I got the gist of it, but it’s… odd.”

“It is extraño, no? A parishioner discovered it beneath a flagstone in his kitchen, wrapped in leather and wax. He brought it to us when he saw it mentioned the Orgaz painting. The home where it was found once belonged to a family of master swordsmiths. We confirmed this with the city records. Ownership of the house transferred to a new family in 1590.”

“Do we know anything about the blacksmith?”

“Sí. He was a man named Bartolomé de Peralta. He was a renowned weapons maker in his day, one of many in this city. You know, we were once famed for our blades. Soldiers and kings all over Europe bought their weapons here.”

“Yes,” Trina said, sincerely. “I know the history. You can see it in the many shops still selling them.”

“But those are, with few exceptions, of far inferior quality to the swords and knives Toledo used to produce. For many centuries, this city’s sword makers had special techniques—recipes, you might call them—that were closely guarded secrets, passed on from father to son. Today, those recipes have been lost.”

“So why was El Greco writing to a swordsmith?”

“A good question. It’s such a strange document. At first, El Greco writes that he agrees to de Peralta’s request. So they must have had a prior meeting about some sort of transaction, and he wrote this to formalize it. That’s not unusual. But then, after mentioning alterations to The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, El Greco writes a strange poem.”

“I saw that. I couldn’t make sense of it.”

“Neither could I. This document was written around the time he completed the painting, but details about any alterations he made are lost to history. El Greco was a notorious perfectionist, always making adjustments. It was reported he showed up one night to this church, weeks after he’d finished the job, just to add a few brush strokes to the canvas. But what adjustments would involve a swordsmith? Oh, and on the back of the page is a receipt for over four thousand reales.”

“I saw that, too. Four thousand four hundred. Is that a lot?”

“The records we have at the church show that the priest who commissioned the Orgaz painting—”

“Andrés Núñez, right?”

“Yes, Núñez paid El Greco thirteen thousand two hundred reales! So whatever deal El Greco and the swordsmith came to was also muy grande, although what exactly it was for is a mystery.”

“Strange.”

“Que extraño. And there is another pertinent fact about El Greco. He was also notorious for getting involved in lawsuits. Did you know he sued Núñez himself, over the Orgaz painting?”

“A painter suing a priest over religious art? That seems so… petty.”

“Sí, perhaps. But business is business, as they say. El Greco lived a lavish lifestyle, even hiring musicians to play for him while he ate dinner. Before beginning work on The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, he agreed in his contract to be paid on the assessed value of the painting after it was complete. Well, in early 1588, two tasadores—appraisers—assessed the value of the painting at thirteen thousand two hundred. Núñez was stunned. He never expected to have to pay that much.”

“So he sued El Greco?”

“Yes, because the painter refused to accept less. The Council of the Archdiocese ordered a new appraisal, but it came in even higher—seventeen thousand six hundred reales!”

“Wow! That really puts Father Zorilla’s money worries into perspective.”

“Precisamente. There was no way Núñez could afford that extra amount. El Greco counter-sued for the higher value, anyway. Strangely, after months of legal wrangling, El Greco suddenly withdrew his suit and agreed to accept the original amount.”

“Why?”

“No one knows. The reason is lost to history.”

They turned a corner, and he pointed to a squat stone building ahead.

“That’s the El Greco Museum. Wait here, please, and I will go in and explain we’d like to see a few examples of El Greco’s writing. Pray they will make an exception for us.”

While she waited, pacing back and forth in front of the museum, her mind worked through the figures Álvaro had given her.

The first valuation was 13,200 reales. The second was 17,600 reales. And El Greco eventually agreed to take the first amount, giving up a difference of…

She did the math, and the answer stopped her in her tracks.

4,400 reales! That’s the same amount de Peralta paid El Greco—at the same time the painter and the priest were settling their lawsuit.

“Que extraño,” she muttered. “Very, very strange.”

Before she had time to draw any conclusion, she caught a whiff of bergamot on the breeze. Instinctively, her hand went to the sigil on its chain, tucked just under the collar of her shirt.

The sigil was warm. She glanced around, wary of danger. Just then, Álvaro returned, waving the clear sleeve with the El Greco letter eagerly.

“By God’s grace, the museum is happy to help us. Quickly, come inside before they change their minds!”

5

AN UNEXPECTED PROPOSAL

September 28, 12:37 P.M.

Toledo, Spain

Three hours later, Trina and Álvaro hurried back into the Church of Santo Tomé. A few tourists clustered around El Greco’s painting, pointing and talking in hushed tones.

“Don Pedro!” Álvaro couldn’t contain his enthusiasm as they entered Father Zorilla’s office. The old priest sat behind his desk. “La señorita Piper—”

He paused. Another man was in the room, seated in front of Zorilla's desk. He had a smile on his face, as if he’d just been having the friendliest chat. Father Zorilla also smiled, though it seemed uncertain.

Trina paused. Hairs prickled on the back of her neck. The faintest scent of bergamot in the air made her heart skip a beat.

It was the man from the cathedral yesterday. And the café. And the face reflected in the window of the marzipan shop. Today, he wore another gray suit, this time with a maroon tie.

Trina forced herself not to gape. Her sigil warmed, but not in the same way it warned her of danger last year in London, or a few months earlier in Paris. Then, the danger had been, what? Unnatural? This sensation was more like wariness. Caution.

“Perdóname,” Álvaro said. “Come, Trina. We will wait outside while Father Zorilla finishes with his guest.”

Trina turned eagerly. She wanted out of there, if for no other reason than to collect herself.

“No, no,” the man in the chair said, his English perfect, if accented. “It is Miss Piper I have been waiting for.”

“It is?” Trina and Álvaro said at the same time.

“Yes,” the man said. “I understand you have just been to the El Greco Museum to finish authenticating the document you found. Were you successful?”

Trina shifted uncomfortably. Álvaro looked at Father Zorilla as if for guidance. The old priest nodded. Proceed.

“Señorita Piper lo ha hecho—” Álvaro began anew, excited words spilling out in his native tongue.

The man in the chair held up a hand. “In English, please, Father Sainz. For our guest’s benefit.” He smiled at Trina.

Our guest? Trina wondered. Who is this guy?

“Of course, señor. As I was saying, using documents in the El Greco Museum archives, Miss Piper was able to confirm our letter is indeed authentic. El Greco wrote it.”

“This is true?” the man looked at Trina. His smile was too friendly. It chilled her.

“Yes,” she said. “The handwriting, the paper, the ink—it all matches with other known examples. The historical context works as well, although, for that, I relied on Álvaro—I mean, Father Sainz’s—translation.” She pointed to the fragile document in the clear sleeve still in Álvaro’s hands. “Gentlemen, you’ve got yourselves a long-lost document penned by El Greco.”

The man in the chair stood excitedly, startling Father Zorilla.

“Excellent news. And you will submit a certificate of authenticity? It will give the document value, no?” He seemed to regret this choice of words, and quickly added, “Credibility?”

Trina nodded. “Yes, an IQDEA authentication often gives a certain credibility to a document. I still need to submit the correct forms.”

“And you can do this now?” the man asked.

Trina hesitated, looking to Álvaro. The younger priest deferred to the older, and Father Zorilla simply nodded, content to let this man, whoever he was, call the shots.

“Yes, I can do it now on my laptop. But these two men hired me.” She turned to Álvaro. “Do I have your permission?”

“Sí.” Father Zorilla said immediately. Perhaps his English was better than he let on.

She looked around at the ancient church. “You, uh, have Wi-Fi?”

Father Zorilla grumbled something in Spanish.

The younger priest gave her an apologetic look. “Don Zorilla says the church may be from the fourteenth century, but we are in the twenty-first. Yes, we do. It is public access.”

She sat in the only other chair, uncomfortably the one next to this strange man, and opened her laptop. As she logged into the IQDEA portal, she could feel him watching her.

“So,” she said casually. “You seem to know quite a bit about old documents. A hobby, perhaps?”

“Hobby!” He sounded insulted. “Absolutely not. But your ignorance is my fault. I have not properly introduced myself. I am Jorge Ramos, head archivist at the Alcázar Military Museum here in Toledo. My interest in old documents is entirely professional.”

He leaned closer, handing her his card.

Trina ignored his insult and took it. Though written in Spanish, it listed an impressive number of credentials, including a doctorate from the University of Seville. This close, the scent of bergamot from his cologne was almost overpowering.

“Forgive me. I should have recognized a fellow academic.”

“No hay problema,” he said, in the same gruff manner he had when she’d accidentally bumped into him in the cathedral. Although now, she wasn’t sure it had been an accident.

She turned back to her screen and began typing. The sooner she was done, the sooner she could be on her way. They offered her another night in the hostel, and she planned on taking advantage of it, spending the rest of the afternoon exploring Toledo before returning to Madrid in the morning to catch her flight back to Cambridge.

She input a brief description of the document, took a few photos of it with her phone, and checked the necessary boxes. A few minutes later, she’d finished. “I’ve filled out the IQDEA forms and sent a digital certificate of the authentication to Father Sainz’s email. Should you require a hard copy, you can order one at the link provided.” She closed her laptop with a firm click that echoed in the little stone office. “Is there anything else?”

Álvaro was at her side, shaking her hand vigorously. “On behalf of our parish and this church, thank you for your quick and professional work, especially knowing we could only pay a small amount.”

“It was my pleasure, Father Sainz. I was happy to have the chance to visit your country, and I look forward to seeing a bit more of this city. After a coffee, that is. I understand I can get an excellent café con leche around here.”

“Absolutamente!” Álvaro said. “First, your stipend. Then I will personally escort you to my favorite café. Father Zorilla, I believe the envelope is in your desk?”

Zorilla pulled a flat envelope from his desk and started to hand it to Trina, but Ramos interrupted.

“So thin?” Ramos said. “I know this is a humble church, but certainly the famous Miss Piper deserves more than a pittance?”

“Famous?” Álvaro asked.

Zorilla set the envelope on his desk, watching Ramos expectantly.

“Did you not know?” Ramos continued. “Last year, Trina Piper authenticated a manuscript by none other than Sir Isaac Newton, and right in the middle of those awful murders that forced London to go on lockdown. Then she was involved in tracking down the perpetrators of the bombing in Versailles this spring.”

Álvaro’s eyes grew wide as saucers. “This is true?”

Trina was equally surprised, but tried not to let it show. “You give me far too much credit, Mr. Ramos. Yes, Interpol brought me in as a subject-matter expert on those cases. But my role was minor. I can hardly be said to have helped much. You seem to know about me, Mr. Ramos. I’m flattered.”

“The international community of archivists is small. I have friends in the British Museum and the Louvre. You are a minor celebrity, Miss Piper. It is an honor for us to have you here. Perhaps, before you go, you might help with one more small task? I would make it worth your while.”

Trina was still stunned. True, her role in the events Ramos mentioned wasn’t a secret, and had been covered in the news. Although the true extent of her involvement was downplayed in the official reports. Her… friend… at Interpol had seen to that. Still, Ramos’s interest put her on edge.

“What task?”

“Father Zorilla had shown me the El Greco letter before you came to examine it. I noticed it contains a strange poem.”

“Yes. Father Sainz and I discussed it. It is strange.”

“Almost like a riddle, wouldn’t you say?”

“It’s possible. The more likely explanation is that it’s a note between sixteenth-century business partners for which we lack the necessary context.”

“Nevertheless, I wonder if someone of your skill might have a look? Perhaps there is more to it. For a few more hours of your time, I would be happy to triple what they’re paying, so you can spend an extra day or two in our beautiful country.”

He pulled a wad of paper euros from a billfold and set them on the envelope. The meager stipend suddenly looked much less meager.

Trina thought it over. El Greco’s strange words were intriguing. And the new term didn’t start for a few days yet—there was no reason for her to rush back to Cambridge.

“I’d be happy to. But I’d like Father Sainz’s help. And the use of this office.”

Álvaro looked pleasantly surprised. Father Zorilla nodded his agreement, and Ramos smiled even wider than before.

“Excellent! Father Zorilla will inform me if your efforts bear fruit. Good luck to you both. I must return to the Alcázar. I am hosting an event, and I’ve been away too long already.”

6

STRANGE WORDS

September 28, 1:12 P.M.

Church of Santo Tomé

Toledo, Spain

Ramos left, and Father Zorilla wandered off into the church. When they were alone, Trina turned to Álvaro.

“That was weird. Do you know this man, Jorge Ramos?”

“I’ve heard his name, though not always favorably.”

“Really?”

“He is, indeed, a respected military historian, although I have heard he is quite—ambitious. He loves prestige even more than this job, preferring to spend his time hosting parties at the Alcázar, gathering donations and mingling with the wealthy and powerful. Ah, but forgive me. I must not gossip. Saint Paul warns we watch what we say, else our tongues practice deceit and the poison of vipers be on our lips.”

“Don’t feel like you’re poisoning me, Father. For what it’s worth, I didn’t get a great feeling about Ramos. You know, I bumped into him a few times last night? If the encounters weren’t so casual, I would have been sure he was following me.”

“Really? You’re sure it was him?”

Trina recalled the aroma of bergamot and the heat of her sigil against her skin. “Pretty sure.”

“Extraño, indeed. Even more strange is his request. Do you think there is more to the El Greco letter?”

“I have no idea. If there is, I need help translating it. That’s why I asked for your help. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Of course not. This has been one of the most interesting days I’ve had in years. The job of a parish priest is often dull. Not that the work of God isn’t important, of course.”

Trina laughed. Álvaro’s priestly self-consciousness was endearing. “Think about it this way. The letter pertains to your church and its famous painting, so perhaps you are doing the work of God.”

He grinned. “Agreed. So, as you are apparently a famous decipherer of historical clues, where do we begin?”

You don’t know the half of it, she thought, her fingers idly brushing her necklace. “Famous is overstating it. Ramos was only trying to flatter me. I’m just a history grad student who had some luck with historical puzzles. So, let’s see if my luck continues. If you don’t mind, translate the front page for me.”

Trina sat in the chair recently vacated by Ramos and opened her laptop, typing while Álvaro scanned the letter, still in its clear sleeve, and translated aloud.

To Bartolomé de Peralta, Sword Maker,

As agreed, I will make the alterations to my canvas of the Orgaz burial in exchange for the following sum. I will ensure the psalm remains hidden while you are off fighting in the King’s English crusade. Should ill fortune befall you, I will deliver it to your sons upon their return. Should none of you survive, as is your concern, I include the following key to its discovery for you to conceal or provide to another before you depart, as you deem most appropriate. God willing, may my art preserve your art until He in his mercy allows your family’s song to be sung again. Farewell, and fair winds.

“Stop there,” Trina said.

“But it’s not the part Ramos is curious about. That comes next.”

“That’s okay. What you just read could offer some clues, some details for context. At the end, El Greco signs his name and mentions Holy Thursday. When is that?”

“It’s also called Maundy Thursday, during Holy Week. It commemorates Christ washing the feet of his disciples before the Last Supper.”

After a moment’s search online, Trina said, “Okay, we have a date. The Thursday before Easter in 1588 was on April 14. And we know El Greco agreed to modify his painting in exchange for forty-four hundred reales. When this gets out, that fact alone will send art historians into a tizzy. It’s a dissertation or two waiting to happen. So the question that remains is why? What is this psalm he’s referring to, and why would a swordsmith want El Greco to hide it?”

Álvaro shrugged. “A psalm is a psalm—a sacred song sung in church. I don’t know what else to make of it.”

“Me neither.” She thought for a moment and came up with nothing. “Let’s move on. This next bit about de Peralta and his sons going on an English crusade. What do you make of that?”

The priest frowned. “By 1588, the Crusades had been over for centuries.”

“Yeah. They were. Hmm.”

“You’re the historian. What else was going on in Europe at that time?”

“Lots of things,” Trina chuckled. “Science, politics, war, exploration. The usual. Just because I’m a historian doesn’t mean I carry the sum total of historical knowledge around in my head. Most people think we’ve got some giant list of dates and places in our brains that we can access at a moment’s notice.”

“I know what you mean,” Álvaro said. “People also think as a priest I have a direct line to God.”

“You don’t?” she teased.

“No. But that will remain our little secret. If word got out, well… Heaven help us.”

Trina smiled. Their banter was helpful. Levity allowed her subconscious mind to wander, to float around and make connections.

1588… English crusade…

Trina scrunched her face in concentration. Her memory was no better or worse than anyone else’s. But she had spent years sifting through reams of historical sources, contextualizing them, finding patterns and connections.

1588… English crusade… a Toledo swordsmith, and his sons… farewell, and fair winds…

“Wait,” she said, tapping at her keyboard. She scanned the results, a theory beginning to form. “I think I’ve got something!”

“You do?”

“I think so… yes. It’s obvious!”

“What?”

“El Greco writes this in April 1588, wishing the sword maker and his sons well as they go off to battle. It’s not an English crusade, but a crusade against England. Who ruled Spain in 1588?”

“King Philip II, of course. A devout Catholic, he was the son of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and had royal titles all over Europe. He also controlled much of the new world through Spain’s empire.”

“Looks like I’m not the only historian in the room.”

“Spaniards are a proud people. When I was a boy, I loved learning about my country’s history.”

“So, what major offensive did Philip II launch against England just a month after El Greco wrote this, in May of 1588? I’ll give you a hint. It didn’t have fair winds after all. In fact, it ended in total disaster.”

“The Spanish Armada!”

“Yes. Philip II’s goal was to dethrone Elizabeth I and make England Catholic again.”

“That’s why El Greco called it a cruzada—a crusade.”

“Exactly.”

Trina stood and paced the room, as if she were delivering a lecture to undergrads. “Here’s my theory. This sword maker, Bartolomé de Peralta, and his sons were assigned to a Spanish galleon. Maybe as soldiers, but more likely as blacksmiths to make and repair weapons and armor. And they never returned, most likely because they drowned in the North Atlantic, or were captured and killed on the coast of Ireland. Or any number of other horrible things.”

“It was a total disaster for Spain. And changed the balance of power in Europe.”

“Right. So they never returned. De Peralta knew war was a dicey proposition. And that’s why the letter, with this mysterious poem, was found in your parishioner’s kitchen. That kitchen was probably once the de Peraltas’ smithy. For reasons lost to time, he hid it there. Even if he told his wife about its location before he left with the Armada, she could have forgotten about it in her grief at losing her husband and sons.”

“It certainly sounds plausible.”

“So now the question is, what exactly was this psalm El Greco agreed to hide for de Peralta? And, more important, is it still hidden? Can you translate the next bit, the part that reads like some strange poem?”

Álvaro read slowly, choosing just the right words. His English vocabulary was remarkably good. Trina typed, watching them appear on her laptop’s screen.

With the tool of Mordente, the first stone measures degrees

Between martyrdom of the willing and unwilling

Where the innocent’s touch reveals the secret song

Beneath the light that illuminates the start and finish of all.

Trina sat back, frowning at her screen. The words were pretty, but without context they were also gibberish.

“What does it mean?” Álvaro asked.

“No idea. But it must mean something if de Peralta paid El Greco four thousand reales for it.”

The young priest sighed. “Well, we did our best. I will tell Señor Ramos that you worked very hard on this, but too much is lost in the past. At least we learned more about the context of the letter, and about the tragic death of a family of Toledo sword makers. That’s something, at least. The Alcázar is always trying to learn more about the swordsmiths that made this city famous, because it brings in tourists.”

Trina copied the transcription to her smartphone and slid the smaller device into her pocket. “I’m not willing to give up just yet, especially with our most important clue hanging right outside this office. El Greco explicitly told de Peralta about his alterations to the painting. Let’s go have another look at it.”

7

CLOSER LOOK

September 28, 2:24 P.M.

Church of Santo Tomé

Toledo, Spain

It was midafternoon, but the church was empty.

“Where are all the tourists?” Trina asked, standing before The Burial of the Count of Orgaz once more.

“With summer tourist season over, this time of day it’s usually quiet,” Álvaro said. “That, and it is now siesta.”

“Isn’t siesta like nap time?”

“It was, in the past. Now it’s a time when Spaniards take a long lunch and do errands. At least the painting is ours alone. What do you see?”

Trina stared once more at El Greco’s masterpiece. “A stunning work of Western religious art.”

“Of course. But right now, do you see any hidden clues?”

“If they’re there, we need to go through El Greco’s odd riddle line by line. The first is ‘With the tool of Mordente’.” She tapped that last word into a web browser on her phone and read aloud. “Hmmm… mordent. From the Italian, meaning to bite. Some sort of short, quick note in music. The last line does mention a song. And look, there are musicians in the upper half of this painting.”

She pointed at three men behind the figure of Saint Mary. “See? That one there has a harp.”

“Those aren’t musicians,” Álvaro said, politely correcting her. “Those are the three eminent men from the Old Testament: David with his harp, Moses with his tablets, and Noah near his ark.”

“Ah, okay. Sorry, I’m not as… religious as perhaps I should be.”

“You are forgiven, my child.” Álvaro made a half-serious sign of the cross. “Remember, El Greco mentions a tool. Is a musical note a tool?”

“Probably not.”

“Perhaps the second sentence modifies the first. Try reading them together.”

“Good idea. ‘With the tool of Mordente, the first stone measures degrees.’” She scrolled down her smartphone’s screen. “Okay, here’s something. Mordente could also refer to this guy: Fabrizio Mordente, an Italian. It turns out he was a contemporary of El Greco.”

“An artist?”

Trina read quickly. “No. A mathematician... whoa! He’s famous for inventing something called the proportional compass!”

“I thought the Chinese invented the compass long before Europeans.”

“Not the magnetic compass, but the kind used to measure circles, angles, and areas.”

“Like a divider?”

“Kind of. I remember using something similar in geometry class. Also called a military compass, because it helped calculate angles for field artillery. Mordente first published a description of it in 1567. It looks like this.”

She held up her phone, showing him an image of two brass rulers, etched with numeric scales and hinged together at one end.

“El Greco got his training in Italy. He would certainly have kept up with news and learning coming out of there.”

Trina nodded, peering at the painting. “On the flight from London, I brushed up on my knowledge of El Greco. I remember reading he was also an architect. It would make sense he would be aware of this Mordente’s invention. But I see nothing like Mordente’s compass up there. Or a first stone—or any kind of stone, for that matter.”

They gazed in silence for a while. The church was quiet, the only sound the guttering of votive candles in a nearby shrine. It was almost meditative. Her eyes scanned El Greco’s canvas for some hint of a compass, or a stone, but she found neither.

Lulled as she was into that contemplative state, she nearly jumped out of her skin when Álvaro’s shout echoed through the church’s interior.

“¡Hala!” he cried. “Not a first stone, but the first stone!”

“What?”

“No, who!”

“What’s who?”

“It’s not a stone El Greco refers too, but a rock. The rock.”

Trina was utterly confused. “I don’t see a stone or a rock.”

“You really should have read your Bible more, Trina Piper. Let’s ask the historian in you. What’s the Greek word for stone?”

“That’s easy. Petra. The masculine form is petros, and... oh my gosh, of course!”

Álvaro finished the thought. “None other than the apostle Peter, whose Greek name was Petros. He is often considered the first among the apostles, and the one to whom Christ refers in the book of Matthew when he says, ‘I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock, I will build my church.’” He expelled a sigh of satisfaction, but was too excited to stop. “So what about the rest of it? With the tool of Mordente, the first stone measures degrees?”

Trina jabbed her finger up toward the top of the canvas with a shout. “The keys!”

There, dangling from a golden rope in Saint Peter’s hand, was a pair of keys. They were splayed at a shallow angle, looking very much like… Mordente’s compass.

“Yes,” the priest agreed. “They look just like the compass you showed me, spread apart as if describing an angle.”

“Exactly! The angle—or rather, the degrees—‘between martyrdom of the willing and unwilling, where the innocent’s touch reveals the secret song.’”

Álvaro squinted at Saint Peter. “But those keys are so small, there’s nothing between them except a wedge of cloud.”

“True. We need to think bigger. Martyrdom is a constant theme in Christianity, especially its art. What could El Greco mean by martyrdom of the willing and unwilling? Who in this painting is being martyred?”

The priest shook his head. “None that I can see. The only person who’s actually dead is the Count of Orgaz himself, and that was from natural causes. He wasn’t killed for his faith.”

“Well, there are a lot of dead people in the upper part—in Heaven.”

Álvaro cleared his throat correctively. “Dead and reborn into a new life, I think you mean.”

“Yes, of course.”

“I’m only kidding you, Trina. But I see your point. If Saint Peter’s keys are measuring the degrees of martyrdom, they point downward, to the earthly realm.”

“I wonder…” Trina extended both her arms, pointing her forefingers at the keys, then lowered them stiffly, tracing straight lines. “If we follow the keys, and the angles they make, downward through the painting, we come to…”

She stopped, her outstretched arms straight as arrows. Her left forefinger pointed at two cowled figures. Monks, one in gray, the other in black. Her right hand pointed at a line of men attending the funeral. El Greco’s self-portrait was one of them.

Could that be where the key was pointing? Trina wondered. No, the artist’s face is just outside the angle.

Lowering her right hand a bit more along the same line, it stopped on one of the key figures of the painting: Saint Stephen, hunched over as he laid the Count of Orgaz into his tomb.

“Those monks on the left, and Saint Stephen on the right. That’s where the angles of the keys stop.”

For the second time, Álvaro shouted. His voice echoed through the stony silence of Santo Tomé. “Of course! Saint Stephen was a martyr. He’s considered Christianity’s first martyr, because he refused to recant his faith at his trial in Jerusalem. His enemies brought false witnesses against him, and the Sanhedrin ordered him stoned to death. Saint Paul was there, before his own conversion, eagerly approving the death sentence. It’s all in the book of Acts.”

Now, Trina was giddy with the thrill of the chase, sensing the solution to El Greco’s puzzle was within their grasp. “El Greco makes him look so alive in this painting, I forgot he is depicted as a saint reborn, coming down from Heaven to take part in the burial. So if Saint Stephen was an unwilling martyr who didn’t intend to die, who is the willing martyr?”

“You already located them.”

“Them? I did?”

“The two monks at the bottom left. The Augustinian friar in black, and the Franciscan in gray.”

“They look alive to me.”

“They are. And that’s the point. From the time of Saint Antony of Egypt, who lived in the desert, the monastic life has always been seen as a form of living martyrdom. When one takes vows of obedience, poverty, and chastity, it’s a lifelong submission to the faith. A willing martyrdom.”

“Yes!” Trina wanted to hug the priest, but stopped herself. She remembered that Father Sainz had taken vows like his monastic brothers. Maybe a hug from a woman wasn’t appropriate? Instead, she glanced at her phone. “So we need to look between the willing and unwilling martyrs, to ‘where the innocent’s touch reveals the secret song.’”

She glanced at the painting again. It only took a moment to find exactly what she was looking for. Like a sunbeam coming down from Heaven, the answer was obvious.

“Right there,” she blurted. “Between the friars and Saint Stephen. The boy, El Greco’s own son. Children are often referred to as innocents. And a doting father like El Greco no doubt felt that way, too.”

“‘The innocent’s touch reveals the secret song,’” Álvaro repeated.

“See? The boy’s finger is out, touching Saint Stephen’s sleeve. He’s even holding a torch with his other hand—could that be the light that illuminates the start and finish of all’?”

He shook his head. “It doesn’t make sense. Art historians say the boy is pointing to the body of the Count, as if to say, ‘This is the message of this painting, dear viewer. See this pious man being lowered into the grave by two great saints, and learn by his example.’ I’ve read nothing suggesting he’s touching Saint Stephen.”

“What if it’s both? A master like El Greco could certainly paint a moral lesson and hide a clue, and what better way to do so than in plain sight? The boy is pointing at the pious Count, but perhaps the exact placement of his fingertip by his father is intentional. What is that symbol on Stephen’s sleeve? It looks like a flower.”

Trina indicated the oval-shaped emblem on the saint’s sleeve, white on the outside and yellow in the middle, almost like the cross section of a hard-boiled egg. The thought made her hungry—she hadn’t eaten all day—and she shoved it aside. The symbol was one of maybe five or six identical emblems that formed a pattern around Stephen’s sleeve. The boy’s finger touched the oval dead center, right at its golden heart.

The priest frowned. “I don’t know. Both Stephen and Augustine have ornately embroidered robes. Those robes are called dalmatics, by the way. Stephen’s dalmatic even bears a scene of him being stoned to death by the Sanhedrin. But I am ashamed to admit I don’t know what that symbol on his sleeve might have meant in the first century.”

“It doesn’t have to be a first-century symbol,” Trina said thoughtfully. “It may well be from the fourteenth when the Count was buried, or even the sixteenth. You said yourself that El Greco followed the conventions of his day, putting the Count in contemporary armor and using the faces of famous rulers and merchants of his day. It doesn’t even have to mean anything. It may simply be a decoration.”

Álvaro moved closer to the painting, getting a closer look at Saint Stephen’s sleeve. After a moment, his eyes widened, and he spun to face her.

“I’ve seen this before!”

“You have?”

“Yes! Right here in this very church. Follow me!”

PART TWO: A SONG OF SPANISH STEEL

Visigoth niche, Church of Santo Tomé

8

THE SWORDSMITH

April 14, 1588 (Maundy Thursday)

Parish of Santo Tomé

Toledo, Kingdom of Spain

Doménikos Theotokópoulos stepped off the narrow street and into the sword maker’s forge. A blast of heat greeted him, accompanied by the thundering of hammers. The sound hit him with nearly the same intensity as the smithy’s fires.

Four men, all stripped to the waist, worked at their anvils. One was older, the other three relatively young—a father and his sons. Grime streaked in sweaty rivulets down their muscled arms and torsos as they worked white-hot metal. He observed them for a while unnoticed as they tempered steel around cores of iron, proto-blades that would soon become finished swords.

If I were like Michelangelo, El Greco mused, I would paint these men, perhaps as a classical scene of the great forge of Hephaestus. But I have my style now, and have made my name as an artist, even if that name is simply my country of origin.

Eventually, Bartolomé de Peralta looked up and noticed El Greco staring at them. The elder sword maker set his hammer down and motioned for his sons to do the same. In a moment, the forge was quiet, four sooty faces of the famed de Peralta sword-making family staring at him in anticipation.

“Señor,” Bartolomé said, nodding at El Greco. “Welcome. I apologize we cannot show you better hospitality, but we are preparing for the king’s expedition.”

Bartolomé indicated the pile of blades stacked and ready for shipment. Nearby was a pile of canvas sacks, full of clothing and equipment.

“We depart on the morrow for Lisbon.”

“Then let us complete our business so I do not delay you any longer.”

“You have considered my proposal to protect our family’s psalm?”

“I have. I prepared the contract just this morning.”

El Greco produced a folded paper and handed it to Bartolomé.

“Your language is not my native tongue, but I’ve written this agreement, using steganography for the key, following the German method. You asked for permanence, and I dare say my canvas shall remain as long as Santo Tomé stands. I’ve left the area about my payment blank. We can discuss terms if everything else meets your approval.”

Bartolomé read the contract and cipher carefully. By the way the man moved his lips, El Greco could tell he did not read often, although, clearly, he had been trained in letters. After a while, he looked up.

“I understand, and yet I do not.”

“That was my intent, of course,” El Greco said. “Allow me to explain. First, I shall make adjustments to my painting, in such a way that no one will notice the reason for those changes. I have also located a suitable hiding place for your document in the tower, which will require only minimal work with a chisel and some fresh mortar, skills I obtained during my time in the workshops of the Italian masters. All of these will be unnoticed by anyone without the key.”

While de Peralta and his sons listened intently, El Greco then explained those changes in detail, and guided them through his cipher, describing how each line pointed to the next step that would ultimately lead to the hiding place of their document should any of them return safely from Philip II’s campaign against England’s reformist Queen. Bartolomé and his sons listened intently. Though unlettered, the young men were clearly intelligent. But they seemed to have a hard time understanding it.

“May I try?”

Bartolomé read the cipher aloud a few times, in a sing-song tempo the boys seemed to respond well to. Soon, reciting it with a musical tempo, they had committed the cipher to memory.

“It is acceptable?” El Greco asked when they had finished.

The father nodded. “It is.”

“Then I will sign our agreement and consider us contracted. May I have the document you wish me to… keep safe?”

From a pocket of his leather apron, Bartolomé produced a roll of paper. Opening it, it looked to El Greco like a piece of sheet music, crudely written with the bars sloping and notes sloppily written. It seemed a rather pedestrian document to go through all this trouble, and expense, of hiding.

“This is… all of it?”

“Sí.”

“What sort of psalm is this? I must confess, I have never known families to have private psalms, much less a family of smiths.”

The man grinned, bits of ash falling from his beard.

“Allow us to show you, señor.”

Bartolomé turned to his boys with the air of a conductor of an orchestra. As one, they raised their hammers and withdrew white-hot lengths of steel that had been heating in the forge. Then, like musicians playing the same tune, they each tempered the steel with a symphonic rhythm, an orchestra of pounding metal and hissing steam, a harmony as pleasing as any of the musicians El Greco sometimes hired to play for him while he dined in his own home.

When it was over, they had added four new blades to the pile.

It was then that El Greco understood why Toledo’s blades were unmatched, especially those of the de Peraltas, who had been regarded as some of the city’s finest sword makers for generations. They were not made by mere blacksmiths, but rather by artists working in steel and song. Artists who cared passionately for their craft. Artists like himself.

The elder de Peralta motioned for silence and turned again to El Greco. “Now, you understand. This method for tempering steel comes from my father, and his fathers before him. Should we fail to return from Philip’s adventure, someone must keep our secret safe for the good of Toledo. Hide it well.”

“It will be my honor to do so. As to the matter of payment…”

“Yes, of course. Speaking of honor and money, I have one more request.”

“Oh?” El Greco girded himself for what came next. The negotiation. He would accept nothing less than 500 reales for this job, and if de Peralta would not pay, then he could take his chances on the king’s galleons.

“As a foreigner, you may not quite understand how much Santo Tomé means to those of us in this quarter. Santo Tomé is our parish. I was raised here. I have raised my sons here. Everyone knows of the lawsuit between you and Father Núñez. It pains me and brings shame to the good people of this parish. I leave to go to war, and God willing I would leave some peace behind. As part of our agreement, I request you accept from the church the initial amount assessed for your fine painting.”

“Thirteen thousand two hundred reales?” El Greco couldn’t contain his anger. “You insult me, Bartolomé. The Council of the Archdiocese itself says I am owed 17,600! Why would I accept any less? Perhaps, because I am a foreigner, you take me for a fool.”

El Greco turned to leave, but de Peralta stopped him.

“Wait, and hear my proposal, señor. I do not think you a fool. Like you, I am no stranger to the courts. You may win the higher amount, or you may not. We both know there is a chance they will force you to settle for less. Either way, you will also pay fees to the courts and solicitors. No one truly wins everything in these situations. But everyone loses something.”

It pained him to admit it, but de Peralta was right. El Greco had already resigned himself to the possibility of receiving something close to the first amount assessed. Squeezing Santo Tomé for too much money could affect his future contracts. On the other hand, if de Peralta wanted to pay him double to hide the family’s psalm and help settle his lawsuit with Núñez, say a full thousand reales, El Greco would benefit greatly. Perhaps he could even get 1,200 reales from this sword maker.

“What do you propose?”

“I will pay you the difference, the entire four thousand four hundred reales, if you do what I have asked you, and also drop the suit against Father Núñez.”

El Greco couldn’t believe what de Peralta said.

“Did you say… the entire difference?”

“Sí. But no one must know I did this. Let it appear to be by your own kindness.”

“Of course,” El Greco nodded, still in the throes of disbelief. “I will wait until your ship has departed to settle the lawsuit, so nothing appears amiss. How will you pay me, however, if you are leaving tomorrow?”

“In advance. Right now. It is a good thing you do for my family and our church.”

Bartolomé set his shoulder to his anvil and gave it a shove, his muscles bulging as the metal block shifted slowly over the stone floor, eventually revealing a small hole from which the sword maker withdrew two bags of coins. “It is in ducats. One thousand two hundred to be precise. But it is of equal value to the amount in reales, according to the money changers. This is acceptable?”

“It is.” He didn’t even bother to count the money. Bartolomé had shown himself an honorable man. El Greco took the contract he’d prepared from the anvil and filled in the amount, then signed and dated it, noting it was Holy Thursday, at the bottom on the reverse side. With that done, he traded their signed contract for de Peralta’s handwritten psalm. Not knowing what else to say, he repeated what he’d written in their contract.

“Farewell, Familia de Peralta. Farewell and fair winds.”

He rolled their song of Spanish steel into a tight scroll, slipped the bags of coins inside his coat, and hurried into the street. It was late afternoon, but he could still reach his bank before it closed.

9

THE TOWER

September 28, 3:22 P.M.

Church of Santo Tomé

Toledo, Spain

Father Sainz practically ran through the church, his cassock billowing behind him. Trina hurried after him down a side corridor, where he stopped briefly to take a stepladder from a closet before leading her through an old wooden door. Before she knew it, they were climbing a twisting stone staircase up the church’s bell tower.

Their feet kicked up dust as they went round and round, passing one windowless landing before arriving on a second floor. The staircase continued higher, but Álvaro stopped, catching his breath.

They were in a small, square room, with two open windows on each side. Not glass windows, but brick-framed arches in the traditional Muslim designs—vertical rectangles with rounded tops, like silhouettes of a chess pawn, or a lowercase letter ‘i’. Lobulated arches, she believed they were called.

Glazed columns and decorated ceramic tiles lined the walls, their colorful designs similar to what she’d seen elsewhere in Toledo. They looked hundreds of years old, faded but still beautiful. There was also a carved niche up on the wall in a style that Trina couldn’t immediately place, but it looked old—much older than everything else. Clearly, this tower bore elements of the many cultures that influenced Toledo over the centuries.

“What are we doing up here?” she said, admiring the view through one of the narrow windows. A breeze blew through, bringing with it some of the heat coming off the surrounding terracotta rooftops. “We still have the last line of the poem to decipher.”

Álvaro glanced around, as if looking for something. “Orgaz had this minaret built when he renovated the church in the fourteenth century. Notice the different styles?”

Was he ignoring her? Trina played along. “I see the Mudéjar, the merging of Islamic east and Christian west.”

“Yes. And also ancient decorations, too. Like that one.”

He pointed to the niche, set in one wall a little above their heads. She looked closer. It was carved marble, a style that didn’t really fit with the rest of the tower, with scalloped shells, thick columns, and thick lines—some of which formed a sunburst pattern. Inside, a symbol looked like a stick figure with blazing hair, with one hand like an open pair of scissors, and the other like two large fishhooks.

“What is it?”

“Records of the church describe it as a Visigoth symbol. I don’t come up here much, but I have seen it and often wondered why it would be up here, so out of place with everything else.”

Trina frowned, recalling what she’d previously taught to her students in her freshman Western Civ classes. “The Visigoths were an ancient Germanic people who defeated the Romans in Gaul and Hispania—what are now France and Spain. That was roughly the fifth century. Toledo was an important religious center to them. This niche looks like either an actual artifact from one of their churches, or a replica.”

The priest nodded. “Yes, I recall reading that the Spanish city of Mérida served as an important Visigoth trade center until the Muslims conquered it in the eighth century. It produced similar sculptures that were sent all over Spain. I think El Greco knew about it.”

“He did? Would El Greco even have come up here?”

“Like many Renaissance artists, he was an architect, too, familiar with stonework. Certainly, he might have taken an interest in this tower.”

Now they were getting back to the task at hand. “Yeah, but what does this have to do with his painting, or his riddle?”

“Because everything he wrote has some hidden meaning. Even the last line, ‘the start and finish.’ Now that I think about it, I could have also translated that as ‘beginning to end.’ There is a similar concept in Christianity, the alpha and omega. The first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, which in the Bible also refer to God, the beginning and end of all things. That niche on the wall up there is the only place I know of in Santo Tomé where these symbols are found. And right between them—”

“I see it! A symbol similar to the one on Saint Stephen’s sleeve! Can I get a closer look?”

Álvaro positioned the stepladder beneath the niche and steadied it while she climbed. Up close, the symbols on the niche were so obvious—the stick figure was actually a type of cross. Though crude, perhaps because they were thickly carved, what she had mistaken for an open pair of scissors was an “Λ” for alpha, and the two fishhooks, the “ω” for omega.

“Right between the alpha and omega, there’s a circular design. Like a button with two concentric circles around it.”

“There’s one above it, too,” the priest said. “With lines radiating out from it. Like a sun.”

“Exactly! ‘Beneath the light that illuminates the start and finish of all.’ The light we’re looking for isn’t the torch in El Greco’s son’s hand. It’s this carved radiance shining down on the alpha and omega, and the circular symbol between them—just like the one the boy touches on Saint Stephen’s sleeve.”

“El Greco’s genius never ceases to amaze,” Álvaro said, reverence in his voice. “So much symmetry. The light of the boy’s torch and the light of God’s glory in this carving. Or even the use of the compass and Saint Peter’s keys, the same as the alpha symbol up there. And to think, I’ve been looking at them for years, walking by them daily, never realizing what secrets were hidden here.”

“Clever, indeed,” Trina agreed, absently running her fingers gently over the Visigoth niche. “I’ve seen medieval artwork where God is depicted measuring His creation with a compass, like some grand architect—hey!” She stopped, feeling a roughness in the carved marble. “It almost looks like someone took a chisel to this long ago. There are tiny marks here, weathered but still visible. I wonder…”

Gently, with her forefinger, she pressed the middle of the circle. She thought she felt it shift inward ever so slightly, but then nothing. Dust drifted down and settled on her boots.

“What was that?”

“I think I felt something give. Or it could just be age and decay.”

“Try the lower one again with this.” His hand went to a pocket in his cassock. He flicked his wrist, and she heard a metallic snap. A pocketknife, now open. He held it up to her, handle first.

She took it, admiring the ivory handle and steel blade with a wiggle pattern that looked like topography lines on a map.

“This is beautiful.”

“Toledo’s finest. Damascus steel.”

“Are priests allowed to carry knives?”

“As long as we don’t stab anyone,” he deadpanned. “Now, try to loosen that bit some more.”

Trina dug the tip of the blade into the indentation around the circular button, working it millimeter by millimeter. More and more dust came loose, and then tiny chunks of mortar, until it was clear that someone had indeed carved out this same circle before and then replaced it. Probably long, long ago.

“It’s definitely coming loose.” She gave the little stone button another push. This time, it went in a good half inch and stopped. “But it won’t go in any further.”

“Can you dig it out?”

“Good idea.” She angled the knife into the gap she’d created around the button, and tried to wedge it out again. Bit by bit, it came forward, not a stone button after all, but the end of a narrow cylinder.

She pulled it out gently, realizing only the cap was marble. The rest of the tube was oxidized metal—copper by the looks of it—formed around the marble. The hole it left behind in the niche was perfectly smooth, as if someone had drilled it out at just the right circumference to hide the cylinder behind its facade of marble.

“Oh my God,” she said, then quickly caught herself. “Sorry. Would you look at this!”

She got down off the stepladder, holding the tube carefully. The opposite end was hollow. She tipped it back, and a tight roll of paper slipped out into her hand.

“What is it?” the priest said, taking his knife back.

Trina held the paper up to the sunlight. It looked fragile, as fragile as El Greco’s letter to the sword maker.

“Only one way to find out.” She opened it slowly, hoping it wouldn’t crumble to dust. Rows of horizontal lines appeared, bearing patterns of dots. There were words, too, beneath each set of lines.

“Those are musical bars!” Álvaro said. “This is a sheet of music.”

“The secret song!”

“It must be.”

“I can’t read music,” Trina admitted. It was a long sheet, longer than the El Greco letter, and written in a different hand. “What kind of song is it?”

“It looks like a psalm.” The priest’s eyes scanned the page. “But it’s like no psalm I’ve ever read. The tempo changes frequently, the words mention metal and fire, water and oil, and…”

He paused, staring out over Toledo. Late afternoon sunlight slid through the openings like a key through a lock, warming them both. The priest closed his eyes, as if thinking… or, perhaps, praying.

Suddenly, his eyes flew open.

“I know what this is!”

“What?”

“It’s—”

A deafening sound thundered from above. The church’s bells, pealing wildly. Álvaro looked confused. Trina checked her phone. It was 4 o’clock in the afternoon. This was not an hourly chime.

The priest tried to shout something, but all she caught were the words between the clangs. He pointed at the stairs. She nodded eagerly. The bells were deafening.

Trina rolled the paper back into the tube, then they hurried down the narrow staircase and back to Father Zorilla’s office. It was empty.

Álvaro looked around. “I should find Don Zorilla. He’ll be thrilled at what we’ve found.”

“What exactly have we found?” Trina asked, handing him the tube. “I’d love to hear your thoughts. Once this ringing in my ear subsides, and I can actually hear again.”

Álvaro set the tube on Father Zorilla’s empty desk, frowning distractedly. “Don Zorilla must have locked your stipend and bonus in the desk. He’s got the only key. While we wait, are you hungry? I can explain that psalm over a nice bowl of salmorejo.”

Trina was suddenly aware of just how hungry she was.

“I don’t know what salmon-rojo is, but I’m in,” Trina said. “I haven’t eaten since this morning. And I could really use a coffee.”

“There is a café across the square. Allow a humble priest to treat you to a traditional Spanish meal.”

“Now that I heard loud and clear.”

10

DECEPTION

September 28, 4:26 P.M.

Church of Santo Tomé

Toledo, Spain

“This is delicious!” Trina dipped her spoon into the bowl of creamy, tangy red soup, tasting the hint of garlic and salt. “Is it like gazpacho?”

“Yes, salmorejo is similar. It too is served cold, and is made from tomatoes. But it also contains stale bread and olive oil.”

“Bread, huh?” Trina mumbled through another mouthful. “That’s why it’s so thick. And this coffee is fantastic.” She alternated between sips of soup and café con leche. After a few rounds of this, finally feeling like her stomach was no longer in danger of devouring itself, she sat back. In most countries, eating at this time of day would be considered an early dinner. In Spain, however, it was a mid-day snack.

The café was in a narrow alley just around the corner from Santo Tomé. Sitting at an outside table, she could still see the church tower rising over nearby rooftops.

“So you think you know what El Greco’s secret song is?”

“I think I do.” Father Sainz set his spoon in his own empty bowl. “Toledo was famed for its swords and knives for over two millennia, right?”

She nodded. “That’s why every other shop around here sells swords to tourists.”

“Yes, and that’s the problem. They’re knockoffs. Any sword maker from the city’s past would be horrified to see what passes for Toledan blades these days. Most of them are made in sweatshops in China or Pakistan. It’s a tragedy, in more ways than one.”

“It is.” Trina took a sip of coffee. “What does this have to do with the song?”

“The art of sword making that made Toledo world famous has been long lost. Only a few true swordsmiths exist here anymore. You can count them on one hand.” He held up his only hand, not the least bit ironically. “In a way, we have ourselves to blame.”

“How so? Didn’t the rise of gunpowder and conventional weapons make their skills less valuable? A simple matter of supply and demand.”

“Yes. But the loss of their techniques and methods is Toledo’s own fault. We thought we would make swords forever. But we let the art disappear, like a song when the composer dies without writing down the notes.”

She followed another bite of soup with a sip of coffee. “I don’t follow.”

“Tempering a Toledo blade was an intricate process. They worked the steel swords over and over, with unique patterns of hammering, heating, cooling in water and oil, and then doing it again. But that’s the key—how many times do you fold the molten metal? How many times, and how hard, do you hammer the blade? How long do you cool the blade in a barrel of water? How thick is the iron core inside the sword?”

“It sounds complex.”

“It was very complex, and there were any number of ways to do it. Each master sword maker had his own formula, which he guarded jealously, only passing it on to his sons, who carried on the tradition. For over twenty centuries, they passed the secret of Toledo steel down through generations, each with its own special formula.”

“How? Weren’t most of them illiterate? Even if they weren’t, they wouldn’t just write it down, because someone might steal—” She stopped, realizing she knew the answer. “They translated their formulas into songs!”

“Exactamente! What better way to record the rhythms and timing of hammering, cooling, heating, than by the tempo of a song?”

“So that’s what we found inside the church tower! That’s what El Greco was hiding, and he must have been doing it on behalf of Bartolomé de Peralta, who had been ordered to sail with the Spanish Armada but worried he and his sons might not make it back. He didn’t want their formula to die with them, so he wrote it down, and paid El Greco to hide it!”

“It explains why El Greco agreed to accept the lower price for his painting from the church—de Peralta must have learned about the lawsuit, which would have been very public, probably gossiped about all over Toledo, and told El Greco he’d pay the difference if he helped hide his family’s formula.”

“This is a monumental discovery,” she said. The feeling of uncovering a piece of the past, of discovering something lost for centuries, was exhilarating. It wasn’t the first time she’d done it, and she hoped it wouldn’t be the last.

The priest nodded. Was that a tear in his eye? “Toledo, and this parish, will regain an art long lost. It will do much to restore this city’s pride, to say nothing of our church’s coffers.”

Trina drained the last of her coffee. “How do you know so much about sword making?”

Álvaro winced, as if recalling a painful memory. Then his face softened, and he pointed to where his right arm would have been.

“You may not know it to see me now, but before this happened, I was quite the fencer. La esgrima, it is called here. I was on the Spanish national team, on track to make the Olympics. I even studied the sixteenth-century Spanish art of rapier swordplay, called the la Verdadera Destreza. It means ‘the true art,’ and is quite beautiful to watch. It’s almost a form of dance, because the footwork involved is not in a straight line like traditional fencing. But…” His eyes drifted upward, finding a memory. “When I was twenty-one, I had a motorcycle accident. A foolish decision, involving too much vino, a reckless dare, and a steep Toledo street. I lost my arm. My fencing career was over. But by God’s grace, I lived. I chose to return the favor and serve Him.”

“It sounds like you made the right decision. Some people might have spent their life wallowing in self-pity.”

“I did, for a while. But why? It’s a beautiful world, and I live in one of its finest cities.” The priest smiled. “I still fence with a local club. At first, they were afraid to fence against a priest, especially a one-armed priest. But I laughed and assured them, ‘I am not left-handed.’ I still do that with the newer members, although many of them don’t get the joke. You know the movie?”

“I do. It’s a classic—” Trina paused. At the end of the street, where it met the Plaza del Conde in front of Santo Tomé, she saw a familiar man getting into the back of a waiting Mercedes sedan. “Hey! Isn’t that Jorge Ramos?”

Álvaro turned, sounding surprised. “And Father Zorilla, as well.”

As they watched, the older priest shook Ramos’s hand, then held the door for him as the archivist climbed in, a metal briefcase under his arm. The Mercedes pulled away, speeding down one of the few streets in Toledo wide enough for cars.

A chill crept over Trina. “I wonder what that was about?”

“I don’t know.” Álvaro sounded concerned, although he took pains not to show it. Instead, he put on a forced smile. “Perhaps Señor Ramos came to congratulate you himself.”

How would he know we were successful? she wondered.

Aloud, however, she only said, “Perhaps.”

“Now that Father Zorilla is back, you can collect your fee and be on your way. You still have time, and now a little extra money, to play tourist for a few more days. Shall we?”

They strolled back to Santo Tomé. Father Zorilla sat in his office, shoulders slumped and looking tired.

“Don Zorilla!” Álvaro’s enthusiasm was unquenchable. “You won’t believe what we found in the bell tower! And all because of Miss Piper’s ability to solve the puzzle in that El Greco letter. Did you know El Greco hid clues in the Orgaz painting itself? It’s a lost formula for Spanish steel, for sword making in the ancient Toledan tradition. Can you imagine what it will mean for Santo—”

The younger priest stopped mid-sentence. Perhaps, like Trina, he noticed the strained look on Zorilla’s face. At first, Trina assumed it was because Álvaro still spoke in English. Then she glanced at the desk.

The cylinder was gone.

Álvaro realized it at the same time. “I set an old copper tube on your desk, Don Zorilla. Did you see it?”

The old priest nodded slowly. “Sí.”

“It contains the most incredible document. Even more important than the El Greco letter itself. Where… where is it?”

The old priest’s eyes shifted nervously around the room, never meeting Trina’s. Perhaps it was because he knew she knew.

“He gave it to Jorge Ramos,” she said flatly.

Zorilla stared down at his desk and said nothing.

“Is this true?” Álvaro asked.

“Sí. Fue muy generoso. Very generous. Your stipend, for your help.” He opened a desk drawer and pulled out her envelope once more. It was considerably thicker now.

She didn’t reach for it.

“When will he bring it back?” Álvaro sounded pained. In fact, if she’d known him as anything other than a patient man and a priest, she would have guessed he was angry. “That formula has great importance to our parish, and to Toledo.”

The old priest winced again. That was when Trina noticed the small lockbox open in the drawer. It was full of bills. Euros.

Álvaro noticed it, too, and gasped. “What is all that money, Don Zorilla?”

“It is… better this way,” the old man said. For the first time, Trina realized he really could speak and understand her language just fine. He had simply been pretending not to.

Álvaro probably knew this, of course. Which was why he persisted in English. “He bought it from you?”

The old priest nodded. “When Señor Ramos heard about the El Greco letter, he suspected it might lead to something like the formula you found. He… I think he was very fair. It will help our church with its financial difficulties. Dificultades financieras. It is a gift from God, is it not, Álvaro?”

“But it is not ours to sell, Don Zorilla! Not without permission from the Archdiocese. Even then, that song belongs to more than our humble church. It belongs to all of Toledo!”

Zorilla seemed ready to argue, but sank back into his sulky silence. Álvaro persisted, this time more gently. “You are correct, Don Zorilla. It is certainly a gift from our Lord. But not a gift to be sold for profit. That formula is a national treasure and could help reinvigorate Toledo's economy. That will benefit Santo Tomé far more in the long run.”

At that, Zorilla’s spirit seemed to collapse. His chest heaved, and tears spilled down his face. Spanish tumbled from his lips between sobs. The younger priest went to stand by his elder, placing his only arm around him. They whispered in low Spanish for a long moment, then seemed to come to an understanding. Álvaro led Father Zorilla back out into the church.

Not knowing what else to do, Trina shouldered her bag and followed at a respectful distance, watching as Álvaro helped Father Zorilla to the main altar. He left him there, kneeling in prayer, then hurried back across the nave to where Trina waited.

“What was all that about—?” she began. Álvaro swept past her, looking angry and determined.

“I must do something I may come to regret,” he said over his shoulder. “I can’t ask you to join me. Thank you for your help, Trina Piper. Take your stipend. You deserve it.”

Trina didn’t hesitate. “Whatever it is you’re doing, I want to be part of it. We’ve come this far, and I’m going to see it through.”

Álvaro paused, one hand on the church’s heavy wooden doors. His smile returned, though his eyes were steely.

“That would be excelente.”

11

THE ALCÁZAR

September 28, 5:19 P.M.

The Alcázar

Toledo, Spain

In the Plaza del Conde, Trina slid into a taxi next to Álvaro. She heard him tell the driver their destination—“Alcázar, rápidamente!”—and then saw him hand the man a few coins in advance. She had barely closed the door before the driver accelerated, shoving her back into her seat. In the rearview mirror, she saw the cabbie’s wide eyes, no doubt surprised that his fare was a priest urging him to reckless speeds.

Trina fumbled for her seatbelt, watching Toledo fly by, its streets so narrow she was sure she could roll down the window and touch the buildings as their cab squeezed past.

“Do you mind telling me what we’re going to do at the Alcázar?”

“We’re going to get the song back from Jorge Ramos before he sells it.”

“He’s selling it?”

“Sí. Don Zorilla confessed to something quite disturbing. Apparently, Ramos has been using his position at the museum to facilitate the illegal sale of local artifacts. Especially, authentic Toledo weapons.”

“That doesn’t surprise me. He’s a snake. But how does Father Zorilla know?”

“Ramos serves on the board that oversees Toledo’s cultural heritage, helping to maximize revenue of museums, churches and other sites that attract tourists, like Santo Tomé and El Greco’s The Burial of the Count of Orgaz. So Don Zorilla knew Ramos.”

“Oof!” A sharp turn pressed Trina against the taxi’s window. “So what does that have to do with Father Zorilla?”

Álvaro rubbed his eyes, as if disbelieving what he was about to say. “A few months ago, Father Zorilla overheard Ramos on his phone in a café, discussing an illegal sale of certain items in the military museum’s storerooms. Don Zorilla confronted Ramos, who denied it. What is an elderly priest to do? There was nothing he could prove. So he dropped it. But Ramos didn’t. He was furious, and a month later, he brought in an accountant from the tourist board to audit Santo Tomé. He meant it to be a threat.”

“Seems a mean-spirited thing to do to a church.”

“It is. But Ramos discovered discrepancies in Zorilla’s accounting. Don Zorilla’s sister in Barcelona is quite ill. I knew this. What I didn’t know was that he had been sending her money from the church’s tourist income to help her. A little here, a little there. He thought he was doing the right thing. I suppose he was. I only wish he had told me.”

“Let me guess. Ramos threatened to go public with it, but made him some kind of deal.”

“Yes. Father Zorilla was to cut Ramos a share of the profits, too. But Don Zorilla knew that wasn’t right and had been looking for a way to end their deal. When the El Greco letter showed up, he told Ramos about it. He’s smart, an archivist with a PhD, and knew there was something special about that letter. He must have suspected El Greco was hiding something. But he couldn’t figure it out himself.”

“And so Ramos offered Zorilla an end to their ‘deal’ if it led to anything valuable.”

“Sí. Don Zorilla saw a chance to get out from under Ramos’s thumb and make amends. So he agreed, and when we found the song this afternoon, he called Ramos right away.”

Trina shook her head. “Ramos really is an asshole. Oh, uh… sorry.”

“I feel the same way,” Álvaro grinned. “I’ll let you say it instead of me.”

The taxi turned a corner, and the narrow streets gave way to a broad boulevard. Ahead, she saw the high, imposing walls of the Alcázar.

“How is Ramos going to sell it?”

“Those parties he is famous for hosting in the museum’s halls? Father Zorilla believes they are fronts for black-market artifact sales. Buyers and sellers meet and mingle, look at objects which are supposedly on loan from private collectors for display in the museum. But, in fact, they are bidding on stolen artifacts. Once he’s sold them, Ramos uses his position at the museum to sign any necessary paperwork, enabling those objects to be shipped out of Spain legally.”

“All for a cut of the profits.”

“Except Ramos will get full profit from de Peralta’s formula for Toledo steel. Remember when he said he’s hosting an event today? I suspect he has buyers ready and willing. We can’t let him sell that song. It’s our last chance to recover the art of true sword making. It’s a lifeline to Toledo’s remaining blacksmiths, who are still willing to produce blades the ancient way.”

The taxi screeched to a halt at the Alcázar’s main entrance. Once an imposing Moorish fortress, its four stone towers and high walls were now decorated with brightly colored signs, marking its transition from fortification to tourist trap. They ran through an arched doorway to where a bored-looking woman sat on a stool behind the glass partition of the ticket kiosk.

The woman saw Father Sainz’s white collar and black cassock.

“Padre,” she nodded respectfully, and waved them through.

They stopped in the foyer, dwarfed by large, echoing hallways and grand marbled staircases leading in all directions. Though still within the museum’s opening hours, the late-season and post-siesta crowd was minimal. Only a few tourists climbed the broad stone steps to the interior rooms.

“Which way?”

A docent lounged in a nearby chair, eyes lidded and head dipping toward his chest, as if his own siesta wasn’t quite finished.

“Perdóname,” Álvaro said.

The docent blinked as his eyes came into focus. “Buenas tardes, Padre.”

“¿Dónde está Señor Ramos?”

The docent looked conflicted. Trina knew exactly what he was thinking. Museum staff must know Jorge Ramos’s events were off limits to the public. And yet he couldn’t deny information to a man of the cloth, could he?

“Por favor,” Álvaro added, with a kind, priestly smile.

“Sí, sí.” The docent agreed, gesturing down one hallway and mentioning something about some stairs.

Trina didn’t wait for him to finish. She was off into the interior of the museum, her backpack bouncing on her shoulder. Father Sainz quickly caught up, his upper body tilted slightly to compensate for the imbalance of his missing arm as his other pumped furiously.

“The docent said Ramos’s gathering is in the Sharp Weapons gallery on the lower level.”

Weaving around tourists, they passed a series of galleries filled with Spanish army uniforms from different centuries, another with suits of armor, and yet another with displays of armed soldiers on horseback.

Finally, they came to a staircase in one of the Alcázar’s corner towers. They plunged down the wide stone stairs, footsteps echoing and the priest’s black cassock flowing behind him like the wings of a descending raven.

A few sharp turns later, they were in the lowest level of the museum. They hurried through a gallery of glass cases, each filled with old firearms—matchlocks, flintlocks, and flared-muzzle blunderbusses. At the end of the gallery, they were stopped by another museum docent. He stood before a red velvet rope blocking the entrance to the next room.

Ramos’s little party, Trina thought, moving closer to get a better look.

A quick glance into the gallery beyond told Trina everything she needed to know. Like the other rooms they’d passed, it was filled with display cases, these full of blades of all types: wide-bladed broadswords, curved scimitars, modest short swords.

Guests in tuxedos and cocktail dresses mingled, eating canapés and holding glasses of bubbly Spanish cava as they inspected a variety of swords and knives laid out on tables covered in black velvet. A beautiful pair of rapiers lay crossed on a table on the far side of the room, their pommels and guards glittering with inlaid rubies.

Those must be the black-market items up for auction.

A knot of serious-looking European and Asian buyers clustered around an adjacent table. Potential bidders? Trina glimpsed Jorge Ramos among them, nibbling olives from a toothpick, while smiling and chatting over the table like a proud father over the bassinet of his newborn.

Then he looked up, perhaps sensing he was being watched. His eyes caught hers, and his smile faded. The empty toothpick fell from his hand. She held his gaze, even as the sigil at her neck flashed hot in a quick pulse of warning.

Ramos pulled a small two-way radio from his pocket and spoke briefly into it, all the while keeping his eyes on Trina.

He’s calling for security.

“Uh, Álvaro?”

Father Sainz didn’t hear her. He had pulled the docent aside, trying to convince him to let them pass.

“Father Sainz?” she said, more loudly. “I think Ramos is making a move.”

Ramos said something to the buyers around him. At first, they looked confused, then nodded, backing away from the table.

She took a step over the red rope.

The docent shouted. “Espera!”

Álvaro reached out his hand. “Trina, wait—”

There was a crash in the auction room. Ramos had flipped the table on which the de Peralta paper lay, but not before grabbing it in one hand. With his other, he snatched one of the two jeweled rapiers. Holding it with the poise of a practiced swordsman, he leveled the tip at Trina and Álvaro.

Then he turned and fled to the far end of the room, disappearing through a service door.

12

COURTYARD

September 28, 6:07 P.M.

The Alcázar

Toledo, Spain

Trina sprinted into the center of the room, Álvaro right behind her. Guests scattered to get out of their way. A woman screamed, dropping her glass of cava. It shattered on the floor, eliciting more screaming.

“This way!” Álvaro jumped the overturned table.

Without thinking, Trina grabbed the other glittering rapier off the nearby table. It was lighter than it looked, just a few pounds. Taking it seemed silly, but it felt good in her hand, as if some defense was better than none as they pursued Ramos.

Then she was through the door and into a service corridor. Trina recognized where they were at once—the building’s archives and storage area. Every museum had them.

This was Ramos’s home turf. He could easily disappear in the maze of corridors if they didn’t keep him in sight. Fortunately, however, the archivist didn’t appear to be a man who exercised regularly. She saw him stumble through a door at the far end of the hallway.

She and Álvaro followed, coming out into what looked like an archaeological excavation—part of the fortress’s original foundations, now open for public viewing. A few tourists peered over glass railings, oblivious to an archivist, one-armed priest, and American woman running by.

Sounds like the opening of a joke, she thought wryly.

She heard footsteps behind them and risked looking back. A half-dozen men and women hurried after them, the ones who had been preparing to bid on the sword maker’s song? Clearly, they didn’t want to give up on their prize.

They charged up a staircase. It was old and narrow, part of the original structure. Gripping the rapier tightly, Trina felt like she was in some movie about musketeers during the final, climactic chase scene. It was strangely exhilarating.

She emerged into a wide hallway on the main floor of the museum. Ramos stumbled ahead, Álvaro on his heels, as they rushed into the Alcázar’s central, open-air quadrangle. Trina passed a sign indicating it was the Charles V Courtyard.

The large, rectangular space was open to the September sky, although the patterned stone floor was covered with the lengthening shadows of early evening. Two stories of marble columns, connected and topped by Roman arches, formed an arcade around the perimeter.

Trina came to a halt next to Álvaro just inside the courtyard. There were exits on all four sides, but now, they were blocked by crowds of curious tourists and museum staff, including a handful of guards, who must have been drawn by the commotion.

In the center of the courtyard, a bronze statue of Charles V stood on a high pedestal, itself set on a platform of tiered steps. Ramos stood on the steps, his face a mask of desperation and fury. In one hand, he held the rapier, in the other, de Peralta’s rolled-up recipe.

Trina was suddenly aware that everyone in the courtyard was staring at her, whispering and pointing excitedly. Remembering she held the twin of Ramos’s sword in her own hand, she knew why.

Of course, she thought. We’re in the middle of a military museum. They must think this is some kind of sword-fighting show. They’re going to be disappointed.

One of the museum guards approached.

“¿Necesita ayuda, Señor Ramos?”

Maybe it was the adrenaline coursing through her veins, heightening her ability to recall the Spanish she’d picked up when she was younger. But she could figure out most of the rapid-fire Spanish that followed, filling the gaps between words she didn’t understand with human actions—and reactions.

Ramos glared at Trina and Alvaro.

“Do you need help, Señor Ramos?” the guard repeated.

“These people are attacking me!”

“This priest?” the guard asked, incredulously. “And this woman?”

“Yes! They—” Ramos began.

Ignoring the guard, Álvaro raised his hands placatingly. “You know why we are here, Jorge. You lied to me and blackmailed Father Zorilla. You have taken what is not yours to take. What you have in your hand belongs to Toledo. It is not yours to sell.”

The buyers who had followed them from the auction two floors below began to shuffle and look around nervously. Two of them, Chinese by their dress and appearance, scurried for an exit. The others—German or Dutch, and possibly an American—lurked in the shadows of the arcade, waiting to see how Ramos’s last stand played out.

“Is what the priest says true?” the guard asked Ramos.

“Of course not.” Ramos shifted on his feet like a trapped animal. His hand clenched the roll of old paper. Trina was afraid he would crush it beyond repair. “Now, call the police and have them arrested!”

The poor guard glanced back and forth between the archivist and the priest, then settled on Trina. “Why do you and the woman have swords?”

“They are trying to take a precious document!”

“It is you who have taken the document,” Álvaro said. His tone, though kind, left no room for debate. “Give it back. As witnesses to your transgressions, Father Zorilla and I will ask the courts to show mercy.”

“He lies!” Ramos shrieked, desperation cracking his voice. Sweat trickled down his brow.

The guard put one foot on the lowest step, his hand reaching carefully toward Ramos’s quivering rapier. “Perhaps you should lower your sword, and we can discuss this in a less public place, Señor Ramos?”

In that tense moment, perhaps because of his perspiration, Trina again caught a waft of Ramos’s bergamot cologne, accompanied by the hint of olives on his panting breath. Suddenly, realization dawned.

“It was you! You were prowling outside my door last night!”

Ramos reacted as if attacked. He shifted deftly to one side, crouching to a fencer’s pose. Clearly, he was no stranger to la esgrima—the art of Spanish fencing.

The guard stumbled backward, muttering in surprise. Nothing in his training had prepared him for this.

With a cry, Ramos sprang down the steps, thrusting his rapier at Trina in a desperate bid to escape. In the split second before he lunged, her sigil flared hot on her chest, bringing her senses alive. Backpedaling as fast as she could, she flicked her wrist upward, bringing the rapier with it. She’d never fenced, other than when, as a kid, she’d fought her brother with sticks in the forests of Wyoming.

Her sigil amplified every nerve in her body. She knocked his blade aside, then did it again when Ramos made a second, lightning-fast thrust. The crossing of their swords produced a metallic ringing that filled the courtyard like a chiming bell.

A fraction of a second later, Ramos did something with his blade she couldn’t follow, much less counter. Her rapier was jerked from her grip and went tumbling through the air ...

… only to be caught by the outstretched hand of Father Sainz, who swished it once, twice—as if testing its balance—before springing between Trina and Ramos in a fencing posture of his own.

Trina moved away, giving them a wide berth.

Applause from the perimeter told her the tourists were still there, and in larger numbers than before. They had filled the upper arcade, smiling and pointing, phones out to capture the show.

But this wasn’t a game. Ramos’s face was red, and spittle flecked his lips. He circled Álvaro, probing for weakness, and seemed increasingly angry when he found none, especially from a one-armed priest.

Father Sainz held his stance, and his rapier, with the poise of one who had, indeed, spent his youth competing at the highest levels of Spanish esgrima. His footwork countered Ramos’s as they circled each other at the base of the statue.

Then, with a cry, Ramos lunged. His blade moved so quickly it was nearly invisible. Only the clang of steel on steel and the drop of Álvaro’s arm marked the parry. Ramos thrust again and again, his blade starting high and dropping low. Each time, he was repelled.

More applause filled the square. Ramos breathed heavily. His rapier wobbled. Álvaro, however, stood tall and controlled, his own blade steady.

Ramos attacked again, coming in from the sides rather than the front. Álvaro blocked each thrust, also stepping from side to side in graceful and precise movements.

Trina remembered what he had told her, how he had studied a centuries-old form of sword fighting that used off-line footwork, more like dance steps than traditional fencing.

La Verdadera Destreza. The true art.

If he was this good with his left hand, she couldn’t imagine how amazing he had been with his right.

Each time the twin swords met, they filled the courtyard with metallic music. Song and dance… it was like a performance. If Trina didn’t know Ramos was truly fighting, she would have applauded right along with the tourists.

Only once, as Ramos’s fury reached a crescendo of desperation, did he get past Álvaro’s defenses. The archivist’s rapier pierced the priest’s billowing cassock near the thigh. Trina gasped, as did everyone watching. As Ramos howled with delight, Father Sainz jumped back, and his black garment—still pricked by his opponent’s blade—tore in a great gash. The rip exposed his leg, revealing it to be whole and un-punctured.

Trina relaxed.

The applause was thunderous.

For Álvaro, however, that was the last straw. He’d spent the entire duel on the defensive, parrying and dodging Ramos’s increasingly sloppy attacks. Now, with his priestly garments in tatters, he launched a furious barrage of his own, easily bypassing Ramos’s defenses but never driving the point of his sword home.

Instead, he forced his opponent back to the pedestal, causing the exhausted archivist to stumble and trip up the steps of the stone platform. Álvaro followed, pressing his attack, until Ramos fell, exhausted, against the base of the statue.

With one final, feeble effort, Ramos lifted his blade. Álvaro knocked it aside with such force that it came free and clattered to a stop at the bottom of the steps.

The courtyard erupted in cheers.

Despite the noise, Trina heard Ramos wheeze. Though his words came in gasps, and were delivered in Spanish, Trina got the gist of them.

“Defeated by a one-armed priest,” he said, shaking his head. “When did the Church teach clergy to fight?”

“It wasn’t Rome that taught me this, it was Toledo. And Toledo’s lessons must remain here.” Álvaro slid the rapier in the sash around his waist and extended his only hand. “Dale el papel. Give her the scroll.”

Ramos reluctantly offered Trina the roll of paper.

Emboldened, Trina confronted him. “Why were you following me around Toledo yesterday, anyway?”

Ramos scowled and muttered something in nearly inaudible Spanish.

“He said he didn’t want anyone examining that letter until he could solve El Greco’s puzzle himself,” Álvaro said. “But when he realized who you were, he thought he could use you to his advantage.”

Trina carefully removed the paper from Ramos’s hand. “And how did that work out for you?”

Miraculously, the document had sustained little damage.

“It’s okay,” she announced after examining it. “A little worse for wear, but still legible.”

The archivist had regained his breath, and with it some of his rage.

“You will pay for this,” Ramos said, this time in his passable English so Trina could hear. “Both of you.”

“Pay?” Álvaro laughed. “I have taken a vow of poverty. And Miss Piper is a graduate student. You, however, have cheated this museum, stolen from this city, and blackmailed Father Zorilla. It gives me no happiness to do so, but I will tell the police what I know. I will, however, allow you the opportunity to confess to them what you’ve done first.”

Ramos’s eyes flashed, and then his head dropped. He knew he was finished. The sky over the courtyard had turned indigo, and the first stars appeared.

“I pray God’s mercy be upon you, Señor Ramos. For you have many trials ahead.”

Trina laughed despite herself, wondering if Father Sainz realized he’d made a pun. From the slight smile on his face as they left the courtyard, she suspected he did.

13

NEWS FROM AFAR

September 29, 1588

El Greco’s Workshop

Toledo, Kingdom of Spain

El Greco stood near the open window of his workshop. A breeze blew through, warm but with a hint of late-September chill.

In the streets below, widows wept.

Autumn was welcome after the oppressive heat of summer. Toledo summers were hot enough without the constant anxiety that added to the oppressive heat this year—that of awaiting news of the Armada. It seemed it was all anyone talked about, and rumors had been rampant.

In midsummer, Spanish ambassadors had promoted news of victory, and there had even been celebrations in Venice, Paris, and Prague. But contradictory reports came in daily, and by August, disturbing news of the Armada’s defeat crept south from Calais and Flanders.

No one knew what to believe.

Until yesterday, when a rider reached Toledo from Coruña. Two days before, the first ships limped into the harbor, battered and burned.

The Armada had not only been defeated, it had been nearly obliterated.

In the distance, just over the rooftops, El Greco saw the tower of the Church of Santo Tomé. It brought to mind his agreement with Bartolomé de Peralta. He hadn’t thought about it since May, when he’d finished his alterations to the Orgaz painting, and hidden their family psalm in that marble niche in the Visigoth style. It was a crude sculpture, wholly out of place in the rebuilt Santo Tomé. No one would ever give it a second glance.

And the clues he’d left in the painting itself, pointing to the song’s hiding place in the tower—they were quite clever, if he were being honest. Only the key, his little riddle now hidden somewhere in the de Peralta forge, would ever reveal the secret hidden there.

Out of morbid curiosity, he turned his gaze to another part of Toledo, where the de Peralta forge stood. Once or twice, as he traveled the city on some errand or another during the summer, he’d passed it by, noting it was empty and shuttered.

He thought he could pick it out among the other rooftops, but no smoke rose from its chimney.

Nor, he suspected, would it. Although some had survived the Armada’s defeat, the wailing of widows and the constant tolling of bells told a different, tragic story.

Fewer would return than had left last spring.

Far fewer.

But that was war.

No matter. He’d fulfilled his end of the bargain. The more he’d thought about it, de Peralta’s request seemed foolish, even vain. Toledo was replete with sword makers, and always would be. But the job had paid well, and for El Greco, that was sufficient.

He offered a silent prayer for de Peralta and his sons. It was the least he could do. Now, life must go on. Because of the growing fame of The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, he had new commissions, new patrons, a half-dozen new apprentices. His workshop had expanded, becoming like the bottega studios of Venice where he’d trained. Even now, his apprentices labored diligently in the room behind him, grinding paint, distilling varnish, sawing wood for frames.

With one last glance over the rooftops of Toledo, he turned away from the window.

El Greco had work to do.

14

CHURROS CON CHOCOLATE

September 29, 8:51 A.M.

Railway Station

Toledo, Spain

Trina watched the high-speed AVE train pull into Toledo’s train station. It would make the return trip to Madrid in seven minutes.

She shouldered her backpack. “This has been quite an adventure.”

“It has, indeed.” Father Sainz set her suitcase next to her. He’d been carrying it for her as they walked from her lodgings to the station. “I bet you never expected a simple document-authentication job like this to end with a scandal in a major European museum.”

She had to suppress a laugh. You have no idea, she thought. Toledo has actually been rather relaxing compared to the events of the past year.

“I bet you never expected it to end in a sword fight with a black-market art thief.”

“Touché.”

They both laughed.

“Will Father Zorilla be all right?”

“He will. He’s mentioned before that he may ask the Archdiocese for a transfer to be with his sister in Barcelona. I think yesterday’s events might… expedite his request.”

“Would that leave you in charge of Santo Tomé?”

“God is in charge of Santo Tomé, Miss Piper. But if Father Zorilla leaves the parish, I may, indeed, step into his pastoral shoes.”

“I know you’ll do an amazing job. After what we just went through, you can handle anything.”

“I believe we are never tested beyond what we can handle, Trina. In passing this test, we’ve done something wonderful for my city. On behalf of Toledo, and especially its sword makers, I thank you.”

“It was my pleasure. What will become of the de Peralta formula?”

“Santo Tomé already had visitors from the Alcázar this morning. The board of the museum apologized profusely for Jorge Ramos’s activities, and assured us that if Santo Tomé is willing to let them exhibit the de Peralta formula, they would make it worth our while. Don Zorilla and I will of course approve their request, but only after we let Toledo’s remaining swordsmiths examine the recipe and learn what they can to help renew the art in the traditional way. It seems after all these centuries, El Greco was right.”

“How so?”

“At long last, God in his mercy has allowed the de Peralta family’s song to be sung again.”

Trina nodded. “As a historian who also tries to recreate past techniques in order to understand them, I think that sounds amazing. What about El Greco’s letter itself?”

“I’m sure the El Greco Museum will be more than happy to display it as well. All of this should bring some much-needed income to the coffers of our church.”

Trina held up her phone, the screen showing the social-media app OnlyConnect. “By the way, videos tagged #priestwithasword and #thefencingpriest are going viral. You could cash in on your newfound fame.”

Álvaro blushed. “I think I’d prefer not to, if it’s all the same. Vows of poverty, and all that.”

A chime sounded, announcing the train’s imminent departure.

“That’s me.” Trina bent to take her suitcase. As she did, her sigil slipped out from under her shirt and dangled in the air.

“That’s a curious necklace,” Àlvaro said. “I noticed you often reached for it… especially when things got dangerous.”

Trina didn’t know what to say. How do you tell a priest you have a magical talisman? Some might consider it witchcraft. It wasn’t—not in her experience. The truth was, Trina didn’t fully understand what it was. She only knew that she trusted it to keep her safe.

“It’s like a good luck charm, I guess. A friend gave it to me. Does the church disapprove of such things?”

The priest laughed. “To the contrary, there are more things in Heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.”

“Hamlet.” Trina grinned, offering him her left hand. “It’s been a pleasure, Father Sainz. I’m glad I accepted the job.”

He shook her hand vigorously. “As am I, Trina Piper. I wish you the best. Please visit again if you’re ever in Toledo.”

She climbed aboard, turning just before the doors closed. “What did you say I should order for breakfast when I get to Madrid?”

“Churros con chocolate.”

“Sounds delicious. I’m hungry already.”

The train began to move. As she settled into her seat, Trina searched her smartphone’s map of Madrid for cafés serving cinnamon pastries with warm chocolate.

And coffee. Definitely coffee.

HISTORICAL AFTERWARD

As with Trina Piper’s other adventures, I based The El Greco Enigma on many actual people, places, and things, and then gave it all a little twist of what if?

Toledo is one of Spain’s most magnificent cities. I’ve visited Spain multiple times, and while I enjoyed Madrid, Barcelona, Seville, and Cordoba, Toledo is the city that still haunts my memories.

I am no expert on sword making and don’t pretend to be, although I was a fencer when I was in college (foil and saber). Many experts I have read agree there was a subjective art to medieval sword making, and much of that art is now forgotten. There is, however, evidence that some of Toledo’s sword makers passed on their methods by translating their patterns of tempering, quenching, and forging metal into songs.

It’s also safe to say that making a blade took time, certainly more time than I allotted to the process in the chapter when El Greco watched the de Peraltas at work in their forge. Sadly, Toledo’s few remaining sword makers know that they are the last of a dying breed. To quote one of them from an article in Business Insider, “The future of sword making is like coal—dark. If things don't change, Toledo's sword making will become a legend. There is no one to follow us nor is there much more business to continue. This is all going to disappear within a few years.”

If you visit Toledo, take the time to get lost exploring its narrow streets and magnificent buildings. You won’t regret it. The Alcázar and the Cathedral of Saint Mary are both magnificent. And, of course, you can’t miss the Church of Santo Tomé. I spent an hour there one summer morning, just basking in the magnificence of El Greco’s The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, while listening to Vangelis’s magnificent album, El Greco, on my iPod.

El Greco did get into a lawsuit over the value of the painting with the priest who commissioned it, Father Andrés Núñez. Historians have reported the value of the assessment in both the Spanish currency of reales, and the Europe-wide currency of ducats. Some historians report the initial value of the painting at 13,200 reales, and then revised to 17,600. Other historians give the value in ducats, which was a standard international currency across most of Europe. In that denomination, the original value of The Burial of the Count of Orgaz was 1200 ducats, later reassessed at 1600 ducats. Thus, in the late sixteenth century, one ducat equaled about eleven reales. The question therefore remains: in which currency was El Greco actually paid? The accounts I read didn’t seem to agree, so I used reales.

Of course, in this story, de Peralta pays El Greco in ducats. I did this primarily because reales were made of silver, and ducats of gold—and thus fewer ducats would be required. Even then, could El Greco really have taken two bags of 1200 ducats worth 4,400 reales to the bank? According to Wikipedia, a sixteenth-century ducat, as established by the Holy Roman Empire, weighed around 3.5 grams “and was 23⅔ carats fine (3.442 g of pure gold).” At 3.5 grams each, 1200 ducats would weight just shy of 10 pounds, so in my fictional version of this story, El Greco could have easily carried two five-pound bags with him. (If it were reales, it would have weighed over 30 pounds!) With ten pounds of gold in his pockets, presumably he’d head straight for his bank with all due haste!

After the success of The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, El Greco’s fame only grew, as did his workshop. He took on more apprentices and produced a stream of paintings and sculptures, as well as altarpieces for religious institutions around Toledo and Madrid. His contemporaries described him as “one of the greatest men in both this kingdom [Spain] and outside it.”

Last, but not least, El Greco did in fact settle his lawsuit with Núñez on May 30, 1588, two days after the Spanish Armada set sail from Lisbon. Reports were that El Greco was prepared to take his lawsuit all the way up the Church hierarchy, to the Pope himself and the Holy See (the papal court). Although we still don’t know why he settled for less than what his painting was worth, most likely, it was that he realized the time and frustration it would cause, especially against a church, simply wasn’t worth it.

Or perhaps, as The El Greco Enigma suggests, there was more to it, and he had a different reason…

READY FOR MORE?

Thank you for reading The El Greco Enigma!

If you enjoyed Trina’s ‘side quest’ in Toledo, you’re going to love her full-length adventures that begin in the first novel, The Newton Cipher. Click HERE to purchase your copy, and learn more about the historical—and slightly magical—mysteries that have Trina hunting all over Europe for ancient and powerful artifacts.

If you would like to know when I release new books, you can join my mailing list (and receive FREE ebooks) here:

www.steveruskin.com

Also by Steve Ruskin:

Trina Piper Thrillers

The Newton Cipher

Scepter of the Sun King

ExoRok Rebels

A Deal with the Devil’s Broker (Prequel)

Prometheus Outbound

Asgard Reborn

Shiva Unleashed

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank my beta readers and Advance Reader Team for their helpful comments and corrections, and my editor Shelley Holloway. I would especially like to thank Laury Behrens, who made sure the Spanish used in this story is as accurate as possible, as it might be spoken (or written) by someone who lives in Spain. Any errors that remain are my own.