Nemesis (36 page)

And here am I with Papa, the old lady said with quiet pride, pointing to a slim, attractive teenage girl standing beside a horse and a tall thin man with riding crop and boots. Next to them was a relaxed and smiling Mussolini, looking quite human, Webb thought, when he wasn’t posturing. Benito, Papa used to say, whatever happens anywhere else, do not worry about here. Here in the hills the people are with you; they understand you. That was before the traitors and the partisans, of course.

Of course, Webb said.

Then there were the slippers of some pope in a glass case, more faded pictures of Mussolini looking noble, a brick from some holy place, and a tiny private chapel, candles freshly lit. Then the old lady excused herself, disappearing along a corridor, and Pascolo explained that he would be taking her to her beach house at Terracina in the morning but please to follow me,
professore
.

Webb followed Pascolo up marble stairs to a landing. The man opened a solid oak door. The room was large, plain and comfortable. It had a double bed, a chest of drawers and a large desk, and a shower room led off. The desk came with an Anglepoise lamp, a pile of paper and a couple of pens, but not, a quick scan revealed, with
Phaenomenis Novae
. French windows led out to a broad balcony.

“Va bene?”
Pascolo asked.

“First class, Pascolo. Do you leave early tomorrow?”

“Si.”

“Do you have something for me?” Webb kept his voice casual.

There was no hesitation. “Sure,
professore
. I go with my aunt now to collect it.”

At least, Webb thought, he could contemplate the business of escape. Webb wandered round the big empty mausoleum. A Christmas tree about nine feet tall, decorated with illuminated bells, looked lost in the big sitting room. There was no telephone. He went out to the grounds. Adolfo and Benito leapt around playfully enough and then chased each other around the house. Over the low balustrade the ground swept down for about three thousand feet to a plain which stretched into the haze. Webb thought he could see a thin glimmering strip on the horizon, like the sea reflecting moonlight, maybe fifty miles away. He could see that the village was dominated by a cathedral, lit up for Christmas.

The motorway, the one along which Webb had been taken, was the
autostrada del sole
connecting Rome and Naples. Lights were drifting up and down it. He reckoned he was about fifty miles south of Rome, probably north of Cassino, south of Frosinone. That put him high in the Abruzzi Hills. Down on the autostrada, modern Italy flowed briskly past; up here, they ticked off the calendar in centuries.

He went out the main gate and set off down the hill. The village seemed deserted. He passed a big white building, like a cantina, which had open ground in front of it and wooden benches and chairs laid out, damp with dew. He walked down the narrow, steep street. Wizened faces looked out of windows. Conversations stopped as he approached and started up again as he passed.

The cathedral was a masterpiece of frescos. Its high altar was a blaze of candles. It was also empty. Webb went back up the street.

“Il padre?”
he called up to an ancient hag, wrinkled and nearly toothless. There was a voice from the back of the room, and an outburst of gabbling from other houses. Then a stream of something incomprehensible was aimed at Webb from several directions at once. He heard
“solo domenica”
a few times.

He tried
“Servizio postale?”
There was an outburst of cackling; he’d said something funny. Someone told him to collect it at Genzano. More faces were appearing at windows.

Webb had one last shot, a throwaway to which he already knew the answer:
“È un telefono qui?”

More merriment. The Man from Mars was proving an endless source of fun.

In an hour the dogs started barking and a small, blue, rusty Fiat turned into the drive and disgorged Pascolo, a little fat wife and an amazing brood of children. The children swirled around the house, teased the dogs and threw things over the garden wall and into the fountain.

Dinner in the big kitchen seemed to make no allowance for Christmas. It was an affair of huge steaming pots, huge plates of spaghetti
al sugo
, huge tumblers of cold white wine and tiny humans leaping off in random directions without warning. Pascolo’s wife smiled and nodded and chattered away in some thick dialect of which Webb caught about one word in ten. They told him the wine came from his fascist aunt’s vineyards and he declared it to be superb which explained why he was drinking so much. After dessert—a massive, cream-covered treacle tart—Pascolo vanished.

Webb, his nails unconsciously digging into the table-cover, waited for the manuscript. After twenty minutes he gave up and plodded up to his room. He kicked a chair in frustration and flopped on to the hard mattress. Pascolo had radiated simple honesty for the entire evening, giving nothing away—maybe because he had nothing to give.

There was a knock at the door. Webb stood up apprehensively, dreading the appearance of Walkinshaw’s killers. But it was only the old lady. In her hand was a small red leather book. Webb sensed that she wanted to talk; he indicated a chair and sat on the edge of the bed.

“You are a scholar. You study history.”

“That is so.”

“How did you learn that I have the book?”

Webb tried a lie. “The Father Apiarist.”

She smiled with pleasure. “
Ebbene!
At last Franco has spoken. That was a bad night.”

“A bad night?”

Her eyes seemed to look beyond Webb. “Many terrible things were done, all those years ago. You are sure that he did explain?”

“Yes, but not in detail. Perhaps you could tell me more.”

As she began to pour out her story, he sensed that it was something she had bottled up for years, that a ghost was being laid to rest. He listened attentively. “My brother was a partisan. His father disowned him and so this house has come to me. It happened in 1944. The Allies had moved inland from Anzio and already they were shelling Grottaferrata. Kesselring had summoned forces out of nothing and the battle was a hard one. But by May the Germans were streaming north. And then we heard that they had filled a train with munitions and guns, but also with wine and sacred relics from the Monastery. This was too much. Our own former Allies robbing us as they fled. And then God created for us a miracle. The train with the holy relics and the wine and the guns was stopped at a tunnel. One of their big guns was too wide to go through. For the first time the
fascisti
and the partisans joined forces. In the dark we attacked. We killed Germans.

“And then was the great tragedy. While the Germans were still being killed, and we were quickly unloading the wagons, we started to fight amongst ourselves. In the dark I ran away along the railway track, with my arms full of whatever I had snatched. But then two partisans jumped out from the ditch of the embankment. They had machine guns. They raised them to shoot me. The air was full of noise and smoke. In the half dark I recognized my brother and he recognized me. There was only a second to act. He turned his gun on his friend, a boy from the same village. He killed his
friend to save me, his sister and enemy. We did not say a word. I ran into the dark.

“We have never spoken of this. As to what I had rescued from the train, it was worth little. Communion wine, silver cups, candlesticks, and a few old books. I never dared to return them.”

She smiled. “I am glad that Franco has decided to speak at last. He must believe that after all this time the boy’s family will forgive him.”

A small boy appeared at the door, followed by his even smaller, dark-eyed sister, finger in mouth. The old lady continued: “Your colleague tells me that you will need peace and quiet to study the book. The children are excited by
Natale
, but will be in bed soon.
Non sul letto, Ghigo, tu sei senza cervello?
” The children ran off giggling. She stood up.

“I’m very grateful to you, Signora. I wish you good night and every happiness.”

Webb opened the French windows. He was light-headed from a mixture of relief and exhaustion. A cool breeze flowed into the room, bringing some sub-tropical scent with it. Car headlights were drifting up and down the distant autostrada. Some animal cry came up from the olive groves below, and he could hear the wind rustling through the poplars at the side of the villa.

He had the book.

He looked at the ancient leather cover. Faded gold lettering said
Phaenomenis Novae
. Underneath was printed
Tomo III
.

It was old and faded. It had a musty smell. On the flyleaf was a date, 1643, and a neatly written dedication in Italian

To the Most Illustrious, Esteemed and Generous Leopoldo, Granduca di Toscana

And below that, the name of the author, Father Vincenzo of the Order of Preachers.

Across the top of the flyleaf someone had written
cremandum fore
in a thin, neat hand, then scored out the
cremandum
and replaced it with
prohibendum
.

Webb flicked through the pages.

It was more of an astronomer’s working notebook than a manuscript. There was page after page of a faded spidery scrawl in Latin and Italian, page after page of drawings—the moons of Jupiter, sunspots, lunar craters—hot off the eyepiece of Vincenzo’s telescope. The bold new frontier of science, of nearly four centuries ago.

The key to Nemesis, in his hands.

So run off into the dark night?

Pascolo: mine host, or a jailer?

The dogs: friendly, or killers on a snap of the fingers from Pascolo?

Webb looked at his watch. 10 p.m. Two in the afternoon in Arizona, 4 p.m. in Washington.

Eight hours
.

A twinge of pain in the jaw warned Webb that he had been unconsciously clenching it. His hands trembling, he picked up the typescript and began to read.

22
^h
00

A hundred pages. Drawings, charts, notes. Written in a scrawl both flowery and spidery, the ink little faded after four hundred years. Webb had no way of guessing what the Grand Duke had thought of Vincenzo’s work, if indeed he had ever set eyes on it.

The apparent lack of supervision had to be an illusion: somewhere, a mechanism for control was in place. But the identification of the crucial text was going to take the same length of time wherever he was, and at least here he wasn’t fleeing over mountains and could study
Phaenomenis
. Webb looked at his watch. He would give himself until midnight, and then make his break.

Resisting the urge to rush at it, he started slowly and methodically through the pages of
Phaenomenis
. It took him half an hour.

Nothing.

He rubbed his eyes and slipped quietly down the darkened stairs to the kitchen. Childish sleeping noises came from one of the rooms as he passed. He found the light switch and went into the big kitchen. He made himself a sandwich with salami and a rosetta, and tiptoed back up to his room with it. Of jailers or dogs, there had been not a sign.

Back in his room, Webb went through it again, a line at a time.

He was beginning to see a problem with Vincenzo: there was nothing
Novae
about his
Phaenomenis
. He had always come second. Sunspots, craters on the Moon, the satellites of Jupiter: they were all there, but they had all been seen earlier by somebody else. Galileo, Huygens, Schroter—these were the sharp men of the new age, and they had all been there before him. Vincenzo had tried; but at the end of the day, he was a failure.

And still nothing.

Webb started on it a third time.

Line one:
Observationes an 1613
.

Line two:
oriens Januarius occidens

The remaining page was taken up by a simple drawing:

The page was completed by a couple of lines at its foot:

Die 2, h.12 a meridie. 1 et 3 conjuncti fuerunt secundum longitudinem
.