The Dante Conspiracy (10 page)
Inspector Silvio Perini glanced at his watch in resignation.
For some reason, sleep had eluded him that night, and about an hour earlier he’d
abandoned all attempts to doze off and walked down to the kitchen to make
himself
a cup of coffee. That, he knew, would make sleep even
less likely, but he’d decided he would be more usefully employed trying to work
out the hidden meaning in the alleged new ‘Dante’ verses than just lying in bed
and pointlessly tossing and turning all night.
His wife had protested sleepily as he’d got up, but he knew she
would drop off again quickly: she was well used to his disturbed nights and erratic
working hours.
He read through the text of Bertorelli’s article twice, and then
turned his attention to the verses themselves. The only bit that seemed obvious
to him – or at least obvious now that Cesare Lombardi had put the idea of the Trojan
horse into his mind – was that the relic had been sent to Florence either disguised
as something else or, perhaps more probably, concealed inside another object. But
he still had no real idea what the object could be, except that it would have to
be fairly small for the Trojan horse idea to work.
And for it
to remain hidden and overlooked down through the centuries.
Eventually he decided that reading the verses wasn’t working
for him. He needed to write them out himself, and maybe that way he could assign
tentative meanings to some of the words and phrases. That might make things clearer.
He took a clean sheet of paper and wrote out the verses in block
capitals down the left-hand side, leaving the other part of the sheet free for his
conclusions. Assuming he came up with any, obviously.
Then he took a red pen and underlined the expression ‘animal
of the
Greeks’,
drew a straight line from that to the other
side of the page and wrote down ‘Trojan horse?’. Some of the phrases in the verses
didn’t seem to refer to anything very specific, but he read them carefully anyway,
just in case they made sense as part of larger expressions. Eventually, he had identified
several phrases that he felt were significant in some way, even though he still
had little idea what they meant.
‘By his hand the masterpiece lies below
Gaetani’s
bane’ and ‘combine the first of the five next to mark he who shall receive’ both
seemed particularly obscure, but he thought the expression ‘author of the arena
and the campanile’ was probably specific enough for him to be able to decipher it,
so he started his investigation with those words. The key to that part of the text
seemed to be the city itself, unsurprisingly, not least because of the phrase ‘home
of the
fiore
and the
fiorino
’
in the previous line, the meaning of which had struck him immediately, while he
was writing out the verses. He’d already underlined and tagged that expression with
the single proper name ‘Florence’.
Fiorino
almost certainly had to refer to the
fiorino
d’oro
, the florin, the gold coin first minted by the Republic
of Florence in 1252. It had been issued without significant alteration for almost
three hundred years, and went on to become the staple coin of trade in Western Europe,
something like the Euro of its day. And the best-known site and the crowning architectural
jewel of Florence was the domed cathedral of the city, Santa Maria del Fiore, known
as the
Duomo
, the second largest cathedral in the world.
So Florence was very clearly the ‘home of the
fiore
and the
fiorino
’
.
But none of that seemed to take him any further forward. The
cathedral of course had a bell-tower, a campanile, but as far as Perini knew Dante
had never had anything significant to do with the building, and almost all of his
achievements as an author had been made after he’d been exiled from the city, when
he wouldn’t have even been able to visit the
Duomo
. And
he had no clue what was meant by the word ‘arena’, apart from the word’s obvious
literal meaning as a kind of amphitheatre.
So he started investigating, using the internet to research the
Duomo
, and almost immediately he discovered something
that was both interesting and confusing, because what he found out had nothing at
all to do with Dante, but put him on the trail of another influential and important
Florentine.
Very little was known for certain about Giotto di
Bondone
, the late mediaeval architect and painter, better known
simply as ‘Giotto’, but two projects he was definitely involved in were the design
of the campanile of the
Duomo
, towards the end of his
life, and the decoration of the
Scrovegni
Chapel in Padua.
There, he had created a fresco depicting both the life of the Virgin Mary and the
life of Christ, a work generally agreed to be not only Giotto’s most important surviving
work but arguably one of the most accomplished and significant masterpieces of the
early Renaissance period. And the
Scrovegni
Chapel, Perini
then discovered for the very first time, was also known as the Arena Chapel.
So he’d cracked that expression: the ‘author of the arena and
the campanile’ was almost certainly a reference to Giotto. But what that had to
do with Dante, Perini hadn’t the slightest idea, and
none of the
text in that section of the verses didn’t seem to help
.
And then he had a sudden flash of inspiration. Maybe this was
a second reference to the Trojan horse, or rather an explanation of the mechanism
which had been employed. Perhaps something, some work of art, bearing Giotto’s signature,
had been given to a prominent official in the city of Florence, and hidden inside
that work was the relic that had been owned or created by Dante. Unlike the author,
Giotto’s genius had been widely recognized in his own lifetime, and as an important
son of Florence anything he produced would have been a welcome gift for anyone.
Finally, Perini thought, he might be getting a little closer
to the truth of the matter. If he was right, he now had at least an inkling of how
the relic might have been delivered to the city of Dante’s birth.
Of course, he still had no idea what the relic actually was,
or to whom it had been sent, but despite this he felt he was making progress. He
poured himself another cup of coffee as a kind of minor personal celebration, and
directed his attention once again to the lines of the verses.
‘That wasn’t the brightest of moves, was it?’ Guido muttered.
‘That could have been the owner, a civilian, and you might have just killed him.’
‘And how would that be a problem?’ Marco asked, as the two men
stood near the foot of the staircase in the old house and peered upwards.
‘If it was the owner, he might have known where the relic was.’
The other man shook his head.
‘I know that’s what Stefan said, but I think he’s wrong. If anybody
actually knew where the relic was hidden, it would have appeared in an auction room
somewhere long before now. And whoever it was running up those stairs, it wasn’t
the owner of this house.
It’s
dark up there, and the owner
would have put some lights on. I mean, why wouldn’t he, in his own house? We both
saw that the courtyard door had been forced, and to me that can mean only one thing:
the men in the other group, the ones who broke into the cenotaph, are following
the same trail we are.’
‘And they got here first, you mean?’
‘Precisely,’ Marco confirmed. ‘And they’re still here and they’ll
be carrying weapons. According to the newspaper reports, they had pistols when they
broke into the cenotaph, and that was an unopposed operation, so they’ll certainly
be carrying some now. So what we don’t do is assume that shot of mine killed or
wounded one of them, and go blundering up the stairs to finish off the job, because
if we do we probably won’t survive. They’ll be up there, occupying the high ground,
pistols in hand and just waiting for us to walk into their sights.’
‘So what do we do?’
‘We leave the house, right now.’
‘That’d be a good way of pissing off Stefan. Are you sure you
want to do that? Just run away?’
‘I didn’t say we’d run away. I just said we’d leave the house,’
Marco responded. ‘And we make it obvious that we’ve done so.’
‘And then?’
‘That will give whoever’s up there enough time to try to find
the relic – that’s assuming it’s here, of course – and then we can take it off them
when they come out. And take them down at the same time. And if they don’t find
it, we can still eliminate them - take them out of the equation. You got a problem
with that?’
Guido shook his head.
‘Works for me,’ he said. ‘Good thinking.’
Without another words, both men turned back towards the kitchen
and the side door of the property.
The slam of the side door of the house echoed through the ancient
building, but for some five minutes neither man moved; they just lay where they
were, breathing shallowly and listening intently. Finally, Bruno spoke.
‘You’re closer than me,’ he said, his voice little more than
a whisper. ‘Can you hear anything?’
‘Nothing now,’ Arrigo replied, just as quietly. ‘After the shots
I heard two men talking quietly together down there, then footsteps - it sounded
like two sets - crossing the floor downstairs, and then the door slammed. I think
they’ve gone.’
Bruno gave a short laugh.
‘They might have left the house, but I’ll bet any money you like
they’ll be waiting for us outside.’
‘Yeah.
Well there are two of them and
two of us, and both of us are armed. We should be able to shoot our way out of here,
if it comes to it.
Which it probably will.
So what do we
do now?’
‘We do what we came for.’
Bruno stood up, looked around the landing where he’d taken refuge,
checking the walls near the doors. In moments, he saw what he was expecting to find:
three old-fashioned electric light switches, which he guessed – and hoped
–
controlled the lights on the two flights of stairs and the
hall below, on the ground floor.
‘Light,’ he said shortly, then clicked the lowest of the three
switches.
A small chandelier flared into life at the very bottom of the
staircase, brilliantly illuminating that part of the ground floor and casting dark
wavering shadows into the upper areas of the stairwell.
‘Can you see anything?’ Bruno asked.
‘Nothing.
It all looks clear to me.’
‘Right.
Stay where you are and cover
me while I go down there to check it out.’
Cautiously, Bruno began walking steadily and quietly down the
stairs, his pistol held firmly in his right hand, the barrel pointing down. He was
alert for any movement, moving the pistol from side to side so that he could cover
every location from which one of the opposition could possibly fire at him.
But he saw and heard nothing, all the way down.
‘It’s clear,’ he said, when he finally stepped off the staircase
and looked all around the hall. ‘Come down here and cover me while I check the rest
of the ground floor.’
Five minutes later, they’d inspected every room on the ground
floor and were quite satisfied that they were alone in the property, apart from
the elderly man, presumably the owner, still tied up in his bedroom upstairs. And
to ensure it stayed that way, they spent several minutes piling up furniture behind
both of the outside doors of the property, firmly jamming a chair under the handle
of each door and then positioning others behind it. It would still be possible for
somebody to force their way inside, but they certainly wouldn’t be able to do it
quietly, and that was good enough for them.
‘Right,’ Bruno said, checking both doors one last time. ‘That’ll
do. Now let’s see if we can find this thing. We’ll start at the top and work our
way down.’
Just under two hours later they stopped looking. They’d checked
every room, and every part of every room, even looking for false walls and hidden
passages, and found absolutely nothing. They’d pulled every book off the shelves
in the library, emptied every cupboard and looked in every wardrobe, and had failed
to discover anything, any hiding place, that could conceal the ancient treasure
which the Russian had told them had to be hidden there.
‘He’s got it wrong,’ Arrigo muttered in disgust, ‘just like he
did with the cenotaph. That was a complete waste of time as well. He’s reading more
into those bloody verses than is really there.’
‘You’re probably right. And we don’t even know if he’s right
about the relic – what it is, I mean, or even if it exists at all. He’s got this
theory, but we still don’t know if his interpretation is right.’
‘Well, his interpretation of where it was hidden has certainly
been consistent,’ Arrigo growled. ‘Consistently wrong, I mean. Now, how the hell
are we going to get out of here?’
‘Carefully,’ Bruno replied.
‘You reckon those guys are still out there?’
‘Probably.
If it was me I would be,
in the same situation. I’d wait outside as long as it took.’
‘I was afraid you’d say that. So how do we do it, without getting
our heads blown off?’
‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ Bruno said, after a short pause.
‘We could wait for daylight, but there’s no guarantee the men outside wouldn’t still
be there, waiting for us, so I think it would be better to try to get out while
it’s still dark. At the very least, that would make us more difficult targets. And
I’ve got an idea that might work. In fact, I’ve got two ideas.’