The Ancient Curse

by Valerio Massimo Manfredi

  When the bell tolled from the tower of the nearby Sant’Agostino church, Fabrizio realized that almost an hour had gone by. He got to his feet and began to set up his camera equipment.

  The photographs available on file had been wholly inadequate. Fabrizio felt the need to explore each and every detail of the statue with his lens; perhaps he’d discover aspects of the casting that the experts hadn’t picked up on. He was reminded of the words of his professor and mentor, Gaetano Orlandi, who used to say that the best place to excavate in Italy was in the museums and storehouses of the National Antiquities Service.

  It took him hours to set up the lights, then study the angles and shots. He took about ten rolls of slide film and the same number of photos using a digital camera so that he could analyse the images electronically. Just as he was finishing up on the figure’s face, head and neck, the phone rang out in the hall. Fabrizio checked his watch: it was after one a.m. Evidently a wrong number. Who could be calling a museum at that hour? He went back to his work, intent on finishing despite his fatigue, but the telephone distracted him again only a few minutes later.

  He went to pick up the receiver and began to say, ‘Listen, you’ve got the wrong—’

  But a woman’s voice with a curt, peremptory tone cut him short. ‘Leave the boy alone!’ This was followed by the click of her hanging up.

  Fabrizio replaced the receiver mechanically and wiped a hand over his sweaty brow. Was he so tired that he was hearing things? No one knew anything about his research, except for the director himself and Mario, but the security guard wouldn’t have had a very clear idea of what it was all about anyway. Fabrizio didn’t know what to think, and the impossibility of instantly finding a reasonable explanation behind this apparently inexplicable event annoyed him tremendously.

  Could there be a rational explanation? Might one of the library clerks have heard about his research and spoken about him to some impressionable soul, one of those fanatics who live on pseudo-scientific New Age hype? Obsessed with the pyramids or – why not? – with the Etruscans. After all, the Etruscans were second only to the Egyptians in their legendary fascination with the afterlife, and famous for being soothsayers and sorcerers.

  The person on the phone must have seen the light filtering from the windows of the second floor of the museum, and that meant they must be somewhere in the immediate vicinity. Without opening the shutters, he sneaked a look outside to check the buildings opposite the museum and to the sides, but he didn’t spot anything worthy of attention.

  As he was scanning the vicinity, another sound – even more alarming than the phone ringing and the creepy voice of the woman warning him off – broke through the still of night, invading his ears and even more so his imagination: the long, deep howling of an animal, a fierce cry of challenge and pain. A wolf. In the centre of the city of Volterra.

  ‘Christ!’ Fabrizio burst out. ‘What the hell is happening?’

  For the first time in his adult life, the panic and fear he’d felt as a child came flooding back, the sheer terror that had kept him nailed to his bed when the screeching of an owl tore through the night air outside the mountain house where he’d lived then.

  A wolf? Wait. Really, though, why not? Fabrizio remembered reading somewhere that recent environmental protection policies had allowed certain predators to extend their territory along the Apennines, all over Italy. But his logic was shattered to pieces as he heard the ear-splitting howl echo again, closer this time, more threatening. It trailed off finally into an agonized rattle.

  He gathered up his things, turned out all the lights, one after another, and rushed down the stairs towards the lobby. He set the alarm and went out into the street, triple-locking the door behind him. As he walked away, he thought he could hear the phone ringing again inside, shrill and persistent, but there was no way he was going back in. There was no trusting where his imagination would take him.

  His car was parked in a little square not far from the museum, but the distance on foot down the silent, deserted streets that separated him from his ride home seemed never-ending. How could no one have heard? Why weren’t people turning on their lights, looking out of their windows? He stopped more than once, sure he’d heard a pawing sound behind him, or even an uneven panting. Each time he spun around, then picked up his pace. When he reached the square, his car was not there. A surge of panic sent him running from one street to the next, this way and that, with his heart in his mouth and his breath coming in short gasps. He could hear that atrocious howling echoing against every wall, from every archway, at the end of every street.

  He forced himself to stop and to control the panic that was overwhelming him. It took all his willpower to lean against a wall, take a deep breath and make an effort to think clearly. He realized that he must have parked his car in another spot and he tried to remember his movements with some degree of clarity. He started walking and, as his thoughts eventually sorted themselves out, he found himself in the square where he had actually parked his car. He got in, started it up and began driving fast towards the farmhouse in Val d’Era. He was starting to feel that living in such an isolated place, buried, practically, by the vegetation all around it, was perhaps not the ideal choice for his stay in Volterra. He let himself in quickly, shut the door behind him and bolted it.

  He lay down, exhausted by the violent emotions he’d experienced on his first day in the town where he had thought he’d be dying of boredom. He couldn’t help straining his ears, fearing that the howling would start up again. Slowly he began reasoning with a fresh mind. The phone call was the work of some fanatic who had a friend inside the museum, while the howl . . . well, the howling could have been just about anything: a stray dog that had been hit by a car or even some circus animal that had escaped. It wouldn’t be the first time such a thing had happened. As far as his car was concerned, it was simple distraction that had led him astray. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t forgotten where he’d parked his car before. Or looked for it in the wrong place.

  Finally he managed to fall asleep, lulled by the rustling of the oaks and the rush of the river down in the valley.

  2

  CARABINIERE LIEUTENANT Marcello Reggiani got out of the squad car, a Land Rover, and walked swiftly towards the site where the corpse of Armando Ronchetti had been found. Ronchetti was an old acquaintance of La Finanza, the Italian customs and excise police, having been caught red-handed several times peddling objects that had been plundered from the Etruscan tombs in the area: vases, statuettes, even small frescoes detached from the walls using decidedly unorthodox methods.

  Ronchetti had been at the top of his game and had honed his technique to perfection. He would roam the area with what those in the business called a prodder’, an iron rod used to locate and break through the ceilings of the underground tombs. He would circumspectly mark the site and then return later with a car battery and a video camera, which he would drop down into the underground chamber. The camera would be rotated by remote control so he could view what was buried below on a small monitor. He’d close the hole up again, camouflage the area all around and then show the video to the right people and auction off the tomb’s contents. The best bidder would often take the whole lot, or he might sell off a bit at a time, single objects or fragments of frescoes, to whoever offered the highest sum.

  It was even said that he’d got one of his nephews an associate professorship by helping him ‘discover’ and publish the contents of an intact tomb of great importance. Obviously with the promise that the old man would be given the treasure trove compensation that the NAS provided for such fortuitous finds. Quite a pretty penny, in this case. That was the only time in his whole career that the old tomb robber had earned money legally, in a certain sense of the word, besides seasonal jobs taken now and then harvesting olives when he felt the police were breathing down his neck.

  Well, there he was. Ronchetti had earned his last dishonest crust.

  Hell, thought Reggiani, what an
awful way to end a career. He had been covered by a sheet but there was blood everywhere and swarms of flies had settled in. When the officer signalled to his men to lift the sheet, he couldn’t help but wrinkle his face in disgust. Whatever it was that had attacked the man had massacred him. His neck had been devoured, leaving mere strips of flesh, his chest was mangled and one of his shoulders had been ripped away from the collar bone and was lying by his foot.

  ‘Has the doctor seen this?’ asked Reggiani.

  ‘Yeah, he’s been by, but he said he’d wait to do the autopsy at the morgue.’

  ‘Well, what did he say?’

  ‘Some animal with a powerful bite.’

  ‘I can see that for myself. What kind of animal?’

  ‘A stray dog maybe?’

  ‘Come on. Ronchetti wouldn’t have been bothered by a stray, a guy like him used to being out in the fields at every hour of the day or night. It looks like his neck and throat were torn out with a single bite. See that.’

  ‘Yeah, and the doctor noticed these claw marks, here at his shoulder. They’re too big for a dog.’

  ‘Would have been one hell of a dog all right. This has to have been a lion or something of the sort. Are there any circuses in town?’

  ‘No, sir,’ replied the carabiniere.

  ‘Gypsies, then. They’ve been known to have bears with them.’

  ‘We’ll check it out, sir. Can’t say I’ve seen any in the area.’

  The carabiniere covered the corpse with the sheet. The coroner showed up a little later, a greenhorn from Rovereto who’d been at the job no longer than a couple of months, and he gagged at the sight of the body. He took a few notes, snapped a few Polaroid photos, said to let him know when the medical examiner’s report was ready, then went to vomit the rest of his breakfast somewhere else.

  ‘So what do the Finanza have to say about this?’ Reggiani asked the carabiniere.

  ‘Well, sir, this is what I was told. A couple of special agents were searching the area in camo gear because they’d apparently been tipped off—’

  ‘Naturally without breathing a word of it to us.’

  ‘I’m afraid not. Apparently they notice some strange activity, hear some suspicious noises, so they move in and manage to surprise Ronchetti, along with a couple of other guys they couldn’t identify, as they’re opening the pot.’

  ‘Breaking into the tomb.’

  ‘Exactly. As soon as they challenge them, these guys scramble and melt into the bushes. As they’re about to nab one of them, the guy jumps straight down off an overhang that’s steep as hell, lands on his feet and hops on a bicycle that’s sitting there waiting for him. He rides off, pedalling like crazy, on that steep slope that leads down towards Rovaio. At that point, there’s not much the agents can do, so they leave one of their guys to guard the tomb site and go back to headquarters to draw up a report for the National Antiquities Service. At dawn they send up another agent to replace the one who was on duty all night and that’s when they discover the body. They informed us and we came right over.’

  Reggiani took off his cap, sat on a stone in the shade of a tree and tried to compose his thoughts. ‘Did the doctor give an approximate time of death?’

  ‘He thought between two and three in the morning.’

  ‘And what time was it when the agents found these guys with their hands in the honey?’

  ‘Two a.m. precisely.’

  ‘And they didn’t hear a thing? That seems impossible.’

  ‘I don’t know what to say, sir,’ replied the carabiniere. ‘Maybe it’s best to wait for the definitive report. The medical examiner said he’d perform the autopsy as soon as he got the corpse.’

  Just then a siren was heard and a four-wheel-drive ambulance climbed up the slope towards them. Two orderlies came out with a stretcher and loaded the body on to it. They took it back to the vehicle with them and drove off.

  ‘Where’s the tomb?’ asked Reggiani.

  ‘Over here, sir,’ replied the carabiniere, walking first down a path and then into a cluster of junipers and oak saplings. They got to a point where several of the young trees had been recently uprooted, their leaves already wilting. An officer sporting the Finanza insignia emerged from the wood with a pistol.

  ‘It’s OK,’ said Reggiani. ‘It’s us.’

  A slab of sandstone had been moved away, evidently using a couple of crowbars that lay to the side. They could distinctly see the dark opening that led into the tomb.

  ‘A chamber vault,’ explained the officer on guard, who must have taken a quick cultural heritage course at the local university.

  ‘Hmm,’ commented Reggiani. ‘Intact?’

  ‘It looks like it,’ replied the officer. ‘Would you care to take a look, sir?’

  Reggiani approached the entrance and sat on his heels as the officer switched on a torch to illuminate the inside of the tomb. Reggiani could see that the chamber was quite large, about four metres by three, and so must have belonged to an aristocratic family. What surprised him was the absence of any sort of treasure inside, except for a fresco on the back wall which almost certainly represented Charun, the Etruscan demon who ferried the dead to the other world. He could see nothing inside but two sarcophagi facing each other, at least from his limited viewpoint. One was topped by the figure of a woman reclining on a couch, while the other was unadorned and coarsely sculpted, about two metres long by one metre wide and covered by a plain tufa slab. The second sarcophagus had evidently been carved out of bare stone and was quite roughly hewn, as was the slab covering it, although it appeared to be air-tight.

  Reggiani noticed the floor of the chamber was made of tufa, a crumbly rock typical of the area, and seemed to be marked by deep abrasions in every direction. ‘Interesting,’ he commented, getting back to his feet. He turned to the guard and said, ‘We’ll be going now. You keep your eyes open, and if you need us you know where to find us.’

  ‘You can be sure of that, sir,’ replied the officer, lifting his hand to the visor of his cap.

  Reggiani then went back to the squad car and asked to be dropped off at his office in the city. He detested asking the Finanza for information, but he had no alternative now.

  Once at his desk, he picked up the phone and dialled the special operations number to see if he could speak to the men who had been on duty the night before. They were unable to give him a decent description of the two bandits who had got away or of the bicycle used to escape down the path through the Rovaio woods: a man’s bike, black and old, with a triangle frame and rusty handlebars. Hundreds just like it in Volterra and the surrounding countryside.

  He started to search the files to see if he could turn up someone who met the description provided by the agents, while he waited for the medical examiner’s report. That’s what it was like working in these small provincial cities: sheer boredom for months or even years, then suddenly someone gets their head torn off with practically no hint of a scuffle anywhere near the murder site. He knew the colonel would be calling before evening to check how the investigation was proceeding and he could already hear his own answer: it appears we’re groping around in the dark, sir. What else?

  He nevertheless ordered the men in his unit to ascertain whether any ferocious animals had escaped from a circus or Gypsy camp or even from the villa of some eccentric local dabbling in the illegal breeding of panthers, lions or leopards. He’d heard that it was becoming fashionable to raise wild beasts in your backyard. In the meantime, he waited for the results of the post-mortem exam on Ronchetti.

  FABRIZIO ARRIVED at the museum shortly before nine and sat at the desk in his cubicle to begin his work for the day. As he was getting started, there was a knock at the door and a pretty girl walked in. Dark hair, nice figure and nicely dressed as well, not the usual vestal virgin he was used to seeing wandering the halls of museums and NAS offices.

  ‘Hi. You’re Castellani, aren’t you? My name is Francesca Dionisi. I’m an inspector here. The direct
or would like to speak to you.’

  Fabrizio got up and walked out with her.

  ‘Do you live around here?’ he asked as they went down the hall.

  ‘Yes, I do. In the Oliveto neighbourhood, left of the first bend in the road that takes you to Colle Val d’Elsa.’

  ‘Right,’ replied Fabrizio. ‘I’m staying in a place not far from there. At the Semprini farm in Val d’Era.’

  They had almost reached the director’s office.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, before they entered, ‘did you hear anything strange last night?’

  ‘No. Why? What should I have heard?’

  Fabrizio was about to answer when Mario arrived at the top of the stairs.

  ‘Have you heard the latest? They’ve found Ronchetti, the tomb robber, in the fields near Rovaio with his throat slashed open! His head was practically ripped off his body.’

  ‘Who told you that?’ asked a porter.

  ‘My cousin, the one who drives an ambulance. He saw the body himself. It was a mess. They’re saying it was a wild animal, a lion or a leopard or something that escaped from a circus. Remember that panther that got out last year at Orbassano? Well, it’s happened again!’

  ‘When did it happen?’ asked Fabrizio, suddenly pale.

  ‘I don’t know. Two, three o’clock, depends on who you listen to. Last night, anyway.’

  Fabrizio could distinctly hear in his mind that unmistakable cry of a wild animal that had split the night as he sat working in the silence of the museum. A long shiver went down his spine.

  Francesca startled him. ‘What was that sound you were talking about?’

  ‘Well, a scream, I think . . . a . . .’

  She looked at him in surprise and curiosity. He was pale and upset, obviously shaken by some strong emotion.

  ‘Go on in. The director is waiting for you,’ she said to relieve his embarrassment. ‘Come and see me later if you like.’

  She opened the door to Balestra’s office and Fabrizio went in.