The Ancient Curse

by Valerio Massimo Manfredi

  She brushed his cheek with her hand. ‘You’re a good guy. You deserve to go places. I had a nice evening too. Ill see you tomorrow.’

  Fabrizio nodded, then got into his car and headed towards the farmhouse. Fortunately, he’d left the front porch light on.

  AT THAT same moment Lieutenant Reggiani was entering the forensics lab at Colle Val d’Elsa. Dr La Bella, a stocky man of about sixty, came to meet him, still wearing a bloody apron.

  ‘I got here as soon as I could,’ said Reggiani. ‘Well, then?’

  ‘Come,’ replied the doctor, and motioned for the officer to follow him first into the locker room and then into his office. The smell of dead bodies saturated the place, overwhelming even the stink of the cigarette butts piled up in a couple of ashtrays on the desk. La Bella lit up a non-filter Nazionale Esportazione, a cigarette that was practically unfindable. A serious professional. Reggiani was impressed.

  ‘I’ve never seen anything like it and I’ve been in this line of work for thirty-five years now,’ he began. ‘When I put the scalpel into the wound it went in this deep,’ he continued, his fingers indicating a length of six or seven centimetres on a convenient pen. ‘No dog that I know of has fangs this long. The entire solar plexus was disarticulated, the upper ribs were torn from his sternum, the collar bone was snapped in two. Almost nothing remains of his trachea. I don’t even know if a lion or a tiger could do this kind of damage.’

  Reggiani looked straight into his eyes and spoke slowly. ‘There are no lions in the area, or panthers, or leopards. I’ve had half of the province inspected. I’ve alerted all our stations, the police, the traffic authorities, even the fire department. There are no circuses or Gypsy camps, no reports of private residences keeping exotic animals. I’ve gone down the list of animal food stores, butchers’ shops, slaughterhouses to check if anyone’s been buying suspicious quantities of meat. And I’ve turned up nothing.’

  La Bella lit another cigarette with the stub of the first, making the air in the little room unbreathable.

  ‘I know I’m not wrong,’ he insisted. ‘Find the animal that did this, Lieutenant, or I’ll soon be slicing into someone else here on my table.’

  ‘What about the time of death?’

  ‘There’s no doubt about that: between two and three o’clock last night.’

  ‘Aren’t there any other tests that could be done – I don’t know, the DNA of the animal’s saliva – so at least we know what we’re looking for?’

  La Bella put out the second cigarette and burst into a hacking cough that seemed to suffocate him while it lasted. When he could breathe again, he said, ‘You must have seen that in some American movie, Lieutenant. Before the file is closed, there won’t be anything but the bones left on this one. The kinds of tests you’re talking about cost a lot of money. They’re only done if there’s been a sexual assault, rape. This is just a poor tomb robber who no one could care less about.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ said Reggiani. ‘Have you already written a report?’

  La Bella opened a drawer and pulled out a folder. ‘Here you are, Lieutenant.’

  Reggiani thanked him, shook his hand and said goodbye. As he was leaving he turned, gripping the door handle. ‘You must have some idea, right?’

  ‘I do,’ replied La Bella. ‘If I had to picture it, I’d say an animal weighing at least a hundred, a hundred and twenty kilos, with powerful claws and fangs six or seven centimetres long, jaws strong enough to break a bull’s backbone. So . . . a female lion, for example, or a panther. Oh, by the way, I had the crime lab check for hairs, but they found nothing. Isn’t that incredible? Not a single hair. What about you? Did you sweep the site?’

  Reggiani shook his head in commiseration. ‘That’s the first thing I did. The ground was inspected over an area of four or five metres all around the spot where Ronchetti’s corpse was found and what we came up with was turned over to the lab.’

  ‘Well, then?’

  ‘Human hairs: Ronchetti’s. No trace of anything else, not even cat hair.’

  La Bella got up to accompany him out. ‘I don’t know what else to say, my dear Lieutenant. If it’s so important to you, I can see about a DNA analysis.’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘But I’m not promising anything.’

  ‘Naturally.’

  Soon his Alfa Romeo pulled out, tyres squealing, and took off in the direction of Volterra. Once he was back in his office, Reggiani picked up the phone and dialled a mobile number.

  ‘Sergeant Massaro,’ replied the voice on the other end.

  ‘This is Lieutenant Reggiani. How are things going there?’

  ‘Nothing’s happened, sir. In half an hour the replacements should show up, for us and the Finanza agents.’

  ‘All right, but don’t let your guard down. Don’t play cards, don’t read comics, don’t sleep in the squad car. Keep your eyes open and each other’s arses covered, because you’re in danger. Get that? Your lives are in danger. Is that clear?’

  There was a momentary pause on the other end, then the voice answered, ‘Perfectly clear, sir. We’ll be careful.’

  Reggiani looked at his watch: one a.m. He loosened his tie and unbuttoned his jacket, leaned back into his chair and sighed. It felt like the night would never end.

  FABRIZIO left the house at seven and drove directly to the excavation site, where the carabiniere on guard greeted him.

  ‘How’d it go last night?’ asked Fabrizio.

  ‘Fine. We didn’t see a soul.’

  ‘Thank God. If you like, you can go.’

  ‘No, the lieutenant says it’s best for one of us to stick around. You never know. Another agent’s coming to relieve me in an hour’s time and I’m hoping he brings coffee.’

  ‘I have coffee for you,’ said Fabrizio, unscrewing the cap of a Thermos he took from his backpack. ‘I’m never awake before I’ve had three cups, so I always carry extra with me. I see the workers haven’t shown up yet.’

  He sat on a block of smooth tufa, while the carabiniere remained on his feet with his left hand resting on the trigger of his sub-machine gun as they sipped their coffee in the cool morning air. A lovely October morning, with the leaves just turning colour and the hawthorn and dog-rose berries taking on red and orange hues.

  The pickup with the workers and the gear arrived and Fabrizio walked over to the driver.

  ‘I think the door is resting on its hinges, stone on stone. We’ll have to clear away at least five centimetres under the wings, then clean the hinges by hosing them down with water and hope the door will open by pushing it back.’

  The workers set about the task, using their pickaxes first to prise off the latch that crossed the two wings and then their mattocks to clear away the soil underneath the door. When they had worked their way down to a thin layer of earth, Fabrizio took over, using his trowel to scrape away the last centimetres, a little at a time, until the edge slipped inside.

  The air flowing out brought no particular smell to his nostrils, apart from the odour of damp earth. The unmistakable whiff of millennia, so familiar to an archaeologist’s nose, had been lost when the tomb robbers broke in. When the soil underneath the door had all been cleared away, he used the nozzle of a small compressor connected to a generator and freed the hinges of encrusted dirt with a pressure wash. The time had come to open the doors.

  He got to his feet and motioned for the workers to join him. One on the right and the other on the left, with him in the centre, pushing at the meeting point of the two door panels. They began applying steady, uniform pressure under Fabrizio’s direction.

  ‘Slowly, slowly, here we go. There’s no rush. Just a bit more now . . .’

  The two door panels finally separated from each other with a slight grinding of fine sand, letting the first beam of light into the tomb after 2,500 years. The scowl of Charun – the demon who accompanied the dead to the other world – greeted him. A fresco of good quality, the work of an artist from Tarquinia, F
abrizio thought at first glance. He had the men push the wings open further, enough to allow him to enter with ease. He turned around before he went in, remembering Francesca’s words and hoping that she’d be there to share this emotional moment with him. No one.

  It was twelve o’clock exactly when he entered under the sign of the new moon and stepped across the threshold of the ancient tomb. He waited to allow his vision to adjust to the shadowy light and to the contrast between the sliver of wall illuminated by the bright sun and the gloom all around.

  It was on his left that he first distinguished the body of a reclining woman sculpted softly into a block of alabaster. The statue represented a person at the height of her beauty, at an age which wasn’t definable, maybe thirty or so. She was resting on her right elbow so that she faced the other sarcophagus on the opposite wall. The contrast was striking: the second coffin was a bare, roughly carved block of sandstone, without the slightest embellishment of any sort.

  The female figure was wearing her jewellery: a necklace, a bracelet, rings and earrings, and her hair was gathered at the nape of her neck with a ribbon. Her facial expression, in the pale flesh tones of the alabaster, was extraordinarily sweet, but a further glance revealed an intense, pained pride.

  Fabrizio couldn’t get over the strangeness of the situation. He walked up to the first sarcophagus and ran his hand lightly along its edge. What he discovered in doing so was even more mystifying: it was sculpted in a single block of stone, almost certainly solid, which meant that there was no one buried inside. A cenotaph: a symbolic tomb. This was rare, for Etruscan times; in fact, it was possibly the only one of its kind. Fabrizio had never seen, or read about, anything like it. He carefully inspected the sides and the back but could find no sign of a separation between the coffin and its cover. What was also very unusual was the absence of a name or marking of any kind.

  He turned towards the second sarcophagus and was struck by how the floor around it was scored by deep, irregular gouges, as if iron claws had scratched away at that smooth finish. His mind was flooded with fangs and claws, with that ferocious howl ripping through the night.

  Fabrizio forced himself to start taking measurements and to draw the layout of the tomb with the various objects it contained. But his eyes kept going back to that rough sarcophagus towering there in front of him and he dreaded the moment of coming to terms with what was inside.

  He came out at one o’clock to have a sandwich and get a breath of fresh air. He lingered in the hopes that Francesca would turn up. He wanted her to be there when he opened the coffin. The carabinieri had a little camp stove for making coffee and Fabrizio joined them in a cup before going back in.

  The workers had already been to fetch the necessary equipment. They placed one wooden horse in front of and one behind the sarcophagus, set a beam across them and hung an electric winch connected to a power generator from the beam. The cable hanging from the winch ended with a ring, on to which four more cables were attached. Each of these ended in a specially shaped aluminium bracket, which was applied to one of the four corners of the lid.

  Fabrizio made sure there were no cracks in the stone and then, at exactly three fifteen, threw the switch that powered the winch at its slowest speed. The four steel cables pulled straight at the same moment and slowly lifted off the lid without making the slightest noise.

  At first the inside of the big coffin was so dark that Fabrizio couldn’t make out what it contained. But this time he got a good whiff of the scent of millennia: the smell of must and mould, of damp stone and dust. An indefinable odour whose diverse components had had all the time they needed to decompose and recombine a thousand times with the passage of the seasons, of the centuries. The work of ages, of heat and cold, and above all of silence.

  He switched on his torch and shone it inside. The contents emerged all at once from the dark, freezing the blood in his veins and cutting his breath short. He had expected to find an urn with the ashes of the deceased, along with all the usual objects that accompanied the funeral rites. What met his eyes instead was a scene of horror, covered only by the thin veil of dust that had fallen from the inside of the sandstone lid over the centuries.

  He saw a tangle of human and animal bones, all jumbled up and practically fused together by a fury and ferocity beyond any limit. Enormous clawed paws, a disarticulated jaw with monstrous fangs still attached, and a human body that was barely recognizable. Shattered bones, mangled limbs, a crushed skull whose top dental arch yawned wide in a scream of pain that could no longer be heard but was still present, desperate, immortal. Both the coffin walls and the inner lid were scored with the deep abrasions that Fabrizio had seen on the ground outside.

  There was no doubt about what had happened here. A human being had been buried together with a wild animal that had torn the body apart and then tried to writhe and claw its way out of that narrow stone prison before dying of suffocation. Fragments of coarse cloth were still sticking here and there to what was left of the man’s head, and this detail left no doubt in Fabrizio’ mind as to the horrifying ritual that had brought about this person’ death.

  He pulled back from the coffin, his face pale and beaded with cold sweat, murmuring, ‘Oh, Christ my God. A . . . a Phersu . . . ’

  4

  FRANCESCA ARRIVED at about five and saw that the workers had already loaded a sarcophagus on to the pickup and were removing the winch cables. It was a striking alabaster cenotaph coffin with the figure of a woman reclining on a triclinium. She saw that the door to the tomb was open and had been entered. Fabrizio was leaning into the other roughly hewn sarcophagus with his head and arms practically inside.

  He straightened up when he heard her footsteps and she was shocked by the expression on his face. He looked as if he had been to hell and back.

  ‘What’s happened? You look horrible.’

  ‘I’m a little tired,’ he said, motioning for her to join him. ‘Look at this. Have you ever seen anything like it?’

  Francesca leaned over the open coffin and her smile disappeared instantly. ‘Good God. It’s a . . .’

  ‘A Phersu . . . I think it’s a Phersu. Look at the skull. There are still shreds of the sack they closed his head in.’

  ‘This is a sensational discovery! I would say that this is the first time archaeological evidence of this ritual has ever been found. Up until now, we’ve only seen it represented in the iconography.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right, Francesca, but I don’t feel satisfied or excited. When I opened the lid and saw this scene I thought I was having a heart attack. It felt like it had just happened.’

  Well, that’s only natural,’ said Francesca. ‘The same thing happened to me when I excavated the harbour at Herculaneum with Contini. Those scenes of death and desperation seemed crystallized in time and were still laden with human drama . . . at least for me.’

  ‘What do you think this poor wretch did to deserve such an end?’

  ‘Come on, you know he was already dead when they shut him in the sarcophagus.’

  ‘All right, let’s say he was dead, but what led up to this? I mean, have you seen that animal inside? I’ve . . . never seen anything like it.’

  Francesca leaned into the coffin again to peer inside, more apprehensively this time. ‘What do you think it is?’

  ‘It looks like a dog, but—’

  ‘Yeah, it does, but its snout is so long and it’s . . . enormous. Did they have dogs that big back then?’

  ‘Don’t ask me. I have no idea. I want to contact a friend of mine in Bologna tonight. Sonia Vitali is a palaeozoologist. I’ll email her a picture. Hopefully she’ll be free to come here and have a look at these bones.’

  ‘What do you have left to do here?’

  ‘I’ve photographed everything, both on film and digitally, and I’ve recorded the position of every find inside the coffin. I just have to remove the remains.’

  ‘Does Balestra know?’

  ‘I called him at the o
ffice and on his mobile phone, but he’s not answering. Have you seen him?’

  ‘I haven’t been at the museum today. But it seems strange you can’t reach him. I think he’d like to see the finds in their original positions.’

  ‘I’m sure he would, but both the Finanza and the carabinieri are telling me they can’t ensure continuing surveillance. That’s why I’ve had the alabaster sarcophagus loaded on to the truck and now I have to remove everything else. I can’t leave things here unguarded. Not that there’s anything precious, but you never know . . .’

  ‘Then I’ll help you,’ said Francesca.

  She set to work with Fabrizio, picking out every little fragment, every last bit of that tragedy, and packaging it all up into plastic boxes. They put little yellow tags on each with the wording: ‘Rovaio tomb. Sarcophagus A. Human and animal remains.’ This formulation was as vague and confused as the situation that had presented itself once the coffin was opened.

  Eventually nothing remained in the big chamber except for the bare sarcophagus, whose lid had been replaced. The boxes were numbered and loaded one by one on to a foam-rubber bed in the pickup. Each box had been wrapped in sacking and placed in a plastic bag to prevent dehydration. It was seven thirty by the time everything was ready.

  ‘What about the door?’ asked Francesca. ‘I know people who could sell that for a fortune to some fence in Switzerland.’

  ‘It’s awfully heavy,’ replied Fabrizio. ‘They’d need a thirty-ton crane. A truck that size could never make it down this path and the carabinieri said they’d send a vehicle over during the night. I think we can relax. When Balestra gets back, we’ll ask him what should be done.’

  Francesca nodded. ‘You know, you don’t seem like a bumbling academic in the least! You’d make a fine inspector!’

  ‘Thanks. I imagine that’s a compliment.’

  Francesca smiled. ‘Listen, you’ve done a great job.’

  ‘It wasn’t difficult. There wasn’t any stratigraphical work, just the two sarcophagi.’