“Meaning that he actually needs to get rid of me if he wants to erase all the pertinent evidence—I reached that same conclusion. It’s either that or he needs me alive for some reason.”
“Which means that we’re also on the hit list because we now know what you know—cool,” Peaches said with a grin. We didn’t share the same views on risk management.
“But what about the police?” Rupert asked.
“I saw no one, I assured them, which I didn’t. The X-ray machine was never mentioned and the plundered casket spoke for itself.” Markus poked a fork at his food but made no move to eat. “I suspect that will be the end of the investigation, which, under the circumstances, is probably for the best.”
“My word!” Rupert exclaimed while delicately decapitating a sardine.
“I agreed to have Connie contact you because I don’t know how long I can keep this up,” Markus continued. “I need your help. I need you to catch these bastards, retrieve that skull, and keep me alive in the process. I have a little money to pay you but I believe I can access more, if needed.”
“How did you communicate with Connie?” I asked.
“By the hotel phone.” Markus shook his head. “Another blunder, I know.”
“Had we that skull, we could use DNA testing to determine if it belonged to a royal personage, I take it?” Evan inquired.
“Yes.” Staring at his food, Markus nodded. “The phenotype aspects like the color of the eyes plus geographical origin and the presence of certain mutations would have confirmed what we suspected all along: that the crowned individual was a Hapsburg.”
“Hapsburg?” Rupert gasped.
“Wow, a Hapsburg,” Peaches exclaimed. “Those are the royals with the mega-jaw, right?”
“Among other abnormalities. This skull had a Hapsburg jaw as well as certain bone markings that indicated the subject had had primitive brain surgery,” Markus commented.
“Brain surgery in those days?” Peaches asked.
“It was a rare event, but presumably a royal who could afford the best surgeons in the land might be in enough of a crisis to warrant such extreme measures.”
I badly needed to brush up on my European royalty but at the moment I was fixed on separating our allies from our enemies. “Connie said something about somebody offering to help? Is this the source of the money you mentioned?” I asked.
Markus sighed. “Another anonymous contact. That particular message came to me by way of a note shoved under the door of my room. It’s in my package.”
“Package?” Even asked.
“I brought it with me.”
Evan and Rupert exchanged glances. Peaches and I did the same because we caught them doing it.
“Right,” Evan said, standing. “We’re here to help protect you and track down that missing skull.”
“But you must tell us everything. Who do you believe is this hapless headless Hapsburg interloper? Where are these X-rays and printouts?” Rupert asked.
Markus tossed down his napkin and stood. “Right here. This contains everything I know. You take it. It feels radioactive to me.” He reached inside his jacket and brought out a plump manilla envelope, which he held over the table. Both Evan and Peaches reached for it at the same time but Peaches, being closer, won.
“Perfecto!” she said, waving the envelope in triumph at Evan. “We’ll start here.”
Markus took his seat and picked up his fork. “I suggest you study the contents someplace else. You’ll need plenty of table space. Maybe we should go back to your accommodations after dinner?”
“Excellent idea,” Rupert said, “but can you tell us anything about this anonymous employer in the meantime?”
“He’s Jose’s friend,” Markus commented between bites. “You’ll have to read the note.”
5
It was close to ten o’clock before we finished supper, ending our meals with a plate of the delectable custard pastries the Portuguese call pasteis de nata for which I was to develop an addiction. I even took a box back to the Airbnb.
Stuffed and a little buzzed after the wine, we left the restaurant with Markus beside Rupert walking in the middle of the sidewalk and Peaches and Evan taking positions front and back. We were in guard dog mode.
I was left to scan the perimeters for possible stalkers from the rear, something for which I’d had plenty of practice. But the leafy streets and roads were quiet except for the occasional car or tramway slipping by, and the shadowy doorways and narrow alleys guarded their secrets. If anyone was ghosting our heals that night, we saw no sign, making it a quick and uneventful downhill trek to our accommodations.
Less than twenty minutes later, we were settled around the table of Rupert and Evan’s penthouse suite beside a pair of double doors open to the cool evening air. The only thing in our line of sight were the tops of the tile-roofed buildings.
Peaches handed me the envelope while Evan made the coffee. Everyone looked on while I placed the pages of Markus’s package on the table in some kind of linear fashion. Four poor-quality black-and-white printouts taken from Wikipedia were laid out along with two prints of portraits from the same source. Two brackish, nearly indecipherable X-rays crowned the top, and I placed the plain white envelope from the anonymous contact at the very bottom.
“You can see that my research was very preliminary. I only began to Google after Jose left so I could gain a basic understanding of what our find involved.”
The portraits caught my eye immediately.
“Who’s this?” I asked, picking up the print of a boy standing in a doublet with an ermine cloak over his shoulders and a castle in the background. Though the copy was muddy, it was clearly of some wealthy offspring in the 1500s, ermine being reserved for only the richest and the royal-est, and doublets a gent’s fashion statement of the day. Of course, the castle’s curb appeal brought its own cachet.
“Crown Prince Don Carlos of Spain, who died in 1568.”
“So you think he’s the owner of the missing skull?” I asked, staring at the youth.
“Almost 99.9 percent certain based on the skull alone. Don Carlos had noted spinal deformities plus a serious head injury in his early twenties that resulted in an extraordinary surgery that ultimately saved his life,” Markus said. “Verdi made him into the hero of an opera but the truth indicates he was anything but heroic.”
“Actually, Schiller was the author of that play and Verdi put it to music,” Rupert said, “and it truly was a work of fiction with little relation to the truth therein but the personages themselves.”
Evan strode to the table with a tray of mugs and a coffeepot. “That’s Don Carlos? By all accounts he was a mentally disturbed young man even before the fall that severely damaged his skull. He wreaked such havoc in his short lifetime that his father was forced to lock him away until his death.”
“Ah, yes, Don Carlos,” Rupert mused, taking the picture from my hand. “That fine opera based totally on fictional elements was the only known benefit of the poor boy’s existence. By all accounts, he was a nasty piece of work who liked to whip girls and torture small animals. I deduced that it might be him. Though inbreeding of European royal families at the time—both Don Carlos’s mother and grandmother were Portuguese princesses and his parents were double first cousins—caused numerous genetic issues, I cannot see why a lad such as this would end up in a Portuguese tomb. His parents were buried in Spain.”
“There lies the mystery,” Evan remarked as he poured a round of coffee for all.
I pointed to one of the articles. “And this Don Carlos had a deformed spine as well as the Hapsburg jaw?”
“He was described as ‘hunchbacked and pigeon-breasted’ with one leg considerably shorter than the other, but without the skeleton to examine we can’t attest to those deformities,” Markus said, accepting a mug. Much calmer now, the man simply looked haggard. “Nevertheless, from the skull alone I believe he’s our boy, the heir-apparent to King Philip II of Spain.”
Peaches leaned over my shoulder. “He was big on making a statement with his clothes, I see.”
“Royalty knew that clothes speak,” I said. “This outfit says, ‘I am mighty in battle, a born conqueror, and my daddy can beat your daddy any day.’ That daddy would be the Holy Roman Emperor King Charles V. Watch out, mere mortals.”
“And Protestants,” Evan remarked. “King Philip would come to see himself as the defender of the Catholic church and owned lands on every continent of the then known world. He sought Catholic world domination.”
“And this is one of the Titian portraits,” I marveled. “For ten years Titian worked for the Spanish court, transcribing parts of Ovid’s Metamorphoses into paintings. At one time he even served as the royal portraitist.”
“Bet King Bling couldn’t have been too happy at having a less than perfect eldest son,” Peaches commented. “Those dudes preferred perfect progeny, didn’t they?”
“Most parents prefer it, I suppose, but kings demanded it. What about his queen, the royal mother?” I asked.
Evan stroked his chin. “If I recall correctly, King Philip had four queens in total with all but one predeceasing him, including Carlos’s mother, his first wife.”
“Maria Manuela of Portugal.” Rupert was reading from one of the Wiki printouts. “She gave birth to the prince in 1545 and died four days later, poor lady.” He pointed to the portrait of a woman, her expressionless face gazing away into space as if anticipating her fate.
“It was not a good time to be a woman,” I whispered, gazing down at the portrait, “or a physically and mentally challenged prince, for that matter.”
My eyes slipped up to the X-rays. Both were as hard to distinguish as a puddle of shadows, but one was more promising than the other. Here, a ghostly image of a skull rose from the background with evenly spaced holes visible around the upper circumference and an alarming fissure that appeared to have fused together. “Is that where the supposed crown sat? It does look like it had been…”
“Bolted to the bone? Precisely. You can just see what looks to be holes,” Markus said, following my gaze. “That’s what started this mess—a skull that once had something appended to the bone, something that could have been a crown.”
“Somebody actually banged a crown on this poor guy’s head while he was still alive?" Peaches asked.
Markus sipped his coffee. “Possibly. Hard to tell whether the man was alive or dead at the time without the skull to investigate and even that might not reveal much after all this time. However, I think it’s safe to say that whoever did this had a bone to pick with the prince—pun intended. First the deed was done—probably close to the time of the prince’s death—and then, presumably sometime later, the skull was moved to the crypt of Capela de Soa Maria Baptista, perhaps with the crown intact.”
“Possibly for safekeeping,” Evan mused.
“Possibly,” Markus agreed, “only someone either stole the crown at the time of the decapitation or at a later date. And then, for whatever reason, someone stole the skull earlier this week.”
“But why?” I asked.
“That is the question.” Markus nodded, looking away. “It seems as though somebody long ago believed the prince and his ill-gotten crown required protection.”
“But what value is the skull without the crown?” Evan asked. “Crowns are precious commodities in themselves but skulls are not, unless…”
“Unless the skull had some reliquary-like value,” I added.
“But why was he permanently wearing a crown in the first place?” Peaches asked.
“Yes, why? No royal personage that I am aware of was ever buried wearing a crown, let alone one pounded into their skull,” I said.
“Because the crown belonged to the monarchy, not the monarch,” Rupert pointed out.
“This one couldn’t have belonged to the monarchy, at least not officially,” I said. “Someone would have noticed it missing.”
“Making this one a special crown,” Evan remarked. “Special enough for the monarchies involved—Spain and Portugal, to begin with—not to miss it when the crown disappeared, presuming it did disappear and wasn’t of some secret nature from the start.”
“But lots of people must have known about its existence initially,” I said. “I mean, if Prince Carlos was crowned under unusual circumstances, as in at the time of his death, and his crowned skull later moved for safekeeping, what does that say? Nothing about this is a one-person job.”
“Indeed, it has all the making of a secret society,” Rupert said, rubbing his hands together.
“Do we know if the prince’s intact remains are at his place of burial in Spain?” Evan asked.
“We have yet to make those inquiries,” Markus said. “Officially he was buried near Madrid at his father’s El Escorial palace and monastery complex, which is where most of the kings and queens of Spain were interred after the mid-1500s.”
“Those tombs are closely guarded and everyone will assume that they have remained undisturbed,” Evan said.
“In any event, he was first and foremost a prince of Spain, regardless of his various royal affiliations,” Rupert remarked. “Though no one has had reason to exhume the remains, at least not officially, I can’t imagine his skull being shuffled off to Portugal with his father’s knowledge.”
Markus cradled his mug in his hands, as if he found the warmth comforting. “I can only say that there would have been no room for two intact bodies in the casket of Senhor Pedro Alavares Fidalgo. According to his stone effigy, Fidalgo was a portly man and would have filled the coffin with his own girth. From the best we can tell, the prince’s skull was added later, with or without the crown.”
“Skulls are easier to transport than full skeletons,” Evan remarked.
That grim fact settled in around us as we stood sipping our coffees and considering the implications.
“And then last week, someone picked up the trail and stole the skull. How weird is that?” Peaches said, setting her mug down on the kitchen counter. “All righty, so who else knows about the true nature of the theft besides you, Markus, this poor Jose dude, the tomb robbers, and now all of us?”
I stared at the white envelope on the table. Rupert picked it up, unfolded the thick bond contents, and began to read aloud.
“Dear Mr. Collins,
“Jose Balboa contacted me with details of your extraordinary find, knowing as he did that it would be of great interest to me. Now I have learned through my sources that he has been murdered and your discovery stolen. You are in extreme danger but know that you are not alone.
“My resources are at your disposal. Please meet me in the gardens of the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga at 5:00 p.m. on Friday, September 12. I can be recognized as a white-haired gentleman with a cane carrying a Hieronymus Bosch carrier bag. Please make every effort to come as to do otherwise may have dire consequences.
“Arrive alone and, at all costs, exercise the greatest caution.
“A Concerned Friend”
“A concerned friend?” Rupert turned to Markus. “How extraordinary.”
“He knew Jose. What do you think your dead colleague may have told him?” I asked, turning to Markus.
Markus frowned and put down his mug. “I’m guessing everything, at least everything we knew up to that point. We had only taken the X-rays that afternoon and Jose must have called the man shortly after that. He was always dashing off to pick up lunch or buy us coffee so he had plenty of opportunity. It wasn’t until later that evening when we were keeping watch that Jose confessed that he’d told an interested party about our discovery. Naturally, I exploded. We had agreed to keep the lid on this find and there he was discl
osing the details to this friend.”
“What was his defense?’ Evan asked.
“He explained that this was a very powerful person who could intervene if necessary in case the skull was hijacked by another interested party. By the time the call came from his wife to return home, I was almost relieved to have him go.”
“And then this supposed powerful friend slips this note under your door,” Evan said.
Markus rubbed a hand over his eyes. “So bloody cloak-and-dagger.”
“Do you plan on keeping the appointment tomorrow?” Rupert asked, turning to him. “Because, I must say, it seems most unwise to do so given that you are clearly in some danger.”
“I don’t know what to do,” Markus moaned. “On one hand, I want to get to the bottom of this and, naturally, I want that skull back and to continue our work—if the authorities will permit it. But I’d rather stay alive as long as possible, thank you very much, and with the thieves threatening me, I figure I’m already as good as dead. All the interested parties must know that I’ve told the four of you but what alternative did I have—say nothing and go this whole thing alone? I doubt I’d even be safe back in England right now.”
“Fear not, my good chap, we are on your side now and will get to the bottom of this while keeping you safe. You must stay here tonight—we have a perfectly serviceable pull-out couch—and Evan will go with you to fetch your things from your hotel in the morning,” Rupert said while patting Markus on the arm. “But, indeed, you should not meet this mysterious emissary tomorrow as that would be far too risky. One of us will go in your stead.”
“I will,” I said with all the authority I could muster. Both Rupert and Evan looked ready to protest as Peaches gave me a thumbs-up. “As a woman, I may be less threatening considering that it’s Markus that Mr. Anonymous is expecting. Peaches will be my backup.”
6
Convincing the team of my suitability was not easy. It was a tiresome argument that I’d had many times with Rupert and Evan but wasn’t in the mood for that night. I pointed out that brawn, height, and even MI6 training were probably not needed when meeting a “white-haired gentleman with a cane.” I didn’t even mention my own martial arts capabilities, of course—that would have been overkill. In all respects, I was perfect for the job.
The Crown that Lost its Head Page 5