Dante's Key

by G. L. Baron

  ‘Can someone confirm it?’

  ‘I hardly went out during the holidays… but some friends came by to wish me well. I think they can confirm it.’

  Sforza decided to try to move the conversation onto another of the elements that he still had not been able to understand, ‘I imagine that many books were written about that triplet of Dante’s. Is one the Secret of the Cursed Painters?’

  The professor nodded.

  ‘Would you like to tell me about it? What was your relationship with Cavalli Gigli?’

  ‘I met him five years ago. We weren’t particularly close. We got in touch sometimes… but not very often. Best wishes for festivities and birthdays, that kind of thing.’

  ‘What was your book about?’

  Cassini made himself more comfortable on the couch. ‘The book is about many things. Mainly the allegories found in many paintings dating between 1500 and 1600. I was in charge of the part on Sandro Botticelli, in some respects a very enigmatic painter. Did you know that he had almost an obsession with Dante Alighieri, and some of his paintings evoke the Divine Comedy?’

  ‘And you, as a great expert on Dante, wanted to know more…’

  ‘Do you know Robert John? He is an English writer whose works at the end of the eighties inspired that part of the book.’

  ‘No,’ admitted Sforza.

  ‘As you are no doubt aware of, according to most scholars of the Divine Comedy, the starting point of Dante’s journey out of the dark forest was near Jerusalem, in the valley of Jehoshaphat.’

  The inspector snorted and crossed his arms.

  ‘If the starting point of the trip was so well-described and really existed, it made me wonder why the white rose – the amphitheatre where the souls of Paradise reside – should be only an imaginary place. I suggested that Dante’s point of arrival could be a physical place, just like the point of departure.’

  ‘You were looking for Paradise in your book?’

  Cassini started to laugh. ‘Of course not! Our book speaks about Tintoretto, Caravaggio and Botticelli. And the reason why the Florentine painter was so obsessed with Dante.’

  Sforza took out another piece of paper and handed it to Cassini; it was the printout attached to the e-mail, of Botticelli’s Primavera, with some numbers printed above the left side of the picture. ‘1, 4; 1000, 300, 10, 9; 3. What do they mean?’

  ‘Have you noticed the characters’ fingers? You see? Each hand indicates a different number of fingers. I thought Botticelli, through the picture’s figures, wanted to suggest a date: March 14, 1319.’

  ‘March 14, 1319,’ Sforza repeated dubiously. ‘And what happened on that date?’

  ‘It was what I wanted to find out. I asked for Cavalli Gigli and a Monsignor’s help, both great experts on the Renaissance.’

  ‘Did they help?’ Sforza urged.

  ‘Unfortunately not. We examined some theories, from Dante being a Templar to a hypothetical journey the poet might have taken on that date… none of them, in my opinion, gave me a definite answer.’

  Just then Sforza’s mobile rang.

  The Interpol agent observed the caller on the display and stood up. Then he went to the window, the downpour beating continuously against it. ‘How? When did it happen?’

  At the other end of the phone a metallic voice spoke for a few seconds, then Sforza replied, ‘How did you identify her?’ Cassini watched Sforza’s expression in silence; it went from smiling, to stiffening and becoming gloomy, in a few moments.

  ‘A gold bracelet? A series of triangles set one on top of the other?’

  Cassini started at Sforza’s words whispered into the mobile.

  A gold bracelet with a series of triangles set one on top of the other… he remembered perfectly…

  19

  Paris, December 31st 6:36 p.m.

  The day prior to Cassini’s visit to the Louvre.

  ‘Will you buy me a drink?’ the girl put her hand on the table, brushing against Manuel Cassini, who was sitting at the counter of Bar Hemingway.

  The professor looked up and stared at her sideways. He was not the type to pick up girls in bars, and at first thought she was a prostitute. He smiled and called for the barman’s attention with a hand gesture. ‘What would you like to drink?’

  She perched on the stool and crossed her legs. She remained silent for a few seconds.

  She had brown shiny hair, big eyes expertly made-up with mascara, and a breath-taking figure. She wore a tight sheath dress and Jimmy Choo sandals with 5-inch heels.

  Not that he was knowledgeable about women’s shoes, but a pair of sandals costing a thousand euro, very similar to those that Clarissa had bought just before she left, did not pass unnoticed.

  ‘A margarita,’ she chuckled, running her tongue over her lips. ‘After all, it is a celebration, right?’

  Prostitute or not, she seemed comfortable in the femme fatale clothes.

  The barman prepared the cocktail in front of them: tequila, fresh lime and a slice of lemon on the rim of the glass. Then he put it on a coaster and placed it in front of the woman.

  She smiled and raised the glass to her mouth. ‘Someone says they drank margaritas in the thirties, in Mexico,’ she whispered in a persuasive tone, as if she had delivered the most scandalous of phrases. ‘So whoever says that they were only invented in the forties… is wrong.’

  Cassini nodded. He sipped his martini and then turned to the girl. ‘Is it a habit of yours to pick up single men in bars?’

  She smiled. ‘Of course not! You are the first.’ She walked over and whispered something in his ear. ‘Forgive me, but I know who you are… I love your work on Dante, Professor Cassini.’

  He seemed surprised. ‘Really?’

  ‘I’ve read all your books, and when I overheard at reception that you were staying here I could not help but come and meet you.’

  Cassini smiled incredulously. It was the first time someone had tried to pick him up. He felt flattered.

  ‘Well, since you know my name…’ he continued, with a cheerful expression, ‘To officially introduce ourselves, you should tell me yours.’ The young professor could not have known it yet, but that meeting would change his life forever. The next morning he would wake up in his suite with a murder charge and a strange selective amnesia.

  ‘How do you do? My name is Meredith Evans.’ The girl smiled and held out her hand. Her gold bracelet inlaid with the triangles gleamed in the dim light.

  20

  File 201X-12-05 10:38:54.

  He could hear his laboured breathing, and his heart beat wildly with emotion.

  He felt the rarefied air, the cold and, despite everything, the sweat on his skin.

  He could hear the murmurs, whispers, the voices, distant sounds of traffic.

  In front of him were the heads of a dozen people who were walking in a procession, neatly, one behind the other.

  He followed them slowly, step-by-step.

  The light was weak and penetrated the windows positioned at the top, on the right side of the hallway. On the other side there was a wooden bench and above, floating on the white wall, fragments of a fresco.

  At the end, you could see a door and a massive iron grate. He crossed the threshold and found himself under the colonnade of a verdant cloister. The arches on the outside were, however, sealed with clear transparent windows.

  He walked a few metres on a grey carpet and found himself in front of a barred doorway. ‘Automatic door,’ said a placard.

  Suddenly the two doors flew open and he slowly entered the room. They closed immediately behind him, leaving him in a cramped, sealed space. The wait lasted only a few moments because another door with tinted windows opened within seconds.

  He crossed the threshold and found himself in a large, dim room. It was long and narrow, with high-up windows on the left side, decorated with Greek key patterns. In the narrower part of the room, there was a fresco, lit by a row of white spotlights; the colours were pale and wash
ed out by time, but his heart began to pound even harder at the sight of it, almost as if it wanted to jump out of his chest.

  He was there and breathing air drenched in history. He could feel it; he might even have been able to touch it.

  He moved closer, until reaching a metal balustrade positioned five metres from the wall. The Last Supper was in front of him, with its faded beauty and its soft colours. The thirteen diners, with Jesus in the centre, seemed alive, ready to walk out of the scene. They were talking and confabulating amongst themselves, forever immortalized in an action-packed instant.

  Suddenly, he heard a noise behind him. He spun around and, as if in a dream, the walls had disappeared, replaced by a black room, covered with a fluorescent green mesh.

  He stood motionless for a moment, staring at the spot where a moment before there had been the wall of the former refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie.

  Aside from that, even the terracotta floor tiles had disappeared. He only saw a big green grid now, a suspended, pulsating heart. He could follow the lines that made up the network, continuing for some metres horizontally and then rising up perpendicularly, drawing an imaginary wall.

  After a few seconds, the wooden benches began to reappear in place of the grid. Then the spotlights that focused on the Greek decorations on the wall, the windows decorated with colourful frescoes and signs with the ban on photographing. Finally, the white, vaulted ceiling.

  His eyes moved again, returning to look at The Last Supper, and even then, for a moment, the fresco was gone, replaced by a black hole covered with a green grid.

  *

  Sheikh Mohamed bin Saif Al Husayn opened his eyes. The image of his laboratory overlapped with that of The Last Supper like a print of two negatives.

  Only his youthful passion for art was left, originating long before the power struggles that had forced him into exile.

  Like many heirs of Arab dynasties, he had studied in Europe. He had spent most of his adolescence in Italy, in a Roman palace that his family had purchased especially for him to study in.

  While his father still sat on the throne, he had mixed with the capital’s high society. Although he had never been a practicing Muslim, it was not all that easy integrating into a deeply Catholic nation. To exorcise his mistrust towards the reality around him, he decided to approach a group whose members were some of his professors. The Knights of Malta were a chivalric order with centuries-old tradition that had made religion their banner. Their formal purpose was – ironically –to defend the Christian world from people like him. Mohamed was convinced, nevertheless, that being part of it could help him integrate better.

  Like all new Knights, he had been awarded the title in San Giovanni Battista in Bragora, a Templar church in Venice. He had even vowed to defend Christianity from the infidels in front of a Catholic priest, a Greek orthodox and an orthodox one.

  Contrary to what he had envisioned, belonging to the Order had not allowed him to overcome his mistrust of Catholicism, but there had been a positive side; in Venice he met the Guardian of Peace, Joonas Eklöf, a young Finnish archaeologist struggling with the Sex dierum iter, an ancient document discovered a few years earlier in the Order’s archive.

  It all began with that document…

  ‘They’ve arrived,’ announced one of the engineers, motionless beside him with a tablet in hand.

  ‘Disconnect me,’ ordered the Sheikh through the electronic voice. Then he rolled his wheelchair towards the entrance.

  It was the 27th of December, and outside the Burj Khalifa the sun had just gone down. The headlights of the cars that were on the ring road seemed like crazed fireflies in search of a destination, just like the jets of water from the large fountain beneath him. A singsong voice from the top of a minaret could be heard in the distance.

  The sliding door of the elevator opened and Meredith, Julia, Dempsey and Nakamichi appeared.

  ‘Welcome back,’ said the Sheikh. His facial expression did not allow him to smile but his eyes clearly radiated happiness… and hope. ‘I’ve just been running the file of the 5th of December. I was right, it’s not a problem with the magnetic field. That’s stable.’

  The young man with the tablet in hand nodded.

  ‘The backup system is no longer good enough… It’s not about imprinting a road race. The amount of data is impressive here; we estimate it is close to a zettabyte. And ultrasound support is too limited…’

  ‘That’s why we’re here,’ Meredith smiled, stroking his head. ‘We have the Florentine file, of subject B, stored on the bio-support.’

  ‘Let’s get to work.’ The Sheikh, happy, turned his wheelchair round and went back towards the centre of the lab. His beloved wife had finally come back to him.

  *

  Two hours later, Meredith, Julia and the Sheikh were around the table in a large meeting room, on the northwest side of the skyscraper. The full moon hung in the sky, and in front of the glass wall – from which they could see the lights of the yachts in the Gulf – a casket made by the goldsmith, Cesare Ravasco, had been placed. It looked like a big easel, with an alabaster support and a rosewood trunk. The top looked like that of a lectern covered with thick crystal. A sketch attributed to Raphael was displayed inside.

  Everyone was silent, subdued.

  After several long minutes, Al Husayn started speaking. ‘Today we did something incredible. I must thank you all for your invaluable work. Obviously, I have to thank Meredith, without her brain, her willingness… and her love, I would not know what I know now.’

  Dempsey looked up; he wanted to say something but then decided not to interrupt.

  ‘Unfortunately,’ continued the Sheikh, ‘The knowledge that we hoped to gain with the experiment in the Uffizi, was not enough.’

  ‘The brain decodes files little by little… we could…’ the American intervened timidly.

  ‘No,’ the host interrupted.

  For a moment no one spoke.

  It was the Sheikh who resumed the subject again; after all, it was he who had developed the technology and knew perfectly well what he could or could not do. Dempsey was wrong. ‘Fear, hope and mood swings. They are all annoying feelings that we cannot eliminate by following this path. They are all factors that affect the files.’

  ‘Shall we concentrate on Cassini?’ Meredith asked.

  ‘The others are gone, unfortunately. He’s the only one left. Get him in front of the Mona Lisa. Use force if necessary.’

  ‘We could make it look like Cavalli Gigli has invited him… Even though he’s dead, we could get inside the computer network of the museum…’

  Dempsey had started to tap on the keys of his laptop.

  ‘He mustn’t find out! That’s the point. I don’t want the file full of useless and misleading data.’

  ‘There could be a way…’ Meredith concluded, winking.

  21

  Paris, New Year’s Day. 2:08 p.m.

  The security offices of the Ritz were on the first floor of the wing overlooking the octagonal corner of Place Vendôme. They had recently been renovated and occupied three windowless rooms connected by steel-clad doors.

  A row of lit monitors covered the entire northern wall. Four computers were positioned beneath it, each with special keyboards and joysticks. The system was able to control, not only the network of one hundred and fifty dome cameras located in every corner of the hotel, but also the sensors installed on the side doors, electrical panels, the continuity modules, and environmental systems.

  ‘Start at 6:34 p.m.’ Sforza was sprawled on a chair with armrests, next to the computer technician operating the console’s controls. Standing behind them, in silence, was the hotel manager, dressed in a black suit, starched shirt and polka dot tie. Nearby, there were two uniformed officers of the Gendarmerie Nationale.

  *

  The image of Meredith reappeared on the central monitor, in a little black dress and heels. She had been filmed in Bar Hemingway the night before, just befor
e her body had been found in a refuse container in La Défense. It had been exactly five days after Al Husayn’s decision to send her to Paris.

  ‘Stop here.’ Sforza pointed at the woman’s image taken by the cameras. ‘That’s the victim. No doubt about it.’

  The image was enlarged and the amber face, immobile in the photo frame that extolled its exotic beauty, remained motionless on the screen.

  ‘Can you zoom in on the bracelet?’ ventured Sforza. As soon as he had heard about the body being found, he had been reminded of that strange bracelet. He remembered seeing an identical one in Florence, when he met the wife of Sheikh Al Husayn for the first time.

  The technician – a huge man of a hundred and fifty kilos – turned. ‘Sure. They are images in 8k, eight times the resolution of full HD,’ he chuckled, while with one hand he pulled out a silver disc from a CD burner and put it on a transparent device. His name was Pierre Vadeleux, he was forty-five years old, and had an unbridled passion for technology. The reason he was head of the Ritz’s control room was just that: the ability to manage equipment and ultra-modern technology. From his position he could see everything and control every aspect of the hotel, and that made him feel like God. ‘If it was a man, I could even focus on his nose hair.’

  ‘Concentrate on the bracelet,’ the director repeated.

  The camera moved to the woman’s wrist.

  ‘It’s identical,’ Sforza decided, after comparing the image with the picture on his cell phone. ‘Our greatest happiness is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall. July 20th. Yours, Mohamed bin Saif.’ The Interpol inspector read the engraving printed on the bracelet’s back – aloud, for the benefit of the others who were in the room.

  ‘It’s lucky that pile of gold hasn’t been removed from her wrist. She certainly didn’t die because of a robbery, and anyway without that bracelet we would never have been able to identify her…’ The gendarme put his hat on and then concluded ‘From the way she was dressed, we would have thought she was a prostitute.’