The Nosferatu Scroll

by James Becker

  Bronson just looked at him. ‘We’ve been through all this, Inspector. Even if you won’t admit it publicly, you know perfectly well that there’s a gang of people operating in Venice who’ve been snatching girls off the street and bleeding them to death. The men I saw earlier today were vandalizing tombs on the Isola di San Michele which contain the bodies of people who they believe were once vampires. Those are the facts as I see them, and that is your link.’

  ‘And your wife? Why was she had abducted? Does she think she’s a vampire as well?’

  Bianchi’s face wore a slight smile as he asked the question, and Bronson resisted the temptation to plant his fist firmly on the man’s jaw.

  ‘No, Inspector. Like me, and I hope like you, she knows vampires don’t exist.’

  ‘Then why was she abducted?’

  ‘Because when we examined the first grave on San Michele, she spotted an old book at the bottom of the tomb, underneath the remains of the body, which she removed. That’s why our hotel room was burgled, and that’s why Angela was abducted.’

  ‘Why didn’t you mention this before?’ Bianchi snapped.

  Bronson shrugged. ‘It didn’t honestly seem that important at the time. Now, I wish we’d just walked away from that first broken tomb and never spoken to a soul.’

  ‘Yes,’ Bianchi murmured, ‘hindsight is a wonderful tool.’

  ‘So this island …’ Bronson continued. ‘Are you going to send somebody to check it out?’

  Bianchi nodded, somewhat reluctantly. ‘You’ve made a report, and I am duty-bound to respond to it, no matter how unbelievable your statement is, and despite my personal misgivings. I will order one of our police patrol boats to go out there now and make inquiries.’

  This wasn’t quite the response that Bronson had been hoping for, but it was better than nothing.

  ‘Can I go with them?’ he asked. ‘That way I can make sure they go to the right place.’

  ‘Certainly not,’ Bianchi said. ‘If they find anything – which I doubt very much – I will call you at your hotel. You will be there, won’t you?’

  The inference was obvious. ‘I might be out and about,’ Bronson said, lightly, ‘so it would probably be best if you called me on my mobile instead.’

  Bianchi looked at him in silence for a few moments, and then nodded. ‘Very well, Signor Bronson. Just ensure that you stay out of trouble. I wouldn’t want our patrol officers to visit that island and find that you were already there. Do you understand what I mean?’

  ‘Of course,’ Bronson said. ‘I can promise you that they won’t see me anywhere near the island.’ Which wasn’t quite the same as saying he wouldn’t go there, of course, but it seemed to satisfy Bianchi.

  Ten minutes later, Bronson was walking quickly back through the crowded streets to where he’d moored the powerboat. He started the engine, cast off the line, and motored slowly away, deep in thought.

  The first thing he was going to have to do, he knew, was top-up the boat’s fuel tank, to ensure that he had enough petrol for whatever the night might bring.

  He was also worried about Bianchi’s apparent reluctance to take his claim seriously. The island might be the property of an Italian politician, but Bronson couldn’t think of a single country anywhere in the world that didn’t have a large and successful crop of corrupt politicians – and in Italy being corrupt seemed to be a part of the job description for a career in government.

  His second worry was that Bianchi was only apparently going to send a single patrol boat over to the island, where the officers would presumably ask politely if anybody in the house knew anything about the bunch of murdered girls. He could guess the probable answer. And that was assuming that Bianchi actually sent anyone at all.

  Bronson had seen the fast, blue-and-white patrol boats in the Venetian lagoon – normally crewed by about three or four officers apparently only armed with pistols, though it was possible, Bronson guessed, that they might have heavier weapons inside the vessels. Even so, they were obviously more concerned with minor crimes, essentially traffic offences, committed on the waters of the lagoon rather than anything more serious.

  But the thing that concerned him most wasn’t anything Bianchi had said. It was actually something the inspector hadn’t said. Specifically, it was a question the man hadn’t asked. It was, of course, possible that Bianchi had simply missed it, in which case it just meant he wasn’t a particularly good policeman, but Bronson doubted this. In his short acquaintance with Bianchi, the inspector had never struck Bronson as a particularly likeable character, but he had always seemed competent.

  The other explanation was that Bianchi hadn’t needed to ask the question because he already knew the answer, and this was a real worry.

  56

  Angela heard the engine note of the powerboat die away to nothing a few seconds after it reached the jetty. Moments later, Marco opened the door to the cabin and stepped inside.

  Angela tensed, wondering if she dare try to escape right then but, even before he unlocked the handcuff, she realized any attempt was doomed to failure: another one of the men stood waiting by the cabin door, clearly ready for trouble. She doubted she could tackle Marco with any degree of success, and she certainly couldn’t cope with the two of them. So she meekly allowed her wrists to be handcuffed in front of her, and was led along the path from the jetty and back towards the house.

  She was almost at the door when an unearthly howling noise echoed from somewhere nearby. Angela froze in mid-stride, her eyes wide as she stared around her. She couldn’t pinpoint the location of the sound, but she was certain it was very close.

  ‘What on earth was that?’ she asked.

  Marco didn’t bother to reply, just led her through the front door of the house and into the drawing-room. Only when she was standing beside the desk were the handcuffs finally removed.

  ‘So what now?’ Angela asked.

  ‘I would have thought that was obvious. One of my men is making a photocopy of the scroll. As soon as he’s done that, you can start translating it. And then we’ll find the answer.’

  ‘The answer to what?’

  But before Marco could reply there was a double knock on the door and one of his men appeared carrying half a dozen sheets of paper. Marco took them, glanced at each in turn, and then placed them on the desk in front of Angela.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Get started.’

  Angela knew she had no choice. She picked up the first sheet and looked at it. She’d already seen that the writing on the scroll was indistinct, the ink a faded grey against the brown of the parchment, but the photocopies were actually fairly clear. She nodded and reached for the Latin–English dictionary she’d been using previously.

  Within minutes it was clear that what she was looking at was not a piece of text like those she’d worked on before. The first two pages appeared simply to contain a list of names, divided up into groups and interspersed by a number of Latin words that she had not encountered before. Words like agnatus, abdormitus and cognationis appeared frequently, and it was only when she translated these expressions that she realized what she was looking at. Agnatus meant a ‘blood relative in the male line’; abdormitus translated as ‘died’, and cognationis referred to a ‘blood relationship’, a meaning that she’d guessed even before the dictionary confirmed it. The list was simply a genealogy, one section of a family tree.

  The first name on the list was familiar to her, because she’d seen it somewhere in the very recent past, though it still took her a few seconds to place it. The genealogy that she was transcribing traced the blood relationship of a number of Italian families back to a single royal source: the Princess Eleonora Elisabeth Amalia Magdalena of Lobkowicz, Princess of Schwarzenberg, the woman who was also known as the Vampire Princess.

  Angela sat back from the desk and stared across at Marco, who was sitting in his easy chair on the opposite side of the room. He was looking in her general direction, and when she met his glance, he n
odded.

  ‘Do you know what this is?’ Angela asked.

  ‘Yes. But you don’t have to list all the members of the family. We’re only interested in the names of the people who died here in Venice in the late eighteenth century. In fact, it’s only one of those names that we need you to check, just to confirm his link to the princess.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Nicodema Diluca.’

  The name meant nothing immediately to Angela, though again the surname had a slightly familiar ring to it. She turned back to the photocopied sheets, quickly found what she was looking for and painstakingly traced the names of Diluca’s forebears back to the Princess of Schwarzenberg. If the names and relationships listed were correct, then Diluca was undeniably one of her blood descendants.

  ‘He’s a descendant, yes, according to this,’ she reported to Marco. ‘Why is it important?’

  He looked at her for a moment, then shook his head. ‘You really don’t understand, do you? It’s all in the blood. There’s nothing quite so important as the bloodline. That’s why you won’t find the name Carmelita Paganini listed anywhere on those pages. She wasn’t part of the sacred family, though she obviously wished she had been. But she did do one thing useful. She – or rather her diary – pointed us towards the correct grave on San Michele.’

  Then the penny dropped. ‘The tomb of the twin angels?’ Angela said. ‘We found it, but I thought the name inscribed on it was Delaca.’

  ‘You were nearly right. I have men out on the island now, recovering what we need.’

  Angela didn’t know what he meant by that remark, unless there was some other document or relic they needed hidden in that tomb as well.

  Then there was an urgent double knock on the door. Before Marco could even get out of his seat, the door swung open and a man Angela hadn’t seen before stepped into the room. Obviously agitated, he strode over to Marco and held a brief but animated conversation with him. Part-way through, they both paused to stare across at Angela for a few seconds. Then Marco smiled. The other man pointed back towards the door, and then left the room.

  ‘What?’ Angela demanded, conscious that Marco was staring at her again.

  ‘I have good news and bad news for you, I suppose,’ he said. ‘The good news is that your ex-husband wasn’t killed when my men attacked him on the street, because he’s just been spotted chasing around the lagoon in a powerboat. The bad news is that he encountered two of my men in one of the canals in Venice and they shot him.’

  Angela’s face displayed the turmoil of emotions flooding through her body as she absorbed Marco’s matter-of-fact statements, and for several seconds she found she couldn’t speak.

  ‘Is he …?’ she finally managed.

  ‘Dead?’ Marco supplied for her. ‘I’ve no idea. Probably. But whether he’s alive or dead makes no difference to you, here and now. The important thing is that he’s no longer of any concern to us. We now have both of the things that we needed, the scroll and the relic, and that’s all that matters. And we’ll be keeping you alive for a little while longer.’

  Angela was starting to recover her composure. She knew Chris, and knew he had a habit of bouncing back. Just because he’d been shot at didn’t mean he was dead. At least, that’s what she would cling to. She turned slightly to face Marco.

  ‘You’re letting me live?’ she asked.

  Marco nodded. ‘At least until you’ve finished the translation,’ he said, and walked across to her. ‘This scroll,’ he continued, pointing at the photocopied sheets on the desk in front of her, ‘is the most important document you’ll ever see. This is the source, the sacred record. This is what we’ve been seeking all these years. Forget Carmelita Paganini’s diary: this scroll contains the answers to every question we’ve ever wanted to ask. Translating it will keep you alive, at least for a few more hours.’

  He paused and smiled. ‘In fact, if everything works out as we hope, whether you live or die might not matter one way or the other.’

  57

  Despite the veiled threat Bianchi had made for Bronson to stay away from the investigation, he had absolutely no intention of sitting around in his hotel room waiting for the phone to ring. Angela had to be on that island, and he was determined – after all he’d been through – to stay close to her.

  This time he knew exactly where he was going, and steered a direct course from the mouth of the Canal Grande across the waterway and through the gap between the islands of Giudecca and San Giorgio Maggiore. Once he was clear of the water traffic around the islands, he opened the throttle and accelerated towards his destination. He kept his eyes open, looking for any sign of the police launch that Bianchi had said he’d be sending to the island to investigate. He saw several of the distinctive blue-and-white craft in the lagoon, but none appeared to be heading in the direction he was going.

  After several minutes of travelling at almost full speed, Bronson reached the small islet where he’d beached the boat previously. He throttled back, bringing the powerboat to an almost complete stop about fifty yards away from the shore of the islet, and for a few moments considered his next course of action. The problem he’d had previously was that the bulk of the house on the larger island to the south of him obscured his view of the jetty where the two men must have landed. It would obviously be far better for him to find a position from which he could see this part of the island, if only to observe the arrival of the police launch – assuming, of course, that one was going to turn up.

  Finally he made a plan. He would head south, towards the end of the lagoon, just like any other tourist exploring this part of Venice, then turn round and come back. That way he would achieve two things: he’d get a far better look at the island itself, and, with any luck, he’d find another island from which he’d be able to watch. At all costs he had to avoid alerting anybody on the island of his interest in them. In other words, he had to play the tourist card.

  Steering the boat around the islet, he meandered south, sitting on the plastic seat in the powerboat and looking all around him, exactly as an innocent tourist would do. But behind his mirrored sunglasses, he was focusing on the island to his right.

  As he’d observed earlier, the island was a reasonable size – big enough for the house to look comfortable in its setting – and as he steered the boat further south, a small inlet came into view. Within it, he could see a wooden jetty and beside it a launch, quite a bit larger than the powerboat Bronson had hired. The inlet wasn’t very big and as far as he could see, there wasn’t much room for any other vessels if the launch was moored there.

  Then he noticed something else. Behind the house, and about midway between the property and the inlet, was an area of level ground that appeared to have been tarmacked, and on it he could just about make out something painted in white. Playing the tourist again, Bronson looked casually around him, then turned back to look once more towards the island. And now, from his slightly altered perspective, he could see exactly what was on the tarmac.

  It was a large white circle, inside which was painted a letter ‘H’: a helicopter landing-pad, which made perfect sense. Bianchi had told him that the island was owned by a senior Italian politician, so travelling to the island by boat would probably be a last resort. It would be so much more impressive, and cater to the politician’s inevitable sense of his own importance, to arrive there by helicopter.

  Bronson continued ambling gently south, past the island and towards a handful of others in the same loose group, most of which had houses built on them. Again, he tried to look like a tourist as he steered the craft around and past these islands.

  About two hundred yards from the politician’s island was another very small island, upon which was a simple structure that looked something like a car port – just a flat roof resting on four vertical supports with a rough wooden table underneath it. Bronson guessed that was probably a picnic spot, the roof providing some shade from the heat of the midday sun. He looked closely at the island,
trying to see if there was anyone ashore there. He glanced at his watch. It was now late afternoon in November, and unlikely to be in use. Certainly, it appeared to be deserted.

  Bronson spotted a narrow bay where he thought he could easily beach his craft. He took a quick look around, but there were no other boats near him, and less than ten minutes later, he was hauling on the bow line to pull the powerboat a few feet further up the muddy beach. He turned off the outboard motor, tied the rope around the trunk of a small tree that was growing near the beach, checked he had his binoculars and the pistol – just in case – and made his way quickly across the small island until he could see his target.

  He had quite a good view of the front of the house, and of the small inlet with its wooden jetty, and the launch moored against it. He lay down, resting on his elbows, and peered through the binoculars. There was no sign of life around the house so he switched his attention to the lagoon that lay beyond the island.

  And then, perhaps a quarter of a mile away, he saw an approaching police launch, its distinctive colour scheme making it quite unmistakable. It looked as if Bianchi had done what he had promised, and had despatched a police patrol to check out the island. Bronson was glad that both he and his powerboat were well out of sight.

  He moved the binoculars again, and looked back at the house. It was, like many of the other properties he’d seen on the outlying islands, built of a kind of grey stone, the windows fitted with wooden shutters and the roof covered in terracotta tiles. But as he looked at it again, he was struck by something else. All the shutters on the windows were firmly closed, and the house seemed to exude an indefinable sense of desolation, of emptiness. If he hadn’t known better – if he hadn’t seen the two men in the powerboat arrive with his own eyes – he would have assumed that it was deserted.