The Book of the Dead

by Douglas Preston

  The great eye of the setting sun had just dipped behind the cape, casting long shadows over the water, limning the ancient castle in gold. The boat was heading north, toward the Aeolian islands, the most remote of all the Mediterranean islands-the dwelling place, or so the ancients believed, of the Four Winds.

  Soon he would be home.

  Home. He rolled the bittersweet word around in his mind, wondering just what it meant. A refuge; a place of retreat, of peace. He removed a packet of cigarettes from his pocket, took shelter in the lee of the deck cabin, and lit one, inhaling deeply. He had not smoked in more than a year-not since he had last returned home-and the nicotine helped calm his agitated mind.

  He thought back to the two days of hectic traveling he had just completed: Florence, Milan, Lucerne-where he’d had his wound stitched at a free clinic-Strasbourg, Luxembourg, Brussels, Amsterdam, Berlin, Warsaw, Vienna, Ljubljana, Venice, Pescara, Foggia, Naples, Reggio di Calabria, Messina, and finally Milazzo. A forty-eight-hour ordeal of train travel that had left him weak, sore, and exhausted.

  But now, as he watched the sun dying in the west, he felt strength and presence of mind returning. He had shaken her in Florence; she had not, could not have, followed him. From there, he had changed identities several times, confused his trail to such an extent that neither she nor anyone else could hope to untangle it. The open borders of the EU, combined with the crossing into Switzerland and re-entry into the EU under a different identity, would confound even the most persistent and subtle pursuer.

  She would not find him. Nor would his brother. Five years, ten years, twenty-he had all the time in the world to plan his next-his final-move.

  He stood at the rail, inhaling the breath of the sea, feeling a modicum of peace steal over him. And for the first time in months, the interminable, dry, mocking voice in his head fell to a susurrus, almost inaudible amid the sound of the bow plowing the sea:

  Goodnight Ladies: Goodnight sweet Ladies: Goodnight, goodnight.

  Chapter 75

  Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast got off the bus at Viale Giannotti and walked through a small park of sycamore trees past a shabby merry-go-round. He was dressed as himself-now that he was safely out of the United States, there was no need for disguise. At Via di Ripoli, he took a left, pausing before the huge iron gates that led into the convent of the Sisters of San Giovanni Battista. A small sign identified it only as Villa Merlo Bianco. Beyond the gates, he could hear the mingled cries of schoolchildren at recess.

  He pressed the buzzer and, after a moment, the gates opened automatically, leading into a graveled courtyard before a large ocher villa. The side door was open, and a small sign identified it as guest reception.

  “Good morning,” he said in Italian to the small, plump nun at the desk. “Are you the Suor Claudia I spoke to?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  Pendergast shook her hand. “Pleased to know you. As I mentioned over the phone, the guest we spoke of-Miss Mary Ulciscor-is my niece. She has run away from home, and the family is extremely worried about her.”

  The plump nun was almost breathless. “Yes, signore, in fact I could see she was a very troubled young lady. When she arrived, she had the most haunted look in her face. And then she didn’t even stay the night-arrived in the morning, then returned that evening and insisted on leaving-”

  “By car?”

  “No, she came and left on foot. She must have taken the bus, because taxis always come in through the gates.”

  “What time would that have been?”

  “She returned about eight o’clock, signore. Soaking wet and cold. I think she might have been sick.”

  “Sick?” Pendergast asked sharply.

  “I couldn’t be sure, but she was hunched over a bit, and her face was covered.”

  “Covered? With what?”

  “A dark blue woolen scarf. And then not two hours later, she came down with her luggage, paid too much money for a room she hadn’t even slept in, and left.”

  “Dressed the same?”

  “She’d changed her clothes, had on a red woolen scarf this time. I tried to stop her, I really did.”

  “You did all you could, Suora. Now, may I see the room? You needn’t bother coming-I’ll take the key myself.”

  “The room’s been cleaned, and there’s nothing to see.”

  “I would prefer to check it myself, if you don’t mind. One never knows. Has anyone else stayed there?”

  “Not yet, but tomorrow a German couple…”

  “The key, if you would be so kind.”

  The nun handed him the key. Pendergast thanked her, then walked briskly through the piano nobile of the villa and mounted the stair.

  He found the room at the end of a long hall. It was small and simple. He closed the door behind him, then immediately dropped to his knees. He examined the floor, searched under the bed, searched the bathroom. To his great disappointment, the room had been fanatically cleaned. He stood up, looked around thoughtfully for a minute. Then he opened the armoire. It was empty-but a careful look revealed a small, dark stain in the far corner. He dropped to his knees again, reached in, and touched it, scratching a bit up with his fingernail. Blood-dry now, but still relatively fresh.

  Back in the reception room, the nun was still deeply concerned.

  “She seemed troubled, and I can’t imagine where she went at ten o’clock at night. I tried to talk to her, signore, but she-”

  “I’m sure you did all you possibly could,” Pendergast repeated. “Thank you again for your help.”

  He exited the villa onto Via di Ripoli, deep in thought. She had left at night, in the rain… but for where?

  He entered a small café at the corner of Viale Giannotti, ordered an espresso at the bar, still pondering. She had encountered Diogenes in Florence, that much was certain. They had fought; she had been wounded. It seemed incredible that she was only hurt, for normally, those who came within Diogenes’s orbit did not leave it alive. Clearly, Diogenes had underestimated Constance. Just as he himself had done. She was a woman of vast, unexpected depths.

  He finished the coffee, bought an ATAF ticket at the bar, and stepped across the viale to wait for the bus into the city center. When it arrived, he made sure he was the last one on. He held up a fifty-euro note to the driver.

  “You don’t pay me, stamp your ticket at the machine,” the driver said crossly, pulling roughly out of the bus stop, his hammy arms swinging the wheel around.

  “I want information.”

  The driver continued to ignore the money. “What kind of information?”

  “I’m looking for my niece. She got on this bus around ten o’clock two nights ago.”

  “I drive the day bus.”

  “Do you have the name of the night driver and his cell number?”

  “If you weren’t a foreigner, I’d say you were a sbirro, a cop.”

  “It’s not a police matter. I’m just an uncle looking for his niece.” Pendergast softened his voice. “Please help me, signore. The family is frantic.”

  The driver negotiated a turn, then said, his tone more sympathetic, “His name is Paolo Bartoli, 333-662-0376. Put your money away-I don’t want it.”

  Pendergast got off the bus at Piazza Ferrucci, pulled out the cell phone he had acquired on arrival, dialed the number. He found Bartoli at home.

  “How could I forget her?” the bus driver said. “Her head was swaddled in a scarf, you couldn’t see her face, her voice all muffled. She spoke an old-fashioned Italian, used the voi form with me-I haven’t heard that since the days of the Fascists. She was like a ghost from the past. I thought maybe she was crazy.”

  “Do you remember where she got off?”

  “She asked me to stop at the Biblioteca Nazionale.”

  It was a long walk from Ferrucci to the National Library, which stood across the Arno River, its brown baroque facade rising in sober elegance from a dirty piazza. In the cold, echoing reading room, Pendergast found a l
ibrarian who remembered her as well as the bus driver had.

  “Yes, I was working the night shift,” the librarian told him. “We have few visitors at that hour-and she looked so lost, so desolate, I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. She stared at a particular book for over an hour. Never turning the pages, always on the same page, murmuring to herself like a crazy woman. It got on toward midnight and I was getting ready to ask her to leave so I could close. But then all of a sudden, she jumped up, consulted another book-”

  “What other book?”

  “An atlas. She pored over it for perhaps ten minutes-scribbling furiously in a small notebook as she did so-and then ran out of the library as if the hounds of hell were after her.”

  “Which atlas?”

  “I didn’t notice-it’s one of those on the far reference shelf, she didn’t have to fill out a slip to look at them. But let’s see, I do still have the slip she filled out for the book she stared at for so long. Just a moment, I’ll collect it for you.”

  A few minutes later, Pendergast was seated where Constance had sat, staring at the same book she had stared at: a slim volume of poems by Giosuè Carducci, the Italian poet who had won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1906.

  The volume sat in front of him, unopened. Now, with infinite care, he upended it and allowed it to fall open naturally; hoping, as books will sometimes do, that it would open to the last page that had been read. But it was an old, stiff book, and it merely fell open to the front endpapers.

  Pendergast reached into the pocket of his suit jacket, drew out a magnifying glass and a clean toothpick, and began turning the pages of the book. For each page he turned, he gently dragged the toothpick along the gutter, then examined the dirt, hair, and fibers that had been exposed with his magnifying glass.

  An hour later, on page 42, he found what he was looking for: three red fibers of wool, curled as if from a knitted scarf.

  The poem that straddled both pages was called “ La Leggenda di Teodorico,” the Legend of Theodoric.

  He began to read:

  Su ’l castello di Verona

  Batte il sole a mezzogiorno,

  Da la Chiusa al pian rintrona

  Solitario un suon di corno…

  Above the great castle of Verona,

  Beats the brutal midday sun,

  From the Mountains of Chiusa, across the plains,

  Resounds the dreaded horn of doom…

  The poem recounted the strange death of the Visigothic king Theodoric. Pendergast read it once, and then again, failing to see what momentous importance Constance could have attached to it. He read it again slowly, recalling the obscure legend.

  Theodoric was one of the earliest of the great barbarian rulers. He carved a kingdom for himself from the corpse of the Roman Empire, and among other brutal acts he executed the brilliant statesman and philosopher Boethius. Theodoric died in 526. Legend had it that a holy hermit, living alone on one of the Aeolian islands off the coast of Sicily, swore that in the very hour of Theodoric’s death, he witnessed the king’s shrieking soul being cast into the throat of the great volcano of Stromboli, believed by the early Christians to be the entrance of hell itself.

  Stromboli. The Doorway to Hell. In a flash, Pendergast understood.

  He rose, walked over to the shelf of atlases, and selected the one of Sicily. Returning to his seat, he carefully opened it to the page displaying the Aeolian islands. The outermost of these was the island of Stromboli, which was essentially the peak of a live volcano that rose abruptly from the sea. A lone village hugged its surf-pounded shore. The island was exceedingly remote and difficult to reach, and the volcano of Stromboli itself had the distinction of being the most active in Europe, in almost continual eruption for at least three thousand years.

  He carefully wiped the page with a folded white linen handkerchief, then examined it with his magnifying glass. There, stuck to the linen weft, was another curled red wool fiber.

  Chapter 76

  Diogenes Pendergast stood on the terrace of his villa. Below him, the tiny whitewashed village of Piscità crowded down to the broad, black-sand beaches of the island. A wind came in from the sea, bringing with it the scent of brine and flowering ginestra. A mile out to sea, the automatic lighthouse on the immense rock of Strombolicchio had begun winking in the gathering dusk.

  He sipped a glass of sherry, listening to the distant sounds from the town below-a mother calling her children in to dinner, a dog barking, the buzz of a three-wheeled Ape, the only kind of passenger vehicle used on the island. The wind was rising, along with the surf-it was going to be another roaring night.

  And behind him, he heard the thunderous rumble of the volcano.

  Here, at the very edge of the world, he felt safe. She could not follow him here. This was his home. He had first come here twenty years before, and then almost every year since, always arriving and departing with the utmost care. The three hundred or so year-round residents of the island knew him as an eccentric and irascible British professor of classics who came periodically to work on his magnum opus-and who did not look with favor on being disturbed. He avoided the summer and the tourists, although this island, being sixty miles from the mainland and inaccessible for days at a time due to violent seas and the lack of a port, was far less visited than most.

  Another rolling boom. The volcano was active tonight.

  He turned, glancing up its steep, dark slopes. Angry clouds writhed and twisted across the volcanic crater, towering more than a half mile above his villa, and he could see the faint flashes of orange inside the jagged cone, like the flickering of a defective lamp.

  The last gleam of sunlight died on Strombolicchio and the sea turned black. Great rollers creamed in long white lines up the black beach, one after another, accompanied by a monotonous low roar.

  Over the past twenty-four hours, with enormous mental effort, Diogenes had expunged from his mind the raw memory of recent events. Someday-when he had acquired a little distance-he would sit down and dispassionately analyze what had gone wrong. But for now he needed to rest. After all, he was in his prime; he had all the time in the world to plan and execute his next attack.

  But at my back I always hear

  Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near

  He gripped the delicate glass so tightly it snapped, and he dashed the stem to the ground and went into the kitchen, pouring himself another. It was part of a supply of amontillado he had laid down years before, and he hated to waste a drop.

  He took a sip, calming himself, then strolled back onto the terrace. The town was settling down for the night: a few more faint calls, a wailing baby, the slamming of a door. And the buzz of the Ape, closer now, in one of the crooked streets that rose toward his villa.

  He put the glass down on the parapet and lit a cigarette, drawing in the smoke, exhaling into the twilit air. He peered down into the streets below. The Ape was definitely coming up the hill, probably on Vicolo San Bartolo… The tinny whine drew still closer, and for the first time Diogenes felt a twinge of apprehension. The dinner hour was an unusual time for an Ape to be out and about, especially in the upper village-unless it was the island taxi taking someone somewhere. But it was early spring and there were no tourists: the ferry he had taken from Milazzo had carried no visitors, only produce and supplies; and besides, it had departed hours ago.

  He chuckled at himself. He had grown too wary, almost paranoid. This demonic pursuit-coming hard on the heels of such a huge failure-had left him shaken, unnerved. What he really needed was a long period of reading, study, and intellectual rejuvenation. Indeed, now would be the perfect time to begin that translation of Aureus Asinus by Apuleius that he had always intended.

  He drew in more smoke, exhaled easily, turned his eyes to the sea. The running lights of a ship were just rounding Punta Lena. He went inside, brought out his binoculars, and-looking to sea again-was able to make out the dim outline of an old wooden fishing boat, a real scow, heading away from the island towa
rd Lipari. That puzzled him: it had not been out fishing, not in this weather at this time of day. It had probably been making a delivery.

  The sound of the Ape approached and he realized it was now coming up the tiny lane leading to his villa-hidden by the high walls surrounding his grounds. He heard the engine slow as it came to a stop at the bottom of his wall. He put down the binoculars and strode to the side terrace, from where he had a view down the lane; but by the time he got there, the Ape was already turning around-and its passenger, had there been one, was nowhere to be seen.

  He paused, his heart suddenly beating so hard he could hear the roar of blood in his ears. His was the only residence at the end of the lane. That old fishing scow hadn’t brought cargo-it had brought a passenger. And that passenger had taken the Ape to the very gates of his villa.

  He exploded into silent action, running inside, dashing from room to room, shuttering and barring the windows, turning off the lights, and locking the doors. The villa, like most on the island, was built almost like a fortress, with heavy wooden shutters and doors bolted with hand-wrought iron and heavy locks. The masonry walls themselves were almost a meter thick. And he had made several subtle improvements of his own. He would be safe in the house-or at least he could gain enough time to think, to consider his position.

  In a few minutes, he had finished locking himself in. He stood in his dark library, breathing hard. Once again he had the feeling he had reacted out of sheer paranoia. Just because he’d seen a boat, heard the taxi… It was ridiculous. There was simply no way for her to have found him-certainly not this quickly. He had arrived on the island only the evening before. It was absurd, impossible.

  He dabbed his brow with a pocket handkerchief and began to breathe easier. He was being utterly foolish. This business had unnerved him even more than he realized.