The Florentine Cypher: Kate Benedict Paranormal Mystery #3 (The Kate Benedict Series)

by Carrie Bedford

  Immobilized and blinded, we endured a painful ride before the car slowed and I heard the driver open his window to pay a toll. I’d been counting seconds for lack of anything else to do. I estimated we’d driven another thirty minutes, so we had to be somewhere near Montevarchi or Arezzo. Now we drove for another ten minutes before the car started winding its way up a steep hill. We were thrown around in the back as we navigated several hairpin bends at speed. The car slowed and I heard the tires crunching over gravel before we came to a halt. The back doors opened and the man leaned in to cut the ties and remove the blindfolds. “Get out,” he ordered. We’d parked in front of a stuccoed farmhouse that stood alone in the center of a circle of cypress trees. In an upstairs window, a single light shone.

  “Do you know where we are?” I whispered to Claire. “Is this Dante’s place?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. I’ve never been here before.”

  I buttoned up my coat, feeling cold after the soft warmth of the car. Wind sighed in the cypress trees, and the car’s engine ticked as it cooled in the chill evening air.

  Given the presence of the gun, we didn’t resist when the man told us to follow him through the unlocked front door into the house. As he turned on lights in the tiled hallway, I noticed a large Deruta urn holding several umbrellas just inside the door. It was like the one in my dad’s house. Checking to be sure our captor wasn’t watching me, I dropped the folded-up diagram inside the urn. If Dante was looking for it, we could claim we didn’t have it. I could retrieve it later maybe. If there was a later. A house in the middle of nowhere with a gunman for company didn’t do much for my sense of optimism.

  We arrived in a large well-lit kitchen where a fire burned in an old blackened stove, and several plates covered with cloths lay on a scrubbed pine table. Candles in Faenza ceramic holders flickered on travertine countertops and old pine cabinets held plates and glasses. Under any other circumstance, it would have been homely and welcoming.

  “Wait,” the gunman said.

  A minute or so later, another man entered the kitchen. Dressed in black trousers, with a black shirt buttoned to the neck, he looked like a priest. His skin was white and unlined, as though it never saw the sun, and his silver hair was cropped short.

  He also had an aura, moving sinuously around his head.

  “At last we have the opportunity to meet,” he said, in perfect English. His lips were thin pale lines that barely moved when he spoke. “You are Kate Benedict and Claire Hamilton, yes? Allow me to introduce myself. I am Cardinal Santini Vanucci.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  “Vanucci? You’re related to Dante?” Claire’s face had gone deathly white.

  He nodded. “I’m his older brother.”

  “I didn’t even know he had a brother. Where is he?” Claire looked around the kitchen as though expecting to see him.

  “Certainly not here. We may be siblings, but we don’t tolerate each other very well. Never have.”

  Claire looked at me, raising her eyebrows in query. I didn’t know what to make of this information. Nor did I know what to make of Santini’s very visible aura. My legs seemed to be giving out. I sank down, uninvited, into the nearest chair.

  Santini waved Claire to a seat next to me and he sat down, facing us across the kitchen table.

  “You may call me Santini,” he said. “It is my baptismal name.”

  I could think of other names for him, but I kept them to myself.

  “Let’s keep things simple,” he said. “You have something of mine and it is time that you returned it.” He looked directly at Claire. “Why don’t you hand it over, my dear?”

  She crossed her arms. “Tell me where Ethan is.”

  “Ethan?” For a moment he appeared confused as though the name meant nothing to him.

  “My brother,” Claire said. “We know you have him.”

  “Ah, of course. Your brother.” He leaned over to lift the covers from the platters on the table. “Shall we conduct our business or shall we eat? Personally, I’m hungry. I drove up from Rome to spend some time in your company.”

  “Where’s Ethan?” Claire demanded.

  Santini stared at her for a long time as though deciding whether to tell her or not. “You give me the key, and I’ll return your brother.”

  “Why should we trust you?” Claire asked.

  “I’m a clergyman,” he said, motioning to his henchman to pour some wine. Gunman and sommelier. That made for an interesting job description. The cardinal waited until we each had a glass in front of us and then raised his in a toast. The wine, dark red, glistened like blood in the candlelight.

  “To the reopening of the vault.”

  So there was a vault. I wondered where it was. Here, at this house? I looked around the kitchen until I caught Santini watching me with a smug smile on his face. I ignored him, thinking about what role the code could play. And what was the purpose of the diagram I’d dropped in the urn by the front door?

  I didn’t drink the wine, but I was starving, and the platters of bread, cheese and salumi were tempting. Santini helped himself and sat back in his chair with all the appearance of a contented host. After placing a few olives and slices of cheese on my plate, I reviewed the kitchen. A cabinet containing china stood against one wall and a rack over the ancient stove held a dozen pots and pans of various sizes. I assumed that there would be knives in a drawer somewhere, but the room was not promising as a means of escape. A single window was protected with an exterior wrought iron grill, so the only exit was through the door into the hallway.

  “What is in the vault?” I asked. I didn’t expect Santini to answer, but asking questions was better than sitting and contemplating what came next.

  The cardinal’s thin lips twitched. “That I can’t tell you. It is one of the best guarded secrets in Italy, which, as you know, is a country full of secrets.”

  “Are you a Custodian?”

  “You’re well-informed,” he said, only a faint lifting of the eyebrows signaling his surprise. “What do you know about the Custodians?”

  “Not much,” I replied. “Except that you steal art but, honestly, we don’t care. It has nothing to do with us. We only want to find Ethan. If you let him go, we’ll return to our normal lives, leaving you to yours and your conscience.”

  Santini chuckled, the corners of his eyes crinkling. In a different setting, he’d have looked like someone’s genial uncle. A genial uncle about to keel over from a heart attack, perhaps. That aura was confusing. Worse, it was scaring me. It meant that death was lurking out there for both Santini and Claire. And for Ethan and Falcone. Maybe for me too. Something really bad had to happen for multiple deaths to occur at the same time. The slice of mozzarella di bufala I’d just eaten stuck in my throat.

  “You seem to have the wrong impression of what we do,” Santini said. “We don’t steal art. We protect it and we do so on a grand scale. The Custodians are the guardians of Italy’s cultural heritage, to use a modern term. By collecting and safeguarding works of art, we ensure our country’s artistic legacy.”

  “It sounds like stealing to me,” I said with a shrug.

  “You wouldn’t understand,” he said. “Every day, precious artifacts are destroyed though carelessness, neglect, war and civil strife. Someone has to protect them for future generations.”

  He smiled and took another sip of his wine.

  “I’m confused about the vault,” I said. “Why do you need the key so desperately? We heard there were two keys. Surely you have one of them? Don’t you store all your ill-gotten loot in your vault?”

  “By 1944, my great-uncle and my grandfather were the only remaining members of the Custodians. My great-uncle’s key was destroyed when his plane crashed in the ’sixties. He was killed, and the key was lost. The other, as you know, was taken from my grandfather during the war and hidden in an attic in England. I was not aware of its location until your father began asking questions, Claire, and that’s w
hen its whereabouts came to light.”

  “Did you kill my father?” Claire asked. She’d gone as white as the porcelain mugs arranged on the shelves.

  Santini looked affronted. “I did not.” He leaned over to pat her hand, and she pulled away as though he’d sent an electric shock through her. “I’m very sorry about your father’s death,” he said, which made me want to throw up. I didn’t believe that he wasn’t responsible.

  “Where is the vault?” Claire asked. “Is it the same one the Custodians used when they first rescued artworks from Savonarola?”

  “The initial collection, the paintings rescued from the fires of Savonarola, were stored in the palazzo of one of the members. But that was a long time ago.” Santini paused to sip his wine. “Over the years, thieves came to hear of this treasure trove, and the palazzo was robbed several times. So in the late 1500s, the group commissioned the great Buontalenti to devise a vault that would be impossible to break into. You have heard of Buontalenti?”

  “Of course,” she said. “Did he design the lock and the keys?”

  “He did.” During a long pause, Santini finished his wine and held up the glass. “A little more please, Aldo,” he said to the gunman.

  He raised the glass to his bloodless lips, his eyes narrowed, looking less like a genial uncle and more like the creepy cleric he was. “That’s enough chitchat. I need the key and the documents. Please hand them over.”

  “Documents?” I asked, playing for time, although there wasn’t any point. We had no chance of being rescued. No one even knew where we were.

  He nodded. “The list that Mr. Hamilton cut out of the cover of the Della Pittura. We retrieved the book, but the contents were already missing.”

  “It was your men who stole the book from me on the autostrada?” Anger made my neck flush warm. “Didn’t you realize that someone innocent might have got hurt? In fact the taxi driver was. Your thug punched him. And, talking of thugs, what about our police escort, Federico? Your men left him lying on the street.”

  Santini flapped a pale hand at me. “Better the street than the alternative. While I applaud your concern for others, I want the key now, please.”

  I reached into my bag and pulled out the pouch, feeling the familiar shape of the key inside. I’d thought of it as a passport to safety for Ethan. Giving it up was as though something was being ripped away.

  The cardinal snatched at the pouch like a greedy boy seizing candy. He withdrew the key and turned it over in his hands, caressing it gently. For the first time, I noticed the large gold ring on his right middle finger. On it was a small engraving of flames and the letter C, just like the one that Gardi had described. It matched exactly the image on the top of the key.

  “At last,” he crooned. “I have waited so long for this.” He held it tight in his fist as though concerned we’d make a grab for it. “Give me the papers.”

  When I held out the fragile provenance list, Claire took it from me before Santini could. “What about my brother?” she asked.

  “I assure you I will return him to you as soon as I get what I want. Now, please, be sensible and give that to me.”

  Claire held the page for a few seconds before relinquishing it to the cardinal.

  “And the schematic?” he asked me.

  “Schematic? I’ve no idea.”

  “It’s a diagram showing the location of the lock.”

  So that’s what it was. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t have…”

  Before I was able to finish, the gunman came round to take my bag from my hands. He tipped the contents out on the table. The paperback and Simon’s notebook sat amid a clutter of keys, cosmetics and a few personal items that sent a flush of pink up the cardinal’s pale cheeks.

  My passport was the last to make an appearance. I gazed at it wistfully, thinking I could be in the air now, on my way home.

  Santini sorted through the mess and retrieved the paperback and the notebook. He flipped through the pages of the notebook and stopped when he came to the page with the string of letters that we now knew were the cypher.

  “These are your notes?” he asked.

  “My father’s,” Claire said.

  He nodded as though understanding something. When he’d finished skimming the notebook, he looked up at us. “You two young ladies have surprised me. I was hoping that the attention of my colleagues would be enough to scare you into giving up the key, but you have remained remarkably impervious to intimidation. In my experience, women are normally far weaker than you’ve shown yourselves to be.”

  “You obviously haven’t had much experience with women,” I said and couldn’t help smiling when I remembered he was a Catholic cardinal. Of course he hadn’t. “You really thought we’d hand over the key because one of your gangsters asked us to? You’re a walking, breathing cliché. It’s the twenty-first century, so you’d better catch up. We’re a lot stronger than you give us credit for.”

  He clapped his hands slowly. “Brava, Miss Benedict. Now, I’d appreciate it if you would hand over your phones.”

  Claire and I exchanged glances, but there was nothing to be done with Aldo standing there pointing his gun at us. Reluctantly, we gave them to Santini. He tapped on the screen of mine with surprising dexterity. “And your passwords,” he said.

  I shook my head. “You can take my mobile, but the contents are private,” I said. “There’s nothing of interest to you on it.”

  He looked up at Aldo, who promptly waggled the gun at me.

  “The password?” Santini asked again.

  I told him and he keyed it in while I sat on my hands to stop myself from lashing out at him. My mobile was my only link to everyone I loved. Without it, they’d have no idea of where I was. When Santini had Claire’s password as well, he took another sip of wine. We sat in silence as he scrolled through her phone and then turned it off. He picked mine up again. A sudden flush of warmth prickled my skin. Leo had texted me the deciphered instruction on how to find the lock. It was sitting there, right on my mobile. Would Santini find it? I leaned over, trying to see the screen, to watch what he was doing but he held the mobile at an angle close to his chest.

  Without saying a word, he turned my phone off and laid it on the table.

  “A necessary precaution in case anyone is trying to track you,” he said. “It would be unfortunate if any unwanted visitors were to turn up here, because we have reached, as it were, the moment of truth. I have the key, which means you’re no longer of any use to me. It is a shame.”

  He leaned across the table to cup Claire’s chin in his hand. “What a waste.”

  “This is ridiculous,” I said. “You’re a cardinal. You can’t get away with murder. And too many people are aware of our connection to the key. If we disappear, you’ll be one of the first people the police come to interview. Besides, don’t you still need that diagram you talked about? How will you get into the vault if you don’t know where the lock is?”

  “You’re very curious for someone with such a short time to live. My line of work brings me in touch with many who are on their deathbeds, as you can imagine. For some, the presence of death numbs the brain, reducing all thought to only how to survive. In others, it triggers an intense desire to know everything, as though that knowledge will protect them or guide them as they leave this Earth. Interesting, don’t you think?”

  When I didn’t answer, Santini’s lips moved upwards a fraction in a parody of a smile. “To answer your question, I have no need of the map. I can find the lock without it.”

  “So why is all that stuff written down at all?” I asked. “Isn’t it the kind of information that would be passed verbally from one Custodian to another? For fear that it would fall into the wrong hands?”

  “For many years, it was,” he said. “But in times of turmoil, death can come quickly. In the mid-eighteenth century, the Custodians decided it would be prudent to keep a copy of the schematic and to create a cypher to disguise the precise placement o
f the lock. The keyword was underlined in the original Della Pittura and the cypher was hidden in the list of the artworks that were in possession of the Custodians at that time. A casual observer would have no idea what any of it meant.”

  I realized now that if we’d had the original leather-bound version of the Della Pittura, we would have broken the code more easily. Did that mean that Santini already knew the code? How could he? He’d had the book since Saturday morning, but he didn’t have the provenance list with the entries that composed the cypher text. By separating the documents from the antique book, Simon had prevented him from decoding the cypher. But now Santini had my phone with the instructions on it.

  He was talking again, but I wasn’t listening. His aura was spiraling madly around his head. It had started to move faster when he picked up the key, just as Falcone’s aura had intensified when he touched it. I was pondering the implications of that when Claire interrupted Santini.

  “What about Dante?” Claire asked him. “Is he working with you?”

  Santini rubbed his chin. “Hardly. He knows nothing about any of this. My little brother and I don’t see eye to eye on many things,” he said. “We…” He stopped when a clock chimed somewhere in the house. The sound must have been a call to action, because he drained the last of his wine and stood up.

  Claire turned to look at me, her eyes brimming with tears. Dante wasn’t involved after all. In spite of our dire circumstances, that had to be of some consolation to her.

  “I regret that I have to leave now,” Santini said. “My people will stay with you tonight and await my phone call to execute you tomorrow.”

  Claire stared at him, her cheeks flaming. “Why wait?”

  “Two reasons. I intend to be far away when it happens, at breakfast with the Pope in fact. An excellent alibi.”

  “You make me sick,” said Claire. “You call yourself a churchman and eat with the Pope while your men kill innocent people.”