by James Becker
“Can you be certain of that?”
Pierro shook his head. “Not without examining the stone for myself, but these photographs are fairly clear. In one of them are what look to me like marks made by a chisel, which would have been the obvious tool to split the slab in two. I think this stone was made as a kind of pointer, a device that would lead to the ‘Tomb of Christianity,’ which is how I believe Pope Vitalian described it in the Codex.”
Vertutti glanced angrily at Mandino as Pierro confirmed the depth of his knowledge of the secret Codex.
“I believe the lower half of the slab almost certainly had a map or directions of some sort carved on it,” Pierro finished.
“So what are you suggesting?” Vertutti demanded. “Where is the missing section?
And how do we find it?”
Pierro shrugged. “That’s not my problem,” he said, “but it seems logical that whoever decided to split the stone would not have discarded the lower half. If this stone had been incorporated in the wall of the house purely as a decoration, why didn’t they keep it intact? Why go to the trouble of cutting it in two? The only scenario that makes sense is that this section of the stone was placed in the wall for a purpose, as a definite pointer for somebody who knew what they were looking for.
Unless you know the identity of the ‘liars,’ this stone is merely a curiosity. And that means—”
“That means,” Mandino interrupted him, “that the other half of the stone is probably concealed somewhere in the property, so I’m going to have to send my men back to the house to find it.”
9
I
Bronson walked across the hall to the front door and pulled it open. Standing on the doorstep was a short, dark-haired man dressed in grubby white overalls. Behind him was an old white van, the diesel engine clattering noisily, with three other men sitting in the cab.
“Can I help you?” Bronson asked in Italian.
“We would like to speak with Signor Hampton. We need to know about the work.”
Bronson guessed they were the builders who’d been employed to do the renovations on the property.
“Come in,” he offered, and led the four men through to the kitchen.
Mark greeted them in halting Italian.
Bronson immediately took over, explaining that he was a family friend and offering wine—an offer that was gratefully accepted. Once Bronson had opened a couple of bottles and filled glasses, he asked what the men wanted.
“We had a small job to do on Wednesday morning and so we arrived here in the afternoon,” the foreman said, “but when we drove up we found that the police were here. They said there’d been an accident, and told us to go away and not come back for at least two days. Later we heard that the signora had died. Please accept our sincere condolences for your loss, Signor Hampton.”
Bronson translated, and Mark nodded his understanding.
“What we need to know,” the foreman continued, turning back to look at Bronson,
“is whether or not Signor Hampton wants us to continue with the work. We have other clients waiting for us if he doesn’t, so it’s not a problem. We just need to know.”
Bronson relayed the question to Mark, who immediately nodded his head in agreement. The renovations weren’t even half finished, and whether he decided to keep the house or sell it, the work would obviously have to be completed. That response generated broad smiles all around, and Bronson wondered briefly just how many “other clients” the builders had.
Ten minutes later, having each drunk a second glass of red wine, the four builders were ready to leave. They would, the foreman promised, be back at the house first thing on Monday morning, ready to continue their labors.
Bronson led the way back to the hall, but as the procession passed the door to the living room—which was standing wide open—one of the builders glanced inside and came to an abrupt halt. He said something to his companion, which Bronson didn’t hear clearly, then stepped inside the room.
“What is it?” Bronson asked.
The foreman turned to face him. His former good humor seemed to have vanished.
“I know Signor Hampton has had a dreadful shock, but we do not appreciate him trying to take advantage of us.”
Bronson hadn’t the slightest idea what the man was talking about. “What? You need to explain what you mean,” he said.
“I mean, Signor Bronson, that he’s obviously employed another builder to do some work here since last Tuesday, and that builder has probably been using our tools and materials.”
Bronson shook his head. “As far as I know, nobody else has done any work here.
Signora Hampton died sometime on Tuesday night or early on Wednesday morning.
The police were probably here for most of Wednesday, and we arrived late last night, so when could . . . ?” His voice died away as a possible explanation occurred to him. “What work has been done?” he demanded.
The foreman swung around and pointed at the fireplace. “There,” he said. “There’s new plaster on the wall, but none of us put it there. We couldn’t have, because we were waiting for Signora Hampton”—he made the sign of the cross on his chest—“to decide about the lintel.”
Bronson felt the conversation slipping away from him.
“Wait there,” he said, and walked quickly back to the kitchen. “Mark, I need your input here.”
Back in the living room, Bronson asked the foreman to explain exactly what he meant.
“On Monday afternoon,” the Italian said, “we were stripping the old plaster off the wall here above the fireplace. When we exposed the lintel, we called Signora Hampton, because the stone had a big crack in it, just about here.” He sketched a diagonal line directly above one side of the fireplace. “It had a steel plate underneath it, so it was safe enough, but it wasn’t very attractive. The signora had wanted the lintel exposed, as a feature, but when she saw it was broken she couldn’t decide what to do. She asked us to wait, and just carry on stripping the old plaster, which we did. But now, as you can see, that whole area has fresh plaster on it. Somebody else has been working in here.”
Bronson glanced at Mark. “Do you know anything about that?”
His friend shook his head. “Nothing. As far as I know, Jackie was perfectly happy with these builders. If she wasn’t, I can guarantee she’d have told them so. She was always very forthright.”
That, Bronson thought, was an understatement. Jackie had never, to use an old expression, been backward in coming forward. It was one of the many things he’d found attractive about her. She always said exactly what she thought, politely but firmly.
Bronson turned back to the foreman. “We’re certain no other builders have been in here,” he said, “but you obviously know what stage you’d reached in the renovations. Tell me, when you removed the plaster, did you find anything unusual about the wall, apart from the crack in the lintel?”
The foreman shook his head. “Nothing,” he said, “apart from the inscribed stone, but that was just a curiosity.”
Bronson looked at Mark with a kind of triumph. “I think we’ve just traced what Jackie found,” he said, explaining what the builder had told him. And without waiting for Mark to respond, he switched back to Italian.
“Strip it,” he ordered, pointing at the wall. “Strip the new plaster off that wall right now.”
The builder looked puzzled, but issued instructions. Two of his men seized club hammers and broad-bladed masonry chisels, dragged a couple of stepladders over to the fireplace and set to work.
Thirty minutes later, the builders left in their old van, again promising to return early on Monday morning. Bronson and Mark walked back into the living room and stared at the Latin inscription on the wall. Bronson took several pictures of it with his digital camera.
“The first four letters are the same as those I found impressed on that piece of paper in the study,” Bronson said. “And it is a Latin inscription. I don’t know what it means, but th
at dictionary Jackie bought should help me decipher it.”
“You think she was searching for a translation of that—of those three words—on the Internet, and that was enough to get her killed? That’s just bloody ridiculous.”
“I don’t know it got her killed, Mark, or not deliberately, anyway. But this is the only scenario that makes sense. The builders exposed the inscription on Monday. Jackie wrote down the words—that’s confirmed by the paper in the study—and bought a Latin dictionary, probably on Tuesday, and if she did do a search on the Internet, she most likely did it that day. Whatever happened, somebody broke into the house—my guess is late on Tuesday night—and on Wednesday morning Jackie was found dead in the hall.
“Now, I know it probably seems stupid that anyone would care enough about a three-word Latin inscription carved into a stone, maybe two thousand years ago, to risk a burglary, far less a charge of manslaughter or murder, but the fact remains that somebody did. Those three words are vitally important to someone, somewhere, and I’m going to find out who and why.
“But I’m not,” he added, “going to use the Internet to do it.”
II
Alberti and Rogan reached the town early that evening, following telephoned instructions—this time from Gregori Mandino—to enter the property for the third—and what they both hoped would be the last—time. They cruised slowly past the house as soon as they arrived in Monti Sabini and saw lights shining from windows on both floors. That complicated things, because they had hoped to be able to get inside and complete their search for the missing section of the stone without detection. But, ultimately, it wouldn’t matter, because this time Mandino’s instructions gave them far more latitude than before.
“Looks like the husband’s home,” Alberti said, as Rogan accelerated away down the road. “So do we wait, or what?”
“We wait for a couple of hours,” his partner confirmed. “Maybe he’ll be asleep by then.”
Just more than two and a half hours later, Rogan drove their car up the lane that ran beside and behind the house, and continued climbing the hill until they were out of sight of the building. Then he turned the car around, pointed it down the slope and extinguished the headlights. He waited a couple of minutes for his eyes to adjust to the gloom, then allowed the vehicle to roll gently down the gradient, using only the parking lights to see his way, until they reached a section of the grass verge that offered a good view of the back and side of their target. There he eased the car to the side of the road and switched off the lights and engine. As a precaution, Rogan turned off the interior light, so that it wouldn’t come on when they opened the doors.
A light was still burning in one of the downstairs rooms of the old house, so they settled down to wait.
III
Chris Bronson closed the dictionary with a snap and sat back in the kitchen chair, rubbing his tired eyes.
“I think that’s the best translation,” he said. “ ‘Here are lying the liars,’ or the short version: ‘Here lie the liars.’ ”
“Wonderful.” Mark sounded anything but impressed. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“I’ve not the slightest idea,” Bronson confessed, “but it must be important to somebody. Look, we’re not getting anywhere with this, so let’s call it a night. You go on up. I’ll check the doors and windows.”
Mark stood up and stretched. “Good idea,” he murmured. “Your subconscious might have a flash of inspiration while you sleep. Good night—I’ll see you in the morning.”
As Mark left the kitchen, Bronson took one of the upright chairs and wedged it under the handle of the back door, then walked out of the room and switched off the light.
He checked that the front door was locked and bolted, and that all the ground-floor windows were closed and the outside shutters secured, then went up to his bedroom.
In the car parked on the hill road behind the house, Alberti nudged Rogan awake and pointed down the slope.
“The downstairs light just went out,” he announced.
As the two men watched, slivers of brightness appeared behind the closed shutters of one of the bedrooms, but after about ten minutes this light, too, was extinguished.
A dull glow was still visible behind two other shutters, but the men guessed this was probably just the landing light.
“We’ll give it another hour,” Rogan said, closing his eyes and relaxing again in the car seat.
In the guest bedroom, Chris Bronson booted up his Sony Vaio laptop. He checked his e-mails, then turned his attention to the Internet. As he’d told Mark, he certainly wasn’t prepared to input the Latin phrase into a search engine or online dictionary, but there were other ways of trying to find out its significance.
First he ran a small program that generated a false IP address—the Internet protocol numbers that identified his geographical location. Then he made it look as if he was accessing the Web from a server based in South Korea, which, he thought with a smile, should be far enough away from Italy to throw anyone off the scent. Even so, he still wasn’t going to do a direct search. Instead, he began looking at sites that offered translations of Latin phrases in common use at the height of the Roman Empire.
After about forty minutes, Bronson had discovered two things. First, a surprising number of expressions he was already familiar with in both English and Italian had their roots in the dead language. And, second, the words Hic Vanidici Latitant were not recorded anywhere as being part of an aphorism or expression in common usage two thousand odd years ago. That wasn’t exactly a surprise—if the phrase had been well known, it would presumably have had no special significance for the people who had broken into the house—but at least it eliminated one possibility.
But he really wasn’t getting anywhere and eventually decided to give up. He shut down the laptop, then opened the shutters and one of the windows to provide fresh air, switched off the main light and got into bed.
Rogan looked along the back of the house. He nodded to Alberti, who produced a jimmy from one of the pockets of his jacket. He inserted the point of the tool between the door and the frame, changed his grip on it, and levered, pushing toward the door. It gave slightly, but then stuck: something seemed to be jamming it.
Rogan took out his flashlight and shone it through the window, the beam dancing over the interior of the kitchen as he tried to see the cause of the problem. He directed the flashlight downward, and muttered a curse. A chair had been wedged below the door handle. Rogan shook his head at Alberti, who removed the jimmy and stepped back.
The two men walked cautiously along the back wall of the house to the nearest window. Like all of the windows on the ground floor of the property, it was protected by full-height wooden shutters, but Rogan didn’t think that would be a problem: it was just going to be a noisier solution. He used his flashlight to check the lock, and nodded in satisfaction. The shutters were held closed by a central catch that not only locked the two halves together, but also secured them to the wall using bolts at the top and bottom. It was a simple design with a single flaw. If the catch was undone, both bolts would immediately be released and the shutters would swing open.
Rogan took the jimmy from Alberti and slid its point between the two shutters. Then he moved it up until it touched the underside of the catch, and rapped the other end sharply. With a scraping sound, the catch lifted and both shutters swung outward.
Rogan opened them fully and clipped them back using the hooks fitted to the wall.
In his bedroom almost directly above, Bronson was still wide awake, lying silently in the dark and puzzling over the meaning of the three Latin words.
He heard noises—a metallic click followed by a creaking sound and other clicks—and climbed out of bed to investigate. He walked across to the window and looked down cautiously.
At the back of the house he saw two dark figures, bulky in the shadows cast by the moon, the beam of a small flashlight playing over one of the downstairs windows.
Bronson slowly moved away from the window and walked back across the room to where he’d left his clothes. He pulled on a black polo-neck sweater and dark-colored trousers, and slid his feet into his trainers. Then he eased open the bedroom door and made his way across the landing and down the stairs.
There were no guns in the house, as far as he knew, but there were several stout walking sticks in an umbrella stand beside the front door. He picked out the biggest one and hefted it in his hand. That, he thought, would do nicely. Then he walked over to the living-room door, which was fortunately ajar, and pushed it open just far enough to allow him to slide into the room.
The open shutters were obvious—every other window was black—and Bronson moved across the room to his left, keeping low. Their unwelcome visitors were not visible through the window but that simply meant that they hadn’t yet broken one of the panes of glass to get in.
The window was wood-framed with twelve small single-glazed panes of glass, and Rogan had come prepared. He hadn’t anticipated that they wouldn’t be able to use the back door again, but whenever he was tasked with a burglary he always had a backup plan. And for an old house like this, with very basic security, breaking a window and getting inside that way was the most obvious option.
He took a roll of adhesive tape from his pocket and tore off several strips, handing each to Alberti, who stuck them on the glass in a star pattern, leaving a protruding
“handle” in the middle, formed from the central sections of the tape. Then Alberti held the tape in his left hand, reversed the jimmy and rapped the rounded end sharply against the taped window. The glass broke instantly, but stuck to the tape, and he easily pulled out the broken pane. He handed the glass to Rogan, who placed it carefully on the ground, then reached inside and lifted the catch to open the window.
Although he’d been as quiet as he could, there was obviously a possibility that the noise had been heard inside the house. So, before he climbed in, Alberti took the pistol from his shoulder holster, checked the magazine and chambered a round by pulling back the slide. He set the safety catch, then grasped the left side of the window frame, rested his right foot on a protruding stone in the wall and pulled himself up and into the open window to lower himself into the room.