by James Becker
Whatever happens to this relic wouldn’t bother me.”
Vertutti glowered at him, but both men knew he had no choice, no choice at all.
“Very well,” Vertutti grated. “I’ll see if I can arrange something.”
“Excellent.” Mandino beamed. “I knew you’d see things my way eventually. I’ll let you know as soon as we’ve resolved the situation in Ponticelli.”
III
“Jeremy Goldman’s pretty sharp,” Bronson said. He was rereading the e-mail and had only just realized the significance of another of Goldman’s suggestions.
“In what way?” Mark asked.
“He spotted something else about the inscribed stone. He says that the Latin text is centered on the stone left and right, but not vertically. The words are closer to the base of the stone than they are to the top. And that could mean that the stone isn’t complete, that someone’s cut away the lower section of it. Let’s go and take a look.”
The two men walked through into the living room and stood in front of the fireplace to stare up at the stone. It was immediately obvious that Goldman was right.
“Look at this,” Bronson said. “If you know what to look for, you can clearly see the marks where someone’s chiseled off the lower part. This section of stone—the bit that has the inscription carved on it—was once part of a much larger slab, probably twice this size. So all we need do now is find the lower half, the bit that presumably contains the map or directions or whatever.”
“That could be tricky. This house is built of stone, and so’s the garage. That used to be a stable block and before that a small barn. The house is surrounded by about half an acre of garden, and most of that has rocks buried in it, some of them obviously worked stones with shaped sides and edges. Even if the stone is somewhere here, it could take a hell of a long time to find it.”
“My guess, Mark, is that if it’s here it’ll be cemented into a wall somewhere in the house, just like this one. The stone was split into two carefully—the cut edge is almost straight—and I don’t believe whoever took the time to do that would simply dump the other section.”
“So we start checking inside the house. The problem is—which wall do we start with?”
Bronson grinned at his friend. If nothing else, the search was taking both their minds off Jackie’s death. “We check them all, and we might as well begin right here with this one.”
Just more than half an hour later, the two men were again standing in the living room, looking at the stone above the fireplace. All but three of the walls in the house had already been stripped of any covering before the Hamptons purchased the property, and they’d just inspected every exposed stone in the house and found precisely nothing. That left only two rooms where they were going to have to get their hands dirty: the dining room, with two plaster-covered walls that the builders hadn’t started work on yet, and the living room itself, where about half of the fireplace wall still had the original plaster on it.
“Is this really necessary?” Mark asked, as Bronson donned a pair of overalls left by the builders and picked up a hammer and chisel.
“I think so, yes. The only way to resolve this is to find the missing half of that stone.”
“And what do we do then?”
“Until we locate the stone and decipher what’s on it, I’ve no idea,” Bronson said.
Then he turned around and studied the wall beside the fireplace. The old plaster began just to the left of the cracked lintel and extended all the way to the back wall, which had already been stripped.
He took a firm grip of the chisel, positioned the tip about three inches from the edge of the plaster, and rapped it sharply with the hammer. The chisel drove about half an inch into it, and a section of plaster fell to the floor, revealing part of the stone underneath. It looked as if stripping the wall wouldn’t take him too long.
Rogan was stiff, tired, uncomfortable, bored and pissed off. He’d slept as best he could in the car for what was left of the night after he’d got back to Monti Sabini, then driven into the town for an early-morning coffee and a couple of pastries. He’d returned to the house straight afterward and had spent the rest of the morning watching the property through a set of powerful binoculars.
He’d seen two men inside—not one, as he’d been expecting—and had watched as one of them had pulled on a pair of overalls and started chipping away at the wall of the living room. It looked as if Hampton and the other man were going to do the job for him.
The old house was surrounded by lawns dotted with shrubs and trees, and the Italian found it easy enough to reach the property without being seen. He flattened himself against the wall and eased up into a standing position. From there he could see into the living room at an oblique angle and watch what was happening.
Removing all the plaster didn’t take long. Every time Bronson used the chisel, he knocked off a chunk two or three inches square and, just more than ninety minutes after he’d started work, the entire section of the wall was bare. Then he and Mark checked every single stone he’d revealed. Several of them bore chisel marks, but none had anything on them that could possibly be either a map or any form of writing.
“So what now?” Mark asked, staring at the debris piled up along the base of the wall.
“I still think it’s here somewhere,” Bronson replied. “I don’t believe that inscribed stone was incorporated in the wall purely as a decoration. That Latin phrase means something today, and must have meant something when this house was built. In fact
. . .” He broke off and looked again at the stone above the fireplace. Maybe the clue had been there all the time, literally staring him in the face.
“What is it?”
“Is this a riddle inside a riddle? According to Jeremy Goldman, that inscription probably dates from the first century, but the house is about six hundred years old.”
“So?”
“So the carving was already about fifteen hundred years old when the house was built. If the stone was just intended to be a decoration, where would the builders have put it? Over the fireplace, probably,” Bronson said, answering his own question, “but not exactly where it is now. They’d have positioned it centrally, directly over the lintel. But it isn’t—it’s well off to one side. That had to have been done deliberately, as a sign to show that the stone wasn’t just a decorative feature but had a special meaning.
“Suppose whoever built this house found the stone and tried to follow the directions to these ‘liars’—whatever they are—but couldn’t follow the map or work out the clues. They might have decided to split the stone and hide the map section somewhere for safekeeping, but leave a clue to its location for future generations. So one part of the stone indicates the location of the other section, which is a map to some sort of long-buried relics.
“If I’m right, maybe the ‘Hic’—the Latin word meaning ‘here’—is the most important part of the inscription. Could it be telling us exactly where the missing section of the stone has been hidden?”
“You mean ‘here’ as in ‘X marks the spot,’ that kind of thing?”
“Exactly.”
“But where is it, then?” Mark asked. “That’s a solid wall almost a meter thick. The other stones below that one are not only unmarked, but they’re also a different kind of rock, so what could the ‘Hic’ refer to?”
“Not something in the wall, necessarily, but perhaps below it. Maybe the hiding place is under the floor.”
But that looked unlikely. The fireplace in the old farmhouse was a collection of solid lumps of granite, and the floor in front of it was made of thick oak floorboards. If there was a hiding place either under the fireplace or below the floorboards, it would require major work—not to mention lifting gear—to find it.
“I don’t expect what we’re looking for will be under something as simple and obvious as a trapdoor in the floor,” Bronson said, “but equally I doubt if we’d need to demolish half the house to get at it.”
He looked at the wall again. “That’s about a meter thick, you said?”
Mark nodded.
“Well, maybe there’s something on the other side of the wall. Have you got a tape measure, something like that?”
Mark went out to the workshop at the back of the garage and returned a couple of minutes later with a carpenter’s steel tape. Bronson took it and, using the floor and the edge of the doorway leading into the dining room as datum points, measured the exact position of the center of the stone. Mark jotted down the coordinates on a sheet of paper, then they stepped through into the dining room itself.
This was much smaller than the living room, and the wall it shared with the living room was fully plastered. The furniture hadn’t been moved, though it was covered in the ubiquitous dust sheets. The Hamptons had planned to knock a large doorway through the southern wall of the dining room and build a conservatory, but they were still waiting for planning permission.
Using the coordinates and the tape measure, Bronson made a cross in the corresponding area on the dining-room wall. To confirm that they had the right place, they checked the measurements in the living room again, then repeated the process in the dining room.
Then Bronson picked up the hammer and chisel, climbed back up the stepladder and struck a single blow just below the cross he’d drawn. The plaster cracked, and after two more blows a large chunk fell off the wall. He wiped his hand across the exposed stone, trying to clear away some of the dust and debris.
“There’s something here,” he said, his voice rising with excitement. “Not a map, but what looks like another inscription.”
Half a dozen more blows from the hammer and chisel shifted the rest of the old plaster and revealed the whole face of the stone.
“Here,” Mark said, and passed up a new three-inch paintbrush.
“Thanks,” Bronson muttered, and ran the brush briskly back and forth over the stone. A few sharp raps from the handle of the hammer cleared away the remaining pieces of plaster. They could both now see exactly what had been carved into the stone.
It was an inscription that hinted at the blood-soaked history of another country—an inscription that was worth killing for.
Rogan watched with interest as the man in the overalls stripped all the old plaster off the wall in the living room, and smiled at their total failure to find what they were looking for. At the very least, they were saving him a job.
At first, he hadn’t understood why they had taken such trouble to measure the exact position of the inscribed stone in the wall, though he realized they’d worked something out when the two men had walked through into the small dining room.
The moment they vanished from sight, Rogan dropped down into a crouch and scuttled along the wall until he was beyond the end of the first of the two dining-room windows. Then he eased up slowly until he could just see inside the room, though he guessed he could have cavorted naked outside the window and the chances were neither of the men would have seen him. Their attention was entirely directed at the dining-room wall.
As Rogan watched, his view slightly distorted through the thick old glass of the dining-room windows, he saw the man uncover something. It looked as if the missing section of the stone that Mandino had sent him to find had been in the house after all.
The stone didn’t appear to have a map carved on it—from Rogan’s viewpoint, and through the admittedly distorting glass of the window, it looked to him more like a couple of verses of poetry. But whatever the content of the carving on the stone, the simple fact that there was another inscription was enough for him to report back to Mandino. He wasn’t prepared to try to get inside the house himself, because he was outnumbered, plus one of them was probably armed with Alberti’s pistol. Mandino had promised to send another man from the Rome family to join him, but he hadn’t appeared so far.
The important thing, Rogan decided, was to let Mandino know what he’d seen, and then await instructions. He dropped down into a crouch, crept back along the wall of the house until he was well clear of the dining room and living room windows, then ran swiftly across the lawn to the break in the fence where he’d entered the property, and walked back to his car and the cell phone he’d locked in the glove box.
“What the hell is it, Chris?” Mark asked, as Bronson climbed down the stepladder and looked up at the inscribed stone.
Bronson shook his head. “I don’t know. If Jeremy Goldman’s deduction was right, and if our interpretation of the first stone was correct, this should be a map. I don’t know what it is, but a map it ain’t.”
“Hang on a minute,” Mark said. “Let me just check something.”
He walked into the living room and looked at the inscribed stone, then returned a few moments later. “I thought so. This stone’s a slightly different color. Are you sure the two are related?”
“I don’t know. All I am certain of is that this stone has been cemented into the wall directly behind the other one, to the inch, as far as I can see, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.”
“It looks almost like a poem,” Mark observed.
Bronson nodded. “That’s my guess,” he said, looking up at ten lines of ornate cursive script arranged in two verses, underneath an incomprehensible title that consisted of three groups of capital letters, presumably all some kind of abbreviations. “Though why a stone with a poem carved into it should have been stuck in the wall at this exact spot beats me.”
“But the language isn’t Latin, is it?”
“No, definitely not. I think some of the words might have French roots. These three here— ben, dessu’s and perfècte, for example—aren’t that dissimilar to some modern French words. Some of the others, though, like calix, seem to be written in a completely different language.”
Bronson climbed back up the ladder and had a closer look at the inscription. There were several differences between the two, not just the languages used. Mark was right—the stones were different colors, but the form and shape of the letters in the verses was also unfamiliar, completely different from those in the other inscription, and in places the stone had been worn away, as if by the touch of many hands over countless years.
IV
The ringing of the phone cut across the silence of the office.
“There’s been a development, Cardinal.” Vertutti recognized Mandino’s light and slightly mocking tone immediately.
“What’s happened?”
“One of my men has been carrying out surveillance of the house in Monti Sabini and a few minutes ago he watched the discovery of another inscribed stone in the property, on the back of the wall directly behind the first one. It wasn’t a map, but looked more like several lines of writing, perhaps even poetry.”
“A poem? That makes no sense.”
“I didn’t say it was a poem, Cardinal, only that my man thought it looked like poetry.
But whatever it is, it must be the missing section of the stone.”
“So what are you going to do now?”
“This matter is now too sensitive to be left only to my picciotti, my soldiers. I will be traveling to Ponticelli early tomorrow morning with Pierro. Once we’ve got inside the house, I’ll have both inscriptions photographed and copied, then destroy them.
Once we have this additional information, I’m sure Pierro will be able to work out exactly where we should be looking.
“While I’m away, you should be able to contact me on my cell phone, but I’ll also send you the telephone number of my deputy, Antonio Carlotti, in case of an emergency.”
“What kind of an emergency?”
“Any kind, Cardinal. You’ll receive a text listing the numbers in a couple of minutes.
And please keep your own cell phone switched on at all times. Now,” Mandino continued, “you should also be aware that if the two men in the house have worked out—”
“Two men? What two men?”
“One is, we believe, the husband of the dead woman, but we
don’t know who the second man is. As I was saying, if these men have found what we’re seeking, I will have no option but to apply the Sanction.”
11
I
“I think these verses are written in Occitan, Mark,” Bronson said, looking up from the screen of his laptop. He’d logged onto the Internet to try to research the second inscription but without inputting entire phrases. He’d discovered that some of the words could have come from several languages— roire, for example, was also found in Romanian—but the only language that contained all the words he’d chosen was Occitan, a Romance language originally spoken in the Languedoc region of southern France. By trawling through online dictionaries and lexicons and cross-referencing, he had managed to translate some of the words, though many of those in the verses simply weren’t listed in the few Occitan dictionaries he’d found.
“What’s it mean?” Mark asked.
Bronson grunted. “I’ve no idea. I’ve only been able to translate the odd word here and there. For example, this word ‘roire’ in the sixth line means ‘oak,’ and there’s a reference to ‘elm’ in the same line.”
“You don’t think it’s just some medieval poem about husbandry or forest maintenance?”
Bronson laughed. “I hope not, and I don’t think so. There’s also one oddity. In the last line but one there’s the word ‘calix,’ and I can’t find that in any of the Occitan dictionaries I’ve looked at. That might be because it seems to be a Latin word, rather than Occitan. If so, it translates as ‘chalice,’ but I’ve no idea why a Latin word should appear in a verse written in Occitan. I’ll have to send a copy of this to Jeremy Goldman in London. Then we might find out what the hell this is all about.”
He’d already taken several photographs of the inscription, which he’d transferred to the hard drive of his laptop, and had also typed the text into a Word file.
“What we need to do now,” he said, “is decide what we should do with this stone.”