by James Becker
As Bronson walked out of Goldman’s office, he glanced around expectantly. He had hoped to see Angela while he was in the museum, and her refusal to meet him had been a disappointment.
He wandered out into Great Russell Street and went down one of the side roads. He took a seat in a café and ordered a cappuccino. The first sip he took made him realize just how bad most English coffee was in comparison to the real Italian stuff. That started him thinking about Italy again and, inevitably, about Jackie.
As he sat there, drinking the bitter liquid, his thoughts spun back over the years, and he remembered how excited she and Mark had been when they completed the purchase of the old house. He’d gone out to Italy with the Hamptons because they didn’t speak the language well enough to handle the transaction, and had stayed with them in a local hotel for a couple of days.
A vivid picture swam into his mind: Jackie, dancing on the lawn in a bright red and white sundress while Mark stood beside the front door, a broad grin on his face, on the day when they’d finally got the keys.
“Stay here with us, Chris,” she’d said, laughing in the spring sunshine. “There’s plenty of room. Stay as long as you like.”
But he hadn’t. He’d pleaded pressure of work and flown back to London the following afternoon. Those two days he’d spent with them in Italy had rekindled feelings for Jackie that he’d really thought he’d got over, feelings that he knew were a betrayal of both Mark and Angela.
Bronson shook himself out of his reverie, and drained the last of his coffee, grimacing as he tasted the gritty grounds. Then he sat back and, in a sudden moment of gloomy introspection, seriously wondered if his life could do anything except improve.
Jackie was now—to his eternal regret—dead and gone. Mark was an emotional wreck, though Bronson knew he was strong and he’d pull himself out of it, and Angela was barely speaking to him. He wasn’t sure he still had a job and, for some reason he still couldn’t fathom, he’d got embroiled with a gang of armed Italian thugs over a couple of dusty old inscriptions. As midlife crises went, Bronson reflected, it pretty much ticked all the boxes on the debit side. And he wasn’t even middle-aged. Or not quite, anyway.
Three-quarters of an hour later he walked back into Goldman’s office.
If Bronson had been hoping for a clue that would lead them to the missing section of the first inscribed stone, or even a written description of its contents, he was disappointed. The verses that Goldman handed him appeared to be little more than rambling nonsense:
GB•PS•DDDBE
From the safe mountain truth did descend
Abandoned by all save the good
The cleansing flames quell only flesh
And pure spirits soar above the pyre
For truth like stone forever will endure
Here oak and elm descry the mark
As is above so is below
The word becomes the perfect
Within the chalice all is naught
And terrible to behold
“You’re sure this is accurate, Jeremy?” he asked.
“That’s a fairly literal translation of the Occitan verses, yes,” Goldman replied. “The problem is that there seems to be a lot of symbolism in the original that I’m not entirely sure we can fully appreciate today. In fact, some of it would be completely meaningless to us, even if we knew exactly what the author of this text was driving at. For example, there are some Cathar references, like the statement ‘As is above so is below,’ which, without a thorough grounding in that religion, would be impossible to understand completely.”
“But the Cathars were prevalent in France, not Italy, weren’t they?”
Goldman nodded. “Yes, but it’s known that after the Albigensian Crusade some of the few survivors fled to northern Italy, so maybe this verse was written by one of them. That would also explain the use of Occitan. But as to what it actually means, I’m afraid I haven’t got a clue. And I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a Cathar you could ask. The crusaders did a very efficient job of exterminating them.”
“What about the title—this ‘GB PS DDDBE’? Is that some kind of code?”
“I doubt it,” Goldman replied. “I suspect they refer to some expression that would have been familiar to people who saw the stone back in the fourteenth century.”
Bronson looked blank.
“There are a lot of initials in common use today that would have been completely meaningless a hundred years ago, and might be just as incomprehensible to future generations. Things like . . . oh, ‘PC’ for ‘personal computer’ or even ‘politically correct’; ‘TMI’ for ‘too much information’; that kind of thing. OK, a lot of these kind of initials refer to slang terms, but nobody today would have any trouble telling you that ‘RIP’ stands for ‘rest in peace,’ and that’s the kind of thing you’ll frequently find carved on a piece of stone. Maybe the initials we have here had a similar significance in the fourteenth century, and were so familiar to people that no explanation was ever needed.”
Bronson looked again at the paper in his hand. He’d hoped that the translation would provide an answer, but all it had done was present him with a whole new list of questions.
II
Early that evening, and a mere five hours after they’d landed at Heathrow, Rogan braked the rental car to a halt about a hundred yards from Mark Hampton’s Ilford apartment.
“You’re sure he’s here?” Mandino asked.
Rogan nodded. “I know somebody is. I’ve made three telephone calls to that apartment and they’ve all been answered. I did one as a wrong number, and the other two as telesales calls. In all three cases, a man answered, and I’m reasonably certain it was Mark Hampton.”
“Good enough,” Mandino said. He picked up a small plastic carrier bag from the footwell of the Ford sedan, opened the passenger door and headed along the street, Rogan at his side.
Time was of the essence. With every hour that passed, Mandino knew that more people would be likely to see copies of the inscriptions as Hampton and Bronson tried to work out what they meant.
He and Rogan walked the short distance to the building. At the entrance door, Mandino glanced in both directions before pulling on a pair of thin rubber gloves, and then pressed the button on the entry-phone. After a few seconds there was a crackle and a man’s voice issued from the tiny speaker grill.
“Yes?”
“Mr. Mark Hampton?”
“Yes. Who is it?”
“This is Detective Inspector Roberts, sir, of the Metropolitan Police. I’ve got a few questions to ask you about your wife’s unfortunate death in Italy. May I come in?”
“Can you prove your identity?”
Mandino paused for a few seconds. In the circumstances, Hampton’s response was not unreasonable, or unexpected.
“You don’t have a videophone, sir, so I can’t show you my warrant card. But I can read you the number, and you can check it with either the Ilford police station or New Scotland Yard. The number is seven four six, two eight four.”
Mandino had not the slightest idea what number or numbers might be found on a Metropolitan Police warrant card, but he was prepared to bet that Hampton wouldn’t either. It all depended on whether the Englishman would bother to check.
“What questions?”
“Just some simple procedural matters, sir. It will only take a few minutes.”
“Very well.”
There was a buzz and the electric lock on the front door of the building clicked open.
With a final glance up and down the street, Mandino and Rogan stepped inside, walked straight to the elevator and pressed the button for Mark’s floor.
When the doors opened, they checked the apartment numbers, then strode down the corridor. At the correct door they stopped and Mandino knocked, then stepped to one side.
The moment the door came off the latch, Rogan kicked against it, hard. The door flew backward, knocking Mark off his feet and sending him sprawling onto the floor
of the narrow hallway. Rogan stepped forward quickly, knelt down and hit him on the side of his head with a bludgeon. The blow was just hard enough to knock Mark unconscious, and was sufficient to disable him for the few minutes they needed.
“There,” Mandino said, walking into the living room and pointing at a carver dining chair. “Tie him in that.”
Rogan pulled the chair into the center of the room. Together, the two men dragged Mark over to the carver and sat him in it. He slumped forward, but Mandino pulled his shoulders back and held him in place while Rogan did his work. He took a length of clothesline from the bag Mandino had been carrying, looped it twice around Mark’s chest and tied it behind the back of the chair, holding him upright.
Then he took some cable ties, wrapped one around each wrist and used a pair of pliers to pull them tight. He repeated the process around Mark’s forearms and elbows, and then secured his ankles in the same fashion to the chair legs. In less than three minutes, he was completely immobilized.
“Check the place,” Mandino ordered. “See if he brought a copy of the inscription back with him.”
While Rogan began looking around the apartment, Mandino walked through into the kitchen and made himself a mug of instant coffee. It was nothing like the Italian latte he was used to, but it was better than nothing, and the last drink he’d had was a can of orange juice on the flight from Rome.
“Nothing,” Rogan reported, as Mandino walked back into the room.
“Right. Wake him up.”
Rogan stepped across to Mark, lifted his head and then roughly forced his eyes open. Their captive stirred, then regained consciousness.
When Mark came to, he found himself staring at a well-dressed and heavily built man sitting in an easy chair opposite him, sipping a hot drink from one of his own mugs.
“Who the hell are you?” Mark demanded, his voice harsh and slurred. “And what are you doing in my apartment?”
Mandino smiled slightly. “I’ll ask the questions, thank you. We know about the two inscribed stones you found in your house in Italy, and we know you or your friend Christopher Bronson decided to obliterate the carving in the dining room. Now you’re going to tell me what you found.”
“Are you the bastards who killed Jackie?”
The smile vanished from Mandino’s face. “I said I’ll ask the questions. My associate will now emphasize the point.”
Rogan stepped forward, the pliers in his hand, reached down and placed the jaws around the end of the little finger on Mark’s left hand and slowly levered backward.
With a snap that was audible to both Italians, one of the bones broke, the sound followed immediately by a howl of pain from Hampton.
“I hope the soundproofing here is good,” Mandino remarked. “I wouldn’t want to disturb your neighbors. Now,” he continued, raising his voice above Mark’s groans,
“just answer my questions, quickly and truthfully, and then we can get you proper medical attention. If you don’t tell us what we want to know, you’ve seven more fingers that my associate can work on.”
Rogan waved the pliers in front of Mark’s face.
Through a red haze and tears of pain, Mark stared in disbelief at the Italian.
“OK,” Mandino said briskly, “let’s begin. What did you find on the second inscribed stone? And don’t even think about lying to me. My colleague here was watching through the window of the house when Bronson uncovered it.”
“A poem,” Mark gasped. “It looked like a poem. Two verses.”
“In Latin?”
“No. We thought it was a language called Occitan.”
“Did you translate it?”
Mark shook his head. “No. Chris tried, but he could only find a few of the words on the Internet, so we’ve no idea what the verses were about.”
“What did you manage to translate?”
“Only a couple of words about trees—oak and elm, I think—and there was a Latin word as well. Something about a cup or chalice. That’s all we could do.”
“Are you quite sure?” Mandino asked, leaning forward.
“Yes, I—” Mark screamed as Rogan tapped the pliers sharply on his fractured finger, already badly swollen and bleeding.
Mandino waited for a few seconds before continuing. “I’m inclined to believe you,”
he said, in a conversational tone. “So where is the inscription? I presume you copied it or something before your friend destroyed it.”
“Yes, yes,” Mark sobbed. “Chris photographed it.”
“And what’s he doing with it?”
“His ex-wife put him in contact with a man named Jeremy Goldman at the British Museum. He’ll be taking the pictures to show him, to try to get it translated.”
“When?” Mandino asked softly.
“I don’t know. We only got back from Italy today. He’s been driving for two solid days, so he’ll probably go there tomorrow. But I don’t know,” he added hastily, as Rogan lifted the pliers threateningly.
Mandino raised a calming hand. “And do you have a copy of those photographs?”
“No. There didn’t seem any point. Chris is the one who’s interested in this—I’m not.
All I wanted was my wife back.”
“Are there any other copies, apart from those Bronson has?”
“No—I’ve just told you that.”
It was time to finish it. Mandino nodded to Rogan, who walked behind their captive, picked up a roll of adhesive tape and tore off a strip about six inches long, which he stuck roughly over Mark’s mouth as a rudimentary gag. Then he cut about a two-foot length of clothesline and knotted the ends together to form a loop.
Mark’s terrified stare never left the Italian as he made his preparations.
Rogan dropped the loop of cord over Mark’s head and walked into the kitchen, returning a few seconds later with that most mundane of kitchen utensils, a rolling pin. He stood directly behind Mark, awaiting instructions.
“Neither you nor your policeman friend have any idea what you’ve stumbled into,”
Mandino said. “My instructions are explicit. Anyone with any knowledge of these two inscriptions—even the limited knowledge you appear to have—is considered too dangerous to remain alive.”
He nodded to Rogan, who slipped the rolling pin into the loop of cord and began twisting it to form a simple but effective garrotte. Mark immediately began to struggle in a desperate effort to free himself.
When the cord tightened around the Englishman’s neck, Rogan paused for a moment, awaiting final confirmation.
Mandino nodded again, and watched Mark as the noose began to bite, seeing the flush rise in the man’s face as his struggles intensified.
Rogan grunted with the effort as he held the rolling pin tight, waiting for the end.
Mark jerked violently once, then a second time, then slumped forward as far as the rope would allow. Rogan maintained the pressure for another minute, then released the cord and checked for a pulse in Mark’s neck. He found nothing.
Mandino finished his coffee, then stood up and carried the mug through into the kitchen where he washed it thoroughly. He wasn’t too bothered about the possibility of his DNA being found in the apartment, as there was nothing whatsoever to link him or Rogan to the killing, but old habits died hard.
Back in the living room, Rogan had already released Mark from the chair and dragged his body to one side of the room. Then they trashed the place, trying to make it look as if a violent struggle had taken place. Finally, Mandino produced a leather-bound Filofax, opened it, tore several pages and smeared the organizer with blood from Mark’s broken finger, then dropped it beside the body. The name in the front of the document was “Chris Bronson,” and it was one of the items Mandino’s men had found when they searched the house in Italy.
They made a final inspection of the apartment, then Rogan opened the door and checked up and down the corridor. He nodded to Mandino and they left the apartment, pulled the door closed behind them
and walked to the elevator.
Outside, they strode unhurriedly down the street to their rental car. Rogan started the engine and pulled away from the curb. As they neared the end of the road, Mandino pointed to a public phone booth.
“That will do. Stop beside it.”
He got out, stepped across to the phone, checked he still had his gloves on, then lifted the receiver and dialed “999.” The call was answered in seconds.
“Emergency. Which service do you require?”
“Police,” Mandino replied, speaking quickly and with what he hoped was the sound of panic in his voice.
“There’s been a terrible fight,” he said when the officer came on the line. He gave the address of Mark’s apartment, then ended the call just as the officer began asking for his personal details.
“Drive back up the road. There’s a side street not far from the apartment building.
Take that turning.”
Rogan parked the car where Mandino directed, facing the main road. Mark’s building was just visible from their position.
“Now what?” Rogan asked.
“Now we wait,” Mandino told him.
Twenty minutes later they heard the unmistakable sound of a siren, and a police car drove swiftly past the end of the road and squealed to a stop outside the apartment block. Two officers ran toward the building.
“Can we go now?” Rogan asked.
“Not yet,” Mandino said.
After about another fifteen minutes, three more police cars, sirens screaming, tore down the street. Mandino nodded in satisfaction. He hadn’t been able to find Bronson so far, but he had no doubt that the British police force would be able to track him down quickly. They would almost certainly have enough evidence to arrest him on suspicion of the killing of Mark Hampton.
Faced with the possibility of a murder charge, deciphering an ancient Occitan inscription would be the last thing on Bronson’s mind. Mandino’s organization had good contacts within the Metropolitan Police, and he was certain he would be able to find out where Bronson was being held and, more important, when and where he would be released.