by James Becker
“OK,” Bronson said. “I’ll call now.”
He quickly searched the man’s jacket, found a handful of nine-millimeter shells and removed them. Then he scoured the floor, found the ejected cartridge case from the Browning and picked it up. The bullet that had hit the Italian had passed straight through his shoulder and buried itself in the edge of the doorframe, but he quickly removed it with one of the screwdrivers he’d used to lift the floor panel. That was all he could do to eliminate the forensic evidence.
Finally, he picked up the holster and the two pistols—and the skyphos as an afterthought—and left the room. Angela was waiting for him in the hall, both her bags at her feet.
“I’ve tried to stop the bleeding with a couple of towels,” Bronson explained, “and I’ll call the emergency services right now. You get in the car.”
Fifteen minutes later they were in the Espace—the back of the car now empty as Bronson had unceremoniously dumped the bath and all the other boxes beside the Hamptons’ garage—and heading west, away from the house.
III
Bronson steered the Renault down the road and glanced over at Angela. “Are you all right?” he asked.
“I’m furious,” she snapped. Bronson realized that the shaking he had taken to be shock or fear was actually intense anger. Every sinew of Angela’s body telegraphed her fury.
“I know,” Bronson said, his voice deliberately calm and measured, “it’s a shame we didn’t get the chance to examine the scroll, but we are alive. That’s the most important thing.”
“It’s not just that,” Angela retorted. “I was terrified in there, do you know that? I’d never even seen a real pistol until you waved that one at me back in England, and a few hours later I’m in the middle of a gun battle, and some fat Italian crook’s dragging me around by my neck. That’s bad enough. Then, just as we finally manage to decode the inscription and track down the relic, those two bastards come along and take it away from us. After all we’ve been through! I’m really pissed off.”
Bronson smiled to himself. Good old Angela, he thought. Trust her to come back fighting.
“Look, Angela,” he said, “I’m really sorry about what happened back there. It was my fault they got into the house. I should have double-checked that all the doors and windows were locked.”
“If you had locked the doors, they’d probably still have got inside, and if we’d heard them coming we might have been involved in a shoot-out neither of us would have survived. As it is, thanks to you, we’re both still very much alive. But it’s a shame about the scroll.”
“I brought the skyphos or whatever you call it. At least we’ve got that as a souvenir.
It’s obviously old—do you think it’s valuable?”
Angela leaned over to the backseat and picked up the vessel to examine it properly—in the house she’d hardly had a chance.
“This is a fake,” she said a few minutes later, “but a good one. At first sight it looks exactly like a genuine Roman skyphos. But the shape is slightly different: it’s a bit too tall for its width. The glaze feels wrong, and I think the composition of the pottery itself isn’t right for the first century. There are a lot of tests we could run, but it probably wouldn’t be worth the effort.”
“So we’ve been through all this for a fake?” Bronson asked. “And remind me. What, exactly, is a skyphos?”
“The name’s Greek, not Roman. It’s a type of vessel that originated in the eastern end of the Mediterranean, around about the first century A.D. A skyphos is a two-handled drinking cup. This one’s in excellent condition, and if it had been the genuine article it would have been worth around four or five grand.”
“So when was it made?”
Angela looked at the skyphos critically. “Definitely second millennium,” she replied.
“If I had to guess I’d say thirteenth or maybe fourteenth century. Probably made about the same time that the Hamptons’ house was built.”
Bronson glanced over at her. “That’s interesting,” he said.
“More coincidental than anything else, I’d have thought.”
“Not necessarily, if you are right and they’re more or less contemporary. I think it could be far more than simple coincidence that a fourteenth-century pot—and a fake at that—was deliberately hidden in a fourteenth-century house.”
“Why?”
Bronson paused to order his thoughts. “The whole trail we’ve been following is obscure and complicated, and I’m wondering if that Occitan verse is even more complex than we thought, and that we’re missing something.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“Look at the verse,” Bronson said. “It’s written entirely in Occitan apart from one word— calix—and that’s Latin for ‘chalice.’ When we follow the other clues in the riddle, we eventually find something that looks like a Roman drinking cup, but isn’t.
So the verse uses a Roman word for chalice, and we’ve recovered a copy of a Roman chalice. Doesn’t that strike you as odd? Or at least convoluted?”
“Keep going,” Angela said, encouragingly.
“Why did they go to all the trouble of manufacturing a fake skyphos when they could just as easily have buried the scroll in any old earthenware pot? It’s as if they wanted to draw our attention to the Roman element in all this, back to the Latin inscription in the living room.”
“But we’ve been over and over this. There aren’t any other clues in those three Latin words. Or, if there are, they’re bloody well hidden.”
“Agreed. So maybe the Occitan verse is pointing us toward something else.
Something more than just the location of the hidden scroll? Perhaps to the skyphos itself?”
“But there’s nothing else inside it,” Angela said, turning the vessel upside down. “I checked that when I was looking for a sittybos.”
Bronson looked confused.
“Remember?” Angela said. “It’s a kind of tag attached to a scroll that identifies its contents.”
“Oh, right,” Bronson said. “Well, maybe not anything inside it, but what about the outside? Is that just a random pattern on the side of the pot?”
Angela peered closely at the green-glazed pottery vessel and almost immediately she noticed something. Just below the rim on one side of the skyphos were three small letters separated by dots: “H•V•L.”
“Now, that’s odd,” she murmured. “There are three letters inscribed here—‘HVL’—and they obviously have to stand for ‘Hic Vanidici Latitant.’ ”
“ ‘Here lie the liars,’ ” Bronson breathed. “That’s a definite link. So what’s that pattern underneath the letters?”
Below the inscribed letters was what looked almost like a sine wave: a line that undulated in a regular pattern, up and down, and with short diagonal lines running below it, sloping from top right to bottom left. Below the wavy line was a geometric pattern, three straight lines crisscrossing in the center and with a dot at each end.
Running along the lines were Latin numbers, followed by the letters “M•P,” then more numbers and the letter “A.” Beside each dot were other numbers, each followed by a “P.” In the very center of the design were the letters “PO•LDA,” and below that “M•A•M.”
“It’s not random,” Angela said decisively. “Whatever these lines mean, they indicate something definite, almost like a map.”
Bronson looked across at the skyphos Angela was holding. “But a map of what?”
20
I
Late that afternoon, the setting sun bathed the irregular rooftops and old walls of the ancient heart of the city of Rome with a golden glow. Pedestrians bustled to and fro along the wide pavements, and a constant stream of hooting and jostling vehicles fought its way around the Piazza di Santa Maria alle Fornaci. But Joseph Cardinal Vertutti saw none of it.
He sat down beside Mandino in the same café where the two men had first met. As the operation had been successfully concluded, he thought that it roun
ded things out nicely to hold their last meeting in the same place where they’d held their first.
But this time Mandino had insisted that they meet in a small back room.
“You have it?” Vertutti asked, his voice high and excited. His hands were trembling slightly, Mandino noticed.
“All in good time, Cardinal, all in good time.” A waiter knocked and entered with two cups of coffee. He placed them gently on the table and then withdrew, closing the door behind him. “Before I deliver anything, we have one small administrative detail to take care of. Have you transferred the money?”
“Yes,” Vertutti snapped. “I sent one hundred thousand euros to the account you specified.”
“You might think your word is sufficient proof, Eminence, but I know firsthand that the Vatican is just as capable of duplicity as the next person. Unless you have a transfer slip for me, this conversation will finish right here.”
Vertutti pulled a wallet from his jacket pocket. He opened it and extracted a slip of paper, which he passed across the table.
Mandino looked at it, smiled, and then tucked it away in his own wallet. The amount was correct, and in the “reference” section Vertutti had inserted “Purchase of religious artifacts,” which was a surprisingly accurate description of the transaction.
“Excellent,” Mandino said. “Now, you’ll be pleased to hear that we managed to retrieve the relic. I watched the man Bronson—Mark Hampton’s friend—retrieve the scroll, and we interceded immediately. Neither Bronson nor his wife, who was also present at the house, have any significant knowledge of what the Exomologesis contains, and so they don’t need to be eliminated.”
Mandino said nothing to Vertutti about what he’d told them about the scroll, or the embarrassing fact that the Englishman had sent him running for his life and had actually shot one of his bodyguards.
“Very generous of you,” Vertutti quipped sarcastically. “Where are they now?”
“They’re probably heading back to Britain. Now that we’ve recovered the relic, there’s nothing else for them here.”
Mandino was again being slightly economical with the truth. He’d already instructed Antonio Carlotti to advise one of his contacts in the Carabinieri that Bronson—a man wanted for questioning by the Metropolitan Police about a murder in Britain—was roaming at will around Italy. He’d even passed on details about the Renault Espace he’d seen parked outside the house. He was certain that the two of them would be picked up well before they reached the Italian border.
“So, where is the relic?” Vertutti asked impatiently.
Mandino opened his briefcase, removed a plastic container filled with a white, fluffy substance and passed it across the table.
Vertutti cautiously lifted out several layers of cotton wool to reveal the small scroll.
With trembling fingers, he gingerly picked up the ancient papyrus. He held it up—the expression on his face reflecting his knowledge of both its age and its terrible destructive power—then carefully unrolled it on the table in front of him. He nodded gravely, almost reverently, as he read through the short text.
“Even if I wasn’t sure about it,” he said, “the way this is written is an indication of the author’s identity.”
“What do you mean?” Mandino asked.
“The writing is bold and the letters large,” Vertutti said. “It’s not generally known, but the man who wrote this suffered from a medical condition known as ophthalmia neonatorum, which was fairly common at the time. This disease caused a progressive loss of sight and a very painful weakness in his eyes, and in his case eventually left him nearly blind. Writing was always difficult for him, and he probably normally used an amanuensis, a professional scribe. That facility was obviously not available to him in Judea when he was forced to write this document.”
Vertutti continued studying the relic for a few moments, then looked up. “I know we’ve had our differences of opinion, Mandino,” he said, with a somewhat strained smile, “but despite your views of the Church and the Vatican, I would like to congratulate you for recovering this. The Holy Father will be particularly pleased that we’ve managed to do so.”
Mandino inclined his head in acknowledgment. “What will you do with it now?
Destroy it?”
Vertutti shook his head. “I hope not,” he said. “I believe it should be secreted in the Apostolic Penitentiary along with the Vitalian Codex. Destroying an object of this age and importance is not something I believe the Vatican should contemplate doing, no matter what the context.”
Vertutti unrolled the last few inches of the scroll. Then he leaned forward to examine something at the end of the document, below the mark “SQVET.”
“Did you look at this?” he asked, an edge of tension in his voice.
“No,” Mandino replied. “I only checked the beginning of it, purely to make sure it was the correct document.”
“Oh, it’s the correct document all right. But this—this changes everything,” Vertutti said, pointing at the very end of the scroll.
Mandino squinted at the document. There were a few lines written in a different, smaller hand just above Nero’s imperial seal.
Vertutti translated the Latin aloud, then looked at Mandino.
“You know what you have to do,” he said.
II
Bronson and Angela found a small family-run hotel on the outskirts of Santa Marinella, on the Italian coast, northwest of Rome. It offered off-street parking in a courtyard at the rear of the building and seemed quietly anonymous. Bronson booked in, taking the last remaining twin room, and carried their bags upstairs.
The room was south-facing, light and airy, with a view over the courtyard. Angela opened her bag, lifted out a bulky bundle of clothes and laid it on the bed.
“We need decent light,” Bronson said, moving one of the bedside tables over to stand it in front of the window.
Behind him, Angela carefully unwrapped the clothes, layer by layer, to reveal the skyphos nestling in the center of the bundle. She placed it gently on the table Bronson had moved.
Bronson removed the digital camera from his overnight bag. He crouched down between the table and the window so that the full light of the afternoon sun fell on the skyphos, making the old green glaze of the earthenware pot glow. He snapped a couple of dozen pictures of the vessel, from all sides and angles, then finally took a pencil and paper and made as accurate a drawing as he could of the inscribed lines and figures on its side.
“So all we have to do now,” Angela said, as Bronson copied the photographs onto his laptop, “is work out what the hell that diagram—or whatever it is—means.”
“Exactly.”
They looked at the lines, letters and numbers.
“I still think it might be some kind of map,” Angela suggested hesitantly.
“You may be right. But if it is, I’ve no idea how to decipher it. I mean, it’s just three lines and a bunch of numbers. Maybe we should ignore it for the moment and look again at Marcus Asinius Marcellus and Nero. We guessed the literal meanings of
‘MAM’ and ‘PO LDA,’ but we never really deduced why they were inscribed on that slab. If we can do that, it might give us a steer.”
“Back to the books?”
“You check the books. I’ll use the Internet. Now that those two Italians have taken the scroll, hopefully no one will be looking for us.”
Bronson logged on to the hotel’s wireless network on his laptop, while Angela leafed through the books that she had bought in Cambridge.
Bronson started by looking for references to Marcus Asinius Marcellus, because they surmised that he had probably been responsible for the Latin inscription on the stone in the Hamptons’ house. They already knew Marcellus had been involved in a scandal over a forged will, and had only been spared execution by the personal intervention of Nero himself.
“That,” Bronson said, “would have given Nero a lever he could use to pressure Marcellus into carrying out tasks fo
r him. That would explain the ‘PO LDA’: ‘Per ordo Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus.’ What the letters on the stone meant was that the job—whatever it was—was done by Marcellus, but on Nero’s orders.”
“So perhaps we should look a bit more closely at the Emperor?” Angela said.
They transferred their attention to Nero himself and discovered, among other things, his implacable hatred of all aspects of Christianity.
“If that Italian henchman was telling the truth,” Bronson said, “the scroll contained some secret that the Vatican definitely didn’t want anyone to discover. Which would mean that whatever we’re looking for is also connected with the Church.”
“And if I’m right and those lines are a kind of map, that suggests Marcellus might have been burying or hiding something for Nero,” Angela said. “It must have been something that the Emperor felt was so important that he had to entrust it, not to a squad of workmen or gang of slaves, but to a relative who owed him an enormous debt of gratitude.”
“So what the hell did Marcellus bury?”
“I’ve no idea,” Angela said, “but the more I look at those lines, the more sure I am that something was buried, and this diagram must be trying to tell us where.”
III
Mandino wasn’t surprised to find the Villa Rosa appeared to be deserted. If he’d been in Bronson’s place, he would have left the house as quickly as possible. He also knew that his wounded bodyguard was now in a Rome hospital, Carabinieri officers waiting to interview him about his gunshot wound, because the man had made a brief telephone call to Rogan.
The driver stopped the car in front of the house. Mandino ordered one of his men to check the garage, just in case the Renault Espace had been parked there. He wasn’t about to make the same mistake twice. Moments later, the bodyguard ran back.