by James Becker
“The door’s locked but I looked through the window. There’s nothing in there,” he said.
“Right,” Mandino said. “Rogan—get us inside.”
The rear door was jammed with a chair—Rogan could see that clearly enough through the glass panels in the door—so he walked farther on to the living room window where he and Alberti had broken the pane. The shutters were closed and locked, but they yielded easily to his crowbar. The glass hadn’t been repaired yet, and in a few minutes Rogan was able to open the front door of the house for the others.
The two men walked straight through to the living room, and stopped in front of the fireplace.
“Are you sure it’s there, capo?”
“It’s the only place it can be. It’s the only hiding place that makes sense. Get on with it.”
Rogan dragged a stepladder over to the fireplace, then removed a hammer and chisel from the bag he was carrying. He climbed up until his shoulders were level with the inscribed stone and started removing the cement that held it in place. He drove the tip of the chisel into the gap between the stone and the one below it, and levered. The stone moved very slightly.
“This slab can only be a few centimeters thick,” Rogan said, “but I’d like somebody else to help lift it out.”
“Wait there.” Mandino gestured at one of the bodyguards who quickly removed his jacket and shoulder holster, and grabbed a second stepladder.
Driving the tool into the space above the slab, Rogan levered upward, and the top of the stone moved forward. He shifted the position of the chisel and pushed up again, then repeated the action on both sides of the slab, until he was satisfied that the stone had been freed off sufficiently to lift it out.
“Get ready to take the weight,” he warned the bodyguard.
Together the two men worked the slab back and forth until it came free. Each held one side of the stone, but Rogan immediately realized it wasn’t that heavy.
“It’s only about an inch thick,” he said. He lifted it himself and climbed down the ladder. He carried the stone across to a small but sturdy table, where Mandino was waiting. Rogan held it up upright on its base while Mandino eagerly brushed dust and mortar from its back, searching for any letters or numbers.
“Nothing,” Mandino muttered. The reverse of the stone was unmarked apart from tiny cuts made when it had been prepared. “Check the cavity.”
Rogan climbed back up the ladder and peered inside the gaping hole above the fireplace.
“There’s something in here,” he said.
“What?”
“There’s another stone lying in the cavity. It’s not been cemented in place. It’s as if the first stone acted as a door.”
“Bring it down,” Mandino instructed.
Rogan pulled the second stone out of the recess and placed it on the table beside the first one.
“No,” Mandino said. “Not like that. Put it below the other stone. That’s it,” he added, as the two men maneuvered the slab into position. “Look, that’s the lower section. That’s the piece somebody must have cut off centuries ago.”
The three men examined the markings on the stone.
“Is it a map?” Rogan asked, brushing the dust and dirt off the inscribed surface.
“It could be,” Mandino said. “It’ll take time to decipher, though. It’s not like any map I’ve ever seen.”
Religion held no sway over Mandino. He believed in the things he could see like money, and fear. But he was developing a grudging respect for the ingenuity of the Cathars. With their religion crumbling around them, they must have known that time was running out. But rather than risk either the stone or the Exomologesis falling into the hands of the crusaders, they decided to hide them both. They buried the scroll under the floor and split the stone in two, sealing the lower half inside the wall, where it would be safe from wear and tear. And then they left two markers visible. Two inscribed stones that showed where the two objects were hidden, but only if you knew exactly what you were looking for.
21
I
The Internet searches had helped, but not very much. Bronson and Angela now knew a lot more about the Romans in general, and Emperor Nero in particular, but still almost nothing about Marcus Asinius Marcellus, who remained a vague and insubstantial figure almost completely absent from the historical record. And they still had no idea what he had buried on Nero’s orders.
In their room in Santa Marinella, Bronson examined the skyphos carefully while Angela studied one of their books about Nero.
“The one thing we haven’t really looked at,” Bronson said slowly, “is this drinking cup.”
“We have,” Angela objected. “It’s empty now, because the scroll’s gone, and we’ve copied that map thing off the outside. There’s nothing else it can tell us.”
“I didn’t mean that, exactly. I’ve been trying to reconstruct the sequence of events.
This pot is a fourteenth-century copy of a first-century Roman skyphos. But why didn’t the Cathars use a contemporary vessel to hide the scroll? They could have made any old pot and inscribed that diagram on it. Why did they bother creating a replica of a Roman drinking cup? There had to be a good reason for doing that.
“The Occitan verse we found contained a single Latin word— calix—meaning
‘chalice.’ That was an obvious pointer to this vessel. But I think the fact that this appears to be a Roman pot points straight to the Latin inscription. Maybe this vessel and the two stones are all part of the same silent message left for somebody by the last of the Cathars.”
“We’ve been over all this, Chris.”
“I know, but there’s one question we haven’t asked.” Bronson pointed at the side of the skyphos. “Where did that come from?” he said.
“The vessel?”
“No. The map or diagram or whatever the hell it is. Maybe we’ve got it wrong about the ‘Cathar treasure, ’ or half wrong, anyway. They must have had the scroll—the clues we followed when we found it were too specific to be a coincidence—but just suppose the scroll was only part of their treasure.”
“What else did they have?”
“I’m wondering if the Cathars found or inherited both the scroll and the stone with the Latin inscription on it.”
Angela looked puzzled. “I don’t see how that helps us. All that’s on the stone are those three Latin words.”
“No,” Bronson said. “There is—or at least there was—more than that. Remember what Jeremy Goldman told me. He said that the stone had been cut, that the section cemented into the wall of the Hamptons’ house was just the top half. In fact, that tip was the reason Mark and I started searching the rest of the house. We were looking for the missing lower section.”
“But you never found it, so how does that help?”
“You’re quite right. We didn’t find it, but I wonder if we have now, or at least what was written on it. Think about it. How would you describe the carved letters on the Roman inscription?”
“All capitals, no frills. A typical first-century Latin inscription. There are hundreds of similar examples.”
“And what about the Occitan verses?”
Angela thought for a moment. “Completely different. That was a cursive script. I suppose the modern equivalent would be a kind of italic.”
“Exactly. Now your estimate was that the Occitan inscription was carved at about the same time as the skyphos was made, probably in the fourteenth century?”
“Probably, yes.”
“Now look at the diagram on the side of the vessel, and the letters and numbers. The numbers are Latin—that’s the first thing—and the letters are all capitals. In other words, although the skyphos and the Occitan inscription are probably contemporary, you’d never deduce that just by looking at the two texts. They appear completely different.”
“So what you’re saying is that if the skyphos was made by the Cathars, why is the decoration on the side so obviously Roman? Except that it’s an
obvious copy of a Roman drinking vessel, of course.”
“Yes,” Bronson said, “but I think that was quite deliberate. The Cathars made a copy of a Roman vessel to hold the scroll, and the decoration they chose for the skyphos is also Roman. More than that, the diagram is headed ‘HVL’— ‘Hic Vandici Latitant’—just like the stone with the Latin inscription.”
“Yes,” Angela said, her voice suddenly excited. “You mean that what we’re looking at here could be an exact copy of the map on the missing section of that stone?”
Bronson nodded. “Suppose the Cathars had possessed this stone for years, but they’d never managed to decipher what it meant. Perhaps the scroll itself refers to the stone, or to whatever was buried, and that convinced them that the map or diagram was really important. When the last of the Cathars fled from France and arrived in Italy, they knew their religion was doomed, but they still wanted to preserve the ‘treasure’ they’d managed to smuggle out of Montségur. So they split the stone in two, left one part—the top section—where it could be easily found, but hid the important bit, the diagram, somewhere else.
“To allow a fellow Cathar, or someone who knew enough about their religion, to decipher it, they prepared the Occitan inscription. The clues in that would lead to the scroll, safely hidden away in the skyphos, and on the vessel itself they left an exact copy of the diagram they’d never managed to understand. I think that map shows exactly where the ‘liars’ are hidden.”
“But this isn’t like any kind of map I’ve ever seen before. It’s just lines, letters and numbers. They could mean anything.”
Bronson nodded again. “If it was easy, the Cathars would have cracked it seven hundred years ago. I’m guessing here, but I think Nero must have insisted that the hiding place be located in an area that would never be found by accident, and that meant somewhere well outside Imperial Rome. Obviously the Emperor—or perhaps Marcellus—decided to make a map showing the location, so that the site could be found later if necessary. But to provide an extra layer of protection, they devised a type of map that would need to be deciphered.”
“I see what you’re driving at,” Angela said. “But this jar is a lot smaller than the stone would have been. What about the scale?”
“I’ve been thinking about that, and I don’t think it matters. I know a bit about mapping and, as long as you know the scale, you can interpret a map of any physical size. That diagram”—he pointed at the skyphos—“isn’t a conventional map because it hasn’t got a scale, at least as far as I can see, and it doesn’t show any features like a coast, rivers or towns. I’ve been trying to put myself in the position of the man who prepared it, trying to work out what he could have done to create a map that would endure, if necessary for centuries.
“If the burial place was outside Rome, he wouldn’t have been able to use buildings as reference points, because the only structures he’d see out in the country wouldn’t have been permanent. I mean, if he’d buried something in Rome itself, he might have guessed that places like the Circus Maximus would survive and used them to identify the location of the burial place. But in the country, even a large villa might be abandoned or destroyed within a generation or two. So the only realistic option he would have had would be to use very specific geographical features.
“I think Marcellus—or whoever made this—picked permanent objects, things that, no matter what happened in Italy, would always be visible and identifiable. I don’t think this diagram needs a scale because it probably refers to a group of hills near Rome. I think the lines show the distances between them and their respective heights.”
For a few seconds Angela looked at the diagram on the side of the skyphos, then down at the drawing Bronson had made, her fingers tracing the letters and numbers he’d copied from the vessel. Then she grabbed a book about the Roman Empire, flicked through it until she reached the index and turned to a specific page. It contained a table with letters and figures, but Bronson couldn’t read it upside-down.
“That might make sense,” she said, her eyes flicking between Bronson’s copy of the diagram and the table in the book. “If you’re right and the lines represent distances, then ‘P’ would translate as passus, the pace step of a Roman legionary and equal to 1.62 yards. ‘MP’ would mean mille passus, one thousand passus. That’s the Roman mile of 1,618 yards. The ‘P’ markings beside the dots would probably represent the heights of the hills, measured in pes, plural pedes, the Roman foot of 11.6 inches, and
‘A’ the actus, 120 pedes or about 116 feet.”
“But would the Romans have been able to produce figures that accurate?” Bronson asked.
Angela nodded confidently. “Absolutely. The Romans had a number of surveying tools, including one called a groma. That had been in use for centuries before Nero’s reign and would have allowed for quite sophisticated measuring. And you should also remember how many large Roman buildings are still standing today. They wouldn’t have survived if their builders hadn’t had quite advanced surveying ability.”
Angela leaned over the keyboard of the laptop, typed the word “groma” into the search engine and pressed the “enter” key. When the results appeared, she picked one site and clicked on that.
“There you are,” she said, pointing at the screen. “That’s a groma.”
Bronson looked at the diagram of the instrument for a few moments. It comprised two horizontal arms crossed at right angles and resting on a bracket that was itself attached to a vertical staff. Each of the four arms had a cord at the end that formed a plumb bob.
“And they also used a thing called a gnomon to locate north—very roughly—and they could measure distance and height using a diopter. ”
“So all we have to do now is work out which hills Marcellus used as his reference points.”
“That sounds easy, but only if you say it quickly,” Angela commented wryly. “How the hell are you going to manage that? There must be hundreds of hill formations outside Rome.”
“I have a secret weapon,” Bronson said, with a smile. “It’s called Google Earth, and I can use it to check the elevation of any point on the surface of the planet. There are six reference points on that diagram, so all I have to do is convert the figures from it into modern units of measurement, and then find six hills that match those criteria.
“Then we find the liars.”
II
On the way back from Ponticelli to Rome, Gregori Mandino telephoned Pierro and ordered him to wait at a restaurant on the Via delle Botteghe Oscure. By the very nature of the business he was in, Mandino had no office and tended to hold most of his meetings in cafés and restaurants. He also told Pierro to find detailed maps of the city and the surrounding area, and of the structures built in ancient Rome, and bring those with him, along with a laptop computer.
They met in a small private dining room at the back of the restaurant.
“So you found the Exomologesis?” Pierro asked, once Mandino and Rogan had sat down and ordered drinks.
“Yes,” Mandino replied, “and I really thought that would be the end of the matter.
But when Vertutti unrolled the scroll completely, there was a postscript to it that we hadn’t expected.”
“A postscript?”
“A short note in Latin accompanied by the imperial seal of Nero Claudius Caesar Drusus. It gave Vertutti quite a scare, because it implied that the scroll was only a part of what Marcellus had hidden on Nero’s instructions, and wasn’t even the most important part at that.”
“So what else did he bury?”
Mandino told him what Vertutti had translated from the Latin.
“Are you serious?” Pierro asked, a slight but perceptible tremor in his voice. “I can’t believe it. Both of them?”
“That’s what the Latin text claimed.”
The academic looked distinctly pale despite the warm lighting of the room. “But I don’t—I mean—oh, God. You really believe that?”
Mandino shrugged. “My vie
ws are irrelevant. And I frankly don’t care whether what’s written on the scroll is true or not.”
“Could those relics really have lasted two thousand years?”
“Vertutti isn’t prepared to take the chance. The point, Pierro, is that we’re still under contract to resolve this, so I’m expecting you to decipher what’s on the stone.”
“Where is it now?”
“We’ve left it in the car. Rogan has taken pictures of the inscription, and you can work from those.”
Rogan handed over the data card from the digital camera.
Pierro slipped it into a document pocket on his computer bag. “I’d like to see the stone for myself.”
Mandino nodded. “The car’s just around the corner. We’ll go and take a look at it in a few minutes.”
“And what exactly is the inscription? A map? Directions?”
“We’re not sure. It’s definitely the lower section of the stone with the Latin inscription—we put the two pieces together and they match—but it seems to be just three straight lines, six dots and some letters and numbers. It’s more like a diagram than a map, but it must indicate where the relics are hidden, otherwise there would have been no point in carving it in the first place, and no reason for anyone to hide the stone.”
“Lines?” Pierro murmured. “You mentioned letters and numbers. Can you remember what letters? Perhaps ‘P’ and ‘MP’?”
“Yes, and I think ‘A’ as well. Why? Do you know what they mean?”
“Well, perhaps. Pedes or passus, mille passus and actus. They’re Roman measurements of distance. Whoever prepared the diagram might have picked some prominent buildings or landmarks in Rome and used those as reference points.”
“I hope you’re right,” Mandino said. “We’ll go and look at the stone now, then you can get to work.” He got up and led the way out of the restaurant.
III
Bronson had been trying to find matches between the heights shown on the diagram from the skyphos and those on Google Earth for more than an hour.
“This could take forever,” he muttered, leaning back in his chair and stretching to ease his cramped joints. “This bloody country is full of hills, and God knows which ones Marcellus picked. And that’s assuming he did use hills.”