The Dante Conspiracy (7 page)
‘I don’t know,’ Perini replied, ‘but I still think there must
be a connection, simply because I don’t believe in coincidence. Bertorelli was researching
Dante’s work, in a way, and was tortured to death for his trouble, and almost immediately
afterwards somebody dug their way into the poet’s empty cenotaph, both events taking
place here in Florence. As far as I can see, there must be something about those
supposed new verses the professor discovered that triggered both his murder and
this break-in, and the only thing that makes sense to me is that they must provide
a clue to something, probably some relic, that’s linked to Dante.’
‘So the people who broke into Santa Croce thought whatever it
was might be hidden there, in the cenotaph?’
‘Exactly.
But Guitoni was right about
one thing. As soon as we get back to the office I’m going to read that article again,
this time really carefully. If a bunch of murderers can figure out the answer to
the mystery, I’m damned sure I can as well.’
‘I’ve always thought that optimism is a wonderful thing,’ Lombardi
murmured, as the two men stood up.
The Russian wasn’t pleased, and when he wasn’t pleased, he let
it be known.
But he was also realistic. He was sure that his interpretation
of the ‘new’ verses purporting to have been written by Dante – but almost certainly
penned by somebody else after the death of the poet – was correct. He was convinced
that he knew exactly what he and his men, a couple of locals recruited specifically
for this one task, were looking for. That seemed clear enough. The problem was that
although he’d worked out the identity of the relic to his own satisfaction, the
parts of the verses which seemed to explain where it had been hidden were obtuse
in the extreme.
And, frankly, he knew that sending his men to look in Dante’s
cenotaph had almost been an act of desperation. Or, as he could just about rationalize
it, as part of a process of elimination. It was obvious to him that the dates didn’t
work. The cenotaph had been erected half a millennium too late, and he knew it.
The only way that could have worked was if the relic had been found centuries earlier,
but, even if it had been, hiding it away in the cenotaph really didn’t make sense.
It would either have been placed prominently on display somewhere or sold at an
auction that would have attracted bidders from all over the world.
So after he had vented his fury on the men he’d hired to get
inside the cenotaph and dismissed them, he calmed rapidly and began planning his
next move. And the more he thought about it, the more obvious it seemed to him that
the mere existence of the relic could not possibly have been known to the authorities
in Florence. And that really changed everything, the whole thrust of his search.
If it had been taken from Ravenna to Florence in secret, then he would be wasting
his time looking in any public buildings in the city. As a private gift – if “gift”
was really the word he was looking for – then it would have ended up in a very private
location. And there was one obvious place that might have become its ultimate destination
back in the first few decades of the fourteenth century. The trouble was he had
no idea where that particular building had been located within Florence.
He would have to do some intensive research, and quickly.
Just over an hour after they’d got back to the station, Silvio
Perini tossed the piece of paper he been working on onto the desk in front of him
with an exclamation of disgust.
‘Not making any sense?’ Lombardi asked.
‘You could say that,’ Perini muttered.
‘I just did, actually. Do you want me to take a look?’
‘You might as well, I suppose. It’s pretty obvious that Guitoni
was right. Whoever wrote that is using a code, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense
to me. That bit about the Greek animal, for example. I think if you asked most people
to name a typical Greek animal, they’d either say a goat or a donkey, and for the
life of me I can’t see what relevance either creature would have to either Dante
or Florence. Or to the poem either. And that seems to be one of the easier references
to understand. There are other lines there that make absolutely no sense, or at
least they don’t to me.’
Lombardi scanned the verses printed on the sheet, and the various
pencilled notations his superior had made alongside them.
‘Guitoni was right about something else as well,’ he said. ‘These
lines don’t follow the numerical pattern of the original poem, so I think it’s pretty
certain they weren’t written by Dante, despite what Bertorelli thought. Maybe he
was prepared to gloss over the problems just to make his case. Scientists aren’t
always the most ethical of people when it comes to research. Anyway, I can see lines
here with ten syllables, and another couple with a dozen or more. And the rhyming
is off, as well.’
‘I’m impressed. You were actually listening to what Guitoni said?’
‘Against my better judgement, yes, I was, just in case he came
up with any startling bits of information that might have helped us close this case.
He didn’t, unless I missed something, but I did make a few mental notes about Dante.
His unusual verse structure was one of them, not least because it seemed so contrived.’
He fell silent for a minute or so.
‘Let’s forget about this for the moment,’ he suggested, ‘and
just look at what we’ve got from a crime point of view, because that might help.
We’ve got an academic authority on Dante kidnapped, tortured and then killed, most
likely by two men, and all the indications are that it was because of something
he knew, or at least something that his kidnappers thought he knew, which isn’t
exactly the same thing. So they were trying to get a piece of information out of
him. Then we have another two men – or possibly the same two men – breaking in to
Dante’s cenotaph, and the only motive that makes any sense is that they were looking
for something in there.’
‘We know all that,’ Perini objected.
‘Yes, but I was just wondering if trying to analyse these verses
with that in mind would produce a result. I mean, you’ve been trying to work out
what they say
,
to crack the code, as it were, so you can
understand what the writer was trying to convey. Suppose you assume that the lines
refer to some important relic that dates from the time of Dante, and just try to
identify what it could be and ignore everything else?’
‘That’s not a bad idea,’ Perini said, holding out his hand. ‘Let
me have it back.’
‘There’s something else I don’t really understand,’ Lombardi
said, passing back the sheet of paper. ‘According to Guitoni, when Dante was sent
to Rome, his political opponents seized all the assets he had in Florence , so he
couldn’t have paid the fine the city fathers imposed on him, even if he had wanted
to. And we know he never came back to Florence for the rest of his life, so presumably
he had no money, and therefore no legacy he could leave, nothing of much value,
I mean. So if we are right and these verses refer to some relic, presumably it was
something he took with him to Rome, or obtained in Ravenna, or maybe
even
an object he acquired while he was at the Vatican. Could
we be looking at some kind of lost treasure?
Or a stolen relic?’
Perini shook his head.
‘He may have had his assets confiscated, but from what I’ve read
about Dante he was a long way from being destitute. Don’t forget, he’d been involved
in diplomacy between Florence and the Vatican and had been asked by the Pope to
stay in Rome while all the other legates were dismissed, which suggests he was one
of the most senior and important people involved. And even after he was driven into
exile, he was still communicating with kings and emperors throughout Europe. In
fact, the whole reason he ended his days in Ravenna was because a prince had invited
him to stay there and, presumably, had provided him with accommodation and perhaps
even funded him as well. So it is at least possible that whatever we’re looking
for could be some kind of legacy from Dante, some valuable he owned, rather than
a relic in the normal sense of the word. But there is another question we need to
think about as well.’
Lombardi just looked at him,
then
shook
his head.
‘Normally, Silvio, I know where you’re going with this kind of
argument, but right now I don’t. What other question are you talking about?’
‘Both you and Guitoni seem quite convinced that these mysterious
extra – or replacement, I suppose – verses were not written by Dante, and the implication
is that they might even have been written after his death. In which case, it’s not
one question, in fact, but three. First, who wrote the verses and, second, why did
they write them? And, most importantly, what were they trying to say?’
Ever since the two Italians, hired at considerable expense through
a contact in the Moscow Mafia who had been expanding his operations inside and outside
Russia virtually since the day Gorbachev came to power, had failed to extract the
information that he was sure the elderly professor of Italian literature had possessed,
Stefan had been trying to retrieve the situation. But it wasn’t easy, and it had
been difficult for him to decide exactly what he should do next.
The man Marco had been quite adamant on the telephone after the
event. He had been positive that if Bertorelli had possessed the information Stefan
sought he would certainly have divulged it. And when Stefan had read the reports
in the newspaper about the death of the academic – the murder had, entirely predictably,
been front-page news ever since the body had been discovered – he had absolutely
agreed with the Italian. Details of at least some of the appalling injuries inflicted
by the two men on Bertorelli had been released by the police to the media, and the
reporter had then described them with a kind of meticulous devotion that suggested
he had been relishing writing every single word of the story. Anyone, Stefan knew,
would have broken under that kind of pressure.
And that was a worry. Because if the man responsible for discovering
the modified verses genuinely had no idea where the relic might be found, then Stefan
wondered whether it wasn’t all just a stupid mistake, if he had read more into the
article than was merited by the facts.
He had gone back again to the article, and to the professor’s
analysis of the two verses, and studied it once more. And, again, he had come to
precisely the same conclusion. Bertorelli had apparently been too obtuse to see
it, probably because he was so tied up in an analysis of the verse
structure,
form and vocabulary that he had simply failed to recognize
the actual meaning of words. But as far as Stefan was concerned, they were clear
enough. Kidnapping the professor, he realized with hindsight, had been a bad mistake,
though it had seemed justified at the time, but fortunately he believed he was well
insulated from the consequences.
So what he now needed to do was move on, and
identify
through his own resources what he had expected Bertorelli
to have told him: the actual location of the object that he had set his heart on
acquiring, at almost any cost.
Stefan glanced at the analysis of the verses in Bertorelli’s
article one more time, and then replaced the magazine on the desk in his study.
The daily paper was lying on the hand-tooled leather surface, and he picked it up
to see if there was any additional information about the murder of the academic,
or more pertinently if the Italian police were claiming they were following any
solid leads as to the identities of the killers. The leader article was clearly
little more than a rehash of the story which had been on the front page the previous
day, just with the addition of a few encouraging but non-specific comments – ‘it
is believed’, ‘police suspect the involvement of’, and that kind of thing – but
nothing solid.
Nothing for him or the two Italians to worry about.
Then his eyes were drawn to a small article at the bottom of
the front page, and unconsciously he gripped the sheet of newsprint more firmly
as he read every word of this report. He tossed the paper down on the desk and simply
stared blankly at the white-painted wall opposite. After a few moments, he picked
up the paper again and read the article once more.
But there was no mistake. In that brief article of a hundred
and fifty words or so – because a report of vandalism, even vandalism inside the
ancient portals of the Basilica of Santa Croce – didn’t merit more than that when
there was still a brutal murder to be solved, he had read what he’d been hoping
not to.
Somebody else had come to the same conclusion as him. There was
another group, at least another two men, on the trail of the relic.
Suddenly, his hunt for the object had turned into a race, and
he knew he would have to act as quickly as possible if he was to succeed in his
quest.
‘This might sound like a silly idea,’ Lombardi said, somewhat
tentatively, ‘but as Dante’s cenotaph has already been broken into, is it worth
mounting some kind of watch – either a couple of uniformed officers, or maybe just
a surveillance camera – on some of the other sites here in Florence that are associated
with the poet?’
Perini thought from moment before he replied.
‘It isn’t a silly idea,’ he replied, ‘and if we were dealing
with regular vandalism I’d agree with you. But I doubt if any of them will be targets
of these people. I think the cenotaph was a fairly obvious target because it was
essentially a locked room, a sealed space in which whatever these people are looking
for could conceivably have been hidden. But when you look at the other stuff here
in Florence which is related to Dante, as far as I’m aware none of them offer any
possible hiding places. I mean, off the top of my head there’s a statue of Dante
in the Piazza di Santa Croce, and another one in the Uffizi, a mural in the same
place, a fresco in the Palazzo
dei
Giudici
and a few paintings in other museums. But they’re all
individual objects, just paintings – which obviously offer no possible hiding places
– or statues, and most of those are carved from solid stone. So, again, I think
we’d just be wasting our time and resources.’