The Dante Conspiracy (13 page)
‘As far as
Spagnoli’s
research would
allow him to confirm, yes. And now I think we can make a pretty good guess at what
happened there last night. Did you get somebody inside the house?’
‘Yes. We sent one of the uniforms in through the open window,
once we found a ladder. The street door was bolted on the inside, and the other
door had a chair wedged under the handle and a bunch of furniture stacked behind
it. The place had been trashed, comprehensively searched. Everything that could
be opened or emptied had been. We found a couple of spent nine-millimetre cartridge
cases near the bottom of the staircase and two corresponding bullets wedged in the
woodwork near the top of the stairs. But none of the neighbours heard any other
shots, so presumably the weapon that fired those rounds was fitted with a suppressor.’
‘That fits,’ Perini said. ‘It looks to me like both groups of
bad guys turned up there to search for the relic. One broke open the side door and
got in first, and then the others arrived. There was a bit of a shoot-out inside
the house and then the second group left the building, either because they were
out-gunned or maybe the first guys had established themselves somewhere that gave
them control, most likely at the top of the staircase. However they did it, they
drove away the second group and searched the house. But they would have known that
the others would be waiting for them outside, so they forced the owner, assuming
the corpse is
Bardolino
– was it?’
Perini paused and Lombardi nodded.
‘Yes. We’ve got a positive ID on him now.’
‘OK. They forced
Bardolino
to go outside
into the street, and the other group obligingly shot him down. And then, I’m guessing,
the people holed up in the house fired the
unsilenced
rounds to wake everyone up, which would have forced the men waiting outside to leave
the scene. As soon as they’d gone, the men inside slipped out of the window and
headed in the opposite direction.’
Perini took a sip of cooling coffee and smiled at his sergeant.
‘And as far as I can tell, the entire operation, by both groups,
was a complete waste of time, because even if that house did belong to Dante, once
he’d left Florence as part of the delegation that was sent to Rome to negotiate
with the Pope, he never went back there. The house was one of his assets that would
have been seized by the Black Guelphs when they seized power and condemned him to
exile, and the chances of any relic or asset he owned being found there are vanishingly
small. And if I’m right about the relic, at the time Dante left Florence, it didn’t
even exist.’
‘What?’ Lombardi looked up sharply. ‘You know what it is?’
‘I think I know what it is,’ he corrected. ‘Or, to be absolutely
accurate, I think I know what the people who are ransacking Florence looking for
it think it is.
If you see what I mean.
And they might
be right.’
‘So what is it?’
‘The clue was in the verses all the time. I was up most of the
night trying to work it out, and I think I’ve finally got a handle on it.’
Perini walked over to Lombardi’s desk and handed the sergeant
the piece of paper he’d been working on.
‘See that line?’ he said, pointing. ‘I don’t think there’s much
doubt that “home of the
fiore
and the
fiorino
”
refers to the
Duomo
and Florentine gold florin, and the
next line, about the “author” is about Giotto.’
‘Giotto? What’s he got to do with Dante?’
‘Now that, my friend, is a very good question, but I think I
know the answer. It goes back to your idea about the Trojan horse. There was one
very big difference between Giotto and Dante. Giotto was revered in his own lifetime,
to the extent that the Commune of Florence actually paid him a salary in recognition
of his skill and talent, whereas Dante was sent into exile by the authorities running
the city of his birth. Assuming that we’ve been right about the relic, I think that
the most likely way for it to have been sent to Florence was inside a work of art
of some sort created by Giotto. If that had been done, whoever it was sent to would
have been delighted to receive it, just because of the signature. That would have
been an excellent way for Dante, or rather some of his friends over in Ravenna after
his death, to get the object here to the city and ensure that it would stay here,
a small memento of Dante that would remain forever in his beloved Florence.’
Lombardi nodded.
‘That’s very eloquent, Silvio, and you might even be right. But
what, exactly, are we talking about here? Do you know what the relic actually is?’
Perini didn’t reply immediately. Instead, he looked again at
the sheet of paper on the desk in front of Lombardi and rested the tip of his forefinger
on one particular line.
‘What do you make of that?’ he asked.
Lombardi read the line aloud.
‘“By his hand the masterpiece lies below
Gaetani’s
bane”. No idea, except that it’s obviously a kind of code.’
‘It is a code, of a sort. I think whoever wrote these verses
didn’t know much about codes and ciphers, but didn’t want to write the information
so that it could easily be read, so he composed lines that were deliberately obtuse,
and to understand them you need to think laterally and have quite a bit of knowledge
about Dante and the history of Florence. Like that line about Giotto. If you didn’t
know he’d worked on the
Duomo
and the Arena Chapel, you’d
never know that he was the subject of those words.
‘Now in this case, I have no idea what the writer means by “
Gaetani’s
bane”, but I think there’s only one thing that the
“masterpiece” can possibly be, the only object that makes sense in this context:
the
Divina
Commedia
itself.’
Lombardi nodded.
‘That makes sense, obviously, and I’ve been thinking along those
lines myself,’ he replied. ‘But we’ve had this conversation before, and you told
me that no original copy of his work has survived. So what are you talking about?
An early manuscript copy, because according to my research quite a lot were known
to be produced in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, or one of the printed
versions from the late fifteenth century, or what?’
‘I don’t know for sure, obviously, but you could interpret the
expression “By his hand” to mean Dante’s hand, not just as the author of the work,
but also possibly as the person who physically wrote it. It could actually mean
that the relic is Dante’s original hand-written manuscript, the work that’s believed
to have been lost since the beginning of the fourteenth century.’
‘But –’ Lombardi began,
then
stopped
short. ‘I was going to say that was impossible, but actually you’re right: it could
be that. After all, Dante didn’t even start writing the poem until 1308 at the earliest,
seven years after he’d been exiled from Florence, so it must have been with him
in Ravenna, and presumably his friends there would have taken possession of it when
he died. And we obviously know the whole work was available because numerous hand-written
copies were made of the text. That also explains why these two gangs are after it.
The original, written in Dante’s own hand, would be worth millions of euros.’
Perini shook his head.
‘You’re wrong about that, Cesare. It wouldn’t be worth millions.
That’s what a collector would pay for a newly-discovered copy of the first edition
printed in 1472 in
Foligno
. If it was another hand-written
version by Boccaccio, a fourth copy in addition to the three that are already known,
the price would be in the tens of millions. But the value of the source document,
the original poem written in Dante’s own hand, would probably be incalculable. Perhaps
a hundred million euros, maybe even more. This is probably the most valuable lost
treasure ever to surface, if we’re right and it’s somewhere here.
‘And that also explains why poor old Bertorelli was tortured
to death. He found the verses and the gang of thugs that kidnapped him simply didn’t
believe he hadn’t seen the significance of the text, and had no clue where to start
looking for the manuscript. Everything that’s happened since – the break-in at the
cenotaph and then the incident at Dante’s old house – have been an escalation as
these two gangs, who’ve obviously come to the same conclusion that I have, have
been searching in the obvious places where the relic might have been hidden.’
‘So where is it hidden?’ Lombardi asked. ‘Do you know?’
‘That’s where it all falls apart, of course,’ Perini said with
a rueful smile. ‘Right now, I don’t, but I can’t believe that the man who wrote
these verses didn’t include some clue that would put us on the right track. You
work on the
Bardolino
murder and I’ll keep plugging away
at this.’
Silvio Perini often didn’t bother with lunch, just worked straight
through, but that day as noon approached he began to feel ravenous, probably because
he’d been awake most of the night and hadn’t had any breakfast.
‘I’m going to go out a grab a sandwich or something,’ he said
to Lombardi, standing up from his chair. ‘Do you want me to bring you anything back?’
‘No thanks,’ the sergeant replied, also standing up. ‘There’s
a bowl of
tortellini
with my name on it
in the restaurant on the corner of the street. Why don’t you come and join me, and
have a proper meal? Give your brain a rest for a while?’
Perini considered the offer for a few seconds,
then
nodded.
‘Why not,’ he said.
‘But just a small bowl,
because I’ve got to watch my figure.’
‘I watch mine as well,’ Lombardi protested, patting his stomach,
‘and I’m happy with every inch of it. Like any finely-tuned machine, it needs the
right fuel. Plus I need to buy my lottery ticket. This could be the week my numbers
come up.’
‘Numbers,’ Perini muttered, all thoughts of bowls of pasta vanishing
from his mind.
‘Numbers.
Of course! The poem is based on
numerology, at least to some extent, so the new verses probably are as well. Change
of plan, Cesare. You go out and have your pasta, and bring me back something. I’m
going to carry on working on it.’
Lombardi ate quickly, as he almost always did, finely-tuned machine
or not, and was back in the office within the hour, a cellophane-wrapped chicken
sandwich in his hand, which he placed on the edge of Perini’s desk.
‘Any luck?’ he asked, opening the packet and taking a bite of
the sandwich.
‘I’m working on a couple of ideas, but nothing is making very
much sense at the moment. I’ll keep at it, but you’d better crack on with sorting
out that murder this morning.’
Lombardi nodded.
‘No problem. I suppose at least one of us ought to be doing the
job we’re paid to do.’
Perini looked at him sharply,
then
grinned.
‘Just get on with it, Cesare,’ he said.
It was late afternoon and the setting sun was filling the office
with a golden glow when Perini suddenly gave an exclamation and sat back in his
chair.
‘You’ve cracked it?’ Lombardi asked hopefully, ‘Because I could
do with a bit of a helping hand here.’
‘Maybe I have solved it,’ the inspector replied, ‘or at least
one part of it. There’s a section of one line here which states “when the cantos
the years describe”, and that’s been really puzzling me. But actually I think the
meaning is quite simple. All the writer is trying to do is tell us when the relic
was sent here. There are one hundred cantos or verses in the poem and that, I think,
means that whatever was sent to Florence arrived here in 1421, one hundred years
after the date of Dante’s death.’
‘That’s interesting,’ Lombardi said, ‘but it doesn’t seem to
me to be particularly helpful. Is there any significance in the date?’
‘Not really,’ Perini replied. ‘But when you also look at the
next line, I think you can see the significance. I still don’t know what was sent
here to Florence, but I’m pretty sure I do know where it was sent.’
‘You do?
How?’
‘Just here: “combine the first of the five next to mark who shall
receive”. I played around with that for quite a while until I realized it was also
a whole lot simpler than I had been expecting. All it actually meant was that I
had to pick the first letter of each of the next five lines to come up with the
initials of the man who had received the Trojan horse, the object in which the relic
was hidden.’
‘And the letters were what?’
‘Really simple,’ Perini replied, and wrote them out on a slip
of paper.
Lombardi just looked at them in incomprehension.
‘“G D B D M”,’ he said. ‘Who the hell was that?’
‘Some day you really must read a little bit about the history
of Florence,’ Perini said, almost sadly. ‘Whoever sent this object would have wanted
it to go to a prominent citizen, a person who would treasure it, and not sell it
or otherwise dispose of it, and there really was only one choice. So what was the
name of one of the most important families in Florence in the fourteen century?’
‘The
Medicis
?’
Lombardi hazarded a guess.
‘Well done, Cesare. And the Medici dynasty was founded by one
man. Giovanni di
Bicci
de Medici, and his initials were
G D B D M. He was born in 1360 and died in 1429, and by 1421 the Medici dynasty
was already well-established, and by far the most powerful family in the city. Sending
it to Giovanni was not only the obvious choice, but probably the only choice.’
‘So do you know where the relic is now, after all this time?’
