The First Apostle (28 page)

“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.

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 for 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.”

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.

“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.

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.”