With a farewell wave that few noticed, he rose to go – and directly bumped into a body. The reaction to arm and strike was overridden, just in time, by the recognition that it was merely a little old woman, one of many working the taverns.
‘Read your palm, my love, my sweet?’ she said, not appreciating the greatness of her own recent good fortune.
The delay allowed the pirates to notice their Captain’s act of departure and the message passed down the line of tables. ‘Go on!’ they shouted, sentimental all of a sudden and anxious to forestall their beloved leader’s exit. ‘Go on – give the old cow some money. See what’s in store for you!’
Christian orthodoxy frowned on such practices and ordinarily Slovo would not have indulged. However, on this occasion he saw no way out that would not be a noisy and embarrassing anticlimax. Besides, he was embarking on a new life, why not bless it with a kindness? He gave the old girl a whole ducat and, smiling, held out his hand.
Also smiling, she took both and studied the upturned palm. She studied it – and studied it – and gradually the pirates became silent.
Then she dropped Slovo’s hand as if it were hot and gave him back his money. Never taking her eyes off him, she retreated stiff-legged backwards to the door.
‘We were astounded,’ said the Welsh Vehmist back at the other end of Admiral Slovo’s existence, where the fever of life and activity now seemed very remote. ‘Such a change in life and yet you took to it like the proverbial duck to water.’
‘A poor metaphor, I think,’ said Slovo. ‘It was the chaos of Neptune’s realm that you had me leave.’
‘Good point,’ nodded the Vehmist. ‘Yes, we required your career to take on the soundness and stability of land. However, we were fully expecting a transitional period, a space where we would need to apologize for you and nudge you along the path of propriety.’
‘For me,’ Slovo mused, ‘it was a novelty to behave like a normal man. Obedience and work, advancement and submission, they were a heady brew – for a while.’
‘But how you supped at it,’ smiled the Vehmist. ‘Dutiful hours in the Vatican, a home, making love to women, a Christian wife even! We didn’t know what to expect next!’
The Admiral turned to look at his guest, an ill-natured light in his eyes. ‘That’s the very point,’ he said. ‘You knew all too well …’
It was around the time that Mikhail Gorbachev died.
The Archaeologist allowed his Italian assistant to sound the call for ‘major find’ – ‘Aaaaaaa! Hereeeeeee!’ she sang sweetly.
That meant the rank-and-file diggers could ‘take five’ and quit their trenches to see what was turning up. The Archaeologist thought such concessions good for site morale.
As the sun-browned mob arrived, the Archaeologist scraped away with mounting enthusiasm. He didn’t even notice that some personnel had lit up strictly forbidden on-site cigarettes. ‘This is going to be good,’ he announced to all. ‘It’s a grave slab – not classical, late medieval, I should think. Joy, pass us the brush, will you?’
A finely constructed, sloe-eyed English girl handed down the required tool. The Archaeologist used it, with the ease born of practice, to flick away the remaining soil.
‘Oh bugger! It’s broken. Wayne, have your crew been using pickaxes down here?’
‘No way,’ answered a tall Anglo-Saxon in John Lennon glasses. ‘I watched ’em – trowels only.’
‘Well someone’s given it a crack. There’s a central strike with radial fault lines.’
‘Looks ancient to me,’ said Wayne authoritatively, leaning forward and peering into the trench.
The Archaeologist stood up. ‘You’re probably right,’ he muttered. ‘What a shame. Well, folks, I didn’t expect to find anything like this. As far as we know there was never a church here, so either this slab is displaced from somewhere else – and has deliberately been broken – or else whoever’s it is, is still underneath, buried outside consecrated ground. All in all, a nice little bonus before we hit classical levels.’
‘Can you read any of the markings?’ asked Joy.
The Archaeologist leaned closer and worried at the stone with his brush. ‘There’s a lot of stuff but in very bad condition, and the fault lines go straight through it. Latin, I think. Also there’s some larger script up one end. Let’s see, SL-O–V–O: Slovo. Well, well, well!’
‘There was a villa here called that,’ explained Wayne for the benefit of the native Caprisi diggers. ‘Fifteenth to sixteenth century – where the Villa Fersen subsequently was. We’ve already uncovered some other stuff from it, fragments of statuary, that nice ornate key we showed you yesterday: bits and bobs, that sort of thing.’
‘Maybe this was the guy himself,’ mused the Archaeologist, smiling. ‘How neat! Right, no more work just here for a space. We’ll make arrangements to lift this beast and conserve it.’
‘One thing,’ said Joy hesitantly. ‘I mean, maybe it’s my eyes playing up or just the grain of the stone but … well, look – I don’t think that’s a natural break.’
She stepped lithely into the trench and knelt beside the slab. The consequent coffee-and-cream cleavage display awoke slumbering engines in the Archaeologist’s mind and he failed to hear her next remark.
‘Pardon?’
‘I said it’s a V,’ she repeated, stretching forward to trace the relevant line, thereby worsening the Archaeologist’s concentration problems. ‘A great big V!’
When the ‘break’ did indeed prove to have intricate radial ends and exquisite lightning bolts carved about the lower portion, the Archaeologist felt impelled to do some research in his free time.
A raid on the Anglo-Italian Institute’s library in Capri Town produced Dr Grimes’s famous Dictionary of Sign & Symbol, a comparable V and the entry: ‘Vehme (supposed)’ beside it. This in turn led him to the two-volume Oxford English Dictionary and greater enlightenment in the form of: ‘Vehme-Vehmgericht: a form of secret tribunal which exercised great influence in Westphalia and elsewhere from the 12th to 16th centuries.’
Intrigued by now, the Archaeologist continued his pursuit of the silent dead. A week or so later he struck oil when the post delivered Secret Societies by Professor Royston Lyness Ph.D. (Oxon) (OUP 1990). Sitting in his tent, reading by the inadequate light of a camping solar lamp, he discovered the following – and as he read he became more and more oblivious of the mosquitoes’ loving attentions.
The Vehme, in legend at least, combined the function of a secret police, an alternative judiciary and a subversive enforcer of justice against prevailing powers. In these and other respects, they seemed akin to the earliest manifestations of the MAFIA/COSA NOSTRA (q.v.), although they allegedly predate their Sicilian counterparts and seem to have greater, albeit dimly glimpsed, ambitions.
In the contemporary popular imagination they appear as avenging angels, in the guise of masked men from nowhere or black-clad knights, the equal in arms of anything Church or State could set against them. Much is made in surviving stories of the mystery of their origin, the grimness of their judgements and the implacable inevitability of execution. A typical tale would involve a summons nailed to a castle or palace door and the named person, terrified and alone, presenting him or herself at an appointed wilderness or crossroads, there to be led blindfolded by a black-gowned usher to the Tribunal of the Vehme.