“Right. What time’s the funeral?”
“Eleven fifteen, here in Ponticelli.”
Mandino glanced at his watch. “Good. We’ll drive out to the house and, as soon as these two men have left, we’ll get inside. That should give us at least a couple of hours to check what this verse says and arrange a reception committee for them.”
“I really don’t want—” Pierro began.
“Don’t worry, Professore, you won’t need to be anywhere near the house when they get back. You just decipher this verse or whatever we find in the place, and then I’ll get one of my men to drive you away. We’ll handle the rest of it.”
III
Like every day since they’d arrived in Italy, the morning of Jackie’s funeral presaged a beautiful day, with a solid blue sky and not the slightest hint of a cloud. Mark and Bronson were up fairly early, and ready to leave the house by a quarter to eleven, in good time to attend the service at eleven fifteen in Ponticelli.
Bronson locked his laptop and camera in the trunk of the Hamptons’ Alfa Romeo when he went out to the garage at a few minutes to eleven. As an afterthought, he went back into the house, collected the Browning pistol from his bedroom and slipped it into the waistband of his trousers.
Two minutes later, Mark sat down in the passenger seat and strapped himself in as Bronson slipped the Alfa into first gear and drove away.
Mandino’s driver had parked the Lancia about a quarter of a mile down the road, between the Hamptons’ house and Ponticelli, in the parking lot of a small out-of-town supermarket, and Rogan’s car was right next to it. The site offered an excellent view of the road, and the gateway of the house.
A few minutes before eleven, a sedan car emerged from the gateway and headed toward them.
“There they are,” Mandino said.
He watched as the Alfa Romeo drove past them, two indistinct figures in the front.
“Right, that was both of them, so the house should be deserted. Let’s go.”
The driver pulled out of the parking space and turned up the road toward the house.
Behind them, one of Mandino’s bodyguards turned the opposite way out of the supermarket in Rogan’s Fiat and fell into place about two hundred yards behind the Alfa, following the vehicle toward Ponticelli.
The Lancia sedan swept in between the gateposts. The driver turned the car so that it faced back up the drive and stopped it. Rogan climbed out and walked around to the back of the house. He slipped a knife from his pocket and released the catch on one set of shutters outside the living room. As he had hoped, the pane of glass Alberti had broken during their last, abortive, attempt to break in still hadn’t been repaired, and he needed only to slip his hand through the window and release the lock.
With a swift heave, he pulled himself up and through the window, landing heavily on the wooden floor of the living room. Immediately, he pulled his pistol out of his shoulder holster and glanced around the room, but there was no sound anywhere in the old house.
Rogan walked through the room into the hall and pulled open the front door.
Mandino led Pierro and his remaining bodyguard inside, waited for one of them to shut the door and then gestured for Rogan to lead the way. The three men followed him through the living room and into the dining room, and then stopped dead in front of the featureless surface of the honey-brown stone.
“Where the hell is it? Where’s the inscription?” Mandino’s voice was harsh and angry.
Rogan looked like he’d seen a ghost. “It was here,” he shouted, staring at the wall.
“It was right here on this stone.”
“Look at the floor,” Pierro said, pointing at the base of the wall. He knelt down and picked up a handful of stone chips. “Somebody’s chiseled off the inscribed layer of that stone. Some of these flakes still have letters—or at least parts of letters—on them.”
“Can you do anything with them?” Mandino demanded.
“It’ll be like a three-dimensional jigsaw,” Pierro said, “but I should be able to reconstruct some of it. I’ll need the stone to be pulled out of the wall. Without that, there’s no way I can work out which piece goes where. There’s also a possibility that we could try surface analysis, or even chemical treatment or an X-ray technique, to try to recover the inscription.”
“Really?”
“It’s worth a try. It’s not my field, but it’s surprising what can be achieved with modern recovery methods.”
That was good enough for Mandino. He pointed at his bodyguard. “Go and find something soft to put the stone chips in—towels, bed linen, something like that—and collect every single shard you can find.” He turned to Rogan. “When he’s done that, get the stepladder and start chipping out the cement from around that stone.
But don’t,” he warned, “do any more damage to the stone itself. We’ll help you lift it down when you’ve loosened it.”
Mandino watched for a few moments as his men started work, then walked toward the door, motioning to Pierro to follow him. “We’ll check the rest of the house, just in case they were helpful enough to write down what they found.”
“If they did that to the stone,” the professor replied, “I doubt very much if you’ll find anything.”
“I know, but we’ll look anyway.”
In the study, Mandino immediately spotted the computer and a digital camera.
“We’ll take these,” he said.
“We could look at the computer here,” Pierro suggested.
“We could,” Mandino agreed, “but I know specialists who can recover data even from formatted hard disks, and I’d rather they checked it. And if these men photographed the stone before they obliterated the inscription, the images might still be in the camera.”
Mandino yanked the power cable and connecting leads out of the back of the desktop computer’s system unit and picked it up. “Bring the camera,” he ordered, and led the way to the hall, where he carefully placed the unit beside the front door.
They walked back into the dining room, where Rogan and the bodyguard were just lifting the stone clear of the wall. When they’d lowered it to the floor, Mandino examined the surface again, but all he could see were chisel marks. Despite Pierro’s optimism, he didn’t think there was even the remotest chance of recovering the inscription from the pathetic collection of chips and the surface of the stone itself.
The best option they had was to talk to the men themselves.
Funerals in Italy are normally grand family affairs, with posters pasted around the town announcing the death, an open casket and lines of weeping and wailing mourners. The Hamptons knew few people in the town—they’d only been there, off and on, for a matter of months, and had spent most of that time working on the house rather than getting to know their neighbors.
Bronson had arranged for a simple service in the anticipation that there’d be only three people there—himself, Mark and the priest. In fact, there were about two dozen mourners, all members of Maria Palomo’s extended family. But it was, by Italian standards, a very restrained, and comparatively brief, ceremony. Within thirty minutes the two men were back in the Alfa, and heading out of the town.
Neither of them had noticed the single man in a nondescript dark-colored Fiat who had followed them into Ponticelli. When they’d parked near the church, he’d driven past but within moments of Bronson pulling away from the curb, the car was behind them again.
Inside the vehicle, the driver pulled a cell phone from his pocket and pressed a speed-dial number. “They’re on the way,” he said.
* * *
Mark had barely said a word since they’d left Ponticelli, and Bronson hadn’t felt like talking, the two men united in their grief for the death of a woman they’d both loved, albeit from different perspectives. Mark was trying to come to terms with the final, irrevocable chapter of his short marriage, while Bronson’s aching loss was tempered by guilt, by the knowledge that for the last five years or so he’d been living a lie, in love with his best friend’s wife.