“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.
II
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.”
III
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.