This was much smaller than the living room, and the wall it shared with the living room was fully plastered. The furniture hadn’t been moved, though it was covered in the ubiquitous dust sheets. The Hamptons had planned to knock a large doorway through the southern wall of the dining room and build a conservatory, but they were still waiting for planning permission.
Using the coordinates and the tape measure, Bronson made a cross in the corresponding area on the dining-room wall. To confirm that they had the right place, they checked the measurements in the living room again, then repeated the process in the dining room.
Then Bronson picked up the hammer and chisel, climbed back up the stepladder and struck a single blow just below the cross he’d drawn. The plaster cracked, and after two more blows a large chunk fell off the wall. He wiped his hand across the exposed stone, trying to clear away some of the dust and debris.
“There’s something here,” he said, his voice rising with excitement. “Not a map, but what looks like another inscription.”
Half a dozen more blows from the hammer and chisel shifted the rest of the old plaster and revealed the whole face of the stone.
“Here,” Mark said, and passed up a new three-inch paintbrush.
“Thanks,” Bronson muttered, and ran the brush briskly back and forth over the stone. A few sharp raps from the handle of the hammer cleared away the remaining pieces of plaster. They could both now see exactly what had been carved into the stone.
It was an inscription that hinted at the blood-soaked history of another country—an inscription that was worth killing for.
Rogan watched with interest as the man in the overalls stripped all the old plaster off the wall in the living room, and smiled at their total failure to find what they were looking for. At the very least, they were saving him a job.
At first, he hadn’t understood why they had taken such trouble to measure the exact position of the inscribed stone in the wall, though he realized they’d worked something out when the two men had walked through into the small dining room. The moment they vanished from sight, Rogan dropped down into a crouch and scuttled along the wall until he was beyond the end of the first of the two dining-room windows. Then he eased up slowly until he could just see inside the room, though he guessed he could have cavorted naked outside the window and the chances were neither of the men would have seen him. Their attention was entirely directed at the dining-room wall.
As Rogan watched, his view slightly distorted through the thick old glass of the dining-room windows, he saw the man uncover something. It looked as if the missing section of the stone that Mandino had sent him to find had been in the house after all.
The stone didn’t appear to have a map carved on it—from Rogan’s viewpoint, and through the admittedly distorting glass of the window, it looked to him more like a couple of verses of poetry. But whatever the content of the carving on the stone, the simple fact that there was another inscription was enough for him to report back to Mandino. He wasn’t prepared to try to get inside the house himself, because he was outnumbered, plus one of them was probably armed with Alberti’s pistol. Mandino had promised to send another man from the Rome family to join him, but he hadn’t appeared so far.
The important thing, Rogan decided, was to let Mandino know what he’d seen, and then await instructions. He dropped down into a crouch, crept back along the wall of the house until he was well clear of the dining room and living room windows, then ran swiftly across the lawn to the break in the fence where he’d entered the property, and walked back to his car and the cell phone he’d locked in the glove box.
“What the hell is it, Chris?” Mark asked, as Bronson climbed down the stepladder and looked up at the inscribed stone.
Bronson shook his head. “I don’t know. If Jeremy Goldman’s deduction was right, and if our interpretation of the first stone was correct, this should be a map. I don’t know what it is, but a map it ain’t.”
“Hang on a minute,” Mark said. “Let me just check something.”
He walked into the living room and looked at the inscribed stone, then returned a few moments later. “I thought so. This stone’s a slightly different color. Are you sure the two are related?”
“I don’t know. All I am certain of is that this stone has been cemented into the wall directly behind the other one, to the inch, as far as I can see, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.”
“It looks almost like a poem,” Mark observed.
Bronson nodded. “That’s my guess,” he said, looking up at ten lines of ornate cursive script arranged in two verses, underneath an incomprehensible title that consisted of three groups of capital letters, presumably all some kind of abbreviations. “Though why a stone with a poem carved into it should have been stuck in the wall at this exact spot beats me.”
“But the language isn’t Latin, is it?”
“No, definitely not. I think some of the words might have French roots. These three here—ben, dessu’s and perfècte, for example—aren’t that dissimilar to some modern French words. Some of the others, though, like calix, seem to be written in a completely different language.”
Bronson climbed back up the ladder and had a closer look at the inscription. There were several differences between the two, not just the languages used. Mark was right—the stones were different colors, but the form and shape of the letters in the verses was also unfamiliar, completely different from those in the other inscription, and in places the stone had been worn away, as if by the touch of many hands over countless years.
IV
The ringing of the phone cut across the silence of the office.
“There’s been a development, Cardinal.” Vertutti recognized Mandino’s light and slightly mocking tone immediately.
“What’s happened?”
“One of my men has been carrying out surveillance of the house in Monti Sabini and a few minutes ago he watched the discovery of another inscribed stone in the property, on the back of the wall directly behind the first one. It wasn’t a map, but looked more like several lines of writing, perhaps even poetry.”
“A poem? That makes no sense.”
“I didn’t say it was a poem, Cardinal, only that my man thought it looked like poetry. But whatever it is, it must be the missing section of the stone.”
“So what are you going to do now?”
“This matter is now too sensitive to be left only to my picciotti, my soldiers. I will be traveling to Ponticelli early tomorrow morning with Pierro. Once we’ve got inside the house, I’ll have both inscriptions photographed and copied, then destroy them. Once we have this additional information, I’m sure Pierro will be able to work out exactly where we should be looking.
“While I’m away, you should be able to contact me on my cell phone, but I’ll also send you the telephone number of my deputy, Antonio Carlotti, in case of an emergency.”
“What kind of an emergency?”
“Any kind, Cardinal. You’ll receive a text listing the numbers in a couple of minutes. And please keep your own cell phone switched on at all times. Now,” Mandino continued, “you should also be aware that if the two men in the house have worked out—”
“Two men? What two men?”
“One is, we believe, the husband of the dead woman, but we don’t know who the second man is. As I was saying, if these men have found what we’re seeking, I will have no option but to apply the Sanction.”
11
I
“I think these verses are written in Occitan, Mark,” Bronson said, looking up from the screen of his laptop. He’d logged onto the Internet to try to research the second inscription but without inputting entire phrases. He’d discovered that some of the words could have come from several languages—roire, for example, was also found in Romanian—but the only language that contained all the words he’d chosen was Occitan, a Romance language originally spoken in the Languedoc region of southern France. By trawling through online dictionaries and lexicons and cross-referencing, he had managed to translate some of the words, though many of those in the verses simply weren’t listed in the few Occitan dictionaries he’d found.