“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.
“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.
21
I
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.”
“What else did they have?”
“I’m wondering if the Cathars found or inherited both the scroll and the stone with the Latin inscription on it.”