The Dante Conspiracy

CHAPTER 11



Ever since the two Italians, hired at considerable expense through a contact in the Moscow Mafia who had been expanding his operations inside and outside Russia virtually since the day Gorbachev came to power, had failed to extract the information that he was sure the elderly professor of Italian literature had possessed, Stefan had been trying to retrieve the situation. But it wasn’t easy, and it had been difficult for him to decide exactly what he should do next.

The man Marco had been quite adamant on the telephone after the event. He had been positive that if Bertorelli had possessed the information Stefan sought he would certainly have divulged it. And when Stefan had read the reports in the newspaper about the death of the academic – the murder had, entirely predictably, been front-page news ever since the body had been discovered – he had absolutely agreed with the Italian. Details of at least some of the appalling injuries inflicted by the two men on Bertorelli had been released by the police to the media, and the reporter had then described them with a kind of meticulous devotion that suggested he had been relishing writing every single word of the story. Anyone, Stefan knew, would have broken under that kind of pressure.

And that was a worry. Because if the man responsible for discovering the modified verses genuinely had no idea where the relic might be found, then Stefan wondered whether it wasn’t all just a stupid mistake, if he had read more into the article than was merited by the facts.

He had gone back again to the article, and to the professor’s analysis of the two verses, and studied it once more. And, again, he had come to precisely the same conclusion. Bertorelli had apparently been too obtuse to see it, probably because he was so tied up in an analysis of the verse structure, form and vocabulary that he had simply failed to recognize the actual meaning of words. But as far as Stefan was concerned, they were clear enough. Kidnapping the professor, he realized with hindsight, had been a bad mistake, though it had seemed justified at the time, but fortunately he believed he was well insulated from the consequences.

So what he now needed to do was move on, and identify through his own resources what he had expected Bertorelli to have told him: the actual location of the object that he had set his heart on acquiring, at almost any cost.

Stefan glanced at the analysis of the verses in Bertorelli’s article one more time, and then replaced the magazine on the desk in his study. The daily paper was lying on the hand-tooled leather surface, and he picked it up to see if there was any additional information about the murder of the academic, or more pertinently if the Italian police were claiming they were following any solid leads as to the identities of the killers. The leader article was clearly little more than a rehash of the story which had been on the front page the previous day, just with the addition of a few encouraging but non-specific comments – ‘it is believed’, ‘police suspect the involvement of’, and that kind of thing – but nothing solid. Nothing for him or the two Italians to worry about.

Then his eyes were drawn to a small article at the bottom of the front page, and unconsciously he gripped the sheet of newsprint more firmly as he read every word of this report. He tossed the paper down on the desk and simply stared blankly at the white-painted wall opposite. After a few moments, he picked up the paper again and read the article once more.

But there was no mistake. In that brief article of a hundred and fifty words or so – because a report of vandalism, even vandalism inside the ancient portals of the Basilica of Santa Croce – didn’t merit more than that when there was still a brutal murder to be solved, he had read what he’d been hoping not to.

Somebody else had come to the same conclusion as him. There was another group, at least another two men, on the trail of the relic.

Suddenly, his hunt for the object had turned into a race, and he knew he would have to act as quickly as possible if he was to succeed in his quest.