The Dante Conspiracy

CHAPTER 24



‘You were right about there being a fire-fight,’ Cesare Lombardi said, when he walked into the office about half an hour after Spagnoli had left the building. ‘We’ve found six nine millimetre shell cases outside the house and pulled one slug out of a wall further down the street. It’s pretty badly deformed, and the techies doubt if they’d be able to match the rifling marks to any particular pistol. Assuming that at some point we find a pistol, of course. And we found some bullet fragments as well, but they’re not going to help us very much. The only good news, if you can call it that, is that the bullet which killed the old man is still inside him, so that might provide a match if we do find the weapon that fired the shot.’

The sergeant sat down heavily in his chair and out his feet up on the desk.

‘You said you’d had a bit of a light-bulb moment over the Dante thing,’ he said. ‘Care to enlighten me?’

‘You remember the last thing I said before I left the crime scene this morning?’ Perini asked, and Lombardi nodded. ‘Well, I was wrong again. That killing is inextricably linked with everything that’s gone before, and we’re dealing with two different groups of criminals. They’re both on the trail of Dante, or something to do with him, at least.’

He outlined what Spagnoli had told him that morning and, just as the researcher had done, he saved the significance of the address until the very end.

‘So that was where Dante lived?’ Lombardi asked. ‘His actual house?’

‘As far as Spagnoli’s research would allow him to confirm, yes. And now I think we can make a pretty good guess at what happened there last night. Did you get somebody inside the house?’

‘Yes. We sent one of the uniforms in through the open window, once we found a ladder. The street door was bolted on the inside, and the other door had a chair wedged under the handle and a bunch of furniture stacked behind it. The place had been trashed, comprehensively searched. Everything that could be opened or emptied had been. We found a couple of spent nine-millimetre cartridge cases near the bottom of the staircase and two corresponding bullets wedged in the woodwork near the top of the stairs. But none of the neighbours heard any other shots, so presumably the weapon that fired those rounds was fitted with a suppressor.’

‘That fits,’ Perini said. ‘It looks to me like both groups of bad guys turned up there to search for the relic. One broke open the side door and got in first, and then the others arrived. There was a bit of a shoot-out inside the house and then the second group left the building, either because they were out-gunned or maybe the first guys had established themselves somewhere that gave them control, most likely at the top of the staircase. However they did it, they drove away the second group and searched the house. But they would have known that the others would be waiting for them outside, so they forced the owner, assuming the corpse is Bardolino – was it?’

Perini paused and Lombardi nodded.

‘Yes. We’ve got a positive ID on him now.’

‘OK. They forced Bardolino to go outside into the street, and the other group obligingly shot him down. And then, I’m guessing, the people holed up in the house fired the unsilenced rounds to wake everyone up, which would have forced the men waiting outside to leave the scene. As soon as they’d gone, the men inside slipped out of the window and headed in the opposite direction.’

Perini took a sip of cooling coffee and smiled at his sergeant.

‘And as far as I can tell, the entire operation, by both groups, was a complete waste of time, because even if that house did belong to Dante, once he’d left Florence as part of the delegation that was sent to Rome to negotiate with the Pope, he never went back there. The house was one of his assets that would have been seized by the Black Guelphs when they seized power and condemned him to exile, and the chances of any relic or asset he owned being found there are vanishingly small. And if I’m right about the relic, at the time Dante left Florence, it didn’t even exist.’

‘What?’ Lombardi looked up sharply. ‘You know what it is?’

‘I think I know what it is,’ he corrected. ‘Or, to be absolutely accurate, I think I know what the people who are ransacking Florence looking for it think it is. If you see what I mean. And they might be right.’

‘So what is it?’

‘The clue was in the verses all the time. I was up most of the night trying to work it out, and I think I’ve finally got a handle on it.’

Perini walked over to Lombardi’s desk and handed the sergeant the piece of paper he’d been working on.

‘See that line?’ he said, pointing. ‘I don’t think there’s much doubt that “home of the fiore and the fiorino” refers to the Duomo and Florentine gold florin, and the next line, about the “author” is about Giotto.’

‘Giotto? What’s he got to do with Dante?’

‘Now that, my friend, is a very good question, but I think I know the answer. It goes back to your idea about the Trojan horse. There was one very big difference between Giotto and Dante. Giotto was revered in his own lifetime, to the extent that the Commune of Florence actually paid him a salary in recognition of his skill and talent, whereas Dante was sent into exile by the authorities running the city of his birth. Assuming that we’ve been right about the relic, I think that the most likely way for it to have been sent to Florence was inside a work of art of some sort created by Giotto. If that had been done, whoever it was sent to would have been delighted to receive it, just because of the signature. That would have been an excellent way for Dante, or rather some of his friends over in Ravenna after his death, to get the object here to the city and ensure that it would stay here, a small memento of Dante that would remain forever in his beloved Florence.’

Lombardi nodded.

‘That’s very eloquent, Silvio, and you might even be right. But what, exactly, are we talking about here? Do you know what the relic actually is?’

Perini didn’t reply immediately. Instead, he looked again at the sheet of paper on the desk in front of Lombardi and rested the tip of his forefinger on one particular line.

‘What do you make of that?’ he asked.

Lombardi read the line aloud.

‘“By his hand the masterpiece lies below Gaetani’s bane”. No idea, except that it’s obviously a kind of code.’

‘It is a code, of a sort. I think whoever wrote these verses didn’t know much about codes and ciphers, but didn’t want to write the information so that it could easily be read, so he composed lines that were deliberately obtuse, and to understand them you need to think laterally and have quite a bit of knowledge about Dante and the history of Florence. Like that line about Giotto. If you didn’t know he’d worked on the Duomo and the Arena Chapel, you’d never know that he was the subject of those words.

‘Now in this case, I have no idea what the writer means by “Gaetani’s bane”, but I think there’s only one thing that the “masterpiece” can possibly be, the only object that makes sense in this context: the Divina Commedia itself.’

Lombardi nodded.

‘That makes sense, obviously, and I’ve been thinking along those lines myself,’ he replied. ‘But we’ve had this conversation before, and you told me that no original copy of his work has survived. So what are you talking about? An early manuscript copy, because according to my research quite a lot were known to be produced in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, or one of the printed versions from the late fifteenth century, or what?’

‘I don’t know for sure, obviously, but you could interpret the expression “By his hand” to mean Dante’s hand, not just as the author of the work, but also possibly as the person who physically wrote it. It could actually mean that the relic is Dante’s original hand-written manuscript, the work that’s believed to have been lost since the beginning of the fourteenth century.’

‘But –’ Lombardi began, then stopped short. ‘I was going to say that was impossible, but actually you’re right: it could be that. After all, Dante didn’t even start writing the poem until 1308 at the earliest, seven years after he’d been exiled from Florence, so it must have been with him in Ravenna, and presumably his friends there would have taken possession of it when he died. And we obviously know the whole work was available because numerous hand-written copies were made of the text. That also explains why these two gangs are after it. The original, written in Dante’s own hand, would be worth millions of euros.’

Perini shook his head.

‘You’re wrong about that, Cesare. It wouldn’t be worth millions. That’s what a collector would pay for a newly-discovered copy of the first edition printed in 1472 in Foligno. If it was another hand-written version by Boccaccio, a fourth copy in addition to the three that are already known, the price would be in the tens of millions. But the value of the source document, the original poem written in Dante’s own hand, would probably be incalculable. Perhaps a hundred million euros, maybe even more. This is probably the most valuable lost treasure ever to surface, if we’re right and it’s somewhere here.

‘And that also explains why poor old Bertorelli was tortured to death. He found the verses and the gang of thugs that kidnapped him simply didn’t believe he hadn’t seen the significance of the text, and had no clue where to start looking for the manuscript. Everything that’s happened since – the break-in at the cenotaph and then the incident at Dante’s old house – have been an escalation as these two gangs, who’ve obviously come to the same conclusion that I have, have been searching in the obvious places where the relic might have been hidden.’

‘So where is it hidden?’ Lombardi asked. ‘Do you know?’

‘That’s where it all falls apart, of course,’ Perini said with a rueful smile. ‘Right now, I don’t, but I can’t believe that the man who wrote these verses didn’t include some clue that would put us on the right track. You work on the Bardolino murder and I’ll keep plugging away at this.’