The Dante Conspiracy

CHAPTER 25



Silvio Perini often didn’t bother with lunch, just worked straight through, but that day as noon approached he began to feel ravenous, probably because he’d been awake most of the night and hadn’t had any breakfast.

‘I’m going to go out a grab a sandwich or something,’ he said to Lombardi, standing up from his chair. ‘Do you want me to bring you anything back?’

‘No thanks,’ the sergeant replied, also standing up. ‘There’s a bowl of tortellini with my name on it in the restaurant on the corner of the street. Why don’t you come and join me, and have a proper meal? Give your brain a rest for a while?’

Perini considered the offer for a few seconds, then nodded.

‘Why not,’ he said. ‘But just a small bowl, because I’ve got to watch my figure.’

‘I watch mine as well,’ Lombardi protested, patting his stomach, ‘and I’m happy with every inch of it. Like any finely-tuned machine, it needs the right fuel. Plus I need to buy my lottery ticket. This could be the week my numbers come up.’

‘Numbers,’ Perini muttered, all thoughts of bowls of pasta vanishing from his mind. ‘Numbers. Of course! The poem is based on numerology, at least to some extent, so the new verses probably are as well. Change of plan, Cesare. You go out and have your pasta, and bring me back something. I’m going to carry on working on it.’



Lombardi ate quickly, as he almost always did, finely-tuned machine or not, and was back in the office within the hour, a cellophane-wrapped chicken sandwich in his hand, which he placed on the edge of Perini’s desk.

‘Any luck?’ he asked, opening the packet and taking a bite of the sandwich.

‘I’m working on a couple of ideas, but nothing is making very much sense at the moment. I’ll keep at it, but you’d better crack on with sorting out that murder this morning.’

Lombardi nodded.

‘No problem. I suppose at least one of us ought to be doing the job we’re paid to do.’

Perini looked at him sharply, then grinned.

‘Just get on with it, Cesare,’ he said.



It was late afternoon and the setting sun was filling the office with a golden glow when Perini suddenly gave an exclamation and sat back in his chair.

‘You’ve cracked it?’ Lombardi asked hopefully, ‘Because I could do with a bit of a helping hand here.’

‘Maybe I have solved it,’ the inspector replied, ‘or at least one part of it. There’s a section of one line here which states “when the cantos the years describe”, and that’s been really puzzling me. But actually I think the meaning is quite simple. All the writer is trying to do is tell us when the relic was sent here. There are one hundred cantos or verses in the poem and that, I think, means that whatever was sent to Florence arrived here in 1421, one hundred years after the date of Dante’s death.’

‘That’s interesting,’ Lombardi said, ‘but it doesn’t seem to me to be particularly helpful. Is there any significance in the date?’

‘Not really,’ Perini replied. ‘But when you also look at the next line, I think you can see the significance. I still don’t know what was sent here to Florence, but I’m pretty sure I do know where it was sent.’

‘You do? How?’

‘Just here: “combine the first of the five next to mark who shall receive”. I played around with that for quite a while until I realized it was also a whole lot simpler than I had been expecting. All it actually meant was that I had to pick the first letter of each of the next five lines to come up with the initials of the man who had received the Trojan horse, the object in which the relic was hidden.’

‘And the letters were what?’

‘Really simple,’ Perini replied, and wrote them out on a slip of paper.

Lombardi just looked at them in incomprehension.

‘“G D B D M”,’ he said. ‘Who the hell was that?’

‘Some day you really must read a little bit about the history of Florence,’ Perini said, almost sadly. ‘Whoever sent this object would have wanted it to go to a prominent citizen, a person who would treasure it, and not sell it or otherwise dispose of it, and there really was only one choice. So what was the name of one of the most important families in Florence in the fourteen century?’

‘The Medicis?’ Lombardi hazarded a guess.

‘Well done, Cesare. And the Medici dynasty was founded by one man. Giovanni di Bicci de Medici, and his initials were G D B D M. He was born in 1360 and died in 1429, and by 1421 the Medici dynasty was already well-established, and by far the most powerful family in the city. Sending it to Giovanni was not only the obvious choice, but probably the only choice.’

‘So do you know where the relic is now, after all this time?’

Perini nodded.

‘I believe I do,’ he said. ‘I think it’s where the Medicis used to live. I believe we’ll find it somewhere in the Palazzo Pitti.’