The Dante Conspiracy

CHAPTER 7



When Perini walked into the station just after ten the following morning, he found the place buzzing, and before he’d even started climbing the staircase to the office he shared with Cesare Lombardi he’d been told four slightly different versions of exactly the same event.

As he opened the office door and stepped inside, Lombardi stood up and walked quickly across the office to meet him.

‘Did they tell you what happened last night?’ he asked eagerly.

‘Shots fired, according to the people downstairs, and one of our cars wrecked, but nobody hurt, thankfully.’

‘That’s right, but it’s only half the story, because Dante’s involved again.’

Perini immediately looked interested.

‘Really? How? To do with the murder?’

‘Almost certainly not,’ Lombardi said discouragingly. ‘We’re talking vandalism, not killing, though if the shot that hit our car last night had been a few inches higher it might have hit the fuel tank, and that could have been really nasty, maybe even fatal. Whoever these two men were – and the officers in the patrol car saw only two people – as well as shooting up our car, they managed to get inside Dante’s cenotaph in the Santa Croce Basilica. They dug their way down into it from the Cloister of the Dead.’

‘Really? That’s weird. I thought it was just an empty box, with nothing inside. What did they do when they got inside? Paint slogans on the inside walls or something?’

‘No. According to the report I just had, apart from making the hole in the floor of the cloister, they did no damage at all. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the shooting incident, we probably wouldn’t even have been told about it.’

‘Actually, you would,’ Perini said. ‘I told them downstairs that we needed to be informed if any other events occurred anywhere in the area that might possibly be linked to Dante, in any way at all. Because I still think Bertorelli’s murder has to be connected in some way with the poet. How, I’ve no idea, but that article he wrote seems to be the only slightly unusual event in his life. Right, on your feet. Let’s go.’

‘Where to?’ Lombardi asked, surprised.

‘Dante’s cenotaph, of course. I want to see it for myself, before any possible clues are trampled into the dust by a bunch of heavy-footed carabinieri.’



‘So they definitely got inside?’ Perini asked. ‘They didn’t just smash a hole through the roof of the cenotaph and walk away?’

‘No doubt at all about that, sir,’ the uniformed officer replied. ‘There’s quite a thick layer of dust on the floor inside, and there are a number of footprints down there. I believe there were two men involved, because I think I can see two different size sets of prints,’ he added for clarification.

‘I understand you were the first on the scene. Could anyone not involved with the break-in have entered the cenotaph? Any of the staff here, for example?’

The officer shook his head.

‘I don’t think so, sir, no, because there seem to be only the two sets of footprints in the cenotaph itself. The alarms were triggered by the intruders when they left the grounds of the basilica, which is when our patrol car responded. As soon as it was light, the staff here carried out an inspection of the area and found this hole.’ He pointed downwards at the roughly circular opening in the floor of the cloister. ‘You’d need to be fairly fit and quite slim to climb down that rope into the cenotaph,’ he added, with a sideways glance at Lombardi’s comfortably-padded frame, ‘and even more fit to make the climb back up again. Most of the people employed here are the wrong side of fifty to start doing that kind of thing. The staff member who found the hole is here if you’d like to talk to him.’

‘I doubt if that will be necessary,’ Perini replied. ‘All he did was find the hole, so I can’t see what useful information he might have for us. You’ve looked down inside the cenotaph but you’ve not gone down there yourself?’

‘I shone my torch around the interior to check for signs of any other damage, and I noticed the footprints when I did so. But that’s all, sir. Oh, the intruders also left their tools behind.’

Both detectives had seen the bulky black bag resting against the wall of the cloister, and Lombardi had already used the end of his pen to open up the top of it to peer inside.

‘You’ve checked it already, presumably? And wore gloves when you did so?’

‘Yes, sir, to both your questions. The tools are about what you’d expect – hammers, chisels, crowbars, that kind of thing – but there are also a couple of pads made of heavy material, quite badly bashed about. My guess is that they used them on the chisels to muffle the sound of their hammering.’

‘Makes sense,’ Perini agreed.

Then he looked behind him as he heard a clattering sound. A man wearing grey overalls was walking down the cloister towards them, a slim ladder resting on his shoulder.

‘He’s one of the ground staff here at the basilica,’ the patrol officer explained. ‘I asked him to find a ladder in case you wanted to examine the cenotaph yourself. Getting up and down that rope wouldn’t be all that easy.’

‘Thanks. That’s good thinking,’ Perini said, making a mental note of the officer’s name, just because of his demonstrable competence.

The workman lowered the ladder through the hole, which left about three feet protruding above the floor of the cloister.

‘Thanks,’ Perini said, then turned to the police officer. ‘Right. Lend me your torch, please.’

He knelt beside the hole driven in the floor of the cloister, switched on the torch and peered down inside. It took a few moments for his eyes to become accustomed to the darkness below him after the early-morning glare of the sun, but soon he was seeing precisely what the uniformed police officer had described. The walls seemed to be completely untouched, with no signs of damage or vandalism, and the confusion of footprints on the stone floor of the cenotaph showed up clearly.

Perini stood up and pulled a pair of latex gloves out of his pocket, just in case what he was looking at was a crime scene and there was a body in the cenotaph somewhere, out of sight, unlikely though that was.

‘You stay up here, Cesare, while I have a quick look round inside. I don’t think this is anything more than a case of determined vandalism, but you never know.’

Then Perini grabbed the top of the ladder, made sure the base wouldn’t slip under his weight, then carefully made his way down it and into the cool darkness of the cenotaph. The hole was big enough that getting through it wasn’t much of a problem, and then he stood up, one foot resting on the pile of rubble and the other on the bottom tread of the ladder. For a few moments he didn’t move. He’d always been taught that at any crime scene – and he supposed that where he was almost qualified for that description simply because of the damage – the most important tool any detective possessed was his eyes. Look first, then move, had always been his mantra.

He shone the beam of the torch all around the interior. Apart from the confusion of footprints on the stone floor, and the hole above his head, there were no obvious signs that anyone had been inside. No graffiti, no other damage that he could see. And certainly no corpses. The air smelt stale and unpleasant, but it didn’t smell of decay.

He squatted down and shone the beam of the torch on the floor. The uniformed officer had been right: two men had been inside, because he could clearly see two different sole patterns, and the shoes were slightly different sizes. Both were obviously male, by their size. They seemed to have walked all around inside the cenotaph, but he had no idea why, or what they had hoped to achieve in there. Or to find. But the sheer labour involved in breaking through the floor of the cloister meant that they must have had a very good reason. He shone the torch up towards the hole. It must have taken them most of the night to get through, which obviously begged the question: why bother?

Lombardi was peering down through the hole, and Perini gestured to him.

‘Nothing much here,’ he said. ‘So you can come down as well.’

‘Do I have to?’

Perini looked up at the slightly rotund figure of his sergeant and what appeared to be the new suit he had on.

‘Yes,’ he replied, resisting the urge to smile. ‘Unless that’s an Armani you’re wearing, in which case I’d want to talk to you anyway, get yourself down here. I’d value your opinion.’

Grunting and muttering, Lombardi slowly and carefully negotiated the opening in the ceiling and climbed down the ladder.

‘What do you think?’ Perini asked, once his sergeant was standing beside him at the base of the ladder.

Lombardi looked all round, following the beam of the torch as Perini slowly moved it across the walls and the floor.

‘Looks as if they didn’t do anything, apart from walk about the place,’ Lombardi said. ‘Bit pointless, really.’

‘I agree. And they didn’t leave any convenient clues to tell us what they were doing,’ Perini pointed out. ‘But I suppose there’s really only one possible explanation.’

‘They were looking for something,’ Lombardi supplied.

‘Exactly. That’s the only explanation that makes sense. But searching for what, and did they find it?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘But why did they come in this way? Wouldn’t it have been easier to break in from inside the basilica, just cut their way through the wall?’

Perini nodded.

‘Easier, yes, from the point of view of the labour involved in getting through the wall. But you’ve obviously not been inside the basilica. All the doors and windows are alarmed, so getting inside would be difficult unless they could disable the system somehow. But more importantly, there’s a hefty stone monument, a kind of celebration of Dante’s life, right in front of the entrance to the cenotaph, which would make cutting through the wall behind it really difficult, maybe even impossible. On balance, taking this route from the outside and going down through the ceiling was probably the only viable option.’

The two detectives made a thorough search of the entire interior but found nothing of significance.

‘There’s dust everywhere,’ Perini said, ‘and I can see print marks – or rather glove marks – on the walls. It looks to me as if they were searching for a hidden compartment or something like that, maybe tapping the walls to see if they could find a hollow section. But there’s no sign of damage, no chisel marks or anything like that, so presumably they left empty-handed.’

‘But what did they expect to find inside an empty cenotaph dedicated to a poet who died nearly a thousand years ago?’

‘Not quite that long,’ Perini replied, ‘but it’s a good question all the same, and I’ve no idea. But I’ve found somebody who knows all about Italy’s most famous poet. Let’s grab a drink at one of the cafes, and I’ll give him a call. He lives near here, and he’s waiting to hear from me.’