The Dante Conspiracy

CHAPTER 8



Perini made a call on his mobile as soon as they emerged from the Santa Croce Basilica, and then the two men walked down the side of the piazza. They found a table easily enough outside a cafe towards the end, a location which offered them an unrivalled view of the basilica itself, its old stones gleaming white at the far end. Once the waiter had deposited their drinks – two cappuccinos – on the table in front of them, Lombardi leaned forward slightly.

‘So is this expert coming here, or what?’ he asked.

‘Yes. He’ll be here in a few minutes,’ Perini confirmed. ‘He works at the university, just like Bertorelli did, but in a different department, and he only lives a couple of streets away. He’s actually a specialist in the Byzantine Empire - the Eastern Roman Empire - but he’s made a detailed study of Dante as a kind of sideline. He’s written a couple of books about him, in fact. I read some of the reviews of them on the Internet, and they looked to me like they would be pretty heavy going.’

‘That’s great,’ Lombardi said. ‘I know nothing about history and care less, and I can’t stand poetry. And now this guy is going to come along and talk about both, and probably bore me into submission in the process.’

‘One day, Cesare, I must find out exactly what you do know, and what your skills are.’

‘I’m a good shot, and a good driver,’ Lombardi answered immediately. ‘And I can normally tell what you’re thinking. As your sergeant, do I need anything more than that?’

Perini grinned at him.

‘Maybe, or maybe not. I really don’t know.’

‘Inspector Perini?’

A late middle-aged man, clean shaven with prematurely greying hair, was approaching their table from the open area of the piazza, a battered brown leather document case clutched in one hand. He didn’t look like an academic, more like a successful businessman. He was wearing a light grey suit of impeccable cut, a white shirt that strained slightly against his belly, and a silk tie with a discreet pattern. His polished brown leather shoes looked handmade, and he seemed to almost exude an air of restrained prosperity.

‘Do I look that much like a policeman?’ Perini asked, getting up and extending his hand to greet the new arrival.

‘Perhaps not by yourself, no, but sitting here with your colleague, the two of you do rather scream “police”, yes. I’m Ettore Guitoni.’

‘I’ll remember that next time I’m on a stake-out. Doctor Guitoni, this is Sergeant Cesare Lombardi.’

‘Doctor,’ Lombardi said.

‘Ettore, please. Now, how can I help the police?’

‘We are facing something of a mystery,’ Perini said. ‘You’re obviously aware of the death of Professor Bertorelli?’

Guitoni nodded, but didn’t respond.

‘At the moment, we don’t know why, but his death and another recent incident seem to be connected in some way with Dante, the poet.’

‘I do know who Dante was, inspector,’ Guitoni replied mildly, then ordered an espresso from the waiter who had just appeared beside their table.

‘I know, sorry. I just meant that Dante rather than anyone else. What I’d like you to do is just talk us through his life and work, in case we can see a link between any aspect of it and the case we’re working on. But please just give us the short version, because my colleague here has a very low boredom threshold.’

‘I’ll do my best. Dante’s pretty much been my hobby for the last ten years or so. Right, Dante, il Sommo Poeta, the Supreme Poet. He was probably born in the early summer of 1265, right here in Florence. His family was loyal to the White Guelphs, which meant they supported the Pope, and also meant they, along with the Black Guelphs, opposed the Ghibellines, who enjoyed the support of the Holy Roman Emperor. In his mid-twenties, in 1289, he actually fought with the Guelph cavalry at the Battle of Campaldino, so he was clearly quite active politically and militarily. He was also active in other ways as well, getting married and having at least four children. We don’t know much about his education, except that he certainly studied both Tuscan and Provencal poetry, as well as reading the classical Latin authors.

‘As well as the woman he married, Gemma, who was a member of a powerful Florentine family – it was an arranged marriage, very common in those days as a way to establish or consolidate relationships between families – Dante fell in love with another woman at the remarkably early age of nine. Her name was Beatrice Portinari, but he never got to know her well, preferring to admire her from afar with a kind of courtly and unrequited love. She was the subject of a number of poems he wrote, often being depicted as a sort of semi-divine being, guiding and watching over him. But she died in 1290 and that seems to have turned Dante into something of a recluse for a time. He retreated from public life and appeared to lose himself in literature.

‘Later, he had some political ambitions, and to aid him in this he became a pharmacist, because politicians were then required to be members of one of the guilds here in Florence, but he actually achieved little in politics. Then things took a turn for the worse for him. The Guelphs defeated the Ghibellines, but then split into White and Black factions, the Whites taking power and expelling the Blacks, which should have been good news for Dante, who was a member of the White Guelphs. The problem was that the Blacks supported the Pope, while the Whites wanted more freedom from papal interference, and that raised concerns in Rome. In response, Pope Boniface VIII decided to occupy Florence with a military force and issued orders to Charles of Valois to implement his wishes. Dante then became directly involved, because he was a part of a delegation sent to the Vatican to try to discover what the Pope intended to do, and hopefully persuade him not to launch an attack Florence.’

Perini noticed that Lombardi’s eyes were starting to glaze over.

‘Try and stay awake, Cesare,’ he instructed.

‘That’s nearly the end of the history lesson,’ Guitoni said. ‘In Rome, the Pope dismissed all the delegates from Florence apart from Dante, but while he was still in Rome, Charles invaded Florence and installed a new Black Guelph government. At a stroke, Dante found himself on completely the wrong side of the political divide. He was condemned to exile from the city of his birth for two years and had a large fine was imposed on him. Dante both wouldn’t, and in fact he couldn’t, pay the fine because he thought it was unjustified, and in any case all his assets in Florence had been seized by the Black Guelphs, so he had no money. As a result, he was then sentenced to perpetual exile, and this was serious stuff. If he ever returned to Florence without paying the fine, he could be seized by the authorities and burnt at the stake. Something else interesting I found out was that the sentence against Dante was eventually rescinded.’

Guitoni paused and glanced at Lombardi, who now seemed slightly more attentive.

‘Would you care to hazard a guess about when that was done?’

Lombardi shrugged.

‘Wheels around here tend to move pretty slowly, so I’d guess it was probably after he died.’

‘It was,’ Guitoni confirmed. ‘In fact, it was quite a long time after he died. Almost seven hundred years afterwards, actually. It was rescinded in June 2008, to be precise.’

‘That is slow,’ Lombardi agreed, smiling. ‘Even by Florentine standards.’

‘So obviously what Dante couldn’t do was return home, and there are various accounts of what he did next. It’s pretty certain he went to Verona and Sarzana in Liguria, and then possibly to Lucca. Other accounts claim he went to France and possibly even to Oxford in England, but there’s actually no credible evidence that he ever left Italy. In 1312 Henry VII of Luxembourg, the Holy Roman Emperor, attacked Florence and defeated the Black Guelphs, but Dante wasn’t involved in the campaign. Afterwards an amnesty was granted to all citizens of the city who were in exile, but required them to make public penance as well as paying a heavy fine, which Dante refused to do. Then he was told his death sentence had been commuted to one of house arrest, on condition that he would travel to Florence to publicly swear that he would never enter the city again. This he also refused to do, with the result that not only was his death sentence confirmed in perpetuity, but was also extended to his sons. But for Dante, exile from his beloved Florence was actually a form of death anyway.

‘In 1318 he was invited to live in Ravenna, an offer which he accepted, but he died three years later, a comparatively young man of 56, possibly from malaria, when on his way back to Ravenna from a diplomatic mission to Venice. He was buried in the city at what was then called the Church of San Pier Maggiore but is now known as San Francesco. Now, that’s a very short history of the man himself, just the bare bones, as it were. The story of his poem, The Divine Comedy, is rather more complicated, but I think it’s relevant.’

‘I was afraid of that,’ Lombardi muttered.

‘Quiet, Cesare,’ Perini instructed. ‘Carry on, Ettore.’

‘It’s fairly certain that Dante didn’t start working on the poem until he was forced into exile, though very little is known for certain about this period of his life. There are some indications that he was already working on it by 1315, possibly even as early as 1308. The poem consists of three parts: Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso – Hell, Purgatory and Paradise – and they describe Dante’s own journey through the three places, accompanied and guided by the Roman poet Virgil through Hell and Purgatory, and then by Beatrice, the subject of his adoring and unrequited love, in Paradise.’

‘Doesn’t sound that funny to me,’ Lombardi commented. ‘Supposed to make you laugh, was it?’

‘Not really,’ Guitoni replied with a kind of weary patience. ‘In those days, the convention was that all serious literary works were written in Latin, so anything written in Italian or any other language was assumed to be trivial in nature, the opposite of serious, and hence a “comedy”. And there was another reason for the appellation as well. In classical literature, the word “comedy” meant a work which demonstrated a belief in an ordered universe, one where events proceeded in a logical manner to ultimate good, according to a kind of divine will. As Dante’s poem showed him travelling through the torments of Hell to the uncertainty of Purgatory, but finishing in Paradise, it was a “comedy” in the classical sense of the word.’

‘And this is important why, exactly?’ Lombardi asked.

‘Bear with me, sergeant, I’m nearly there. We know very little about the publication history of the three parts of the poem. It seems fairly certain that the first part – Inferno – had been published by 1317, but nobody’s ever than able to find out when the other two sections were published, though it is likely that the last part, Paradiso, was actually published after Dante died in 1321. Unfortunately, none of his original manuscripts have survived. The earliest copies of his masterpiece were made by Giovanni Boccaccio in the 1360s, and three of these do survive. In fact, it was Boccaccio who first called it the “Divine Comedy”, the Divina Commedia. Originally, Dante had just called it the Commedia. The first printed version wasn’t produced until April 1472, just over a hundred and fifty years after Dante’s death. That was a run of 300 copies of which a mere fourteen are still around.

‘Part of the reason for this lack of contemporary manuscripts is that although the poem quickly became recognised as both an important literary work, and also as a solid marker in the evolution of Italian as a literary language, it fell out of favour during the Renaissance. The Divine Comedy only really became established internationally as one of the most important works of literature in Italian, in fact in any language, in the nineteenth century, and by then Dante himself had already become recognized as a literary icon.’

Perini finished the last of his coffee and beckoned the waiter over to ask for refills for the three of them.

‘As I said,’ Guitoni continued, ‘Dante was buried in the church in Ravenna, but it wasn’t until 1780 that a separate tomb was erected for him in that city. In the meantime, the people of Florence finally realized how important a literary figure he was, conveniently forgot how shabbily he’d been treated by the authorities in his home town, and tried to persuade the city fathers in Ravenna to send his body here. They refused, of course, and at one point they became so convinced that what was left of his corpse would be taken by force that they bricked up the bones in the wall of a monastery.

‘But the Florentines never gave up, and in 1829, just under a century after Dante’s tomb had been built in Ravenna, they erected their own tomb to await the eventual arrival of his body.’ He pointed down the piazza towards the Santa Croce Basilica. ‘That’s the Dante cenotaph, of course, which is in the basilica. It’s been empty since it was built, and it’s most probably going to stay that way. So that’s a potted history of Dante. Anything else you want to know?’

Perini nodded slowly.

‘Thanks for the history lesson, Ettore,’ he said. ‘I don’t think we’re any the wiser as far as our present investigation is concerned, but we’re certainly better informed.’

‘But does any of that help?’ Guitoni asked. ‘We’re talking ancient history, really, and I can’t see what bearing Dante’s life could possibly have on the brutal murder of Professor Bertorelli. I know he believed he’d found a couple of new verses from the Inferno, but I think he was mistaken, at least in the interpretation he placed on them.’

Perini perked up at that.

‘In what way?’ he asked.

‘Well, I don’t like to criticise any of my colleagues, and especially the ones who are unable to respond, but there are two obvious objections to his conclusion that he’d found a new version of that part of the poem, the “Ravenna Variant”, as he called it. First, although superficially the style of the additional verses is similar to Dante’s writing, he had a particularly deft and accomplished touch, and I don’t believe that you can see that in the new material. But there’s a much more fundamental reason, which relates to the very structure of the poem.’

‘Yes? What’s that?’

Guitoni opened his document case and extracted several sheets of paper, each printed with a number of verses.

‘This is just one part of The Divine Comedy,’ he said, pointing at the top sheet. ‘In all, the poem consists of 14,233 lines divided into three canticas – Hell, Purgatory and Paradise – and each of those contains thirty-three cantos.’

‘So that’s ninety-nine in all,’ Perini said.

‘Yes, but actually there’s also an initial canto that serves as an introduction to the whole poem, so that’s a total of one hundred. Numbers were very important to Dante, and especially the number three. The cantos, for example, were made up of lines containing eleven syllables, but arranged in groups of three, a form known as tercarima, and the subject of each of the canticas also features three multiplied by three, so there were nine circles of the Inferno, nine rings of Purgatory and nine celestial bodies in Paradise. At the end is one further section known as the Empyrean, which describes the very essence of God.’

Guitoni glanced at the two police officers to make sure they were still following his argument. They were.

‘So quite obviously, as the whole work was written to a numerical as well as an artistic plan, it is complete in and of itself, so no additional lines or verses can be added, which is what I understood Bertorelli to have first suggested. Then I gather he changed his mind and claimed that the new verses he’d found were intended to replace the original text. But that doesn’t work either, because the subject of the new text is jarringly inconsistent with the remainder of the work.’

‘In what way is it inconsistent?’ Perini asked.

‘It doesn’t really relate to either the preceding or following sections, and seems to be dealing with an entirely unrelated subject.’

‘Which is what?’ Lombardi asked.

‘I don’t know. I can read what it says, but to me it looks almost as if the new verses Bertorelli claimed to have discovered are actually written in a kind of code, because the plain language really doesn’t make sense. Have either of you actually read them?’

Both Perini and Lombardi shook their heads.

‘I’ve read the article Professor Bertorelli wrote,’ Perini said, ‘but I have to confess that I rather skimmed over the actual text he quoted.’

‘You should read the verses carefully,’ Guitoni said firmly, ‘and see if you can make any sense of them. They talk about matters that have no place within the context of the poem, things like “the animal of the Greeks” and the “By his hand the masterpiece lies below Gaetani’s bane”. Complete nonsense, in my opinion, and I’m quite certain they weren’t penned by Dante.’

He finished his coffee and glanced from Perini to Lombardi and back again.

‘So,’ he said, ‘has any of that helped you?’

Perini spread his hands in a universal gesture.

‘I really don’t know,’ he said. ‘The Dante connection was just a lead I thought was worth exploring. Anyway, thank you for your time.’

As the slightly portly figure of the academic disappeared into the crowds of tourists beginning to throng the piazza, Lombardi asked the obvious question.

‘I heard what you said to Guitoni, obviously, but did anything he told us help?’

‘I don’t know,’ Perini replied, ‘but I still think there must be a connection, simply because I don’t believe in coincidence. Bertorelli was researching Dante’s work, in a way, and was tortured to death for his trouble, and almost immediately afterwards somebody dug their way into the poet’s empty cenotaph, both events taking place here in Florence. As far as I can see, there must be something about those supposed new verses the professor discovered that triggered both his murder and this break-in, and the only thing that makes sense to me is that they must provide a clue to something, probably some relic, that’s linked to Dante.’

‘So the people who broke into Santa Croce thought whatever it was might be hidden there, in the cenotaph?’

‘Exactly. But Guitoni was right about one thing. As soon as we get back to the office I’m going to read that article again, this time really carefully. If a bunch of murderers can figure out the answer to the mystery, I’m damned sure I can as well.’

‘I’ve always thought that optimism is a wonderful thing,’ Lombardi murmured, as the two men stood up.