The Dante Conspiracy

CHAPTER 9



The Russian wasn’t pleased, and when he wasn’t pleased, he let it be known.

But he was also realistic. He was sure that his interpretation of the ‘new’ verses purporting to have been written by Dante – but almost certainly penned by somebody else after the death of the poet – was correct. He was convinced that he knew exactly what he and his men, a couple of locals recruited specifically for this one task, were looking for. That seemed clear enough. The problem was that although he’d worked out the identity of the relic to his own satisfaction, the parts of the verses which seemed to explain where it had been hidden were obtuse in the extreme.

And, frankly, he knew that sending his men to look in Dante’s cenotaph had almost been an act of desperation. Or, as he could just about rationalize it, as part of a process of elimination. It was obvious to him that the dates didn’t work. The cenotaph had been erected half a millennium too late, and he knew it. The only way that could have worked was if the relic had been found centuries earlier, but, even if it had been, hiding it away in the cenotaph really didn’t make sense. It would either have been placed prominently on display somewhere or sold at an auction that would have attracted bidders from all over the world.

So after he had vented his fury on the men he’d hired to get inside the cenotaph and dismissed them, he calmed rapidly and began planning his next move. And the more he thought about it, the more obvious it seemed to him that the mere existence of the relic could not possibly have been known to the authorities in Florence. And that really changed everything, the whole thrust of his search. If it had been taken from Ravenna to Florence in secret, then he would be wasting his time looking in any public buildings in the city. As a private gift – if “gift” was really the word he was looking for – then it would have ended up in a very private location. And there was one obvious place that might have become its ultimate destination back in the first few decades of the fourteenth century. The trouble was he had no idea where that particular building had been located within Florence.

He would have to do some intensive research, and quickly.