The Dante Conspiracy (15 page)
‘So what’s this “
Gaetani’s
bane” thing?’
Lombardi asked.
‘I have no idea,’ Perini said, ‘but it really must be something
to do with Pope Boniface. The line from the verses reads: “By his hand the masterpiece
lies below
Gaetani’s
bane”.’ He paused briefly,
then
finished the thought. ‘I wonder if that line is making a
deliberate literal reference, using the word “below” in its common, everyday meaning.
In other words, the relic is hidden in the chest but underneath this bane thing.’
He looked at the chest, considering.
‘Has this ever been properly examined? Checked for any hidden
compartments, I mean?’
Massimo shook his head.
‘I doubt it. It’s just a plain wooden chest, and of importance
only because of the painting that’s inside it. There would be no need for anyone
to do any other checks on it.’
‘So how about we do that right now?’ Perini said, taking a couple
of steps forward. ‘Have a proper look at it.’
‘Just a moment,’ Massimo said. ‘You’d better not damage it. That’s
a very valuable exhibit.’
‘If I’m right about those verses, signor, what I think is inside
that chest is probably more valuable than all the other exhibits in this palace,
put together.’
‘What? What do you mean?’
‘I mean that somewhere inside that wooden chest could be not
simply a hand-written copy of the
Divina
Commedia
itself,
but the original manuscript.’
Massimo’s eyes bulged.
‘You can’t be serious. We believe we’ve located all the early
copies, years ago.’
‘No.’ Perini shook his head. ‘I didn’t say a copy. I said the
original manuscript, written in Dante’s own hand.’
For a few moments, the director just stared at the detective.
‘You’re serious, aren’t you?’ he said at last. ‘You really think
it might be here?’
‘We’re perfectly serious,’ Perini replied. ‘Just as serious,
in fact, as the criminals who have so far killed two men here in Florence and broken
into Dante’s cenotaph looking for the same thing.’
‘I’m not surprised there’ve been deaths,’ Massimo said. ‘The
value of that manuscript is incalculable. Anyone who knew about it would probably
be prepared to kill to get their hands on it.’
Lombardi had been examining the wooden chest while Perini and
Massimo had been talking, and now he looked up.
‘There seems to be a break in the lid,’ he said. ‘It looks like
a join between two of the pieces of wood, but it’s a bit wider. And there are a
couple of small slots in the lid on either side that could be intended to take the
end of the blade of a knife or dagger.’
‘Let me see,’ Massimo instructed, and bent down to see for himself.
‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘Somebody should have spotted these
a long time ago.’
‘Maybe they did, and the cupboard’s bare,’ Perini said.
‘Only one way to find out.’
The sergeant reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out a
switchblade knife that he opened with a click.
‘We need something for the other side,’ he said.
Perini took out a small multi-tool, equipped with files and pliers
and a host of other gadgets that he’d never used, selected one of the knife blades
and slid the end of it into the slot that Lombardi had pointed out.
Almost immediately there was a faint sound, less a click than
a
creak
, and the gap between the two pieces of wood on
the lid of the chest opened a fraction wider. Lombardi inserted the point of his
switchblade into the gap and levered slightly. There was another creaking noise
and a small section of the wood forming the top of the lid opened up just a couple
of centimetres.
Lombardi peered inside the hidden compartment and then glanced
up at Perini, his eyes glinting with excitement.
‘There’s something in there,’ he said, and slid his fingers into
the gap.
‘Stop!’
Massimo almost yelled. ‘Don’t
touch it.’
Lombardi froze, the tips of his fingers a bare centimetre from
the object he’d spotted, then he took a step back.
‘Why?’ he asked.
Massimo didn’t immediately reply, just bent down
himself
so he could look through the narrow opening.
‘It looks like a piece of parchment,’ he said, ‘and if you two
are correct it’s been here for almost six hundred years, which means it needs careful
handling. And that doesn’t include grabbing it with your fingers and dragging it
out. Just wait a moment.’
He reached into his pocket, pulled out a pair of thin white cotton
gloves and put them on.
‘Can you open the gap a little wider?’ he asked Lombardi, who
obliged by levering the wooden panel up another three or four centimetres. Then
all three men could clearly see the light brown piece of parchment that lay inside.
Delicately, Massimo took hold of either side of it and lifted
it out of the recess. He turned it so that it was upright and gave it a very delicate
tap with the tip of one of his fingers. A small cloud of brownish dust drifted off
it, and he laid it down carefully on a shelf near the wooden chest.
There were lines of text visible on the parchment, and while
Perini and Lombardi watched, almost holding their breath, the director scanned what
was written on it.
After a couple of minutes he straightened and looked at them.
‘The bad news from your point of view,’ he said, ‘is that this
has nothing at all to do with the
Divina
Commedia
, though
it’s certainly something that Dante knew about and had in his possession. What you’ve
found in that chest is what the person who wrote those verses described as “
Gaetani’s
bane”, and it’s pretty explosive stuff.’
‘Or at least,’ Massimo amended, ‘it would have been explosive
at the end of the fourteenth century, but it’s rather less so now.’
Perini made an impatient gesture, and the director continued,
explaining what he’d read.
‘It’s written in Latin, which is what you’d expect, and the document
definitely originated in the Vatican. I haven’t read all of it, but I can quite
see why Dante loathed Boniface as much as he obviously did, quite apart from the
fact that the Pope had orchestrated the take-over of Florence by the Black Guelphs
and, indirectly, caused Dante’s own exile from the city of his birth.’
Massimo pointed at the parchment.
‘That wasn’t written by Dante, or by Boniface, but by a young
priest who held a position at the Vatican, and it’s a sort of confession, I suppose.
His name was Timor, and he had become a personal assistant to Benedetto
Gaetani
when he was still a cardinal. If this document is accurate,
and I have no reason to assume that it isn’t, he became rather more than that. Timor
claims that
Gaetani
seduced him and that he was regularly
sodomised by the cardinal. What’s not clear is whether or not this was done by
Gaetani
for purely sexual reasons, or as part of a longer-term
plan, because at some point the cardinal presented Timor with an ultimatum. Either
he assisted
Gaetani
in a scheme he had concocted, or the
cardinal would ensure that the young priest was dismissed from his position in the
Vatican for moral turpitude and sexual deviance.’
‘Wouldn’t that have been just as dangerous for
Gaetani
?’ Perini asked. ‘As the other party in the relationship,
I mean?’
‘Probably not.
By that stage he was
a very ambitious senior cardinal and exerted considerable power in the Roman curia,
and he could have played the innocent, claiming that Timor had approached him rather
than the other way round. Just as it does now, the Church would have closed its
ranks then to protect its own, so I think
Gaetani
would
have been safe enough.’
‘So what was his plan? Why did he need this man Timor at all?’
Massimo glanced again at the parchment.
‘I said
Gaetani
was powerful and ambitious,
and what he wanted more than anything else was to occupy the Throne of St Peter,
and he’d hatched a plan to ensure that the then incumbent would leave as soon as
possible.’
‘And who was that?’ Lombardi asked. ‘On the off-chance that I
might have heard of him,’ he added, as Perini looked at him.
‘His name was
Pietro
Angelerio
, and he took the name Celestine V as Pope in August
1294, after the papal throne had been vacant for over two years. He was a former
monk and a hermit who had founded the Celestine Order fifty years earlier, in 1244,
but he wasn’t actually a lot of good as pontiff, and resigned after just over five
months in office. The general impression was that he hated the pomp and ceremony
of being the head of the Church and wanted nothing more than to resume his solitary
existence. But
Gaetani
obviously took the view that Celestine
needed a good push, just in case he refused to jump. So he made Timor his instrument,
and had the young monk hide himself away in Celestine’s chambers. Timor was instructed
to imitate the voice of God when the Pope was on the verge of dropping off to sleep,
and tell him repeatedly that the will of God was for him to abdicate. That, at least,
is what this confession by Timor claims.’
‘It sounds as if it worked,’ Perini commented.
‘Yes. And you could argue that what happened next more or less
proves that
Gaetani
had something to do with it. Celestine
had ruled from Naples, but as soon as
Gaetani
had been
elected as Boniface VIII, he ordered his predecessor to be seized and brought to
Rome. Celestine escaped and hid out in a forest – he was man of eighty, by the way
– and then made his way to
Sulmona
, to the monastery which
had become the head of the Celestine Order. But he was soon forced to flee from
that sanctuary as well, and was recaptured on the orders of
Gaetani
,
who had him imprisoned in a castle in
Campagna
, and he
died there about ten months later. It’s possible, maybe even probable, that he didn’t
die a natural death, but was murdered on the direct orders of the new Pope. If he
had been, it certainly wouldn’t have been the first – or the last – murder Boniface
was responsible for.’
‘He sounds like a nasty piece of work,’ Perini said.
Massimo nodded.
‘He was definitely one of our less attractive pontiffs. He also
then systematically reversed just about every decision and decree his predecessor
had made. But you could argue that Celestine had the last laugh, because he was
canonized in 1313 as Saint Peter Celestine, whereas Boniface was actually tried
for heresy after his death. He also later suffered the indignity of having his body
exhumed.’
‘Right,’ Lombardi said. ‘We know what that is, but it’s not
The Divine Comedy
, and it’s actually got
nothing to do with it. That’s all we’re really interested in. So where is it?’
‘And that,’ a new voice said from the end of the gallery, ‘is
a very good question. All of
you,
stay exactly where you
are.’
The three men, the two detectives and the director of the Palazzo
Pitti
, had been so engrossed in their examination of the
ancient parchment and its ramifications that they hadn’t heard the stealthy approach
of the new arrivals, three men all wearing dark suits, two of them carrying semi-automatic
pistols fitted with suppressors. Both weapons were held in their out-stretched hands,
and pointed straight at the small group standing beside the wooden chest. The other
man was standing a little way behind them, with no weapon evident, though that didn’t
mean he was unarmed. He was heavily built, with a mane of silver-grey hair, and
exuded an air of authority and dominance.
Perini was the first to recover. He turned very slowly to face
the men, his hands at his sides, being careful not to make a threatening move. He
had never seen any of the men before, but he immediately guessed who two of them
were.
‘We’re police officers,’ he said, ‘and I’d strongly advise you
to lower your weapons right now. If you kill or wound one of us, the police will
never stop looking for you. Whatever you’re being paid to do this, it isn’t worth
it.’
‘You have no idea what I’m paying these men,’ the man standing
behind the two with the pistols stated, ‘but I can assure you it’s enough. And I’m
what you might call an equal-opportunity employer, so I don’t care who they kill.
One bullet, one body, no problem.
Policeman or professor,
it makes no difference to me.’
‘But you didn’t even use a bullet on Bertorelli, did you?’ Perini
asked. ‘Wasn’t he worth it?’
‘There was no need,’ Guido replied. ‘The garrotte was silent
and quick, and he didn’t suffer. At least, he didn’t suffer as he died.’
‘And now this is the end-game,’ Marco said. ‘You aren’t the only
people who can crack a simple code and, just like you, Stefan here worked out that
the manuscript had to be in that chest.’
‘How did you even know the chest existed?’ Massimo
asked,
a distinct tremor in his voice.
‘That was the easy bit,’ Stefan said. ‘It was listed in the guide
book for the Palazzo
Pitti
, together with a most helpful
description. Once I’d worked out that the relic had to have been sent to Giovanni
di
Bicci
de’ Medici, it was fairly obvious where it had
to be. Then it was just a matter of working out which of the various objects he
acquired early in the fourteenth century was most likely to contain it. That chest
was really the only choice.’