Dante's Key

by G. L. Baron

  At first, she thought the museum guard would stop him, but unfortunately he remained motionless in front of her. The man had been literally overwhelmed by the professor’s speedy exit, as with the momentum of a sprinter, he had disappeared out of the room.

  And Julia had remained motionless, dazed and stunned by Manuel’s unexpected reaction.

  She was certain that after the night spent together he would remain with her. What they had had together was more than just a physical relationship. Or so she thought.

  She was not good at communicating her emotions, not after what she had been through during her youth in Bashar Al Husayn’s harem. But she was sure that he had felt something. She thought that she had seen it in his eyes… But apparently she was wrong!

  Suddenly she shook, like a wounded animal. She looked up and started to run.

  *

  Cassini was exhausted. His lungs were burning. He had not stopped to ask for help, nor had he slowed down.

  He had passed the fountain, hidden between the columns and then reached the trapezium shaped part of the square. There were various rows of chairs arranged there, separated by long low wooden barriers.

  A hundred tourists were already in a queue to reach the basilica’s steps.

  He mingled with them to regain his breath. He heard the voice of an English tour guide explaining the Loggia of Blessings. Above them was the place where new popes appear after election in the nearby Sistine Chapel.

  He took a few steps and then turned around to check that his pursuer was not there.

  But there she was.

  *

  Julia stood still near the obelisk next to the crib, in an area relatively free of tourists. Nearby, soared an impressive decorated fir from Carinthia.

  She turned several times, trying to guess where the professor could have gone.

  On either side of the small grandstand were two rows of faithful waiting to enter into St. Peter’s.

  She decided to try and look there.

  The last time she had seen Cassini, he was on the south side. She thought he would not be able to move to the other side with the chairs already positioned in the centre of the square. If so, her prey had slipped into a dead end.

  She pulled out her cell phone and moved quickly, with the sinuous elegance of a panther that has identified its prey.

  *

  Cassini saw her.

  Then he glanced at the facade of the basilica. Two Swiss guards were standing silently at one of the entrances, attentively observing the faithful moving like a procession.

  ‘No. Not the Swiss Guards!’

  They had entered the Raphael Rooms from a service entrance and in the company of one of the attendants. This meant that Julia had contacts even in the Vatican. He could not be sure, but preferred not to risk asking for their help.

  In the few moments in which he could have rested, he had even managed to think out a plan. He would hide somewhere and then phone Nigel Sforza, perhaps by borrowing a phone from someone.

  Making his way among the tourists, Cassini moved forward again. He heard a few curses behind him, but ignored them. Smiling at the surveillance attendant he found himself on the porch, next to the statue of Charlemagne.

  There were several groups of people. He quickened his pace and walked toward the entrance to the left, the “Death Gate”.

  He hoped that the name was not a bad omen…

  58

  Vatican City, January 4th. 9:35 a.m.

  There was silence in the twilight of the cathedral and the air was perfumed with incense. A languid organ melody sounded from far away.

  Cassini was scared and dripping with sweat down to the base of his spine. His escape had turned into a chess match between him and Julia, but now he had a strategy… as crazy as it was.

  Making the sign of the cross he moved quickly to the right aisle and stopped in front of the Pietà by Michelangelo.

  He joined some tourists in prayer, determined to reach the transept. What he needed was there, from what he could remember…

  He would have to cover the entire nave, ninety metres of round arches and rosy marble floors. Ninety metres where Julia could see him.

  Tourists moved in the direction of the dome and he did the same. Unfortunately, they stopped soon after, in front of the mosaic of Saint Sebastian’s martyrdom.

  Cassini turned back to the cathedral doors, worried that he was moving too slowly… And he was right; on the opposite side, next to the Baptism Chapel on the left aisle, he saw Julia appear.

  And this time she was not alone!

  *

  ‘He’s armed and very dangerous.’ The woman stared at the two agents who had reached the cathedral’s staircase after her phone call. She gestured, indicating the professor’s height.

  ‘Be careful!’

  The two men in dark suits and two-way radios in hand, separated. One went down the aisle to the left, the other headed for Cassini.

  Julia moved along the central nave instead. She moved forward slowly towards the ambulatory. Looking both left and right with each step, she prowled like a hunting dog scenting a rabbit.

  Then she froze, staring over the colonnade that separated the two aisles. One of two agents had appeared between two granite pillars, he had a coat with a fur collar and a hood in his hand… It was Cassini’s.

  *

  The professor had reached the transept. He slipped by the papal altar’s four twisted columns and went towards the right.

  The confessional area was bordered by a red cord, with a series of wooden benches prepared in front.

  But Cassini did not stop.

  The attendant seemed distracted by the silent turmoil that Julia and the two agents created. He left his position and took a few steps in the direction of one of the two.

  It was what the professor was waiting for; he climbed over the barrier and slipped to the right wing of the church.

  Against the walls, there were ten inlaid confessionals. They had the kneeler for the penitents on both sides, and space for the priest at the centre, covered by a red curtain. Judging by the faithful seated along the right side, only the first three were occupied.

  Cassini quickened his step and slipped into the fourth.

  *

  ‘He took off his coat,’ declared one of the two guards, the shortest, with a black goatee round his thin white face.

  Julia had reached the agent between the Gregorian chapel and that of the Blessed Sacrament. A row of candles lit in honour of the Madonna del Soccorso was before the altar. The yellow light illuminated the worshippers’ faces in prayer.

  The woman scrutinised them one by one, as if they were facing a firing squad. ‘He must be here somewhere,’ she murmured. ‘He can’t have gone far.’

  The agent put the jacket on a bench and whispered something into the transmitter. Then he looked towards the Vatican Grottoes’ entrance.

  Cassini, in the confessional, breathed heavily, as if he had just completed an Olympic marathon.

  He wore the same dark suit that Julia had left him on the bed that morning. He felt even more agile without the jacket… but could not stay hidden in a confessional.

  He wondered how safe he would be. He was certain that one of the faithful would have seen him entering.

  He tried to focus, thinking about what could have happened: had her contacts allowed Julia to ask for help from the police or, more simply, had she reported seeing something suspicious?

  He convinced himself that he had been right not to contact the Swiss Guards, outside the basilica.

  ‘Forgive me Father, for I have sinned.’ A female voice with a southern Italian accent shook him from his thoughts.

  Cassini stared over the metal grate; he saw a little white-haired, red-faced woman eager to ask for God’s forgiveness.

  He looked around the narrow space. A stroke of luck… at last: a white embroidered stole was hanging on a smaller coat stand, as well as a surplice of the same colour with large gol
den crosses at the ends. They must have been the clothes worn by the priest who had preceded him.

  The professor smiled to himself. He slipped the surplice over his suit and put the stole around his neck. He had not been to confession for twenty years and was not sure what to do. He started improvising.

  *

  Julia and one of the agents, meanwhile, had reached the transept.

  A cleric with a dark suit and blue eyes was motionless behind a high-backed chair, Italian and German flags fixed to it.

  A red velvet rope that limited the semicircle area of the confessionals was beside him. Some faithful were sitting on benches, waiting to be admitted to confession.

  ‘Go towards the Grottoes,’ the woman ordered. ‘I’ll start from here.’

  She walked to the first confessional and flung back the curtain; inside there was a carrot-red priest, eyes narrowed into a crack.

  Julia gave him a quick glance and passed without delay to the next.

  ‘Hey!’ one of the priests scolded when she was in front of him.

  *

  Cassini, in robes, bowed his head, pretending to scratch and went to the sacristy adjoining the cathedral. He had left the confessional just moments before Julia swooped down the transept.

  ‘Forgive me Father, for I have sinned,’ the old woman kneeling in front of him had said before, over the grate.

  ‘Sister, before I confess you, I have to ask a favour,’ he replied, his voice set with a slight tremor.

  Immediately after, he slipped out with a prehistoric Nokia 3310 and a priest’s surplice that matched his dark suit perfectly.

  ‘Hey!’ he heard behind him, nobody noticed and no one tried to stop him.

  Disguised as a priest, with his head down, he crossed the nave undisturbed, mingling with the faithful and then turned to the exit. After about thirty metres he had turned right and gone into a long dim corridor.

  And there he was, with the small cell phone in hand and the number of Sforza indelibly stamped in his head.

  He dialled and waited.

  The inspector answered on the second ring this time.

  ‘It’s Cassini,’ he stammered. ‘I need your help.’

  59

  Venice, January 4th. 4:41 p.m.

  The Chris Craft Crowne 26 speedboat docked at the pier of San Zaccaria – near the Hotel Danieli – with a dull thud.

  Cold gelid air was blowing in from across the lagoon, carrying a smell of kerosene mixed with brackish water. The sea was rough and pitch black. The waves bounced noisily on the Riva degli Schiavoni, and the backwash agitated the gondolas tied to wooden poles in the marina.

  The man was numb, his cheeks red from the cold. He leapt from the outboard, and squinting furtively at the pilot, growled, ‘Wait here!’ Then he stared at the reddish sky; the last rays of the day were sinking behind the island of San Giorgio Maggiore.

  He turned to the city and started limping along the Ponte della Paglia, the opposite side of Saint Mark’s Square. Although it was nearly dark, some hawkers were still standing with their stalls full of souvenirs. He passed a tourist who was towing his trolley towards the ferry from Murano, and continued briskly.

  He was a giant of a hundred and twenty kilos of muscle, with a short, thick neck and a bull’s head. He wore his brown hair short and had a pointed goatee that made him look like D’Artagnan.

  Nicknamed the Bull, no one exactly knew his real name or nationality. He spoke grammatically-perfect Italian, but some inflections brought to mind the accents of Argentinian soccer players.

  The man who had contacted him four days before knew his skills very well; in a career of twenty years, the Bull had killed more than two hundred people.

  An average appearance, a normal job, married with two children, a common man rather than a professional killer. And so, from the end of the nineties, he had gained the trust of the mafia, drug dealers and anyone else who had a score to settle with the unlucky next.

  His specialty was strangling his victims with an electric wire, a weapon that allowed him to travel undisturbed without worrying about metal detectors. If necessary, he was able to make his victims suffer; once he had amputated a woman’s ears, and then a finger a day, waiting until her family members would pay the ransom. In another case he had dipped the legs and arms of a man in boiling water, which were then detached from the torso with minimum effort.

  Then, for no apparent reason, he found God, repented and decided to change his life. But a wolf, however much it forces itself to become a sheep, is still a wolf… and that was the reason why they had asked him to rush to Venice.

  Coming up to the Calle del Dose, he turned left into a dark passage, a little wider than his shoulders. After a few steps, he came out into the Campo Bandiera e Moro, a grey square with the shape of a strange pentagon.

  He looked around and headed for the Templar church of San Giovanni Battista in Bragora. He knocked on the heavy door and almost instantly a crooked little man, who seemed blind in one eye, opened the door.

  ‘I am expected,’ he said with his hissed pronunciation.

  The little man did not bat an eyelid. He just observed the brooch stamped with the red cross on the Bull’s lapel and let him in.

  After all, perhaps, he saw enough…

  *

  A few minutes later, he was sitting in an old library with high Gothic ceilings and long narrow windows. A roaring log fire crackled on the shorter side, and on the opposite side a huge bookcase full of scrolls covered the entire open brick wall.

  ‘Thank you for coming so quickly, brother.’ The man was perhaps about seventy, with white hair perfectly coiffed. He wore trousers of an anonymous dark suit, and a white shirt with the initials E.C. embroidered under the pocket. The sleeves, folded up on his forearms, revealed wrinkled skin. ‘It’s still for the Sex dierum iter. The papyri hidden by the Templars may be closer than we expected.’

  The Bull nodded. He was before the Grand Master, a man whom he would give his life for. He was the person who a few years earlier had helped him get out of the spiral of violence in which he had been sucked into… But at the same time, the one who six months earlier – in the name of the brotherhood – had asked him to return to.

  ‘The search has begun again. This time we do not know the exact destination,’ he said, pointing with his index finger to a map on his desk. ‘In respect to when we were first in touch, though, we have more information; they’ll ask for permission for archaeological excavations along the rivers Blákvísl and Jökulfall… and up to here—’ He stabbed at a point in the north west of Iceland and looked back at the Bull. ‘At the Gýgjarfoss waterfall.’

  ‘When do I start?’ he just asked him, staring at the strange design on the map similar to a camel’s humps, which followed the course of the two rivers.

  60

  Rome, January 4th. 6:50 p.m.

  The small silver MG Roadster, driven by Nigel Sforza, stopped by the edge of the road and flashed its headlights.

  The Interpol inspector tried to peer over the headlights; to his right was the long row of sycamore trees that overlooked the Tiber. The pavement was crowded with street vendors in front of the masonry parapet. Across the river, through the bare branches, he could see the rounded profile of Castel Sant’Angelo, illuminated by yellowish lights.

  He turned off the engine and looked at the clock; there were still ten minutes to the appointment.

  When Cassini had called that morning, he was still in Milan, completing the statements on the canal chase. He had left immediately and – without stopping – driven the six hundred kilometres that separated him from the capital in just over five hours.

  He understood that the professor was in danger from his agitated conversation. It seemed clear that the reason was linked to the OCST devices, of which by now he knew everything there was to know.

  ‘Hide somewhere. I will come and get you,’ he commanded him, already thinking about the next move. ‘Meet me tonight at seven o’cloc
k on the bridge in front of Castel Sant’Angelo. You know which one? If they’re following you, come at the last minute. If I’m not there, don’t wait, just call me on the phone.’

  Sforza got out and started walking briskly down the pavement alongside the Tiber. He reached the statue of St. Peter with the Bible in hand, at the beginning of the bridge, and kept on walking along the cobblestoned pedestrian bridge.

  He walked between the illuminated sculptures of the ten Angels of the Passion and Bernini’s parapet.

  When he was about halfway across, just below the figure of the angel with the cross, he heard his name called.

  ‘Inspector.’ It was Cassini’s voice.

  Sforza looked up at the facade of the castle. Suddenly, a black figure dressed as a priest appeared from the steps leading down to the Tiber’s edge.

  The professor went to meet him, holding out his hand. ‘I was afraid you wouldn’t come.’

  The inspector smiled. ‘I had to repay my debt for the other night… when I didn’t answer your call.’

  ‘I’ve been hiding all day, as you told me to.’

  ‘Has anyone followed you?’

  ‘No. At least, I don’t think so,’ groaned the professor, afraid.

  ‘Good. But let’s get out of here now.’

  The two crossed over the bridge again and were back alongside the Tiber. Sforza looked back several times and then pulled out his cell phone. Reaching the car, they got in quickly and pulled out into the evening traffic.

  61

  London, January 4th, 6:55 p.m.

  The headquarters of Hidetoshi Tanaka’s Qualcon Services was in a historic grey sandstone building, in the eastern part of the city. It looked directly onto Threadneedle Street, halfway between the city’s nerve centre and the “old lady”, the first headquarters of the Bank of England. It was in an upmarket neighbourhood, in which the valuable buildings of classical London alternated with the modern skyscrapers that had mushroomed in the last two decades.