The Medici secret

by Michael White

  Jeff suddenly became aware of just how cold it was. He shivered and averted his eyes from the hideous sight, feeling outraged and impotent. A police launch and an ambulance sliced through the freezing water towards them, and came to a dead stop, covering the final few metres with the engines stilled. There was no sign of Antonio's murderer. 'Hi Rose. Yes, I'm so sorry, darling. We had a little accident… No, nothing serious… we're all OK. I'm at Roberto's place, but I'll be home later. Look… No, listen. Don't stay up. We'll have a day out together tomorrow, I promise. Yes, yes… Maria is up watching it with you, is she? Yes, that's good. OK sweetie… I'll make you breakfast in the morning and I'll show you the sights… OK, bye.'

  It had been an exhausting night. Roberto's head wound was treated at the scene then all three of them were escorted to the police station, an ugly, squat building on Ponte della Liberia, the causeway linking Venice to the mainland. There, they had been separated. Jeff had answered questions and made a detailed statement, and was about to ask for a lawyer when he was led from the interrogation suite to a conference room where he found Roberto and Edie talking to a man in a very natty police uniform. They had left the station soon afterwards.

  The officer was the Chief of Venice police, Aldo Candotti, and he was now sitting at one end of a parcel-gilt eighteenth-century settee, holding the stem of an empty Schott Zwiesel sherry glass. He was a powerfully built man; a former rowing international gone to seed thanks to his love of fine wines and too much tender venison. He had ruddy cheeks and a broad nose upon which was perched a pair of Dior spectacles.

  At the other end of the settee sat Roberto. He had showered and changed. But his hair was still wet, and a piece of gauze covered the cut he had sustained earlier. Edie was swirling a single malt in a tumbler. They were in the ground floor library of Palazzo Baglioni, the Venetian home of the Armatovani family since the fifteenth century. Facing the Grand Canal, the palazzo was the epitome of faded grandeur. Four storeys high, rows of Byzantine windows and crumbling colonnades made it as beautiful as a Titian or a Byrd motet. Inside, each room was filled with antique furniture, some of which had been in the building since their purchase centuries earlier. The library was a vast, high-ceilinged room, lined on all sides, floor to ceiling with rosewood shelves containing thousands of books, a collection that had grown with each generation. The books ranged from a priceless seventeenth-century edition of Hobbes' Leviathan to signed, leather-bound first editions of Hemingway. Several of Roberto's antecedents had been flamboyant bibliophiles and the Armatovani library was considered one of the finest in private hands.

  'Well, I'll leave you and your guests now, Roberto,' Candotti said, pushing himself up from the settee and placing his glass carefully on a marble-topped occasional table. 'One of my men will call on you tomorrow to give you an update. Tonight I shall begin the search for the mysterious stranger. You will speak to the unfortunate Antonio's family?'

  Roberto nodded. Aldo Candotti shook hands with each of them and was then led away along the wide hallway by Vincent, the rake-thin and extremely distinguished butler who had served Roberto's parents and came with the house.

  'An eventful evening,' Roberto said. 'And what have we learned, apart from the fact that our lives really are in danger?' 'You can remember the exact wording of the inscription on the map?' Edie asked, sitting in the place vacated by Candotti.

  'I can do better than that,' Roberto replied. 'A little frayed and smudged perhaps, but just about legible.'

  And he unfolded a crumpled and soiled piece of paper, smoothed it down as best he could and read aloud the lines of verse he had transcribed from the map on San Michele: Reaching across the water, the man with the perfect name: a sad man, deceived by the Devil. It is hidden there with the lines, Beyond the water, behind the hand of the architect. 'What do you make of it?' Jeff asked his friend.

  'That's all I've been thinking about between answering police questions and trying to be nice to the Chief of Police.' 'And?' Edie asked.

  'The first part is quite obvious, but the last two lines are a little more enigmatic' Roberto looked'at their puzzled faces and smiled. 'The man with the perfect name? It must be Andrea Da Ponte.' 'The man who designed the Rialto? Of course.' 'Reaching across the water, the man with the perfect name,' Edie said half to herself. 'Ponte, bridge… neat. But, why "a sad man, deceived by the Devil"?'

  'Ah, well, that's a little less obvious,' Roberto leaned over to offer Edie a refill before passing the bottle to Jeff. 'Late in 1591, as Da Ponte's deadline for the commission approached, cracks kept appearing in the main structure of the bridge and it was only the scaffolding that saved the whole thing from crashing into the Grand Canal. Legend has it that one night, the designer was walking alone beside the canal when the Devil appeared before him. The terrified Da Ponte froze to the spot and the Devil smiled cruelly before telling him that he could help solve all his problems with the bridge. The designer was so desperate he listened to what the Devil had to offer.' 'No doubt, he wanted his soul?' Edie interrupted.

  'No, he didn't actually. He wanted the soul of the first person to cross the bridge.' Roberto took a sip of his drink. 'Da Ponte obviously thought this was a great offer and he quickly accepted. A few weeks later, the bridge was completed successfully. The night before the official opening, Da Ponte was putting the finishing touches to an ornamental stone at one end of the bridge while at home his pregnant wife Chiara was waiting for him to return. There came a knock at the door of Da Ponte's house. His wife answered and was confronted by a young builder from the site who told her that she must come quickly, her husband had been hurt. Chiara Da Ponte rushed from the house, and thinking that Andrea was on the far side of the canal, she stepped on to the Rialto and ran as fast as she could towards the other side. It was only after she had traversed the bridge that her husband saw her and at the same moment he heard a terrible, cold laugh from behind him. He turned, but no one was there. Terrified for his wife and unborn child, he rushed on to the bridge and took Chiara home.'

  ' A month later, Chiara was struck down by plague and she and the baby died. Da Ponte was inconsolable, and it is said that to this day, on the anniversary of Chiara Da Ponte's death, her ghost and that of her baby may be seen wandering over the bridge, lost, looking for rest that will for ever elude them.' Edie drained her glass. 'Nice story, Roberto.' 'Thank you.' He smiled and held Edie's eye for a moment.

  'So, that explains "the sad man", etc. But what about the rest? You don't seriously think the next clue is really hidden in the bridge itself, do you?' Roberto shrugged.

  'I suppose, "with the lines" might refer to the lines of mortar between the stones that support the bridge,' Jeff said. 'But what about "beyond the water, behind the hand of the architect"?'

  'Only one way to find out,' Roberto said, standing up. At 2 a.m., the banks of the Grand Canal around the Rialto were almost silent. Approaching the bridge in a rowboat, Jeff, Roberto and Edie saw a solitary drunk swaying his way home. Past the bridge and further along the canal were brightly lit windows, and from far off came the faint throb of a bass drum drifting through the night.

  Roberto guided the boat slowly along the canal. The traffic had fallen away to nothing and the vaporetti had stopped running. They passed slowly under the bridge and Jeff helped Roberto manoeuvre them towards the point where the wet stone met the water of the canal. Jeff took over steering the small boat. Roberto held a powerful flashlight and Edie helped to search the walls. They saw broken stones, ancient hooks and rusted iron, but nothing that resembled a hand or the mark of the man who had constructed the bridge over four centuries earlier.

  After doubling back once, Jeff rowed them across the canal towards the far wall. It arched over their heads in the gloomy night. There they repeated the search, and one third of the way along the wall on the south-eastern end of the bridge, they found it, a small brass plaque, no more than a few inches square. It contained a single, simple image, a human hand, held palm outwards.

&nbs
p; Jeff kept the boat steady by clinging on to a large iron ring a few feet to one side of the plaque and Roberto held the torch level with the image. 'The hand of the architect,' Edie said.

  'Fascinating. I've never even noticed it before and I must have passed under this bridge a thousand times.'

  'But I don't see what good it does us,' Jeff said. 'It's been built into solid stone. We can hardly start chipping away at the Rialto, can we?' 'No,' Roberto sighed. 'So what now?' Edie stifled a yawn.

  'There's nothing more we can do tonight. I suggest we all get some rest. We need to sleep on this. I think we're going to need a little lateral thinking to solve this puzzle.' And Roberto turned to Jeff. 'I'll drop you guys back at your place.'

  Chapter 11

  THE TIMES, June 2003 Little remains today of room 16 of Sotheby's vault sixty feet beneath their London offices. The fire which yesterday destroyed several collections of near-priceless documents some dating from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was thought to have been started by an electrical fault in the computerised security system. A spokesman for Sotheby's said, 'The loss is tragic. Many of the documents stored there were irreplaceable. Boom 16 was a holding vault for prospective auctions, and from here the documents were microfilmed and stored on a database.'

  It is believed insurers will be liable for a multi-million pound claim from Sotheby's. The greatest loss appears to be a unique collection of Renaissance manuscripts written by a prominent member of a Humanist movement linked to the Medici of Florence. Reports suggest that at the time of the fire experts at Sotheby's had been authenticating the authorship of these papers. Independent experts today placed the value of this collection alone at a figure in excess of five million pounds.

  Chapter 12

  London, June 2003 It was approaching 7 p.m. and Sean Clifton was thinking about his earlier meeting with the estate agent in which he had concluded negotiations over the eight-bedroomed house he had chosen close to Sevenoaks. Emerging from Highgate tube station, he considered with pleasure the fact that he would not have to make this journey many more times. Soon, he would be bidding farewell to his scruffy rented flat just off the High Street.

  Rush hour had passed and it was quietening down, most of the shops were closing. The street lights had come on and it had started to rain, windscreen wipers beating to the urban rhythm. But Sean Clifton was barely aware of anything around him. In his mind he was already the lord of the manor, sipping a G amp; T in his elegant drawing room with views across perfectly manicured lawns.

  He turned off the High Street into a quieter road as the rain grew heavier. Quickening his pace, he crossed over, his head down, collar up. At the end of the street, he turned right. It was empty except for a young couple walking away from him on the other side. Without pausing to look, he stepped off the pavement and into the road. A silver Lexus pulled away from the curb.

  He reached the mid-point of the road and turned just in time to catch a glimpse of the two men in the car and the huge hands of the driver, a sovereign ring on the middle finger of his right hand.

  The car smashed into him, tossing him into the air. Landing on the bonnet, Clifton slithered beneath the wheels and the car drove on, crushing him. A faint hiss came from his mouth, and he died on the cold, wet tarmac.

  Chapter 13

  London, present day Luc Fournier sat in an apartment once owned by the Rockefellers who had financed the construction of this Beaux Arts building overlooking Green Park almost a century earlier. Now the entire building was part of his multi-billion pound property portfolio.

  Little was known of Fournier's past; he lived in the shadows but enjoyed the finest the world could offer. Flitting between homes on five continents, travelling by private jet, he was very rarely seen in public, and even then, few people knew who he was.

  As he slowly stirred his peppermint tea, he reclined in a George Newton chair and glanced through a wall of windows to his immediate left. It offered a spectacular vista: Green Park was spread out before him like the baize of a billiard table, and in the distance, Buckingham Palace, The Mall and St James. On the wall behind him hung his favourite de Kooning, a mess of yellow, orange and turquoise which Fournier liked because, for him, it represented the world beyond the air-tight bubble he had created for himself.

  He would soon be seventy. He didn't feel it, and he knew he looked twenty years younger thanks to a rigorous exercise and dietary regimen he had followed conscientiously since his thirties. Fair enough, he had been born into money, but he had seen this inheritance grow a hundredfold and at the same time he felt that he had contributed greatly to the world. Luc Fournier perceived himself as a warrior, or better still, a leader of warriors: a man who made things happen.

  He took a sip of his tea and thought back over his many successes and his occasional failures. He had been in this industry for forty-five years. Using his intelligence and natural talents, and what had developed into a huge clandestine network of contacts, he supplied arms and other materiel to any anti-Western group who could afford him. A percentage of his earnings was reserved to maintain his lavish lifestyle, but a portion of every deal was used to finance his hobby, a hobby that was more like an obsession: a vast and growing collection of ancient artefacts mostly dating from the early renaissance. The beauty of this life was that every aspect of it brought him rewards. With the money he earned he could buy the things he desired and at the same time he could attack the thing he most hated: modern Western society.

  Luc Fournier's loathing for the twenty-first century created by the West had not dissipated with age. No matter how much effort he devoted to insulating himself from the world, each new McDonald's that sprang up caused him real, physical pain. Every time he happened to catch a snatch of some ghastly pop song, his stomach turned. The edifice the West had created was, he believed, a deadly cancer that was spreading disease through what had once been a pure and noble body, metastasising into new and ever more repellent forms. One of his most vivid and cherished memories had been the day two passenger jets crashed into the twin towers. He had known of the mission in advance, of course, but the thrill of seeing the destruction of such iconic monuments to all that he abhorred was unmatched and surely unmatchable.

  His career had begun in the early 1960s. Some of his earliest work had been supplying munitions to the Vietcong. In those days he had also dabbled in selling strategic information, but those were simpler times. With the rewards he had earned from the early days of that war, he had financed the operation to retrieve Cosimo de' Medici's journal from the chapel in Florence. But, in spite of all his efforts and the assistance of a team of experts, he had lost the prize. The fool who had found the journal in the flood waters had broken the seal and the precious contents were crumbled to dust.

  The Western powers were never short of enemies and, as a consequence, Fournier had never been short of work. He had made hundreds of millions from Contra rebels, South American dictators, from Havana, from Moscow and latterly from the 'new' terrorist groups of the Middle East. And then, a few years earlier, he learned of the greatest treasure he could wish for. One of his many contacts informed him of a priceless document written by none other than Niccolo Niccoli, a close friend of Cosimo de' Medici. But more extraordinary revelations were to come, for apparently this document described the most unimaginable things, clues to great mysteries, remarkable secrets. Soon this document was his.

  Placing his cup on a glass-topped table, he picked up a remote and depressed two buttons. A moment later, a large plasma screen was filled with images of the Niccoli document. Each page was frayed and a few had been torn, but the original was in remarkably good condition. He had had each page carefully photographed and stored on a drive for which only he had the password. He flicked through the pages, rereading his favourite passages.

  Then after a few minutes Fournier clicked forward to the end section, the part that always produced the greatest thrill. He had read this section so many times he knew it almost off b
y heart. And now, as he read it for perhaps the hundredth time, he felt again a strange sensation of prescience, almost deja vu. But as always, comprehension lay just beyond his reach.

  Chapter 14

  Florence, 9 May 1410 It was the third hour after sunset when the two men and their servants met at the San Miniato gate to the east of Florence. Cosimo arrived mounted on a grey gelding, accompanied by three men on horseback, servants hooded and wrapped up against the unseasonable chill of the night. Niccolo Niccoli, sitting on a white mare, had eschewed his usual red toga for the sake of discretion and was wearing a green coat and an anonymous black hat. It was six days since the meeting at his home and during that time he and Cosimo had organised everything in secret for the journey that now lay ahead of them.

  'We will make for Fiesole and stay there the night,' Niccoli said. 'It is a mere league distant, but I would like to make sure we are away from prying eyes.' Niccoli led them through the gate and on to the road that took them around the city wall. From there they followed a broad track north-east, a road hemmed by dense woodland stretching as far as the eye could see.

  The road was deserted but travel was always dangerous. Cutpurses and bandits made a healthy living prying on careless city folk who stayed beyond the walls. These men had no compunction in slitting throats for a few coins, often stripping naked the corpses to make a little extra.

  But this was a sizeable group and, with Niccoli they had a man who not only knew how to handle himself in a fight but who seemed to possess a sixth sense for danger. He had a tracker's instinct and a nose for the slightest whiff of trouble.