The Ben Hope Collection: 6 BOOK SET

by Mariani, Scott

  The rooms of the museum were still and quiet. Down in the basement, among the honeycomb of gloomy passageways and corridors, there was the sound of a door creaking open.

  Ben peered out, listening, then stepped quietly out of the disused store cupboard.

  Leigh followed. Her legs were cramped after the long wait in the darkness. They made their way through a door and up some shadowy steps, tracing their way back to the main part of the building.

  Ben recognized the workshop where they’d sneaked past the two men earlier. It was empty now, tools left in a disordered pile on a restoring bench. An old violin lay on a chisel-scarred table with its face removed. Two frameless oil paintings were propped up against the wall awaiting restoration. The workshop smelled strongly of wood glue, wax polish and varnish.

  Ben picked up a hand-saw. He ran his eye along the sharp blade and nodded to himself. Leigh gave it a puzzled look. She didn’t even want to think what he was planning to do with it.

  There was still no sign of anyone around. Ben pushed softly through another doorway and found what he was looking for. The main fuse-box was an ancient Bakelite affair with big clunky switches. He pushed them all to OFF, then flipped off the master switch. He pulled out all the fuses and hid them in a crate under a pile of packaging material.

  They emerged from a staff-only doorway into the main hall. Dull sunshine filtered in through the windows. All the lights were dead, and the blinking red LEDs on the security cameras had gone dark.

  They made their way back through the long corridor where the violins were displayed. The keyboard instruments exhibit was just around the corner.

  Germana Bianchi had been dusting the frames upstairs in the portrait gallery and listening to Mina on her battery radio when the lights cut and her vacuum cleaner died. She was a heavy, ponderous woman and it took her a moment to register what had happened. She reached down with a fat hand to switch the vacuum cleaner off and on several times. ‘Cazzo,’ she swore. The power had cut out once before. She’d been alone in the building just like today, doing her lunchtime cleaning, when the fuses had tripped and she’d had to make her way down to the basement to flip the switch on the box. It was a long way down for her, and she didn’t like the empty feeling of the place when it was closed.

  She munched on her sandwich for a moment or two, hoping the electricity would come on again on its own. It didn’t. She heaved a sigh, picked up her radio and started towards the stairs.

  Ben examined the piano and decided on his plan of action. The front right leg had to come off as quickly and cleanly as possible. He might not have a lot of time. A member of staff might be back any minute. If he could lift the right corner of the piano an inch or two and jam something underneath the lip of the keyboard to keep the leg raised up long enough to saw it off…He grabbed a double piano stool, flipped it up on end, but it was too high.

  He stepped up on the plinth, laid the saw down on the piano and tested the instrument’s weight. He could barely move it quarter of an inch, and he didn’t think that Leigh’s extra strength would make the difference. He gazed at the saw, then down at the leg. It was going to take a good fifteen minutes to cut through the solid wood. He might not have fifteen minutes.

  Think of something, Hope.

  Leigh tensed. ‘Ben, there’s someone in the building.’

  Ben heard it too. Footsteps, slow and heavy, on the creaky stairs leading down to the main hall. In the quiet building the echo carried softly but clearly. There was another sound too. It was music, growing steadily louder. Someone with a radio was coming down towards them.

  This wouldn’t do. It was now or never. He looked around him desperately.

  The rope cordon around the piano was supported by six brass pedestals, three feet high on broad circular bases. Yes, that was the only answer. He used the saw to cut the rope, then picked up one of the pedestals. It was solid and heavy. He turned it upside down and held it like an axe. The brass was cold in his hand.

  ‘Fuck it,’ he muttered. He caught Leigh’s horrified look as he swung the pedestal back over his shoulder and then smashed it sideways into the piano leg with all his strength.

  The crashing noise shattered the stillness of the room. There was a huge crunch of splintering wood. The piano gave a juddering groan, strings vibrating in unison. The leg gave a little, and the front end of the instrument sagged, creaked. Then stopped.

  Halfway down the stairs and puffing with the exertion, Germana heard the terrible sound over her music. She turned the radio off. What the hell was that? Her heart gave a flutter. She grasped the banister rail and started walking faster.

  Ben hit the piano again. The pedestal hummed through the air. Another shuddering crash. The leg gave way and folded out from underneath the keyboard. The front corner of the instrument tipped downwards and he stepped quickly out of its way.

  A ton of iron frame and heavy wooden casing toppled over and smashed through the plinth it stood on. Splinters flew. The massive ringing chord of the fallen piano filled the whole museum with a cacophony of sound.

  Germana was getting very scared now. There were thieves in the place. She reached the bottom of the stairs and waddled across the hall to the ladies’ toilets. She wedged herself into a cubicle and bolted the door. Her heart was pounding and her breathing came in rasping gulps. She felt the shape of her mobile in her pocket. Yes. Call the police.

  Leigh was standing over the wrecked piano with her mouth hanging open. All her father’s work, hundreds of hours he’d spent restoring the valuable instrument. The loss of this piece of musical heritage. It was terrible, sickening.

  The strings were still resonating as Ben picked up the smashed leg. He hoped it had been worth it. He pulled away at splintered bits around the broken end. ‘I can’t see anything,’ he said. He picked up the saw and hacked frantically at the end of the leg. The sharp blade skipped off a splinter and sank into his hand, biting at the flesh and drawing blood from a jagged gash. He swore and ignored the pain. He sawed harder. Leigh was standing at his shoulder, her eyes widening.

  He blew sawdust away, wiped blood off the wood. Nothing.

  ‘This wood is solid,’ he said. ‘There’s no hollow.’

  Germana spoke in a flurry to the police switchboard. There were thieves in the Museo Visconti. Relief spread over her face as the man’s voice on the other end of the line reassured her. The police were on their way.

  Ben glared up at Leigh. ‘You said you were sure.’

  ‘I-maybe it was the left leg.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ he muttered. He jumped to his feet, glancing at his watch.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered.

  ‘I will be too, when someone walks in on us.’ He grabbed the pedestal and raised it up again. The devastated instrument was lying like a beached whale with its remaining front leg sticking out at an angle. Ben brought the pedestal down hard. Another tremendous crash filled the museum. Leigh covered her ears.

  Ben stood back. The leg had broken cleanly away. He dropped the pedestal with a clang on the wooden floor and fell on his knees. He picked up the severed leg.

  It was hollow. His heart jumped. He pushed two fingers inside the smooth cavity and felt something.

  There was a roll of paper inside. He turned the leg upside down and shook it out. The tight roll was old and yellowed, tied neatly around the middle with a ribbon. It fell on the floor amongst the wreckage of the smashed piano.

  Leigh knelt and snatched it up. She picked at the ribbon and unfurled the single sheet, handling it as though it could break apart at the slightest touch. ‘My God, this is it,’ she said, staring at it. The ink was faded, but there was no mistaking the handwriting and the signature.

  She was holding her father’s prize. The Mozart letter.

  When she heard the sirens, Germana Bianchi ventured out of the toilet and opened up the front door to let the police in. She pointed and jabbered and led them through towards the piano room where the robbers had
been. A whole gang of them, vicious, armed. She was lucky to be alive.

  They rounded the corner. The keyboard exhibit room was empty. They all gaped speechlessly at the wrecked piano. Who would do this? It was senseless.

  The thieves were far away by then, the old Fiat lost in the crazy sea of Milanese traffic.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Ben drove fast out of Milan, wanting to put as much distance between the city and themselves as possible. He checked his mirror every few minutes. Nobody was following them. Sleet and hail hammered the Fiat’s windscreen for two hours as they headed north-east towards the Austrian border. Beside him, Leigh was bent over the old letter, deep in thought. Signs flashed up for autostrada services.

  The motorway cafeteria was half-empty. They bought two coffees and headed for a corner table that was far from the other diners and close to an emergency exit. Ben sat facing the room and kept an eye on the entrance.

  Neither of them had eaten anything since the night before, but the letter came first. Leigh unrolled and flattened it carefully across the plastic table, using the salt and pepper mills to weigh down the edges and stop it from springing back into a tight curl.

  ‘This is so precious,’ she said, running her fingers over the aged, faded paper.

  ‘Fake or no fake, it’s only precious if it can teach us something.’ Ben took Oliver’s file out of his bag and opened up his notebook. ‘Let’s see what we’ve got. How’s your German?’

  ‘I can sing it better than I can translate it. How’s yours?’

  ‘I can speak it better than I can write it.’ He ran his eye over the handwriting. Was this really Mozart’s original hand? It looked authentic enough, but then, what did he know? He studied it up close. The writing was scratchy in places, and it looked as though the letter had been dashed off in the back of a carriage.

  The best place to start was from the top. ‘Mein liebster Freund Gustav,’ he read. ‘My dearest friend Gustav.’

  ‘Good start.’

  ‘That’s the easy bit,’ he said.

  They worked for an hour, and the coffee cooled untouched on the table. The translation came together very slowly, piece by piece. Ben glanced over his shoulder around the room every few seconds, checking for any unwelcome company.

  ‘What’s Die Zauberflöte?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s easy. The Magic Flute. What about this word?’ she said, pointing. ‘I can’t make it out.’ She chewed her pen thoughtfully.

  ‘It’s Adler.’

  ‘Adler?’

  ‘Adler is eagle’, Ben said, biting his lip. It didn’t mean anything. He filled the word into his patchy translation. Understanding could come later. First, get it all down.

  It took another three coffees and several pages of crossed-out notes before the translation had taken shape. Ben turned the notebook sideways on the table so that they could read it together.

  Vienna

  16 November 1791

  My Dearest Friend Gustav,

  It is in great haste that I pen this letter to you, and I hope with all my heart that it may reach you in time. I so wish I could write to you with only good tidings about the magnificent reception of The Magic Flute. But alas I have more pressing things to relate to you. There is nothing more pleasant than the freedom to live peacefully and quietly, and how I wish that could be for our Brethren! However, God seems to have willed it otherwise.

  Yesterday I was taking my favourite walk near the Opera when I met our friend and brother ‘Z’. He was most distressed and agitated, and when I asked him what was wrong he told me of new developments. As you know, ‘Z’ is privy to certain information that has been discussed at the meetings of the Order of Ra. Thanks I am sure in no small part to the favours that our Emperor has placed upon The Eagle, our enemies grow stronger and more influential with each passing day. I fear that the success of my opera has angered them exceedingly and that our Craft may be in greater danger than ever before. Our friend advises great caution in all our movements. I urge you to be most careful, my dear Gustav. Do not trust strangers. The Order of Ra has agents everywhere, and not only in our beloved Austria.

  I am sorry for the brevity of this letter, but I will sign off now in the deepest hope that my warning may reach you before the forces pledged to destroy us can do greater harm. Keep yourself safe and well. I send my love to your dear Katarina and am always

  Your Brother,

  W. A. Mozart

  ‘What do you make of it?’

  ‘Let’s talk about it while we eat. I’m ravenous.’

  The lasagne was hot, tasty and plentiful. They ate as they talked, with the letter carefully tucked away in Ben’s bag. He had the notebook open in front of him, next to his plate.

  Leigh looked disappointed. ‘There’s nothing here that we didn’t already know from Professor Arno. Mozart was warning his Lodge friend about these Ra people who were out to get them. That’s it. It’s a waste of time.’

  ‘Adler’, Ben said through a mouthful of pasta. ‘Eagle.’

  ‘What about it?’

  He pointed at the notebook. ‘It looks from this as though “The Eagle” is important, and connected with the Order of Ra.’

  ‘How, though?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Oliver’s notes mentioned eagles a lot.’

  ‘Might Eagle be a code for something?’

  Ben nodded. ‘Could be. Eagle. Maybe a symbol.’

  ‘Imperial eagle?’

  ‘It can’t be that. Read it. The Eagle is something or someone the Emperor paid favours to.’

  ‘If we knew what the favours were—’

  ‘But we don’t.’ He scanned the letter again. ‘There’s nothing more.’

  ‘Basically we’re back where we started.’ Leigh sighed. ‘We’re no closer to knowing what happened to Oliver.’ She let her fork clatter down and rested her head on her hand. ‘Maybe this is all a wild-goose chase. Maybe the letter has nothing to do with any of it. And what if it really is just a fake?’

  Ben shook his head. ‘I’d be inclined to agree,’ he said. ‘But there’s one thing that’s puzzling me. The room where the murder took place-do you remember the ram?’

  She’d been trying to forget what she’d seen in the video-clip. ‘Ram?’

  ‘On the wall, up above the altar or whatever it was, there was a gold ram’s head with long horns.’

  She hesitated. ‘Rams. Goats. Idols. Horns. You’re talking about devil worship now.’

  ‘No. Something a lot older than that. Remember I said I studied Theology?’

  ‘That was a surprise, Ben.’

  It was a chapter of his life that he didn’t like to talk about, so he moved on quickly. ‘Ra was the sun god of the ancient Egyptians. Arno confirmed it.’

  Leigh didn’t see where this was going.

  ‘He didn’t always go by his name,’ Ben said. ‘He was depicted in symbols too. Usually the sun, but often also as a ram. You see him in Egyptian art as the body of a man with the head of a ram, or sometimes just the head on its own.’

  ‘Are you sure? Why a ram?’

  ‘The horns. They symbolized rays of light coming from the sun. It’s an old, old symbol and it became pretty universal through the centuries. The Hebrew word karan, meaning rays, is a close match with keren, meaning horns.’

  She took a moment to digest this, then nodded. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Something about that gold ram on Olly’s film struck me at the time,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t think what it was, but now I have an idea. You’re going to think this sounds crazy.’

  ‘Nothing sounds crazy to me any more, believe me.’

  ‘Try this on. I think the Order of Ra still exists.’

  ‘That does sound crazy.’

  ‘Yes, but think about it. What did Oliver witness? They cut the guy’s tongue out and then disembowelled him. What did Arno tell us about Lutze? The exact same thing happened to him. Coincidence? I don’t think so.’

  She pulled
a face. ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘Now remember what Arno told us before he was shot? He said, “So it is true”’

  ‘I remember. So what was true?’

  ‘He never got a chance to finish. But he was pointing at the ram’s head as he said it. I think he knew something. Don’t ask me what. But whatever suspicions he had, hearing the news of Oliver’s death must have confirmed them. He got frightened enough of the letter to want to keep it far away. You saw how well he hid it.’

  Leigh thought for a while, poking at her food absently. ‘If the letter is so dangerous, why didn’t they come after Dad while he still had it?’

  ‘Firstly, your dad was more interested in the signature at the bottom, and its historical value,’ Ben said. ‘Oliver was the one who went deeper. Secondly, until Oliver began to investigate it and found what he found, I don’t think anyone cared about the letter at all. It only became important when it led him to them.’

  ‘But how could it have?’

  ‘I don’t know that yet,’ he replied.

  She was silent for a minute. ‘Say you’re right and these people still exist. Who would they be? Where would you find them?’

  He shook his head. ‘You wouldn’t find them, not easily. Remember who they were. This wasn’t just some silly cult of men with funny handshakes. They had links with the secret police. They were deep in the heart of politics, not just in Austria. Those were uncertain times. The powers of the day were so scared of a Europe-wide revolution that they’d have been very happy to encourage them. Think how big they might be now, two centuries later. Not only big, but tight into the establishment.’

  ‘But this is modern democratic Europe. Surely that kind of repressive organization doesn’t exist any more.’