The Sacred Spoils
Page 37
‘On your orders.’
‘Please God, no,’ he said, blanching white at what was coming. ‘Not that. I beg you. Anything but that.’
The helicopter roar grew loud again. Carmen looked around to see it returning into view, slower and lower this time, hovering by the bank. She waved her arms again and this time Baldassare saw her. He and three other men jumped down, weapons half raised as they laboured up the steep embankment. Cesco realised he needed to hurry. He grabbed Tomas by a hank of hair and tugged his head to one side to expose the soft tissue of his throat. ‘Look away,’ he told Carmen. ‘You’re not to see this. No one should ever have to see this.’
‘Then don’t do it.’
‘I have to. For Claudia. For my family. This is what revenge looks like.’
But Carmen refused to look away. She knelt instead on the roiled earth beside him. She hugged her arms around him then turned his face towards her so that she might kiss him once lovingly on the lips. ‘No,’ she told him. ‘This is what revenge looks like.’
Epilogue
Four weeks later
Morning
Zara’s right leg was still in its cast, as it would be for several weeks yet. She boarded early, therefore, taking the front window seat so that she could stretch it and her single crutch out in front of her without tripping up the crew and other passengers. General boarding began. A surly looking man stuffed his bag into the overhead locker. He recognised her instantly; she could tell from the sour twitching of his lips. Yet the thrill of celebrity evidently overcame his dislike, for she could see him thinking up something witty to say as he took the seat beside her. She closed her eyes before he could succeed, and rested her head against the window.
The Italians had at last released her – and without charge too. Her willingness to tell all had played a part, but in truth Carmen’s relentless lobbying of Baldassare Mancuso had been far more important – that and pressure from the Israeli government, eager to put the whole Menorah affair behind them. Not that that would be happening anytime soon. As far as Zara could make out, it was all anyone back home was talking about. And everyone seemed to have different views, except for on one point.
They all of them hated her.
The liberals hated her because clips of the footage she’d recorded during their grotto incursion had been leaked, making it seem like she’d originally been an enthusiastic participant in the heist. The hardliners hated her because Avram, Dov and the others were their new martyrs, and she’d betrayed them. Everyone else hated her because the Bernstein family had been feeding all kinds of vile smears to their pet journalists, so that the whole country now believed her to be an arrogant, disloyal, alcoholic slut who thought herself too good for her childhood friends and her parents. Her university was no better. Its governors had summoned her to a crisis meeting in such blunt terms that she knew her job was already lost. Even Professor Kaufman had denounced her in a bid to save his own skin.
Yet she couldn’t bring herself to care.
The flight was bumpy enough that the man in the seat beside her turned sickly pale and clutched his armrests. She ordered a glass of Pinot Noir and stared out the window. On landing, she was made to wait while everyone else disembarked. Her leg began to itch furiously beneath its cast. She rubbed it as best she could with the heel of her hand. A kindly stewardess came to warn of the hostile reception awaiting her. Yet it astonished her even so, stepping out into Ben Gurion’s arrival hall to find herself confronted first by a barrage of TV cameras and flashbulbs, of shouted questions and thrust microphones, then by a crowd of hundreds of protesters held back by barriers and police. She steeled herself to walk this gauntlet, doing her best to remain dignified and impervious, but it was hard with her crutch and wheeled suitcase to manage, and with spittle-flecked people yelling at her and waving placards in her face. She couldn’t believe how worked up they all were. But then outrage and hatred were the only way some people—
Out of the corner of her eye, she glimpsed a grey-haired woman dressed all in black standing behind the wheelchair of a stiffly upright old man with a tartan blanket over his knees. Instantly, she lost her rhythm. Her foot tangled with her crutch and she went sprawling. Flashbulbs popped. The crowd hooted and jeered and filmed it delightedly on their camera phones.
She stayed on hands and knees for a moment or two, blinking away the tears, gathering her breath, testing her hands and wrists to make sure she hadn’t broken anything else. She was about to reach for her dropped crutch when the grey-haired woman dressed all in black appeared beside her. She stooped to pick up the crutch herself then she offered Zara a hand to help her to her feet.
‘What are you doing here?’ Zara asked her.
‘You’re our daughter,’ replied her mother. ‘You’re in trouble. Where else would we be?’
Four weeks later
Stuttgart, Afternoon
Knöchel’s instant diagnosis had proved correct. Dieter’s anterior cruciate ligament had ripped almost clean through, leaving no option but surgery. Three weeks he’d had to wait for the swelling to go down. But eight days ago now, a tendon taken from some poor dead bastard’s knee had finally been grafted into his own. He hadn’t given a moment’s thought to the donor beforehand. Why would he? But now, every time he unstrapped his cryo cuff to trade it for a freshly chilled one, he’d see the scarring from the screws holding his new tendon in place, and wonder. He’d even asked his surgeon about it. She’d assured him that his donor had been of good German stock, but with a little smirk on her lips that had set him brooding.
His knee was still only up to range-of-motion exercises, but his physio Gunnar still pushed him until his eyes watered, like he was punishing him because he hated fags. Dieter welcomed this. He wanted it to hurt. Pain meant it was doing good. And it reminded him of who’d done this to him too, and what he owed him in return.
Six months, everyone kept telling him. Six months before he could properly trust his knee again.
But fuck that.
Every evening, he’d scour the net for fresh news of Cesco Rossi. Turned out it wasn’t even the bastard’s real name. Turned out that he was actually ’Ndrangheta royalty. It made Dieter feel a little better about his own humiliation. But it didn’t make him one whit more inclined to forgive or let it go.
Four months. That was as long as he was prepared to wait.
Four months and then he was off back to Italy with a new and larger crew, whatever nick his knee was in.
Four months and then Cesco Fucking Rossi PhD would come to know what humiliation, hurt and loss truly were.
Four months and the man was dead.
Four weeks later
Rome, Evening
Six o’clock already. Carmen could scarcely believe it. The days were simply whizzing by. It had felt like a crazy risk to throw aside most of her thesis and start over. But it had proved the right decision, for she was springing light-hearted out of bed every morning, her next few paragraphs already cued up in her fingertips – not because she knew more about Alaric than about Galla Placidia, or even half so much, but because her knowledge was hers alone, because she’d earned the right to speak it.
And there was more to come too.
The Italian Ministry of Culture had announced a first season of excavations at Morigerati later that year, once the rains had stopped for the summer. It was to be a joint venture between Napoli’s famed Archaeological Museum – which had already taken charge of the Menorah, the silver trumpets and all the other recovered treasures – and Sapienza University, whose team was to be led by her own professor Matteo Bianchi, who’d not only invited her to be his assistant, but who’d also agreed to add Cesco to their roster of photographers.
That familiar creak upon the stairs. That warning knock. She jumped to her feet and hurried to let him in; she couldn’t help herself. Cesco was spending so much time travelling to his old haunts, making amends to those he’d once cheated, that she was constantly hungry for the zing of h
is touch, the sparkle in his eyes and the way he’d swallow when he watched her undress. Such headiness couldn’t last, she knew. All the more reason to savour it while it did.
‘How was it?’ she asked.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘Good. Really good.’
‘They didn’t chide you, then? Or fly over all this way only to cut you dead?’
‘Fine. Okay. You were right.’
‘Of course I was.’ He’d been panicking about the reunion ever since finally making contact with his English family, fearful that they’d still resent him for having vanished so abruptly from their lives. Sure. That was why – on learning not just of his reappearance but also of his difficulties with obtaining a new ID card and passport – they’d grabbed the first flight out that all of them could make. He gave her a final squeeze then let go. He wandered to her desk to check her word count, turned and raised an admiring eyebrow. ‘They’re looking forward to meeting you,’ he told her. ‘I’m afraid I’ve set an impossibly high bar.’
She laughed. ‘Then I’ll just have to scooch down beneath it. What time?’
‘I booked the table for eight. But I’ve ordered the car a little early. There’s something I need your help with first.’
‘Yes?’
‘Humour me. We’ll do it on the way.’
She checked her watch. ‘I’d best get ready, then.’
She saved and closed her thesis then took her new red dress to the shared bathroom to wash and get ready. Cesco gazed so hungrily at her on her return that only the timely arrival of their taxi stopped him from undoing all her good work. He took her hand as they made their way downstairs. The simplest of contacts, yet the most eloquent too. It made it absolutely clear to her that she didn’t want him as her bedfellow or her boyfriend. She wanted him as her partner or even as her husband. She wanted to have children with him, a family of their own. But she hadn’t found the courage yet to ask if he wanted this too, lest she bring their idyll crashing prematurely to a close.
He hurried ahead to open the taxi’s rear door for her, slid in alongside. ‘Via Siracusa,’ he told their driver.
‘Via Siracusa?’ she frowned.
‘You’ll see.’
Her phone rang. Baldassare, with the latest news on the Cosenza ’Ndrangheta. She told him she had Cesco with her and put it on speaker. He had a lot to cover, as it turned out. The Critelli brothers had found out about the coup Tomas Gentile had been planning against them, and so had tried to have him killed. They’d failed. He’d been in solitary ever since, his nights tormented by demons, his days confessing eagerly to his hideous catalogue of crime. Seeing the writing on the wall, several key Critelli lieutenants had turned pentiti too. As a result, Baldassare and his team now had enough testimony not only to imprison them all for decades, but to arrest and charge numerous corrupt politicians, civil servants, customs officials and police officers too. The Amsterdam operation had been rolled up, along with similar cells in Munich, Rio and Sydney. And there’d been significant drug seizures in South America as well.
By the time Baldassare rang off, they’d reached the residential street that ran south of the Villa Torlonia. Via Siracusa. Of course! Carmen had walked through the villa’s gardens a hundred times on her way to and from the university library, and she’d often told Cesco how much she loved them too. She slid him a curious look but his expression gave nothing away. He asked their driver to wait then led her up the front steps of a tall mid-terrace whose front door he opened with a set of estate agency keys. They went together up to the top floor. He led her into an unfurnished apartment, small enough that she could see most of it from the hallway.
‘Well?’ he asked.
‘I don’t… are you thinking of taking it?’
‘Your place is too small for two. And your landlady hates me.’
‘She hates everyone,’ she said. ‘It’s how she is.’
He led her into the second bedroom, whose sash windows looked out over the Torlonia gardens. A Vespa buzzed by beneath. A doting mother leaned forward to arrange the bedding in her pram. ‘I thought this could be your office,’ he said.
She looked uncertainly at him. ‘My office? Are you… Are you asking me to move in?’
‘Of course,’ he smiled. ‘What did you think? But only if you like it. I can always carry on looking. But this is so quiet, and so close to your lovely gardens and the university.’
‘But I could never afford my share of—’
‘Stop it,’ he said. ‘For any other reason, yes. But not for that.’
She looked back out the window. It was what she’d been praying for – who was she trying to kid? To start a new life with Cesco in a place like this, a place all to themselves. Yet, now that it was upon her, she couldn’t help recall that day in Cosenza Hospital, the way he’d sat beside her bed spouting pious bullshit in his effort to convince her to come join him in a different apartment. He must have read it on her face, for he took her hand again and pressed it between both of his. ‘I’m not that person any more,’ he said. ‘Everything we’ve been through together, it’s changed me completely. No. It’s not even that. It’s that it’s freed me to become the person I’d otherwise have been all along. You must see that.’
‘And you promise you’ll never lie to me again?’
The question took him by surprise. He gave a little grimace. The silence stretched on so long she felt something painful about to break inside her chest. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said at last. ‘I don’t see how I can.’
‘Oh,’ she said, making to pull her hand from his. ‘Thank you for being honest, at least.’
‘I mean, think about it,’ he said, refusing to let her go. ‘What if one of the kids were to break your favourite piece of china, and they were so terrified of your temper that they begged me – I mean begged me – to tell you it was I who broke it?’
‘My temper?’ she protested. ‘My temper?’
‘Yes. Exactly. Your temper. What then?’
‘Very well,’ she said, and her heart so swelled with happiness that it seemed a miracle to her that she didn’t lift right up off the floor and float away. ‘In those circumstances, and only those, then you may lie to me.’
Author’s Note
I love the ancient world and I write stories about fabulous lost tombs for a living, so I’m a little ashamed to admit that I knew nothing about the death and burial of Alaric, the Visigoth king who famously sacked Rome in CE 410, until I visited the south of Italy on a family holiday. It’s a remarkable and fascinating tale, one that still attracts treasure hunters from across the world, so I only hope I’ve done it justice.
Acknowledgements
My thanks – as ever – to my agent Luigi Bonomi, as well as to Michael Bhaskar and Kit Nevile at Canelo, and to my copy editor Seán Costello, who each helped make this book much better than it otherwise would have been. I’m also deeply indebted to all those who so kindly shared their knowledge with me during my various research trips – most particularly Maria Rosaria Di Mauro, who gave very generously of her time showing me around Morigerati, Caselle in Pittari and other parts of the Cilento. I’d also like to thank Demetria, Caterina and Felicia from the Bussento Grotto nature reserve for helping me to understand the river and the local cave system. I’ve deliberately changed some details for dramatic effect, and no doubt I’ve made a fair number of unwitting mistakes too. As always, these belong to me and me alone.
First published in the United Kingdom in 2019 by Canelo
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Copyright © Will Adams, 2019
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photoc
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781788637138
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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