They went out that night to find somewhere to eat other than the pensione. A cab took them into the centre of Mestre, and they spent the best part of an hour wandering the rain-dulled streets in search of somewhere that did not sell hamburgers or French fries. All around them, grey apartment blocks glowered behind a constant, niggling drizzle. Patrick had never felt more miserable in his life.
They settled on a place at last, a cramped trattoria caught helplessly between a budget furniture store and a video games arcade. As they ate, the constant sound of bleeps and roars and staccato firing rushed through the thin partition wall. The cheese on Patrick’s pizza was rubbery. Most of Assefa’s antipasti came out of a tin.
In the midst of the twentieth century, assaulted on every side by its sights and sounds and rancid smells, they huddled over a checked tablecloth trying to solve a mystery at least seven centuries old. Patrick was certain now that Francesca was alive, that he had seen her the night before, and that she was out there even now, watching from the shadows. He had thought once that the shadow in which she dwelt was death, but now he knew that to have been a lie. The dead do not return. Whatever came back from those other, crueller shadows, it would not be Francesca.
They ate slowly and talked of this and that, like lovers who have grown intimate yet jaded. Tragedy had brought them close, and a sense of mutual danger made elaborate what might have been a simple friendship. And yet, in reality, neither man understood much of the other or the world to which he belonged. Patrick’s scholarship was, in small measure, a link; but his Catholicism, with its frequent lapses and furious rejections, was less a bond than a barrier set between them.
‘Those Latin verses,’ Patrick asked. ‘Did they make any sense to you?’
Assefa shook his head wearily.
‘Not really,’ he said. He did not want to talk about them, nor even think of them. ‘I suppose,’ he went on, ‘they contain some sort of eighteenth-century play on words.’
Patrick nodded. He thought the same.
‘Can you translate them?’
‘Yes, of course. The first two are from the Book of Job: “It is hid from the eyes of all living” and “they shall go down to the grave”. The next is Deuteronomy: “and the deep that crouches beneath”. Then there was one from Exodus: “and they took a stone and put it under him”. Then Joshua: “Behold, this stone shall be a witness unto you”. The next from Mark is the only one from the New Testament: “Who shall roll us away the stone from the door of the sepulchre?” And the last is from Zechariah: “Upon one stone are set seven eyes”.’
Patrick slipped a wrinkled olive into his mouth and chewed on it morosely.
‘You’re right. None of it makes any sense.’
Assefa took a sip of wine.
‘I thought this sort of thing would have been just up your street.’
Patrick shook his head.
‘I worked in the field. I gathered intelligence, others made sense of it. I know almost nothing about cryptanalysis.’
‘Maybe it’s some sort of acrostic, using the first letters of the verses. Let’s see, that would give us AAASEQS. I don’t think that’s much use.’
What about the first letters of the words in a single verse?’
Well the first one from Job would read AEAOOV. That’s no help. The second reads AID. At least it means something in English. Then we’ve got AAS - that corresponds to three of the letters in the first group we came up with. The one from Exodus gives us SILPSE, which means nothing. Then ELIEVIT, which looks like Latin but isn’t. Maybe the first part refers to the prophet Elias. The one from Mark reads QRNLAOM, and Zechariah gives SLUSOS. Frankly, it’s all gibberish.’
From next door came a round of frantic bleeping as someone’s video game reached a crescendo.
Patrick sighed.
‘I think you’re right. But we’ll give it a more careful look when we get back to the pensione. At least we know it wasn’t done with the help of a computer, so in theory we don’t need one to help us unravel it.’
‘There is one thing, Patrick.’
‘Yes?’
‘Have you noticed that, if we take the first letters of the verses we come up with seven? And the last verse refers to “seven eyes”.’
Patrick shook his head.
‘Not if you include the very first one from Ezekiel.’ He put down his fork and took a sip of Pinot Nero. ‘You’re just starting to clutch at straws.’
‘If you say so. But with Claudio and Siniscalchi dead, where do we go from here, Patrick? You say the police are looking for us. What about giving ourselves up? Maybe someone will listen to our story, start an investigation. This sort of thing would have sounded outrageous not all that many years ago; but since the P2 scandal, people in Italy are ready to believe almost anything.’
‘Almost anything, Assefa - but not this. Not on our say-so, not without hard evidence. And the fact that the police are interested in us shows that someone in the force is already working for these people.’
‘So, what do you suggest?’
What was there to suggest? Why even bother to suggest anything? Events would take their course, whether they did anything or not. The result would be the same - death: for them, for anyone who got too close to this thing.
‘I don’t know,’ he murmured. ‘I don’t know.’
He ordered another bottle of wine. Tonight he wanted to drink as much as possible, to wipe out the bleak images that tormented him. The wine was cheap and acidic, but potent. Assefa watched detachedly as he got drunk. He himself wanted to remain sober. He feared the loss of self, however temporary, the vertigo of spirit that drunkenness entailed. Abandoning his priestly identity had not come easily to him, and in everything that happened now he found a further disjunction between reality and a growing sense of madness. He drank bottled water and listened to the machines next door acting out their own computerized fantasies.
Afterwards, they could not find a taxi anywhere. The drizzle continued, soft and chilling, pale against the street-lamps. Patrick walked unsteadily, helped along by Assefa. They followed signs to Porto Marghera, but in reality were lost. This was the real Venice now, the future stamped in glass and ferro-concrete, blunt, sterile, unlovely, devoid of either spiritual or earthly grace. Beyond the street-lights, the drab waters of the Adriatic stood waiting for their final incursion.
‘Assefa,’ mumbled Patrick as they turned into yet another stretch of featureless apartment buildings,
“what was the common element in those verses?’
‘Forget the verses, Patrick. They don’t mean anything.’
Patrick staggered and caught Assefa’s arm.
“You’re wrong. They must mean something. What’s the common element in most of them?’
‘I don’t know, Patrick. You tell me.’
‘The stone, for God’s sake. “They took a stone and put it under him”, “This stone shall be a witness for you”, “Who shall roll us away the stone from the door of the sepulchre?”, “Upon one stone are set seven eyes”. Don’t you see, there must be some connection.’
“You’re drunk, Patrick. It doesn’t mean a thing. Or if it does, it’s too late to find out now. Corradini had the verses for seven years and made nothing of them. Let’s try to get back to the main road. It’s not too late to get a taxi.’
What’s the Italian for stone?’
‘Pietra.’
‘And what else?’
Assefa shrugged.
‘Roccia?
‘No, not roccia. The name “Pietro”. Peter. And Peter in the Bible is the “rock” or the “stone”.’
‘I don’t see how that helps us, Patrick.’
Patrick stopped and took Assefa hard by the shoulder.
‘It does. Don’t you see, it helps us all the way.’
He said nothing more. They found a main road and waited in silence for a taxi to appear. One came past
