‘Present myself? What the fuck does that mean?’
‘Sorry, I’m thinking in Italian. Go to city hall and meet with them.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s about the permits your company was granted to operate those helicopter flights. Apparently they expire in forty-eight hours. Basically, they want to know if there’s any truth in Aldobrandini’s allegations. I don’t want to sound alarmist, Mr Nguyen, but I think you should take this very seriously. Italy may seem all free and easy and spontaneous on the surface, but when the going gets rough you find out that it’s basically a police state in many respects. This could just be one of those occasions.’
Martin Nguyen stared at the blank television screen.
‘Holy fuck,’ he repeated.
The convoy of vehicles came to rest at a remote spot on the banks of the Busento river a few kilometres south of Cosenza. The only access was by a dead-end dirt track leading steeply down from a minor road to the city from the village of Dipignano, which saw very little traffic now that there was a much faster route over the line of hills to the east connecting with the autostrada.
As a result, the guard who had been posted at the turn-off to deter intruders was only called upon to act once, when a farmer in a quad vehicle came along, trying to short-cut across the valley by fording the river and taking the equivalent track leading up on the western side. The guard simply shook his head and told the man that the road was ‘ chiusa per lavoro ’. What sort of work? Construction of a weir in the river-bed to improve flow levels and protect aquatic life. An environmental project. The farmer cackled cannily.
‘Glad to hear someone’s getting Rome’s money!’
Say what you liked about Giorgio — and opinions on this subject were many and various, although rarely expressed — he knew how to organise and execute a project like this on time, under budget, with minimal risk and at the shortest possible notice. The last of these attributes was perhaps the most valuable, given the nature of his business. Opportunity tended to knock rarely and with no notice whatever, so to take advantage you needed to be able to think on your feet. He had spent the previous day scouting out a suitable site. Enquiries at the few neighbouring farms in the area Giorgio had eventually chosen revealed that no helicopters had been seen or heard in this valley as yet. This was crucial to the success of Mantega’s scheme for instant riches, as was haste, since those searching for the location of the tomb might appear at any moment.
The first stage of the operation involved installing sandbags upstream to dam the flow of water — still minimal despite the recent rains, thanks to the absorption capacity of the baked hillsides all around — followed by the marking out of a circular area ten metres in diameter and the removal of the superficial rocks, gravel and vegetation. This was done by hand by the unskilled labourers, great care being taken not to mark the rocks with metal tools or to damage the various reeds and weeds that had taken root for the summer in muddy patches formed by the eddies of the stagnant stream but would be swept away once the winter floods arrived. A geotextile access path was then laid down to minimise any further disturbance to the surface and the big yellow mechanical digger unloaded from its transporter and brought up to excavate the site down to a level of about two metres.
While all this was going on, another phase of the job was taking place on the lower slopes of Monte Serratore to the south, where the stonemasons were dismantling a long-abandoned and roofless house of the type that abounded in the area and transferring the blocks of weathered basalt to the bed of a truck. These materials arrived at the construction site shortly after the team’s lunch break, following which the masons started to install them in the excavated pit in the form of a circular wall five courses deep and nine hundred and forty-three centimetres in diameter. The masons protested that this was an irrational number, but Giorgio refused to be swayed. He had no idea what kind of linear measurement would have been used by the people who had supposedly built this structure, but it certainly wouldn’t have been the standardised French import which even today wasn’t in general use in certain parts of the region. Likewise, he had chosen the circular pattern on the basis of some very old earthwork mounds up in the mountains, which the schoolteacher had told the class were the graves of the Bruttii, the original inhabitants of Calabria. This information had caused general hilarity, since the deletion of the final letter gave a word meaning ‘the uglies’. From that moment on, Giorgio’s personal motto became ‘ Sugno brutto e mi ’nde vantu ’: ugly and proud of it.
The resulting structure, however, wasn’t ugly at all. Indeed, as it gradually took shape, the stone blocks trimmed, laid and locked together with no visible mortar, Giorgio began to think for the first time that this scheme of Mantega’s might actually work. Not that it would be any great loss to him if it didn’t. His contact in Vibo Valentia owed him a couple of favours and had offered a very reasonable price for the equipment and wages. And if it did by any chance succeed, then there was no telling what kind of profits might be made on the operation. It was simply a question of what the purchaser wanted, how badly he wanted it and how much he could afford to pay. If Mantega was to be believed — and in cases offering the possibility of personal enrichment, he was — the answer to the last question was ‘almost anything’.
Dusk had gathered by the time the walling was completed and the mechanical digger started to dump the rock and gravel excavated earlier into the resulting enclosure. Its claw would inevitably scar some of the stones in a potentially suspicious way, but the constraints of time and security had forced Giorgio to make various assumptions. One of these was that once it became apparent that the supposed tomb had already been opened, the treasure seekers would not bother to dig it out to a depth greater than the five courses of blocks that had been laid, and that they would use mechanical means to do so. Any marks on the rocks removed would therefore be attributed to their own equipment. And if by any chance they took a more painstaking approach, Giorgio had already worked out various ways to hurry them up. The work they imagined they were doing would of course be illegal, so it shouldn’t take much to scare them off.
The final phases of the operation were undertaken after dark, lit by the headlights of the various trucks. The remaining stones from the demolished barn were tossed on top of the piled infill, suggesting elements of the vaulted roof which had been removed, then the surface rocks and vegetation were carefully replaced and the entire site cleared and swept by hand. Last of all, the dam of sandbags was removed, allowing the accumulated water to flow over the workings, obliterating the traces of human intervention. The construction convoy then snaked its way around the narrow country roads to the autostrada and headed south to their depot. As for Giorgio, he drove the black Jeep back up into the Sila mountains, heading home to his sister’s apartment. At the former station of San Nicola, on a windswept plateau fifteen hundred metres above sea level, he pulled off the main road. Cowbells clanked intermittently in the far distance, but there was no other sound. This part of the railway had been abandoned, but the public payphone attached to the station building still worked and there was never anyone there.
Giorgio fed in some money and had started to dial when he heard a noise close behind him. He let the receiver drop and whirled around, his pistol in one hand and his torch in the other. A pair of hallucinogenic eyes stared back at him, a feral black cat out hunting for prey amidst the long grass that had grown up between the rusted rails. After a moment it disregarded him and moved away across the row of sleepers, balks of sun-spliced timber cut from the forests that had once clad this entire region, now aged and weathered like beams of the True Cross.
‘ Pronto,’ Mantega’s voice squeaked somewhere in the distance. ‘ Pronto, pronto?’
Giorgio picked up the receiver.
‘Signor Rossi?’
‘He’s gone out.’
Giorgio hung up and climbed back into the Jeep, well pleased with the way the day had gone. The coded message was to inform Nicola Mantega that the trap was ready. Once it was found and opened — self-evidently for the second time, the contents already looted — then the notary would initiate dealings with the disappointed tomb robbers. They would almost certainly demand to inspect a sample of the supposed treasure before proceeding any further. To guarantee the authenticity of the fakes that would subsequently be offered for purchase, some genuine sample of antique Roman gold work would have to be produced for verification. That was Giorgio’s next task, and he had already decided on a way to accomplish it. This involved a kidnapping prospect he had had his eye on for some time, and would be put into effect the very next day.
Having been detained in Rome by work until early evening, Aurelio Zen decided to return to Calabria in the same way that he had arrived, rather than trekking all the way out to Fiumicino to catch a plane and then have to arrange for transport from the airport at the other end. He slept badly this time — possibly as the result of over- indulging at a restaurant near the Viminale, where he had eaten the first decent meal he had had for weeks and the