Sam clicked it on and shined it into Pietro’s niche. A skull stared back. He shined it down the length of the skeleton. He repeated the process with Majella’s niche. Just another skeleton.
“Nothing but bones,” Remi whispered. “Then again, what were we expecting, that one of them would be holding the bottle?”
“True, but it was worth a try.” He turned to Andrej. “When they were brought from Poveglia, was there anything else with them?”
“Pardon?”
“Were there any belongings?” Remi said. “Personal possessions?”
“Yes, yes. You saw upstairs.”
“Nothing else? A bottle with French writing on it?”
“French? No. No bottle.”
Sam and Remi looked at one another. “Damn,” he whispered.
“No bottle,” Andrej repeated. “Box.”
“What?”
“French writing, yes?”
“Yes.”
“There was box inside coffin. Small, shaped like . . . loaf of bread?”
“Yes, that’s it!” Remi replied.
Andrej stepped around them and walked back down the passageway. Sam and Remi hurried after him. Andrej stopped at the first niche beside the steps. He knelt down, leaned inside, rummaged about, then scooted back out with a wooden crate covered in Cyrillic stencils. It was a World War II ammunition crate.
Andrej opened the lid. “This?”
Lying atop folds of rotted canvas and half buried under spools of twine, rusted hand tools, and dented cans of paint was a familiar-looking box.
“Good God,” Sam murmured.
“May I?” Remi asked Andrej. He shrugged. Remi knelt down and carefully lifted the box out. She turned it over in her hands, inspecting each side in turn, before finally looking up at Sam and nodding.
Sam asked, “Is there . . .”
“Something in it? Yes.”
CHAPTER 55
TRIESTE, ITALY
Sam’s iPhone trilled and he checked the screen. To Remi, he mouthed,
They were sitting on the balcony at the Grand Hotel Duchi D’Aosta, overlooking the lights of the Piazza Unita d’Italia. Night had fallen and in the distance they could see the lights twinkling in the harbor.
“We’d already decoded eleven lines of riddles and hundreds of symbols,” Selma replied. “It’s starting to feel like a second language.”
After opening the box and confirming it did in fact contain a bottle from Napoleon’s Lost Cellar, Sam and Remi had faced a dilemma. Clearly Andrej didn’t know the value of what had been tucked away in his family’s catacombs for the past two hundred- plus years. Still, they weren’t about to give up the bottle. In truth, it didn’t belong to them or to Andrej, but to the French people; it was a part of their history.
“This is a rare bottle of wine,” Sam told Andrej.
“Oh?” he replied. “French, you say?”
“Yes.”
Andrej snorted. “Napoleon disturb Tradonico grave. Take bottle.”
“Let us give you something for it,” Remi said.
Andrej’s eyes narrowed. He stroked his chin. “Three thousand kuna.”
Sam did the conversion in his head. “About five hundred dollars,” he told Remi.
Andrej’s eyes brightened behind his wire-rimmed glasses. “You have U.S. dollars?”
“Yes.”
Andrej stuck out his hand. “We make deal.”
Now Selma said, “I just e-mailed the riddle.”
“We’ll call you when we’ve got an answer.” Sam hung up and checked his e-mail. Remi scooted her chair closer and looked over his shoulder. “A long one this time,” he said.
“The first five lines fit the pattern,” Remi said, “but the last is different. They’ve never been so explicit, have they?”
“No. This is the first time they’ve come out and said, ‘go here’ and ‘find this.’ We may be coming up on the finish line, Remi.”
She nodded. “Let’s get cracking.”
They started as they had before, picking from the riddle what seemed like places and names. For “dubr” they narrowed the references to two likely candidates: Ad Dubr, a village in North Yemen, and
“So something either east of Ad Dubr or east of some body of water. What’s east of Ad Dubr?”
Sam checked Google Earth. “About eighty miles of mountains and desert, then the Red Sea. Doesn’t seem likely. Up until now all of the locations have been in Europe.”
“I agree. Let’s move on. Try the ‘King of Iovis.’ When did he die?”
Sam checked. “No such person. Iovis wasn’t a kingdom or a territory. Here’s something. . . . We’re grouping the words wrong—
“King of Thursday?”
“Jupiter,” Sam said. “In Roman mythology, Jupiter is the king of gods, like Zeus is to the Greeks.”
Remi caught on: “Also known as the Jovian planet. So from the Latin Iovis they got Jovis, then Jovian.”
“You got it.”
“So try a search with ‘Jupiter,’ ‘dubr,’ ‘three,’ and ‘seven.’ ”
“Nothing.” He added and subtracted the search terms and again came up empty. “What’s the fifth line?”
“ ‘Temple at the Conqueror’s Crossroads.’ ”
Sam tried “Jupiter” combined with “Conqueror’s Crossroads,” turned up nothing, then tried “Jupiter” and “temple.” “Bingo,” he muttered. “There are lots of temples dedicated to Jupiter: Lebanon, Pompeii . . . and Rome. This is it. In Rome the Capitoline Hill is dedicated to the Capitoline Triad—Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva. And here’s the kicker: it’s located on one of the Seven Hills of Rome.”
