The Geneva Deception

‘It is from the greatest dangers that the greatest glory is to be won.’

Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War -

Book 1, 144

EIGHTEEN

Via Galvani, Testaccio, Rome

18th March – 3.12 p.m.

The speaker crackled into life.

‘Mitto tibi navem prora puppique carentem.’

Allegra hesitated, her mind racing. She understood the Latin, of course – I send you a ship lacking stern and bow. But what did it mean? How could a ship not have a stern and a bow? Unless…unless it was referring to something else. To the front and the back? The beginning and the end? The first and the last? Latin for ship was navem, so if it was missing its beginning and its end, its first and last letters perhaps…

‘Ave,’ she replied with a smile. Latin for hello.

‘Ave, indeed,’ the voice replied with a chuckle. ‘Although I can’t claim the credit this time. That was one of Cicero’s.’

The door buzzed open and Allegra made her way to the lift, smiling. She’d first met Aurelio Eco at La Sapienza, before heading off to Columbia for her Masters, where he’d been a visiting professor in the university’s antiquities department. Before that, he’d spent fifteen years as the Director of the Villa Giulia, Rome’s foremost Etruscan museum, during ten of which he had also headed up the Ufficio Sequestri e Scavi Clandestini, the Office of Clandestine Excavations and Seized Objects. Unfortunately for her, these posts seemed to have provided him with an inexhaustible supply of riddles, which he delighted in asking her as a condition of entry to his apartment. A latter-day Sphinx to her Odysseus.

As usual the door was open and the kettle boiling. She made herself a strong black coffee and Aurelio an Earl Grey tea with lemon, an affectation of his from a brief stint at Oxford in his twenties that he had never been able, or wanted, to shake off.

He was waiting for her in his high-backed leather chair, the split in the seat cushion covered by a red-and- white keffiyeh purchased during an exchange posting to Jordan. His dusty office was full of such mementoes – photographs of him at various digs over the decades, framed maps and faded prints, prayer beads and inlaid boxes picked up in dusty Middle-Eastern souks, fragments of inscribed Roman tablets, shards of Etruscan pottery, carved remnants of Greek statues. At times it seemed to Allegra that his entire life was held in this small room, each piece invested with a particular meaning or memory that he only had to glance at or hold to live all over again.

And yet this primitive mental filing system was as chaotic as it was effective, pictures hanging askew, books stacked any which way on the shelves with dirty cups and glasses squeezed into the gaps, the floor covered in a confetti trail of newspaper cuttings and half-read books left facedown, alongside a stack of index cards inscribed with notes for a forthcoming lecture. And while a favoured few of his artefacts had been placed in a glass display cabinet, the rest were scattered indiscriminately around the room, some squeezed on to his desk and the marble mantelpiece, others lining the edges of the bookshelves like paratroopers waiting for the order to jump.

Despite his cheerfulness on the intercom, Aurelio now seemed to have sunk into what Allegra could only describe as a sulk, his bottom lip jutting out, brows furrowed. Funny, she thought, how old age seemed to have given him an almost childlike ability to flit between moods on a whim.

‘Maybe you shouldn’t come any more,’ he sighed. ‘Spend time with your real friends, instead, people your own age.’

‘Don’t start that again,’ she sighed. ‘I’ve told you, I’m too busy to have any friends. Besides, I like old things.’ She winked. ‘They smell more interesting.’

Approaching seventy, Aurelio had no family left now, apart from a distant cousin who only seemed to show up when he needed a handout. As they had got to know each other, therefore, Allegra had taken it upon herself to look in on him whenever she knew she would be in the area. And sometimes, like today, when she knew she wouldn’t.

‘But you said you’d be here for lunch,’ he continued in a hurt tone, although she could sense that her reply had pleased him. ‘You’re late.’

‘And whose fault is that?’

He grinned, his sulk vanishing as quickly as she suspected it had appeared. He had a kindly face, with large light brown eyes, a beaked nose and leathered skin that spoke of too many long summers spent hunched over an excavation trench. He was dressed in an open-necked shirt and a yellow silk cravat, another hangover from his Oxford days. As ever, he was wearing a motheaten grey cardigan for warmth, his refusal to pay the ‘extortionate’ prices demanded by ‘piratical’ energy companies condemning his apartment to a Siberian permafrost for at least three months of the year.

‘So they did call you?’ he crowed.

‘I knew it!’ she remonstrated angrily. ‘Who did you speak to? What did you tell them?’

‘The GICO wanted an antiquities expert. They called the university. The university put them on to me. I told them I’d retired and recommended you instead.’

‘Did they tell you what they wanted?’

‘Of course not. It’s the GICO. They never tell you anything.’ He paused, suddenly concerned. ‘I thought you’d be pleased.’

With a deep breath, Allegra recounted the events of the past twenty-three hours. The inverted crucifixion at the site of Julius Caesar’s assassination. The carefully staged beheading in the Pantheon. The apparent link to two Caravaggio masterpieces. Aurelio listened intently, shaking his head at some of the more gruesome details, but otherwise remaining silent until she had finished.

‘So the man they found in the Pantheon…?’

‘Was Annibale Argento’s twin brother, Gio.’

‘Merda,’ he swore, for what could well have been the first time since she’d known him. ‘They must be lapping it up.’

They, she knew, referred to the media, an industry he despised, having been tricked a few years ago into authenticating a forged Etruscan vase by an investigative reporter. He gave a contemptuous wave of his hand towards an imagined TV set in the corner of his room, as if trying to further distance himself from an object he had already demonstrably banished from his life.

‘I’ve spent half the day trying to see if there’s anything else that links the two sites or any of Caravaggio’s other works. Gallo is trying to get me seconded on to the case full time.’

‘I’m sorry, Allegra. I didn’t know…I didn’t mean to get you involved in anything like this.’

She shrugged. It was hard to be angry with him. It was Aurelio after all who, guessing that she would quickly tire of academia, had encouraged her to apply to the art and antiquities unit of the Carabinieri in the first place. He’d only been trying to help.

‘I know.’

‘Anything to go on?’ he asked hopefully.

‘Plenty to go on. Just no idea where to start,’ she sighed. ‘Which reminds me. There’s something I wanted to ask you.’

‘Anything, of course.’

‘Both victims had what looked like an antique coin in their mouths.’

‘To pay Charon,’ Aurelio guessed immediately.