FORTY-NINE
Nr Anguillara Sabazia, northwest of Rome 19th March – 8.34 p.m.
Tom’s eyes flickered open. The room slowly came into focus. Allegra was lying on the tiled floor next to him. Still breathing.
Gingerly pulling himself upright, he sat with his back against the wall, trying not to vomit. The drugs had left him dizzy and with a bitter taste at the back of his throat. Worse still was the headache centred behind his right eye, the daggered pain ebbing and flowing with the hammer beat of his pulse. Within seconds he’d fainted back to sleep, vaguely aware of a dancing blue light licking the walls, of the whisper of running water, of the deadened echo of his own breathing, and of De Luca’s warm breath on his neck.
‘Tom?’
Allegra had rolled over on to her side to face him, her dark hair tumbling forward over her face. She looked worried and he wondered how long she had been calling his name.
He groaned as he sat up, his neck stiff where his head had fallen forward on to his chest.
‘What time is it?’ she asked.
He checked his watch, then remembered with a rueful grimace that it was still wrapped around Johnny Li’s tattooed wrist.
‘No idea.’
‘
Tom looked around with a frown. They were at one end of a windowless room that had been almost entirely swallowed by what appeared to be a large swimming pool. Five feet deep, sixty feet long and thirty feet across, it was lined with white tiles, the water spilling with a gurgling noise over the edges into an overflow trench and washing through skimmers. The underwater lights cast a shimmering flicker on to the white-washed concrete walls.
Standing up, Tom walked unsteadily to the edge. His eyes adjusting, it took him a few moments to realise that the dark shapes lurking under the water’s silvered surface were rows of antique vases and jars, each carefully spaced one from the other along the pool floor like vines anchored to a steep slope. Stiff and still, they reminded him of a Roman cohort arranged in a
‘It’s a chemical bath,’ he said, pointing at the blue drums that explained the slight burning sensation in his eyes.
‘I’ve seen something like this before,’ Allegra nodded, joining him. ‘But not this big. Not even close.’
‘Over there,’ Tom pointed hopefully at a door on the far side of the pool.
They passed through into a large room, its tiled walls lined with glass-fronted cabinets that contained a rainbow array of paints and chemicals in differently sized and shaped tins and jars. Beneath these, running along each wall, were polished stainless steel counters loaded with microscopes, centrifuges, test-tube racks, scales, shakers and other pieces of laboratory equipment.
The centre of the room, meanwhile, was taken up by two large stainless steel benches and deep sinks. A trolley laden with knives, saws, picks, tweezers, drills and other implements had been drawn up next to them, as if in preparation for an imminent procedure. In the corner was a coiled hosepipe, the white tiled floor sloping towards a central drain as if to carry away blood.
‘Cleaning, touching up, repairs, open-heart surgery…’ Tom pursed his lips. ‘This is a tombaroli restoration outfit.’
‘On an industrial scale,’ she agreed, Tom detecting the same instinctive anger in her voice as when she’d found the orphan vase fragment in Cavalli’s car.
There was another unlocked door which gave, in turn, on to a third room, lit by a single naked bulb whose weak glare didn’t quite reach to the corners. Here there was a more rustic feel, the ceiling supported by parallel lines of closely spaced wooden beams, semicircular iron-framed windows set into the stone walls at above head height and welded shut. A flight of stone steps led upstairs to another door. Predictably, this one was locked.
Shrugging dejectedly, Tom made his way back down. Allegra was waiting for him, silently pointing, her outstretched arm quivering with rage.
Looking around, he could see that the paved floor was covered in a foaming sea of dirty newspapers, wooden crates and old fruit and shoe boxes, some stacked into neat piles, others split open or listing dangerously where the cardboard had collapsed under their combined weight. He only had to open a few to guess at the contents of all the others – antique vases still covered in dirt, loose jumbles of glass and Etruscan jewellery, envelopes bulging with Roman coins, gold rings strewn on the floor. In the corner was what had once been an entire fresco, now hacked away from the wall and chain-sawed into laptop-sized chunks. Presumably to make them easier to move and sell.
‘How could they do this?’ Allegra breathed, her anger tinged by a horrified sadness.
‘Because none of this has any value to them other than what they can sell it for. Because they don’t care. Look.’
He nodded with disgust towards one of the open shoeboxes. It was stuffed with rings and human bones, the tombaroli having simply snapped off the fingers of the dead to save time.
‘You think this is where Cavalli got the ivory mask?’ she asked, looking away with a shudder.
‘I doubt it,’ Tom sighed, sitting down heavily on the bottom step. ‘Whoever owns this place must work for De Luca, and he certainly didn’t look like he’d ever seen the mask before.’
‘He may not have seen it, but he might have found out that Cavalli was ripping him off,’ she suggested, sitting down next to him. ‘Theft and disloyalty, remember? According to De Luca, Cavalli was guilty of both. Maybe Cavalli was trying to sell the mask behind the League’s back.’
‘So De Luca killed Cavalli, Moretti evened the score by murdering Ricci, and then De Luca struck back by executing Argento. He was right. We’ve stumbled into a war.’
‘That must be why they both put the lead discs on the bodies.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Remember I told you that the original Delian League was to have lasted as long as the lead its members had thrown into the sea didn’t rise to the surface? The discs were to signal that this new alliance was fracturing.’
‘None of which explains who ordered the hit on Jennifer or why.’ He sighed impatiently.
‘You don’t think De Luca had anything to do with it?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe…No. I think he would have told me if he had.’
‘Then who?’
Tom shook his head, still no closer to the truth. There was a long pause.
‘She must have meant a lot to you,’ Allegra said gently. ‘For you to have come all this way. For you to be risking so much.’
‘She trusted me to do the right thing,’ Tom answered with a half smile. ‘That’s more than most have ever done.’
There was another, long silence, Tom staring at the floor.
‘How did you two meet?’
He was glad that Allegra hadn’t picked up on the obvious cue and said that she trusted him too. He wouldn’t have believed her if she had. Not yet at least.
‘In London,’ he began hesitantly. ‘She thought I’d broken into Fort Knox.’ He smiled at the memory of their first bad-tempered exchange in the Piccadilly Arcade.
‘Fort Knox!’ She whistled. ‘What did she think you’d…’
She broke off as the door above them was unbolted and thrown open. A man stood silhouetted in the doorway, his long shadow stretching down the stairs towards them. He was holding a hip flask.
‘Let’s go for a drive.’
