It was the tender image of a sad, slight little boy. His frail body was exaggeratedly long, while his minute face had a melancholy look that couldn’t entirely mask a hint of natural light-heartedness, cut down too soon by death. A child whose loss must have left his parents in the most unthinkable despair, if they had appealed to such a sublime artist to portray him so realistically, capturing his personality, his youth, perhaps even signs of the illness that had spirited him away…
When the bell tolled from the tower of the nearby Sant’Agostino church, Fabrizio realized that almost an hour had gone by. He got to his feet and began to set up his camera equipment.
The photographs available on file had been wholly inadequate. Fabrizio felt the need to explore each and every detail of the statue with his lens; perhaps he’d discover aspects of the casting that the experts hadn’t picked up on. He was reminded of the words of his professor and mentor, Gaetano Orlandi, who used to say that the best place to excavate in Italy was in the museums and storehouses of the National Antiquities Service.
It took him hours to set up the lights, then study the angles and shots. He took about ten rolls of slide film and the same number of photos using a digital camera so that he could analyse the images electronically. Just as he was finishing up on the figure’s face, head and neck, the phone rang out in the hall. Fabrizio checked his watch: it was after one a.m. Evidently a wrong number. Who could be calling a museum at that hour? He went back to his work, intent on finishing despite his fatigue, but the telephone distracted him again only a few minutes later.
He went to pick up the receiver and began to say, ‘Listen, you’ve got the wrong-’
But a woman’s voice with a curt, peremptory tone cut him short. ‘Leave the boy alone!’ This was followed by the click of her hanging up.
Fabrizio replaced the receiver mechanically and wiped a hand over his sweaty brow. Was he so tired that he was hearing things? No one knew anything about his research, except for the director himself and Mario, but the security guard wouldn’t have had a very clear idea of what it was all about anyway. Fabrizio didn’t know what to think, and the impossibility of instantly finding a reasonable explanation behind this apparently inexplicable event annoyed him tremendously.
Could there be a rational explanation? Might one of the library clerks have heard about his research and spoken about him to some impressionable soul, one of those fanatics who live on pseudo-scientific New Age hype? Obsessed with the pyramids or – why not? – with the Etruscans. After all, the Etruscans were second only to the Egyptians in their legendary fascination with the afterlife, and famous for being soothsayers and sorcerers.
The person on the phone must have seen the light filtering from the windows of the second floor of the museum, and that meant they must be somewhere in the immediate vicinity. Without opening the shutters, he sneaked a look outside to check the buildings opposite the museum and to the sides, but he didn’t spot anything worthy of attention.
As he was scanning the vicinity, another sound – even more alarming than the phone ringing and the creepy voice of the woman warning him off – broke through the still of night, invading his ears and even more so his imagination: the long, deep howling of an animal, a fierce cry of challenge and pain. A wolf. In the centre of the city of Volterra.
‘Christ!’ Fabrizio burst out. ‘What the hell is happening?’
For the first time in his adult life, the panic and fear he’d felt as a child came flooding back, the sheer terror that had kept him nailed to his bed when the screeching of an owl tore through the night air outside the mountain house where he’d lived then.
A wolf? Wait. Really, though, why not? Fabrizio remembered reading somewhere that recent environmental protection policies had allowed certain predators to extend their territory along the Apennines, all over Italy. But his logic was shattered to pieces as he heard the ear-splitting howl echo again, closer this time, more threatening. It trailed off finally into an agonized rattle.
He gathered up his things, turned out all the lights, one after another, and rushed down the stairs towards the lobby. He set the alarm and went out into the street, triple-locking the door behind him. As he walked away, he thought he could hear the phone ringing again inside, shrill and persistent, but there was no way he was going back in. There was no trusting where his imagination would take him.
His car was parked in a little square not far from the museum, but the distance on foot down the silent, deserted streets that separated him from his ride home seemed never-ending. How could no one have heard? Why weren’t people turning on their lights, looking out of their windows? He stopped more than once, sure he’d heard a pawing sound behind him, or even an uneven panting. Each time he spun around, then picked up his pace. When he reached the square, his car was not there. A surge of panic sent him running from one street to the next, this way and that, with his heart in his mouth and his breath coming in short gasps. He could hear that atrocious howling echoing against every wall, from every archway, at the end of every street.
He forced himself to stop and to control the panic that was overwhelming him. It took all his willpower to lean against a wall, take a deep breath and make an effort to think clearly. He realized that he must have parked his car in another spot and he tried to remember his movements with some degree of clarity. He started walking and, as his thoughts eventually sorted themselves out, he found himself in the square where he had actually parked his car. He got in, started it up and began driving fast towards the farmhouse in Val d’Era. He was starting to feel that living in such an isolated place, buried, practically, by the vegetation all around it, was perhaps not the ideal choice for his stay in Volterra. He let himself in quickly, shut the door behind him and bolted it.
He lay down, exhausted by the violent emotions he’d experienced on his first day in the town where he had thought he’d be dying of boredom. He couldn’t help straining his ears, fearing that the howling would start up again. Slowly he began reasoning with a fresh mind. The phone call was the work of some fanatic who had a friend inside the museum, while the howl… well, the howling could have been just about anything: a stray dog that had been hit by a car or even some circus animal that had escaped. It wouldn’t be the first time such a thing had happened. As far as his car was concerned, it was simple distraction that had led him astray. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t forgotten where he’d parked his car before. Or looked for it in the wrong place.
Finally he managed to fall asleep, lulled by the rustling of the oaks and the rush of the river down in the valley.
2
CARABINIERE LIEUTENANT Marcello Reggiani got out of the squad car, a Land Rover, and walked swiftly towards the site where the corpse of Armando Ronchetti had been found. Ronchetti was an old acquaintance of La Finanza, the Italian customs and excise police, having been caught red-handed several times peddling objects that had been plundered from the Etruscan tombs in the area: vases, statuettes, even small frescoes detached from the walls using decidedly unorthodox methods.
Ronchetti had been at the top of his game and had honed his technique to perfection. He would roam the area with what those in the business called a prodder’, an iron rod used to locate and break through the ceilings of the underground tombs. He would circumspectly mark the site and then return later with a car battery and a video camera, which he would drop down into the underground chamber. The camera would be rotated by remote control so he could view what was buried below on a small monitor. He’d close the hole up again, camouflage the area all around and then show the video to the right people and auction off the tomb’s contents. The best bidder would often take the whole lot, or he might sell off a bit at a time, single objects or fragments of frescoes, to whoever offered the highest sum.
It was even said that he’d got one of his nephews an associate professorship by helping him ‘discover’ and publish the contents of an intact tomb of great importance. Obviously with the promise that the old man would be given the treasure trove compensation that the NAS provided for such fortuitous finds. Quite a pretty penny, in this case. That was the only time in his whole career that the old tomb robber had earned money legally, in a certain sense of the word, besides seasonal jobs taken now and then harvesting olives when he felt the police were breathing down his neck.
Well, there he was. Ronchetti had earned his last dishonest crust.
Hell, thought Reggiani, what an awful way to end a career. He had been covered by a sheet but there was blood everywhere and swarms of flies had settled in. When the officer signalled to his men to lift the sheet, he couldn’t help but wrinkle his face in disgust. Whatever it was that had attacked the man had massacred him. His
