The First Apostle

Bronson placed the two pistols on the table, well out of reach, then bent down and eased the injured man into a sitting position. He pulled off his lightweight jacket and removed the shoulder holster he found underneath it. Then he folded one of the towels and placed it over the exit wound, laying the man down again so that the weight of his body would help reduce the blood loss.

“Hold this,” Bronson said in Italian, pressing the man’s bloody right hand onto the other towel, positioned over the entry wound.

“Thank you,” the Italian said, his breath rasping painfully, “but I need a hospital.”

“I know,” Bronson replied. “I’ll telephone in a minute. First, I need answers to a few questions, and the quicker you tell me, the sooner I’ll make that call. Who are you?

Who do you work for? And who’s your fat friend?”

The ghost of a smile crossed the wounded man’s face. “His name’s Gregori Mandino, and he’s the capofamiglia —the head—of the Rome Cosa Nostra.”

“The Mafia?”

“Wrong name, right organization. I’m just one of the picciotti, a soldier,” the man said, “one of the capo’s bodyguards. I do what I’m told, and go where I’m needed. I have no idea why we’re here.” He said it with such conviction that Bronson almost believed him. “But let me give you a piece of advice, Englishman. Mandino is ruthless, and his deputy is worse. If I were you, I’d get away from here as quickly as you can, and not come back to Italy. Ever. The Cosa Nostra has a very long memory.”

“But why should someone like Mandino care about a two-thousand-year-old scroll?” Bronson asked.

“I told you, I’ve no idea.”

The “need to know” concept was one Bronson was very familiar with from his time in the army, and he guessed that a criminal organization like the Mafia probably worked in a similar way. The wounded man very probably didn’t know what was going on. Employed because of his skill with a gun— though he hadn’t been quite good enough on this occasion—he would have been told only what he needed to know to complete whatever tasks he was set.

“OK,” Bronson said. “I’ll call now.”

He quickly searched the man’s jacket, found a handful of nine-millimeter shells and removed them. Then he scoured the floor, found the ejected cartridge case from the Browning and picked it up. The bullet that had hit the Italian had passed straight through his shoulder and buried itself in the edge of the doorframe, but he quickly removed it with one of the screwdrivers he’d used to lift the floor panel. That was all he could do to eliminate the forensic evidence.

Finally, he picked up the holster and the two pistols—and the skyphos as an afterthought—and left the room. Angela was waiting for him in the hall, both her bags at her feet.

“I’ve tried to stop the bleeding with a couple of towels,” Bronson explained, “and I’ll call the emergency services right now. You get in the car.”

Fifteen minutes later they were in the Espace—the back of the car now empty as Bronson had unceremoniously dumped the bath and all the other boxes beside the Hamptons’ garage—and heading west, away from the house.

III

Bronson steered the Renault down the road and glanced over at Angela. “Are you all right?” he asked.

“I’m furious,” she snapped. Bronson realized that the shaking he had taken to be shock or fear was actually intense anger. Every sinew of Angela’s body telegraphed her fury.

“I know,” Bronson said, his voice deliberately calm and measured, “it’s a shame we didn’t get the chance to examine the scroll, but we are alive. That’s the most important thing.”

“It’s not just that,” Angela retorted. “I was terrified in there, do you know that? I’d never even seen a real pistol until you waved that one at me back in England, and a few hours later I’m in the middle of a gun battle, and some fat Italian crook’s dragging me around by my neck. That’s bad enough. Then, just as we finally manage to decode the inscription and track down the relic, those two bastards come along and take it away from us. After all we’ve been through! I’m really pissed off.”

Bronson smiled to himself. Good old Angela, he thought. Trust her to come back fighting.

“Look, Angela,” he said, “I’m really sorry about what happened back there. It was my fault they got into the house. I should have double-checked that all the doors and windows were locked.”

“If you had locked the doors, they’d probably still have got inside, and if we’d heard them coming we might have been involved in a shoot-out neither of us would have survived. As it is, thanks to you, we’re both still very much alive. But it’s a shame about the scroll.”

“I brought the skyphos or whatever you call it. At least we’ve got that as a souvenir.

It’s obviously old—do you think it’s valuable?”

Angela leaned over to the backseat and picked up the vessel to examine it properly—in the house she’d hardly had a chance.

“This is a fake,” she said a few minutes later, “but a good one. At first sight it looks exactly like a genuine Roman skyphos. But the shape is slightly different: it’s a bit too tall for its width. The glaze feels wrong, and I think the composition of the pottery itself isn’t right for the first century. There are a lot of tests we could run, but it probably wouldn’t be worth the effort.”

“So we’ve been through all this for a fake?” Bronson asked. “And remind me. What, exactly, is a skyphos?”

“The name’s Greek, not Roman. It’s a type of vessel that originated in the eastern end of the Mediterranean, around about the first century A.D. A skyphos is a two-handled drinking cup. This one’s in excellent condition, and if it had been the genuine article it would have been worth around four or five grand.”

“So when was it made?”

Angela looked at the skyphos critically. “Definitely second millennium,” she replied.

“If I had to guess I’d say thirteenth or maybe fourteenth century. Probably made about the same time that the Hamptons’ house was built.”

Bronson glanced over at her. “That’s interesting,” he said.

“More coincidental than anything else, I’d have thought.”

“Not necessarily, if you are right and they’re more or less contemporary. I think it could be far more than simple coincidence that a fourteenth-century pot—and a fake at that—was deliberately hidden in a fourteenth-century house.”

“Why?”

Bronson paused to order his thoughts. “The whole trail we’ve been following is obscure and complicated, and I’m wondering if that Occitan verse is even more complex than we thought, and that we’re missing something.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“Look at the verse,” Bronson said. “It’s written entirely in Occitan apart from one word— calix—and that’s Latin for ‘chalice.’ When we follow the other clues in the riddle, we eventually find something that looks like a Roman drinking cup, but isn’t.

So the verse uses a Roman word for chalice, and we’ve recovered a copy of a Roman chalice. Doesn’t that strike you as odd? Or at least convoluted?”

“Keep going,” Angela said, encouragingly.

“Why did they go to all the trouble of manufacturing a fake skyphos when they could just as easily have buried the scroll in any old earthenware pot? It’s as if they wanted to draw our attention to the Roman element in all this, back to the Latin inscription in the living room.”

“But we’ve been over and over this. There aren’t any other clues in those three Latin words. Or, if there are, they’re bloody well hidden.”

“Agreed. So maybe the Occitan verse is pointing us toward something else.

Something more than just the location of the hidden scroll? Perhaps to the skyphos itself?”