absurd affairs.’ Agrippina said. ‘This is between you and me. You honor me with the title Domina, but you, Balbilus, my great astrologer, you are
Balbilus bowed his head.
‘I want to know about this boy,’ she said. ‘Tell me what will befall him.’
Balbilus had been reading the charts carefully. He knew each day of the week by heart, almost each hour. He rose to his feet and delivered the prophecy with great solemnity.
‘The boy’s rising sign, Sagittarius, is in tune with Leo where his moon is placed. As the moon represents you, Domina, you and the boy will enjoy harmonious relations.’
‘Ah, good,’ Agrippina purred.
‘The planet that rules this boy and which is his ascendant is highly propitious. It is Saturn, the evil one.’
She smiled.
‘And his moon is situated in the Eighth House, the House of Death. This indicates high position, large income, honors. Jupiter is in the Eleventh House, the House of Friends. From this will come the greatest good fortune and great fame, enormous power.’ He lowered his voice, ‘There is only one caveat.’
‘Tell me,’ Agrippina said.
‘He is square with Mars. This will serve to diminish his good fortune. How, I cannot say.’
She sighed. ‘It is a good reading. To say otherwise would be untrue. Nothing is perfect in our world. But tell me, Balbilus, will my son be Emperor?’
Balbilus closed his eyes. He felt his own tail tingle. ‘He
Agrippina hardly flinched as she said, ‘So be it.’
NINE
ELISABETTA HELD THE slim volume in her hands, felt its smooth binding, smelled the mustiness of the yellowing and crinkling vellum pages. It was only sixty-two pages long, yet she had the sense that there was more to it than its value as an antiquarian book.
She’d only asked to borrow it but Frau Lang had pressed her to have it.
‘What if it’s worth something?’ Elisabetta had asked.
Frau Lang had lowered her voice, cocking her head at the wall separating them from her husband. ‘I doubt you could buy a loaf with it but if there’s money to be made let the Church have it. My eternal soul could use the help.’
The envelope with its neatly written enigmatic message lay on Elisabetta’s desk at the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archeology.
What was B? The key to what?
A sign? What was Ottinger up to and who was the writer, K?
And the curious symbol, vaguely astrological, vaguely anthropromorphic. What did it represent? And why was it so familiar?
Elisabetta drew it on her whiteboard with a black marker and glanced at it frequently.
She heard female voices coming down the corridor and hoped that some of the Institute’s nuns weren’t coming to ask her to join them for coffee. She wanted to shut her door but that, she thought, would have been rude. So she kept her chair turned away in order not to invite eye contact. The voices faded. She opened her desktop computer’s browser and searched:
Voluminous results filled her screen. She began to scroll through a load of articles and failed to notice that an hour had flown by or that Professor De Stefano was trying to get her attention by tapping at her door in a fierce staccato.
She’d borrowed Micaela’s mobile phone the day before to brief him from the airport but this morning he was anxious for more.
‘So?’ he demanded a bit testily. ‘What does it all mean?’
‘I think I know what B is,’ she said.
De Stefano closed the office door and sat on the other chair.
She already had pages of notes. ‘Two versions exist of
‘Why two versions?’ De Stefano asked.
‘No one seems to know. Some scholars say that Marlowe wrote the A text and others revised it into the B text after his death. Some say he wrote both A and B. Some say both are differing products of actors’ memories of performances years after the fact.’
‘And what does this mean for us? For our situation?’
Elisabetta raised her hands in frustration. ‘I don’t know. We have a collection of facts which may be related to one another, although how is unclear. We have a first-century columbarium containing nearly a hundred skeletons – men, women and children, all with tails. There is evidence of a fire, perhaps coincident with the death of these people. The walls are decorated with a circular motif of astrological symbols depicted in a specific order. The upright Pisces symbol certainly can be seen as having a double meaning. We have the post-mortem photographs of an old man, Bruno Ottinger, with a tail and numbers tattooed on his back. What these numbers mean is unknown. We have a play by Christopher Marlowe in this man’s possession. It was given to him by another person, a K. On the note it’s written that ‘B is the key,’ and that September 11 was a sign. The book from 1620 is the so-called B text. The frontispiece of the book shows Faustus summoning the devil while standing inside a circle of astrological symbols which are laid out in the exact same order as in the circle on the columbarium fresco. These are the facts.’
Except, Elisabetta thought, there was one more she’d keep to herself: the fleeting image of her attacker’s hideous spine on the awful night when Marco was killed.
De Stefano rubbed his hands nervously together as if cleansing them. ‘So we’re not in a position to weave them together into a cohesive hypothesis?’
She shrugged. ‘From my knowledge of the period, astrology was highly important to the Romans. Aristocrats and common citizens alike placed a great deal of value in the predictive value of star charts. Maybe for this particular cult or sect, the stars and planets were of pre-eminent importance. Its members’ physical abnormalities clearly made them different from most of their contemporaries. We know that they clung together in death. It’s not too much of a stretch to imagine that in life they were associated in some cultural or ritualistic way. Perhaps they were intensely guided by astrological interpretations. Or maybe they were a sect of actual astrologers. This is all pure conjecture.’
‘And you think this cult or sect might persist to this day?’ De Stefano asked incredulously. ‘Is that what this Ottinger is telling us?’
‘I wouldn’t begin to go that far,’ Elisabetta said. ‘That would take us beyond the boundaries of proper speculation. For a start, we need to understand the message on the envelope and to decipher the meaning of the tattoos.’
De Stefano had been growing more haggard and sallow-looking by the day and she was becoming worried about his health. He seemed to labor at the simple act of pushing himself up from the chair’s armrests. ‘Well, the good news is that the media hasn’t gotten wind of the columbarium yet. The bad news is that the Conclave begins in four days and as it gets closer my superiors are certain to get more and more anxious about the risk of a leak. So please keep working and please keep me informed.’
Elisabetta turned to her computer screen, then caught herself. She decided she ought to devote a few
