James Becker - The Nosferatu Scroll

Angela dabbed her eyes angrily with a tissue, cleared her mind of all extraneous thoughts, and again focused on the task at hand.

Quite a lot of the Latin words were familiar to her. One of the advantages of learning Latin was that it had an essentially finite vocabulary, unlike English and other modern languages in common usage, which acquire new words, new meanings and new variants of existing words on an almost daily basis. Once you knew the meaning of a Latin word, you knew it for ever, because it would never change.

She remembered most of the declensions and many of the conjugations of verbs, and she was able to jot down the general sense of several of the sentences quite quickly, just leaving a handful of blanks for the words that she was either unfamiliar with or unsure of. Then she’d open the dictionary and flick through the pages until she found the first word she needed to check. Then she’d fill in the meaning, and move on to the next word. When she’d finished each sentence she paused for a moment to read it in its entirety, to make sure that it made sense, then re-wrote it in modern English.

The translation itself had proved to be relatively straight-forward, but she soon realized what Marco had meant when he referred to ‘unusual aspects’ in the text. Although the references to the tomb of the twin angels still seemed fairly clear, other passages in the Latin were ambiguous at best, and she was increasingly unsure whether or not she was getting it right. In some passages, Carmelita had referred to the Isola di San Michele as the insula silenti , the phrase translating as the ‘island of the dead’, but there were several occurrences of an entirely different phrase — insula vetus mortuus — which puzzled her.

Her literal translation rendered this as the island of the ‘ancient dead’ or ‘old dead’, which she really didn’t understand. It wasn’t clear to her whether Carmelita was using the expression as a synonym for San Michele, or if she meant somewhere completely different, possibly a more ancient graveyard located elsewhere in Venice.

And there was another phrase which sent a chill through her. The pages referred to planctus mortuus , which translated as the ‘wailing dead’ or the ‘screaming dead’. ‘Dead’, as far as she was concerned, meant exactly that: death, the cessation of life. The dead could neither scream nor wail. But the same expression appeared in several places in the text, and the context suggested that Carmelita was referring to a specific place where the dead had screamed.

Angela shook her head and continued working through the text.

When anybody asked him if he knew any of the martial arts, Bronson normally told them he had a black belt in origami — it amused him to see the conflicting emotions this statement usually produced. In fact, he’d trained to an intermediate level in aikido.

Perhaps the most unusual, and certainly the least known, of the oriental fighting techniques, aikido is purely defensive. No master of aikido could attack anyone using the art, because no offensive moves exist. But once an aikido practitioner is attacked, his or her response to that attack can easily prove fatal to the assailant. It relies heavily on unbalancing the opponent, essentially using the attacker’s own weight and speed and aggression against him.

Bronson’s tutor, a Japanese man barely five feet five inches tall and aged sixty-three, had told him years before that an aikido master could take on as many as three masters in any of the other martial arts, at the same time, and still expect to be standing when the dust settled.

Bronson frankly hadn’t believed him, but one evening when the two of them had left the dojo and were walking over to where Bronson had parked his car, a gang of six scarf-wearing football supporters, high on drink or drugs, had streamed out of an alleyway directly in front of them, looking for trouble, and ideally searching for a soft target.

Bronson had stepped forward to face them, but with a courteous bow the old Japanese man had motioned him back, taken two paces forward and just stood waiting. His harmless appearance and placid stance had seemed to enrage the youths, and they’d spent ten seconds shouting abuse before launching themselves at him.

What happened then had had all the appearance to Bronson of magic. It was as if each youth encountered something akin to a catapult: the faster they slammed into the old man, the faster they were tossed aside. In a little under twenty seconds the six youths were lying broken and bleeding on the ground, and throughout the entire time the old man barely seemed to have moved, and when he stepped over the legs of the nearest youth to rejoin Bronson, he hadn’t even been breathing hard.

‘Now do you believe me, Mr Bronson?’ he had asked, and all Bronson had been able to do was nod.

And now that training was going to save his life. Bronson swayed backwards, and the blackjack whistled viciously through the air a bare inch in front of his face. Then he stepped towards his attacker, turning as he did so, and seized the man’s right arm. He pulled him forward so that he was off balance, and continued to turn his body so that his back was towards his assailant. Then he bent forward, still pulling on the man’s right arm, and his attacker flew over his back to land — hard — on the ground directly in front of him.

Bronson hadn’t practised Aikido for some time but, much like riding a bike, his brain still retained the moves and his body responded with the actions he’d practised so many times in the past. The throw he’d just completed was one of the first and most basic of the moves he’d learned, and he finished it off in exactly the way he’d been taught, by tugging on the man’s arm at the instant before he landed, dislocating his shoulder.

The man screamed in pain as the bone was wrenched from its socket, the blackjack tumbling from his hand on to the ground. He was hurt, but Bronson knew he wasn’t immobilized, not yet, and this was something he needed to attend to. He snatched up the blackjack, and swung it as hard as he could against the man’s skull. His attacker flinched and raised his left arm in a futile defence, but there was no way he could avoid the blow. The impact jarred Bronson’s arm, but had the desired effect on his target. The man slumped backwards, instantly knocked unconscious.

Bronson was certain he’d recognized his assailant — and this meant that the two men by the tomb, only some twenty yards away, were surely part of the same gang.

Standing up, he turned towards the tomb of the twin angels and took a couple of steps forward. Then he dropped down, because one of the men had just swung round to face him, and was brandishing a semi-automatic pistol in his hand.

The sound of the shot was shockingly loud amid the tranquillity of the ancient cemetery, echoing off the walls of the church and the tombs all around him. The bullet just missed Bronson as he dived for cover, smashing into a tall stone cross behind him and sending stone chips flying in all directions.

The pistol added a whole new dimension to the situation. Bronson would have had no qualms about tackling the two men. As he’d just demonstrated, he was proficient in unarmed combat, and his whole body burned with fury against the men who’d snatched Angela. Taking on two Italian thugs and beating them to a pulp might well have helped him find her, but no level of anger or competence in hand-to-hand combat would help against a man carrying a gun. This radically altered the dynamics of the situation.

For perhaps a second, he remained crouched down behind another of the tombs, weighing his options and figuring the angles. He couldn’t run, not even if he’d dodged and weaved from side to side, because nobody can out run a bullet. And he couldn’t hide, either, because the other men knew where he was.