Valerio Manfredi: The Ancient Curse

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.

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 neck had been devoured, leaving mere strips of flesh, his chest was mangled and one of his shoulders had been ripped away from the collar bone and was lying by his foot.

‘Has the doctor seen this?’ asked Reggiani.

‘Yeah, he’s been by, but he said he’d wait to do the autopsy at the morgue.’

‘Well, what did he say?’

‘Some animal with a powerful bite.’

‘I can see that for myself. What kind of animal?’

‘A stray dog maybe?’

‘Come on. Ronchetti wouldn’t have been bothered by a stray, a guy like him used to being out in the fields at every hour of the day or night. It looks like his neck and throat were torn out with a single bite. See that.’

‘Yeah, and the doctor noticed these claw marks, here at his shoulder. They’re too big for a dog.’

‘Would have been one hell of a dog all right. This has to have been a lion or something of the sort. Are there any circuses in town?’

‘No, sir,’ replied the carabiniere.

‘Gypsies, then. They’ve been known to have bears with them.’

‘We’ll check it out, sir. Can’t say I’ve seen any in the area.’

The carabiniere covered the corpse with the sheet. The coroner showed up a little later, a greenhorn from Rovereto who’d been at the job no longer than a couple of months, and he gagged at the sight of the body. He took a few notes, snapped a few Polaroid photos, said to let him know when the medical examiner’s report was ready, then went to vomit the rest of his breakfast somewhere else.

‘So what do the Finanza have to say about this?’ Reggiani asked the carabiniere.

‘Well, sir, this is what I was told. A couple of special agents were searching the area in camo gear because they’d apparently been tipped off-’

‘Naturally without breathing a word of it to us.’

‘I’m afraid not. Apparently they notice some strange activity, hear some suspicious noises, so they move in and manage to surprise Ronchetti, along with a couple of other guys they couldn’t identify, as they’re opening the pot.’

‘Breaking into the tomb.’

‘Exactly. As soon as they challenge them, these guys scramble and melt into the bushes. As they’re about to nab one of them, the guy jumps straight down off an overhang that’s steep as hell, lands on his feet and hops on a bicycle that’s sitting there waiting for him. He rides off, pedalling like crazy, on that steep slope that leads down towards Rovaio. At that point, there’s not much the agents can do, so they leave one of their guys to guard the tomb site and go back to headquarters to draw up a report for the National Antiquities Service. At dawn they send up another agent to replace the one who was on duty all night and that’s when they discover the body. They informed us and we came right over.’

Reggiani took off his cap, sat on a stone in the shade of a tree and tried to compose his thoughts. ‘Did the doctor give an approximate time of death?’

‘He thought between two and three in the morning.’

‘And what time was it when the agents found these guys with their hands in the honey?’

‘Two a.m. precisely.’

‘And they didn’t hear a thing? That seems impossible.’

‘I don’t know what to say, sir,’ replied the carabiniere. ‘Maybe it’s best to wait for the definitive report. The medical examiner said he’d perform the autopsy as soon as he got the corpse.’

Just then a siren was heard and a four-wheel-drive ambulance climbed up the slope towards them. Two orderlies came out with a stretcher and loaded the body on to it. They took it back to the vehicle with them and drove off.

‘Where’s the tomb?’ asked Reggiani.

‘Over here, sir,’ replied the carabiniere, walking first down a path and then into a cluster of junipers and oak saplings. They got to a point where several of the young trees had been recently uprooted, their leaves already wilting. An officer sporting the Finanza insignia emerged from the wood with a pistol.

‘It’s OK,’ said Reggiani. ‘It’s us.’

A slab of sandstone had been moved away, evidently using a couple of crowbars that lay to the side. They could distinctly see the dark opening that led into the tomb.

‘A chamber vault,’ explained the officer on guard, who must have taken a quick cultural heritage course at the local university.

‘Hmm,’ commented Reggiani. ‘Intact?’

‘It looks like it,’ replied the officer. ‘Would you care to take a look, sir?’

Reggiani approached the entrance and sat on his heels as the officer switched on a torch to illuminate the inside of the tomb. Reggiani could see that the chamber was quite large, about four metres by three, and so must have belonged to an aristocratic family. What surprised him was the absence of any sort of treasure inside, except for a fresco on the back wall which almost certainly represented Charun, the Etruscan demon who ferried the dead to the other world. He could see nothing inside but two sarcophagi facing each other, at least from his limited viewpoint. One was topped by the figure of a woman reclining on a couch, while the other was unadorned and coarsely sculpted, about two metres long by one metre wide and covered by a plain tufa slab. The second sarcophagus had evidently been carved out of bare stone and was quite roughly hewn, as was the slab covering it, although it appeared to be air-tight.