Valerio Manfredi - The Ancient Curse

‘Who were the victims this time?’ asked Fabrizio.

‘Guy named Marozzi,’ replied Reggiani. ‘A farmhand, as big as they come and tough as nails. Hell itself wouldn’t scare him. That’s what got him. When he saw his son attacked by that monster, he ran after it with a pitchfork, of all things. Christ, what a massacre…’

A long, leaden silence followed, then Francesca spoke up.

‘Have you checked whether these victims had anything in common with the others?’

Reggiani took a little notebook from his pocket. ‘They didn’t actually,’ he said. ‘The first ones were all tomb robbers or had actually broken into the Rovaio tomb, but these last ones-’

‘I’ll tell you what they have in common,’ piped up one of the carabinieri, a youth of about twenty. ‘I was born here and I can tell you that all of the guys who were killed are from families that have been in Volterra for generations and generations. They’ve always lived here, as far as I know.’

‘As if it smelt the scent of their blood,’ observed Fabrizio. ‘Native blood… from Volterra… It hates this city with a fierce, implacable loathing.’

‘And its den is under one of the oldest buildings in the city,’ said Reggiani, shaking his head. ‘Christ, what is all this?’

‘We saw it with our own eyes,’ said Francesca calmly, placing the tray with the coffee cups on the table. The look she gave them allowed no doubt.

‘Well, then, we can set up a trap,’ said Reggiani. ‘This time it won’t get away. I’ll put enough firepower out there to exterminate a regiment.’

‘You really think you can put it down, like a mangy stray dog?’ asked Fabrizio.

‘I’ve said it before: if it kills, it can be killed.’

Fabrizio looked straight into his eyes with a bleak expression. ‘Death kills. But it can’t be killed, right? You have no idea what this is. We had it right in front of us, just a metre or two away from us, for a few endless seconds. I have never seen anything like it my whole life. I am very certain that no animal of a like species exists. It’s a monster, I tell you. A… chimera.’

Francesca’s expression confirmed Fabrizio’s words in full.

‘I don’t know about that,’ replied Reggiani. ‘Maybe it’s the product of some experiment, you know? You hear about strange genetic experiments. Some mad scientist…’

Fabrizio thought of what he’d seen in the upstairs rooms of the Caretti-Riccardi palace and shivered. He drank his coffee in little sips, then looked up at the lieutenant. ‘Marcello, don’t make your move yet,’ he said. ‘You’d be making a terrible mistake. It’s too soon and you’ll have terrible losses. You won’t be able to turn back. Wait.’

‘I’ve waited long enough. As soon as I have word that we’re ready to go, I’ll unleash hell.’

‘Wait, for the love of God,’ insisted Fabrizio in a monotone.

‘Wait for what? For this thing to exterminate every last person in Volterra?’ He pulled a pile of newspapers from his black leather bag. ‘Look at this! The news is all over the national papers. In an hour’s time, people will be seeing this on the news-stands and they’re going to panic. And that panic will spread. We have a catastrophe waiting to happen.’

‘Wait,’ Fabrizio insisted. He lifted the cloth covering the last fragment of the slab of Volterra. ‘Until I’ve read this. Maybe… I think… it’s the key to everything.’

‘At this point,’ said Reggiani, ‘it’s sixteen hours to green light. Not a minute more.’

‘That’ll have to be enough,’ replied Fabrizio.

LIEUTENANT REGGIANI looked at the little boy, then at Fabrizio and Francesca. ‘What do you know about him?’ he asked.

‘Not much. Nothing, really,’ replied Fabrizio. ‘He has more or less told us that his father is, or was, Jacopo Ghirardini, and that Ambra Reiter is his stepmother and that she beats him. He showed up at my house saying he didn’t want to live at Le Macine any more and that he wants to be an archaeologist when he grows up. I’ve told you the rest.’

‘Let me take a picture and see if we can find out anything more about him. You can never tell. Do you know how many kids disappear each year without leaving a trace?’

He went out to the car to get his digital camera and took a couple of close shots of the sleeping child. ‘Keep him with you for now,’ he said. ‘No one has reported him missing yet. As soon as we’re out of this mess, well worry about getting him settled.’

He swallowed his coffee down in a single gulp and left, racing off in his Alfa. Even before he was on the regional road he was on the radio to headquarters.

‘Lieutenant Reggiani here. Who’s that? Over.’

‘It’s Tornese. What do you need, sir?’

‘Three vehicles and ten men set to move out right away. A search party. Have the warrant ready. Ambra Reiter at Le Macine. Look in the blue folder, top drawer of my desk. Is Bonetti from the archaeological protection team in yet?’

‘He won’t be here for a couple of hours.’

’Get him out of bed now and tell him to bring his gear.’

‘You got it, sir,’ replied the sergeant.

As soon as Reggiani arrived, he took the folder, picked up his men and vehicles and headed to Le Macine at top speed. They stopped about 300 metres from the building and he had the men scatter in a semicircle, hidden by the vegetation, so they would be able to converge on the objective and secure it.

He walked into the tavern alone and shouted, ‘Reiter, Ambra Reiter, this is Lieutenant Reggiani. I have a search warrant!’

No answer. The place seemed deserted. He waved in the archaeological expert, who had just arrived. Bonetti set to work combing the floor of the room with a metal detector. He had no success until he moved behind the bar counter, when the needle surged past the maximum mark and the buzzer began to sound loudly.

‘Under here,’ said Bonetti.

Two of the men joined him and they knelt on the floor and started to scrape between the bricks with trowels until they found the edges of a well-disguised hatch. They used a crowbar to prise the lid up and an entire section of the floor opened up, revealing steps that led underground. Reggiani went down first, with a torch in one hand and his pistol in the other.

There was no one down there, but the place was a treasure trove. Bucchero pottery, a large red-figured Attic crater which was practically intact, an alabaster vase, a cinerary urn of alabaster as well, decorated with images of the deceased reclining on a triclinium, and even a fragment of a fresco with a dancing figure. It had been brutally hacked from its wall using a power saw. It was already partially packaged in Styrofoam and plywood, no doubt to be smuggled off in a truck headed for Switzerland. There were ancient weapons as well. Arrow- and spear-heads, a bronze shield and a couple of helmets, one of the Corinthian type, the other a rare Negau, dragon-shaped buckles with amber beads and others made of yellow granulated gold, a double-cone-shaped cinerary urn of the Villanovan era and metal fragments of a war chariot.

Bonetti, their archaeological expert, was an auxiliary officer who in civilian life was a researcher at Tuscia University. He dutifully jotted down a piece-by-piece description of the objects as Reggiani’s torch illuminated them.

‘Good Lord, Lieutenant, this stuff is worth millions.’

‘I have no doubt about that. But I’m looking for something else here. Have them send me down a spotlight. I need to search this place centimetre by centimetre.’

One of his men connected the spotlight to an extension cord that he plugged in behind the bar, flooding the underground chamber with light. The chamber had been cut into a bank of tufa and had no flooring, although the ground was covered with a layer of yellowish earth; the same earth that Fabrizio had noticed on Ambra Reiter’s shoes. The bright light revealed greenish traces on the ground over a rectangular area measuring about forty by eighty centimetres.