Valerio Manfredi: The Ancient Curse

Fabrizio fell to his knees in front of the sarcophagus, stretching the still body of the little boy forward towards them. ‘Let me keep him!’ he pleaded. ‘Let him live! He can’t die twice! I beg of you, leave him to me!’ He burst into tears and clasped the little boy’s body close to his chest.

The dark underground chamber was once again invaded by that cold, mysterious, sudden breath of air, and Fabrizio heard a sound that roused him from his weeping: a whisper more than a sound; a long, sorrowful sigh.

‘Did you hear that?’ he asked Reggiani.

The officer shook his head, regarding Fabrizio with a pitying expression.

‘Francesca…’

‘Who said that?’ asked Fabrizio in surprise, but as he spoke he felt a shudder run through the little body he was clutching and then he felt the rhythm – hiccuping at first and then slow and even – of the child’s breathing.

‘Shine that over here!’ he shouted frantically, and Reggiani illuminated the face of the little boy, who blinked in the sudden harsh light. The two men stared at each other without managing to get a word out.

‘Where’s Francesca?’ repeated Angelo. ‘What is this place?’

‘Francesca? We’ll find her. She’s right here, close by,’ replied Fabrizio, trying to control his emotions and speak as normally as possible.

They walked back towards the main tunnel, while the mausoleum of the Kaiknas family sank into darkness and silence again.

They joined Francesca and tried to retrace their steps, but the tunnel was obstructed by a landslide, as if there had been an earthquake.

‘All we can do is go on towards the cistern,’ said Francesca. ‘We have no choice. I hope your men aren’t feeling trigger-happy,’ she added to Reggiani.

They walked for about twenty minutes in the dim glow cast by the torch. When they were approaching the cistern, Reggiani called out, ‘It’s us! We’re coming out!’

‘We’re waiting for you, Lieutenant! It’s safe to come out,’ came back the sergeant’s voice, followed by a thump and a loud buzz as the photocells flooded the cistern well. The four people who had been feared buried alive came out one after another, last of all Fabrizio with the child on his shoulders.

An ambulance soon pulled up and a couple of nurses came out with a stretcher, accompanied by a doctor.

‘He’s fine now,’ said Fabrizio. ‘He fainted, but he’s better now.’

‘I’d still like to have a look,’ said the doctor, who had been given a much more alarming prognosis by Reggiani’s men. ‘I think it’s best we keep him under observation for the rest of the night.’

Francesca took Angelo’s hand. ‘I’ll go with him. Don’t worry. We’ll see you in the morning.’

Fabrizio kissed her and held her tight. ‘You were very brave. I never would have forgiven myself if anything had happened to you… I love you.’

‘I love you too,’ replied the girl, leaving him with a gentle caress.

Lieutenant Reggiani mustered his men. ‘The operation is suspended,’ he announced. ‘The animal has been destroyed.’

‘Destroyed?’ repeated Sergeant Massaro. ‘How?’

‘With… a flame-thrower,’ replied Reggiani curtly.

‘A flame-thrower, sir?’ asked the sergeant incredulously.

‘That’s correct. Why? Is there something strange about that?’

‘No, nothing. I was just thinking…’

‘No need to rack your brains, Massaro. Everything’s fine, I can assure you of that. You can demobilize now and return to headquarters. It’s all over. There will be no more deaths. All I have to do now is face the Home Secretary and the press, but at least they don’t bite… At least, I hope not.’ He turned towards Fabrizio. ‘Where can I drop you off?’

‘At the museum. My car is still in the middle of the road and… there’s something I still have to do.’ He switched on his mobile phone and called Sonia, but her phone was off and when they reached the museum there was no trace of her.

‘I’ll call her tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I have to ask her to forgive me. Or… would you like to call instead?’ he asked Reggiani, guessing at his thoughts. ‘Yeah, I think that’s a better solution. Here, this is her number. Tell her that I’ll call her as soon as I can and that I’m very, very sorry, but that I had no choice. You know why.’

‘I’ll take care of it,’ promised Reggiani. ‘What’s next?’

‘Come in. There’s something I want to show you.’ He took the key from his pocket, opened the door, crossed the hall and walked down the stairs to the basement. The room was still full of smoke and invaded by an intense, acrid, scorched smell.

Reggiani noticed the gas canister and burner. ‘You could have blown up the whole place. You’re completely irresponsible.’

‘I told you I needed a flame-thrower and this was all I could find. Thank God I did! I remembered seeing a roadworker using something like this once to melt tar.’

‘I think you owe me an explanation,’ said Reggiani. ‘Even if this is all over, I want to know what set the whole thing off and how.’

Fabrizio took a folded sheet of paper out of the inside pocket of his jacket and handed it to Reggiani. It was the translation of the inscription. ‘Read this. You’ll understand everything. It’s the text of the slab of Volterra. Complete.’

As the lieutenant scanned the crumpled sheet in disbelief, Fabrizio bent down and carefully gathered the bones of the Phersu that Sonia had painstakingly separated from the animal’s bones. He walked towards the stairs.

Reggiani turned towards him, still shaking his head. ‘Where are you going now? Haven’t you got into enough trouble for one night?’

‘I’m going back down there,’ he said without turning. ‘I’m going to take Turm Kaiknas’s bones to the family tomb, so he can rest alongside his wife and his child. I’m certain about one thing at least. The statue of the young lad in room twenty above our heads, the one I came to study, comes from that tomb. Have all the entrances to the tunnel closed tomorrow in secret if you can. No one must ever disturb the sleep of Turm and Anait again, for any reason.’

Back up in the front hall, Fabrizio turned out the lights and set the alarm before leaving. ‘In a few days we’ll be asking ourselves if we dreamed it all. You know we’re going to forget this, don’t you? That’s what happens to the human mind when events are too difficult to accept. Anyway, I think we’ve done the right thing. And what counts is that your case is solved, isn’t it, Lieutenant?’

‘No, not completely,’ objected Reggiani as they walked towards the car. ‘We still don’t know where Angelo comes from.’

‘Maybe Ambra Reiter will tell you the next time you question her.’

‘You think so? I’m sure she’ll come up with the most obvious story possible. That when her first husband died he made her promise to bring the child to safety in Italy. She may even have an ID card, documents.’

‘Maybe…’ said Fabrizio as if talking to himself. ‘But the wounds of the past can come back to bleed again in the present. Sometimes they can even hurt. Debts have to be settled, sooner or later. The truth – if it exists – is buried deep in the mind of that little boy, lurking in his dreams, waiting for the shades of twilight to come calling.’

TWO DAYS LATER, Lieutenant Reggiani was back in his office at seven a.m. His expression gave no hint of the hellish events of the past fortnight. Instead, his face wore the perplexed expression that he got when he was trying to work his way through a complicated problem. He sat at his desk and began to sketch out a diagram with all the individuals who had played a role in the case and the relationships between them. After a couple of good nights’ sleep, his mind was functioning again as usual and was refusing to accept an explanation that had nothing rational about it. As time passed and he got over the shock of what he’d seen down in that tunnel, he wondered whether the case was solved after all. Might there not be another murder that very night, or in two or ten days’ time? In the end, all he had seen in the tunnel was a black mass on the ground that could have been anything. And a woman and child crying. He was startled from his thoughts by a knock at the door.