The Lost Testament

89

Early the next morning, Bronson stepped out of the hotel and made his way to the car park where he’d left the Renault late the previous night. En route he made a brief stop at a small hardware shop, where he bought a cheap and basic tool kit. In the car park, he took the lift to the top floor and then started making his way down to the level where he’d left the Megane, walking around each floor as he did so. Most of the vehicles parked there were shiny, meaning that they were probably in regular, possibly daily, use, but there were a handful bearing a layer of dust, which suggested they’d been parked some time before and not touched since. But on the fifth floor he spotted one car actually covered with a dust sheet and when he took a look underneath it he guessed that car hadn’t moved in months.

He checked to make sure there were no surveillance cameras that could record what he was doing, then knelt down beside the car and snapped open his tool kit. Inside five minutes he’d removed both of the number plates. Fifteen minutes after that he was able to get back into the lift and leave the multistorey car park, the new number plates already attached to the front and back of the Renault.

Angela was waiting for him in the hotel room.

‘Any problems?’ she asked.

‘Good news and bad news, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘The good news is we have a temporary disguise for our car. The bad news is there’s almost no traffic on the streets, and I don’t think we can leave until it’s a bit busier, and we will be less conspicuous. I think we’ll need to give it a couple of hours.’

‘Well, I can’t just sit here and do nothing,’ Angela replied. ‘I’m going to work on my translation of the parchment. If I can translate just a little bit more, that might give us another clue as to its authenticity. Like every other language, Latin evolved over time, and it’s possible that if the parchment is actually some kind of forgery I might be able to detect that from the words used or the sentence forms.’

‘Good idea,’ Bronson said, then gestured towards his overnight bag.

‘And as I now seem to be the owner of three unlicensed Glock 17 pistols and a handful of loaded magazines, I’m going to clean those three weapons, just in case. Once I’ve done that, I plan to do a bit of Internet research. From what Pere said, the parchment was stolen from the Vatican a long time ago. That must have made the papers, at least in Italy, so I’m going to see if I can find some record of it.’

While Angela worked on the specialized photographs of the parchment, Bronson sat on the side of the bed, a hand towel from the bathroom beside him, and carefully stripped each of the Glocks in turn, cleaning and reloading them.

When he’d finished, he replaced one of the Glocks in the shoulder holster he had put on under his jacket, wrapped the other two weapons in one of the shirts he’d already worn and tucked away the bundle in his overnight bag. The loaded magazines he distributed around various pockets, where they would be readily to hand if trouble started anywhere down the line.

Then he opened his laptop, and was quiet for a while as he did various searches.

‘Oddly enough,’ he began, breaking the silence, ‘it looks as if the Vatican’s been a target of thieves for quite some time. This very first result here is about a robbery that took place in nineteen hundred when thieves stole 350,000 lire from a room in the building, aided and abetted by some minor Vatican official.’

Bronson laughed shortly as he read something else.

‘What is it?’ Angela asked.

‘It’s just rather sweet. Apparently in previous cases thieves had been forced to return whatever goods or money they had stolen, and then they were forcibly expelled through the “bronze door”, the principal entrance to the Vatican. In one case a clerk who worked for the Papal Secretary of State stole about 280,000 francs, but wasn’t able to return the stolen money, presumably because he’d already spent it. He was condemned by an ecclesiastical tribunal to undergo eight days of spiritual exercises, which would encourage him to repent his sins, and was then given his job back. I don’t somehow think they’d do that today.’

‘Not a chance,’ Angela agreed.

‘There was another theft in nineteen thirty-seven, and even an attempted armed robbery — thieves with guns, no less — who tried to steal the entire Vatican payroll in nineteen eighty-six. The place seems to be a hotbed of crime. Here’s another one. A couple of thieves riding motor-scooters got away with about £150,000 just before Christmas in nineteen eighty-eight. It sounds like they had accurate inside information because they identified a Vatican car in the traffic near St Peter’s Square, blocked it in with one scooter while the other man smashed a window on the vehicle, grabbed the briefcase containing the money, and they both got away on the second scooter.’

‘All very amusing, but that’s not the kind of thing we’re looking for,’ Angela said. ‘If that parchment was stolen from the Vatican, then it was either an inside job or a breakin by thieves who were looking for relics, and maybe even stealing them to order.’

‘But surely almost anything stolen from the Vatican would be easy enough to identify,’ Bronson objected. ‘I’m sure they must keep detailed records of pretty much everything they have in the archives. So if something was being stolen to order, whoever organized the theft would never be able to sell it.’

Angela shook her head.

‘For some collectors, the idea of selling any of the items they own never even occurs to them. For people like that, possession is all that matters.

‘If this parchment was taken out of the Vatican, it was probably one of a number of items stolen; otherwise the robbery really wouldn’t make much sense. According to one of Ali’s emails, this relic turned up in a metal box in the wall or floor of a building being demolished in Cairo. If it had been taken by a collector, he certainly wouldn’t have done that with it. He would have wanted the parchment to be displayed somewhere, in some room in his house, and probably in a specially designed case to ensure the right light, temperature and humidity to preserve it. Because of where the relic was found, my guess is that it was picked up with a number of other items during a robbery.

‘The thieves probably tried to find a buyer for it, but a grubby old bit of parchment with illegible writing on it is not the kind of thing that most collectors will be interested in purchasing. After a while, they probably gave up, locked it away in the steel box and cemented it into a wall or hid it under the floorboards so that no one would find it, and then forgot about it.’

Bronson was still scanning the results of his Internet search while he listened to Angela.

‘That makes sense,’ he said, ‘and it’s just possible that I know when the robbery took place.’