The Lost Testament

91

‘Listen to this,’ Bronson said. ‘I’ve just found something in a paper called the Lodi News-Sentinel.

‘There’s a pretty full report here of a robbery that took place in the Vatican. The publication date of the paper was 27 November 1965, and the robbery took place in the early hours of the previous Friday morning. And if I’m reading this correctly, it does look very much like a tailored robbery, because they could have taken a whole bunch of things but they didn’t, just four specific items.’

‘Which were …?’ Angela said.

‘They took two historic manuscripts and two important relics of the Roman Catholic Church. According to Vatican officials, the manuscripts were priceless, and the two relics were worth about half a million dollars, so we must be talking about several million dollars at today’s value.’

‘Typical of a newspaper to concentrate on the price of the objects, not what they were,’ Angela commented.

‘Actually, it does go on to explain what was taken, and also how the robbery was carried out,’ Bronson said. ‘First of all, the two relics. One of them was a facsimile of a crown that belonged to Hungary’s national hero, St Stephen, made of gold. This report said it was made in the early part of the twentieth century and was a gift from the Catholics of Hungary to Pope Pius X.’

Bronson paused for a moment as he read the next section of the article.

‘But it looks as if the original is still around,’ he went on. ‘According to this other website, the genuine crown was smuggled out of Hungary some time after the end of the Second World War to the United States, and it was secreted in America, in Fort Knox, no less, by a group of Hungarian exiles who wanted to protect it against any claims from the Communist government which had taken power in Hungary. It was only returned to that country in nineteen seventy-eight.’

‘So what was the other relic?’

‘That’s a wee bit gruesome,’ Bronson said. ‘It was a small box, decorated with copper and ceramics, which contained a message to Congress. It was being carried by the president of Ecuador, Garcia Moreno, when he was assassinated outside the cathedral in Quito in August 1875. Apparently the paper the message was written on was stained with Moreno’s blood. I think the Vatican was being a bit optimistic with its valuations if it reckoned that a piece of blood-stained paper and a fake crown were worth half a million dollars back in nineteen sixty-five.’

Bronson looked back at the scan of the newspaper article on the screen of his laptop.

‘The other stuff might be a bit more valuable, though whether it qualifies as being “priceless” is another matter altogether, and you know more about this kind of thing than I do. Anyway, the most valuable item stolen was an original copy of a thing called Canonziere by a fourteenth-century poet named Francesco Petrarch. According to this, it was his most outstanding work and contains several sonnets, madrigals and ballads, and was written on sheets of parchment, a lot of it by Petrarch himself.’

‘Now that would be worth a lot,’ Angela said, nodding, ‘but I don’t know about “priceless”. You said there were four items stolen, so what was the last one?’

‘That was another collection of parchment sheets. Altogether there were 152 of them, containing a number of poems by a man named Torquato Tasso, a Roman poet. But not ancient Roman — he lived in the sixteenth century. The sheets contained copies of his poems, some of them in his own handwriting, and other versions of his work written by other people but corrected by him.’

‘He wrote “Jerusalem Liberated”, if I remember rightly,’ Angela said.

Bronson was still looking at the scan of the page of newsprint.

‘Now this is interesting as well,’ he said. ‘It looks as if you were right about the items being stolen to order. The Italian police thought the same thing. They said that it would be almost impossible for any of the items to be sold, except to a collector who already knew they were going to be stolen. They believed that it was a well-organized international gang that had carried out the robbery, because they obviously had a very detailed knowledge of the Vatican and knew exactly where to find these items. What’s also interesting is that they left behind stuff that was even more valuable than what they took. Apparently the display cases in the area they broke into also contained manuscripts by people like St Thomas Aquinas, Michelangelo and Martin Luther, and even a love letter written by Henry VIII.

‘After the theft was discovered, the Italian police alerted forces around the world, because they doubted if any collector in Italy would be able to afford to purchase the items. They haven’t actually said it specifically in this article, but the implication is fairly clear. It looks as if they thought the most likely destination for the stolen goods was America. Maybe some wealthy collector there had decided that he needed these items to complete his collection and didn’t much care how he got them.’

He opened up another web page and read a part of the contents.

‘Now hang on a minute, because this is where it gets really weird,’ he said. ‘On the very day that the thefts were discovered, the two manuscripts and the replica crown were discovered in a field just outside Rome. According to this, two men were seen behaving suspiciously in a car, and then one of them threw a case into the field, where it was picked up by the gardener of a nearby villa. When it was opened, the crown and manuscripts were inside it. That really doesn’t make any sense.’

Angela nodded, and a slight smile crossed her face.

‘Actually,’ she said, ‘it does to me. I’d lay you money that the real targets of the thieves were the manuscripts, because some collector had arranged for a couple of really good forgeries to be made, and by organizing the burglary he could swap them for the real thing, with nobody being any the wiser. He arranged to steal the originals, and then to return the fakes. That’s really cheeky, but it does make sense.’

‘But surely the Vatican would know they were forgeries?’

‘Not necessarily. Don’t forget, we’re not talking about a collector with just a handful of items, each of which he would know intimately. The Vatican holds tens of thousands, maybe millions, of treasures of different types. Nobody there could possibly be certain whether or not the objects they got back were the same as those that had been taken, as long as the copies were good enough, because nobody would know them that well. And I doubt if they’d have wanted to call in an outside expert to verify their authenticity, just in case they were forgeries. Better by far to rationalize the sequence of events to suggest that the burglars were so overcome by sorrow or whatever at what they’d done that they decided to hand back the spoils. The Catholic Church is very good at rationalizing things that don’t make sense, and they’ve had a lot of practice at it.’

‘OK, I see what you mean. But if the two manuscripts were stolen to order, why did the thieves also take the replica crown and the other box of bits?’

‘I don’t know,’ Angela said with a shrug. ‘Maybe just as a smokescreen, so that the Vatican wouldn’t look too closely at the manuscripts when they got them back, because it would be much easier to verify that the crown was the real thing. The real replica, I mean.’

She paused for a moment, her gaze distant and unfocused.

‘Here’s a thought,’ she went on. ‘I’m just wondering if a few years before the robbery took place some official at the Vatican didn’t quite know what to do with this relic, this sheet of parchment that we’ve now got our hands on, and needed somewhere secure to hide it.’

‘I don’t follow what you mean,’ Bronson said.

‘Think about it for a minute. We’re saying that this parchment contains a really damaging, explosive secret that the Roman Catholic Church would do absolutely anything not to have revealed. But they can’t really destroy it, because they know it’s an important ancient relic. So they’ve got to keep it somewhere, somewhere safe. Storing it in the Vatican Archives probably wouldn’t work, because a lot of scholars and experts in ancient documents have access to them, and they couldn’t risk somebody like that finding the relic. They could have kept it in a safe somewhere, I suppose, but again any safe would be an obvious target for thieves, or even for some thieving Vatican official who happened to know the combination and decided to make a few quid on the side. Some of those reports you told me about earlier involved a corrupt official or somebody else inside the Vatican who either carried out the theft or helped those people who did the job, so the men who live and work inside the Holy See aren’t what you might call paragons of virtue, obviously.

‘No, I think they could well have decided that their best option was to hide the parchment more or less in plain sight. I think that when the thieves picked up the Tasso manuscript, there weren’t 152 sheets there, but 153. After all, it was in a locked display case and so wouldn’t have been accessible to a researcher, and I doubt if anybody was going to bother periodically checking the exact number of sheets in the case. This also fits in with what we know happened to the parchment later on. The thieves must have delivered the items they’d been told to steal, and this one odd sheet that was clearly nothing to do with Tasso or Petrarch was then discovered. The man who’d hired them probably wouldn’t want it so, as we said earlier, they most likely tried to flog it themselves, but when they had no takers they simply locked it in the box, hid it and then forgot about it.’

‘Yes,’ Bronson agreed. ‘And years later, when the house in Cairo was being demolished, out pops the box. But I’ve no idea how the Vatican managed to find out that the manuscript had surfaced again. But however they did it, what they found was a worst-case scenario. The manuscript was in the possession of an Egyptian antique dealer who was almost certainly going to sell it to the highest bidder, and that was something that the Vatican couldn’t permit. Everything that’s happened since then has been a direct result of whatever research Husani or the first market trader — Kassim, was it? — did once they’d got their hands on the parchment. Something or someone must have alerted the Vatican, which immediately took steps to try to recover the relic and incidentally eliminate anyone who knew anything about it.’

He looked over at Angela again.

‘We still don’t have any idea what the text says and we should hit the road pretty soon,’ he reminded her. ‘Unless you’ve got somewhere with the translation, that is.’

Angela shook her head.

‘Not really,’ she replied. ‘It’s too disjointed. There are too many sentences where either the verb or the subject — or sometimes both — is invisible. The only thing I can say for certain is that whatever event is being described is not actually about Joseph himself, though I’ve seen his name written on it in two places and he’s obviously involved somehow. It’s actually about somebody else, but right now I’ve no idea who it is, or what’s really going on, except that it could possibly be a trial.’

‘A trial? You mean like in a court of law?’ Bronson asked.

Angela shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It’s just that some of the expressions sound like the kind of thing you might hear during a trial. But who’s on trial, and for what offence, I have no idea.’