The Nosferatu Scroll

56

Angela heard the engine note of the powerboat die away to nothing a few seconds after it reached the jetty. Moments later, Marco opened the door to the cabin and stepped inside.

Angela tensed, wondering if she dare try to escape right then but, even before he unlocked the handcuff, she realized any attempt was doomed to failure: another one of the men stood waiting by the cabin door, clearly ready for trouble. She doubted she could tackle Marco with any degree of success, and she certainly couldn’t cope with the two of them. So she meekly allowed her wrists to be handcuffed in front of her, and was led along the path from the jetty and back towards the house.

She was almost at the door when an unearthly howling noise echoed from somewhere nearby. Angela froze in mid-stride, her eyes wide as she stared around her. She couldn’t pinpoint the location of the sound, but she was certain it was very close.

‘What on earth was that?’ she asked.

Marco didn’t bother to reply, just led her through the front door of the house and into the drawing-room. Only when she was standing beside the desk were the handcuffs finally removed.

‘So what now?’ Angela asked.

‘I would have thought that was obvious. One of my men is making a photocopy of the scroll. As soon as he’s done that, you can start translating it. And then we’ll find the answer.’

‘The answer to what?’

But before Marco could reply there was a double knock on the door and one of his men appeared carrying half a dozen sheets of paper. Marco took them, glanced at each in turn, and then placed them on the desk in front of Angela.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Get started.’

Angela knew she had no choice. She picked up the first sheet and looked at it. She’d already seen that the writing on the scroll was indistinct, the ink a faded grey against the brown of the parchment, but the photocopies were actually fairly clear. She nodded and reached for the Latin-English dictionary she’d been using previously.

Within minutes it was clear that what she was looking at was not a piece of text like those she’d worked on before. The first two pages appeared simply to contain a list of names, divided up into groups and interspersed by a number of Latin words that she had not encountered before. Words like agnatus, abdormitus and cognationis appeared frequently, and it was only when she translated these expressions that she realized what she was looking at. Agnatus meant a ‘blood relative in the male line’; abdormitus translated as ‘died’, and cognationis referred to a ‘blood relationship’, a meaning that she’d guessed even before the dictionary confirmed it. The list was simply a genealogy, one section of a family tree.

The first name on the list was familiar to her, because she’d seen it somewhere in the very recent past, though it still took her a few seconds to place it. The genealogy that she was transcribing traced the blood relationship of a number of Italian families back to a single royal source: the Princess Eleonora Elisabeth Amalia Magdalena of Lobkowicz, Princess of Schwarzenberg, the woman who was also known as the Vampire Princess.

Angela sat back from the desk and stared across at Marco, who was sitting in his easy chair on the opposite side of the room. He was looking in her general direction, and when she met his glance, he nodded.

‘Do you know what this is?’ Angela asked.

‘Yes. But you don’t have to list all the members of the family. We’re only interested in the names of the people who died here in Venice in the late eighteenth century. In fact, it’s only one of those names that we need you to check, just to confirm his link to the princess.’

‘Which is?’

‘Nicodema Diluca.’

The name meant nothing immediately to Angela, though again the surname had a slightly familiar ring to it. She turned back to the photocopied sheets, quickly found what she was looking for and painstakingly traced the names of Diluca’s forebears back to the Princess of Schwarzenberg. If the names and relationships listed were correct, then Diluca was undeniably one of her blood descendants.

‘He’s a descendant, yes, according to this,’ she reported to Marco. ‘Why is it important?’

He looked at her for a moment, then shook his head. ‘You really don’t understand, do you? It’s all in the blood. There’s nothing quite so important as the bloodline. That’s why you won’t find the name Carmelita Paganini listed anywhere on those pages. She wasn’t part of the sacred family, though she obviously wished she had been. But she did do one thing useful. She – or rather her diary – pointed us towards the correct grave on San Michele.’

Then the penny dropped. ‘The tomb of the twin angels?’ Angela said. ‘We found it, but I thought the name inscribed on it was Delaca.’

‘You were nearly right. I have men out on the island now, recovering what we need.’

Angela didn’t know what he meant by that remark, unless there was some other document or relic they needed hidden in that tomb as well.

Then there was an urgent double knock on the door. Before Marco could even get out of his seat, the door swung open and a man Angela hadn’t seen before stepped into the room. Obviously agitated, he strode over to Marco and held a brief but animated conversation with him. Part-way through, they both paused to stare across at Angela for a few seconds. Then Marco smiled. The other man pointed back towards the door, and then left the room.

‘What?’ Angela demanded, conscious that Marco was staring at her again.

‘I have good news and bad news for you, I suppose,’ he said. ‘The good news is that your ex-husband wasn’t killed when my men attacked him on the street, because he’s just been spotted chasing around the lagoon in a powerboat. The bad news is that he encountered two of my men in one of the canals in Venice and they shot him.’

Angela’s face displayed the turmoil of emotions flooding through her body as she absorbed Marco’s matter-of-fact statements, and for several seconds she found she couldn’t speak.

‘Is he…?’ she finally managed.

‘Dead?’ Marco supplied for her. ‘I’ve no idea. Probably. But whether he’s alive or dead makes no difference to you, here and now. The important thing is that he’s no longer of any concern to us. We now have both of the things that we needed, the scroll and the relic, and that’s all that matters. And we’ll be keeping you alive for a little while longer.’

Angela was starting to recover her composure. She knew Chris, and knew he had a habit of bouncing back. Just because he’d been shot at didn’t mean he was dead. At least, that’s what she would cling to. She turned slightly to face Marco.

‘You’re letting me live?’ she asked.

Marco nodded. ‘At least until you’ve finished the translation,’ he said, and walked across to her. ‘This scroll,’ he continued, pointing at the photocopied sheets on the desk in front of her, ‘is the most important document you’ll ever see. This is the source, the sacred record. This is what we’ve been seeking all these years. Forget Carmelita Paganini’s diary: this scroll contains the answers to every question we’ve ever wanted to ask. Translating it will keep you alive, at least for a few more hours.’

He paused and smiled. ‘In fact, if everything works out as we hope, whether you live or die might not matter one way or the other.’