Webb struggled up to a sitting position. His arms and legs were made of lead. An illuminated sign said
Pavesi
, and above it was a picture of a plump, smiling chef holding a roasted turkey on a tray. The clock on the dashboard read just after three, and the autostrada cafeteria was busy. The voices were coming from a group of truck drivers at the entrance of the cafeteria, one of whom made a dash for his truck, holding a newspaper over his head.
Walkinshaw appeared and ran towards the car with a paper cup, water streaming over his dome-like head. Webb lacked the energy to open his door. He handed a hot chocolate carefully to Webb, before settling into the car.
Walkinshaw sipped at his drink. “I have never seen anyone so exhausted.”
“I’m more concerned about you, Mister Walkinshaw. I don’t believe you’re a civil servant.”
“Actually, I’m a pianist in a brothel,” said Walkinshaw. Webb assumed it was a joke.
“And there is no Walkinshaw at the Department of Information Research. I checked.”
Walkinshaw’s face was a picture of injured innocence. “So? There might have been. Sir Bertrand is disappointed in you, Webb. He thinks you’re off on some eccentric tangent.”
“I probably am. I also believe someone on the team is trying to screw us up.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Finish your chocolate.”
Webb had scarcely done so before, once again, he flaked out.
He wakened again in the late afternoon, stretched out on the soft leather. The morning rain had gone and the sky was blue. Webb sat up. The terrible exhaustion had eased but he felt as if his blood had been drained off and replaced with water.
They were speeding over a cobbled road, with Trajan’s
Column on the left, the Roman forum to their right and the Colosseum straight ahead. There was a mechanized chariot race around the Colosseum but Walkinshaw took it in his stride. They stopped at traffic lights, the lights turned green, and the traffic made a Brand’s Hatch start. Walkinshaw weaved swiftly up to the head of the traffic. The Appia Antica appeared ahead but they suddenly screamed off round a corner.
In minutes they had cleared the suburbs of Rome and were hurtling towards a large hill town some miles ahead. “Frascati,” Walkinshaw said. “The Embassy have given us the use of a house just beyond there.”
They trickled through the town and then started to climb through a winding road. There were signs for Tuscolo and Monte Porzio. Ahead, Webb glimpsed a cathedral dome straddling the summit of a hill some miles ahead, with ancient houses clustered around it like cygnets around a swan. The Spyder cannoned up the narrow road, and Webb’s knuckles showed white against the dashboard, and his scrotum thought it was being squeezed by a gorilla. At last the car growled and slowed, and they stopped at the large metal gates of a white villa.
Walkinshaw searched under some stones and triumphantly produced some keys. Then they were up a short, steep drive. There was a balcony, big enough to hold a party on, looking down on a panorama which probably had not changed in a thousand years.
“This belongs to one of the Embassy staff. It’s probably a safe house, and in any case we only need it for a few hours. However you are still Mister Fish, and you still look like a corpse in a freezer. Would you like to rest awhile?”
“I daren’t.”
He was aroused by sunlight on his eyes. He was in a king-sized bed. Cherubim hovered over him, and a saintly, bearded
figure in the ornate ceiling had raised a glass of wine. A chandelier of pink Venetian glass was suspended almost overhead. Twin dragons guarded a wardrobe about twelve feet long underneath a mirror of similar size. He had a quick shower in an old-fashioned bathroom about the size of his Oxford flat, and found his way to a downstairs lounge. Walkinshaw was contemplating a lurid female photograph in a magazine. He stood up as Webb approached.
“Ah, much better. You no longer look like death warmed up.”
“What time is it?” Webb asked.
“Just after five o’clock. You’ve been out for an hour.”
“Oh my God. I have to get to a monastery. It’s not too far from here.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“No. I’m a solitary scholar researching a manuscript. And you look like something out of MI5.”
“At least I’ll give you a lift, time being what it is.”
Webb opened the car window and glanced at his watch. The plain of Rome stretched into the distance on his left, with its wonderful city shimmering in the haze. Beyond, the long spine of the Abruzzi Hills stretched to the south. The air blowing in the window was warm and scented, and the sky was blue.
And he had fifteen hours.
It was a fifteen-minute drive up a steep, narrow, tree-lined road. The monastery was contained within a wall about fifteen feet high, part of which was also the front of a church. A white marble saint with a lightning conductor running down his back stood atop its steepled roof. Behind the wall a tall bell-tower dominated the skyline.
There was a crowded car park. Walkinshaw put the seat back and covered his eyes with his ridiculous Tyrolean hat. Webb followed a family into what seemed to be a porter’s lodge, and passed through it to a shop, where he was met by the scents of a thousand flowers. A brisk trade in honey, royal jelly and some translucent green liqueur was under way, while the Virgin Mary, captured on canvas, stood with her eyes raised to Heaven and arms crossed on the wall behind the counter. Webb tried out his Italian: “I’d like to speak to the Father Abbot, please.”
The white-robed monk behind the counter raised his bushy eyebrows in surprise. “You have made an appointment?”
“Yes,” Webb lied. “But I’m only in Italy for a few hours.”
“Un àttimo.”
A few minutes later the monk reappeared. With him was an older man, nearly bald, with a ruddy face and a smile which, Webb thought, was less than wholly welcoming. “I’m Father O’Doyle,” he said in an American English with a strong hint of Irish. “The Father Abbot is in chapel but I’m
responsible for visitors. No visitors are pencilled in to my diary for today. When did you write?”
“About six weeks ago,” Webb lied again. “My name is Fish. I’m from Cambridge. I’m trying to trace a book.”
“Ah, that explains it. You want the Father Librarian. Come with me.”
Webb followed the American monk out to the car park and back in through the church. About halfway down he led Webb off to a transept, produced a large key and unlocked a door. There was a short stretch of corridor. Webb noted a door, with an alarm and lights over it, protected by three locks. The monk caught Webb’s curious stare. “Our sacristy,” he said.
Through another locked door, Webb found himself outside again, in a large, square cloister. Father O’Doyle led the way along the covered cloister-walk. Webb was surprised to find Christmas lights and decorations strung between the pillars lining the walk. Faces looked down at them from barred windows. “Oblates,” the monk said, waving up.
They turned off and climbed some stairs. A handful of white-robed monks, hoods down, passed silently. Through a door, Webb found himself in a modern library. A few teenage students were scattered around desks. “I will leave you in the capable hands of our librarian.”
The librarian had the physique of a rugby player, but the muscle was turning to fat and his face was pale.
Webb tried out his rusty Italian. “My name is Larry Fish. I’m from Cambridge in England. I’m doing some historical research and have been directed to your library. I wrote some weeks ago.”
“I do not recall your letter. Did you not receive a reply?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been travelling.”
The monk bowed. “What do you seek, my son?”
“My informant was uncertain, but she thought that you might be in possession of the works of Vincenzo Vincenzi.”
A look of surprise passed over the librarian’s face, but quickly vanished. “A moment.” He disappeared momentarily through a door and returned with a set of keys. He said, “Follow me.”
Webb followed the monk out of the neon-lit, computerized library back down the stairs to the cloister and past a refectory with a long, heavy table and a small lectern. At the end of the cloister-walk was another set of stairs and the monk led the way down them and along a cool, dark stone-lined passage which ended in a massive wooden door. The monk used two keys. From the push he gave it, Webb inferred that, underneath the wood veneer, the door was basically a slab of steel. The monk punched in a number on a keypad and then locked the door behind them. “To control humidity and temperature,” he said. “I must remain with you, but also I must attend compline in an hour. And tonight, of course, we celebrate the birth of our Saviour.”
Webb took a moment to wander while the Father librarian stood at the door. Some of the books predated Gutenberg; many could have bought a Rolls-Royce, or a yacht, or a house. Here, handwritten, was Vitellio’s medieval compendium on optics, and next to it Kepler’s “supplement to Vitellio,” his
Dioptrice
, in which he described the principle of the camera centuries before Daguerre. Here, unbelievably, was Nicolas of Cusa’s 1440
De docta ignorantia
of 1440, asserting that the universe is unbounded, and that all motion is relative, almost five hundred years before Einstein and the modern cosmologists. There was a little cluster of seventeenth-century comet books—Rockenbach, Lubienietski, Hevelius and others. And there was Copernicus’s
De revolutionibus orbium coelestium
—the 1617 Amsterdam edition—which had ushered in the painful birth of the scientific revolution. It was Aladdin’s cave, but Webb had no time to explore it. He turned to the monk, who simply said,
“Opere di Vincenzo, qui”
and took Webb to a shelf.
And there, indeed, were the
Opere
of Vincenzo; all but Volume Three.
“Volume Three, Father?”
“We have fifty thousand titles here, but unfortunately not the one you seek. It has been missing from our collection for sixty years.”
Webb’s heart sank. “How can I have been so misinformed? Volume Three was the one I sought.”
“And after sixty years, you are the second man to have asked for it in a week.”
You don’t say
. “To be frank with you, Father, I’m desperate to see it. I’m involved in a scholarly dispute which only the works of Vincenzo can resolve.”
The librarian lowered his voice conspiratorially. “Perhaps you should speak to our Father Abbot. At this time of day, after chapel, he is often in his study. Follow me.”
The librarian left Webb facing the Abbot across a large desk. A computer terminal on the desk struck the astronomer as somehow odd. Unmonklike, he imagined Noordhof saying. The man was middle-aged, with a thin face and a classical Roman nose. He spoke with easy authority, in English, and had bright, alert eyes.
“So, Mister Fish, you are from Cambridge. Which college is that?”
Webb tensed. “Churchill.”
“On Madingley Road, as I recall. It is many years now. Tell me, that little coffee shop on Silver Street—what was it called?”
“There are a few,” Webb guessed.
“Lyons? Was that it?”
With a start Webb realized that he was being tested. He avoided the trap: “Rings no bells, I’m afraid.”
“How odd. Everybody knew Lyons in my time at Cambridge. I wasted my youth there.” Webb raised his hands expansively, Italian-style, and the Abbot dismissed the matter. “It was so long ago. Perhaps it no longer exists. However, it
is not part of our Rule to engage in idle gossip. You seek the works of Vincenzo, Mister Fish. You see that our collection is incomplete. Are you aware of their history?”
“I understand that the partisans rescued them from the Nazis, along with sacred artefacts and works of art, at the end of the last war.”
The Abbot nodded. “It is also widely believed by local people that these things were returned to our monastery whence they were looted. Alas, Mister Fish, that persistent rumour is only partially true. Some treasures, some works of art, were not returned. The volume you seek is amongst them.”
Webb, feeling gutted, closed his eyes in despair.
The Abbot continued, “Vincenzo was a very minor actor in the great drama which was played out so long ago. Now had it been Galileo, great efforts would no doubt have been made to recover his works. But Vincenzo? Few have even heard of him.” The Abbot looked at Webb with curious intensity. “Is it so important, this scholarly dispute?”
“If only you knew, Father Abbot.”
“You can tell me no more?”
Webb shook his head.
The Abbot leaned back in his chair and looked at Webb thoughtfully over steepled hands. “I am left wondering what possible scholarly dispute can require such secrecy and lead to so much despair in your face.”
“I’m not at liberty to say. And I don’t come from Cambridge and my name isn’t Fish.”
The Abbot chuckled. “I thought as much. But we all have secrets to keep. I too have constraints on my freedom to talk.”
This guy knows something
, Webb thought, maybe from the confessional. He toyed with the mad idea of blurting out the whole Nemesis story but immediately dismissed the thought. It would be seen as the ravings of a lunatic. He also suspected that the Abbot, faced with a choice between betraying a
confession and permitting a holocaust, would tell the planet to get stuffed.
“You are leaving Italy soon?” the Abbot asked.
“I must. I came only for the manuscript.”
“All this way for a missing volume! If only I could help. Before you leave us, perhaps you should take the opportunity to see our monastery. There is an unusual mixture of styles here. You will have seen that our basilica is made in the style of a Greek cross, that is square, rather than in the medieval plan which has a long nave so as to represent the shape of the cross of Christ. The craftsmen who built our monastery were influenced by the Doric, which is simple and strong, rather than decorative. And yet our chapel is entered through a porch with a horizontal entablature supported by columns, more in the style of the decorative Corinthian order.” The Abbot smiled. “But I agree with your expression, Mister Fish. If you prefer, we can satisfy more bodily needs. We have many products. I recommend our liqueur, which is made of over thirty aromatic herbs according to a secret recipe which even I do not hold.”