The apartment’s owner lived abroad, but their downstairs neighbour kept two spare sets of keys. Cesco handed over cash for the next four days then let himself in. He put his gear in the single bedroom, leaving Carmen the double en suite. Now he needed supplies. There was a cluster of shops and a cafe downstairs, but it was also market day along the river embankment, so he spent a pleasurable forty minutes wandering among the stalls of gaudy shoes and stretchy bright clothes, haggling cheerfully with smallholders touting their own fresh produce, with fishmongers displaying their morning’s catch on trays that glittered with salt and ice.
Back in the apartment, he took a deckchair out onto a large balcony ringed by terracotta tubs. As the listing had promised, it looked right over the Busento, barely a stone’s throw from where it joined the Crati. A series of weirs had been built to regulate the river’s flow through the city, and there was one directly beneath, the roiled water at the foot of which had taken captive several plastic water bottles and chunks of white styrofoam, which now bobbed like exhausted salmon gathering themselves for their next leap. There he continued his refresher course, skimming papers on the early Church, the settlement patterns of barbarian tribes and the Roman emperors of late antiquity. In case Carmen asked him about his time at Oxford University, he investigated their postgraduate courses and found one led by a gorgeous, dark-eyed professor called Karen Porter, who’d recently written a book and fronted a TV series on the famous Sicilian city of Syracuse. He downloaded and played the first episode in the background as he read more papers, turning it up loud when his neighbours got into an argument and then again when a local politician drove by below, campaigning from the back of a pickup with loudspeakers strapped to its roof. He’d only just driven off when there came a loud rumble from across the river and Cesco glanced up to see a line of four black Harleys cruising along the far bank. He fell instantly to all fours and scrambled back inside. The bikes turned up a side street and disappeared. Dieter and his mates. But what the hell were they doing here? Had they tracked him somehow?
He searched again for his name online, but still found nothing. Then he realised. Any man nuts enough to have Alaric’s name tattooed across their back was sure to be drawn to news that his tomb was about to be discovered. Even so, he’d need to be careful whenever he went out. His van had already had its makeover; he himself had not. It was time for his hair and beard to go.
He took his scissors and electric razor into the bathroom then set to work.
The prison dig creaked slowly into life. A pair of police vans arrived, disgorging a dozen uniformed officers with riot gear who for some bizarre reason set up crash barriers around the proposed drill site, then stood there diligently guarding them, despite the heat. A ministry lawyer came next, driving a blue BMW. She was short and stout and furious, as if she’d been dragged here from her daughter’s wedding. She presented Kaufman and Zara with non-disclosure agreements to sign, in which they gave up rights to everything connected with the excavation and any discoveries they might make, threatening punishments for breach so absurdly over the top that Zara bridled as she read. ‘And if I say no?’ she asked.
‘I’m sure you have other places you could be. I know I do.’
Their mechanical digger finally arrived from Tel Aviv, on the back of a flatbed truck. It was a push-me-pull-you kind of device, its opposing arms fitted with a scoop and a jackhammer. They directed the operator to where they wanted him to drill, which was the furthest point from the prison wall that had a cavity beneath. Then they retreated into the shade and covered their ears as the jackhammer turned the bedrock into rubble that was then cleared with the scoop.
The noise was dreadful. The air filled with dust that clotted thickly in Zara’s mouth. She went to ask the operator how much longer it would take to make the breach. He shrugged and suggested at least two more hours. She retreated to her car, put the air con on and checked messages on her phone. To her mild surprise, they included dozens of notifications from a late antiquity discussion board that she helped moderate, and which rarely received that many in a month.
She went to see what had caused the fuss and found a link to a story about Visigothic artefacts in a Cosenza newspaper that had been posted by an American doctoral student called Carmen Nero, asking for help identifying a certain signet ring. And an identification was exactly what she’d got, linking it to a sealstone ring held by a Viennese museum, which bore around its perimeter the inscription:
ALARICVS REIKS GOTHORVM
Alaric, king of the Goths.
She got out of her car and went in search of Kaufman. He was lying stretched out on the front seats of the university van he’d brought, loaded with the various pieces of equipment they’d likely be needing later on. He woke groggily to her rap upon his window and removed his panama hat from over his face. ‘What is it?’ he asked.
She gave him her phone to look at as she explained the background. His eyebrow arched like a fishing rod at its first nibble. ‘Cosenza, you say?’
‘Not just that. On the bank of the Busento.’
He gave a grunt. ‘You wait two millennia for one lead…’
She looked across at the dig site. ‘What do you think? Should we say something?’
‘To whom? And whatever for? We’ll find it or we won’t. This doesn’t change that.’ He gestured vaguely at the jackhammer, still thundering away. ‘And we’ll have our answer soon enough.’