The helicopter gave wide berth to Sicilì, lest the noise of its approach alert the ’Ndrangheta to their arrival. They set down instead in the empty car park of a pizzeria on the Caselle road, where four unmarked police cars were arranged as promised in a square, their headlights marking out their landing area. Baldassare was first out, running hunched beneath the blades to where Giuseppe, the Sapri station chief, was waiting with his retired policeman Zeno, a grizzled, short, broad-shouldered man with a piercing eye and a crunching handshake.
They squeezed together into the back seat of the lead car. Zeno repeated the story he’d told Baldassare once already, for it had been largely drowned out by the relentless roar of the helicopter cabin. How he’d thought it prudent to survey the cottage first, so had hidden behind a cactus hedge to watch while his wife drove by with her headlights on full beam before turning around at the bottom of the hill and driving back past again. ‘There are at least two of them,’ he said. ‘One in the trees by the back door. The second on a bench by the pond. There may be more inside, but I didn’t see them.’
‘Outstanding work, officer. Truly outstanding. And you’ll thank your wife for me, if I don’t get the chance myself?’
Zeno flushed. ‘Of course, Judge. She’ll be honoured.’
The cottage lay the far side of Sicilì. They slowed as they approached, staggering their arrival to avoid the look of a convoy. The place was still and quiet, as befitted an Italian hill village in the small hours. Yet precisely because it was so still and quiet, their presence was likely to be spotted soon, however discreet they were.
If they were to take these people by surprise, they needed to go in now.
Zara stood back against the wall of the sarcophagus chamber, the better to film Dov and his men as they tried in vain to storm the Roman gates. She had no appetite for her assignment any more, yet she carried on with it all the same out of some vague hope that if she pretended that everything was normal, Avram and Dov would let her live. Perhaps. But, if not, it was just about possible that this footage might one day provide the evidence that locked them all up for life.
Brute force failed to budge the gates. No surprise there. They’d by now stripped them of their veneer, revealing the massive slab of granite behind. Yonatan and three others hurried off upstairs to fetch down the tools they’d brought to open the marble tomb. But that had been a completely different proposition to this. And once they’d emptied all their bags onto the floor, the only tools even worth trying were the sledgehammer and the spike – a brute to wield in the confined space, barely even chipping the granite. They needed some kind of jackhammer, that was the truth of it. A jackhammer and several hours. But they had neither.
Avram started checking his watch at regular intervals. As if he’d set himself a deadline, and they were almost at it. Hope began to desert Zara. Dread took its place. She looked around for Carmen and Cesco and saw them at the doorway. There was a brightness in Carmen’s eye as she gazed, not at the gates of Rome themselves, nor at the men attacking it, but at the skyscape above their heads. Zara turned to look at it herself, curious as to what Carmen had seen. And suddenly she had it too. She cried out so loudly in her excitement and relief that everyone turned to look. And now they all saw it too.
The moon was set too high in the wall for them to apply pressure from the chamber floor. They gathered around the sarcophagus instead, working it back and forth until they slid it from its plinth and over to the wall. It took all of them to lift its lid back on, to give themselves a platform on which to stand. Then they clambered up upon it and pressed the head of the sledgehammer against the moon’s pitted surface. They all took hold of its long handle and pushed together. And pushed. And pushed. A faint grating noise spurred them on. It ceded with painful slowness until it stopped and would go no further.
They looked around at each other, wondering what now. A faint scratching noise came from deep inside the wall, followed by the ghostly groan of wind in a ruined building. A moment of silence, then an eerie clanking of chains, as some antique system of counterweights was waking from its long slumber. A low thud made the whole chamber tremble, showering them with grit and dust and prompting them to jump down from the sarcophagus. Then the gates of Rome gave a little shiver and began, with painful slowness, to rise like a portcullis up into the ceiling.
Too much had happened for Avram to keep his promise of priority. But Zara meant to be first anyway. She went down onto her stomach and wriggled beneath its base, careless of her back and buttocks scraping against its crushing weight. Then she was through and standing up on the other side, at the foot of a dusty white marble staircase plenty tall enough to keep whatever lay at its head safe from the Bussento should the antechambers flood. Others now came crawling in behind her. Carmen and Cesco, Yani with his gun, Dov and Yonatan and Avram too, each pausing a moment to absorb what they saw.
The staircase was wide enough for two, but Zara had no intention of sharing this moment, not if she could avoid it, so she stuck resolutely to the middle, claiming priority for her camera. Her legs trembled as she ascended; her heart beat in wild and unfamiliar rhythms, hungry to discover what lay ahead, yet fearful of disappointment too, and what would follow.
Matching oyster-shell niches had been cut into the walls either side. Oil lamps of exquisite craftsmanship alternated with ivory statuettes of beautiful young women at daily tasks: with alabaster vases painted with scenes of love and hunting and war; with bowls of wrought silver filled with precious and semi-precious stones; with golden caskets of ancient coins, of brooches and belt buckles. And these were just the stairs! She heard something being unzipped behind her and glanced around to see Yonatan opening a pouch on his neoprene suit in order to tip a bowl of gemstones into it.
‘That’s not what we’re here for,’ Avram told him angrily.
‘It’s not what you’re here for,’ retorted Yonatan. And it was like a starting gun for Dov’s men, who now grabbed whatever came to hand. Only Yani kept his discipline, covering the three of them with his gun.
They reached the top step, followed closely by Avram carrying four of the yellow waterproof bags over his shoulder for his own sacred spoils. A short landing led to a wide arched doorway covered by a curtain of thick purple velvet so ancient that, when Zara tried to ease it gently to one side, it fell in a crumpled heap at her feet, throwing up a thick cloud of dust like a magician’s squib, making them all blink and cough before it cleared again to reveal the chamber behind in the confusion of beams from their torches and helmet lamps.
Zara stood there a moment to drink it in. Never in her most fevered dreams had she imagined such a place. Its ceiling first – tall and domed and gleaming like a Byzantine chapel with gold and turquoise, with ruby and with emerald. The walls next, decorated with extraordinary mosaics of pastoral beauty, of gentle woodland whose boughs were bent by ripened fruit, of docile wildlife and a cascading river by which a pair of golden-haired young women in bright white gowns stooped to fill golden amphorae. As for the floor, it was laid with tiles of black and white – though in truth she couldn’t see much of it from where she stood, so crowded was it with grave goods of astonishing richness and variety. But the heart of the chamber was different again, taken up as it was by a raised oval platform on which was arrayed the armour from the sculpture downstairs along with the skeletal remains of a pair of hunting dogs and a warhorse in ceremonial tack, arranged around a tall stepped plinth of pink marble upon which rested a golden anthropoid coffin of a size and grandeur to make Tutankhamun weep.
A nudge from behind. The others were pressing in. Zara had that numb, disembodied feeling as she walked, as if on a mattress of thick foam. Everywhere she turned her camera lay treasures more spectacular than the last. A long table to the right of the doorway was covered by a golden cloth laden with platters of desiccated meat, with crusted goblets and bowls of finely wrought silver containing the shrivelled husks of ancient fruit, with stoppered amphorae and jewelled caskets whose once exotic delights had long since been reduced to dust. Beyond that, a miser’s attic of wooden chests stacked one upon the other, packed to overflowing with gold and silver coins, with jewellery and precious stones that had overspilled their vessels and fallen to the floor where they lay like iridescent gravel. A giant silver font on a porphyry stand contained a basin with a tall golden candleholder and a golden lamb from whose mouth holy water would once have poured. A half-dozen painted marble statues of the apostles clustered together, as if in conference. A majestic silver throne, its back and arms inlaid with amber, corals and other stones. A piece whose purpose she couldn’t grasp, but seemingly made from solid gold, and decorated with enamelled bees and leaping dolphins with sapphires for their eyes.
Yet, despite all these and other wonders, she still hadn’t seen what they’d come here for. She continued her circuit of the chamber, therefore, picking her way between the pieces, and suddenly her hopes were lifted by the sight of a sturdy long table on which six silver trumpets stood upon their bells next to a tall wide object covered by a thick embroidered white cloth. She drew closer. The trumpets were inscribed with antique Hebrew script. Her heart hammered like a woodpecker at a tree. Her left hand trembled wildly as she held her camera out to one side to capture the moment as she pulled the cloth off with her right. And there it was at last, glorious and unmistakeable, a massive, seven-branched candelabra that gleamed every bit as brightly as her dreams of it. She gave a low moan at the sight. She set down the camera on the table, angling it to catch what she was about to do next. She paused for a moment out of respect then took its stem and one of its branches in her hands, braced her legs and tried to lift. But it was too heavy for her. Far too heavy. She couldn’t even tip it towards her. There was no question of this one being anything other than gold. She began to laugh at the realisation of everything this meant, and her laughter had a manic tinge to it, and it spread like a hot fever amongst Avram, Dov and their men, who all now began laughing too, laughing drunkenly at this extraordinary triumph and their sudden obscene wealth, so that it seemed that nothing could taint the moment.
But life has a way of punishing hubris. There was a panicked scamper of footsteps from the stairs at that moment, and they all looked around to see Ezra arriving in the doorway, breathing hard and with a hand to his side. ‘The river,’ he panted, even as he gazed in awe around the chamber. ‘It’s started running.’