“August!” his mother said. “Edsel, it’s Augustine!”
“I had an inkling when you shouted his name, Marie.”
“Here, you can hold it yourself. Say hi!”
“Your mother’s going to tell me every word to say, Augustine.”
“Be nice, Dad. She’s just excited.”
“Don’t I know it.”
Augie was stunned to hear his father sounding much better. He seemed to be working to make each word understood, but he was making sense. “How’re you feeling, Dad?”
“Like I’ve been in a coma. How’s Rome? Have you seen Michaels?”
“Yes, I told you I was with him. Listen, Dad, are you up for a puzzle?”
“I’d love to do a crossword or an anagram again, but I can’t hold a pen.”
“A friend of mine hid something for Roger and me to find, and he left us a clue we can’t figure out. Let Mom listen in and she can write this down for you.” Augie heard his mother rustling to find pen and paper.
Augie described the plain white sheet and lavender ink, and then read the handwritten couplet. “It’s from a poem from the—.”
“I know,” his father said. “St. Bernard in the 1100s. The thing’s been made into a Catholic hymn.”
Edsel Knox’s prodigious mind never ceased to amaze Augie.
“Could be something simple if the author is the key,” his father said. “He was known as Bernard of Clairvaux. French. He was an abbot, ‘a doctor of the church’ they called him at one point. He judged pope candidates once. Considered Pope Eugenius his best friend. Kind of a friend to Protestants now, because he was skeptical of the Immaculate Conception of Mary and an early proponent of justification. That help at all?”
“I’m scribbling, Dad. I don’t know. Somehow we’ve got to narrow this down.”
“I’ll work on it.”
“I appreciate it. You need a goal, something to shoot for? I’m going to ask Sofia to marry me in Texas in August.”
“That’s not the way these things go, Augustine. Her father will be paying for the wedding, so you just show up, I assume in Greece.”
“But if we have it in Texas, I’d love to have you there.”
“Who cares if I’m there?”
“I just told you who cares.”
The scandal exploded in the Italian press and swept the globe by late morning. Sofia’s father’s involvement seemed to shock all of Greece, and the prosecution laughed off his lawyer’s attempt to plea bargain in exchange for testifying against Aldo Sardinia. The chief prosecutor told Emmanuel, “Se avessi qualsiasi ulteriori prove contro Mr Sardinia, mi sentirei colpevole per l’eccesso” [“If I had any more evidence against Mr. Sardinia, I would feel guilty about overkill.”]
Sofia rushed home to be with her mother, who was desperate to defend herself against the vultures already circling their business. Augie had driven her to the airport at dawn and offered to fly with her, but Sofia insisted he stay and work with Emmanuel and Roger until they found Paul’s memoir.
“Does your mother believe the charges, Sofia? Or will your dad convince her he was framed?”
“Too late for that. The first thing she said was, ‘It’s true, isn’t it?’ She told me she knew his reputation would come crashing down someday, because she was once in charge of his books.”
Georgio Emmanuel said Malfees would wind up in an Italian prison. If that happened, Augie hoped to persuade Mrs. Trikoupis to move to the United States with her daughter, but all in good time.
Roger immediately moved back to his apartment and began letting his hair and beard grow again. He broadcast online notices to travel companies, letting them know he was back in business. The press hounded him for interviews, few of which he turned down.
Augie phoned Les Moore to let him know he would be at least a few days late for his summer-school assignment, expecting a threat or at least a lecture. But Les said, “You’re all over the news here. It’s as if you’re our own Indiana Jones. Don’t come back without the memoir!”
Augie laughed. “It won’t likely ever leave Italy again, but I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
Augie talked to his parents at least once a day, careful not to push but eager to know whether his dad had made any progress on the puzzle. Meanwhile Augie worked with five analysts assigned to Emmanuel’s office. They had been poring over Giordano’s letter and generating lists of potential target cities suggested by every detail they could uncover about St. Bernard of Clairvaux.
Despite the colonel injecting himself into the effort, they had accomplished little. Italians were already clamoring for recovery of the artifact, and guesses to its nature ranged from the Holy Grail to the Ark of the Covenant.
Colonel Emmanuel was giving a pep talk to Augie and the other analysts, urging them to concentrate on Greece, “because despite all the other possibilities raised by the Bernard connection, one thing we know for sure is that Giordano flew there and back the day after the heist.”
Augie had forgotten to silence his phone, so when it rang he stepped into the hall.
“Mom, what time is it there?”
“Three in the morning,” she said, “but your father insists on talking to you. He made me turn on the light and find my notes. He ignored the poem and kept asking about my other scribbles.”
“Let me talk to Augustine!”
“All right, Edsel. Calm yourself. Here.”
“Philippi,” Augie’s father said. “That’s where you’re going to find what you’re looking for.”
“How in the world did you figure that out?”
“The guy who wrote this, where’s he from?”
“Here. He’s Italian.”
“Yet he wrote this in English. That’s important. You said he wrote it in colored ink. Think that through and concentrate on the first two words, and you’ll see it works only in English. Then it’ll dawn on you.”
“Just tell me, Dad. I’ve been working on this for days.”
“Don’t worry, you’ll get it” Click.
Augie rushed back into Emmanuel’s office. “Excuse me, Colonel, but forget the author. Focus on the fact that Klaudios wrote this in English and in colored ink. We’re supposed to get Philippi out of that.”
“Where in Philippi?”
“It’s supposed to be obvious, but I have no idea.”
A young woman at a laptop spoke as if thinking aloud. “Color. Lavender. Purple.”
“That’s it!” Augie shouted, smacking his head with both hands. “Give me an anagram for Daily ….”
Georgio was the first to respond. “Lydia!”
Augie dropped into a chair. “The Apostle Paul met Lydia of Thyatira, the seller of purple-dyed cloth, at a riverside in Philippi. She became the first European and the first female convert to Christianity.”
Georgio dismissed the others and told Augie, “If we can connect Klaudios to Philippi, we’ll find the manuscript.”
“Roger knew him better,” Augie said, punching in his number.
As soon as Augie told him of his father’s solution to the mystery, Roger said, “I know right where we’re going to find the memoir. Remember that beautiful outdoor chapel in Philippi, with the little brook and the Baptistery of St. Lydia?”
“Sure.”
“And the gorgeous little Greek Orthodox Church of St. Lydia on the grounds there—all kinds of original art on the walls?”
“Been there many times.”
“Ever seen that wiry little guy, looks like he’s two hundred years old, who hands out pamphlets in there?”
“Yeah, but he hardly says anything.”
“That’s him. You ready for this? He’s some distant relative of Klaudios.”
“Get out! I thought Klaudios’s whole family was Catholic.”
“I’m telling you, they squabble like brothers, but they’re related. We find that guy—I’m trying to remember his name, it’s got a z in it—and I guarantee we find the memoir.”
“Tell Roger we’ll pick him up,” Georgio said. “We’re going to pay a visit to Klaudios’s widow, then the three of us will fly to Philippi.”
Somehow Emmanuel talked his superiors into the use of a private jet and also put someone to work determining an appropriate reward for the two men responsible if Italy were to recover the most prized antiquity in history.
Just before noon, Mrs. Giordano confirmed that Yuri Zodiates, a caretaker at the Church of St. Lydia in Philippi, was Klaudios’s uncle. “Most of the family shunned him, but Klaudios enjoyed him and saw him whenever he traveled to Philippi.You will find that he also does not believe Klaudios would ever steal.”
On the way to the airport, Emmanuel said, “I didn’t want to spoil her image of her husband. Down deep she must know. Still, Klaudios should have been charged, not murdered.”
“Philippi is less than 150 kilometers from Thessaloniki,” Augie said. “I’d hate to leave Sofia out of this when she’s so close. No idea whether she’d leave her mother for a while ….”
“It’s all right with me,” Georgio said. “She can pick us up at the airstrip in Alexandros and save us a few euros. She deserves to come.”
A couple of hours later the three men greeted Sofia and followed her to a late-model Mercedes four-door.
As soon as they were on the road, headed toward the foot of Mount Orbelos, Georgio said, “L’ironia non è perso su di me”
“No fair,” Augie said. “Speak English.”
Roger said, “He told her the irony was not lost on him. I’ll bet we’re closing the loop on all of this in Trikoupis’s own car.” “It’s true,” Sofia said.
When they arrived and walked past the Baptistery of St. Lydia on their way to the church, they passed a busload of tourists leaving the outdoor chapel. Augie said, “I’ll be right there,” and stopped to examine trinkets offered by an elderly matron. He gave her three euros for an ichthus ring no thicker than a wire, then hurried to catch up.
The others were waiting at the stairs leading to a triple-arched entryway. They filed into the narthex, which featured a painting of Hagios Paulos (Saint Paul) holding that very church in one hand and a white Bible in the other. Next to a marble cabinet, which held candles for sale, sat a tiny priest in all black. He had tied back the long, straggly hair that protruded from a chimney pot-style hat, and he sported an untrimmed patchy white beard. He sat so still that he could have been a carving.
Roger knelt before him. “Remember me, Yuri?”
The old man blinked. “The voice,” he breathed.
“Yes! You remember my voice! Imagine me with my bushy gray beard.”
Finally Yuri focused and smiled. “Klaudios said you would come,” he managed, crossing himself right to left. “Rest his soul. I will need help getting downstairs.”
Yuri accepted Roger’s outstretched hand and slowly pulled himself upright. The four followed him down a narrow staircase to a small office where he unlocked a cabinet to reveal a rough-hewn wooden box measuring about twenty-four by twenty inches. The initials RM had been penned atop it in lavender ink.
“Got to be sure this is it before we haul it out of here,” Emmanuel said. “Mr. Zodiates, do you have a screwdriver or a hammer?”
Yuri rummaged through an old metal desk and found an oversize pair of scissors.
Roger hefted the box from the cabinet, and Emmanuel carefully used the scissors to work at the top pieces of wood. When he finally broke through, he gingerly lifted out the bubble-wrapped stack of about five hundred sheets of ancient parchment.
“Please,” Augie said, “don’t anyone touch them.”
As if on cue, everyone pulled out their cell phones and began shooting pictures, even the old priest.
Finally Georgio said, “This isn’t standard operating procedure, but shouldn’t someone pray?”
The five of them held hands and Augie said, “Father, we are overcome. We feel unworthy, yet blessed beyond measure. When we think of the man who penned these pages and what he endured for Your sake, we are reminded of what Your Son endured for us. We say with the Apostle Paul himself, who wrote to the believers in this very city: ‘Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though He was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made Himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.
“‘And being found in human form, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted Him and bestowed on Him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.’
“Thank You in the name of Jesus the Christ, our Lord and our Redeemer. Amen.”
As they made their way back to the car, Roger—tears streaming— carried the box. On the flight back Georgio used a satellite phone to announce to his superiors the procurement of the memoir. They arranged a press conference for the following morning. There Roger officially presented to Italy the most valuable antiquity ever discovered.
Roger and Augie received checks for two hundred fifty thousand euros each. “Depending on how soon you cash this,” Roger told Augie, “it should net you somewhere between three hundred thirty and three hundred fifty thousand dollars.”