“Yes, but not in detail. Perhaps you could tell me more.”
As she began to pour out her story, he sensed that it was something she had bottled up for years, that a ghost was being laid to rest. He listened attentively. “My brother was a partisan. His father disowned him and so this house has come to me. It happened in 1944. The Allies had moved inland from Anzio and already they were shelling Grottaferrata. Kesselring had summoned forces out of nothing and the battle was a hard one. But by May the Germans were streaming north. And then we heard that they had filled a train with munitions and guns, but also with wine and sacred relics from the Monastery. This was too much. Our own former Allies robbing us as they fled. And then God created for us a miracle. The train with the holy relics and the wine and the guns was stopped at a tunnel. One of their big guns was too wide to go through. For the first time the fascisti and the partisans joined forces. In the dark we attacked. We killed Germans.
“And then was the great tragedy. While the Germans were still being killed, and we were quickly unloading the wagons, we started to fight amongst ourselves. In the dark I ran away along the railway track, with my arms full of whatever I had snatched. But then two partisans jumped out from the ditch of the embankment. They had machine guns. They raised them to shoot me. The air was full of noise and smoke. In the half dark I recognized my brother and he recognized me. There was only a second to act. He turned his gun on his friend, a boy from the same village. He killed his friend to save me, his sister and enemy. We did not say a word. I ran into the dark.
“We have never spoken of this. As to what I had rescued from the train, it was worth little. Communion wine, silver cups, candlesticks, and a few old books. I never dared to return them.”
She smiled. “I am glad that Franco has decided to speak at last. He must believe that after all this time the boy’s family will forgive him.”
A small boy appeared at the door, followed by his even smaller, dark-eyed sister, finger in mouth. The old lady continued: “Your colleague tells me that you will need peace and quiet to study the book. The children are excited by Natale, but will be in bed soon. Non sul letto, Ghigo, tu sei senza cervello?” The children ran off giggling. She stood up.
“I’m very grateful to you, Signora. I wish you good night and every happiness.”
Webb opened the French windows. He was light-headed from a mixture of relief and exhaustion. A cool breeze flowed into the room, bringing some sub-tropical scent with it. Car headlights were drifting up and down the distant autostrada. Some animal cry came up from the olive groves below, and he could hear the wind rustling through the poplars at the side of the villa.
He had the book.
He looked at the ancient leather cover. Faded gold lettering said Phaenomenis Novae. Underneath was printed Tomo III.
It was old and faded. It had a musty smell. On the flyleaf was a date, 1643, and a neatly written dedication in Italian
To the Most Illustrious, Esteemed and Generous Leopoldo, Granduca di Toscana
And below that, the name of the author, Father Vincenzo of the Order of Preachers.
Across the top of the flyleaf someone had written cremandum fore in a thin, neat hand, then scored out the cremandum and replaced it with prohibendum.
Webb flicked through the pages.
It was more of an astronomer’s working notebook than a manuscript. There was page after page of a faded spidery scrawl in Latin and Italian, page after page of drawings — the moons of Jupiter, sunspots, lunar craters — hot off the eyepiece of Vincenzo’s telescope. The bold new frontier of science, of nearly four centuries ago.
The key to Nemesis, in his hands.
So run off into the dark night?
Pascolo: mine host, or a jailer?
The dogs: friendly, or killers on a snap of the fingers from Pascolo?
Webb looked at his watch. 10 p.m. Two in the afternoon in Arizona, 4 p.m. in Washington.
Eight hours.
A twinge of pain in the jaw warned Webb that he had been unconsciously clenching it. His hands trembling, he picked up the typescript and began to read.
Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto
A hundred pages. Drawings, charts, notes. Written in a scrawl both flowery and spidery, the ink little faded after four hundred years. Webb had no way of guessing what the Grand Duke had thought of Vincenzo’s work, if indeed he had ever set eyes on it.
The apparent lack of supervision had to be an illusion: somewhere, a mechanism for control was in place. But the identification of the crucial text was going to take the same length of time wherever he was, and at least here he wasn’t fleeing over mountains and could study Phaenomenis. Webb looked at his watch. He would give himself until midnight, and then make his break.
Resisting the urge to rush at it, he started slowly and methodically through the pages of Phaenomenis. It took him half an hour.
Nothing.
He rubbed his eyes and slipped quietly down the darkened stairs to the kitchen. Childish sleeping noises came from one of the rooms as he passed. He found the light switch and went into the big kitchen. He made himself a sandwich with salami and a rosetta, and tiptoed back up to his room with it. Of jailers or dogs, there had been not a sign.
Back in his room, Webb went through it again, a line at a time.
He was beginning to see a problem with Vincenzo: there was nothing Novae about his Phaenomenis. He had always come second. Sunspots, craters on the Moon, the satellites of Jupiter: they were all there, but they had all been seen earlier by somebody else. Galileo, Huygens, Schroter — these were the sharp men of the new age, and they had all been there before him. Vincenzo had tried; but at the end of the day, he was a failure.
And still nothing.
Webb started on it a third time.
Line one: Observationes an 1613.
Line two: oriens Januarius occidens
The remaining page was taken up by a simple drawing:
The page was completed by a couple of lines at its foot:
Die 2, h.12 a meridie. 1 et 3 conjuncti fuerunt secundum longitudinem.
So. On 2nd January 1613, at midnight, Jupiter had satellites 4 and 2 (that would be Callisto and Europa) on its left, with 1 and 3 (Io and Ganymede) to the right. Io and Ganymede had then changed places in the early hours of the third.
All of which could be worked out in minutes on a modern computer.
He nibbled at his sandwich; it was painfully spicy. Every page was turning out much the same as the last. None of them connected with hysterically screaming terrorists and determined killers, let alone Nemesis.
Webb took another break; he was beginning to have a problem with keeping his eyes open.
He put out the lamp and walked on to the verandah. A half-moon hung low in the sky, and the fields and hills glowed a gentle silver. Far to the north the horizon was tinged with orange; that would be Rome and the villages of the Castelli, and the towns scattered over the Campagna. He took five minutes to breathe in the honeysuckled air.
A solitary car was hurtling down the autostrada. Probably, someone heading back for a long weekend with his family in Naples or Palermo, escaping from a car factory in Turin or Milan where the young men of the mezzogiorno went to make big money. He went back in, switched on the lamp, and started on his third read of the book.