‘He was retired from the university. I have no idea what kind of professor he was but there were so many books in his flat when he died.’ Frau Lang spoke in German to her husband. ‘Hans says they were mostly science and engineering books so maybe that was his field.’
‘And there were no relatives?’
‘None. The authorities checked, of course. We had to go through a formal process before we were entitled to sell his belongings to satisfy the unpaid portion of the rental agreement. We didn’t do so well out of the process. The man had no significant possessions. More cake?’
Micaela nodded happily and accepted another slice before asking, ‘Did you ever notice anything odd about him? Physically?’
Frau Lang shook her head. ‘No. Whatever do you mean? He was just an ordinary-looking older gentleman.’
‘So, there’s nothing left in the flat?’ Elisabetta asked, leaving her sister hanging.
‘No. Of course we’ve had new people, a nice couple living there since 2008.’
Elisabetta shook her head slightly. She’d call the university, see if she could track down any former colleagues. There was nothing left to be done here.
The baker said something gruffly in German.
‘Hans reminded me,’ his wife said. ‘We kept a small box of personal belongings, things like his passport, the items in his bedside table in case a relative ever appeared.’
The sisters looked up hopefully. ‘Can we see it?’ Elisabetta asked quickly.
Frau Lang spoke to her husband in German again and Elisabetta made out curse words as he pushed himself off the sofa and headed out the door.
‘He’ll get it. It’s in the basement,’ Frau Lang said, frowning after him and pouring more tea.
In five minutes the baker came back with a cardboard box the size of a briefcase. It was clean and dry, and had obviously been stored with some care. He handed it to Elisabetta, mumbled something to his wife and appeared to be excusing himself with a small bow.
Frau Lang looked embarrassed. ‘Hans is going to take his nap now. He wishes you a good trip home.’
Elisabetta and Micaela started to rise but the baker shooed them down with a wave of his hands and disappeared into another room.
The box was light; its contents shifted in Elisabetta’s hands when she transferred it to her lap. She pulled apart the tucked-in corners and looked in. A stale mustiness escaped, an old-man smell.
Reading glasses. Fountain pens. A passport. A bronzed medal on a ribbon from, as far as she could tell, a German engineering society. Checkbooks and bank statements from 2006 and 2007. Pill bottles which Micaela inspected and whose contents she declared to be for high blood pressure. A box of dentures. A fading Kodachrome of a young man, Ottinger himself perhaps, in hiking gear on a steep green slope. At the very bottom was an unsealed Manila envelope with a handwritten note on the outside, written finely in black ink.
Elisabetta lifted out the envelope, prompting Frau Lang to remark that it contained a book, the only one they hadn’t sold because of the personal note. Elisabetta, who had a passable grasp of written German, read the note to herself slowly, translating as best she could.
To my teacher, my mentor, my friend. I found this in the hands of a dealer and I enticed him to part with it. You, more than anyone, will appreciate it. It is the B Text, of course. As you always taught – B holds the key. 11 September is surely a sign, don’t you think? I hope you will be with us when M’s day finally comes. K. October 2001.
Beneath the date was a small hand-drawn symbol.
This sight of it made Elisabetta’s head swim.
There was something strangely familiar about it, real and unreal at the same time, as if she’d seen it before in a long-forgotten dream.
She tried to shrug off the feeling as she opened the envelope. Inside was a slim bound book. Its cover was plain, worn leather, ever so slightly warped. The pages were a bit foxed. It was an old book in fairly good condition.
When she opened the cover her head cleared as effectively as if she’d taken a strong whiff of smelling salts.
Elisabetta didn’t think she’d ever seen the engraving before, but part of it was as recognizable as her own reflection in the mirror.
It was a 1620 edition of Marlowe’s The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, and there on the frontispiece was the old conjuror wearing his academic robes, standing inside his magic circle with his staff and his book, summoning the devil through the floor. The devil was a winged creature with horns, a pointy beard and a long curled tail.
None of that made Elisabetta’s heart race or her skin crawl. None of it made her feel like she was suffocating under her tight veil and gown.
The source of her alarm lay around and within the rim of the magic circle.
Constellation signs.
Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer.
Star signs.
The moon, Mercury, Venus, the sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, presented in the same peculiar order as on the fresco at St Callixtus.
And peeking out to the right of Faustus’s robes was Pisces, tilted upright, looking for all the world like a man with a tail.
EIGHT
Rome, AD 37
DUSK WAS TURNING to night as two weary boys trudged up the road toward the city centre. An insipid quarter-moon hung limply in the black sky, dimly lighting the way. In silence they kept close to the stinking central gutter to avoid worse piles of refuse that littered their way.
‘Where will we sleep?’ the youngest asked fearfully as they passed a gloomy alley.
‘I’ve no idea,’ snapped his older brother. Sensing the seven-year-old’s abject misery he relented. ‘The father of my friend, Lucius, says he sleeps in the cattle market whenever he stays in Rome. We’ll find a place there.’
Clasping his brother’s hand, the younger child shivered. His loose tunic barely warded off the chill.
‘Are we nearly there? At the cattle market?’ he enquired hopefully.
Quintus groaned, having heard a variant of the same question at least a hundred times that day.
‘Yes, Sextus, soon we’ll have somewhere warm to rest, after we’ve had a bite to eat.’
They were travelling to their uncle’s brick manufactory in the north of Rome, on the Pincian Hill, and they were hungry and exhausted following a dawn departure from their village. At least they’d made it through the walls, into the city. The two huge Praetorians with scorpion emblems affixed to their breastplates at the Porta Capena had given them a world of trouble and tried to shake them down for a bribe. But they had no coins, nothing at all and they had to prove it by stripping themselves bare and enduring the taunts of the fearsome soldiers.
Quintus, the older by three years, had wondered if his father had looked like these men. Only the vaguest of memories lingered. He was a toddler when the centurion left for active service in Germania. Their mother had to fend for herself with only the help of two older girls to tend their smallholding and look after Quintus and his baby brother.
Only a fortnight ago, their mother had gotten notice of her husband’s death in battle against the Cheruscii. On further learning that the bastard had frittered away his accumulated pay on wine and whores all she could do was shed futile tears.
Faced with crippling debts, she quickly sold her land for a pittance to a rich patrician. She and her daughters would have to survive by hiring themselves out as labourers and cloth weavers, but she could ill afford to feed two useless mouths. Rather than sell them into slavery she made the somewhat more humane decision to send the boys to their uncle to earn their keep there.