‘Why am I here?’ she asked with a shudder, glancing back to Gallo.
‘This -’ He led her forward to the body and snapped his flashlight on to illuminate its face.
For a few moments she couldn’t make out what he was pointing to, her attention grabbed by Ricci’s staring, bloodshot eyes and the way that, from the shoulders up, his skin had turned a waxy purple, like marble. But then, trapped in the light of Gallo’s torch, she saw it. A black shape, a disc of some sort, lurking in the roof of Ricci’s mouth.
‘What is it?’ she breathed.
‘That’s what you’re meant to be telling me,’ Gallo shot back.
‘Can I see it, then?’
Gallo snapped his fingers and la Fabro handed him a pair of tweezers. To Allegra’s horrified fascination, he levered the object free as if he was prising a jewel from an ancient Indian statue and then carefully deposited it inside an evidence bag, holding it out between his fingertips as if it contained something mildly repellent.
‘Knock yourself out,’ he intoned.
‘I thought it might be some sort of antique coin,’ Salvatore suggested eagerly over her shoulder as she turned it over in the light. ‘It seems to have markings etched into it.’
‘The ancient Romans used to put a bronze coin in the mouths of their dead to pay Charon to ferry their souls across the Styx to the Underworld,’ she nodded slowly. ‘But I don’t think that’s what this is.’
‘Why not?’
‘Feel the weight, it’s lead. That’s too soft to be used in everyday coinage.’
‘Then what about the engraving?’ Gallo asked impatiently.
She traced the symbol that had been inlaid into the coin with her finger. It showed two snakes intertwined around a clenched fist, like the seal from some mediaeval coat of arms.
‘I don’t know,’ she said with an apologetic shrug. ‘But whatever this is, it’s not an antique nor, I would say, particularly valuable.’
‘Well, that was useful.’ Glaring angrily at Salvatore, Gallo turned his back on Allegra as if she had suddenly vanished.
‘I’m sorry,’ Salvatore stuttered. ‘I thought that…’
‘We’ve wasted enough time. Let’s just get him bagged up and out of here so the forensic boys can move in,’ Gallo ordered as he turned to leave. ‘Then I want a priest or a cardinal or somebody else in sandals down here to tell me more about…’
‘It can’t be a coincidence though, can it, Colonel?’ Allegra called after him.
Gallo spun round angrily.
‘I thought you’d gone?’
‘It can’t be a coincidence that they killed him here?’ she insisted.
‘What the hell are you talking about?’
‘In Roman times, this entire area was part of the Campus Martius, a huge complex of buildings that included the Baths of Agrippa to the north, the Circus Flaminius to the south and the Theatre of Pompey to the west,’ she explained, pointing towards each point of the compass in turn. ‘The Senate even met here while the Curia was being rebuilt after a fire in 54 BC -’ she pointed at the floor - ‘in a space in the portico attached to the Theatre of Pompey.’
‘Here?’ Gallo looked around him sceptically, clearly struggling to reconcile the fractured ruins at his feet with the imagined grandeur of a Roman theatre.
‘Of course, the one drawback of this spot was that the Campus Martius stood outside the sacred pomerium, the city’s official boundaries, meaning that, although it was quieter than the Forum, it was not subject to the same restrictions against concealed weapons.’
‘What’s your point?’ Gallo frowned wearily, and she realised that she was going to have to spell it out for him.
‘I mean that Ricci isn’t the first person to be killed here,’ she explained, a tremor of excitement in her voice. ‘I mean that in 44 BC, Julius Caesar was assassinated on almost this exact same spot.’
The Getty Villa, Malibu, California 17th March - 10.52 a.m.
Verity Bruce had been looking forward to this day for a while. For nearly three years, to be precise. That’s how long it had been since she had first been shown the dog-eared Polaroid in a smoky Viennese café, first been winded by the adrenaline punch of excitement at what was on offer and chilled by the fear of possibly losing out.
She’d shaken on the deal there and then, knowing that the director would back her judgement. The trustees had taken a little more convincing, of course, but then they didn’t know the period like she did. Besides, once they’d understood the magnitude of the find, they’d bitten and bitten hard, sharing her mounting frustration at the years lost to the scientists as test upon test had heaped delay upon deferral until she was sure they must have finished and started all over again. And then, of course, the lumbering and self-perpetuating wheels of international bureaucracy had begun to turn, a merry-go-round of sworn affidavits, authentication letters, legal contracts, bank statements, money transfer forms, export and import licences and Customs declarations that had added months to the process. Still, what was done was done. Today, finally, the waiting ended.
She positioned herself in front of the fulllength mirror she’d had bolted to the back of her office door. Had the intervening years between that first breathless, absinthe-fuelled encounter and today’s unveiling aged her? A little, perhaps, around her fern-green eyes and in the tiny fissures that had begun to fleck her top lip like faint animal tracks across the snow. Ever since she’d turned forty-five, the years seemed to weigh a little heavier on her face, as if they were invisibly swinging from grappling hooks sunk into her skin. She could have had surgery, of course - God knows everyone else her age in LA seemed to have had work done - but she hated anything fake or forced like that. Highlights in her long, coiled copper hair were one thing, but needles and knives …Sometimes, nature had to be allowed to run its course.
Besides, she reminded herself as she put the finishing touches to her makeup, it wasn’t as if she’d lost her looks. How else to explain the fact that that gorgeous thirty-two-year-old speech writer she’d met at a White House fund-raiser the other month was pestering her to travel up to his place in Martha’s Vineyard next fall? And she still had great legs, too. Always had. Hopefully always would.
‘They’re ready for you.’
One of the Getty PR girls had edged tentatively into the room. Verity couldn’t remember her name, but then all these girls looked the same to her - blonde, smiley, skinny, jutting tits that would hold firm in a 6.1 - as if the city was ground zero in some freakish cloning experiment. Even so, the girl’s legs still weren’t as good as hers.
‘Let’s do it,’ she said, grabbing her leather jacket off the chair and slipping it over a black couture Chanel dress that she’d bought in Paris last year. It was an unlikely combination, but one deliberately chosen to further fuel the quirky image that she’d so carefully cultivated over the years. It was simple really. If you wanted to get ahead in the hushed and dusty corridors of curatorial academia without waiting to be as old as the exhibits themselves, it paid to get noticed. She certainly wasn’t about to tone things down now, despite the occasion, although she had at least upgraded from flats to a vertiginous pair of scarlet Manolos that matched her lipstick. After all, this was a ten-million-dollar acquisition and the Los Angeles Times would be taking pictures.
The small group of donors, experts and journalists that she and the director had hand-picked for this private viewing