The Heretic Scroll Page 11

  He frowned suddenly. She was doing this because of their shared suspicion that the scroll was actually by St Mark. But what if that was wrong? What if it truly was just another Philodemus? No reason then for Carmen to run the risk. And maybe he could answer that himself, by finding Raff’s photos of it.

  He threw back the duvet and sprang with purpose to his feet.

  II

  Romeo Izzo kissed Mario fondly on his crown and told him to be good at school, then left him in Isabella’s care and set off for the station on foot. It was cold out, and breezy, and soon it began to rain, if only lightly. He put his hood up and increased his pace, though it only seemed to make him wetter.

  Valentina Messana was already at her desk when he arrived. Neither was much for morning chat. They grunted at one another instead. To his gratification as well as his surprise, Onofrio had been true to his word. The preliminary forensic and medical reports were indeed waiting on his desk, as promised. He fixed himself a cup of filthy but strong coffee, then took the reports to the corner armchair, turning it so that the sunrise was at his back, making the small print easier on his eyes. The medical report began with photographs of the victim, his legs, torso and face charred to such gruesome ugliness that, for all Izzo’s years as a policeman, he found them difficult to look at. ‘Hell!’ he muttered. ‘You should see these.’

  ‘Already did,’ said Messana.

  After the photographs, the report came almost as a relief. Conte had been forty-one years old, one metre eighty-one tall and ninety-two kilos – though both those measurements had, for obvious reasons, only been approximate. He had had a pin in his left leg from a bike accident, but otherwise had been in good health – though Onofrio drew attention to two points of particular interest. The first, a fresh fracture in Raphael Conte’s right parietal bone, corroborating his sister’s report of blood on his head. The second, significant if still preliminary traces of a class of psychoactive drugs called benzodiazepines, most likely flunitrazepam, better known as Rohypnol, drug of choice for date rapists everywhere. ‘See this about the Rohypnol?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Any thoughts?’

  ‘They didn’t want him waking from the bang they gave him.’

  ‘Or maybe they weren’t as cruel as it looked.’

  ‘Sure. Hearts of gold.’

  The coffee and the report each left a bitter taste. He fetched a bottle of sparkling water from the fridge, then turned to Onofrio’s scene-of-crime report. The blaze had destroyed much potential evidence. But he’d recovered the molten remains of a mobile phone, a laptop and several pieces of photographic equipment. More tellingly, he’d also found an old Nokia phone that appeared to have been taped to a crude but effective homemade detonator and one of the five-litre water bottles filled with kerosene that had been spotted on the Lamborghini’s floor. This would have been triggered when the Discovery arrived, melting the plastic and igniting the fuel within, which in turn had melted the other containers, explaining reports of a moderate first blaze followed by the raging conflagration that had so quickly consumed Raffaele Conte and his car.

  Izzo turned the page to find Cesco Rossi’s photographs presented in chronological order. The yellow Lamborghini had already been on fire in the first shot, of course. That was what had prompted Rossi to grab his camera. Lucia Conte was scrabbling frantically at the driver’s door as Carmen Nero watched in obvious horror, while Taddeo Santoro, Rupert Alberts and Professor D’Agostino were still climbing out of the Discovery. The next shot now. Lucia stooping for a rock as the flames inside the car grew visibly fiercer, and black smoke leaked from the windows and bonnet. And a blur inside that might have been the top of Raffaele Conte’s head as he started to sit up. The third photograph now, and yes, Raffaele Conte was now sitting upright, looking groggy and bewildered as his sister hammered at his window. In the fourth, his horrified realisation of what was happening. And now the fifth, the last before he was engulfed, glaring impotently through the windscreen in the general direction of Taddeo Santoro, Carmen Nero, Rupert Alberts and Professor D’Agostino – and indeed of Cesco Rossi too. What with the smoke and tinted glass, it was impossible to follow his eyeline with precision; but there was no mistaking the hatred and fury in his gaze, stronger even than his fear, as if he knew exactly who’d done this to him.

  And it was one of them.

  III

  Carmen Nero set off for the National Library in excellent time to reach Rare Books & Manuscripts before it opened. But in Naples there’s no such thing as excellent time. A problem with the ticket machines meant a huge queue at the Metro’s only booth. Then she reached the top of the platform steps to see her train disgorging passengers below. She fought her way down as best she could, only for the doors to close right in front of her, leaving her scowling in frustration at the stolid faces inside.

  Twenty minutes passed. No train arrived. She paced along the platform trying her best to think of her thesis rather than of Cesco. Trying but failing badly. Her life had seemed so perfect until her mother’s diagnosis. Finding out she was so ill had been a brutal double blow, for Carmen had realised instantly that it simply wasn’t in her nature to let her mother deal with it alone. That meant returning to America. How, then, could she start a family with a man not even allowed in? She couldn’t. What future, then, did they have? None. They had none. And so her heart had shattered and she’d seethed at him with a terrible fury for making her fall in love with him while having a criminal past.

  He’d met her at the airport on her return from America. She’d been emotionally exhausted and badly in need of sleep. He’d cajoled her out to a restaurant instead, where promptly he’d proposed. He’d framed it as an official joining of their forces, as putting himself and his resources at the disposal of her and her mother. But he’d been so exasperatingly glib and airy about it, as though he hadn’t yet internalised what the diagnosis truly meant, or the institutional barriers they now faced – so very different from the obstacles he was used to overcoming with charm and perseverance. A perfect storm, then, for a perfect storm.

  Yet she loved him still. Last night had made that clear, if only from the way her heart was breaking all over again. How she longed for a dollop of his optimism, that they could overcome all this with denial and blind faith. And maybe they could. Maybe something really would turn up, as he kept claiming.

  Was it really not even worth trying?

  A train finally trundled in, so crowded that she had to elbow and fight her way aboard and then squirm along the aisle for space in which to breathe. It kept stopping in tunnels too, several minutes at a time, until the exasperation became almost intolerable and other passengers began to yell. At last, they reached Municipio station. She hurried up its long escalators and out into the drizzle, yet still arrived to find that Rare Books & Manuscripts had been open for five minutes, the usual faces already settling in their places, spreading their pads and bags around themselves like defensive ramparts.

  She made her way through the rooms to the end, hoping to find it empty, to slip unnoticed into the Colonna room. To her dismay, however, Father Alberts was standing by the open door of one of the steel cabinets with Victor, the department head. They were both wearing white gloves, she noted. One of the arsenic volumes then. Victor pulled a flat archival box from the shelf and laid it reverently on the table. And there was an extraordinary look on Alberts’ face as he watched him remove its lid and take it out – a kind of thrilled dread.

  She retreated before either man could see her, took an empty chair at one of the other tables. A minute passed. Victor walked by alone, looking cheerful, his lips pursed as if to whistle. She gave him a moment, then followed him to his desk, arriving as he put away his gloves. ‘At the arsenic, I see,’ she murmured. ‘One of your team getting above themselves?’

  ‘What makes you think it’s not one of our guest researchers?’

  ‘Ouch,’ she said. ‘Duly warned.’

  ‘You’re a ple
asure to have,’ Victor assured her, lest she think he meant it. Then he looked around before lowering his voice. ‘It’s actually for one of poor Lucia’s friends.’

  ‘Really? What did he do?’

  He smiled politely, then glanced around again, though this time to see if he was needed. When he saw that he was not, he beckoned her out the swing doors into the hallway. ‘It’s Rupert Alberts,’ he murmured. ‘He wanted our copy of Tertullian.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, taken aback, for Victor was normally discreet about people’s reading requests. But he had to be intrigued by the secrecy surrounding the Philodemus project; and while he couldn’t push it hard, what with Lucia being his line manager, it was hardly surprising that he was willing to trade information. ‘Your Tertullian?’ she asked. ‘May I ask which one?’

  ‘Adversus Marcionem. Do you know it?’

  ‘No.’

  His eyes lit up. The one thing he loved as much as his books was the chance to discourse on them. ‘A fascinating volume,’ he told her. ‘A fascinating man.’

  ‘Who? Tertullian?’

  ‘Heavens, no. Tertullian was a miserable bore. A lawyer to the bone, always scoring points. No. I mean Marcion. The man the book was about. Against, I should say. That is its title, after all.’

  Carmen scoured her memory for what little she knew of him. ‘Wasn’t he the rapist?’

  ‘The violator of a young virgin, to be precise,’ said Victor. ‘But the virgin in question was almost certainly the young Church. A metaphor, don’t you see?’

  ‘Ah. Yes. Thank you.’

  ‘It gave the Church Fathers the perfect excuse to vilify and expel him, while disguising the real reason.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘His doctrine. His creed. His school. But, most of all, his canon.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Carmen, belatedly remembering. ‘He published the first one ever, didn’t he?’

  ‘Codices,’ said Victor.

  ‘Bless you,’ said Carmen.

  ‘I wasn’t sneezing,’ he told her severely. ‘I was explaining. A student of ancient Rome such as yourself must surely know what a codex is?’

  ‘Yes. Of course. But I don’t see what—’

  ‘You simply stitch several small rectangular sheets of parchment or papyrus together along one side. And there you have it. A prototype book. One that means you can write on both sides of each page too.’ He gestured vaguely towards his department, all the ancient volumes on its shelves. ‘And very much a Roman technology, I might add. Some of the oldest ever found actually came from beneath Vesuvius’s lava. Only a few pages long, mind. But unquestionably proof of concept.’

  Carmen frowned. ‘How do codices explain the canon?’

  ‘Have you ever worked with scrolls?’ replied Victor. ‘Maps, say? Architectural plans? They’re a terrible pain. Especially if you’re after something right at the far end, or if you’re referring back and forth between different sections. So they tended to be kept short to make them manageable, then they were stacked fairly haphazardly on shelves for scribes and scholars to take down and consult as needed. Most religious schools and libraries would have owned copies of all the most popular and important texts, of course; but there was no canon to speak of. Then codices came along. Suddenly you had the ability to collect large numbers of related texts in a single volume without making it impossibly cumbersome. Which not only gave you the power to select which texts to include and which to leave out, but meant putting them in a particular order too.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Carmen delightedly. ‘The canon.’

  ‘Exactly. As I say, codices were developed here shortly before Marcion arrived from Syria. He set up a school of Christianity in Rome, which even then was the centre of the new religion. They say his family owned ships, and that he used them to scour the Mediterranean for Christian texts to collect. These became his canon, and very likely his school’s curriculum. Ten letters of St Paul, a pared-down gospel of St Luke, and a curious work of his own called Antitheses that’s sadly been irretrievably lost, but which apparently contained the essence of his two great heresies.’

  ‘Two great heresies? Some people just don’t know when to stop.’

  Victor flashed a rare broad grin, showing long and yellowed teeth. ‘He was quite the troublemaker, our Marcion. Yet his teachings clearly spoke to people, because they caught fire. They spread everywhere, and with impressive speed. They became so popular, indeed, that Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian and the rest felt grievously threatened. They called him a heretic and set about discrediting him and destroying all traces of his writings. They might even have succeeded, too, except for one terrible mistake. They cited so much of his canon in their attempts to disprove his theories that we’ve largely been able to recreate them!’ He threw back his head for a librarian’s laugh, simultaneously gleeful and completely noiseless.

  Carmen nodded. It was indeed a satisfying quirk of history that many controversial texts had survived thanks only to the denunciations of their foes. Seeking to destroy, they’d immortalised instead. But what, precisely, had Tertullian immortalised to make Rupert Alberts quite so agitated? ‘These two great heresies…?’ she prompted.

  ‘The first was Docetism,’ nodded Victor. ‘You know what that is, I trust?’

  ‘That Jesus wasn’t human,’ said Carmen. ‘Only a spirit in human form.’

  ‘Correct. Not born and raised like the rest of us, fated to grow old and die; but rather a deity who took on human form for the duration of his mission, and then vanished. The second was a kind of Gnosticism, I suppose you’d call it, though stripped of the usual mystic guff. Because the thing about Marcion was that he not only studied and taught Jewish scripture, he believed it too. He believed in the Jewish creator god depicted in the Old Testament. He just didn’t like him very much. He thought him cruel, vindictive, inconstant and unduly partial to the Jewish people – in short, nothing like the Christ he himself had fallen in love with. His Christ had been merciful, understanding and kind, bringing a message of love, hope and salvation for all mankind. That was the point of his Antitheses, as best we can tell. He took lines from Jewish scripture and set them alongside lines from his gospel and the letters of St Paul. Would his Christ have killed a man for gathering firewood on the Sabbath? Never. Would he have laid waste cities like Sodom and Gomorrah for the sins of a few inhabitants? Of course not. Nor would he have approved of the genocide, rape and slavery advocated by the god of the Old Testament, or drowned the whole world to start afresh, simply because he’d messed up first time round. So Marcion wrestled with the problem of how one could be the son of the other. It made no sense to him. No sense at all. Yet there it was, spelled out in texts whose truth he utterly believed. Texts that somehow had to be reconciled.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He had an epiphany of sorts. The Jewish God had indeed created this world. But that didn’t make him the god of all creation, only of this wretched and imperfect earth. He was a second-order god, a demiurge, worthy of respect and fear, but not of love or worship. And it also meant that there had to be an even higher God, the ineffable source of everything in creation, including the Jewish God.’

  ‘And Jesus was his son?’ suggested Carmen.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Victor. ‘A Gnostic, as I said. Which was why he was a Docetist too – for how could the son of such an ineffable god be mortal and prone to the same weaknesses of flesh as the rest of us poor creatures? But Marcion didn’t stop there. He taught that this true god had sent Jesus with a very specific mission: to put right what the demiurge had got so hideously wrong. To put it bluntly, therefore, his Jesus hadn’t come to fulfil the Jewish scriptures. He’d come to replace them. And that was Marcion’s greatest heresy of all, as far as Tertullian and the rest were concerned. That Jesus hadn’t come to save mankind for the Jewish God. He’d come to save mankind from him.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  I

  As on every morning, Professor Zeno D’Agosti
no rose before the sun. Unlike those other mornings, however, today he barely made it to his bathroom for paracetamol and an alarmingly yellow piss before collapsing back into bed, where he lay in a hangover fugue, groaning quietly to himself and taking such comfort as he could from hugging a pillow and pretending it was Emanuela.

  The sun appeared, if murkily. It traced a slow passage across his wall. The room grew sticky. He could excuse himself no longer. He rose a second time, showered, shaved, dressed, went downstairs, and forced down a light breakfast of coffee, yoghurt and fruit. At every moment, he expected Cousin Claudio to ring with his quid pro quo. And yet the phone remained silent. He took the lift down. The rain had stopped and the broken sunshine made their small parking lot glittery with puddles. He felt noticeably lighter as he approached his Mercedes; lighter still once he’d turned off his mobile for the drive in to the university. Whatever misery Cousin Claudio had in mind for him, he was free of it for the next half hour at least.

  He turned his key in the ignition. A phone trilled beneath his seat. With horror, he remembered yesterday morning, the Lamborghini bursting into flames, poor Raffaele sitting up as the fire had engulfed him. He cried out in terror, flung open his door and hurled himself out onto the broken tarmac, scrambling away on hands and knees while bracing for the eruption.

  II

  The Rohypnol could hardly be called a breakthrough. It did, however, give Izzo an excuse to pay Lucia Conte another visit. He drove back up to Torre Del Greco Hospital in a borrowed squad car, buying a bunch of flowers at a roadside stall along the way – somewhat undermining his claim to be on official business when he discovered visiting hours hadn’t started yet.