The Nosferatu Scroll (20 page)

As he walked, Bronson tried to recall exactly where they’d found the tomb that Angela had believed was the one mentioned in the vampire’s diary. The problem was that many of the sections of the cemetery looked fairly similar, and he was also approaching the area from a different direction, which meant it was difficult to get his bearings.

The good thing was that today the place wasn’t crowded with tourists and locals, although on the far side of the graveyard he could see three separate funerals taking place. That morning the weather was clear, with unsullied blue skies, and the brilliant sunshine imparted a warm glow to the memorial stones, and even seemed to have breathed fresh life into the bouquets of cut flowers that decorated most of the graves. For the first time, the Isola di San Michele seemed a friendly, almost welcoming place to walk and explore.

Bronson remembered that the tomb he was looking for lay in one of the older sections of the graveyard, so he made his way to the spot where he thought the grave should lie, then stopped short as he reached the end of a line of trees and looked over to his right. He had reached a section of the graveyard with numerous ancient tombs of the type he was seeking, but what had caused him to stop was the sight of two men standing beside a familiar-looking carved statue.

Bronson eased back into the shadows cast by the trees, took his compact binoculars from his pocket, and stared through the instrument at the intruders. He adjusted the focus, and immediately confirmed one thing: the men were right next to the tomb of the twin angels.

For a few seconds, Bronson studied the two figures, noting what he could of their physical appearance. Both were wearing casual clothes, jeans and white shirts, but each also wore a Windbreaker, one blue and the other dark gray, which suggested to Bronson that they’d most probably arrived on the island by boat. Driving a powerboat at speed over the water could be quite chilly, and he’d been glad of his leather jacket on his own journey. Not that that deduction actually helped him in any way. The two men could easily be workers sent out to San Michele to do maintenance jobs, or even a couple of bureaucrats counting the graves or something equally mundane.

Bronson moved the binoculars slightly so that he
could see the tomb itself. From the angle he was looking at it, he could see one side of the structure, while the two men were on the far side, both of them looking down at the ancient stone. Then one of the men bent down beside the grave, and was lost to sight.

Bronson wondered if he should simply stroll through that part of the cemetery toward the grave he was interested in, playing the part of an innocent tourist, because he was still unsure about who the two men were. If they were just workers, he would be able to examine the grave without any problems, and if they were in some way connected with Angela’s abduction, he might see them clearly enough to provide a photofit for the carabinieri. Or perhaps he could even follow them when they left the island. Either way, getting closer to the tomb seemed like a good idea.

He slipped the binoculars back into his pocket, stepped out from behind the tree, and started making his way across the grass that carpeted the area between the graves. He’d gone only half a dozen steps when he heard a sudden noise from behind him, and glanced back to see another man walking swiftly toward him through the graves. Instinctively, Bronson stepped to one side to allow the man to hurry past.

The new arrival nodded his thanks and stepped past Bronson. And as he did so, he abruptly turned and swung his right arm toward Bronson’s head. But something in the way the man moved must have triggered some subliminal warning, because as he did so Bronson realized
two things simultaneously: first, that the figure beside him was one of the men who’d attacked him in the street when Angela was abducted, and, second, that he was trying precisely the same technique again, swinging a heavy blackjack with the intention of smashing it into the back of Bronson’s skull.

Angela had woken stiff and aching from her fitful sleep on the sofa, and had been allowed to wash in a bathroom adjacent to the lavatory she’d used the previous day. Her breakfast had consisted of a plate of pastries and coffee, and as soon as she’d finished it, Marco had told her to carry on working on the translation.

She had acquired her knowledge of Latin over the years that she’d worked at the British Museum, building on the lessons in the dead language she’d enjoyed at school, more years ago than she could now contemplate with any degree of comfort. But try as she might to concentrate on the words in front of her, her thoughts kept returning to the awful reality of her situation and, inescapably, to Chris. She had no idea whether he was alive or dead. If he was alive, if he’d survived the attack on the street, she knew he’d be trying to find her, and would be frantic with worry. But how on earth would he be able to track her down?

She had no idea how long she’d spent in a drug-induced state of unconsciousness, but it must have been several hours, perhaps even days, and it was entirely possible that she was no longer in Venice at all. Her only reassurance was that her captors spoke together in Italian, which presumably meant that she was still in Italy. But even that, she had to acknowledge, was actually pure conjecture. It was just as possible that she’d been snatched by a gang of Italians, and then taken to some other country entirely.

And she’d found the coolly dispassionate attitude of her captors enormously alarming. She really believed that any one of them could kill her with as little compunction or concern as he would exhibit if he swatted a fly. As far as she could see, the only reason she was still alive at that moment was because they needed her translation skills, and Marco—or whatever his real name was—had implied that they wanted only to see her version of the ancient text to check that whoever else they had employed to decipher it had gotten it right.

That meant they already had a good idea of what the Latin text said, which in turn meant that she had to do a reasonably good job herself. But not a perfect job, she decided. Perhaps she would make a handful of trifling errors in the translation—errors that she could explain away because of her unfamiliarity with Latin, and which might mean they would keep her alive for a bit longer while they ensured that she’d done the best job she could, and that the text she’d produced was accurate.
That was the only thing she could think of doing to make her abductors think twice before killing her. And the longer she stayed alive, Angela knew, the better the chances of her finding some way of getting out of the house—wherever it was—and escaping. And maybe somebody, Chris or the police or even the occupants of a neighboring property, if there was one, might discover where she was being held prisoner. It was a cliché, obviously, but it was just as obviously true: while there was life, there really was hope.

Angela dabbed her eyes angrily with a tissue, cleared her mind of all extraneous thoughts, and again focused on the task at hand.

Quite a lot of the Latin words were familiar to her. One of the advantages of learning Latin was that it had an essentially finite vocabulary, unlike English and other modern languages in common usage, which acquire new words, new meanings and new variants of existing words on an almost daily basis. Once you knew the meaning of a Latin word, you knew it forever, because it would never change.

She remembered most of the declensions and many of the conjugations of verbs, and she was able to jot down the general sense of several of the sentences quite quickly, leaving just a handful of blanks for the words that she was either unfamiliar with or unsure of. Then she’d open the dictionary and flick through the pages until she found the first word she needed to check. Then she’d fill
in the meaning, and move on to the next word. When she’d finished each sentence she paused for a moment to read it in its entirety, to make sure that it made sense, then rewrote it in modern English.

The translation itself had proved to be relatively straightforward, but she soon realized what Marco had meant when he referred to “unusual aspects” in the text. Although the references to the tomb of the twin angels still seemed fairly clear, other passages in the Latin were ambiguous at best, and she was increasingly unsure whether or not she was getting it right. In some passages, Carmelita had referred to the Isola di San Michele as the
insula silenti
, the phrase translating as the “island of the dead,” but there were several occurrences of an entirely different phrase—
insula vetus mortuus
—which puzzled her.

Her literal translation rendered this as the “island of the ancient dead” or “old dead,” which she really didn’t understand. It wasn’t clear to her whether Carmelita was using the expression as a synonym for San Michele, or if she meant somewhere completely different, possibly a more ancient graveyard located elsewhere in Venice.

And there was another phrase that sent a chill through her. The pages referred to
planctus mortuus
, which translated as the “wailing dead” or the “screaming dead.” “Dead,” as far as she was concerned, meant exactly that: death, the cessation of life. The dead could neither scream
nor wail. But the same expression appeared in several places in the text, and the context suggested that Carmelita was referring to a specific place where the dead had screamed.

Angela shook her head and continued working through the text.

When anybody asked him if he knew any of the martial arts, Bronson normally told them he had a black belt in origami—it amused him to see the conflicting emotions this statement usually produced. In fact, he’d trained to an intermediate level in aikido.

Perhaps the most unusual, and certainly the least known, of the oriental fighting techniques, aikido is purely defensive. No master of aikido could attack anyone using the art, because no offensive moves exist. But once an aikido practitioner is attacked, his or her response to that attack can easily prove fatal to the assailant. It relies heavily on unbalancing the opponent, essentially using the attacker’s own weight and speed and aggression against him.

Bronson’s tutor, a Japanese man barely five feet five inches tall and aged sixty-three, had told him years before that an aikido master could take on as many as three masters in any of the other martial arts, at the same time, and still expect to be standing when the dust settled.

Bronson frankly hadn’t believed him, but one evening when the two of them had left the dojo and were walking over to where Bronson had parked his car, a gang of six scarf-wearing football supporters, high on alcohol or drugs, had streamed out of an alleyway directly in front of them, looking for trouble, and ideally searching for a soft target.

Bronson had stepped forward to face them, but with a courteous bow the old Japanese man had motioned him back, taken two paces forward and just stood waiting. His harmless appearance and placid stance had seemed to enrage the youths, and they’d spent ten seconds shouting abuse before launching themselves at him.

What happened then had had all the appearance to Bronson of magic. It was as if each youth encountered something akin to a catapult: the faster they slammed into the old man, the faster they were tossed aside. In a little less than twenty seconds, the six youths were lying broken and bleeding on the ground, and throughout the entire time the old man barely seemed to have moved, and when he stepped over the legs of the nearest youth to rejoin Bronson, he hadn’t even been breathing hard.

“Now do you believe me, Mr. Bronson?” he had asked, and all Bronson had been able to do was nod.

And now that training was going to save his life. Bronson swayed backward, and the blackjack whistled viciously through the air a bare inch in front of his face. Then he stepped toward his attacker, turning as he did so, and seized the man’s right arm. He pulled him forward so
that he was off-balance, and continued to turn his body so that his back was toward his assailant. Then he bent forward, still pulling on the man’s right arm, and his attacker flew over his back to land—hard—on the ground directly in front of him.

Bronson hadn’t practiced aikido for some time but, much like riding a bike, his brain still retained the moves and his body responded with the actions he’d practiced so many times in the past. The throw he’d just completed was one of the first and most basic of the moves he’d learned, and he finished it off in exactly the way he’d been taught, by tugging on the man’s arm at the instant before he landed, dislocating his shoulder.

The man screamed in pain as the bone was wrenched from its socket, the blackjack tumbling from his hand onto the ground. He was hurt, but Bronson knew he wasn’t immobilized, not yet, and this was something he needed to attend to. He snatched up the blackjack, and swung it as hard as he could against the man’s skull. His attacker flinched and raised his left arm in a futile defense, but there was no way he could avoid the blow. The impact jarred Bronson’s arm, but had the desired effect on his target. The man slumped backward, instantly knocked unconscious.

Bronson was certain he recognized his assailant—and this meant that the two men by the tomb, only some twenty yards away, were surely part of the same gang.

Standing up, he turned toward the tomb of the twin angels and took a couple of steps forward. Then he
dropped down, because one of the men had just swung round to face him, and was brandishing a semiautomatic pistol in his hand.

The sound of the shot was shockingly loud amid the tranquillity of the ancient cemetery, echoing off the walls of the church and the tombs all around him. The bullet just missed Bronson as he dived for cover, smashing into a tall stone cross behind him and sending stone chips flying in all directions.

The pistol added a whole new dimension to the situation. Bronson would have had no qualms about tackling the two men. As he’d just demonstrated, he was proficient in unarmed combat, and his whole body burned with fury against the men who’d snatched Angela. Taking on two Italian thugs and beating them to a pulp might well have helped him find her, but no level of anger or competence in hand-to-hand combat would help against a man carrying a gun. This radically altered the dynamics of the situation.