End Games - 11 (9 page)

‘As it happens, we’re standing in a former possession of that family,’ the archivist said as he saw his visitor to the door. ‘This building was originally one of their many properties. When they came south from Naples for the summer, they would break their journey in Cosenza for a few days and wine and dine the local notables before making the long trek up into the mountains to Altomonte. Until a century ago there was no road beyond Spezzano. The baron and his entire retinue had to get out of their carriages and continue on muleback.’

Zen had taken a taxi to the offices of the museum, but he opted to return to the modern centre on foot, down the narrow curve of Corso Telesio, where renovated apartments awaited yuppies with enough money and stamina to gentrify the largely abandoned mediaeval maze, and across the Busento river, a mere trickle between islands of gravel and tall reeds at this time of year. For a moment he wondered if he had wasted his time by going to see Antonacci. What he had learned had been interesting, particularly the bits that didn’t make sense, like Ottavia being past childbearing age when her son had been born. However, it remained doubtful how relevant any of it was to the task of getting Pietro Ottavio released as soon as possible by his kidnappers.

Jake and Madrona drove up into the mountains, pulled the bikes out of the back of the SUV and then cycled along an old railroad grade winding up above a dark, sinuous lake sheathed by forested slopes. Now they were sitting side by side on the timbers of a trestle overlooking the shimmering water below. The fresh, warm air was heady with the smell of pine sap and creosote.

‘Tell me about the Rapture again,’ he said.

Madrona smiled.

‘Oh Jake, you’re just like a baby, wanting to hear the same story over and over.’

She sighed wistfully.

‘I’ve been thinking a lot about babies recently.’

‘We’ll have one, Madrona. Real soon. I just have to get this project finished first. As soon as that’s done I’ll switch to breeding mode, I promise.’

He grinned at her.

‘The Lord has sworn and will not repent.’

‘Huh?’

‘Some hypertext link. I want to say someplace in the Bible, but I can’t be bothered to Google it.’

‘I never read that creepy Jewish stuff. They had their chance to accept Jesus as their personal saviour and they blew it.’

‘But you told me that the end times can’t happen without the Jewish state.’

‘Oh sure. That’s why we’re in Iraq. Pastor Gary says that even though it turns out that Saddam didn’t have any like missiles and was never a threat to us, he was a big threat to Israel. That’s why the president had to send in the troops. The other stuff was just window dressing to keep the liberals quiet.’

Jake leant over and kissed her. God, he loved this woman. She wasn’t maybe what you’d call really beautiful, but she was a total babe. A sweet smile, frizzy blonde hair, plus the guileless blue eyes of a child combined with that hot bod and a voice like wind-chimes colliding in a gale, harmonious but with a raucous edge. Above all, though, he loved Madrona for her mind. She was sublimely stupid.

This was a central processing issue, nothing to do with data storage, which for Jake was peripheral. Why overload your system with a bunch of mostly dormant read-only files when the internet could come up with anything you didn’t know in like 0.18 seconds? Jake didn’t know practically everything, but he wasn’t stupid. You didn’t rise like a rocket through the massed ranks of Microsofties without being able to spot a glitch invisible to other eyes, or figure out a more elegant route from A to B than detouring via Z. But Madrona was not only even more ignorant than him about every aspect of human knowledge, except maybe female grooming, she was also dumber than fuck. Jake found this adorable. It was like having some big, placid, playful dog around the place, only one you could have great sex with too.

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Before the end times can happen, the Jews have to rebuild the Temple. Then Jesus and the Antichrist duke it out while we all watch from heaven. It’s foretold in the Book of Revelations. God, I can’t wait to see the movie!’

Jake sighed.

‘Yeah, well, we’re having some problems.’

‘Really? Like what?’

‘Oh, the director wanted to cast some English guy but he pulled out. Plus we’re having some issues with the location shooting in Italy. I’m sending one of my people out there to try and fix things up.’

Madrona made her charming sideways moue.

‘I’ve always wanted to go to Italy.’

‘Chill, hon. I’ll take you there for our babymoon.’

‘But I don’t get it. If those guys are being assholes, why don’t you just make the movie here? Nevada or Utah or Arizona or someplace.’

Jake longed to tell her the truth, to bring her in on the whole delicious secret, but that would be too risky. The fact that Madrona had nothing to say didn’t stop her talking incessantly, particularly when she got together with girlfriends like that turbo-bitch Crystl. The media had been sniffing around Rapture Works and its unique project for months. So far Martin Nguyen had managed to ensure that they gave big returns for small feeds, but as the commencement of shooting approached the predators were getting hungrier by the minute. If Madrona mentioned the truth to even one of the gals in her worship group or therapy workshop, somewhere along the line someone would figure out that there were big bucks to be made by breaking the story. At the same time, Jake couldn’t lie to Madrona. It would be like stealing candy from a kid.

‘No, it’s got to be Italy. See, every game has a scenario, but only the players can make it all pan out by making the correct moves. By moving against Saddam, the guys in DC made a good blocking move. Right now I’m set to make an even better enabling move.’

‘Wow,’ said Madrona.

‘Totally,’ agreed Jake. ‘Here’s the thing. Okay, the Jews rebuild their temple. What about all the goodies they kept in there, the lost Ark and shit? You can’t fake those. Plus a lot of people think they’re not around any more.’

‘How come?’

‘It’s like history. Way back, the Romans burned the Temple down and stole all that stuff.’

‘That was the Jews’ punishment for rejecting Jesus. But wouldn’t they have melted them down and made it into jewellery? Hey, you know what! If you ever want to buy me something, I could really use some gold bracelets.’

Jake looked around at the jagged rocks and spiky conifers, then up at the vacant blue sky.

‘Madrona, is God perfect?’

She laughed.

‘Well, I could have used longer legs. But sure, of course he is.’

‘Then everything he does must be perfect, right? So he wouldn’t have designed a game which could never work out because one of the key items of loot is lost for ever.’

‘I guess.’

‘Okay. So if the Apocalypse is going to happen, all that treasure from the Temple must still be around somewhere. And I’m pretty sure I know where one chunk of it has been hidden all this time.’

Madrona looked totally awed.

‘Really, hon? What are we talking about here?’

Her husband smiled artlessly.

‘Like, a candlestick?’

At seven o’clock precisely, Claude Rousset awoke from plump, untroubled sleep, grasped the vacuum flask of coffee he had prepared before retiring the night before and stepped outside accompanied by Fifi, leaving his wife snoring contentedly in bed. The sun had not yet reached the side of the lake where their camper van was parked, but further out the water glinted prettily in a gentle breeze. The silence was absolute.

Fifi went off to urinate on selected features of the landscape while her master sipped his coffee and started planning the day’s activities. Monsieur and Madame Rousset owned a furniture shop in Dijon. Every August they closed up the business and took to the road. Having thoroughly explored every region of France, many of them more than once, they had lately started to venture further afield. Switzerland and Spain had been first, then the Ligurian coast, Tuscany and the Amalfi peninsula. This year, feeling they were by now seasoned travellers, Claude had proposed to his wife that they tackle Sicily and
le Calabre sauvage
.

Sabine Rousset’s response had at first been decidedly negative, but in the end her husband had prevailed. Fears of Mafia shoot-outs, larceny, theft, extreme poverty and casual violence were absurd and anachronistic, he had declared. Italy was a leading industrial nation and a founder member of the European Union, and that included the bits south of Naples. Sabine still had her doubts, but she had not held the marriage together for almost thirty years without learning to pick her battles.

When she finally emerged, the sun was up above the mountains, the temperature had climbed several degrees and her husband had made his plans. After leaving Crotone the previous day, they had visited San Severina and the Bosco del Gariglione, one of the few remaining patches of the primeval forest that had once covered these mountains – named
selva
, ‘wild’, by the Romans, later corrupted to Sila, as the extract from the Michelin guide read aloud at some length by Claude had explained.

Apart from the lake beside which they had spent the night, in a car park off a minor road, there appeared to be little more to detain them in the interior. After breakfast, they would therefore abandon these rugged heights and descend to Cosenza (
visite 3 heures environ
) and thence to the coast, where Claude had located a recommended camp site with good facilities close to shops and the beach. On the way he proposed a detour to the abandoned town of Altomonte, whose ruins were on a plateau now inaccessible to vehicles and required a stiff climb to reach, but which the guidebook described as
suggestif
, one of the highest terms of commendation in Monsieur Rousset’s touristic lexicon.

They arrived shortly after ten o’clock. There were two tracks leading up to the ruins, one of which left from the outskirts of the new town which had replaced its earlier namesake, but the guide made it clear that the other, accessible off a narrow and winding road with passing places, was the more suggestive. It was accordingly this route that Claude had chosen. The heat was still bearable and the small unpaved parking area was shaded by a grove of giant holm oaks. Having inspected the prospect with a beady eye, Madame Rousset professed herself perfectly content to remain in the camper while her husband explored this particular aspect of Calabrian savagery to his heart’s content, just so long as they got to Cosenza in time for lunch. Her husband indicated gesturally that while he would not of course contest this decision, the loss was hers. Fifi, on the other hand, was clearly dying to stretch her legs and to stake a urinary claim on yet more virgin territory.

At first the path wound gently upwards through a dense undergrowth of scrub and spindly trees, but after a while the character of the landscape abruptly changed. The vegetation died out for want of soil and the way ahead became a series of steep and abrupt ramps quarried out of the crevices and gullies in the sheer rock face. The reasons given by the guidebook for both the construction and the abandonment of the original town at once became clear. In the centuries when marauding armies had processed through the area every few years – Greeks, Romans, the Goths led by Alaric, and later the French, the Spanish and Garibaldi’s ragged army of liberation – this site had been a natural and virtually impregnable fortress, conveniently hidden from the invaders’ view and, if discovered by chance, requiring infinitely more time and effort to conquer than it was worth.

It was only more recently that the disadvantages of the now unthreatened location had come to outweigh the benefits. Frigid winters with no shelter from the wind, sweltering summers with no shade from the sun, and a subsistence economy dependent on the male population leaving for months at a time to work on the great estates of the region. Once that population decided to emigrate en masse to America, Argentina and Australia, the town began its slow decline. The final blow had been an earthquake in the 1950s which demolished most of the houses, rendered two of the four original access paths unusable and persuaded the remaining waverers to move to a new settlement in the valley below. The original Altomonte was now completely uninhabited, although the townsfolk still returned once a year, on the feast day of their patron saint, to celebrate mass in the small twelfth-century church of their ancestors.

Claude Rousset was a devotee of
le footing
and liked to consider himself supremely fit for a man of his age, but by the time he had hauled himself up the final stretch of sun-baked rock and taken refuge in the shade of the shattered guard tower which rose beside the remains of a fortified arch at the brink of the cliff face, he was beginning to envy his wife, who was no doubt nibbling one of her mid-morning snacks in the verdant cool far below. Even Fifi looked momentarily disconsolate, but after a lot of loud lapping at the bowl her master produced from his backpack and filled from the litre of Evian he had also brought along, she quickly recovered and set off in search of adventure.

Claude took longer to recover, but he had also brought the guidebook and a camcorder, so as to be able to include this
curiosité
in the two-hour video presentation with accompanying commentary with which the Roussets regaled their friends during the winter months. He therefore set off towards the only two remaining structures of any size, taking panoramic shots of the general situation as he went. Twenty minutes should do it, he thought. They’d be on their way again by eleven-thirty, and down in Cosenza shortly after noon. Just time to find a parking spot, enjoy an aperitif in some pleasant café and then proceed to the restaurant which the Michelin had recommended for the typicality of its cuisine.

Somewhere out of sight, Fifi had started yapping loudly. If his wife had come along, she would be having hysterics, but Claude saw the poodle as a dog rather than a substitute grandchild. Dogs do what dogs do, and in this case Fifi had probably startled a hare or some other small mammal that lived virtually undisturbed in this wilderness. Well, let her have her fun. The sun was now significantly higher and hotter. He made his way over to the church and poked his head inside the unlocked door. ‘Austere but of harmonious proportions’, the guidebook said, which was on the generous side. Claude shot forty-five seconds, which he would later edit down by half, then did a slow pan of the former piazza. Unfortunately Fifi was still barking her head off, thereby ruining the impressive ‘silence of desolation’ audio angle that he’d had in mind. The next thing he knew, the little bitch was right there in front of him, yelping away and making runs towards the centre of the square, returning when he didn’t follow.