The Seventh Sinner - Elizabeth Peters [78]
Dana’s face was green.
“But I did know. I mean—didn’t any of you—”
“Ah, no,” José muttered. He smote himself heavily on the brow. “I do not believe this. You knew?”
“Well, yes. I mean—”
“You knew,” José shouted, “that that miserable young fool was not a fool, that those pitiful notes were not his, that he had found a valuable and important thing—and you did not contradict the police when they talked of suicide?”
“Yes—no!” Dana was close to tears. “I never thought of it like that…. I mean, people kill themselves for weird reasons! How was I to know the notes weren’t his? And that weird idea of his—it was just weird, I didn’t know! He kept following me around, you know how he was, and he talked all the time, and I didn’t pay much attention—”
“Now, now,” Ted said soothingly. “We understand. No imagination,” he explained sadly to the others. “Combined with a greatly inflated ego…What do you expect? As Jacqueline said, no one ever listens.”
“He might have killed me,” Dana sniffed.
“I doubt that you were in danger.” José looked a little sheepish. “Dana, I apologize for shouting. You understand, it was prompted by frustrated curiosity. For days we have been talking about Albert’s work, and his great discovery, and his treasure; and none of us knows what it is! Relieve our curiosity, since you are the only one who can.”
“Well, I didn’t really listen,” Dana repeated. She blew her nose into the handkerchief José handed her; Gino’s café did not boast such amenities as napkins. “It was something about a saint’s tomb, under one of the churches.”
The others exchanged glances. Ted said delicately,
“Do you happen to remember which church?”
“No. Oh—Saint Petra, something like that.”
“Could it have been Santa Petronilla?” José asked.
“Right, that was it. He’d been reading old manuscripts. You know, the Notitia ecclesiarum and ancient pilgrims’ books—that stuff.”
“Yes, I know that stuff,” José said in an odd voice. “Pilgrims began coming to Rome even before the fourth century. They wrote travel books…an incurable habit…. Do you mean Albert stumbled upon a reference no one else ever noticed?”
“Not just one—it was, like, putting together a lot of clues from different sources. Like with St. Peter’s. Wasn’t there someone, back in the third century, who wrote that he saw Saint Peter’s memorial on the Vatican? Nobody paid much attention to it until they dug and found the memorial. It was like that. Somebody saw the tomb, way back when, and said it had a long inscription on it. Something about the daughter of Saint Peter. I remember that because it struck me as weird. I didn’t even know he was married.”
“Married,” José repeated, like a machine. “Inscription…But no. If such a thing once existed, it must have been destroyed. Albert was a crazy fanatic.”
“Andy wasn’t,” Jean reminded them. “He valued Albert’s work enough to steal it. You know—it isn’t impossible. I bet Albert knew more about the virgin saints than anybody. Even his obsession gave him an advantage; he would take literally facts that other students might dismiss as legend.”
“Like Schliemann and the Iliad,” José agreed.
“He kept comparing himself with Schliemann,” Dana said. “He had it all worked out. He even got down into the crypt of the church and found a fragment of stonework that matched someone’s description back in 1143—oh, I don’t know how he did it, but he was convinced the tomb was still there.”
José kept shaking his head.
“It is more than possible,” Ted said, his eyes glittering as the idea grew on him. “It has happened before. Several of the catacombs were lost during the Middle Ages and only rediscovered in modern times. What a fantastic thing!”
Dana was sniffling pathetically into José’s handkerchief.
“Now stop it, all of you,” Jean said. She leaned across the table and patted the other girl’s hand. “Don’t mind them, Dana. Michael was putting you on. Where’s that darned Gino? We all need some coffee.”
Gino stood in the doorway, wiping his hands on his apron. His eyes moved over the group and then, for the first rime, he spoke to them as fellow human