The Florentine Cypher: Kate Benedict Paranormal Mystery #3 (The Kate Benedict Series) (18 page)

“We don’t need to do that,” Claire interjected. “It’ll probably be a waste of time anyway.”

I didn’t want to argue with Claire in front of the detective, but I still believed it was worth making the detour to visit Luca Gardi’s house. I thought Falcone might object, but if he’d intended to, he was interrupted by the arrival of the train, which hissed to a halt at our platform.

We waited until the train emptied and our fellow passengers boarded before we got on. Claire and I took seats facing each other, close to the exit, while Federico looked up and down the carriage, and then sat down across the aisle from us.

“We should have bought first class tickets,” Claire said, frowning at a sticky mark on the table between us. I took a long, slow look around. The carriage was almost empty. A group of student backpackers, a young woman with a child. No one was paying any attention to us.

Claire pulled her jacket tightly around her, perching on the edge of the seat as though reluctant to come into contact with it. She’d managed to remove most of the soot from her face with tissues, although her eyes still looked sore from the smoke.

As the train pulled out of the station, I looked out the window to see Falcone still there. Strange chap, I thought, but I hoped his colleague in Florence would be able to help us. At the very least, we needed to go to Claire’s apartment to get her passport. Then we could fly to England and check in with Detective Lake. I was sure we could convince him that Ethan was innocent now that we had the provenance list and the notebook. Funny how I couldn’t wait to get out of Lake’s office on Friday night, and now it felt like a shelter in a storm.

As the train gathered speed, Claire leaned forward over the table to look at me. “Are you okay? You seemed awfully panicked at the hotel. I’ve always thought of you as sort of cool and unemotional. I didn’t expect you to freak out like that.”

“I didn’t exactly freak out,” I objected. “But it wasn’t clear whether you were alive or dead.”

“Well, it would be helpful if you wouldn’t overreact so much,” she said. “We’re going to have enough trouble getting through this without undue drama.”

“Right.” I didn’t need a lecture from Claire how to deal with the threat of impending disaster. I knew something she didn’t. That she was fated to die soon, unless I did something to stop it.

“Nothing from Dante yet?” I asked.

She shook her head. The knight in shining armor was a little slow off the mark, I thought. I’d imagined him galloping across the Italian countryside as fast as his fancy Alfa Romeo would carry him.

Claire returned the phone to her bag. “But I remember now that he had a big meeting scheduled for today. Some international buyers are coming in. He’ll be tied up all afternoon, but I’m sure he’ll check his messages at some point.”

“Let’s hope so,” I said. “Maybe he can send someone to pick us up in Pianoro.”

“I don’t think we should stop there,” she said. As I began to argue, she glanced at her watch. “On the other hand, if we do, that would give him more time to get my message. I’m confident he’ll do whatever he can.”

“How did you two meet?” I asked.

“Here and there at official functions. Our first date was at a private reception at the Uffizi. Most of Florence’s glitterati were there. Donors, art lovers, academics. It was a brilliant evening.” She sighed.

We lapsed into silence as the train chugged into Mestre, the mainland station at the end of the causeway from Venice. I’d forgotten we had to stop here and watched anxiously to see if anyone got on. Federico stood up, looking up and down the carriage. Only four people boarded, two stylish, middle-aged ladies in leather jackets, and a young couple holding hands. The man put his hand on the woman’s back to steady her as the train started with a jolt. She giggled as she flopped down into a seat and he sat down beside her with his arm around her shoulders. Heads together, they whispered and laughed.

“Claire,” I said when the train pulled out of the station. “Do you remember Robby?”

“Who?”

“Robby Peterson, in our class at school. You know, the one with the cleft chin and the cowlick?”

She chewed on her lower lip for a few seconds. “No, I don’t think so.”

“He was captain of the cricket team,” I said, determined to jog her memory.

“Oh, yes. I thought his name was Ricky, not Robby.” She examined her fingernails. “Damn, I’ve broken a nail. Anyway, why? Why should I remember Robby?”

I was aghast. “You went to the end of school Ball with him,” I said. “You can’t have forgotten that?”

“Oh, that Robby. Yeah, I remember him. Why the sudden interest?” She looked around as though expecting to see him in the vicinity.

“Not sudden, actually. I think about him sometimes.” I raised my eyes to look at hers. “You really don’t recollect what happened? How I wanted you to talk to him, to persuade him to ask me to the dance?”

She looked surprised. “Did you? Then how come I went with him?”

“Presumably because you didn’t tell him I was interested.”
Interested
didn’t quite cover it. I’d had a painful crush on Robby for most of that year. I doodled his name on my homework books, and even went to watch a couple of cricket matches, which were excruciatingly dull and incomprehensible, just to watch him in action.

“So you liked him?”

“Of course I did. That’s why I wanted you to help bring us together. You knew him and I was desperate to go to the Ball with him. I hoped you’d put the idea in his head to ask me. But I never heard anything from him, or from you. I turned down three other offers, holding out hope that you’d succeed, and then I ended up going with Tim, the mathematics dweeb. That must sound familiar?”

Claire laughed. “I suppose it does, a bit. I had no idea you were that keen on Robby. He asked me to go with him before I could ever bring up your name. Gosh, that seems like a long time ago, doesn’t it? I wonder what all those people are doing now?”

“You don’t recall that we fought about it? We didn’t even hang out with Ethan and Leo any more.”

“Really? I thought we gave up seeing each other because well, you know, we didn’t have much in common.”

I sighed. That wasted time, those spent emotions, the heartbreak of watching Claire and Robby dance together all night. And she didn’t even remember it.

She cocked her head and looked at me. “Have you been mad with me ever since then?”

“Yes. No. Not exactly.” I shifted in my seat.

“Oh well, spilt milk and all that,” she said, smiling at me. “But we’re friends now, aren’t we?”

I smiled back. “Of course.”

“I’m going to take a nap.” She leaned back and closed her eyes.

With nearly an hour to go until we reached Bologna, I retrieved the books and lists from my bag, thinking I might as well do something useful. I’d just put them on the table when Leo called me.

“How are you and where are you?”

I gave him a quick update on events and told him we were on our way to Florence, with a detour in the hope of finding a trace of a man called Luca Gardi.

“I’ve been mulling over the cypher you were talking about this morning,” he said. “But I need more information. Can you text me images of those documents you found?”

I took some shots of the provenance list and the strange diagram of rectangles and sent them over. “I don’t have much power left on this phone,” I said.

“Again? You usually nurture your mobile more carefully than most people look after their newborns.”

“Yeah, well. Claire’s a charger hog, and we only had access to power for about an hour.” I decided not to mention the fire at the hotel, the reason for our hasty retreat.

“Let’s do this then,” he said. “I’ll work on it, and you do the same. We’ll talk again in twenty minutes. Text me if you uncover anything useful.”

“All right.” I felt bereft when the line went dead. Claire was sleeping. I was missing my boyfriend and my workmates. I texted Josh, not sure what time it would be in China, but he’d read it at some point. I didn’t want to worry him, so I kept it light, saying I was in Italy with a friend. Maybe we could try skyping again, although last time we’d tried, it had failed. I glanced over at Federico, who was concentrating on a crossword puzzle. Taking a deep breath, I tried to calm myself. The good thing was that we were heading back to Florence, where I’d be able to see Dad before flying on to London.

I opened the
Della Pittura
paperback, certain that it held information that would help us. Maybe if I stared at it long enough, something would jump out. Perseverance was a quality highly valued by my father. I’d grown up with the idea that any problem could be solved if you stuck with it for long enough. But, as Leo always said, determination alone rarely succeeded completely. What was needed was a blinding flash of insight, a chance meeting, or an educated guess to grease the wheels of progress. I contemplated that as I flicked through the first few pages, re-reading Alberti’s dedication to Brunelleschi and his miraculous dome.

I read for fifteen minutes. I could probably have passed an exam on the
Della Pittura
at this point, but it wasn’t telling me anything that seemed pertinent to the problem I was trying to solve. Giving up on Alberti, I opened Simon Hamilton’s notebook and looked through it carefully. The last page that had any writing in on was the one containing the odd string of letters. FCBCIHAWBRPSPOVCBUGWLO.

I took a photo and sent it to Leo. “Any ideas?” I texted.

Although I was nervous about having the old provenance page out in the open, I carefully removed it from its envelope and laid it on the table. Something struck me this time that I hadn’t noticed before. The catalogue entries weren’t listed by date, nor were they in alphabetical order. The listing seemed completely random. FA–14361608–AG was followed by CM–16021725–BC and BS–14821563. Below that was CT–14601590–AG.

I also noticed there was a space between two entries about halfway down the page. Just a single line space, but none of the other entries were divided that way. Something was poking at my brain, urging me to recognize the obvious. Finally, I saw the link. I sent another message to Leo. “The string of letters is the first initial of the top twenty-two artists on the provenance list. I think those letters are the cypher.”

A couple of minutes later, my phone rang. “Good work,” Leo said. “Now we need the keyword.”

“Uh huh. And how are we supposed to find it? It could be anything.”

“Patience, Kate, patience. You’ve found one of the two elements we need. Let’s think logically about what the keyword might be. Is there anything else in the notebook that might help?”

“I doubt it. I’ve read everything and there isn’t much. So the only other potential source is the text of
Della Pittura
. But it would be impossible to pick out one word from that whole book. There are thousands of possibilities.”

I heard him tapping away on his keyboard. “Keep cogitating,” he ordered.

“Okay. A good place to start is the Prologue.”

“Great, throw some ideas out.”

“Hmmm. What about Brunelleschi? Or his first name, Filippo? Maybe his nickname, Pippo?”

“I’ll begin by investigating those. You carry on digging around for possible keywords.”

“What do you mean, investigate?”

“I taught a seminar on cyphers and cryptanalysis a few years ago. I’ll use the Vigenère code table, plug in the letters you gave me and try out the different keywords until something makes sense.”

“The what table?”

“Vigenère. It’s a code system invented by a Frenchman, hence the name, but it’s based on Alberti’s original polyalphabetic cypher. It’s a tabula recta, a table with the alphabet letters across the top and down the side. Then repetitions of the alphabet to fill the squares left to right and top to bottom. But I tend to prefer working algebraically, assigning a numerical value to every letter, with A being zero, B being one—”

“Stop. I’m about to run out of power.” And brain cells, I thought. “I’ll keep looking for possible keywords. Let me know what you find out. Oh and don’t forget the final decoded text will be in Italian, not English. At least I expect it will be.”

I hung up and checked my watch. We still had half an hour to go, so I opened the paperback and started looking for possible keywords. At once, I realized that was what Simon Hamilton had been doing too. He’d underlined artist names like Donato and Massaccio, and place names including Firenze or Toscano. I typed them all into my phone, adding some more words as I read further into the Prologue. When I’d finished, I texted them to Leo, not sure how long it would take him to check out each one.

Then I considered what Alberti was saying in his Prologue. He praised the genius of Florentine artists and sculptors, and paid homage to Brunelleschi for his incredible feat of engineering, the great dome. I came up with three more possibilities: the name of the cathedral, Santa Maria dei Fiori, which seemed awfully long for a keyword,
cupola
and
duomo
.

A wave of exhaustion hit me, and I started yawning so hard my cheek muscles hurt. We’d left Padua behind and were passing through the flatlands adjoining the River Po. Here and there, men worked in the emerald green rice fields, and white birds stood on long, angular legs.

Another train sped past with a roar, disturbing Claire. She stirred and opened her eyes. In the bright light coming through the window, her aura was distinct.

“What are you staring at? Is my hair sticking up?” she asked, smoothing it with the palm of her hand.

I looked around the carriage. Federico was intent on his puzzle. No one else was in earshot and we were speaking English anyway. In spite of my earlier reservations, I decided the time had come.

“There’s something I need to talk to you about. It may sound crazy.”

She raised a perfectly arched brow. “Crazy? Well, what’s happening to us is already crazy, so it can’t get much worse.”

Oh yes it can, I thought, but I decided to jump in with both feet. “I can see auras over people, auras that predict the threat of death.”

Claire pursed her lips. A faint tinge of pink filled her cheeks as though she was embarrassed.