The Medici Conspiracy Read Online Free PDF Page A

castle came to a standstill.
    Maschito’s shoulders were pulled back, hard, by rope. He sat mute, terrified, as three men, all dark-haired, all in their thirties, all wearing sunglasses, took a huge metal lug wrench and attacked the glass case protecting the Melfi vases.
    The glass of the case shattered immediately and fell in a shower of fragments on to the tile floor. The sweat of fear ran down Maschito’s forehead and into his eyes as he watched the three men reach forward and snatch at the eight precious vases. The men still didn’t speak—the entire operation was carried out in complete silence.
    One man took three of the smaller objects. The second man lifted the smallest vase, a jug, and placed it inside one of the others, a larger bucketshaped vase with handles. He slipped these under the arm of the man with the gun, so he still had one hand free for his weapon. Then the second man took the remaining vases, one of which had a narrow neck, making it easier to hold, and hurried out of the room. They had obviously rehearsed this procedure beforehand.
    The man with the pistol pointed it again at Maschito. The robber lifted the barrel so that it was vertical and touched it to his lips—another warning to keep silent. Then he too was gone.

    Maschito was no fool. He struggled to free his hands before starting to shout and scream. In no time, two of his colleagues appeared. In fact, they had heard the alarm go off when the glass of the protecting case had been smashed but assumed that the alarm had malfunctioned. Never dreaming there was a real robbery in progress, they hadn’t hurried.
    Seeing Maschito tied to the chair, one guard ran toward him while the other, Massimo Tolve, turned and gave chase out of the room. He rushed from the building, through the two arches set into the two protecting walls, and out along the stone bridge, the only way in and out of the castle.
    The road fell away sharply beyond the bridge, and there was a parking lot farther down. As Tolve turned off the bridge, he saw a car reversing in the lot. He watched it pause while it changed gear, and then it moved forward, accelerating down the remainder of the hill, heading west for the road to Calitri.
    Thanks to that pause, he was later able to tell the police just two things about the car. That it was a Lancia Delta—and that its license plate was Swiss.

    An ornate, four-story, ochre-and-white baroque palazzo, a small jewel on the Piazza Sant’Ignazio in the center of old Rome, lies just across from the Jesuit church of Sant’Ignazio, famous for its trompe l’oeil cupola painted by Andrea Pozzo (1642–1709). This splendid edifice is the public face and headquarters of the Carabinieri Art Squad, the Italians’ way of showing the value they put on their heritage. The squad also has twelve regional units and one of these, in Naples, now became the operational headquarters for the Melfi investigators. One of the vases that had been stolen in the Melfi theft showed Hercules carrying a circular shield and in combat with Geryon, a three-headed monster. Because the monster with three heads resembled the antiquities underworld, which manifested itself in many different guises, Colonel Conforti—the man in charge of the Art Squad—code-named the Melfi investigation “Operation Geryon.”
    At the time of the Melfi theft, Roberto Conforti was fifty-seven and had been in charge of the Art Squad for a little over four years. He is old-fashioned, experienced, round faced, with a small mustache and the gravelly
voice of a man who smokes two packs of Marlboros every day. He was born in Serre, near Salerno, and still speaks with a distinctive southern Italian accent despite his many years in Rome. His father was a civil servant, his mother was—and his sister still is—a schoolteacher, and his wife was in the same class as his sister at school. He grew up at a time when it was normal for him to