The Dante Conspiracy

CHAPTER 14



It had taken a lot longer than he had expected, because some parts of the city archives had suffered during the flooding of the River Arno, floods which had been both a common and a highly destructive feature of the city of Florence through the ages. There were gaps in the records, and several times he had been forced to make what amounted to educated guesses as he attempted to trace the thread that ran through the documents from the end of the thirteenth century to the present day.

When he reached the end of the research, he’d started again, going back and double-checking everything once again, just to make sure. Only then did he make the telephone call to arrange a meeting with his client.

‘How certain are you that this is correct?’ Stefan asked, looking down at the pages of notes, principally comprising names, dates and addresses, which the dark-haired young man sitting opposite him had just handed over.

Dino Spagnoli was a professional researcher, employed on a freelance basis by everybody from authors trying to get the facts right in their latest novel and historians farming out part of their research, to people looking for a heirs who had unaccountably gone missing, and others trying to trace past property ownership – shrugged his shoulders.

‘If you asked me to quote a figure,’ he said, ‘I’d say about ninety per cent, and that is about as good a result as you’re going to get from anybody. The problem isn’t tracing information back through the records. That’s the easy bit. The trick is trying to fill in the gaps where the records literally no longer exist. You’ve obviously heard about the floods we’ve had here in the past. A lot of information was simply lost due to water damage, and some of the other records which were saved are still awaiting restoration and can’t be accessed by me or by anybody else. But I’m confident that the end result is right.’

He leaned forward over the small circular table in the cafe on the outskirts of Florence which Stefan had suggested for their meeting, and pointed at the last line of the sheet of paper the other man was studying.

‘What I’m saying is that I have almost no doubts that that piece of information is correct.’

Stefan nodded, reached into his pocket and took out a sealed envelope which he tossed onto the table.

‘Your fee,’ he said, ‘as we agreed.’

Spagnoli used the handle of his coffee spoon to break the seal and glanced inside the envelope. It looked about the right amount. Then he got to his feet with a smile and extended a hand across the table.

‘A pleasure doing business with you, my friend.’

The other man glanced at his outstretched hand but ignored it. Then he looked up briefly at the young man’s face, before returning to his study of the papers.

Spagnoli dropped his hand to his side, his smile dimming somewhat at the other man’s rudeness. But as he walked away his smile returned, and he glanced at his watch. The timing was just about perfect.

His services were much in demand in Florence, but the two telephone calls he had received the previous day less than thirty minutes apart had been a first, even for him. Both callers had been looking for precisely the same piece of information and both had agreed to the fee he had suggested without the slightest quibbling. He had effectively been paid twice over for doing the same job.

The second meeting of the afternoon was at another Florentine cafe less than a mile away, where he would hand over an exact duplicate of the information he already supplied to his first client a few minutes earlier.

He just hoped that the Russian would pay up as promptly as the man from the Balkans, and with as little fuss.





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