The Forbidden Stone. Tony Abbott

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      Nowotna, Poland

      March 9th

      10:23 p.m.

      Frost was forming over the rutted fields of northern Poland.

      Three giant klieg lights cast a brilliant glow on a stone-faced man in a long leather overcoat, making his trim white hair look like the peak of a snow-capped mountain. He stared down at the dirt being excavated shovelful by shovelful from a pit.

      “Fifteen days and nothing,” said a voice over his shoulder. “The men are exhausted. We should try another location.”

      The white-haired man half turned, keeping his eyes riveted on the work below. “She told Dr. von Braun the exact spot. She knows these things. Would you like to tell her that we gave up?”

      The second man shrank back. “No. No. I’m simply saying that perhaps the coordinates are wrong and there’s been a mistake.”

      “Fraulein Krause makes no mistakes.”

      “And yet fifteen days and still no—”

       Clink.

      The white-haired man felt his heart stop. The shovelers froze in their places, turning their eyes up to him. He clambered down into the pit, the workers helping him from ledge to ledge. He reached the bottom and shooed them away. Holding a flashlight in one hand, he took a soft brush from the pocket of his coat and cleared away centuries of dirt from the object lodged in the ground. First he revealed a corner. The object was rectangular. This quickened his heart. She had told him: a bronze casket the size of a Gucci shoebox. As a man of fine taste, he knew exactly the dimensions she meant. More brushing, more clawing gently at the centuries of caked dirt, and a bronze box revealed itself.

      Carefully, he extracted it from the ground.

      “Light! More light!”

      Two work lights were refocused on the box. With the handle of the brush he cleared the dirt from the rim of the chest’s lid. Setting it on level ground, he undid the clasp that held the lid to the body of the chest. He drew in a long breath to calm his thudding heart and lifted the lid for the first time in five centuries.

      Inside, amid the tattered remains of its velvet lining, was a leather strap, a sort of belt, half-rotted away as if it were the skin of a corpse. On it, however, and catching the spotlights’ beams as exquisitely as it would have on the day it was last seen, sat a large ruby in the shape of a sea creature with a dozen coiling arms.

      A kraken.

      The white-haired man turned. “You were saying?”

      At the same moment a thousand miles south, the same starry sky looked down over the streets of an Italian city packing up for the night. Bologna on a warm March evening was heaven, mused a middle-aged woman at a café table. The street was deserted, save for the shopkeepers and café owners sweeping, turning their chairs over, and lowering their louvered security gates in preparation for tomorrow morning’s rush. She sat on a wicker chair, sipped the last drop of espresso from her cup, then set it down in its saucer and picked up her cell phone.

      “Answer this time,” she said aloud. She pressed the name for the fourth time in the last ten minutes. Holding the phone to her ear, she heard the same message, brief and clipped. After the tone she said, “Call me, Henry. Please. It’s about Silvio. I have discovered something about his accident last year. Something he intended me to find after all this time. I need to speak with you as soon as you get this.” She ended the call.

      Across the piazza, chimes sounded. She glanced up at the six-hundred-year-old tower, then at her phone. The clock, a nineteenth-century addition, wasn’t more than a minute off.

      Cars were fewer now. She had to get going to her office, a short stroll from the café. Her lecture on Michelangelo’s poems was early the next morning, and there were final notes to assemble. Her husband, Silvio, a longtime reader of the artist’s poetry, would have loved to be there to listen. Now, she realized, there was only one reason he wouldn’t be.

      As she reached into her bag for several coins, a black car rumbled up the cobbled street toward the café. It drove across the open square and shrieked to a halt, skidding on the stones. The rear door flew open, and a man wearing an oily black suit leaped out.

      Instinctively, the woman screamed. “Aiuto! Help!”

      From inside the café came the sound of a broom dropping, the quick scrape of chairs. “Que? Signora Mercanti?”

      The oily man outside wrapped one arm around the woman’s face, the other around her waist. She kicked furiously with her heels, knocking over the small table. The man dragged her into the backseat. The car roared away.

      When the café owner rushed out three seconds later, all he saw was an overturned table and a small saucer spinning on the pavement.