Selene closed her eyes. There it was, another room in the past she hadn't known existed.
“Why didn't you tell me?”
“Because you were seven. And when you grew older, he always said he'd explain when the time was right.” Vera's voice trembled. “I believed him. Sometimes believing a person is just another way of being frightened.”
Selene promised to call back. Then she sent the photograph to Mara through the secure folder and waited until her lawyer confirmed receipt.
Mara phoned ten minutes later.
“Don't answer the sender. We don't know whether this is a warning or bait. I've asked a digital examiner to preserve the email headers.”
“That's my father.”
“He could have told me.”
“Maybe he tried.”
Selene looked at the letter folded in her book of maps. Dmitri's handwriting was small and upright. Most of the letter was ordinary affection: Did you sleep? Did you eat? Stop working after midnight. At the bottom he had written, You don't owe the truth your life. You owe it care.
She had once thought that meant the Cambridge paper. Now she wasn't sure.
At ten, she met Dante in an archival imaging studio operated by a university-trained conservator named Ellen Shaw. Mara had insisted on an outside specialist. Dante had been irritated by the expense until Selene told him that a manuscript without a documented chain of custody might be useless in court.
“It's always court with you,” he said as he took off his coat.
“Somebody should be planning for a room where nobody carries a gun.”
He studied her. “Did you get any sleep?”
“Neither did I.”
Ellen did not care how little either of them had slept. She made Dante place his father's parchment in a cradle, measured the light exposure, recorded each mark of damage, and refused Luca permission to touch the edges.
“Paper is evidence,” she said. “And fragile evidence doesn't care who owns the building.”
Selene could have embraced her.
For four hours they compared strokes, fiber patterns, marginal notes, and the little split fishhook. Ellen's transmitted-light photographs showed that the central text had been copied onto a sheet that was probably several decades old when Vittorio acquired it. The ink used in his later marginal note had a different composition. None of this dated the underlying text precisely. It did tell them that Dante's father had left a constructed message, not an untouched ancient relic.
Selene arranged the signs according to where they occurred, not the order in which they appeared.
“Look at this,” she said. “The fishhook is a line divider. We thought the block below it was part of the cipher. It's a reference number.”
“Reference to what?” Dante asked.
“A source volume. If I can identify the book, the volume may supply the alphabet and the key.”
He drew up a chair. “And the two words you read at Loro?”
“Latin. Non aurum. Not gold. But the ink is so worn that I still want another independent reader to confirm it.”
Dante rubbed his forehead. “Carmine says Father's reserve was hidden as gold and bearer bonds. Everybody says it.”
“Then your first mistake may have been trusting everybody.”
He looked as though he wanted to argue. Instead he said, “Continue.”
Selene liked that less than she expected. She had become accustomed to men who used rank to make a question disappear. Dante's willingness to be corrected came in brief, unpredictable flashes. It was impossible not to notice them.
Around noon, Ellen found a small pencil mark on the rear support sheet. It was not on the parchment itself. Somebody had reused a page torn from a ledger when the item was first framed. Under raking light, the indentations resolved into part of a catalog code and a stamp: MUNICIPAL PORT RECORDS.