Clio
Clio called in sick from the departures lounge at Heathrow Airport first thing in the morning, boarded her flight, and landed in Venice sixteen hours after Anya Brown had arrived in Verona.
She got off the water ferry at St. Mark’s Square after a fierce internal debate over which was the lesser of two evils: coming to Italy when she’d called in sick in order to work an investigation she wasn’t allowed near, or breaking international law by not informing the carabinieri she was here. She figured the odds of Tim finding out she was here were minimal, even if she did make contact with the local force. She was the only one on their team who had a contact here, from an old case. Better to risk it than to risk landing in an Italian jail if things went pear shaped.
She wove through throngs of tourists on St. Mark’s Square to reach the huge wooden doors of the Carabinieri Command for the Protection of Cultural Heritage, on the square’s south side, and pushed the tarnished brass buzzer. She intended to behave confidently, as she would if she’d been sent here officially. She didn’t think anyone would bother to check. Each of the heavy wooden doors had an elaborate door knocker, a ram, with curved horns and a worried look on its face that Clio thought appropriate to her profession.
It turned out to be a pleasant and helpful visit. She spent a bittersweet half hour in their offices, marveling at the size and strength of their operation, the value they put on cultural heritage. It was something to aspire to, though she knew it would never happen in London.
Even better, her contact helpfully made a call to the force in Verona to let them know she’d be there. She was given permission to interview Anya Brown without oversight but warned that if she got a sniff of any laws being broken, including those involving culturalheritage, she should let him, or the local force, know immediately, and she’d have the full force of their resources behind her.
On the train from Venice to Verona she made a call she’d been thinking about all morning, to the British Museum, requesting CCTV footage from inside the museum on the morning she and Lillian had visited. It had been niggling at her that Lillian had taken her there. If the situation had been so dangerous, why do something so brazen when she could have just shown Clio a photograph of the embroidery or sent her a link to the Museum’s catalog entry for the piece, where there was a high-resolution image?
The scenery from the train was a mix of industrial, beautiful—a clock tower in Padua, mountains, vineyards, a bridge over a wide, milky-green river near Vicenza, terraced hills embracing Verona—and voyeuristic, where the tracks ran behind private gardens and apartment buildings and she got glimpses into other people’s lives.
There were two parts of her job that Clio took very seriously: upholding justice and protecting people from crime. It was why she was proud to call herself a police officer. She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. She couldn’t shake her unease that she was breaking rules to be here now. Nor was it lost on her that she was starting to get a strong whiff of corruption, and she had no one to turn to.
As the announcer told her, first in Italian, then in English, that they were arriving in Verona, she received a message from her Italian contact: an address for where Anya Brown was staying.
Whatever else was going on, at least she could try to ensure this young woman remained safe.
Anya
“Ignore the message from Magnus,” Sid said.
“I think he knows I took the bestiary.”
“I agree, but please ignore it for now.”
“He’s powerful, Sid.”
“I don’t think he can possibly know you’re here, for one, but also, heneedsyou, which means you have some agency. Don’t forget that. You don’t need to respond immediately.”
I knew he was right, Magnus didn’t have all the power, but I felt the creep of paranoia. “You know that woman whose foot you stepped on in the church? I saw her earlier, in the amphitheater.”
“Verona’s a small city. We’re bound to see the same people doing the same things. There’s a tourist circuit here.”
“I think we should go back to the apartment for a bit.” No matter what he said, I was suddenly nervous to be out on the street, and I felt like I’d seen enough to know that we were right to come here. Now I needed to go back to the manuscript and look at it with fresh eyes, to try to identify possible locations within the city whereThe Book of Wondermight be.
“Sure,” Sid said. He took my hand as we walked. “Tell me about the last paragraph of the Voynich. What have you managed to figure out so far?”
I smiled. “It’s kind of charming, like Isotta’s letter. It talks aboutThe Book of Wonderand explains that it’s been hidden, and why. Like the letter, it refers the reader to the rosette page, that big fold-out page, and Ithinkit says something along the lines of ‘You can find it there.’”
“Meaning the rosette page contains clues for findingThe Book of Wonder?”
“I think it might and in relation to the location, it mentions a word that I’m not sure how to interpret: ‘tegumentum.’ It means cover, or skin, sometimes clothing. It could refer to the book’s original binding, but that’s lost. The binding that’s on the Voynich today was put on more recently. I’m also wondering if ‘tegumentum’ could mean something else. Sometimes old manuscripts were stored in bags.”
“And this binding or cover could be the key to the location ofThe Book of Wonder?”
“It might be, but ‘tegumentum’ could also be a metaphor.”
“Right. What about the words on the rosette page? Can they give a clue?”
“They seem to be names, but I can’t make anything of that yet. ”
“It’ll come. Give it time.”
I wished I had his confidence in me. “But what if it doesn’t? What if I’m only as good as my memory?”
