Read Online The Manuscript I the Secret by Blanca Miosi, Gretchen Abernathy - Free Book Online Page A

still lying in the canvas bag.
    As he drew it out of the bag, he noticed a groove in the middle. He pulled gently, and the tube parted with ease. The rolled-up papers inside were covered in handwritten Latin. They seemed like notes, calculations, and formulas. There were other notes in German along the edges, with arrows pointing to certain words, but he could make nothing of it. He knew very little Latin. Claudio spoke German, but the annotations were beyond him. He sighed, slid the papers back into the tube, and placed it beside the still-open chest. He gently replaced the glass capsule.
    Before shutting the little box, he closed the curtains. In the dim light, the piece of metal that had at first seemed like an unevenly shaped rock began to glow again. He suddenly felt uneasy about it all but hoped to be wrong. He quickly snapped the chest closed and observed its exterior. It looked like the kind of thing commonly sold in tourist markets, a knick-knack imitation of an antique: wooden slats held together by strips of metal. But its weight did not fit its appearance. Maybe the documents in the metal tube would explain the disparity. He would wait for Francesco to arrive.
    Claudio Contini-Massera’s athletic body slowly emerged as he peeled off the dirty, earth-covered clothes from the day before. The pounding of cold water in the shower shocked him fully awake. He lathered up vigorously and could not stop thinking that this discovery might turn out to be valuable, much more valuable than the relics and artwork that the offspring of the pre-Soviet “purged” elite had sold him for next to nothing. It was basic pillaging: valuable objects for which, unbeknownst to the monk, Francesco Martucci had been the key connection happened to end up in Claudio’s hands instead of their intended destination. Claudio smiled remembering his good friend. There were so few people as honest as Francesco. If only he knew.... Yet at the same time, Claudio feared that the object inside the chest was dangerous. He began scrubbing his hands feverishly, as if attempting to erase any sign of contamination. After a long, long time, he turned off the water.
    At thirty-five years of age, Claudio Contini-Massera was one of Italy’s youngest businessmen. The postwar years were a landmine of opportunity for him. His father, Adriano Contini-Massera, had made the wise decision to retire to his residence in Bern and wait out Mussolini’s reign, thus safeguarding the family’s fortune during the tumultuous years of the dictatorship. Claudio’s older brother, Bruno, the primary inheritor, had his father’s tendencies. He only knew how to get by, as if that were enough. He seemed content to wait until Adriano Contini-Massera succumbed to one of his many ailments—which Claudio attributed more to his sedentary lifestyle than to anything else—to claim the estate which, Bruno believed, was rightfully his.
    Adriano, the family patriarch, may have been useless in terms of earning money, but he had a keen nose for safeguarding what he already had. He had no intention of leaving the future of the Contini-Masseras to the whims of his eldest son. And to the surprise of many, including Bruno’s young wife, the lion’s share of the inheritance went to Claudio. By 1974 his wealth had burgeoned with import businesses, massive quantities of works of art, and relics of inestimable worth derived from questionable and undisclosed sources; yet for Claudio it was just divine justice. Was it not better for these objects to end up in his hands than at the mercy of the communist regime that had taken over a large part of Europe? Luckily for him, the representatives of said regime were quite susceptible to bribes and all sorts of “legal fraud.”
    Claudio had thrown scruples out the window when it came to making money once he learned that the Roman Catholic Church itself was wrapped up in dirty “agreements” to get certain Nazis off the hook for war crimes.