The Lure of the Italian Treasure Read online

  “It explains the dazed expression on the guard’s face,” Frank pointed out. “He was drugged.”

  Now Inspector Barducci was motioning everyone away from the site. “Move to the house, please,” she said in English and then Italian. “We must question everyone.”

  • • •

  “This is going to take forever,” Joe complained as they sat with the rest of the twenty students, along with the household staff and the count and his daughter in a huge room in the middle of the villa. Only Professor Mosca and Julia had stayed at the site, to make sure the investigators did no damage.

  The room was covered with frescoed wall and ceiling paintings of pink-skinned angels flying through wispy clouds. Not my cup of tea, Joe thought about the paintings, sighing in boredom. But they must not have been easy to do.

  Frank noticed that Bruno the gardener was acting more and more anxious as the time stretched out. It didn’t seem likely that the kindly old man could have been the thief, so Frank asked Cosimo to find out if he was feeling all right.

  Cosimo ended up having a long conversation with Bruno. After several minutes, he motioned Frank and Joe to join them.

  “It seems Bruno is now living a second life,” Cosimo said. “In his first, he was caught embezzling from a bank. He spent five years in prison.” Bruno didn’t understand much English, but nodded sadly when he heard the word prison.

  “So now,” Cosimo went on, “he’s quite worried about the police suspecting him because of his record.”

  An hour earlier the police had taken down all their names. Frank assumed they were now doing exactly what Bruno feared, checking to see if anyone had a record. So far they had been working straight through without coming out of their makeshift office to question anyone.

  When Inspector Barducci and one of the officers finally walked through the carved wooden door, it was late morning. She stopped just past the threshold while the officer pointed toward their small group. As she started walking toward them, Frank assumed, and clearly so did Bruno, that she was going to bring Bruno into her office for questioning.

  Instead she said, “Frank and Joseph Hardy, please come with me.”

  4 The Secret Passageway

  * * *

  Frank and Joe followed Inspector Barducci into the adjoining room, which had a long, dark table underneath a huge crystal chandelier. As the slim woman motioned them toward two ornately carved wooden chairs, she took a seat across the table. Frank studied her small, dark eyes for an indication of what she was thinking. He and Joe knew enough about American police detectives to have some idea of the range of their personalities and methods, but at this moment Frank felt completely at sea. He thought Barducci didn’t look happy. Had she been told that Frank was snooping around near the site?

  “We have just received a report,” she began, her sharp features becoming hawklike as she worked hard to form her words in English. “It concerns the espionage equipment that the Milanese customs officials discovered in your bags.”

  So that’s the red flag, Frank thought. That shouldn’t be too hard to explain. In fact, though, he himself still wondered why Joe had brought the bugging device. Had Joe just begun to assume that wherever they went, they would get drawn to a crime scene? Or was he planning a practical joke involving eavesdropping? Joe had told the customs officials that he had forgotten it was tucked into the side pocket of his duffel bag, and that he hadn’t meant to bring it. Privately, Frank had agreed with the officials that that was a pretty lame excuse.

  “This equipment,” the inspector continued, “could be used for police work. But of course it is also used by spies and criminals.” She scanned a computer printout that must have come from the portable printer set up on the table near a laptop that was plugged into a cell phone. “And you claim you are detectives?” She smiled slightly and raised an eyebrow.

  “Our father is the detective,” Frank answered calmly. “Sometimes we get to use what he’s taught us.”

  “And you planned on doing some detective work while working on an archaeological dig? A dig, I might add, where there were no crimes until two days after you arrived?”

  Joe wasn’t going to stand for the insinuation. “But we were the first ones to find something worth stealing,” he blurted out. He was including his amphora in the stealable category, even though its pieces had been safely sent over to the lab.

  “Which means you may have been lucky,” the inspector said.

  “Look,” Frank said, trying to ignore the accusation, “I know you’ll probably think I’m just throwing up a cloud of dust, but I still think you ought to know that the thief knocked out the guard with a handkerchief soaked in chloroform. And my guess is that he did it sometime between three and five-fifteen in the morning.”

  Frank watched the inspector close her eyes and rub her forehead.

  “How did you figure the time out?” Joe asked.

  “Well, there was a bright quarter-moon last night. The moon would have set about three o’clock in the morning, giving the thief the required darkness until the sun came up at five-fifteen.”

  “Yes, I see,” the inspector said. “And we of course know about the chloroformed handkerchief. We have already speculated that you were nervously checking to see if it still smelled several hours after you used it. It would be a classic case of criminal anxiety. And of course it is interesting to see how carefully you have considered the position of the moon while you were supposedly sleeping last night.”

  “Hey,” Joe blurted out defensively. “That’s the kind of thing my brother knows. He doesn’t have to see the moon to know what it’s doing. Anyway, we were both sleeping in the same room last night with our roommate. Ask him.”

  The inspector began writing on a pad of paper. “You may go for now,” she said, not looking up. “But you may not leave the villa without my permission.”

  Frank and Joe got out of their chairs and walked out as quietly as if they were at a funeral.

  “Sorry about that, Frank,” Joe said sheepishly. “I guess I shouldn’t have brought that bugging device.”

  “You guessed right,” Frank said sullenly. “That’s really all she’s got on us, and she’s squeezing it for all it’s worth.”

  “At least we can handle it,” Joe replied. He watched an officer lead Bruno into the inspector’s office. “I hope she’s not too hard on Bruno. He’s pretty shook up about this.”

  Cosimo was still in the same chair. “You guys don’t look too good,” he said.

  “That inspector’s a real fruitcake, if you ask me,” Joe said. “She thinks Frank’s interest in solving the crime makes him a suspect.”

  “There is a certain logic to that, Joe,” Frank said. “But I’m sure she’ll come around eventually, and realize she ought to take advantage of us. In the meantime, I plan on keeping my eyes open.”

  “By the way,” Cosimo said, “while you were in with the inspector, Count Ruffino’s lawyer showed up and complained bitterly about the count being detained for questioning.”

  “They’re gone,” Joe pointed out, “so it must have worked.”

  “Yes,” Cosimo replied. “But pulling rank like that makes me mad. Why couldn’t he sit here like the rest of us.”

  “It makes me suspicious,” Joe said. “Maybe he’s got something to hide. After all, it was his friend Signore Cafaggio who was talking about selling the jewels on the black market. Maybe Count Ruffino thought it was a good idea.”

  “I don’t know, Joe,” Frank said. “This guy must have money coming out of his ears. Why would he risk it all for a few more million, or whatever the jewels are worth?”

  While Cosimo waited to be interviewed, Frank and Joe went to the dining hall to grab a couple of the sandwiches that the police had allowed the cook to prepare. Then they went out into the garden to see if they could get back to digging. They arrived at the site just as two officers were climbing out of it. Julia was in the room, alone.

  “Possiamo scendere?” Fr
ank asked the officers, wondering if it was all right to go down.

  “Sì, sì,” one of them responded, indicating that it was okay.

  “Thank goodness you’re here,” Julia said when she saw Frank and Joe. “I could use a shoulder or two to lean on. This whole experience has been devastating.”

  “It hasn’t been too great for us, either,” Joe said as he climbed down the ladder. “Inspector Barducci thinks we stole the box.”

  “Maybe you did,” she said, smiling. “What do I know about either of you, anyway. For all I know, you’re not even brothers.”

  “And for all we know, you’re an undercover cop,” Joe joked as he reached the floor. “But you’re not going to get any information from me.”

  Frank stepped onto the floor and walked over to the place that had been pillaged, shaking his head.

  “How much of the floor was still covered by plastic when you got down here?” he asked Julia.

  “Most of it,” she replied. “Just the section around where we put the canvas tarp was uncovered.”

  “Since you can’t see through the opaque plastic, the thief must have known where to go,” Frank concluded.

  “Yes, that’s what Inspector Barducci concluded. She went over the whole scene before the fingerprint experts got here.”

  “No wonder we had to wait so long to see her,” Joe said.

  “Were any of the artifacts under the plastic smashed?” Frank asked, scanning the floor.

  “Just one, on the path from the box to the ladder,” Julia said. “Apparently, the thief walked straight to the spot, took off the plastic and then the tarp, and dug out the box with a large shovel, which the officers recovered in the garden.”

  “Just one person, then?” Joe asked. He was listening as he settled down to working with his trowel near the site where he had found the amphora.

  “That’s what it looks like,” Julia said.

  “And these fine scratch marks—a broom for covering up footprints?” Frank asked, studying the ground around the hole where the box had been.

  “Exactly,” Julia confirmed.

  “Oh, man,” Joe said with a mixture of excitement and aversion. “I didn’t expect to find this.”

  Frank, Julia, and Cosimo came rushing over. Julia bent down to take a close look. Frank could see past her shoulder, and there was no mistaking it.

  “I guess we just found out why we thought nobody came back for the jewelry,” said Frank.

  “I think she came back too soon,” said Joe, examining the five perfectly preserved finger bones emerging from the black, sooty soil.

  “It does look like the hand of an adult female,” Julia said, carefully examining the bones. “I wonder if the house was burned in an attack.”

  Nobody felt like celebrating over Joe’s discovery of a twenty-five-hundred-year-old skeleton, even though it was a great find.

  “It’s kind of eerie,” Julia said, “thinking that we must be the first ones to see this poor old thing since she died.”

  “I feel like we ought to give her a funeral, instead of picking at her bones and putting them on display in some museum,” Joe said.

  “And I feel like I let her down by allowing her jewelry box to get stolen,” Julia said glumly.

  “Look, Julia,” Frank said, putting a hand on her shoulder, “you did what you could. In fact, you did what the conservator told you to do.”

  Joe spent the afternoon excavating the skeleton, while Frank searched in vain for something to take his mind off the loss of the jewelry box. Cosimo started to work an hour after Frank and Joe and found a well-preserved bronze dagger in his section.

  When it finally became too dark to work, the boys helped Julia cover up the site. They were about to say goodbye when Frank saw Bruno the gardener approaching. He was grinning from ear to ear and speaking too fast for Frank to understand.

  “He says he just discovered that someone has used some secret passageway recently,” Cosimo said, “and he wants us to look at it. He thinks the thief may have used it.”

  Bruno began leading them all toward the east wall of the garden. They walked on a gravel path past the rows of intricately laid-out flowers, whose colors were muted now by the early evening light.

  “Isn’t it marvelous,” Julia said to Joe, “to be able to finish a hard day at work unraveling the mysteries of the past with a walk through this gorgeous garden?”

  Joe wasn’t the type to gush about flowers, but he knew what she meant. At first he hadn’t been sure why anyone would spend so much time and money on a garden. Now that his senses were soaking it up, he felt that that well-tended beauty somehow made the world all right.

  As Joe watched Bruno lead them past the groomed order of the formal garden and into a section where large flowering bushes and trees grew in lush abundance, he couldn’t believe that Bruno would do anything to jeopardize his place in this beautiful microcosm, no matter what he had done in the past.

  They arrived at a little hill that had been built up in the corner of the wall, so that when you walked up it, you could see over the wall to view the fields beyond. Bruno brought them to the base of the hill, where an ancient-looking statue was holding a cup and smiling.

  “Guardate!” he said, pointing to the ground at the base of the statue. Look.

  Joe could see clearly that some large, flat object had been scraped along the ground in an arc next to the base. It looked as though the statue and its pedestal had been pivoted on an axis.

  Bruno reached behind the base and pulled a hidden lever. Then he pushed hard at the base of the statue, and the whole thing moved just as Joe had imagined. “Il passaggio segreto,” Bruno panted, the secret passage.

  Joe took his penlight out of his pocket and shone it down the shaft that had opened up. “Wow!” he said. “This is cool.”

  “Bruno says he’s sure this hadn’t been opened in a long time before somebody opened it last night,” explained Cosimo.

  “Let’s check it out,” Joe said. He started down the steep stone steps that were built into the wall of the passage.

  “Perhaps we should inform the inspector of this,” Cosimo said cautiously, but Joe was already out of sight.

  Frank looked up at everyone and shrugged. “I guess I’d better see what he’s up to,” he said, beginning the descent while everyone else stayed behind.

  “Nothing down here except this old broom,” Joe said as Frank joined him in the narrow tunnel at the base of the stairs.

  “Then Bruno is right. The thief did get away through here.”

  “Let’s see where this goes,” Joe said as he began climbing up the steep stairs at the end of the twenty-foot passage. Frank was worried about disturbing evidence but not enough to stop Joe.

  There was a trapdoor at the top and a large lever to the right of the door. First Joe tried to push the door open, and when it wouldn’t budge he grabbed the lever with both hands and pulled with all his might.

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” Joe said as it began to move. “Whoever got this to move was no weakling.”

  As Joe pulled on the lever, the door above began sliding sideways in an arc, leaving an opening behind it. The mechanism creaked but moved easily, so Joe shoved it all the way open. He was about to climb out into the night air when a bright light went on a few feet away and shone right in his eyes.

  Now another light went on, and through the glare Joe could see the light reflecting off a machine gun pointing right at him.

  5 Cosimo’s Fort

  * * *

  Frank knew something was wrong by the way Joe froze. He had to decide quickly if he should stick with Joe or stay out of sight and creep back through the tunnel to the garden.

  Before he could decide what to do, a bright light glared in his face and he had to freeze, too. Then as Joe moved slowly up and out of the stairway, Frank followed him. He couldn’t understand a word of the Italian that was passing between a woman and two or three men, and the light in his eyes made it imposs
ible to see.

  “I have a bad feeling about you two,” said the woman. Frank knew right away that it was Inspector Barducci. “But lucky for you, I checked out your story about your father teaching you detective work.” She said something in Italian, and the lights were lowered. Frank could see that they were in a small three-walled enclosure, and that a statue of the Virgin Mary had been moved aside by the lever. They had emerged in the middle of a small religious shrine.

  “It seems Mr. Fenton Hardy is well known in Rome,” Inspector Barducci continued, “which apparently means that I must try to tolerate your meddling in my investigation.” She was pacing back and forth, but it was hard to tell how angry she was.

  “And now that you have made a spectacle of discovering this tunnel,” she went on, “we have no doubt lost any chance of surprising the thief should he decide to return.”

  “You mean you knew about the secret passageway?” said Joe.

  “Of course,” she said.

  Frank was wondering how she would have known when she added, with a sly smile, that the count had told her about the secret exit.

  “And how did you find it?” she asked.

  “Bruno the gardener showed us,” Joe said. “He seemed sure that the thief must have used it. And he was right.” He told the inspector about the broom they had found.

  “And I suppose you think that means he is innocent.”

  “Bruno?” Joe said, not having thought that Bruno might have been putting on a big act to make himself look innocent. “I haven’t singled out anybody yet.”

  “Whatever the case,” she said. “I will give you one last chance. If I catch you tampering with the evidence one more time, I’ll have to arrest you.”

  • • •

  The next morning Frank and Joe were having breakfast with Cosimo in the dining hall earlier than the rest of the students. As they sat there, it ocurred to Joe that the room was so huge—longer than a bowling alley—that it alone was probably as big as the whole first floor of their house in Bayport.