The Ancient Curse by Valerio Massimo Manfredi Page A

three robbers who had opened the Rovaio tomb, but he realized how stupid that sounded. He was ashamed at how foolish the idea seemed, and how incongruous it would look for an archaeologist to be raving about Etruscan curses.
    Finally he arrived home. He dissolved some instant decaf in a cup of milk and sat down to work at his computer. He put on some music, started up a graphics program and began uploading the photos he’d taken of the statue of the boy in room twenty of the museum. He integrated the X-rays with the three-dimensional images generated by the program and began to rotate the figure in space, trying to make sense of the strange shape he’d noticed inside the bronze.
    It was after midnight when he became convinced that the shadow he’d seen in the X-rays represented the outline of a knife. The blade of a knife that had penetrated deep into the boy’s body!
    He shook his head repeatedly, as if trying to banish an idea that had started to eat away at him, then got up, walked around the room and went to the refrigerator to fetch a glass of water, trying to set his thoughts straight. He’d arrived only three days ago but it felt like he’d been sucked into another world. He was losing control over his emotions and he realized that his usual manner of rationally approaching a find or a research topic was being shot to hell with this crazy whirlwind of events. His anxiety was growing and his sense of reality felt distorted.
    He went back to the computer screen to watch the image of the boy that continued to rotate in the virtual space generated by the machine as if he were floating in a timeless limbo.
    What could this mean? What was that intrusion doing inside the statue and how could no one have noticed it before now? How had it been inserted, and why? Was there a reason why? Could it be a clue, or a message? If so, who was the message from, the artist or the person who had commissioned it? Unfortunately, as far as he was aware, nothing was known about where the statue came from, or in what context it had been found. His only option was to ask Balestra for permission to perform a metallographic probe, if he wanted to get to the bottom of the question and publish an article with sound documentation. Hopefully the director would be grateful to him for his work on the Rovaio tomb and would allow him to go ahead with the analysis. Just a few milligrams of material would be sufficient to let him know if he was right. He decided he’d ask for authorization explicitly the next day.
    There was still one thing left to do. He connected the digital camera he’d used to take the shots of the bone fragments from the tomb, copied two or three of the photos into a file and attached it to an email to Sonia Vitali, along with an explanation.
Hi, Sonia
I’m in Volterra, where the regional NAS director has put me in charge of excavating a third- or fourth-century Etruscan tomb. I’ve just finished and – get ready for this – I have reason to believe it’s the grave of a Phersu! Along with the human bones I found the skeleton of an animal – a wolf, or a dog, I’m guessing – of enormous proportions. Offhand I’d say about a metre ten tall at the withers and more than two metres long from snout to tail. The fangs are six or seven centimetres long. I’m attaching some pictures so you can have a look and would ask you please not to mention this to anyone. If you’re interested in a closer examination, I don’t think Balestra would object to you studying the skeleton and publishing it. I’ll leave you my phone numbers. Let me know what you think.
Fabrizio
     
    He felt calmer now and was about to get up and go to bed when the phone started ringing. In the deep silence of the night, the insistent trilling sounded ominous to him and alarming. An unpleasant sensation of solitude and insecurity surged through him. Logically, it could be Francesca or Massaro or maybe someone from Finanza headquarters, but Fabrizio had a gut