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“Who are we meeting?” Remi asked.
“The curator,” Sam replied. “Maria Favaretto.”
Before catching their two o’clock Lufthansa flight from Salzburg, Sam had called the curator of their destination, the Museo Archeologico, and introduced himself. Luckily, Signora Favaretto had heard of them. Their discovery of the lost diary of Lucrezia Borgia, the fifteenth-century Machiavellian political operator/seductress, a year earlier in Bisceglie had been front-page news in Venice, she told Sam. In fact, a former colleague of hers was the assistant curator of the Vatican Library’s Museo Borgiano, where he and Remi had donated the diary. Favaretto agreed to meet them for an after-hours visit of the Museo Archeologico.
“Is that her?” Remi asked, pointing.
A woman was waving to them from inside one of the entrance arches to the Procuratie Nuove, in which the Museo Archeologico was partially housed; the rest was located within the Biblioteca Nazi onale Marciana—the National Library of St. Mark’s. Sam and Remi walked over to the woman.
“Signor Fargo, Signora Fargo, I am Maria Favaretto. It’s my pleasure to meet you.”
“Please call us Sam and Remi,” Remi said, shaking her hand.
“And I’m Maria.”
“Thank you for your help. We hope we aren’t inconveniencing you.”
“Not at all. Remind me again, what period are you interested in?”
“We’re not positive, but none of the references we found are later than the eighteenth century.”
“Good. I think we’re in luck. If you’ll follow me, please.”
She led them through the arch, across a breezeway done in terra-cotta and cream tiles, and into the museum. They followed her past displays of Egyptian sarcophagi and Assyrian chariots, Etruscan statues and vases and Roman busts, Byzantine ivory carvings and Minoan earthenware jars.
Maria stopped at a wooden door and unlocked it with a key. They went down a long, dimly lit hallway. She stopped. “This is our not-for-public library. Given what you were asking about I thought the best person to help you would be Giuseppe. He doesn’t have a title per se, but he’s been here longer than anyone—almost sixty years. He knows more about Venice than anyone I know.” She hesitated, cleared her throat. “Giuseppe is eighty-two and a little . . . odd. Eccentric is the word, I think. Don’t let that worry you. Just ask your questions and he’ll find the answers.”
“Okay,” Sam said with a smile.
“The reason I asked about your time frame is that Giuseppe is what you might call a throwback. He has no interest in anything modern. If it didn’t happen in the nineteenth century or earlier, it doesn’t exist for him.”
“We’ll keep that in mind,” replied Remi.
Maria opened the door and gestured for them to step through. “Just press the buzzer on the wall here when you’re done. I’ll come back for you. Good luck.” She shut the door.
The museum’s library was long and narrow, measuring two hundred feet by forty feet. The walls were not walls at all, but floor-to-ceiling bookcases. They were twenty feet tall. On each of the four walls was a rolling wooden ladder. A single, ten-foot-long worktable and a lone hard-backed chair sat in the center aisle. Halogen pendants hung from the ceiling, casting soft pools of light on the green-tiled floor.
“Is someone there?” a voice called.
“Yes,” Sam replied. “Signora Favaretto let us in.”
As their eyes adjusted they could see a figure standing atop the ladder at the far end of the library. He was perched on the top rung, finger tracing along the book spines, occasionally nudging one inward or sliding one outward. After a moment the man climbed down and started shuffling down the aisle toward them. Thirty seconds later he came to a stop before them.
“Yes?” he said simply.
Giuseppe was barely five feet tall with wispy white hair that jutted out from his head at all angles. He couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds. He stared up at them with surprisingly sharp blue eyes.
“Hello. I’m Sam and this is—”
Giuseppe waved his hand dismissively. “You have a question for me?”
“Um, yes. . . . We’ve got a riddle on our hands. We’re looking for the name of a man, probably from Istria in Croatia, that might have a connection to either Poveglia or Santa Maria di Nazareth.”
“Give me the riddle,” Giuseppe ordered.
“ ‘Man of Histria, thirteen by tradition,’ ” Sam recited.
Giuseppe said nothing, but stared at them for ten seconds as he pursed his lips from side to side.