“Pardon?”
“Were there any belongings?” Remi said. “Personal possessions?”
“Yes, yes. You saw upstairs.”
“Nothing else? A bottle with French writing on it?”
“French? No. No bottle.”
Sam and Remi looked at one another. “Damn,” he whispered.
“No bottle,” Andrej repeated. “Box.”
“What?”
“French writing, yes?”
“Yes.”
“There was box inside coffin. Small, shaped like . . . loaf of bread?”
“Yes, that’s it!” Remi replied.
Andrej stepped around them and walked back down the passageway. Sam and Remi hurried after him. Andrej stopped at the first niche beside the steps. He knelt down, leaned inside, rummaged about, then scooted back out with a wooden crate covered in Cyrillic stencils. It was a World War II ammunition crate.
Andrej opened the lid. “This?”
Lying atop folds of rotted canvas and half buried under spools of twine, rusted hand tools, and dented cans of paint was a familiar-looking box.
“Good God,” Sam murmured.
“May I?” Remi asked Andrej. He shrugged. Remi knelt down and carefully lifted the box out. She turned it over in her hands, inspecting each side in turn, before finally looking up at Sam and nodding.
Sam asked, “Is there . . .”
“Something in it? Yes.”
CHAPTER 55
TRIESTE, ITALY
Sam’s iPhone trilled and he checked the screen. To Remi, he mouthed, Selma, then answered. “That’s a new record. Took you less than two hours.”
They were sitting on the balcony at the Grand Hotel Duchi D’Aosta, overlooking the lights of the Piazza Unità d’Italia. Night had fallen and in the distance they could see the lights twinkling in the harbor.
“We’d already decoded eleven lines of riddles and hundreds of symbols,” Selma replied. “It’s starting to feel like a second language.”
After opening the box and confirming it did in fact contain a bottle from Napoleon’s Lost Cellar, Sam and Remi had faced a dilemma. Clearly Andrej didn’t know the value of what had been tucked away in his family’s catacombs for the past two hundred- plus years. Still, they weren’t about to give up the bottle. In truth, it didn’t belong to them or to Andrej, but to the French people; it was a part of their history.
“This is a rare bottle of wine,” Sam told Andrej.
“Oh?” he replied. “French, you say?”
“Yes.”
Andrej snorted. “Napoleon disturb Tradonico grave. Take bottle.”
“Let us give you something for it,” Remi said.