The small jeweled cross was treated with great respect, snug in a velour clothe on an ornate silver tray, as it was passed around the large mahogany table, for each person to caress, examine and compare to the photocopied image that they had earlier on received. The agenda for this special meeting of The Society’s board had only one item: to assess and judge the unusual project which had been proposed by Dona Maria Donatello, its current Chief Executive Officer. John, as it had been code named, was printed on the cover page of the document that had been placed before each member. Other than regular quarterly meetings and one annual meeting, The Society board met on occasion in special session and only when the CEO needed consent for an extraordinary venture. This was such a meeting.
The Society was governed by the same rules and standards as any large publicly traded corporation. But The Society was not listed on any stock exchange or registered with any government, since it paid no taxes, even if it was neither a charitable nor religious enterprise. At the traditional head of the round table, at the north end of the square, spacious room, in the elegant Florentine palace, sat the current chairman, Gianni Donatello, patriarch of the family which traced its roots to the early thirteenth century. Unless disqualified by severely debilitating mental or physical infirmity, as far back as anyone can remember, the chairman has always been the sitting family patriarch.
The Society had started life in the high middle ages as a family concern, specializing in condottiere, or mercenary recruitment, the provision of assassins and the monetization into local currency of looted treasure. At the time, all of its activities had been officially sanctioned and were scrupulously governed by carefully worded contractual obligations. The hiring and remuneration of condottiere captains was particularly closely regulated by the condotta, a specialized contract developed by the Florentines. In later centuries, when such activities were no longer recognized as legitimate enterprise, when the state reserved unto itself the monopoly on organized violence, the Donatello reinvested their substantial profits into legitimate endeavour. The Society, however, was not closed down. It was simply reengineered into a group using alternative business practices, which continues to this day.
The Society was more than a lucrative distraction. It was a vast network that had been diligently assembled over the centuries. It collected intelligence valuable to their other, legitimate business interests, particularly in finance, energy and mining. Much of that intelligence was Insider information, provided by The Society’s clients, in lieu of direct monetary remuneration. This was a most convenient arrangement for the large corporations that availed themselves of The Society’s many otherwise unavailable necessities. Auditors, difficult, but not impossible to influence, were notorious for tracing even the smallest transaction when money changed hands. With fees for assembling small rebel forces in remote regions to destroy competitors’ installations running into the tens of millions, another way had to be found. Not uncommonly, a Donatello would sometimes be pleasantly surprised by unexpected lucrative contracts; the family might receive timely information about an acquisition, on which they might decide to take a gamble; or, perhaps, prior knowledge of major mineral discoveries and other bits and pieces of useful intelligence.
Outside the purely mercantile motivation for running and maintaining a sub rosa enterprise, the Donatello looked upon The Society as a reality training ground for their men and, more recently, women. Managing The Society was a key prerequisite for future Donatello leaders, very much as in private corporations where executives are groomed by moving them through key positions to acquire vital experience, knowledge and a smidgeon of killer instinct. They learn how to deal with people whose only fuel is high octane intrigue; the extent to which human beings are driven by undiluted self-interest; how quickly the unobserved hand will reach into the untended pocket and much more. The family has long understood, from centuries of experience, that most humans will be guided not by good intentions but by raw, highly varnished self-interest.
Appearances to the contrary Dona Maria, related in varying degrees to all the other members of the board, was refined, well educated and an eminently practical business woman who would always try and resolve disputes brought to her by clients of The Society through arbitration and compromise. It’s not that she was squeamish about murder, only that she preferred to minimize risk all around – a natural enough strategy from someone with an advanced degree in statistics. Her weakness for body-clinging leather and spiked heels, hardly the gear for a serious business leader, did tend to irritate her father, Gianni Donatello.
As in the once hit pop song, Dona Maria was a witchy woman. Thick black hair, long face, aquiline nose, huge mahogany eyes and lips of the most basic red, all sitting atop an airbrushed body. Since she also dressed to enhance what needed little enhancement she sometimes found herself in the awkward position of having to rough up those clients who may have honestly mistaken what she was actually selling. Even here, in the bosom of her family, some of her more distant relatives were sure to find their attentions wandering from her altogether very serious and keenly excellent presentation.
As brokers in looted treasure, for almost 700 years, the missing wealth from John II’s baggage train was the stuff of stories the Donatello children imbibed with mother’s milk. They all knew that the little jeweled cross the senior Donatello had purchased from the French dealer, along with information as to its provenance, had been part of the fabled fortune looted by the Gascon force that had turned the tide at the Battle of Poitiers. In those unsettled times, kings and nobles always traveled with their valuables, since that was the most convertible currency of the time and they might be on the road for months if not years at a go.
“To support you in this one, Dona Maria, I would have to believe that the treasure is still intact,” the elder Donatello began, “that we could actually find buyers for such well documented artifacts and that it would be a sound business proposition. The sudden appearance of the cross leads me to accept that the treasure may, indeed, still be intact. As for buyers, in our specialized network there is little doubt that we would find a few willing to spend, if for nothing else, the chance to own something entirely unique. As for it being a sound business proposition, that’s where I have a problem. While such a treasure, circulating in the open market would be worth hundreds of millions, moved through the underground, I’m guessing that we could earn, at most, thirty to forty million. Such a pittance would be worth neither the effort nor the risk.”
“Father, you are right, with the evidence of the cross the probabilities that this treasure does not exist are vanishingly small. Since no other pieces have ever turned up, the risk that the treasure has already been disassembled and sold off discreetly, bit by bit, can also be discarded as trivial. The really big risk, father, is one you have not mentioned; Abelard may not know where it is. He may have gotten the cross from someone and never been aware that it was part of a larger haul. But, if that is the case, then we still have a good chance of tracing it through Abelard. The investment should be fairly small; two guys, with some expenses, to kidnap him. Once we have Abelard here we will know soon enough whether this venture is worth pursuing. So our downside risk is small but the potential gain, father, is actually well beyond what you have guessed. If it was only the treasure by itself, you’re point about small potential rewards should quite rightly kill my proposal.”
This last bit got the attention of everyone in the room. “There are two reasons why we might expect returns well beyond our minimum hurdle rate,” she stressed, using basic financial language to clearly demonstrate that she was, above all, focused on the business case. “Firstly, there is very likely much more than just the idiot King’s looted treasure. I have been looking through our oldest records of the period and it seems we had dealings with one Abelard de Buch, the son of the Captal de Buch who had led the looting raid on King John’s baggage train. This Abelard, a captain in his own right, was several times engaged as a condottiere during brief periods of p
eace that now and again broke out during the Hundred Years war. He was also a notorious highwayman, maintaining a small force of temporarily unemployed English and Gascon knights, which he put to very lucrative use on the trade routes in French controlled territory. He was apparently very successful and amassed a hugely valuable cache. The last time he was in Florence, we had negotiated with him to broker valuables well in excess of what is believed to have been taken from King John. The description, still preserved in the minutes of that meeting, included jeweled reliquary cases, chaplets, cluster brooches, coronets, sapphires, rubies, diamonds and on and on. You each have,” speaking now to the entire board and holding up four sheets filled with tightly spaced printing, “the entire list as taken down by a clerk named, simply, Francesco. Should the treasure still be intact, as I believe it is, the potential gain for us would approach 200 million. Even if that was the end of the story, we would already have our business case.”
A cacophonic babble drowned out Dona Maria’s sultry voice. She waited for the excitement to subside. Her fluid body glided around the table much like a hungry panther, stopping opposite her father. “The second and, in my opinion, more important reason why we should diligently pursue this matter has to do with a tale that has been passed down through the centuries about an incident near Rocamadour, in France. The dealer, who so kindly brought us the cross, related it to me.
“In the year 1358, two years after the French catastrophe at Poitiers, Abelard de Buch, the same Abelard that had visited our ancestors one year earlier, was again en route to our fine city. He had been contracted by Sir John Hawkwood, probably the most famous of all the condottiere, who was himself under contract with Florence, to protect the city from its main rivals, Milan and Siena.
“Although much out of his way, he wished to pray before the remains of St. Amadour and ask that his father’s shaking disease be cured. Henry Plantagenet had made a similar pilgrimage to Rocamadour, the village that grew up around the sanctuary, two centuries earlier, and had reputedly been cured. Abelard was to bequeath a small but valuable jeweled cross to the sanctuary.
“As he and his small group laboured towards the village, along the narrow path hugging the cliff wall, more than 150 meters above the Alzou Canyon floor, they were attacked by a band of routiers, French knights without a day job during periods of peace. The fight was fierce and Abelard was gaining the upper hand, many of the attackers already dead or dying. The Gascons were formidable combatants. Suddenly, there was a deafening whistle and a ball of fire came hurtling from the heavens to crash against the cliff wall. Abelard’s horse, greatly spooked by the explosion, reared up and threw its rider. The attackers had seized the opportunity presented by the ensuing commotion to flee, and when the smoke cleared Abelard was nowhere to be found. Where the object had struck the cliff wall there was now only a pile of rocks jammed into what may have been an opening. Of Abelard, nothing was ever heard again. At first it was suspected that the attackers had used the chaos to kidnap him, but there was never any ransom demand. Over the years, the belief emerged that God had caused him to be swallowed by the cliff wall, to punish him for his banditry and blasphemous ways.
“The dealer tells me that our Abelard was found in a cave, which had opened up suddenly from the pressure of a climber. He was dressed in full armour and wearing the jeweled cross. Is this the same man, asleep for over 650 years?”
“Donita,” her father answered, “we may believe in miracles and certainly in the Almighty, but fairy tales, please. What you are suggesting is impossible.”
“Do you have any other explanation?”
“Because we cannot explain something does not mean we must fall back on the absurd. A perfectly sensible explanation will eventually turn up.”
“This is true father, but the only game in town, as the saying goes, is that the heavenly object was a meteorite and it had somehow put Mr. de Buch into stasis. If that turns out to be the case, the chemical formula of whatever that was, would beggar all the treasure Abelard may have hidden. Many would be willing to pay princely sums for such a formula: Governments looking to send people on long space voyages or just to minimize the size of prisons; pharmaceutical companies looking to increase life spans; cryogenic enterprises currently freezing the recent dead with hopes of reviving them when cures may be found for whatever killed them would be delighted to find a more reliable technology.
“It is, I admit, a long shot. And if it turns out to be a dead end we will still have a good shot at the astounding treasure this Mr. de Buch seems to have amassed. What do you say father?” Dona Maria knew she was taking a risk with this project. She could see that her father was more than a little uneasy at what an objective observer might judge to be a worrying turn of mind for a future Donatello leader and he implied as much with his final words.
“Do whatever is necessary to find the treasure and get the formula if it exists, but it is the treasure which we are after. Do not take on any additional risks for the formula. Are we clear?”
“Yes father, and thank you.”
The elder Donatello would regret his decision.
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