“We have a couple of ideas,” Sam said. “We’ll let you know if we’re right. What’s the latest on Arpad Bako?”

“Still no movement. Tibor positively identified Bako going into his office as usual this morning and coming back from lunch in the afternoon. He had four of his security men with him.”

“Great. Please let us know if anything changes. By now, Bako should have read the inscription in the false tomb and he ought to be moving.”

“Maybe he’s not as good at this as we are,” Selma said.

“I’m just hoping he’s not better.”

“We’d better get going,” said Remi.

“I heard that,” said Selma. “We’ll be waiting for news.”

Early the next morning, Sam and Remi dressed in tourist clothes: shorts, T-shirts, and athletic shoes, with their sun visors and sunglasses. In another five minutes they were out on the road, heading for the Mincio River.

An old, level towpath bordered the river and made it a favorite ride for bicyclists. Sam and Remi pedaled along the paved path with dozens of others, admiring the beauty of the city and the equally beautiful Lombardy landscape, the flat fields nearby and low rolling hills in the middle distance, with a row of trees growing along each bank of the river. There were houses that must have dated from the Middle Ages and old vineyards with vines strung on poles and overhead wires. They stopped at a pleasant spot beneath the trees along the river and ate their picnic lunch.

They reached Lago Superiore, the first of the lakes, at one-thirty p.m. and rode along its southern shore into the center of Mantua. They found a sidewalk café where they could rest and have espressos and pastries in view of the second lake, Lago di Mezzo, then rode over the Via Lagnasco bridge to SS 482, the Via Ostiglia.

“Eight more miles,” said Remi. “This is glorious. I don’t feel tired at all.”

“It occurred to me that we’ve been following the river downstream,” said Sam. “Does that suggest anything to you?”

“Yes. That we’ll be pedaling uphill all the way back to Peschiera del Garda,” Remi said. “Or we’ll have to find another way.”

After an hour of easy pedaling, they could see the destination. The Po ran west to east and was wider than the Mincio. On both sides of the Mincio were cultivated vegetable and grain fields as far as they could see, except for the field at its confluence, which had been plowed but not yet planted. The trees were all along the riverbeds.

Sam and Remi dismounted from their bicycles and studied the landscape. “This is a good place not to be noticed,” said Remi. “I can’t even see a building on this side. Albrecht said to stay on the west side of the Mincio, north of the Po. All we need to find now is a fifteen-hundred-year-old campsite.”