The Last Ember (12 page)

Disregarding the
comandante
’s instructions, Rufio directed the inspectors to stay at the gate while he went into the ruin alone. His authoritative body language and harsh tone convincingly suggested that this precaution was for their own benefit, but in reality it was for his: All traces of illegal excavation must be erased.

He walked down the steps into the ruin and touched down on the damp moss, steaming.
Why had no one told him of those vandal cameras?
Within days, a junior officer would be tasked to watch all of the previous month’s footage only to see none other than Lieutenant Rufio himself standing beside the ruin, surveying the men’s excavation last week, preventing any other police disturbance.

Rufio walked through the sunken arches of the gladiatorial barracks. Noisy, traffic-jammed streets rose twenty feet above the ruin’s ancient pavement on which he stood. He was grateful for the morning’s earlier downpour, which washed away any footprints.

As expected, Salah ad-Din’s men did not tell Rufio what they were looking for. Nor did Rufio care. The men received their access to the ruins of the gladiator barracks without police molestation, and Rufio received twenty thousand euros in a briefcase on the seat at a café table beside the ruin’s eastern fence.

Now, as Rufio finished walking through the ruin, he breathed deeply. There were no traces of any work.

Rufio exited the ruin, ignoring the two inspectors who still awaited him by the gate. He crossed the Via del Colosseo, walked briskly past a row of cafés, and turned into a narrow and foul-smelling medieval alleyway. In the middle of the alley was another pay phone.

The receiver shook against his ear as he nervously rolled another cigarette and licked the paper shut. Pulling drags between the seemingly countless rings, he finally heard the beep of an answering machine.

“No one will discover the other excavation sites,” Rufio’s voice quavered. “No further measures are necessary. I repeat: No further measures are necessary.”

Rufio returned to the ruins of the gladiatorial barracks. He was dismayed to find Profeta and Brandisi walking among its ancient arches.

“No evidence of illegal excavation here,
Comandante
!” Rufio called out, hurrying down the steps after them.

Profeta nodded. “Not here in the ruins, no,” he said. He pointed at the concrete wall that ran around the perimeter of the ruin. “But I fear they used this excavation site as access to the Colosseum.”

“Access?” Brandisi asked. He pointed at the cars whizzing past along the Via del Colosseo, the four-lane street that curved around the Colosseum. “But the Via del Colosseo is between the Colosseum and this ruin,
Comandante
.”

“Only above the ground, Lieutenant,” Profeta said. “In antiquity, an underground tunnel linked these barracks for the gladiators to have access to the arena.”

Profeta walked along the perimeter of the ruin, continuing to inspect the slanted wall that buttressed the streets above them. He approached a weather-beaten door with a rusted bolt brace across it, secured by a padlock. The padlock was so corroded that Profeta could not even lift it. He kneeled in the moss and looked at its bottom. Beneath its brown, rusted skin was a hidden lock with a glistening titanium base.

“Get this door open
now
,” Profeta said.

J
onathan moved through the tourist line outside the Colosseum, zigzagging through a cattle pen of rope lines inside the ruin’s outer vault. The sweatered ticket staff was stationed like a row of bank tellers inside a long window, issuing tickets, audio phones, and brochures, talking over the loud ratcheting clicks of the turnstiles.

“One adult please, with audio phones,” Jonathan said politely to the woman behind the ticket window. The audio phones would make it less conspicuous that he was wandering around without a tour group. Nearly ten thousand tourists each day visited the Colosseum, making it Italy’s most popular tourist attraction. Jonathan knew this number of visitors was only a fraction of the sixty thousand Romans who packed the stadium to watch gladiatorial battles in antiquity.

He stepped through the turnstile and entered the enormous expanse of the Colosseum’s interior, which resembled an oval stone crater rimmed with hundreds of archways carved in its walls. Any classicist could not help but admire the Colosseum as a model of urban survival. Earthquakes damaged the amphitheater in 442 and 508, and in 1349 it was converted into a fortress.

Jonathan tilted his head back, taking in the vastness of its elliptical shape, six acres in diameter. On the top row, he could see the indentations in the stone that marked where a vast
velarium
, or linen awning, would unravel over the immense crowd.
The world’s first retractable stadium roof.
Jonathan’s eyes scanned the complexity of the Colosseum’s architecture, its system of stairways cascading between seating levels with eighty arches per floor. Numbers carved above the arches revealed a modern system of crowd control. At the Colosseum’s center, the excavated arena floor revealed an underground maze of ancient brick-lined passages four stories deep below. Jonathan could make out ancient metal hinges still in the brick, where systems of rollers and pulleys and counterweights hoisted gladiators and animals up through trapdoors to the arena floor. Few people realized just how technologically advanced the Colosseum was.

Jackdaws darted between the brush of the dark archways. It was impossible to comprehend the ancient chaos of the Colosseum—the stench of the dead beasts and the volume of human slaughter in the arena. The violent history of the Colosseum made it a very real political symbol still. Every time a death sentence is overturned somewhere in the world, the local government of Rome, as part of a “Cities for Life” program, illuminates a large upturned thumb on the Colosseum’s façade, referring to the ancient emperors’ gesture to spare a gladiator’s life.

Jonathan entered a small glass-enclosed museum shop and bought a small map of the ruins and a souvenir penlight with
I survived the Colosseum
written in glitter around it. He tested the penlight, knowing that daylight might not be sufficient where he was going. Tour groups moved around the arena as steadily as watch hands, and Jonathan joined one.

“Hail Caesar!” an Australian guide proclaimed. “Those who are about to die in the Colosseum greet you!’” Never mind, Jonathan thought, that the Flavian amphitheater was not called “the Colosseum” until the sixth century A.D. It was a common historical blunder, and during the movie
Gladiator
, he groaned every time Russell Crowe called the stadium “the Colosseum,” a name not imagined until hundreds of years after Rome’s fall.

Jonathan drifted away from the tour, walking around the iron fence that surrounded the arena. His eyes scanned the arches’ high architraves, noting the Roman numerals above each one.

Jonathan stopped in front of an arch with no number above it. The map identified it as the
Porta Sanavivaria
, where gladiators entered the arena. A thin rusted chain across its opening indicated that it was off-limits to tourists. He knew the hypogeum, the labyrinth of passageways beneath the Colosseum, was not excavated until the nineteenth century, leaving it mostly intact. The sealed-off subterranean compartments owed their survival to their having been forgotten—proving the old preservationist’s proverb that Emili had taught him years before.
Quae amissa salva.
Lost things are safe.

Jonathan stepped over the chain into the dark apse. He twisted the shaft of the penlight and it illuminated a medieval stairwell leading downward. Ghostly white roots spread across the stairwell’s aperture, and he parted them as casually as if they were a beaded curtain. A sour, clammy breath washed over him as he descended, the stairs growing steeper toward the bottom. He reached an underground brick passage. The floor was slick, and he pressed his palms against both walls for support as he moved deeper into the corridor. The daylight from the stairwell dimmed to a distant greenish glow, reflecting the walls’ coat of algae. Jonathan turned up the collar of his suit; the damp air was ten degrees cooler down here. At roughly fifteen feet below street level, his arguments to Mildren were fast losing their clarity, and Jonathan began to question himself.
What did it mean, a monument to Josephus? Almost no one who saw these corridors survived. Why would these passageways bear a monument at all?

At the end of the corridor, the walls were so thick with moss and purple roots that they resembled coral reefs. Jonathan knew that much of the plant life beneath the Colosseum was indigenous to Africa and Asia Minor. In antiquity, seeds had fallen off the coats of the tigers and lions brought to Rome for combat in the Colosseum. Over the centuries since, hundreds of species of plant life had taken root here in the labyrinth and flourished up through the sewer grates.

Not yet turning the corridor’s bend, he noted crude excavation work on the walls all around him. A hatchet job, he knew immediately. The broad gashes of ax marks and electric sanders were hallmarks of illegal excavations. The walls were brutalized for as far as he could see.

At the end of the corridor, Jonathan could see a faint light growing stronger. It was a flashlight’s beam moving up and down, scanning the walls. He quickly walked away from the light, ducking under the corridor’s low, jagged ceiling.

He made a wrong turn and the corridor’s features looked different from how they did a moment ago. Jonathan shut off his penlight, not wanting to give away his location. He hid inside a niche and stood very still, swallowing his breaths. Illicit excavators were known to kill.

The sound of rapid footsteps on the dirt-packed floor grew louder. As though sensing Jonathan’s presence, they stopped suddenly. Jonathan remained plastered against the rock wall. The white shaft of light moved closer, shining into each niche in search of an intruder.

Jonathan pressed further against the wall until, in sudden terror, he realized the wall’s jagged surface had pressed a button on his audio headset. The loud sound of a mellifluous French voice emerged from the dangling electronic device around his neck and filled the tunnel.
“Bienvenue au Colisée . . .”

The light moved sharply toward him and Jonathan rushed into the darkness, using his hands to feel along the walls. The flashlight grew stronger behind him, and as he picked up the pace, his hands could no longer anticipate the corridor’s sharp turns. Now running, he slammed the top of his head into the ceiling, and piercing threads pulsed down his neck as though he had swallowed the pain. He keeled in silent agony, holding his head and feeling the dampness of the blood above his hairline. A flashlight’s beam trained on him and observed him doubled over against the wall. He squinted into the beam.

“Wait!” He was breathless, hands out in front, temporarily blinded.

Against all expectations, he recognized the voice behind the flashlight’s beam. Around the rim of light, and beneath an open overcoat, Jonathan could make out the same gray suit she had worn in court that morning.

“Let me guess,” Emili Travia said. “You’re down here for legal research.”

I
nside the Temple Mount’s aqueduct, Ahmed hacked through the wall, each stroke flooding the tunnel with more light. The professor stepped in front of Salah ad-Din, dazzled. The hole grew larger and the professor had a nearly religious experience, staring into an infinite light with the dry, dusty breeze of a canyon on his face. But as his eyes adjusted and the image became clearer, the vision stunned him into a horrified silence.

The tunnel wall gave way to a cavern as large as an indoor stadium. Blazing white klieg lights hung from iron girders, illuminating what appeared to be a massive construction site. The tunnel’s opening was six stories from the cavern’s floor, and the volume of activity below resembled a small metropolis. Bulldozers rolled along the floor of the hollowed-out cavern. Dozens of men in kaffiyehs pushed wheelbarrows brimming with piles of ashlar block, potsherds, and broken glass. A pulley system raised and lowered buckets of pottery from crude wooden platforms that swung along the cavern walls.

On the cavern floor, a man in a glass operator’s cage worked a massive machine with a bucket shovel the size of a car. The professor could barely contain his fury as he watched it plow into the cavern wall. Thousands of pieces of broken Roman-era glass glimmered in the piles of crushed stones. The machine backed up from the wall, followed by a continuous popping sound of terra-cotta vases and other artifacts crushed within its jaws.

Looking up, the professor could discern that the cavern’s ceiling was as jagged as natural bedrock, presumably the underside of the Temple Mount’s natural contours. He knew that one hundred feet above them, people of many faiths gathered for quiet devotion in the Western Wall plaza, the al-Aqsa Mosque, or in the Sisters of Zion Convent, unaware of this destruction beneath one of the most exalted places on earth.

“I had heard rumors of illegal excavations beneath the Temple Mount,” Cianari said, “but I never imagined something like this.” Only now did it make sense to the professor why the Waqf Authority denied access for UN investigators, citing their jurisdiction from Ottoman times to administer the Temple Mount without regard to Israeli sovereignty or to the Christian patriarchies around it.

“This is all your destruction, isn’t it?” The professor’s small face reddened with fury.

“Excavation is the word I prefer,” Salah ad-Din replied.

“Your men have been here for months,” the professor said angrily. He pointed where countless axes had cleaved into the limestone. “Why did you need me to find where the tunnel from the Temple entered into this cavern?”

“The priests moved the artifact across an aqueduct’s bridge that once spanned the walls of this cavern,” Salah ad-Din said in a factual tone. “And to find the end of a bridge that no longer exists—”