On the Fifth Day (11 page)

He tossed his wrinkled jacket on the bed and plucked the notebook from its inside pocket.

It was thinner than he would have liked, and the back half was empty. The notes were arranged by location: Pompeii, Herculaneum, Castellammare di Stabia, Paestum, and Velia. The only one that meant anything to Thomas--and not much at that--was Pompeii, the ancient Roman town destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79.

Each section seemed to be a list of locations, Pompeii being the longest at fifteen closely written pages, then Herculaneum. The lists seemed to be places within the site, many of them sounding like private residences (
the house of the dancing
fawn, the house of the Vettii, the house of the wooden partition
), though others were temples and public buildings. Paestum fea

tured a single, lengthy entry, added to in different-colored inks 74

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and scribbled pencil. The other two bore the same inscription:

"No visible evidence."

Of what?

His first response was a sense of deflation. Ed may well have been poking around ancient Roman sites for his book on early Christian symbols, but that didn't seem terribly promis

ing as a link to terrorism, the Far East, or anything else that might have somehow gotten him killed.

He gazed down at the street to where a young Asian man was tentatively edging through the constant stream of little cars and scooters, and suddenly felt tired beyond the capacity to think. He closed the glass door to the balcony, electronically lowered the outer screen--nicely cutting out most of the street noise--shed his clothes, and flopped heavily onto the bed. In seconds he was asleep.

He woke an hour later, still tired but somehow sure he couldn't get back to sleep. He showered, put on shorts and a T-shirt, and went down to the tiny lobby, where the concierge took his key.

"How long does it take to get to Pompeii?" he asked.

"Maybe one half hour. By train, yes?"

"I guess. Can I get a cab to the station?"

The concierge picked up the phone and barked orders in Italian.

"Five minutes," he said, eyeing Thomas's shorts skepti

cally. "When you get to the station, look for the Circumvesu

viana line. And watch your wallet."

The station was dirty, chaotic, and packed with people, includ

ing huddles of uniformed policemen with dogs. No one seemed to pay them any attention, so this was, Thomas surmised, a rou

tine presence. Buying a ticket proved complicated, requiring him to go to a different area of the building and then follow a grimy subway down to the track. He carried only a small digital camera that he had borrowed from Jim in Chicago, and Ed's notebook, which he studied as the train pulled out into the sun. 75

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After the second stop, a band of musicians boarded and launched into an effusive song accompanied by accordion, tambourine, and--improbably--double bass. Most of the pas

sengers ignored them, but Thomas dropped a couple of euros into their hat as they moved to the next coach. Afterward he wondered whether he should be spending his money rather more carefully. It was not as if he had an income anymore. The train's passengers were about a quarter tourists, some of them Americans. There was one group sitting close by who were pale and large, and oddly dressed in pastels and baseball caps. They talked loudly to each other, clutched their cameras, and puzzled over the foreign currency as if it were written in Sanskrit. It was as if they were playing tourists in a movie.
Of course, there might be others on the train who blend in
so well you don't notice them.

Thomas considered the people around him and thought it unlikely, though he couldn't put his finger on exactly what marked out the Italians as so clearly Italian. Tanned skin, dark eyes, and manes of black hair dominated but were by no means the rule. It was something in the way they dressed, the way they carried themselves that made them so conspicuously dif

ferent, an elegant nonchalance that made even the most ordi

nary of faces strikingly intriguing. The only one who might be American was a woman in the brown habit of the nun he had seen at the retreat house.

Thomas looked out over the Tyrrhenian Sea to his right as the track traced down the coast with its fishing boats and black lava beaches. There were two Ercolano stops, one of which would probably take him to the ancient town of Herculaneum, should this blind search seem worth pursuing elsewhere. At the moment, with no idea what he was looking for and deeply skeptical that there was anything valuable to be found, Thomas thought that unlikely. He had a vague sense of mission that served only to make him anxious and uncertain, but to all in

tents and purposes, he was no different from the tourists. The idea depressed him.

But it was only after the train left him at the Pompeii station 76

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and he got his first glimpse of the site that the enormity of his problem truly registered. This was no huddle of stone frag

ments dotted with statues, no cluster of columns on an acre or two of patchy mosaic. The place was huge. It was, in fact, a town, vast and breathtaking, its streets radiating out for what seemed like miles in all directions.

What the hell am I supposed to do now?

He began by buying a glossy guidebook and spending ten long minutes under the shade of a palm tree studying a map of the remains, marking every site he could find listed in Ed's notebook.

"It's a bit daunting, isn't it?" said a voice. Thomas looked up, shading his eyes against the light. It was the nun from the train.

"It is a bit, yes," he said, getting to his feet. "We're here, right?" he said, prodding the map with one finger.

"No," said the nun. "We're at the Marine Gate, here."

"Christ," muttered Thomas, hastily adding, "sorry. No of

fense."

"None taken. I realize that for most people such words don't really mean what they say."

"No," said Thomas, relaxing a little. "You're right."

She smiled back. She was perhaps thirty, maybe a little more, though it was hard to tell with the habit and headdress that revealed only her face and hands. She wore a silver cruci

fix around her neck, a white rope belt around her waist, and heavy, buckled sandals on her feet. If she was Italian, her En

glish was flawless.

"I didn't mean to interrupt you," she said, smiling and tak

ing a step backward as if ready to leave. "I just thought you were looking lost. You seem slightly familiar too, but I expect I'm thinking of someone else."

"Probably," said Thomas. "I just arrived from the States. Chicago."

The nun frowned and shook her head.

"I'm from Wisconsin," she said. "Here for a retreat."

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He could just about hear it now that she said it, that slightly Nordic inflection and the flat, open vowels of the upper Mid

west.

"Wait a minute," said Thomas, the light going on. "Are you a Franciscan?"

"What gave it away?" said the nun, with a comic glance at the floor-length habit.

"You're at the retreat house in Naples? Santa Maria . . . something."

"Delle Grazie!" the nun completed, her smile broadening.

"That's right. I saw you there, didn't I?"

"Briefly," said Thomas.

"Are you a priest?"

"God, no," said Thomas. "Again, no offense. I was just . . . visiting. I'm staying at the hotel around the corner."

"I'd say it was a coincidence, but since this is the major tourist attraction in the area, I guess it's not that surprising,"

said the nun. "I've been here since Wednesday but I was so jet-lagged at first that I haven't seen much yet. My retreat doesn't start for another few days so I thought I'd better get some sight-seeing in. I came here yesterday for a few hours, but it was just too much to process. I figure you really need a week to see the place properly."

"A week?" echoed Thomas, crestfallen. "I thought I'd get it covered today."

"Well, you've only got a couple of hours left today," said the nun. "The site closes at six. Was there something special you wanted to see this afternoon?"

"Not really," said Thomas. "I hadn't expected it to be so . . .
enormous.
"

"Best to do it in bits," she said. "I was going to look at the theaters today. Join me if you like."

Thomas glanced at the map and chose one of the places he had circled at random, glad he didn't have to produce Ed's notebook.

"I was hoping to visit the Temple of Isis," he said. 78

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"Perfect," she said. "That's right next to them. Shall we?"

"I'm Thomas, by the way," he said, as he followed her into a stone-flagged tunnel that climbed up into the ancient town.

"Sister Roberta," said the nun. "I'm glad to have someone to talk to. My Italian is patchy at best, so it's been a pretty quiet couple of days."

"I would have thought you'd be good at silence," said Thomas, grinning.

"We're not Trappists," laughed the nun.

They climbed the Via della Marina toward the Roman fo

rum, passing the Temple of Apollo on the left. Thomas was amazed. Few of the structures had roofs, but he'd seen earlytwentieth-century buildings that had decayed more completely than these two thousand year old remains. The streets were bustling with tourists, most in large guided groups, so that he wondered how different the place would have been the year the mountain--looming in the distance over the brick columns of the Temple of Jupiter--had blown its wooded top, showering the area in a killing rain of lava and rock and suffocating ash.

"They didn't know it was a volcano," said Sister Roberta, distantly, following his gaze to the broken summit of Vesu

vius. "A few scientifically minded folks had made connec

tions to other known volcanoes like Etna, and there were more concerns after the earthquakes of AD 62, but the ordi

nary people had no idea at all. One day they were just living their lives in a fairly average Roman town, and the next . . . Everything gone. Everyone dead."

Thomas nodded, thinking of Ed.

"Funny, isn't it," she said. "It should be sad. Should make you think about mortality and such. But it's just so amazing that you can't get past the awe. It's like a movie set abandoned in the desert, but it's all real: a museum that people lived in!"

She looked thoughtful for a moment and then her face lit up.

"Let me show you something," she said, suddenly girlish in her excitement. "It's a bit out of our way at the other end of the forum, but you really have to see it to see what I mean."

She led him quickly across the great expanse of the 79

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forum--once the city's marketplace and formal piazza--edged with white columns, and skirted the Temple of Jupiter, pointing out features she noted as she walked. Thomas smiled at the way her enthusiasm transcended the harshness of her attire.

"That was the Temple of Vespasian," she said. "And that there was the public Lararium, a kind of shrine to household gods, I think. There's a carved marble relief somewhere that shows the citizens making sacrifices to the gods after the earth

quake here. The Macellum was the food market proper. You can imagine the townsfolk coming here to buy bread and fish . . ."

She was as good as a guide.

She led him through a brick arch and onto the Via di Mercurio, its great flagstones rutted with years of cart traffic be

fore the eruption, and stood proudly pointing at the entryway of a building generally known as the House of Tragic Poet.

"There," she said. "See? They were just regular people. It's like they just stepped out for a while, except that they've all been dead for two thousand years."

What she was pointing at was a large floor mosaic in the entryway to the house, made mainly of tiny black and white squares, each only a half inch or so across. They depicted a large chained hound with a red collar, its teeth bared. Set into the mosaic beneath the beast, were the words
Cave Canem.

"What does it mean?" said Thomas.

"Beware of the dog," she said. "See?"

And he saw.

CHAPTER 18

They meandered along the streets with their stepping-stones and their rope ties for animals, peering into once-grand villas with rectangular pools for collecting rainwater in the center of peristyled atriums. Some of the plaster walls still bore the 80

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original deep crimson paint ornamented with cupids and vines and stylized animals. They filed through the cool bathhouses with their hot rooms, cold pools, and dressing rooms; watched lizards skittering through the thermopolia where the ancient Pompeians bought wine from great clay amphora set into stone counters by the street; and marveled at the fragments of political graffiti daubed on the walls.

And they talked. The nun was surprisingly good company, and Thomas felt comfortable, perhaps because of the strange

ness of the place and the fact that it all seemed so far from the States and the circumstances that had brought him here. He told her that his brother had been a priest and about his recent death, though he left any sense of mystery out of the account and made it sound as if his presence in Italy now were more pilgrimage than investigation, which was not far from the truth. He didn't know what he expected to find here, though it pleased some part of him to retread his brother's footsteps. Maybe that was all he could hope to get from the visit.

"And he was interested in archaeology?" asked Roberta.

"I guess so," said Thomas. "He was writing a book on early Christian symbols, I think, but I'm not sure why he'd be here."

"Oh, but there is some very exciting evidence of a Christ

ian settlement here," said the nun, her face lighting up again.

"Think of that! Less than fifty years after the death of Our Lord, there were already people gathering to worship Him here."