On the Fifth Day (17 page)

"Thanks."

"And Mr. Knight?" said Hayes.

"Yes?"

"Try not to worry about it. The senator is a powerful man."

"Yes. I know."

"How's Father Jim holding up?"

The shift caught Thomas slightly off guard.

"Okay, I think," he said. "Why?"

"Nothing," said Hayes. "Tougher job than most, I would imagine. And he's had a rough six months, what with that evic

tion case and all."

"Eviction case?"

"You hadn't heard," said Hayes, sounding suddenly less assured. "I'm sorry. My mistake. He probably doesn't like to discuss it. Please, forget I mentioned it."

Thomas went to the National Archaeological Museum to take his mind off things, making the journey on foot in an attempt to work some of the stiffness out of his legs. Waking the morn

ing after his last run convinced him that he should be getting more exercise. So he walked through the bustling streets of Naples, passed a broad square where some kind of political rally was taking place, and skirted a row of cardboard shanties where homeless men slept.

The museum was too big for him to process, and his exclu

sive focus on pieces from Pompeii and Herculaneum didn't significantly reduce the scale of the collection. He studied the painted panels taken from the Temple of Isis with their Egypt

ian motifs and assortment of strange sea creatures, many with the forequarters of horses or crocodiles and the tails of fish. Then there were the extraordinary and vivid mosaics from var

ious Pompeian houses, and an overwhelming collection of statuary, and then he gave up. He had a coffee in the museum's 121

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courtyard garden and returned to the hotel, constantly check

ing his watch to make sure he didn't miss the senator's call. Af

ter trying to make sense of all these ancient artistic fragments, he was hoping that the senator might have more clear and di

rect information for him.

CHAPTER 29

Sister Agnes, of the Woodchester convent of the Poor Clares in England, who had been traveling constantly for almost thirtysix hours, thought that they would never reach the Naples re

treat house. When they did, they were almost two hours late and had time only for a light dinner, taken in silence as the Mother Abbess read to them from Augustine, before unpack

ing their few belongings. They came from various chapters in Europe and a couple from America, though the majority were direct from Assisi, so that the recreational period between din

ner and the bell for evening prayer at seven-fifteen was filled with the bubbling conversation of the newly acquainted. They had been introduced to the chaplains of the retreat house: Monsignor Pietro, who seemed both strange and severe, and a sweet, soft-spoken priest called Father Giovanni, who had excused himself to work on tomorrow's sermon. After eve

ning prayer came the Great Silence from seven-thirty, and the tasks of the day would be completed by nine-thirty. They would all be in bed with the lights out in another hour, and would rise for morning prayer at five-thirty.

It wasn't an easy life, particularly in this day and age, when such things were under perpetual assault by the materialism and skepticism of the outside world, thought Sister Agnes, but it had a rhythmic simplicity and purity of focus that suited her tem

peramentally. She had chosen to spend the last moments of the day in the silent chapel before returning to her room, because 122

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her Italian was so poor, and because the other English speakers were Americans and thus almost as foreign in speech and culture as the Italians. Or so she feared. Agnes was, she knew, a timid girl, always had been, and she avoided newness and exoticism so acutely that it could get in the way of the plain Christian charity to which she daily dedicated herself. Indeed, this very trip had been the Mother Abbess's idea, a thinly disguised treat designed to strip her of some of her fearfulness and closeness. It was ironic, she thought, that a nun could be considered too cloistered, but she knew that she was difficult to work with and that though the Poor Clare sisters spent much time in pri

vate devotion, they also needed to be able to work together. To

morrow she would introduce herself to the Americans. Surely they would have enough in common to put her at her ease. The chapel was blissfully cool after the heat outside. She missed England's gentler climes and was glad that she would be home for Easter week, but this too was part of her Lenten penance to be offered up in memory of Christ's wounds. She felt as she always felt in church: small and insignificant in ways she found oddly comforting. She slid the rosary beads between her fingers, opting to say one decade before bed. The sorrowful mysteries would be her focus, as they always were. The first rustle of movement behind her she ignored, as

suming another sister had joined her, but when it came again, accompanied by a sibilant hiss that she took to be whispered speech, she turned, indignant that the Silence should be so troubled. But no one was in the chapel but her, and the unfa

miliarity of the place contrived to make her uneasy, even fear

ful, something she had never once experienced in the house of the Lord before.

She completed her decade of the rosary, conscious that she had rushed the final Glory Be, promising silently to return and do two decades before bed tomorrow, conscious that her hands were slightly unsteady as she moved along the pew and into her genuflection. She gave one last look at the tabernacle light, took strength from it and its reminder of the Lord's pres

ence, and left, the door booming hollowly behind her. 123

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The chapel opened onto a vaulted corridor with peeling paint and no lamps, so that with the church door closed the only light filtered through from the courtyard ahead, and that palely. She moved quickly toward it, listening. Her imagination was playing tricks on her, she thought. She was tired and unsettled by the foreignness of the place; that was all.

Then it came again, that hiss that was almost a snarl. Her eyes grew wide as saucers, the hair on her arms prickled, and her feet somehow lost their sense of purpose. She stopped quite still.

"Who's there?" she said to the dark, stone hallway. There was no sound in reply, not until she was ready to take another step, and then it was only the faintest scraping, like the sound a large insect might make over a hard surface, the sound--

perhaps--of long fingernails on stone . . .

She whirled suddenly, looking back to the chapel door. The darkness was almost complete, but something pale crouched there, something still and hairless. It might have been some dis

carded gargoyle left to sit behind the door, except that the eyes were bright as glass.

She stood rooted to the spot, tears starting to her eyes, in

capable of looking away.

And then it moved, and she ran screaming as if the hosts of hell were at her heels.

CHAPTER 30

"I don't believe it," said Devlin over the phone.

"Thank you, Senator," said Thomas.

"This isn't just a leap of faith, Thomas," said Devlin. "Your brother was a good man, but I couldn't vouch for you in a mat

ter like this with nothing else to go on."

"So why do you believe me?"

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"It's too convenient. No terrorist in his right mind would leave this stuff lying around while he went on vacation. It makes no sense."

"That's not exactly hard evidence, sir," said Thomas.

"Did they tell you that they found copies of the Qur'an and downloads of hard-line religious writings?"

"No, sir."

"You read Arabic, Thomas?"

"No, sir."

"That's what I figured."

"Again, sir, that's not exactly evidence . . ."

"It's not just me," said Devlin. "Even the DHS guys are skeptical. Some of them, at least. The ones who aren't too used to jumping at shadows that they start pumping hollow points through everything that moves. See, there's all this printed stuff in Arabic: books, pamphlets, computer printouts. Stuff that could have come from anywhere. But there isn't a scrap of Arabic
handwriting
in the place. The books are all new, the weapons barely handled, the bomb-making stuff missing crucial hardware that would suggest a Middle Eastern source. It smells like a shell game to me."

"So what do I do?"

"Nothing," said Devlin. "Stay where you are. If you think you can learn something about Ed, do so. Let them examine the stuff they've found and see if they produce anything more than circumstantial evidence."

"Right," said Thomas. "Thank you, Senator."

"Just understand, Thomas, that if they do find your prints all over those guns, I will hang you out to dry and do my damnedest to ensure they throw the biggest and heaviest of books at you. We clear on that?"

"Yes, sir," said Thomas. "It won't come to that."

He hung up, hoping to God that was true.

CHAPTER 31

Thomas spent half the next day reading the guidebooks he had bought, and then browsing online at a tiny cybercafe a couple of blocks from the hotel, where he paid eighty cents for half an hour on the web. He learned a lot, but what loomed largest was that the early Christian presence in the cities destroyed by Vesuvius was well known, as was the
Pater Noster
acrostic and the shadow crucifix in the House of the Bicentenary. Most of the online material was of a decidedly Christian bent, often possessing a slightly shrill jubilance about the way that the ar

chaeological evidence was seen to prove the historicity of the biblical account of the early Church. One site that made much of the Herculaneum cross specifically targeted the Jehovah's Witnesses, who said that Jesus died not on a cross but on a kind of stake; others were less specific but often seemed in

formed by a zeal and a defensiveness that made Thomas wary. He called Sister Roberta.

"I was planning to go to Paestum," he said. "Feel like join

ing me?"

"Confined here today," she said, apparently unhappy about it. "Sort of an emergency orientation. One of the English nuns got spooked in the night."

"Spooked?" said Thomas. "By what?"

"Probably nothing. A shadow. Her imagination. One of her sisters suggested the girl was looking for an excuse to go back home."

"Is she okay?"

"Of course," said Sister Roberta with a touch of impa

tience. "There's nothing wrong with her."

"You sure you won't join me in Paestum?"

"It's a long way," she said. "You have to take the train down to Salerno. I won't have the time today. I was thinking of going up Vesuvius this afternoon. There's supposed to be a wonderful 126

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view, and it would be nice to get up to the crater, see the grand villain of all this archaeology up close and personal."

"Another day, perhaps," said Thomas. Vesuvius seemed like something to visit when he was done with all this other stuff. Or when it was done with him.

Thomas went to Paestum alone, expecting it to be another well-preserved Roman town, another victim of the eruption, but, from what he could gather from his guidebook, it was quite a different kind of place. It had been a Greek settlement, founded about six hundred years before the birth of Christ, but--like Naples--it had been occupied by the Samnites and the Romans. It was well south of Pompeii and Herculaneum, on the bay of Salerno, and beyond the reach of Vesuvius's de

structive power. In fact, the city had been inhabited all the way into the medieval period, though in consistent decline, and at some point in the eighth or ninth century AD, the population--

decimated by malaria and Saracen raids--had just moved away, abandoning the ancient city to weeds and marsh. It didn't sound especially promising, and Thomas, having walked the high-hedged lane from the railway station, was therefore astonished to see three massive Doric temples rising up from the flat expanse of the old town. In form, complete

ness, and simplicity they outshone anything he'd seen in Italy and, indeed, anywhere else. Their massive columns of golden stone supported monumental friezes. All that was missing were the roofs and whatever colored plaster had once covered the rock.

For a long moment, Thomas just gazed at them, awestruck. The sheer scale of the temples, coupled with a windswept an

tiquity that was absent from the newly unearthed remains he had seen elsewhere, bespoke an almost mythic majesty. At Herculaneum he had been struck by a sense of ordinariness, by the idea that the town had been inhabited by people like himself, a place that had died in living memory, leaving clues to what that life had been writ large on its walls. This was 127

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quite different. This was history on an epic scale, full of power and dignity: a history that leaned toward legend. This was, he knew, a projection of his own, something any serious historian or archaeologist would dismiss as romantic hokum, but he felt it nonetheless, and stood astonished and humbled that he had never even heard of the place before. Where he was supposed to start looking for what had rendered the remains so interesting to his dead brother--how this piece of the mosaic might be turned to fit what he already had--was a different problem entirely.

The other sites had a convenient and unique historical specificity. They illumined a single year, even a single mo

ment when the sky had rained ash and fire. This place, by con

trast, had evolved over centuries until the human fabric that held it together had finally melted away. While he knew noth

ing about Roman art, he could at least be sure that whatever he saw in Pompeii came from AD 79 or was, at least, still in use then. Here he could make no such assumptions. Any stone fragment he saw could be part of a thousand years of contin

ual life on the same site. If he found things Ed had thought were interesting, he wouldn't have the first idea how to make sense of their history.