On the Fifth Day (22 page)

CHAPTER 40

Back at the retreat house, Roberta was hovering.

"You are heading back to Pompeii today?" she asked. It was a prelude to a request to join him, and Thomas found his heart sinking a little. He had enjoyed her company well enough, but he was ready to be alone, to think.

"Yes," he said, trying to be amiable. "Surely you've seen enough of that place?"

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"Better than hanging around here," she said. "And these are my last days of freedom before the retreat proper starts. Mind if I tag along?"

Put like that, of course, with that slightly desperate hope in her eyes, what was he supposed to say?

"I'll wait here for you."

She had barely left his side when Giovanni stuck his head over the courtyard rail and shouted down to him.

"The police just called. They are on their way over to speak to you."

Thomas's first instinct was to leave, but that made no sense, so he forced himself to sit.

Camoranesi arrived with a uniformed driver and the stillnervous translator almost immediately. He had called, he ex

plained, from the Executive.

"What can I do for you?" Thomas said.

Camoranesi drew a small cloth bundle from his pocket and began to unfold the fabric.

"Have you seen this before?" said the translator, his eyes on the investigator. "It was found in the dead man's clothes."

It was the silver fish that Parks had stolen from Ed's room in Chicago. Thomas picked it up, felt its weight and coolness, and then told them.

For a long moment nobody spoke, and then Roberta was blundering in, asking if Thomas was ready to go, and Camoranesi was wrapping up and pocketing the fish without another word. As they stood up, the policeman muttered a few words in Italian and then turned and began walking away.

"He wants you to contact him before you check out of the hotel," said the translator.

"Am I a suspect?" said Thomas.

The translator looked embarrassed.

"I don't know," he said, and Thomas believed him. But in the cold pit of his stomach, he was sure that he was. CHAPTER 41

Roberta talked constantly, first on the crowded number two bus that collected them from outside the tobacconist's across the street from the Executive, then on the Circumvesuviana platform, then on the train, and finally in the hot and shadeless site itself. She talked about Italy and Italians, Italian food, the Italian language and how she wished she understood more of it. She discussed her nervousness about the upcoming retreat. She offered various reflections on Thomas's horrific night, the imminence of mortality ("it can come any time: the trick is to be ready") and the necessary spiritual preparedness for death. She talked about the wonders of archaeology and history, and how being confronted by the past changed one's sense of the present. In short she said much of what she had said before, and while it had formerly sounded like thought, it now sounded like something she'd read. While she was listening in on a guided tour in the forum, Thomas ducked back toward the Temple of Apollo and waited till she had given up scan

ning the faces around for him, and wandered off alone. Thomas felt a little bad for ditching Roberta, but it was what he had planned to do from the outset. He hadn't seen the magic square firsthand, and knew it was in a house that wasn't open to the public. The plan that was forming in his head on the train was that he would find a place to hide, maybe in the amphitheater, which was well-removed from the most fre

quented parts of the site, and wait the day out. When the site closed, he would locate the house of Paquius Proculus, break in, and see what the square might have to show. In the meantime, Thomas made for all the places Ed had listed, places he had largely missed in his last visit: the bath

houses with their sea-creature mosaics, and--most 160

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important--the Temple of Isis, which he had somehow walked past twice last time without noticing. All the while he tried to process what he knew, about Ed's research, Parks, how Satoh wound up with the little silver fish, the tale of the Herculaneum cross, and, most insistently, the circumstances of Satoh's death. The rambling chaos of his thoughts was mir

rored by the sites he looked at: fragmented mosaics; halfintact structures of crumbling brick, stone, and tile; nameless houses stretching down empty streets. There was no order, no sequence; nothing was making any sense. He stood in the Temple of Isis and saw only pieces of a puzzle he could not hope to solve. What had his brother seen here that was so im

portant? What had this place been? What function had this column and that altar served? Why was an Egyptian god being worshipped in a first-century Roman town anyway?

The last question was new and gave him pause. Rome had had territories in North Africa. He recalled Cleopatra's links to Julius Caesar and Mark Antony from Shakespeare. So the cult of Isis had been imported, absorbed into the Roman pan

theon as foreign cultures were absorbed into the empire, as Christianity would be absorbed and made official three cen

turies later?

He considered the remains of the temple. It was laid out as a square courtyard surrounded by a walkway lined with columns, and with steps up to the shrine in the center. Several large stone blocks were arranged around the open space, though whether they were statue bases or altars he wasn't sure. In one corner of the square was a blockish building covered in white plaster. Thomas checked his guidebook. This was the pur

gatorium, a building containing a subterranean, vaulted room that once held water from the Nile: holy water. He approached the pale structure, his gaze sliding over it, already frustrated and a little bored. Then he shaded his eyes, caught by a familiar image, and looked again. A little over head height was a plaster frieze of fish. Strange ones, with oversized fins at the front and, in some cases, triangular teeth like alligators.

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Fish again.

His mind flashed quickly over the other sites he had seen that day, and the ones Ed's notes had pointed to elsewhere, and the image of the fish suddenly seemed to be what he had been seeing constantly since he arrived. He had seen it in the mo

saics of the bathhouses and the underground swimming pool in Herculaneum, in the Christian tomb of the diver with the red water in Paestum, in the silver votive stolen by Parks and found on Satoh's corpse, in locations all over Pompeii, and most clearly, here in a Greco-Roman temple to an Egyptian god. Thomas felt his pulse starting to race. Was this it? And if so, what could it possibly mean?

He stared at the plaster reliefs of the curious fish, with their bulbous snouts, wriggling tails, the toothed jaws, and those massive forefins that looked like . . .

Like legs.

It was an Egyptian cult, and one of the beasts most clearly linked to Egypt was the crocodile. Could these odd images be representations of those animals made by Italians who'd never seen one? But he'd seen the paintings from the temple in the museum in Naples and they had been full of detailed Egyptian divinities with jackal heads and motifs that came from real knowledge of Egypt. He'd also seen plenty of representations of fish from all over Pompeii and Herculaneum, many of them not only lifelike but recognizable. But then there had been the others, the weird ones with the large fins that looked like legs. They hadn't all come from Egypt. They'd come from here, had probably been local images grafted onto the imported Isis cult as Hera's pomegranate had been grafted onto the Virgin Mary.

So the legged-fish symbol was local and was old, and--as the Paestum tomb demonstrated--had been adapted for Chris

tian use. Giovanni had said that the fish in its familiar form had plenty of symbolic resonance for Christians, but the legged fish would surely have even more. A legged fish could cross between land and water, could--now that he thought of it--

echo Christ's own walking on water as the terrified apostles 162

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cowered in their boat on the sea of Galilee. If the earlier Paes

tum tomb used the symbol of the diver as an image suggesting the passage into death, wouldn't the Christian use of a
legged
fish suggest a kind of transcendence, moving through death and beyond it: the ability to live in both elements?

What had Ed's note to Giovanni said?

p

"xi ian symbol-wise, I might have hit the mother lode
(should that be father lode??!!), but it's pointing outside Italy
now and I have to follow."

Was the legged fish the mother lode symbol of early Chris

tianity? The supreme icon of Christ's triumph over death? If so, why didn't it become part of the mainstream iconography of the church, and where had Ed followed it next? And how could such a quest have gotten Ed--and Satoh--killed? He had no idea, but he felt it in his veins, a humming energy. He was on to something at last.

CHAPTER 42

Thomas found Roberta waiting at the Marine Gate. The magic square was, he decided, a moot point. Ed hadn't been inter

ested in crosses and probably didn't believe that they were Christian symbols as early as AD 79. If there was truth to Satoh's story about the Herculaneum cross, the key was surely the fact that the cross was marked by the image of a "strange fish." That would certainly have piqued Ed's curiosity.

"So now what?" said Roberta as they rode back. He had given her the gist of his ideas in a muted and un

specific way as a way of salving his conscience for abandon

ing her. She was probably lonely, as so many religious seemed to be, doubly so here.

"I have to talk to Pietro," said Thomas. "No evasions, no 163

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hostility, no excuses. If he doesn't tell me what I need to know, I'll give his name to the police."

"You think he was connected to the death of that Japanese man?"

"No," he said. "But I do think he was implicated in a larger puzzle centering on my brother."

"He's doing sick visits this afternoon," she said. "He won't be back till six. Let's take a break for an hour or so, think it all through, then go and talk to him."

For a long moment Thomas considered her pale round face and serious eyes. He probably could use some time to make sense of what he had learned.

"What kind of break?"

"We'll get off at the Ercolano stop," she said, clearly ex

cited. "I have an idea. Come on, Thomas, my retreat starts to

morrow and then I won't be able to leave the house. One last excursion for a couple of hours, and then you can see Pietro, okay?"

For once she let him just sit and think, and as the train sped along the seawall with its patches of black sand beach, she produced a silver cell phone from a pocket in the sleeve of her habit. Thomas raised his eyebrows at the phone.

"Oh," she said, with a playfully dismissive wave, "we're all very modern these days."

Thomas smirked.

"Pronto,"
she said into the phone, then mouthed "Father Giovanni." She introduced herself in faltering but competent Italian and asked a series of questions. The answers seemed to satisfy her.

"What was all that about?" asked Thomas.

"Wait and see," she grinned, girlish.

The surprise was waiting for them in the street by the Er

colano station: a white, two-door Fiat rental car.

"We have to drop it off at seven, so that gives us two and a 164

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half hours," she said, pleased with her scheme. "I've been wanting to do this since we got here."

"Do what?"

"Visit the cause of all the trouble," she said, as if this were obvious.

For a moment Thomas's heart skipped. What was she talk

ing about? What did she know.

"Vesuvius!" she said into his baffled face, "the volcano."

"Oh," he said. "
That
trouble."

She fumbled with the keys, shaking her head at his slow

ness, chuckling to herself.

She was a surprisingly good driver, which was just as well, be

cause the road across town was narrow and hazardous, and the moment they began to ascend the mountain itself, things dete

riorated. Roberta clearly enjoyed the hairpin turns, the blaring of horns at every bend, the skirting of the precipices on the passenger side, but Thomas quickly wearied of it all, and after ten minutes, he was getting nauseated. Twice they had to inch past great lumbering coaches descending from the summit, and other cars were constantly rocketing by at wholly unrea

sonable speeds.

"Wow!" said Roberta, as a tiny white van shot around the corner toward them, missed by inches in a blaze of horn, and headed down toward the town without slowing one iota. "He was moving!"

She seemed quite delighted by the whole thing. Thomas stared out at the purplish cone of the volcano above the tree line, and tried to ignore their zigzagging ascent. When they finally stopped in a parking lot of pinkishbrown gravel, he took several minutes gazing down over the trees to the gleaming sea for his stomach to calm.

"Come on," said Sister Roberta, as if she were leading a Girl Scout hike.

Thomas looked bleakly around and up. They were still a long way from the crater.

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"Now we walk," said the nun, as if this were a special treat. She marched away in the lowering afternoon sun, her cru

cifix swinging with each pounding stride of her sandals so that their buckles jingled faintly with each step. There was a gate at the entrance to the trail. Most of the tourists were on their way down. The thin, long-haired woman at the turnstile checked her watch.

"Straight up and down. No more than fifteen minutes at the crater," she said, tearing off tickets from a spool without look

ing at them.

A few yards beyond the gate the path began to climb steeply, cutting back on itself and then slanting hard up the mountain.

This will be no picnic,
thought Thomas, wearily. His feet already ached after the day's walking.