The Far Time Incident (21 page)

The grad students returned carrying something my nose registered before my eyes did. Bread. Round, about the size of a dinner plate, and marked into wedges by a design on the top. The sweet, yeasty aroma made my stomach growl with hunger. “Where did you get that?” I asked the pair as Kamal wiped his hands on his shirt (a useless gesture in terms of getting them clean, since his shirt was equally grungy). He proceeded to break the bread into sections and pass them all around.

It was Abigail who answered, mouth full. “I—yum—distracted the bakery shopkeeper while Kamal borrowed the loaf.”

“Borrowed the—Abigail! Kamal!” Helen chastised them, shocked.

“You should have seen her,” said Kamal, who didn’t seem chagrined at all. “She all but fluttered her eyelashes at the baker.” He offered the professor a wedge. “Dr. Presnik, if any of our actions threatened to significantly impact someone’s life
or change History, we wouldn’t be able to undertake them. You know that.”

“Still—one does not alter one’s morals according to the difficulty of the circumstances, Miss Tanner and Mr. Ahmad.”

It seemed to me that the opposite was true and that sometimes circumstances did need to dictate our actions. The bread must have been fresh out of the oven, and its oatmeal-white interior was warm and dotted with nuts and raisins. Suddenly realizing how ravenous I was, I attacked the piece. Kamal and the security chief proceeded to dig in as well.

After a moment, Helen relented and took a bite. “I’ve always felt that our researchers should carry along a bag of gold nuggets for emergencies. When we get our hands on a denarius or two—no, I don’t have any ideas yet about how we can do that—we’ll go back and reimburse the baker.”

“Fair enough,” the chief said through a full mouth. For a police officer, he sure didn’t seem too bothered by the idea of consuming stolen goods.

While the chief and I got ready for our expedition into town, Abigail tore up the note she’d written blaming Dr. Rojas. Using a pen from her purse, Helen reworded the note in neat cursive:

Finder, please convey this message to Campus Security, St. Sunniva University, Minnesota. Marooned in Pompeii ghost zone. August 25, year 79. Presnik, Kirkland, Olsen, Ahmad, Tanner.

“There,” she said. “Let them sort out the details at their end.”

Next we needed something to encapsulate the note so that it would be protected from the destructive elements it would face.
Helen’s purse turned out to be pristinely clean. All it held was more paper, pencils for sketching, pens for notes, and the plastic bag into which we’d placed Abigail’s crumpled-up note and the rest of our trash, mostly strips and backing from the Polaroid films.

The camera took up most of Abigail’s backpack. There was also an extra pack of film, the useless Callback, and her research notebook.

Nate and Kamal had nothing in their pockets.

From my shoulder bag I pulled out my wallet and matching change purse, the cell phone, a couple of black-ink pens, a dozen paperclips, and a list of names, the first pass at the guest list for Dean Sunder’s annual π-day cocktail party (π being 3.14, the party was held on March 14, which also, in a cosmic coincidence, happened to be Albert Einstein’s birthday). I shook the shoulder bag but nothing else came out except for a palm-full of cracker crumbs and a piece of gum that had come loose from its packaging and was covered with lint.

“I really should clean my bag more often,” I said, slightly embarrassed.

But the others weren’t even looking in my direction. Their eyes were fixed on something in Kamal’s hand.

“Perfect!” Abigail said. Kamal had retrieved the empty cheese-and-cracker package from the bag in Helen’s purse.

“We’re going to bring someone to justice using trash?” I asked.

Nate snapped the package open and shut a few times. “Why not? This should last a good while.”

“Long enough for our purposes, I imagine.” Helen sighed at the thought of contaminating an archeological site. “Assuming the plastic doesn’t melt in one of Vesuvius’s eruptions, that is.”

“Eruptions?” I said. “There’ll be more than one?”

“Besides the upcoming one? Yes, there will be other, smaller ones through the centuries. One as late as 1944. We’ll have to choose a hiding place well.”

“Why don’t we slip it into one of those urns?” Abigail suggested, pointing to one of them.

“Abigail!” I exclaimed, shocked. “Somebody’s ashes are in that.”

Helen took my spot on the wooden chest as I donned one of the cloaks. “Let me think about this. We need a hiding place that will be safe from the force and heat of the eruption, once it comes, and all of the subsequent ones, too. The note must stay undisturbed for two thousand years. From what I remember about Pompeii’s history, there was looting immediately after the eruption by rightful owners, thieves, and treasure seekers, who dug tunnels into the ash and looked either for their own valuables or those of others. In time both Pompeii and Herculaneum were forgotten… In the early eighteenth century, a villager digging a well came across marble—Herculaneum’s theater, as it turned out—and excavations began. Pompeii’s Forum and Amphitheater have long been excavated and well explored, so we can’t hide a message there.” She wrinkled her nose in thought. “I can try to remember which houses are currently undergoing excavation…the House of the Painters at Work…the House of the Chaste Lovers…but, to be honest, I have no idea how we’d figure out where they are in AD 79 without a modern map of the site.”

Chief Kirkland and I left while she was still puzzling out the problem. Even though my cheeks were sunburned from yesterday’s wanderings around the foot of Mount Vesuvius, the sun felt pleasant on my face as we walked toward the town gate.

“There is a fountain just inside,” Helen had instructed us. “Go straight in, you can’t miss it.”

I adjusted my cloak. The itchy brown wool was musty and smelled like olive oil; I hoped fumes were the only thing it was harboring. On the plus side, keeping my balance on the large cobblestones was easier now that my boot heels were gone. After one of them had broken off, I had gotten rid of the other by whacking it against a stone. The chief had tried rubbing dust onto his black leather shoes in an effort to conceal their modernity, but his cloak reached well above his shins. In the end he’d removed his shoes and socks. “I hope I don’t step on anything sharp,” he’d said, rolling up his pant legs so they disappeared under the cloak. His calves, I noticed as we walked, were hairy and had round marks on them from the elastic in the socks.

As the chief and I passed under the town gate, I noticed that it seemed a little askew, perhaps due to displacement from recent earthquakes. The square building next to it was the town’s water reservoir—the
castellum aquae
, Helen had called it. I could hear the gurgle of water as the aqueduct, which started in the mountains beyond the town and ran somewhere underneath our feet, emptied into the brick building. I reached out to touch one of the thin orange-red bricks of the castellum aquae, but was unable to do so, as if the mere gesture would have immediately pegged me as an intruder. We turned away and I asked the chief, “Which of our TTE professors do you suspect?”

With the caution of a law enforcement officer, he said, “Anyone can pull the trigger under the right circumstances. If one of them felt their survival or long-desired goals were at stake—well. It might not even have been personal. Do you understand what I mean?”

I didn’t answer. I was too caught off guard. It was clear that I’d have to throw all my preconceived notions about life in a Roman town out the window. I’d been picturing toga-clad
citizens standing around in fancy gardens dotted with gleaming white statues, debating the finer points of law and aqueduct building. What I saw was much different. The town teemed with life—shops, eateries, and workshops lined the narrow cobblestone street on both sides, shaded by the awnings and wooden overhangs of the cream-colored buildings whose terra-cotta roofs we’d seen from Mount Vesuvius. The men wore tunics and the women had on long dresses and wraps of ochre, red, blue—the colors fresh, the cloth, though not fancy, nothing like the long-faded, drab, depressing historical costumes one sees in museums. There was not a white toga in sight. Probably they were reserved for the upper crust, people who didn’t do their own errand running. I expected that togas would be more plentiful around the Forum, which, according to Helen, stood on the opposite side of the town, facing the harbor.

“Here,” said the chief. We waited for our turn at the fountain. A faucet protruded from the carving of a flask and emptied into a square tub. The water was cool and it tasted of the mountains, or so I imagined, as I cupped my hands under its flow and drank deeply, then splashed my face. As the chief took his turn, I noticed a peculiar wall painting above one of the shops. The subject matter made me raise an eyebrow but I decided not to point it out. “Let’s keep walking,” I suggested after Nate had splashed his face and taken his fill of the water. “The others will be waiting, but going in just a bit farther won’t hurt.”

“Yeah.”

It was easy to see why the others had taken their time, too.

Brightly painted gods and goddesses stared at us from above shop entrances—a blue-gowned Venus on a chariot pulled by elephants, a plump Hercules wrestling a snake, Bacchus draped in a cloak of grapes, and a host of others I didn’t recognize. Some had clearly been composed by experts, and others were
just crude sketches. The colors were bold and brilliant—rich ochre, cornflower blue, warm red with a hint of orange… There were also the
other
decorations, a lot of them. I decided I’d have to ask Helen about that later. The street seemed to be a main one, with deep ruts worn into the paving stones by long years of cart traffic. It gradually sloped downhill and was narrow by modern standards. It was lined with a raised sidewalk, and a half a dozen steps, or three hops on the large stepping-stones that served as pedestrian crossings, would get you across it. The building facades were painted reddish orange up to head height and were covered with notices and signs for businesses. I spotted long cracks in the plaster here and there—more damage from the recent or past earthquakes.

Near a bakery (probably the one we owed money to) we stepped off the sidewalk onto a stepping-stone crossing, which allowed us to avoid the animal refuse, kitchen trash, broken pottery, fish bones, and other elements lodged among the cobblestones. The mixture had baked in the sun, releasing a foul smell. I imagined rain torrents rushing down the sloped street in the winter, washing the caked refuse in the direction of the sea.

A narrow side lane caught our eye and we turned into it, dodging a bucketful of slops that had been thrown from above. The side lane was quieter, with no shops fronting it, only back doors. A mousy-looking man with a line of warts down his nose worked in the shade of one of the walls, squinting at a half-finished line of text, a brush in one hand, a small pot of paint in the other. Graffiti? Or perhaps an ad or an election poster? I was curious, but my legs suddenly felt heavy again, stiff, like I had been transported to a planet with a stronger pull of gravity. I came to a stop with no choice in the matter.

“I’ll never get used to this,” the chief said next to me.

“Maybe we stand out because the street is mostly deserted?” I suggested in a low voice as we made a U-turn. “Or the sign painter might be a crux person—someone nameless, an ordinary local who is key to history in some fashion that they themselves will never know. It’s almost like there’s an impenetrable bubble around such a person, I remember Dr. Mooney saying.”

“Or maybe it’s simpler than that. We might have startled him and caused his hand to slip.”

“Dr. Mooney would have probably pointed out that possibility, too.”

As we merged again with the shoppers, merchants, and well-tanned children running about on the water-reservoir street, he asked, “You miss Mooney, don’t you, Julia?”

It was the first time he had called me Julia. It was an odd moment for him to have chosen to do so, but life is full of odd, seemingly unimportant moments.

“A dean’s assistant isn’t supposed to have favorites,” I said.

“If Gabriel Rojas wasn’t the one who got rid of the professor, it must have been one of the others.”

Earlier, he had asked me again about the door code to the TTE lab. “It’s like I told you before,” I’d replied. “The TTE professors and their grad students have the code, as well as our postdoc researchers. The cleaning staff. Professors and researchers from other departments with spots on the STEWie roster, like Helen here—”

“My code didn’t work this time. Gabriel had to let me into the lab,” Helen had said.

“New policy,” I’d explained, smacking my head with the heel of my hand. I’d completely forgotten to mention it, but the code had been changed after Dr. Rojas had found evidence of sabotage. The dean’s office had been giving out the new code on a strict need-to-know basis. “I’d just started giving out the new
code to teams with runs scheduled this week, starting with yesterday’s for Dr. Baumgartner. Today’s run would have been Dr. Little’s. Tomorrow—Thursday back home—would have been Dr. May’s from the History Department, but I hadn’t gotten around to giving her the code.” I added, “None of the students had the new code yet.”