The Last Ember (11 page)

In the courtyard, the palazzo’s arched stables were outfitted with sleek glass walls for the partners’ indoor parking. Now, during the workday, it resembled a luxury Italian car dealership of vintage Ferraris and Alfa Romeo roadsters.

Jonathan was somewhere in the middle of the courtyard when he realized he simply could not let it go.
Titus’s mistake.
The ancient spy craft was too obvious for him to ignore. If an inscription about Emperor Titus lay inside the gladiators’ gate, a message carved
inside
a fragment of the Forma Urbis would have been the most durable way to signal someone to retrieve it, even centuries later.

“Damn it,” he said, turning away from Dulling’s palazzo.
The Colosseum is not far from here,
Jonathan thought.
In this weather it probably won’t be packed with tour groups.

He walked at a determined clip, as though the firm’s eyes were still on him. He suspected the research he was about to do could come dangerously close to betraying attorney-client confidentiality, and he could not afford to leave a trail. He turned off the Piazza della Repubblica into a narrow alley, past a small Renaissance niche that housed a statue of the Virgin Mary and fresh flowers supplied daily by the local faithful.

The wind had picked up considerably, nearly pushing him across Piazza Venezia.
The reason the message
Error Titi
was carved inside those fragments of the Forma Urbis was to identify a gladiators’ gate in the Colosseum.
Jonathan shook his head, as though trying to snap himself out of the notion. But an adrenaline rush well known to classicists rose within him, a sense of imminent discovery as palpable as the freezing gusts whipping at the tails of his suit jacket.

From the precipitous height of the Vittorio Emanuele Monument, the top of the Forum’s ruins came into sharper focus.

The Roman Forum, the open-air archaeological park located in the center of downtown Rome, lay sixty feet below the traffic-clogged streets on either side. On a summer day, its ancient pavement would be packed with barking tour guides and screaming children. But on a cold winter afternoon beneath gathering clouds, the foggy, slumbering ruins looked more desolate than ever.

To Jonathan’s trained eye, the strewn pillars and marble debris were silent ghosts of the bustling marketplaces and ancient office buildings that once stood in this downtown of the Roman Empire. For Jonathan, the whistle of the wind was a haunting reminder of how quickly civilizations fade.

Jonathan jogged down the stairs through the entrance gate. Touching down on the Via Sacra’s original Roman pavement, he felt the uneven texture of the ancient road through the soles of his still-soaked Ferragamos.

It began to drizzle again, but Jonathan pressed forward, stretching his long legs with each stride, his shoulders thrust forward as he walked through the ruins, passing the Arch of Septimus Severus, the burned masonry of an ancient notary public’s office, the onionskin marble of temple columns. Jonathan’s pace quickened, his anticipation growing more intense as the Colosseum loomed into view.

He entered the Piazza del Colosseo, a vast expanse of cobblestone that even on this winter afternoon was packed with tour guides shouting in different languages over the calls of souvenir hucksters with arms full of Colosseum paperweights. Locals dressed in gladiatorial garb stood in front of the outer arches, knocking tin swords against their plastic chest shields to solicit pictures for two euros apiece.

Even from across the piazza, the Colosseum’s massive pilasters of limestone and travertine dwarfed the souvenir tables. An orange mist of late-morning sun hung low around the Colosseum’s four stories of classical stone archways.

“Marcus Aurelius!” A voice nearly startled Jonathan out of his skin. The meat of a hand struck Jonathan, a friendly back slap, with enormous force.

Jonathan recognized the voice immediately. Chandler Manning. Jonathan had not seen him in years. He was much the same as Jonathan remembered him from the library at the American Academy: a small, paunchy frame; disheveled hair over his ears; a partially untucked dress shirt beneath a wrinkled blue blazer. Chandler had lost weight, but not enough.

“Look who’s returned!” Chandler said, throwing up his stubby arms. He was shorter than Jonathan had remembered. In his right hand Chandler held an extended pointer with a purple feather glued to the top for the benefit of a small group of tourists trailing behind him. For a moment he jogged to keep pace with Jonathan’s long strides, tripping over the Forum’s uneven stones.

Jonathan stopped and extended a hand. Chandler playfully batted it away, offering a clubby male hug.

“Hullo, Chands,” Jonathan said.

When Jonathan was a graduate student at the Academy, Chandler Manning was the librarian. Chandler spoke with a vaguely British accent, with his jaw thrust forward. He was American, but from his many years abroad and facility with languages, he had abandoned his native inflection for a foreign air that would make few guess his childhood origins were a small mining town in northwestern Oregon.

“Ladies and gentlemen”—Chandler turned to the semicircle of people on his tour and spoke to them effortlessly in German—“this is an honor, really. The former Rome Prize winner who dazzled us all.”

They nodded enthusiastically, as if Jonathan were an unexpected monument not on their itinerary. One of the tourists took a picture of him.

“Seven years it’s been, Aurelius?” It was a Chandler affectation, nicknaming the world around him to make it instantly his own. Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor A.D. 161-180. “I still remember you running around this Forum,” he said, leaning in with a close, nostalgic smile. “Could date the stones of this place to the year, couldn’t you?”

“That’s overstating things, Chands,” Jonathan said politely. “How are the ancient cults treating you these days?”

“Not ancient cults, Jon, it’s the modern ones I’ve been up to.” He handed Jonathan a card. It looked vaguely occult with green designs resembling crop circles. Jonathan glanced down at the card. It said, “Roman Kaballah: Eternal Knowledge in the Eternal City.”

“Need anything at all while you’re here, Aurelius, you call that number, or just show up. I’m around.”

Jonathan looked up from the card. “
Kaballah?
You’re not serious, Chandler.”

Chandler shrugged. “Commercial mysticism and some entrepreneurial savvy go a long way these days. Bought some dead occultist’s library just off the Campo dei Fiori for a song. Place is just magic. Up to two lectures per evening. Even have a girl at the receptionist desk taking credit cards.”

Not that this surprised Jonathan. He remembered how Chandler could captivate entire tables of scholars over drinks at the local pub by the American Academy, the Thermopolium. Showing off his photographic memory for a pretty Italian bartender, he would combine codices by Benedictine monks with Egyptian astrology to produce a theory that the sphinx was
really
a representation of Saint Paul. It was nonsense, of course, but the only offensive part to Jonathan was how the party tricks masked Chandler’s remarkable ability to synthesize endless material spreading across centuries and recall details at a moment’s notice.

“Sounds like you’ve found your calling, Chandler.”

“And you?” Chandler leaned in rather close, his eyes wide open. He flashed a deadly serious face. “Your exit was the stuff of ancient myth.” Chandler stood back, as though to give space to the grandiosity of the statement.
“Myth,”
he repeated. “I mean, after the tragedy in the catacombs that night, it’s like there was
damnatio memoriae
about you,” he said, referring to ancient Rome’s political tradition of blotting out inscriptions and defacing statues to erase the memory of previous emperors. “Remember how the academy keeps portraits of former Rome Prize winners above that little wooden bar off the villa’s salon? Well, they even took yours down.
Nerve,
I tell you.”

“Listen, Chandler”—Jonathan’s eyes caught the long line for the Colosseum—“I’m in a terrible rush, but it’s good to see you. Really.”

Jonathan edged away, a tight-lipped smile, holding up Chandler’s card as though intending to use it.

Chandler moved his pointer in Jonathan’s direction, holding it like a tilted foil. “One more thing.”

He tapped Jonathan’s chest with his pointer, an air of playful menace. He turned to the members of the tour group, again in German. “Did I mention that Marcus here was not just a scholar but an excellent swords-man?” He switched back to English. “Division One saber fencing champion for Columbia, was it?”

“City College of New York.”

“Even better. Those uptown snobs can’t handle anything other than a foil anyway.”

Jonathan looked over Chandler’s shoulder. “Chandler, really, I—”

“Come, Jon, one point for old time’s sake.” Chandler took another pocket pointer out of his jacket, pulled it to full extension, and handed it to Jonathan.

Chandler bent his knees in the classic pose of a fencing advance, jiggling the purple feather in front of Jonathan.

“Next time”—Jonathan imitated a smile—“I’m afraid I’m just too—”

Jonathan stepped to the left to make his way politely around him, but Chandler stepped to the left, one foot in front of the other. With a one-two beat, he scraped Jonathan’s pointer with his own, tap-tap, egging him on.
This is ridiculous,
Jonathan thought, and if he weren’t in such a rush, Jonathan would have waited out his showmanship, but tourists were starting to gather, and this was becoming a spectacle. Reluctantly Jonathan raised the extendable pointer, holding it loosely enough to lead Chandler to lunge, and when Chandler did, Jonathan deftly rapped Chandler’s knuckles from below. As though on a string, Chandler’s pointer flew into the air and landed flat in Jonathan’s palm. Turning around, Jonathan straight-thrusted the pointer with such force into Chandler’s breast that it collapsed to its pocket size, giving the German tourists such a perfect illusion of impalement that their eyes went around their tour guide’s body to see if the pointer had exited the other side.

Chandler reddened, embarrassed, but after a moment he laughed. “Always were one up on me, weren’t you?” He threw an arm out, smiling, as he walked off, motioning for his tour group to follow. “That’s a point for you, Aurelius, but I’ll take the match!”

I
n a carabinieri trailer parked outside the Piazza del Colosseo, Profeta and Rufio spread out an aerial map of the Colosseum across a small folding table. The area’s senior patrol officer crouched beneath the trailer’s fluorescent tube light pointing at the map as he briefed them.

“The cameras outside the Colosseum show the excavation team here, inside the gladiatorial school on the other side of Via del Colosseo.” The officer grew more uncomfortable as he spoke, his eyes not leaving the map. His patrolling officers were at fault for not checking the excavation team’s permits. They should have investigated any work conducted within such proximity to the Colosseum.

“These men worked in the ruins for two weeks in broad daylight thirty meters from the Colosseum? Without a single permit?” Profeta asked in an even tone, careful to restrain his anger.
So much for the tighter security that Roman municipal forces promised for the city’s most popular attractions in the wake of the London bombings.
It was only a few years ago, in 2002, that the carabinieri discovered large quantities of a cyanide-based compound in utility tunnels beneath Via Veneto near local water-supply points. Profeta shuddered to think what an efficient group of thugs could accomplish with access to the ancient tunnels that sprawled beneath the Colosseum.

“The men were in range of the Colosseum’s exterior surveillance cameras,” the officer said. “We’re running the tapes to see if any officers spoke to them.”

“What cameras?” Rufio asked brusquely.

“Vandal-surveillance cameras,” Profeta answered. “The Cultural Ministry installed surveillance cameras around Rome’s most significant ruins to prevent graffiti.” Profeta knew the cameras had caused controversy among the older Roman locals who were wary of local government since the fascist overrun a half-century before. But Profeta had submitted a powerful letter of support to the Cultural Ministry.
The Vandals sacked Rome once before,
he said, referring to the fifth-century sack of Rome.
They must not do it again.

“Are you sure the
municipio
has no record of any work done in this area?” Rufio said, controlling his anxiety. “The archaeological superintendent said no equipment or vehicles have been stolen.”

“These were professionals,” Profeta said. “They constructed their own scaffolding and brought their own equipment.”

At the back of the trailer’s door, Brandisi appeared. “The staffers from the archaeological superintendent’s office have opened up the gates to the gladiatorial barracks.”

“Lieutenant Rufio,” Profeta said, “go ahead with the staffers in the ruins and search for any remnants of illegal excavation.”

Despite the bracing wind, Rufio was sweating as he crossed the street from the Colosseum to the ancient gladiator barracks, which were now an excavated semicircular ruin of moss-covered brick. Rufio knew the ruin was largely ignored because of its location in the literal shadow of the Colosseum’s eastern wall, but its small arena where the gladiators trained before their matches was one of Rome’s most well preserved open-air excavations.

At the gate leading down to the steps of the ruin, Rufio saw two staffers from the archaeological superintendent’s office, Rome’s municipal bureaucracy of archaeologists and engineers charged to protect the city’s archaeology from modern dangers, ranging from illegal excavations to proposed metro tunnels. The department was notorious for its bribery, but as Rufio approached the two middle-aged staffers, a heavyset woman with a clipboard and a balding man in a pince-nez, he cursed his luck that it appeared the only two incorruptible staffers in the entire ministry had come to join his inspection.