The Last Ember (26 page)

“Open the door and I will protect you,” Rufio said, pointing his gun at the Casa’s doors. Jonathan could see his forefinger on the trigger.

“Jon!” Emili said. “Let’s go!”

Jonathan raced down the ladder, crossed the room, and lowered Emili through the black square in the floor. The doors exploded inward with a gunshot, just as Jonathan lowered the trapdoor over their heads, rejoining glued tiles to the floor’s pattern.

Rufio stormed in to find the Casa Rustica empty. He yelled an Italian expletive and in his rage fired another deafening round into the half-light.

Jonathan, Emili, and Chandler stood completely still beneath the tile floor. A damp breeze carried the smell of stagnant water and mildew.

Beneath the Casa’s floor, they heard a mobile phone ring, and all three of them gave one another panicked looks for a moment for fear it was one of theirs.

But it was Rufio’s. They heard him answer the phone, speak one line into it, and then clip it shut.

“Tell Salah ad-Din they are gone,” he said.

B
eneath the Casa Rustica’s tile floor, Jonathan, Emili, and Chandler could hear Lieutenant Rufio’s stampede of boot steps as he searched among the bookcases and under the tables. Chandler clicked on his Mag lite, illuminating Roman-era grooves in the walls that indicated water levels in antiquity.

A steel sewage pipe, caked in rust, ran across the ancient tunnel like a limbo bar.

The ancient Roman engineering graded the angle of the tunnel downward, allowing the water to flow toward the city. They walked, leaning backward to balance against the slope. After about a hundred feet, daylight seeped through a manhole above them. Chandler pushed it upward, revealing a street on the other side of the academy’s gate. The oblivious driver of a royal-blue Smart car nearly clipped Chandler’s arm, but the car passed harmlessly overhead. The afternoon light was startlingly bright.

Two carabinieri officers were stationed outside the embassy, deep in conversation. They stood less than twenty feet from Emili’s motorcycle.

“You still have that thing?” Jonathan said, blanching at the sight of the motorcycle. “The Ducati?”

He remembered Emili’s classic motorcycle, its handcrafted engine exquisite even by Italian standards. Their death-defying trips at sixty kilometers an hour down the winding streets of Janiculum Hill rushed back to him. “And you’re still alive? Luck really does favor the brave.”

“Listen, I’ll go first,” Chandler said. “I’ll get their attention, and you two slip over to the bike. Got it?”

“Chandler, how will you get to the Domus?” Emili asked.

“There’s always a cab at the Fontana dell’Acqua Paola.” Chandler pointed down the road. “They circle like vultures to pick off exhausted tourists who underestimate the Janiculum’s climb. I’ll be lucky to get ’em to use the meter.”

Chandler pushed himself out of the manhole, and within seconds he was walking toward the officers, yelling in a foreign language as he waved his hands to make a great fuss with the policemen. They gathered around him.

“Wait here,” Emili said. “I’ll pick you up.”

Pick me up?
Jonathan thought. Before he could say anything, Emili hopped out of the manhole and walked briskly toward the motorcycle. Soundlessly, she threw a leg over, but upon giving the engine some gas, one of the policemen called out. She revved the engine and darted down the side street toward Jonathan.

“Get on!” She briefly slowed down.

Scarcely had Jonathan thrown a leg over the saddle when the low growl blared into a roar. The bike fishtailed up on the sidewalk curb, just missing a shuttered flower stand along Via Masina. A group of locals miraculously parted as the bike’s chassis scraped against the street curb. The bike’s back tire clipped the charcoal grill of a vendor selling smoked chestnuts. Hunched over the handlebars like a jockey, Emili’s small frame leaned forward, and the bike tore down the Viale Glorioso as though finding an open patch of sky.

Jonathan grabbed her waist and yelled in her ear, “Why can’t you just have a Vespa like everyone else?”

F
rom the Command, Profeta’s drive to La Sapienza’s gated sixteenth-century palazzo took less than two minutes, but he felt as though he had traveled back a lifetime. He had been here as a young graduate student in art-recovery and architecture before the carabinieri’s first specialized team approached him in a dark library. It was a memory that now seemed part of this university’s ancient past, just another historical fact, as distant as its founding by Pope Boniface VIII, who in 1303 raised taxes on wine to pay for the new college he christened simply Sapienza, or “wisdom.” For Boniface VIII, wine may have paid for education, but for Profeta and his young colleagues who spent half their stipends at the local bars, education paid for the wine.

Profeta walked through the palazzo’s main courtyard toward Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza, one of the school’s original baroque buildings from the mid-1600s. Its bizarre corkscrew tower, designed by Francesco Borromini, resembled a dark castle from the Middle Ages. During Mussolini’s era, most of the university’s faculty were moved to a spacious campus of stark concrete neoclassical design nearer Termini station, but not Cianari. His seniority allowed him to remain in these historic offices inside the palazzo, which now contained the State Archives.

“Cianari,” Profeta said to himself, shaking his head. He had been a faculty member even during Profeta’s graduate school days. Profeta knew that Cianari, as a biblical archaeologist, had always been marginalized by skeptics in his department. As academics, Cianari’s colleagues disbelieved most of what was
in
the Bible, not to mention that it could ever be a useful archaeological text. Even graduate students chided him about his fieldwork in the hills of Turkey in search of where Noah’s Ark ran aground on Mount Ararat. Cianari’s ambition was epochal, and that was precisely what worried Profeta. If Cianari had finally found someone to believe in or, even more dangerous,
fund
one of his escapades, the parameters of the expedition could span countries.

An officer stood outside the partially open door to Professor Cianari’s office. “None of the faculty have seen the professor in two weeks,
Comandante
. Traveling outside the country, they said.”

“That will be all, Officer, thank you,” Profeta said, now fearing the worst. He stepped into the office alone. It was wallpapered with books vaulting up to the ceiling. There was a tall wheeled ladder and a sweet, musty smell of oiled leather. Seven hundred continuous years of professors had inhabited this office.

The area near the desk was in total disarray. Not quite ransacked, but revealing the throes of a tormented man. Open copies of books in ancient Greek and Latin lay across the desk. Profeta circled the desk and, using a handkerchief from his pocket, lifted manuscripts to uncover a glossy photograph lying beneath.

“I don’t believe this,” he said, staring at the black-and-white image.

“What is it,
Comandante
?” asked Lieutenant Brandisi, who had just entered the office behind him. As Brandisi rounded the desk, no spoken answer was necessary.

The corpse from the abandoned pier of Civitavecchia again floated before them, this time in the center of a blown-up photograph on Gustavo Cianari’s desk. The setting of the photograph was not the warehouse, but rather an underground grotto with a low-roofed ceiling of jagged stone. Only the top of the column’s lid had been sawed off, revealing, like a partially open casket, the corpse above the shoulders. The rest of the column remained a unified single piece of fluted column, as first discovered in situ. A chain saw lay beside the column, the whitened, powdery teeth of its blades suggesting that it had chewed through the column’s stone just moments before.

“This is where they found her,” Profeta said, now looking at the tomb art paintings in the photograph’s background. “Looks like a first-century catacomb.”

“Who took these photographs?” Brandisi asked.

“I think it was Cianari, and it doesn’t look like he was supposed to,” Profeta said. “The red glow suggests he avoided using a flash.”

Profeta picked up the picture.

He took off his reading glasses and held them an inch from the picture to magnify the image. His eyes focused on a fresco in the photograph’s background, along the grotto’s back wall. He could not make out the ancient drawing, but along its bottom he could see that someone had vandalized the painting with two words scrawled in red spray paint.

“To a grave robber that ancient painting would have been priceless,” Brandisi said. “Why the graffiti?”

“I think Cianari did that,” Profeta said.

“An archaeologist would vandalize an ancient painting?”

“It might have been Cianari’s only method of identifying where these men had been digging. Whatever they were looking for, it was important enough that Cianari felt compelled to document its context.”

Beneath Cianari’s desk, Profeta noticed a large, map-sized piece of paper crumpled on the floor. He picked it up and spread it over the strewn papers. It was an aerial satellite image of downtown Rome. With a blue felt-tip marker, someone had circled two locations in Rome. One circle was drawn around the ruins across the Colosseum.

“Do you recognize this location, Lieutenant?” Profeta said. Brandisi detected an urgency rising in the
comandante’
s voice.

“The gladiator’s barracks,” Brandisi said.

“That’s right, Lieutenant. Precisely the location of the explosion just three hours ago.”

Profeta’s index finger moved along the satellite image as though hovering above the city center. His finger stopped where the other circle was drawn around a church basilica on the Oppian Hill, a half-kilometer from the Colosseum. Beside the circle, someone had written a hurried note:
SPIV.

“It looks signed,” Brandisi said aloud. “Those initials, SPIV.”

“That’s not a signature, Lieutenant. From the location, I think it’s referring to Rome’s oldest reliquary church, San Pietro in Vincoli. Saint Peter in Chains. Lieutenant, these could be the same men who blew up the corridors beneath the Colosseum. Get the tourists out of that church.”

T
he streets were barricaded at the bottom of the Janiculum Hill. Emili cut the engine, maneuvering her motorcycle down the jagged stone steps, its suspension absorbing each of the tiny ancient ledges carved into the hillside. They exited the staircase onto Via Goffredo Mameli, as though emerging out of the mountain’s rock. Emili turned the ignition, gave the motorcycle some gas, and followed the tracks of the electric tram across the Ponte Garibaldi back over the Tiber.

A police car raced in the opposite direction toward the academy’s gate. Emili sharply turned the motorcycle off Via Arenula, taking back streets behind Piazza Venezia. It was a bizarre reverse
Roman Holiday
, Audrey Hepburn gunning the engine and Gregory Peck clutching her waist for dear life.

Her motorcycle slalomed through Via Cavour’s traffic, and reaching the dark side streets of the Oppian Hill, she eased off the gas, gliding into an overgrown municipal park with a panoramic view. Beneath them, Rome rose out of a sea of brake lights from the late-afternoon traffic. They could see police cars still flanking the Colosseum’s outer arches like a wedge of geese. A tour bus traffic jam lined Via dei Fori Imperali, caused by the sudden closure of the Colosseum piazza since the explosion hours earlier.

Jonathan looked at his watch. Nearly four-fifteen p.m. He watched Emili gracefully dismount the Ducati and stow her helmet beneath its seat. He could not believe it was only this morning in court that he had seen her for the first time in seven years. What did Tatton say? “For Rome, one lifetime is not enough.”
Apparently.

“I’ll leave the motorcycle there,” Emili said. She walked her bike over to some brick ruins where the ivy was three feet thick, and it disappeared beneath its tufts.

In the park, small brick chutes that looked like chimneys dotted the terrain in all directions. Jonathan knew they were ventilation grates for the ancient corridors of the Domus Aurea, which sprawled for a quarter-mile beneath this litter-strewn park. Jonathan remembered Pliny’s fanciful descriptions of the palace:
“Even when the doors are closed, inside the gems glowed like daylight,”
but he knew that even when the museum was open to the public only one-tenth of the Domus Aurea’s one hundred fifty rooms were excavated.

They crossed the park, entering another set of gates behind a glass gazebo that once sold tickets to the Domus Aurea Museum, but now a sign in its window read: “Guided Tours Only.” A small private tour of seven British couples bundled in fur coats and cashmere scarves gathered near the ticket booth. In a cultivated accent, one woman expressed surprise that the entrance to this “palace” was an unimpressive steel gate leading underground.

“Where is Chandler?” Emili said.

“Maybe he’s not com—Wait, there,” Jonathan said.

A figure hurried up the hill toward the museum entrance. Chandler Manning was running awkwardly with a large folio under his arm.

“I . . . I brought it,” Chandler panted, handing them the nineteenth-century cartographic renderings of the Domus Aurea. “Once you split from the tour you’ll need it to find the map of Jerusalem.”

Jonathan unrolled the parchment map while waiting for the rest of the tour group.

“The route of the guided tour goes right through Nero’s octagonal dining room, which is connected to the corridor leading to the Vault of Owls.”

“But how will we split from the tour?” Emili pointed at a security guard standing at the back of the crowd. She knew the museum corridors of the Domus Aurea were dim, and many passageways led abruptly to dried-up waterfalls, fake grotto cliffs, and other hazards. To ensure visitors stayed together at all times, each Domus Aurea tour had a security guard following at the rear.