The Last Ember (28 page)

“This cistern must be sixty feet high,” Emili said as they entered another chamber.

“Not a cistern,” Jonathan said. “Look.” Jonathan turned his flashlight’s beam to the wall. A bright ancient fresco of reds and blues jumped out at them. The fresco was a country setting, with birds and trees, painted in remarkable detail, befitting the villa of an emperor.

Suddenly there was a slow rumble above them, gathering in intensity and volume.

“What is that?” Emili yelled above the noise.

Jonathan waited for it to pass. “I think we’re below a metro station. That was a train.”

Jonathan pointed above them and then to the map of Nero’s palace that Chandler had given them. “This brick architrave here,” he said, looking into the map, “it’s the double barrel vault of the palace’s portico. This is the right way.”

They walked down a corridor, following the curve of a solid ivory wall until they reached a grand space meant to receive guests. Dust sifted down under the weight of another rattling train. The modern sounds comforted Jonathan as they descended deeper into the corridors.
I never thought I would be doing this again
, he thought.

While Emili wiped a thick layer of algae off the wall, to admire a remarkable stucco in the Pompeian style of landscapes, Jonathan felt the floor moving slightly. He pointed his flashlight downward and realized the floor was practically alive with worms, an endless bed of writhing pasta. Pinkish-white worms swarmed over his Ferragamos. One disappeared inside his shoe.

“This is part of grad school I haven’t missed.”

Jonathan and Emili penetrated deeper into the palace. The sounds of the passing metro trains faded to a soft, distant thunder. An acrid subterranean breeze singed their nostrils, and they both breathed in soft gasps. The air around them was fifteen hundred years old.

Jonathan walked in first, into a semicircular room. Seven radial passageways branched out of the curved far wall.

“How do we know which passageway leads to the map of Jerusalem?”

“These frescoes,” Jonathan said. He trained his beam on a series of ancient paintings that lined one of the corridors. “They look recently excavated.” In the first painting, the pigment had faded, but the figures were quite clear: a young man, in a neck chain hitched to other prisoners, pulled heavy stones.

“I don’t recognize the myth,” Emili said. “Sisyphys pushing a boulder?”

“No,” Jonathan said. “Look at the next painting.” The same young prisoner, Jonathan noticed, the chain still around his neck, but he was now standing before a king, who listened raptly. The prisoner was pointing above his head, where two rows of cows stood side by side among stars in a night sky.

“In this last frame, a slave has been brought from prison before a king,” Emili said. “It looks like an Egyptian pharaoh.”

“Yes,” Jonathan said, “and he’s interpreting the pharaoh’s dream, pointing to skinny cows and fat cows.”

“What Roman myth is it, then?” Emili said.

“Not Roman,” Jonathan said. “It’s a narrative from the Bible.”

“The Romans were pagans, Jon.”

“But the prisoners of Jerusalem weren’t. The young man in the fresco is a prisoner in Egypt interpreting Pharaoh’s dream. Ring any bells?”

“The biblical story of Joseph,” Emili answered.

“Exactly. Look at the cows. Pharaoh dreamed of seven fat cows standing beside seven skinny cows, foreshadowing famine in the land.”

“This must be the right tunnel,” Emili said, picking up her pace.

As they moved deeper into the corridor, Emili shone her light along the tunnel floor.

“Jon, look at these tools.” Old, rusted picks and saws with eroded wooden handles lay against the walls. “This equipment hasn’t been used in a hundred years.” Her flashlight caught the grooves of an Italian inscription.

“In honor of Pope Pius VII. Giuseppe Valadier. 1811,” Jonathan translated, standing behind her.

“Pope Pius the Seventh is known as the first conservationist pope,” Emili said. “He must have commissioned the papal architect, Giuseppe Valadier, to lead a restoration team here in this corridor.”

The passage led to a small archway. Jonathan pointed his light above the arch, revealing a stone carving of a large owl perched above it. The owl’s eyes were orblike, glowing gemstones that seemed to follow them through the door.

“The Vault of Owls,” Emili said, exhilarated. “The map must be in here.”

They entered a large circular room. In the high vaulted ceiling, the perforations of a steel manhole showered slim rays into the cavern like spotlights, illuminating—to their surprise—a large modern aluminum scaffold constructed against one of the room’s bare rock walls. Among other rusted nineteenth-century excavation tools, the structure’s gleaming metal was as out of place as a stage set from the wrong play.

“Looks a little modern for an excavation in the 1800s,” Jonathan said.

“It was just built. There’s scarcely any condensation on the piping,” Emili said. She walked the circumference of the room. “Why build a scaffold when there are no ancient murals to restore?”

Jonathan pulled on the scaffolding’s lower pipes, testing their sturdiness, and then scampered up several first rungs.

“Jon, what are you doing?”

“It’s here, Em. It’s huge!”

Emili looked around. “There’s nothing on the walls.”

“The scaffolding’s not meant to look at the walls. It’s to look at the floor.”

Emili looked under her feet. She could make out the faint colors of an image beneath the green membranous veil of algae. She joined Jonathan on the scaffolding, and took in the size of the floor painting.

“It’s a painting of Jerusalem,” she said, “Drawn as large as the room.”

The ancient floor painting portrayed Jerusalem beneath a brilliant blue sky, which was still visible as flaking blue stucco under the algae. Towering walls surrounded large public courtyards, and in the mural’s center stood a large white structure surrounded by a rectangular columned portico.

“It’s so . . .
peaceful
,” Emili said, struck by such a soothing landscape of first-century Jerusalem. Repeated European paintings of Roman soldiers burning Jerusalem were her only visual references, most notably Poussin’s seventeenth-century corpse-strewn
Destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem Under Titus
, but never had she seen a rendering of Herod’s Temple
before
the destruction in such a pastoral setting.

“Those concentric colonnades are the priestly courtyards of the Temple Mount,” Jonathan said. He pointed at the center of the painting. “The large, white building there must be the Holy of Holies.” Josephus’s description of the rectangular white marble structure was surprisingly accurate.
Like a snowy mountain glittering in the sun.

Emili looked at the map. “Titus built his baths directly above this wing of the Domus Aurea. He used Jewish slave labor for its construction, just as he did for the Colosseum. The slaves must have spent months sneaking down here to work on this painting,” Emili said.

“And I think I know why.” Jonathan climbed down from the scaffolding and walked across the fresco. He knelt down and wiped the algae away from the depiction of the Temple’s inner courtyard surrounding the Holy of Holies.

“This painting must show the path of Josephus’s escape with the menorah . . .” he said softly, “through a hidden gate.”

“But there’s nothing drawn there.”

Jonathan twisted the cap face of the flashlight, narrowing the beam until only a small bright circle concentrated on the painting.
Tropaeum Illumina,
Jonathan remembered the Forma Urbis’s instruction.
Illuminate the monument.

To his astonishment, a small row of red stones became luminescent beneath the thin layer of stucco, shimmering a fiery orange-red glow, lighting an electric path as his flashlight moved.

An inlaid trail of gemstones beneath the painting.

“Emili, get down here!” Jonathan said. “It looks like there’s a row of—”

“Rubies?” Emili said, already standing beside him.

“Or pyrope,” Jonathan said, “a red mineral, named from the Greek
pyropus
, meaning fiery-eyed.” Jonathan tilted his head to see the line of stones only millimeters beneath the paint. “Completely hidden,” he said, marveling, “but revealed through light, just like the carving inside the Forma Urbis instructed.”

“The slaves must have collected these stones from Nero’s gem-studded walls and buried them beneath this stucco to illuminate the path of Josephus’s escape with the menorah,” Emili said, trailing her flashlight’s beam along the stones until the path came to an abrupt stop where water damage had lifted up the stucco. “The flaking surface of the paint exposed the other gemstones, and now they’re gone.” She looked up at Jonathan. “
Quae amissa salva.
Lost things are safe.”

Jonathan held up his hand. “Do you hear that?”

The unmistakable sound of rushing feet emerged from the darkness around them.

Before they could react, a high-powered LED floodlight shined through the archway and trained side to side like a prison searchlight casting for fugitives.

“Carabinieri!” Profeta yelled. “Do not move!”

Jonathan stood in the carabinieri’s bluish light, as though frozen in ice. Emili grabbed his arm and pulled him into an adjacent corridor.

“Jon, up there!” She pointed to a rock scarp ten feet off the ground. There was a steep but climbable face of packed dirt. As they clambered up, the sound of the policemen increased with every second. Just as the flashlights turned the corner and flooded the niche, Jonathan and Emili were lying on top of each other on a narrow rock shelf ten feet above the frantic rays of the flashlights.

The beams raced past them, and again they were in total darkness, fitting so compactly on the ledge that their lips nearly touched. Jonathan caught an alluring scent from Emili’s neck and would not have minded being trapped on the ledge a little longer.

“There must be a way out,” she whispered.

“Way out?” Jonathan whispered back. “They must have twenty guards at the exit. We’re a quarter-mile inside the Domus Aurea! No, there’s not a way—” The distant rumble of a metro train interrupted him. “Wait a minute,” he said, the flicker of an idea taking shape.

“What?” Emili said eagerly.

“The room with the map of Jerusalem,” he said. “There was a manhole above the vault.”

“What about it?”

“I think it opens up to the train station.”

“There are usually a dozen carabinieri outside the station.”

“From the sound of those trains, I think that manhole opens
inside
the station.”

“Let’s go,” Emili said, rolling her body off his.

The carabinieri had taken their search deeper into the ruin, and Jonathan and Emili quietly reentered the vault where they had discovered the giant fresco. Jonathan pointed at the manhole above them. Five feet beneath the manhole was a metal grate suspended by with iron girders.

“Must be a maintenance platform to repair the tracks,” Jonathan said. “We can get close to the ladder hanging from the bottom of the grate if we climb up the scaffolding, but it may be too high for us—”

Emili ran to the wall and began climbing up the scaffold.

“—to reach.” Jonathan shook his head and followed her up the aluminum pipes. They were more than twenty feet above the ground when a carabinieri officer made his way back into the cavern beneath them. They both froze to stop the creaking sound of the swaying scaffold.

Beneath them, the officer walked slowly across the cavern. He took a few steps, his footfalls echoing as his flashlight swept the floor. He un-snapped his leather holster, and they could hear the sound of metal against leather. He unsheathed his gun.

Jonathan recognized him.
Lieutenant Rufio.

Jonathan and Emili remained motionless on the wall. If he pointed his beam upward forty-five degrees, they would be exposed. As he walked around the scaffolding, the hard-packed stucco floor crackled under his feet.

Lieutenant Rufio beamed his flashlight inside the deep statuary niches that surrounded the room. He searched the perimeter of the cavern, clearly growing more frustrated. Jonathan realized he was not looking for them, but rather for
something else
. From inside his jacket, Rufio removed a pair of white carabinieri gloves, quickly slipped them on, and removed two plastic jugs from a dark niche in the wall. Gray dust covered the cartons; they appeared to have been there for some time. He unscrewed the tops of both cartons and began pouring the liquid contents onto the fresco, coating the floor. Within seconds, fumes carrying the strong odor of gasoline wafted up to where Emili and Jonathan remained still in the darkness.

No,
Emili whispered.

Rufio pulled a lighter from his inside jacket pocket, lit a small piece of paper, and threw it onto the center of the floor. Like a flood of fire, the flames spread across the floor. Plumes of smoke billowed upward.

“Go!” Jonathan yelled, shoving Emili up the scaffolding to reach the service ladder that hung from the maintenance grate. She jumped and grabbed the bottom rung and lifted herself up.

“Keep going!” he shouted. The fire spread across the floor and Jonathan looked down, his panic dredging up the imagery of Homer,
a pouring fire sweeping the earth beneath it
.

Rufio heard the shouting and cast his beam upward. Through the smoke, he could faintly see Jonathan on the maintenance grate desperately trying to push up the manhole in the ceiling. Rufio sprinted around the burning fresco and began climbing up the scaffold. The aluminum had become hot, even beneath his white officer’s gloves.

Now crouching on the grate beside Emili, Jonathan pushed the manhole up with all his strength from below. Smoke sieved upward through the grate, and he could feel the heat of the steel through his shoes. He managed to scrape the manhole aside far enough for their bodies to slide through. The sudden sound of an oncoming train was deafening. The grate shook uncontrollably.