The Last Ember (53 page)

His left foot slipped from the rock hold. He grabbed the rock face and his oxygen tank fell from his shoulder. He watched it descend to the gray silt below. His arms bore his entire weight as his legs clawed at the cliff face. His grip gave way and he plummeted the height of the rock face, landing on what felt like a deep cushion that moved beneath him, over him, around him, even down the back of his shirt. Orvieti rocked back and forth on the bed of eels like a man tossed about on small waves. He struggled to stand up, pulling two small eels from inside his shirt and moving his legs with great difficulty toward his oxygen tank. Each movement of his legs displaced dozens of eels. In his flashlight beam the white underbellies of the eels moved like the enormous tentacles of one seething organism. The fall of a rock outcrop had crushed hundreds of them, and their white insides coated hundreds more, giving them an even greas ier feel as they slid across Orvieti. Digging through the eels, Orvieti miraculously saw a glimmer of the green metallic tank. He grabbed the mouthpiece, turned the knob a few rotations, and, panting into the plastic mask’s sweet, cold air, pulled several long breaths from the tank.

Orvieti struggled through the water. He knew anyone else would not have continued, some of the smaller eels crawling up his pant leg, sliding past his calf and up his thigh. He had survived worse. The very air of this buried Roman street emitted a steam that stung his skin. Orvieti pressed forward.

Orvieti recognized the giant marble columns, rising up into the darkness.
The Portico di Ottavia.
Orvieti remembered Josephus’s description of the procession.
“And Vespasian and Titus proceeded through the Octavian walks.”
The base of the Portico di Octavia stood at the lowest archaeological strata beneath the Jewish Ghetto. As a child Orvieti had played among the capitals of these columns, which poked through the cobbled streets sixty feet above where he now stood. As a child, he imagined that massive pillars reached down into the center of the earth. Orvieti used the base of each column to step over the river of eels, as though using stones to cross a stream. He stepped gingerly, hoping that his frail legs would not give way. The long, dark cavern stretched beyond the columns with no end in sight. Giant stalagmites of moss and silt had grown from hundreds of years of hardening algae.

Stopping for a moment, Orvieti breathed in a snatch of air not from his oxygen tank, and he coughed violently. He dropped his flashlight, which was immediately carried away on a bed of writhing eels, its beam of light sinking and reappearing. Retrieving it was like plunging his hand into a vat of live squid.

He reached higher ground, which was not yet flooded. He pulled more small eels from inside his shirt and, unfazed, reached into his waistband to remove a large eel that had crawled up his leg nearly to his stomach. The eel fell to the ground, writhing helplessly on the dry dirt. Orvieti assisted it back into the water.

He moved between the ancient brick buildings, and his flashlight’s beam illuminated narrow streets and the pink eyes of amphibious creatures that defied classification. He turned a corner. There, at the dead end of an alleyway, stood an arch. The arch looked embedded in rock, as though in the midst of being swallowed by the wall of earth behind it.

“My God.” Orvieti drew close. “The Arch of Titus.”

He approached slowly, almost reverently. Half buried inside the stone embankment at its back end, the arch resembled an ancient cave tomb burrowing into a hillside behind it. Orvieti knew the arch had been abandoned only a decade after its construction to shore up the Tiber’s banks, which was precisely why the slaves from Jerusalem had seized their opportunity.

Orvieti waded as far beneath the arch as he could, standing in the rising water between the arch’s two pilasters.

The travertine along the arch’s exterior displayed rough carvings of ritual objects sacred to the Jewish slaves: ram’s horns, palm fronds, and small seven-branched emblems. Orvieti stepped back outside the arch and saw the most prominent inscription of all carved above the central architrave. In his flashlight’s beam, he was able to read the single line in ancient Hebraic script above him. He read it aloud, as if by hearing it he could believe what he read: “ ‘
Eytz chaim hee l’machaziki’im ba
.’ It is a tree of life for those who grasp it.’ ”

The water’s current picked up and Orvieti grabbed on to the arch’s corner to prevent being washed downstream. He was now treading four feet above the ground, his fingers clutching the flutes of a column along the arch face.

Orvieti knew he didn’t have much time. At high tide, the Tiber entirely submerged this lowest underworld of imperial Rome.

There must be an opening,
Orvieti thought.
A door.

With his mangled, closed fist, Orvieti banged on the arch’s columns, listening for something hollow.

“Please,” he whispered, searching for any seams in the stone. “Open the gate.” But the water kept rising inexorably and his tears around the oxygen tank’s plastic mouthpiece tasted salty. “After all you have taken from me.
Please
.”

It was the first word of prayer he had uttered in sixty years. Not since he prayed while pressing his entire body against a wooden door in the Ghetto, his arms splayed like a transom across the threshold, the Gestapo banging with the butt of their rifles. Orvieti remembered his children cowering in the corner and his wife smoothing back their hair to keep them quiet. Orvieti’s strong hands gripped the door’s knob—when a sudden gunshot blasted through the wood, and his right hand. Two fingers fell to the floor. That was the last thing he remembered, his fingers lying on the floor at his feet.

The water rose higher. He climbed up the volutes of the columns and then traced the travertine curve of the arch to stay under the monument.

“A tree of life for those who grasp it,” he repeated like a mantra.

The water pushed him up to the arch’s vaulted ceiling, the current pressing him against the carved foliage along the architrave. “A tree of life,” Orvieti said, and then stopped.

It all suddenly seemed absurd, a child’s tale.
The slaves from Jerusalem were defeated men, Orvieti. No different from you.
Frustrated and resigned to his own fate, Orvieti put his hands down, his head sinking beneath the surface of the water.

And that is when he realized it:
for those who grasp it
. Orvieti shot out of the water, his hands moving wildly across the arch’s ceiling, searching for a marble tree carved into the stone.

He saw a carving of a marble branch and pulled it from the ceiling, summoning every ounce of withered muscle in his body. He pulled harder, his whole body shaking, reaching the peak of exertion for an old man who had withstood so much. It was just after that moment—that fraction of a second before he released an explosive exhale of failure—that he heard a sound.

The sudden, sharp sound of stone scraping against stone. A large stone block on the arch’s ceiling began to move and plunged into the water next to him, leaving a black square opening in the arch’s ceiling.

For a moment, Orvieti remained motionless, stunned by his success and panting from exertion. The water’s surface was only inches from the opening, and Orvieti climbed up into the arch’s darkness.

He collapsed on the dry stone inside, taking deep pulls from his oxygen tank. The attic was a large space, at least twenty feet high. After he caught his breath, he shined his flashlight. The dusty floor was completely dry. The water did not rise above the opening he had crawled through, even though the tide kept rising.

Orvieti realized the architectural genius. Builders from Jerusalem had secretly hollowed out this attic in accordance with an ancient architectural principle, that water will not displace air from beneath a closed container. The attic was carved from a single mass of stone to ensure it would remain dry for thousands of years.

Orvieti’s oxygen tank hiccupped, signaling its last stretch of remaining oxygen. He stood up and walked within the attic: Twenty ornate stone pillars lined the walls, and the ceiling of the attic was dotted with ten bands of copper used for embroidered curtains. He recognized the room’s biblical design at once.

He walked past the pillars inside the attic and saw a carved rectangular doorway and a pile of wood pulp where presumably a doorway once stood. Above the transom, two lines were inscribed. One in Latin, the other in Greek.

Orvieti stepped back, stunned.
The inscription from the outer courtyard of the Temple, precisely as Josephus described.

Suddenly, a harsh beam of light flooded the attic.

Orvieti turned around. A man stood behind him, equipped with a wet suit, oxygen tank, and diving mask.

The young man’s eyes were aglow with wonder as he scanned the arch’s walls with an oversized lantern flashlight.

“Bloody jackpot,” Chandler Manning said.

J
onathan pulled himself up through the grate and slammed it shut as he limped onto the Ponte Rotto’s small overgrown island. The tide had already risen above the patch of grass around the ruin, and Jonathan grabbed on to the ancient bridge’s plaster to anchor himself from getting swept downstream. He made a round of the entire island, which was only slightly larger than the bridge’s lone remaining arch.

“Emili!” Jonathan yelled.

On either side of him, the crushing river-bend current that had washed away the bridge’s other arches pounded the riverbanks. Jonathan scaled up the lone arch’s broken travertine, using the weeds and roots between the ancient stones to haul himself upward.

As Jonathan neared the top of the bridge, he heard a hacking cough. He reached the top of the ruin and found Emili on her knees, shuddering as she coughed up river water. She gripped the overgrown roots that strapped the stone, as though afraid her hacking would shake her off the arch. Jonathan hoisted himself up and ran toward her, ducking against the unrelenting wind.

“Are you okay?” Jonathan said soothingly, kneeling next to her, pulling her hair from her face.

She nodded as she slowly closed her eyes.

From the top of the Ponte Rotto where Jonathan and Emili stood, the double-lane highway of the modern Ponte Palatino was separated by only forty feet of turbulent water. Cars and trucks careened past in both directions.

“I’ll get help,” Jonathan said, rubbing his neck. He pulled to the edge of the Ponte Rotto.

“Hello!” he called out, trying to get a pedestrian’s attention. The wind picked up considerably and Jonathan could not even hear his own yell. He looked down to survey the rising water on the ruin’s island when he noticed something that chilled him far more than the freezing gusts of wind.

Someone had reopened the sewer grate over the tunnel they had just crawled through.

Jonathan turned around and Sharif stood behind him. He had gripped Emili by the arm and held her over the edge of the ruin, dangling her thirty feel above the raging river current. His bloodied face held its gaze at Jonathan.

“Like Josephus,” Sharif said, “it’s important not only to plan a way into the emperor’s court, but also a way out.”

A
s one of the ranking officers at the Colosseum, Lieutenant Rufio directed other carabinieri to assist the Colosseum’s evacuation of dignitaries attending the UN ceremony. The water level had reached the tourist deck and now spilled onto the
sampietrino
of the Piazza del Colosseo. A dozen municipal trucks lined the Via del Colosseo, dropping men through each manhole to find the breach in the water main. But Rufio’s attention was elsewhere.

Cigarette rolling paper,
he thought.
How could I have been so careless.
Rufio owed his survival to his instincts, and he already knew something was very wrong at the Command. The
comandante
sending evidence to an outside laboratory? Going to pick it up himself?

To make matters worse, he had just received an “urgent location request” from the Command, which required a carabinieri officer to respond immediately with his current position inside the city center. Rufio knew those requests were infrequent and always ominous.
Had the American lawyer spoken to the Command?
Rufio had survived internal investigations before and knew cooperation from the very start was critical. He picked up his mobile phone to respond to the Command’s request when—like a prayer answered—his closed-circuit radio blared to life.

“Three unidentified persons on top of Ponte Rotto,” said the young, nervous voice of an officer. “Two men and a woman near the breach in the riverbank. The woman is apparently injured.”

That’s them,
Rufio thought, and snapped shut his phone. Rufio jogged down the Lungotevere along the river toward the Ponte Palatino. He reached the bridge and held his badge over his head, barking at the crowd now gathered on the side of the highway to move out of the way. Three young carabinieri had cordoned off the bridge, making Rufio the most senior officer on the scene. One of the officers handed him a bullhorn, happy to hand over control of the growing crowd. But Rufio just kept walking until he reached the center of the Ponte Palatino, only fifty feet from the Ponte Rotto. He could clearly see the American lawyer standing on the ruin, the river raging beneath him on all sides. Rufio prepared to issue a single warning from the bullhorn, as was standard operating procedure before firing. Within seconds after the warning he could then fire. He would say he mistook a branch for a firearm. An internal reprimand was a fair price to eliminate his larger problem.

He rested his elbow on the bridge railing and prepared to fire. He paused to regulate his breathing, but the problem was that the young man began to walk, becoming a moving target. Using a pistol in this wind, Rufio would have to wait for him to be stationary. He would only have one chance to fire.