The Testimonium (3 page)
The problem with that goal was that, so far, she had made no remarkable discoveries. Italy had one of the richest historical and archeological heritages in the whole world, but so many scholars and treasure hunters had dug and excavated there for so long that remarkable discoveries were now few and far between. Like nearly all Italian archeologists, she had spent some time in the ongoing excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum—nearly two hundred years after their discovery, these two buried cities were still being slowly uncovered. She also helped excavate and study an ancient temple of Minerva discovered during street work in the city of Rome, but it had been leveled and built over in the ancient past, so that the foundations and flooring were just about all that remained. Despite all this, her professional reputation was solid—just not remarkable.
She hoped the discovery on Capri would change all that. Tiberius was the second emperor of Rome, the adopted son and heir of Augustus Caesar himself, and had ruled during the life and times of Jesus of Nazareth and his apostles. She reviewed her knowledge of Tiberius from her college classes and personal readings. His mother was Livia Drusilla, and his father was Tiberius Claudius Nero. When he was a child she had divorced her first husband, a cruel and vain man, in order to marry Caesar Octavianus, subsequently named Augustus by the Senate when he became the first Emperor of Rome. Tiberius was already in his late fifties when he became emperor in 14 AD after Augustus died. He had been forced to divorce Vipsania, the woman he loved, in order to marry Julia, the daughter of Augustus by one of his earlier marriages. It was a miserable marriage, and Julia had publicly shamed him by taking many lovers. Tiberius hated Rome and despised the Senate, and after only a few years as Emperor had retired to the Island of Capri, where he owned twelve villas, of which the Villa Jovis was the largest and best preserved.
Could Rossini have actually found a chamber from Tiberius’ day, sealed for nearly two thousand years? The odds seemed remarkably long, but stranger things had happened. She was glad that it was Giuseppe Rossini who had made the discovery. He had been one of her early mentors, and by all accounts a tremendous field archeologist before his crippling injury. Unfortunately, she had only gotten the chance to go on a dig with him once, as a teenage volunteer. But he had become a close and trusted friend during her college years, and had been a great comfort to her when she lost Marc, and then her father, within a few months of each other. She knew how badly it chafed Rossini to be unable to lead digs as he used to, and decided that whatever it was that he had found, he would get full credit as the discoverer. As Isabella called various people and made arrangements to fly to Capri that afternoon, she wondered more and more if this could be the excavation that finally earned her the fame and acclamation she had sought for so long. It was all she could do not to get her hopes too high.
Lucius Pontius Pilate, Senior Legate, Prefect, and Proconsul of Judea, to Tiberius Julius Caesar Augustus, Princeps and Imperator of Rome, Greetings.
Your Excellency, you know that it is the duty of every governor to keep you informed of events in the provinces that may in some way affect the well-being of the Empire. While I am loath to disturb your important daily work with a matter that may seem trivial at first, upon further reflection, and especially in light of subsequent developments, I find myself convinced that recent events in Judea merit your attention. And I would be telling an untruth if I were not to say that I am concerned that other accounts of these happenings may reach your ears which are not just unfavorable but frankly slanderous of my actions and motives. The situation was one of unusual difficulty and complexity, and hard decisions were called for. As always, I tried to make the decisions that I felt would most lend themselves to a peaceful and harmonious outcome for the citizens of the Republic and the people of Judea. But local passions in this case were so strong, and so diametrically opposed to each other, that it may be there simply was no completely correct choice to make. I leave that to your judgment.
CHAPTER TWO
Dr. Rossini sat in a folding chair, notebook open, sketching the dark opening in the ancient wall before him. He was tired and his leg was throbbing slightly—a couple of Tylenol had relieved his pain somewhat, but not entirely. However, he had managed to get a great deal done in the three hours since his conversation with Dr. Sforza. The police chief of Capri village had closed the Via Tiberio leading up the side of the mountain with barricades informing tourists that the ancient road was not safe due to earthquake damage. Rossini had talked to the friars at the Church of Santa Maria Del Soccorso, informing them that the ruins adjacent to their church had been damaged and were not safe for foot traffic. There were only three elderly clerics tending the Medieval-era chapel these days, so he doubted they would come poking around anyway, but better to cover all bases, as his American friend Dr. Luke Martens used to say. Rossini thought it was an American football term, but was not sure. Sports had never been of much interest to him. The friars had also loaned him a folding chair and filled his flask with excellent brandy, which had made his wait on the mountaintop much more comfortable.
True to his word, he had not set foot inside the tiny chamber yet. But he had carefully walked around the entire staircase, and compared its height, width, and other measurements to the other staircases in the ruin. Then he had picked up and looked at each of the scattered blocks knocked loose by the quake, mentally restacking them and seeing how they had fit together to form a solid wall covering the ancient chamber. He wanted to cover the entrance, but there was nothing on the site that would serve as a drapery or tarp, so instead he just guarded the ancient opening until Isabella could arrive with proper supplies. Last of all, standing outside, he had shone his light into the void, mentally marking its approximate dimensions and shape. He thought that perhaps this staircase had rested on a solid pile of stone, like the others, and that whoever built the chamber had simply removed some of the stones from the pile, inserted braces to support the weight of the stairs, and then ordered some of the original blocks replaced when they decided to seal up the chamber. Certainly there was no visible arch or framing stonework for an ancient doorway; the stones that had finally fallen outward to reveal the entrance looked no different from the stones all around them, or the stones of the other staircases in the old villa. The secrecy and cleverness of the design were about right for the deeply paranoid and suspicious character of Tiberius Caesar, the island’s most famous inhabitant.
As for what was in the chamber—he tried very hard not to think about that. Everything was coated with a deep, solid layer of powdery stone dust from twenty centuries of feet tramping up and down the stairs, but he could tell that, from what he could see, the space was not empty. What those tantalizing shapes he had glimpsed actually were, he could not say with any certainty. But he definitely felt that he was not wasting Isabella’s time.
As if on cue, he heard the sound of a helicopter approaching in the distance. He carefully closed his sketch book, took one last sip of brandy, and watched as an Italian government helicopter slowly lowered itself over the largest extant floor of the ancient villa, which had once been Tiberius’ audience chamber, on the level above the chamber he had found. The small chopper delicately touched down, and Isabella hopped out, grabbing a heavy backpack and some notebooks, and then waved them off. Rossini walked up the steps to greet her with a smile.
“Isabella! So good to see you again! When are you going to put aside your widow’s weeds and make me a happy man?” his strong Italian voice boomed over the fading sound of the rotors.
Dr. Sforza threw her head back and laughed. Rossini was thirty years older than she, and a widower for the last ten years, but even when his beloved wife was still alive he had always flirted with her shamelessly—and harmlessly. “As soon as you lose thirty years and thirty kilos!” she shot back. “Now let’s see your great discovery.”
“All business with you young people these days!” he laughed. “In my time we would have celebrated the discovery of a chamber like this with three days of music and dancing before we thought about going inside!” Of course that was not true, but Rossini was enormously fond of Isabella. Although he had not spent much time with her since her husband’s death, he still thought of her as his adopted daughter.
Bantering back and forth, the two archeologists descended the steps toward the collapsed section of wall. Isabella already had her camera out, snapping pictures of the scene. Then she carefully measured the opening, and stepped back for a wide-angle shot of the entire staircase. She jotted down a few lines in her field notebook, then closed it and put it in her pocket. She reached inside her backpack and pulled out a powerful, battery-powered halogen lamp. She set it just outside the opening, shining in, and switched her digital camera over to video mode to record her first impressions of the chamber.
“April 8, 1630 hours. Preliminary investigation of chamber inside Villa Jovis, Capri, exposed by this morning’s earthquake. The chamber is hidden beneath a large staircase, revealed when a section of its exterior wall fell outward. Chamber is roughly triangular in shape; maximum height is about two and a half meters, sloping sharply downwards towards the rear. Floor and walls appear to be undressed stone. Contents of chamber are all heavily shrouded in stone dust from the stairs above. Clearly visible are a small, low table with several indeterminate objects on it, a backless stool resembling the ‘curule chairs’ favored by Roman magistrates, and some sort of rectangular box or cabinet that is wedged into the angle formed by the descending ceiling and floor of the chamber. Switching over for still shots.” As she spoke, Isabella had carefully filmed the entire chamber—each wall and object, as well as the floor—holding the camera in one hand and the halogen lamp in the other. Now she carefully photographed the entire chamber, recording the original position of every visible object. Only when she had photographed everything and double checked on her camera’s image viewer to make sure that the pictures were clear and sharp, did she turn to Rossini. “Professor, this is your discovery. By all rights you should be the first to enter and see what it is you have found.”
Rossini reached down to pick up a small brush from her assortment. “Are we in agreement that we can remove some of the overburden of dust at this point to see what is beneath it?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “I suggest we start with the small table near the door. And, of course, bag samples of all the dust we remove for pollen residue analysis.”
“Don’t teach your grandmother to knit, girl,” he growled in mock irritation; although he admired her thoroughness. One thing every archeologist lived in horror of was having a find’s authenticity called into question due to sloppy field technique. He shone the light on the floor of the chamber to make sure that he was not stepping on anything but dust, and then eased his way in until he was standing over the table, which was a little over a meter in height. The curule chair had been pushed almost underneath it, so there was room for both of them to stand over the table, albeit very close to one another. Isabella handed him a plastic bag with a zippered top; very similar to commercial food storage bags, except these were a bit larger and manufactured to be acid-free. The largest object on the table, a lump about two inches across and three inches high, was as good a starting point as any. With deft, gentle strokes, he began clearing the dust off of it and brushing it into the bag—although not without sending plumes of atomized stone and mortar into the air, which set him coughing in a matter of moments. Isabella handed him a painter’s dust mask and he donned it before continuing. She was already wearing a similar mask.
Within a few minutes he could recognize the object he was uncovering. It was a small bottle or jar, made of ancient greenish glass or porcelain. The bottommost layer of dust was very stubborn, especially along the top edges of the jar, where it clung to the surface as if it had been glued—leaving that area of the jar much darker than the outside, almost black. But then, as he cleaned his way around the outside surface, he saw a long streak of the black stain running down one side of the jar. Frowning, he teased the dust away from that part of the table. Suddenly he laughed out loud. “
Bravissimo
, Isabella!” he exclaimed. “It’s an inkwell! And look at this—it was actually used at this very table!” As he cleaned around the base of the glass, several dark spots of ink showed on the ancient lacquered tabletop.
Isabella’s lustrous brown eyes lit up as she pondered this. “Could this be a writing nook or chamber of some sort?” she wondered out loud. “Or did someone just store their writing table here when they were done?”
He looked over her head, at the wall above the door, and gave a start. “Look above you, my dear!” he said. “That’s not only a lamp niche, there appears to be a lamp still in it!” The depression in the wall had been barely visible from the outside, but from this angle he could see an odd-shaped, dust-covered object that could only be a small oil lamp. Isabella asked him to pause while she snapped some more pictures of the new discovery.