The Vesuvius Isotope (The Katrina Stone Novels) (10 page)

Which meant that whatever they wanted from me was legitimate.

Dalfani was holding my purse above shoulder level, like a severed head displayed on a spike as an example for other would-be traitors. Rossi’s grip on my shirt did not relax until a bone-splitting metal crack on each of my wrists left me handcuffed to a chair in the lobby.

What do they want? What do they know? How can they know? Oh, God…

There were so many things they could know, so many possible reasons for them to have brought me here. My crimes were snowballing.

How did I not see this coming?

I need a lawyer.

A cloud of cigarette smoke swirled around me like gray confusion, and I felt like gagging from the staleness of the air. I blinked, in a feeble gesture to protect my eyes from the smoke, my hands bound uselessly behind me.

Now, there were not two but dozens of policemen shouting at me, and at each other. They descended upon me like a lynch mob, cigarettes waving like torches between their stained fingers. They motioned toward me and toward my purse, each of them grabbing for it in turn as Officer Rossi began rifling through its contents. I watched as he extracted both of the iPhones within and began clicking through their data.

A skeletally thin man was roughly brought toward me and handcuffed to the chair next to mine. Through his worn, filthy clothing, I could see the man’s shoulder bones jutting angrily forth. He looked up at me with eyes as dead as night, and I could see in his fixed pupils that he was strung out.

A buzzer sounds, and the door before me swings open. I step forward.

I enter the prison’s visiting area and approach a long bank of small booths. I sit at one of them. Then I wait.

A moment later, Lawrence Naden enters the room. He shuffles slowly toward me, and the bones of his legs are visible through his paper-thin pants. He sits on the other side of the barrier. He lifts the receiver of the telephone beside him and raises it toward one hollow cheek.

As if it is a mirror between us and not a panel of clear glass, I reach for the telephone on my side of the barrier and raise it to my own ear.

“Who the fuck are you?” he asks me, a sneer projecting forth, accentuating his crack-rotted teeth.

“I’m Katrina Stone.”

The clamor of policemen and civilians echoed through the small smoke-filled Naples police station. I scanned the crowd for a kind face. “Does anyone here speak English?” I kept asking, and I felt as though I might start crying again. And then, as I continued searching through the horde, I did cry. But they were tears of relief as I saw, through the unruly swirl of people, a familiar backward baseball cap.

The young man with the tattooed arms pushed his way aggressively through the crowd as he yelled rapidly in Italian. When he was close enough, he stepped boldly up to Officer Carmello Rossi, pointing a finger no more than two inches from his face. This was a strong, confident, and concerned
man
—a dramatically different person from the happy-go-lucky child who had teased me in a café and then helped me buy a bus ticket.

The formerly authoritative policemen were now almost shriveling. They stood quietly, listening to the onslaught from my unlikely hero. His rant carried on for a few moments to an increasingly sheepish audience.

He stepped toward the officer currently in possession of my iPhones and snatched them viciously from him. He gathered the rest of my belongings and returned them to my purse, offering a brief look of apology in my direction as he did. He pointed at Rossi and then at me. And then, to my sheer amazement, Officer Rossi leaned down and unlocked my handcuffs. I began to rub my bruised wrists and peered questioningly up at him. Without a word, Rossi turned and walked away. Then the tattooed young man with the backward hat took me silently by the hand, and we walked, unimpeded, out of the police station.

For the second time in less than an hour, I found myself wiping tears from my eyes while the enigmatic stranger waited politely nearby. When I was finished, he spoke. His voice was gentle, but firm. “On the bus there are machines,” he said. “They are impossible to see when the bus is full, and half of the time they don’t work. But if you don’t use them”—he made a stamping motion—“to mark your ticket, it is a crime here. Tourists usually have to pay money. If they don’t pay, they go to the police station. Then they do pay. That is why this always happens to people on the bus near the police station.”

“But I paid them,” I said.

He shook his head. “
Signora
, you were going to jail whether you paid them or not. I heard them talking. The bus ticket was an easy excuse, but… it wasn’t really why you were arrested. Now I think”—he paused and took a deep breath—“I think you should tell me the truth about your husband.”

My knees buckled, and the world went gray. Through tunnel vision, I could see a strong pair of thick, tattooed forearms flash toward me, and then a pair of large gentle hands was supporting me by my elbows. He guided me to a concrete wall running along the sidewalk.

Trembling, I sat and looked up at him. “What do they want with my husband?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “But whatever it is, it is in Herculaneum. That cop is going there now.”

As yet we have only entered into one room, the floor of which is formed of mosaic work, not unelegant… I was buried in this spot more than twelve days, to carry off the volumes found there… Those which I have opened, are philosophical tracts the subjects of which are known to me; but I am not at liberty to be more explicit.

-Director of the Museum Herculanese

Camillo Paderni (1720–1770)

Chapter Eight

The
Circumvesuviana
train lumbered away from the central train station of Naples before picking up a steady, rocking speed. I gazed out the window and watched the city recede. Then I turned to stare unabashedly into the unlined face of my new companion. “Why are you helping me?” I asked gravely.

“Only a monster would allow you to do this alone,” he responded. “I wish you would tell me why you need to do it at all.”

I ignored his request. “I’m serious,” I insisted. “It’s one thing to get a crying woman in a café a glass of water. It’s quite another to blow off your entire afternoon and chaperone her through Roman ruins.”

The train chugged farther and farther from the city.

The boy shrugged. “I felt very sorry for you,
signora
. You looked… lost. And also, I did not want to go to class today, and I was—how do you say?—playing hooker?”

I giggled, despite myself. “Hookey,” I said, and he blushed.

“Listen, I really appreciate what you did for me at the police station. And I appreciate your sharing what you overheard there. I guess you could say I am going to Herculaneum to hear the rest of the story.” I held out my hand. “I’m Katrina.”

“Dante. Dante Giordano.”

Dante instructed me that we needed to disembark at the train stop designated for the Herculaneum excavations—
Ercolano scavi
—rather than the stop for the modern province of Ercolano, now sitting atop the ancient ruins. He explained that getting off at the wrong stop was a common mistake among tourists.

I took a deep breath before stepping off of the train.

To my relief, a small gathering of tourists was still entering the Herculaneum ruins, despite the late afternoon hour. I could hear the enthusiastic chatter of more people inside.

I walked to the booth and purchased two tickets. I did not see Officer Carmello Rossi.

“I don’t see him,” Dante said, echoing my thoughts. “What do you want to do, just walk through the whole site? The Herculaneum ruins are quite large.”

“I don’t know,” I said with a sigh. “I guess I hadn’t really thought it through…”

I forced my mind back to my earlier conversation with Alyssa Iacovani, and then I knew where I needed to look. I returned to the ticket booth. “Do you have a map of the ruins?” I asked the attendant.

Still standing at the window, I unfolded the large map I was given and looked through its features. There were two large bath complexes, a forum bath and a suburban bath, and several other marked spaces I assumed to be private residences and temples. In bold, seemingly of utmost importance, were the House of the Mosaic Atrium, the large Palestra, and the Shrine of the Augustales. I did not see what I was looking for.

“Excuse me.” I turned once again to the attendant. “Where is the Villa dei Papiri?”

“Oh, it’s slightly outside of the main area—right about here.” She circled a blank area of the map outside of the annotated region.

“Why isn’t it on the map?” I asked.

“Because you can’t go in.”

I gaped at her. “Why not?”

“It’s closed off. It’s actually still almost completely buried.”

“How did they get the papyrus scrolls out?” I asked.

“They didn’t,” she said. “The scrolls that have been unearthed are probably just a small fraction of what’s there. Most of the collection is still buried in the villa.”

I glanced at the young man beside me and then wordlessly sprang into a dead run.

My heart was pounding as I approached the area circled on the map, the area off the tourist trail. Behind me, I could hear the labored breathing of a young man who clearly was not the runner I was. He plodded toward me and then stopped to rest his hands on his knees, wheezing.

Before me was a section of a high stone wall, clearly a remnant of an ancient building. Scattered around it were several large piles of stone, some as tall as I was, which I took to be excavated rubble from within the villa. Surrounding the area was a low chain-link fence bearing a single fading metal sign. The sign bore the name of an Italian construction company.

Thick dust covered the sign and the piles of stone adjacent to the wall. I glanced at Dante and then looked around the area. There was no sign of Rossi. Indeed, there was no sign that anyone had been there for years.

I swung myself over the chain-link fence. A cloud of dust billowed up from beneath my shoes when I landed on the ground near the ancient wall, the only visible trace of the Villa dei Papiri. For a moment, I stood immobile and only listened. Except for the still-ragged sound of Dante’s breathing, there was only silence. I timidly stepped toward the wall.

No vegetation was present in the heavy dirt, and the area looked completely uninhabitable. In the dust beside a shoulder-high mound of construction rubble was an abandoned pair of work gloves, also covered with dirt and nearly camouflaged.

I stepped around the pile of rubble. Behind it, invisible to any passerby from the opposite side of the chain-link fence, was a large rectangle of rotting wood that lay flush with the earth like a trapdoor leading into the ground. Crossing it were two four-by-four beams, a crude barrier to block entrance to what lay beneath.

The beams caught my attention immediately. They were relatively new and did not bear the layer of dust that coated every other object around me.

Dante slipped up next to me and whispered, “Someone used something to cover their tracks in the dirt after putting those there.” His unexpected voice in the utter silence made me jump.

“I know.” I nodded, as my heartbeat settled back to normal. “Here, help me.” Dante and I bent forward in unison to push the four-by-fours aside to access the trapdoor and whatever lay beneath it, but before we could move them the silence of the abandoned area was broken once again.

“You should have stayed away, Dr. Stone.”

“Naples has crime. Naples has
camorra
.”

“What is
camorra
?”

“Like in the movies, the criminals.”

“Mafia?”

I looked up into the face of Carmello Rossi. In his hand was a pistol. As he stepped toward us, he raised his arm and trained the gun on me.

I froze, crouched near the trapdoor. Beside me, Dante looked up into my eyes.

“What do you want with me?” I asked Rossi.

“I only wanted you to stop searching,” he said. “But since you will not, then I must deal with you another way. Stand, please, with your hands over your head.” He pulled back the hammer of the pistol.

I slowly stood, raising my hands above my head. As I did, I saw a flash of ink and flesh below me, and then a shot rang out as a force like a train crashed into me, knocking me to the ground. My head hit the dirt, and a cloud of dust flew into my eyes, nose, and mouth. I began hacking and coughing.

I heard a sickening thud, and in my blurred peripheral vision I saw Rossi fall backward, clutching his chest. A rock approximately eight inches in diameter was rolling away from him.

“
Hurry!
” Dante shouted and yanked me roughly to my feet with both hands. Still sputtering, I lunged behind the nearest pile of stone just as another shot sent splintered fragments of rock toward me.

Using the piles of stone and rubble as cover, Dante and I raced to hurl ourselves over the chain-link fence. Then without stopping or looking behind us, we sprinted back toward the annotated area of the map of Herculaneum.

The gunshots had ceased by the time we re-entered the populated area of the ruins, but Dante and I kept running. We barely made it onto the train before it left the Herculaneum station. As the doors closed and the train began pulling away from the station, I peered through a window to see Carmello Rossi still trotting after us, now looking casual, his pistol tucked out of sight. As the train rolled away from him, his pace slowed to a walk.

The train picked up speed as it left the ruins of Herculaneum behind. I sat down heavily and gulped in air. My throat was still scratchy from the dust I had inhaled, and my head was throbbing. I reached a hand up to rub it and then looked up at the young man who had just thrown me violently to the ground and pelted a police officer with a boulder in order to save my life.

“I’m sorry,” Dante said, touching the top of his head to signify the wound on my own. His face was strained.

For a moment, we sat in silence as I struggled to think. His eyes never left me.

“I want to help you,” he finally said. “But I can’t unless you tell me whatever it is you are not telling me.”

I still paused before answering, but then I said, “OK. The villa we were just at contains a two-thousand-year-old collection of documents. One of them describes an ancient plant called a nardo. My husband and… others… have apparently been looking for that plant. Rossi obviously wanted my husband—wants both of us—to stop looking. I suspect he wants to find it first.”

“Katrina,” Dante said, “I have lived in Naples all my life. Take my advice. Stop looking.”