The Vesuvius Isotope (The Katrina Stone Novels) (23 page)

A few minutes later, I stood before the one man Jeff had trusted.

I asked him his name, but I already knew it. His name was Aldo de Luca. I had learned it that morning from my attorney.

My next question was more complicated than the first. I asked him why he was homeless.

Aldo de Luca glared at me. “That’s an easy question for you to ask, standing there instead of sitting because you don’t want my sleeping quarters to dirty your expensive jeans.”

Suddenly, I realized how out of place I must look in the makeshift homeless shelter of the central cloister of
Santa Maria del Carmine
. I sat down next to de Luca on the ragged mattress on the floor. “I apologize. What I meant was that you are obviously an intelligent, capable man. What happened in your life to make you end up here?”

He took my hand and examined it, turning it over to look at both the back and the palm. “Your husband was born into his charmed life,” he said matter-of-factly. “Not you. You have known hardship. So you should already know the answer to your question.”

I looked into his tired eyes, stunned at his sense of perception. He was right. I needed only to reflect upon my own history to understand how many variables can affect the course of one’s life. Was Aldo de Luca born into this situation? Was he thrown into it? Did he make some huge, devastating mistake and bring it on himself? It was probably a combination of all three, and it didn’t matter anyway. Whether sitting on a floor in a homeless shelter or behind a desk in a corner office, he was still the same person. And he was the closest thing to a friend that I had.

“I need your help,” I said.

“I’m listening.”

“I double-checked on the fifty thousand,” I said. “It’s in Jeff’s will.”

“Of course it is, or you would not be here.”

“I will make it a hundred thousand, payable immediately. But first I need you to help me do something.”

“What do you need me to do?”

“Not now,” I said. “Tonight. Late.”

“Why wait?”

“Because first I need to resurrect an ancient world from a two-thousand-year-old grave.”

The direction of the work was given to a Spanish engineer named Roch Joachim Alcubierre. To borrow the Italian proverb, this man knows as much of antiquities as the moon knows of crabs. His incapacity caused the loss of many antiquities.

-Open Letter on the Discoveries of Herculaneum

Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768)

Chapter Sixteen

When the lost city of Herculaneum was rediscovered in the early 1700s, one of the first artifacts located and retrieved was a statue of Cleopatra. It was excavated along with a trio of female statues, each woman draped in a flowing silken tunic carved of the purest white marble. All four of these statues have since been lost once again.

It was Alyssa who told me of their existence. After leaving Aldo de Luca, I called her and accepted her offer of a full tour of the lab beneath Raimondo di Sangro’s chapel. As we once again walked single file through the cramped underground tunnel toward the lab, I began asking questions.

Every scientist understands that inconsistent data is not the exception but the rule. Rarely does an entire package of evidence come fitting neatly together with no anomalies. If it does, one should be very skeptical. There is always at least one piece in the otherwise flawless jigsaw puzzle that stubbornly refuses to fit with the others. And it is usually this piece that ultimately leads to the
true
conclusion, formerly masked by the overshadowing, seemingly cohesive majority of the pieces—which turn out to have presented a distracting fallacy all along.

I asked Alyssa about the piece of the puzzle that didn’t fit. “Why was the Villa dei Papiri never fully excavated?”

She smiled. “Excellent question. One I have been seeking the answer to since I first came to Naples. There is absolutely no shred of doubt that this villa is one of the most important archeological resources in human history. Other areas of Herculaneum
have
been excavated. The fact that this villa has been relatively neglected over the centuries while digging has continued at these other sites is a truly glaring omission in the archeological record. It’s like unearthing the fossil of an extraterrestrial humanoid and then just walking away from it.”

We reached the end of the tunnel, and Alyssa opened the door leading into the laboratory. This time, the space was bustling with activity.

I immediately felt at home. The constant, loud whirring of assorted machinery was a comforting sound. It was accompanied by a crackling radio blasting a Lethal Factor tune at full volume.

I’ve got something so, so bad

Something in me I never wanted to know I had

And it’s changing all I know

Raging inside, every day I can feel it grow

This is my lab
, I realized.

We had entered the facility into the biological sciences space, as evidenced by the familiar objects before me. Three parallel rows of lab benches spanned the room. Their shelves were stocked with bottles of clear and colored liquids, only a few of which were properly labeled with the appropriate universal hazard stickers. The remaining solutions were identified by strips of colored tape labeled with the scrawled handwriting of a rushed scientist. Lining the outer perimeter of the large main room were metal cabinets. I knew without looking inside that they would contain glassware, chemicals, assorted reagents, and specialized laboratory supplies. Four people, all of whom I guessed to be under thirty, were at work.

“Hi, Jackie,” Alyssa said to one of them as we passed. The girl waved without looking up from her experiment.

“This is the main bio lab,” Alyssa said. “Over here we have a cold room, a warm room, and a radioactive room”—she pointed to the doors of each in turn and then to a fourth door—“and this door leads to a separate space for tissue culture. You need to walk through it to get into the chemistry and analytical labs.”

We stepped through the fourth door, passed between the tissue culture hoods, and entered the chemistry lab, crammed with fume hoods and additional benches. Lethal Factor became markedly louder.

Try, can you keep it locked inside?

Deep within the secret place it hides

Block it away from you, trapped within

But this can devour you through my skin

Neatly sorted on one of the benches were the biological samples Alyssa and I had collected the previous day. A pimple-faced young man was feeding test tubes into a machine. He glanced up and offered a distracted greeting as we stepped past him.

Lying on the bench next to the collection of samples was my scuba tank. Alyssa picked it up and led me away with a subtle nod toward the young man.

Once we were alone, she leaned toward me. “The tank held both the normal scuba air mixture and carbon monoxide. The carbon monoxide percentage was low—it would have taken quite a while for the gas to get to you. But the more you breathed, the more it overwhelmed your body. There is no doubt that was what caused you to faint.”

“Interesting,” I said. I took the tank from Alyssa and examined it. “They don’t make this model of tank in the U.S. anymore.”

She shrugged. “They probably don’t make it here either. This particular one is clearly past its prime.”

“See the connection here”—I pointed to a fitting—“these can take in a certain amount of air from the environment. The presence of carbon monoxide inside the tank could mean that someone tried to kill me. Or, it could just mean that someone stupidly set the tank down next to an idling VW bus before I used it. We will never know. But it doesn’t matter. Even if this was an attempt on my life, it certainly wasn’t the first. We need to move on.”

“I know,” she said.

“Have you procured a source of nardo?”

“No, I didn’t make it out to the Himalayas yet this morning,” Alyssa scoffed. “And, anyway, we’re still not sure what a nardo is. But it’s time to find out. Now that we have collected these samples, positively identifying the nardo plant has become the rate-limiting step in this entire endeavor.”

“Then bring me up to speed,” I said. “What can we learn, and what have you learned already, from Raimondo di Sangro and the others who have searched for the nardo before us? Tell me what you know, and I will tell you about the man I believe is trying to kill us both.”

Alyssa opened a door and led me past a series of private offices. A nameplate on the door of the corner office read “Jeffrey Wilson, Ph.D.”

We entered a break room with a small kitchen, and Alyssa headed straight to an espresso machine on the counter. She quickly prepared two large cappuccinos, and we sat across from each other at a small table, upon which sat an assortment of pastries. Alyssa motioned for me to help myself.

I walked Alyssa through my two encounters with the Naples transit policeman named Carmello Rossi. She appeared totally unsurprised.

She then began telling her story, the story of the rediscovery of the Villa dei Papiri in the 1700s. It began with a statue of Cleopatra, and three others eerily resembling the veiled Isis standing above us in Raimondo di Sangro’s chapel.

Like so many of the world’s most amazing discoveries, the lost city of Herculaneum was rediscovered by accident. The year was 1709, and Naples and the surrounding regions were under Austrian rule.

While digging a well, a feat accomplished in 1709 by leading oxen in a circle to drive a drill into the ground, a farmer began unearthing pieces of marble. The farmer began selling the marble fragments, and one of his first customers was Emanuel d’Elboeuf, the French prince commanding the Austrian cavalry.

Eager to complete his summer residence, the task that had brought him to shop for marble in the first place, d’Elboeuf confiscated the poor farmer’s well on behalf of the Austrian government. D’Elboeuf began digging in earnest, and the three female statues were unearthed. They were quickly followed by the statue of Cleopatra. The statues were claimed as property of the Austrian government and placed in the king’s garden in Vienna.

D’Elboeuf and his workers pillaged the building that had been drilled into until it was stripped clean. When the booty was gone, they filled in the holes. With no interests whatsoever in art, no such field as archeology existing at the time, and no apparent concept of historical preservation, no real records of the find were made.

The story might have stopped right there had it not been for a succession of women as ambitious as Cleopatra herself.

Twenty-five years after d’Elboeuf abandoned the site, two factors converged to revive the excavations at Herculaneum. The first was the ascension of a new king of Naples, or rather, the
true
monarch—his mother.

In 1734, Austria ceded Naples to Spain, and Naples fell under the rule of the Spanish royal dynasty controlling the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, although neither king nor queen was either Spanish or Sicilian.

King Philip V was the grandson of Louis XIV of France and was raised at the court of Versailles with aspirations to the French crown. Instead, he was granted the lesser Spanish crown. Philip’s wife Queen Elisabetta was an Italian princess descended from the Medici dukes of Florence and the Farnese dukes of Lombardy. Throughout his reign, Philip suffered from severe depression that left him categorically incapacitated most of the time. So the kingdom was managed by his queen.

Queen Elisabetta installed her firstborn son, eighteen-year-old Charles, upon the throne of Naples. Four years later, Charles married. King Philip had sought a French bride for his firstborn in a feeble effort to cling to the French throne. Elisabetta’s wishes prevailed, however, and Charles married a Prussian, Princess Maria Amalia, who coincidentally had grown up in the very Austrian palace containing the first statues excavated from Herculaneum—the three veiled females and the statue of Cleopatra.

While Charles nominally ruled his kingdom, it was his mother, the Italian-born Queen Elisabetta, who became determined to convert the run-down, poverty- and disease-infested cesspool that was Naples into “the Florence of the South.” And this she did, funding her ambitious endeavors by taxing the Catholic Church on its lands. As the Church was the largest landholder in Campania, tax revenues tripled.

Elisabetta used the newly acquired funds to build three new palaces, a royal opera house, a prison, hospices, a cemetery, and a number of factories. The palaces were intended as museums as well as royal residences; therefore, she set the course to transfer a vast number of pieces from her family’s priceless Farnese collection to Naples.