The Vesuvius Isotope (The Katrina Stone Novels) (39 page)

In an adjacent shop, we buy new clothing yet again.

I step behind a curtain and emerge in another galabia and niqab. I am surprised to discover that I am, in fact, becoming accustomed to the view through its screens. And without the bulky bags I had previously carried at my side and blue jeans underneath it, the galabia offers a freedom of movement almost akin to nudity. My body is remarkably cool.

John has changed from his blood-soaked tan shirt into a dark long-sleeved, button-down shirt and a pair of black slacks. His salt-and-pepper hair will blend seamlessly into the ancient marketplace of
Khan al Khalili
.

As I look over his new outfit, I realize that John’s briefcase remained looped over his shoulder throughout the entire chase that led us here. A dark red stain on the tan shoulder strap is now the only reminder of what we have just been through.

Together, we look like any other Egyptian couple.

“How did you find me?” I ask him.

“I was the one who broke into your lab. I knew something was wrong from your first phone call when you fed me that bullshit line about you and Jeff being in the Bahamas. Then when Jeff wouldn’t return my calls or e-mails, I knew I had to do something.”

I realize now how ridiculous it had been to lie to him.

“So I raided Jeff’s file cabinet, and I found the HER2 project data. Within it was a huge pile of notes about some medical project in Italy seeking a cancer remedy. The contact phone number was for Alyssa Iacovani. I remembered her from UCLA. We had freshman chemistry together.”

Freshman chemistry was also the class in which Jeff and John first met. I smiled and blinked back a wistful tear.

“So I called Alyssa,” John continues. “I met up with her in Naples and then followed her to Aswan.”

“And that’s why you weren’t responding to my e-mails from Jeff’s account,” I say. “You were traveling.”

“No, I wasn’t responding to your e-mails from Jeff’s account because I knew they weren’t from him.”

John smiles, and I smile back for a moment. Then I frown.

“I lost the nardo,” I say. “And the document.”

John grins, reaches into his briefcase, and retrieves both items. The roots of the nardo are wrapped in damp cloths and protected in a plastic bag. The papyrus document is now dry again.

“I figured out that they were important to you when you didn’t let go of either one of them, even with a croc dragging you into the Nile.”

The papyrus is remarkably smooth and supple, not like the charcoal-colored meat I saw hanging in a Naples museum more than a week ago. I roll a corner of it between my fingers for a few moments, peering curiously at the hieroglyphs. Then I hand the document to John.

“I need your help,” I say. “I seem to have a bit of an immigration problem, and I think I am stuck in Egypt for the moment. So I need you to do something for me.

“In Naples is a chapel called
Cappella Sansevero
. In its basement is a pair of human corpses as well-preserved as Egyptian mummies. And behind one of them, behind the pregnant female, is a corridor leading to a laboratory. Take these items there.

“In the lab you will find a chemist named Romano Moretti and a shitload of commercially purchased papyrus. Tell Moretti that the key to what we are looking for is in the combination of that plant and the one you hold in your hand.

“Tell Moretti to do whatever it takes to find the isotope. And for God’s sake, save my daughter’s life.”

Really, I can’t see what use all that science is to you.

-King “Big-Nose” Ferdinand (1751–1825)

Chapter Twenty-Six

I am an anonymous Egyptian woman once again.

After sending John to Naples, I walk. The streets are getting dark, but I am not afraid. Cairo is pulsating. I am amazed to find a nightlife akin to Las Vegas. Loud music pours from large boats docked at every twist and turn of the Nile. The overlapping cacophonies of techno beats might have come from any night club in the United States, but the lyrics are in Arabic.

Pockets of galabia-clad men sit in the shadows of the docks. I watch them stopping the groups of tourists passing through the streets, offering boat rides and shows with belly dancers. But they leave me alone.

I walk slowly in my black galabia and niqab. I limp heavily, favoring my wounded leg, but the fresh breeze wafting beneath my long gown feels healing. I envision the wings of Isis.

The isotope is out of my hands now. If it exists, and I must believe it does, then it is incumbent upon a chemist I have never met to create it from a collection of building blocks I have provided. A chemist my husband trusted above any other. And if Moretti
is
able to create the isotope, then it is up to John to get it to Alexis in time.

I have picked the right people to finish the job, and there is nothing more I can do. In this regard, I feel helpless.

But now I have another life to consider as well. There is a new life inside of me. There is a reincarnation of Jeff growing there, developing.

What world will I bring this young life into? Not one where his mother remains at large in Egypt, hiding from the authorities as well as from his father’s killer. No. I need to finish this.

“You can make them kill each other.”

Those were Alyssa Iacovani’s final words to me. But who are they? What do they want?

“I’m still trying to sort out the details of exactly who knew about… the papyrus scrolls… over the centuries…”

I realize again that Alyssa had never finished telling me what she had been trying to tell me in Naples. She had been answering my question as to why the Villa dei Papiri was never excavated, when we were interrupted by the earthquake. She had arrived at the rise of Napoleon and the rule of Naples by King Ferdinand and his wife Maria Carolina.

I need to know the rest.

I step into a twenty-four-hour Internet café, and I drop enough money for the entire night.

In 1765, excavations at Herculaneum were halted, and the focus shifted to Pompeii. Two years later, King Charles’ son Ferdinand came of age and officially became the king of Naples, a ruler so unpopular among his subjects that they began to refer to him publicly as “King Big-Nose.”

Although Ferdinand had no interest in the papyrus scrolls from Herculaneum, his queen, Maria Carolina, was fascinated by them. Maria Carolina befriended Padre Piaggio, the Vatican calligrapher tenaciously working to unroll and translate the papyrus scrolls from the Herculaneum villa. She wholeheartedly supported these efforts despite—or perhaps because of—the complete lack of interest by her husband.

Then a world event utterly personal to Maria Carolina interrupted the priest’s work. Louis XVI of France was overthrown and beheaded, and shortly thereafter Louis’ queen also fell to the guillotine. Maria Carolina’s outrage was two-fold. First, the infamous queen, Marie Antoinette, was her much-loved younger sister. Second, Napoleon was now marching toward Naples.

As Napoleon’s army approached, Maria Carolina packed up the scrolls and fled south to Sicily with her husband.

After pillaging what the royal family had left behind in Naples, Napoleon’s interest in the ruins of Herculaneum escalated to obsession almost overnight. From Italy, Napoleon headed directly to Egypt, and from there back to France, from where he immediately established a new Institute of Egyptian Studies in Cairo.

Seven years later, Napoleon returned to Naples. This time, the papyrus scrolls were still there for him to seize.

The kingdom of Naples was granted to Napoleon’s sister Caroline and her husband. Caroline personally financed excavations at Pompeii and took an interest in the scrolls of Herculaneum. She raised the wages of workmen unrolling the scrolls and funded the hiring of additional apprentices. When Napoleon became emperor, Caroline sent him her prized scroll as a gift. It described in detail the Battle of Actium and the fall of Cleopatra and Mark Antony.

Then Napoleon was defeated, and King “Big-Nose” Ferdinand was back on the throne in Naples for a third time, but without his queen. Maria Carolina had died while in exile.

By 1870, Naples was in shambles following a long succession of Ferdinand’s offspring, all of whom were as incompetent as he. The king that finally ended this legacy was Vittorio Emanuele, who brought about the Unification of Italy that has remained to this day. He was the first king of a united Italy in over a thousand years.

Under Emanuele, the church and state divided. The fledgling unified Italian state used every weapon imaginable to defeat the Catholic Church. The secularism of ancient Rome proved to be an invaluable one and sparked a new interest in the ruins of Pompeii. Emanuele and the architects running renewed excavations posed—literally with shovels in hand—for the recently developed medium of film. The perfectly preserved slice of ancient Rome that was Pompeii inspired an Italian nationalism never seen before.

This set the stage perfectly for a young journalist coming to power as Italian premier in 1927. Benito Mussolini exploited the nationalist fervor that was sweeping the nation and developed a cult that tightly associated Roman antiquity with Italian racial superiority. According to Il Duce, the ruins of Pompeii held the archaeology to prove that superiority.

The ancient Eastern good luck symbol that was found repeatedly in the ruins, and that I had noticed in the pattern on the floor of di Sangro’s chapel, was picked up by Mussolini’s German counterpart. Hitler’s hijacking of it as the symbol for his political party tarnished the swastika globally and forever.

By the end of World War II, Pompeii and Herculaneum had been excavated, bombed, and excavated some more. But the Villa dei Papiri remained submerged. By that time, approximately four hundred scrolls had been opened and read. With approximately only one in ten of those scrolls written in Latin as opposed to Greek, despite the fact that most ancient Roman authors wrote in Latin, it was believed that a still-buried Latin library probably existed within the house. If so, it is still there.

Throughout the 1980s, the 1990s, and the first decades of our new millennium, the Villa dei Papiri excavations have been reopened but then halted several times. There have been three obstacles in the way.

The first is the constant flooding and poisonous gases of the ancient ruins, which lie several feet below sea level.

The second is the now-contested location of the Villa dei Papiri. The first map of the villa was generated in the 1700s by Karl Weber. Weber’s contemporaries were amazed at its accuracy and detail, and the exact location of each room within the villa was undisputed for two hundred years. Until today.

The most recent effort to excavate the Villa dei Papiri was initiated in the 1990s. Following the reliable maps of Karl Weber, an excavation crew bored into the belvedere, or pavilion, first described by Weber’s men in the 1700s. They discovered that Weber had only identified the uppermost story of the building; in fact, there were three levels to the sprawling villa.

Then the modern crew changed their minds. Weber’s original map of the villa was declared erroneous. The tunnels proving otherwise were filled back in, and the Villa dei Papiri has been inaccessible ever since.

The third obstacle is the modern town of Ercolano, which now sits directly on top of the ruins of Herculaneum.

The sun is beginning to come up as my Internet search takes me to modern news articles, white papers, and petitions centered around Ercolano. And I am beginning to understand exactly who Carmello Rossi is, and the extent of the blood bath Jeff has involved us both in.

With no identification and little money, I return to the same filthy Cairo hotel in which I slept during my first night in Egypt.

I am taken by surprise when, in broken English, the concierge bubbles forth with enthusiasm at my arrival. He has placed my voice and my accent. I smile beneath my niqab at the realization that the hotel staff probably doubled their annual income with the contents of the suitcase I left behind on my previous visit. And at the realization that they almost certainly think that I have now converted to Islam. The concierge asks me to wait in the lobby while my room is prepared.

The hotel upgrades me for free to their best room, and I am surprised to discover that, while much more basic than the hotel rooms of my former life, this one is reasonably sized and—more importantly—spotless. They have prepared it especially for me.

I deadbolt the door and draw the curtains, and in just minutes I am in bed, well aware that I need to be rested for what I am about to do.