Roman Ice

by Dave Bartell

  “The story goes that Pasquale jumped ship in Naples and found a box of scrolls in a newly excavated part of Herculaneum. He was there digging for buried gold. After a couple months, the family dragged him back into the business, because they needed him to captain a vessel. But he kept the box close all his life, hoping he could unravel its secrets.”

  “The Box,” as the Lacroix family had named it, was made of ebony and covered with thick hammered bronze. The intense heat of the pyroclastic surge that annihilated Herculaneum and its more famous cousin, Pompeii, had discolored the metal, but the Box had saved the scrolls.

  “I found it after World War Two, when I was looking for food stores in the basement. It looked like no one had touched it in decades. When I asked my father about it, he remembered only what his father told him, which is what I told you,” said Emelio.

  “When can I see the Box? This is great stuff,” said Darwin.

  “You need to finish your PhD first.”

  Rain drummed on the glass roof of the sunroom, and Darwin switched on a lamp. In the two years since obtaining the scroll, Darwin had asked enough questions to figure out that Emelio had caught the treasure bug and, with no family like Pasquale’s reining him in, had become isolated. The situation had reached a breaking point with his family when Emelio had published in an archeology journal the suggestion that Romans, Nero in particular, had stashed gold in secret tunnels across the Empire. In addition, he had presented at a conference in Paris, where he had been ridiculed.

  Some people, however, had read the journal article with interest. Among the letters calling him a crackpot were two responses that further fueled his misguided passion. The first arrived in the late 1970s from a woman in central France who claimed to have a notebook with evidence of potential old tunnels. The second letter came in a package Emelio had received out of the blue one day in 2004. It contained a Roman scroll that had been found by an amateur archeologist in London.

  Darwin had begged Emelio to send him more clues to work on this summer. Emelio had obliged and shipped a fat envelope that arrived in yesterday’s post. Its contents included the letter from the amateur archeologist and a partial copy of the scroll. Darwin arranged the contents on the table. Besides the letter and scroll were a yellowed copy of Emelio’s article from 1974, a handful of pottery shards, several coins, and a raw diamond the size of a strawberry.

  The letter was signed “James Mason.” In a shaky scrawl, he wrote about finding the contents during a London Underground project in the 1933. He wrote that the scroll claimed the diamonds had been found near a ‘land of fire and ice’. James mentioned that someone might need the big diamond to link the scroll to the land of fire and ice should they should ever find it. Darwin set it aside and looked at the other letter.

  The lady in France, Amelie Giraud, claimed to have notes from her great-grandfather, who had researched volcanoes in the mid-1800s, saying he had “found something that might help.” She still lived in Clermont-Ferrand France, the ancient Roman city of Augustonemetum. Emelio told Darwin that she had always come up with an excuse to not meet and also confessed that his obsession with the treasure fractured his family. Darwin’s father stayed away after completing university.

  “Your grand-mère was heartbroken, and I promised her I would not bring up the quest with you,” Emelio had said in a phone conversation the previous summer when Darwin asked why he had not been told before. It had been three years since her passing, so he figured Emelio was now changing his tune.

  At first, Darwin researched Emelio’s ideas alongside his dissertations. However, as much as he was interested, until he landed his PhD, he did not have time to chase a fantasy. But with a free summer and a lead in London, he figured if nothing else, it would keep his skills sharp. Londinium had collapsed just after they pulled the legionnaires back to Rome, but five hundred years of Roman legacy lay just under the modern concrete jungle.

  After a couple hours of making notes and plans, Darwin grew restless. On impulse, he decided to visit the Liverpool Street Station of the London Underground where James had found the scroll. He slipped on a light jacket and walked into the Circle Line station at Notting Hill just as a rain shower began.

  5

  The station was active, but the commuter crush had passed. It would provide a balance between anonymity and being able to find what he was looking for. Twenty minutes later, he exited into the summer sun at Liverpool Street. Waves of evaporating rain danced above the pavement on their way back to the heavens. Needing a place to plan his next move, he ducked into Caffè Nero for a triple-shot cappuccino.

  Coffee in hand, he walked to a stand-up table along the front window to consult a map of the Liverpool Street Station he found online. Once in the station, he needed to find a maintenance entrance without appearing to look for one.

  Darwin laid a printed copy on the map on the table and scrolled through Wikipedia on his mobile. The Liverpool Street Station had opened in 1874. Four Underground lines converged there and the massive Crossrail and Thameslink projects were just starting up. Whatever James Mason had found years ago, these two ginormous projects would obliterate the evidence.

  The station was within the boundaries of first-century Roman London, and its position, just north of central Londinium, fit with descriptions in the scroll. Today he planned on some basic reconnaissance to get a feel for where Mason had found the scroll, but his online map from Transport for London was too current. The original tunnels remained behind facades when they remodeled stations. He logged in to the British Museum archives using his university credentials and browsed old maps of the London Underground. Documentation of the century-old system was vast, but he soon found a station map for Liverpool Street, circa 1940. For quick reference, he took screen shots of a few zoomed-in sections of the map.

  With the caffeine boosting his confidence, he walked back to the station. He followed wide stairs to the first level of the concourse where gleaming stores beckoned shoppers. It felt like people were staring at him as the escalator undulated down to track level. Reaching into his backpack, he clipped an archeological pass for the Crossrail project to his jacket.

  A southbound train pulled out just as he reached the platform. Good timing, he thought. The station sign showed the next train would arrive in three minutes. Plenty of time. He walked to the far end of the platform and released the safety on the platform edge door, exposing the track. No alarm sounded. He jumped down to track level and flicked on his flashlight. Time to work fast.

  His heart sped up as he picked his way along, avoiding the electric rail. He reached the side tunnel in about ten meters where precast concrete rather than cast iron shielding held back the soil. The construction drawing listed it as “shaft to old river tunnel.” He was approaching a door when a powerful light struck him in the eyes.

  “Stop where you are!”

  Darwin squinted in the fluorescent lighting of the City of London police interview room. He sat on a one-piece aluminum chair at a table bolted to the floor. He stood and rubbed his aching backside with the hand that was not cuffed to the ring on the table. The last plain-clothes officer had said to wait a few minutes. That was an hour ago.

  Eventually, the door opened. “Darwin, what happened? The police said you broke into the Tube.” It was his mother, Carmen. He breathed a sigh of relief. He had given the names of both his parents as next of kin, but his mother was more tolerant of his incautious actions.

  “It’s a long story,” said Darwin.

  “What the hell were you doing? You could have been killed. The police scarcely believe your story, and I’ve had a helluva time trying to convince them you’re not a terrorist.”

  “I know, Maman,” he replied in a can-we-please-get-this-over-with tone.

  “It’s best if you stop there,” she cautioned. “They’re willing to forget about this if you promise to not do anything so stupid again.”

  “Yes,” he said to the floor.

  “What?”<
br />
  “Yes, I promise,” he said.

  “Sit here,” she said. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  Carmen Lacroix, née Mendez, was a professor of neurolinguistics and early language development at the Birkbeck University of London. She came from a prosperous family in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and was the brainy girl in the family who asked “why.” She had struggled through years of people telling her what a woman should and should not do. As a result, she had always encouraged Darwin to pursue his passions.

  That few minutes turned into half an hour, but they got out of the police station and in a cab heading back toward Notting Hill. Darwin explained what he was trying to find. She had heard all about the Lacroix obsession from her husband, but even she had limits.

  “Why do you want to do this? You’ve heard your father talk about this Lacroix quest,” she said.

  “No, I haven’t, Maman. Papa doesn’t talk about it. When I ask, he rants about Grand-Père’s stupid hunt for Roman gold and tells me to never get caught up in it. I dunno, maybe there’s a new discovery here in the history of Roman Londinium. I want to see if I can connect this scroll with the scrolls Grand-Père has,” Darwin said, staring out the front of the cab.

  “I understand,” she said, patting his knee. “But you need to be more cautious. You’ve got a great opportunity at Berkeley. This kind of thing, getting arrested, could put an end to it all,” she said.

  She gazed out the window as the taxi passed Hyde Park Corner. Tourists were gathered around a man standing on a wooden box who waved his arms madly as if making a grand point. As they rolled past the crowd, she turned back to Darwin.

  “There’s a man who might help. Do you remember my friend Catherine?”

  “The sociology professor?”

  “Yes, she always enjoys hearing how you’re doing. Anyway, a few years ago, her father, Charles, retired from British Telecom. He worked in their underground facilities here in London. She says he’s always telling unusual stories about things found in underground London. He might have ideas for you.”

  “Really!” said Darwin.

  “Let me ask her,” she said.

  6

  The introduction was made, and Darwin exchanged emails with Charles to arrange a meeting time. When Charles learned that Darwin was researching Roman Londinium, he replied that he had something “very interesting indeed” to show him.

  Darwin arrived early to Furnival Street in case the address was hard to find and saw Charles already there standing by a nameless building with a simple “39” painted on the stone facade.

  “Hello, Darwin. Any trouble finding the place?” asked Charles.

  “No. How are you, Charles?”

  “Fine, thanks. Let’s go in. They don’t like people to linger about the entrance.” He turned and inserted a key into an odd shaped keyhole. Charles looked up and down the street before closing the door.

  Charles did not look like a pensioner with his stylish dress and full head of dark brown hair, worn longer than most men his age. He also had the bushiest eyebrows Darwin had ever seen. Combined with the round glasses, they gave him the look of a mad-scientist.

  They stepped into an industrial lift. Charles hand closed the jaw-like doors and pressed a button. A musty odor came from the air swirled about by the descending lift. He reversed the process at the bottom and motioned for Darwin to step out. Safety lights cast a dim glow. The same steel plates that supported the older London Underground tunnels lined the walls, except these were painted white.

  Charles flipped a switch, and fluorescent tubes snapped on and on down a tunnel that curved out of sight in both directions. The space became stark white, like the corridors in a Star Wars spaceship.

  “Whoa!” said Darwin.

  “Welcome to the BT Kingsway Exchange,” said Charles. “Don’t feel bad. All first-timers have that same slack-jawed expression.”

  “How big is this place?” asked Darwin.

  “There are two main tunnels, or streets as we call them, and a group of fatter tunnels that contained most of the work area. This is South Street, and it’s about a thousand feet in total length. C’mon, you’ll get a better sense of the place by seeing it.”

  They turned left onto South Street as Charles explained that the Furnival Street entrance was used for goods delivery. Other personnel entrances, like Tooks Court, had been built over as London modernized. He led them into a smaller tunnel on the right.

  “We called this Tea Bar Alley because we could get a quick cup of tea here. The main kitchen is at the other end,” he said.

  Darwin was wondering if the Romans could have tunneled down here when a deep, rumbling sound filled the tunnel and seemed to move toward and over them. He stopped and put his right hand on the wall.

  “That’s the Central Line. Both east and west tubes are staggered above and between North and South streets. Don’t worry. Nothing’s ever caved in,” said Charles.

  “When was this built?”

  “During the War. They added the rest in the fifties and sixties when BT moved its critical telecommunications down here. For a short while all the important British government documents going back to the Domesday Book were stored in boxes piled on the old civilian bunks.”

  “That’s a thousand years of records,” said Darwin.

  “We Brits like our administration,” said Charles.

  The curve straightened and Darwin could see the tunnel run to its vanishing point. They passed another cross tube and continued past the High Holborn Street shaft. A kitchen and dining room sat frozen in time, like an abandoned restaurant. They continued down a spiral staircase and through a small tube and up another spiral staircase. Charles opened a door, and Darwin followed him into a section containing an enormous generator.

  “This is one of the few cross-tunnel doors. We installed it because of the noise these generators made. They’re the backups for times when we closed off the outside world, usually just the monthly tests, but we were on our own for two weeks during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.”

  “When did you work down here?” asked Darwin as they continued along South Street.

  “Nineteen fifty-two. They hired me as an engineer supervising a couple teams during the build out. I finished up my electrical engineering degree at night and worked on the telecommunications equipment until I retired.”

  “You were down here the whole time?”

  “No. We shut down everything but the main switch in the eighties, and we turned it off in 1995. The Internet changed the need for a single facility,” said Charles. “Here we are—the Kingsway Telephone Exchange.”

  They walked past banks of ancient telecommunications equipment, much of it gutted. An old office chair lay on its side. A fine grit covered everything.

  “Did you know of that famous hotline between the American White House and the Kremlin?”

  “Sure, it’s grammar school history.”

  “Well, that hotline ran through these tunnels. One of my mates was on the team that watched that line day and night. He hates phone calls to this day.”

  “I can imagine,” said Darwin. “What was it you wanted to show me?”

  “Ah, I figured you might get bored with the history lesson. It’s just down here.” He pointed ahead. “I saved it for last, to give you some context for what we were up to.”

  They made their way back past the alley where they had come in. A wall covered this end of the tunnel, broken only by a strong metal door set off center to the left. “Authorized Entry Only” was stenciled in red letters.

  “I haven’t been in here in about twenty years. I hope the cameras are off. If not, we might have company,” said Charles.

  Darwin’s eyes widened at the thought of a second encounter with the police, this time in a secret facility.

  “Gotcha!” said Charles.

  Darwin pretended to laugh as Charles worked the key into the lock with both hands. It yielded after half a minute. The door screeched, its
hollow metal construction amplifying the strain of rusty hinges and metal scraping on concrete.

  The door wedged up against grit on the floor and they shouldered their way inside the dark space beyond. Charles walked over to the right wall and flipped a switch. A ceiling bulb flashed and popped in a shower of fragments. Darwin covered his head.

  “So much for that,” said Charles, flicking on a flashlight.

  The unpainted and rusted steel wall supports absorbed much of the light. Moldy stagnant air added to the gloom in the tunnel that ended at a wall of red bricks, about seven meters in. A metal plate covered a section of the floor just short of the wall.

  “About a year on the job, I led the team that was working this tunnel. We installed this sump for flood emergencies and plans called for us to connect it to an emergency ventilation shaft,” said Charles.

  He grasped a ring welded onto the plate. Darwin stepped up, and they slid it away from the wall. A circular hole dropped about two meters and curved out of sight. The soil was dry, but the air coming up the hole had a noxious odor.

  “We can’t go down there without breathing gear. The oxygen level is too low,” said Charles.

  “Where does it go?” asked Darwin.

  “This is what I wanted you to see. We stopped digging because we found an ancient tunnel. We couldn’t call the museums because of Cold War secrecy. At first we thought the Russians were trying to subvert our telecommunications, but there was nothing fresh about the dig. We were told to seal it up and forget about it.”

  “This is amazing,” said Darwin, his voice echoing off the tunnel below. “Did you go down the old tunnel?”