‘I won’t,’ promised Philip. ‘Thank you, Father.’
‘Fine. You’ll find,’ he said, sweeping a hand towards the stacked bones, ‘that after a while these brothers of mine will seem less disturbing. You’ll feel their spirits hovering under these vaults. Do you know what I think? I think that the ancient Egyptians were on to something when they said that the ka remained close to the buried body. There must be some trace of our thoughts and feelings that remains behind after we’re gone . . . And before you leave, perhaps you’ll tell me the real reason you are so cynical.’
He walked back up the stairs that led to the church’s main altar.
EVENING WAS FALLING on the city of Alatri and the mighty cyclopean walls glowed with crystalline reflections. Great black and pink cumulus clouds rose from the hills like colossi and flocks of crows glided on the northern wind, contending dominion of the sky that stretched over the bell towers and domes of the churches with the swallows.
Father Hogan looked out of the window of his hotel room and let his eyes roam over the rooftops of the old city, towards the setting sun.
Father Boni’s voice rang out behind him. ‘We have an appointment with the pastor in half an hour, outside the city. We’ve quite a way to go, so it’s best we get started.’
They went down to the street, both in civilian dress, and walked down the roads that flanked the cyclopean walls.
‘Legend has it that these walls were built by giants at the time of the god Saturn,’ Father Boni mentioned to his companion. ‘But no one really knows who could have built them, or how . . . What mysteries still exist on this earth!’
They set out towards the open countryside and a small cemetery soon came into sight.
‘I’d like to know what you have in mind,’ said Father Hogan at a certain point, as he realized where they were heading.
‘We’ll exhume Father Antonelli’s body,’ said Father Boni. ‘I thought you’d understood.’
Father Hogan was completely taken aback. ‘I don’t believe we have the right . . .’
‘We have the duty, Hogan, the duty to do so! Don’t you see?’ He stood motionless for a few moments, as the valley was flooded with golden light. ‘It seems that you still do not fully appreciate what we’re trying to discover. Or – if you do understand – you’re trying unconsciously to back away. Why?’
‘Because this thing that we’re looking for has already had perverse effects on us, while we still have no idea of what, exactly, we are pursuing. I don’t recognize you any more, Father Boni. I watched you react with complete indifference to a dying man, a fellow priest, imploring you to absolve his sins, and now I see that you are ready to profane his grave. What is happening to us, damn it?’
They were now less than a hundred steps from the cemetery. Father Boni glared at his companion with icy eyes: ‘If you don’t feel up to it, leave. Now.’
Hogan nodded. ‘That’s exactly what I’m going to do,’ he said, turning back in the direction they’d come from.
‘But remember,’ said Father Boni, ‘if that signal is coming from a civilization as fierce as it is intelligent, it is our duty to decipher the message it bears and even to attempt to extinguish it, no matter what the cost.’
Father Hogan stopped.
‘Well?’ asked Father Boni.
‘What you’re saying is absurd. But I’ll come with you,’ said Father Hogan.
‘Fine. And from now on, try giving me a hand instead of hindering me. I consider your decision definitive.’
They started back down the path, reaching the churchyard entrance in a few minutes. The pastor was waiting for them.
‘We’re ready,’ said Father Boni.
‘I’m sorry. There’s a problem,’ said the pastor.
‘A problem?’ asked Father Boni, visibly unnerved. ‘What kind of problem?’
‘The late Father Antonelli is not in this cemetery.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Well, you see, three hours ago I was expecting his coffin, for the funeral.’
‘And?’
‘A Jesuit came instead of the coffin. Not just any Jesuit but the secretary of the Father General. He came to tell me that Father Antonelli’s last wish was that his body be cremated.’
Father Boni blanched. ‘You can’t be serious. A priest cannot be cremated.’
‘And yet his request was authorized. The coroner was here with me and the papers we were shown were the original, signed documents. The Jesuit’s credentials were in order as well. I wanted to contact you, but I didn’t know where to look for you. You would have already left Rome by that time. So I decided to wait for you here.’
‘Were you told where the body was taken?’
‘To Rome, I think. But if you want my opinion, I say there’s not a bit of truth in that story about his last wishes. I say that Father Antonelli had some disease. He was a man who travelled a lot, all over Africa and the East . . . That’s why they had to burn his body. They’ll have asked for some special dispensation from the Pope.’
‘I thank you,’ said Father Boni. ‘We must leave now. Please do not say anything to anyone regarding our visit.’
They quickly made their way back to Alatri.
‘Your fellow Jesuits have trumped us, Hogan.’
‘No, I don’t think so. It was probably Father Antonelli himself who arranged to have his body cremated.’
‘Well, I haven’t lost hope yet. Let’s hurry back to the car. I know a way to get to Rome in less than two hours, if you don’t mind driving fast.’
THEY LEFT SOON AFTERWARDS and in half an hour found themselves on the unsurfaced bed of a road still under construction. The car sped off, leaving a black cloud of dust in its wake.
Just before nine p.m. Father Hogan stopped in front of the Verano cemetery in Rome. Father Boni had not opened his mouth once during the entire journey, except to spit out terse directions.
He rang the bell repeatedly, nervously, until the custodian showed up.
‘Who are you? The cemetery is closed.’
‘We know,’ said Father Boni, ‘but, you see, we just happened to be passing through Rome when we heard that one of our brothers had passed away suddenly, and that his body had been brought here, to the funeral chapel, awaiting cremation. We have to leave Rome tonight, but we wanted to pay our last respects. We were good friends in our youth . . .’
The custodian shook his head. ‘I’m very sorry, but I can’t let you in at this hour. I’ve been given strict orders.’
Father Boni opened his wallet and took out a banknote. ‘Please,’ he insisted, ‘you can’t imagine how important it is for us.’
The man eyed the money and then took a quick look to make sure no one was around. He opened the gate to let the two men in.
‘It’s against the rules,’ he said, swiftly pocketing the cash. ‘I’m risking my job. But I’m not a man to deny someone in their time of grief . . . Hurry, this way. What was the good father’s name?’
‘Antonelli. Giuseppe Antonelli.’
‘Excuse me a moment,’ said the man, stopping in front of his living quarters, ‘I have to get the register.’ He was soon back. ‘Follow me,’ he said, ‘this way.’
They walked down a gravel path between two rows of cypress trees, past a long series of vaults, until they found themselves before a low, grey building. The custodian turned the key in the lock.
‘But this is not the funeral chapel,’ protested Father Boni.
‘No, it’s not,’ replied the custodian, opening the door and switching on the light inside. ‘This is the incinerator. Your brother has already been cremated.’
Father Boni turned to Father Hogan. He had paled and his eyes were wide in disbelief.
‘You can pay your respects to his ashes,’ continued the custodian, ‘if you so desire.’
Father Boni seemed about to turn on his heels but Father Hogan gripped his arm and practically forced him to follow the man into the large empty room.
‘There,’ said the custodian, pointing to a little chest on a metal shelf, ‘that’s the urn with his ashes.’ He read the label to make sure he wasn’t mistaken. ‘Yes, it’s him all right. Giuseppe Antonelli SJ. What does SJ mean?’
‘It means Societatis Jesu, the Society of Jesus. He was a Jesuit,’ replied Father Hogan.
He lowered his head and said a prayer. He recited the Requiem under his breath, then raised his hand to bless the urn.
‘Thank you,’ he said to the custodian, ‘it’s been a great consolation for us. Our heartfelt thanks.’
‘Don’t mention it,’ replied the man.
‘Well, we’ll be going then.’
Father Boni strode off without waiting for the custodian to lead them out and Father Hogan followed. They’d covered perhaps ten metres when the custodian called them back. ‘Wait!’
‘What is it?’ asked Father Hogan.
‘No, nothing. I just remembered that . . . Well, the personal effects of the people we incinerate are kept for their relatives. But this man had no one at all – at least, not according to the register. If you were friends, perhaps you’d like to have something as a keepsake.’
Father Boni spun around and practically ran back.
‘Yes, yes, of course!’ he said. ‘We’d appreciate it greatly. As I said, we were very close, very close indeed.’
‘Well, he didn’t have much actually.’ The custodian opened a side door and led them into a little office. He used a key to open the top drawer of a filing cabinet.
‘This is it, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘His breviary.’
‘Are you sure there was nothing else?’ Father Boni asked anxiously.
‘No. Look yourself. There’s nothing else here.’
The custodian looked on dumbfounded as an expression of deep dismay transformed Father Boni’s features. Father Hogan fingered the little book with its cover of shiny black leather, worn by years of use, and pictured it in the bare room of the dying priest, in the dim lamplight of his bedside table. In his mind’s eye he saw the old man’s ashen forehead, beaded with sweat.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Please give it to me. We’ll take good care of it.’ He took the breviary and they left the room.
HOGAN SAT ON THE WHEEL of the car and drove in silence through the practically deserted streets of the city. Father Boni never said a word the whole time. He calmly placed his hands on his knees and stared into the distance without blinking an eye. When they reached their destination, he opened the car door and walked off across the courtyard in silence. Father Hogan’s voice stopped him before he could disappear under the portico. Father Boni turned and saw him in the centre of the courtyard with the breviary in his hand.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
Hogan raised the open breviary, gripping it between his thumb, index and middle fingers, and turned it so the print faced him.
‘It’s here,’ he said. ‘The translation of “The Book of Amon”.’
‘I imagined as much,’ replied Father Boni. ‘But I didn’t have the courage to look. Don’t lose it now. Goodnight.’
4
PHILIP GARRETT FOUND HIMSELF three levels down, in a tunnel that he estimated was about ten metres below the ground. The map that his father had drawn years before ended here, more or less; beyond this point there was nothing other than a very cursory sketch that indicated a fork in the tunnel that then broke off into a labyrinth of sorts. Philip realized he was in a fix. Whichever direction he chose, he’d no doubt end up lost in this maze of underground passageways. It would take months to survey the network and explore it centimetre by centimetre. His only option was to skip ahead to the last instruction: ‘Find the entrance under the eye.’
‘Under the eye’ – what could that possibly mean? Another one of his father’s brain-teasers. But was there really something worthwhile behind all this, something that would justify all this effort? Philip was feeling increasingly frustrated, and the situation brought up all those feelings of hostility and even resentment he’d felt for his father as a boy. He’d realized for some time now that he had always unconsciously held his father to blame for the death of his mother, no matter how implausible and unreasonable that was.
His father was living in Italy when he’d written those messages; perhaps he meant them to be read as a literal translation of the Italian? He remembered how his father had been fond of word games and of setting puzzles using different languages. ‘Under the eye’ would be ‘sott’occhio’ in Italian, which also meant ‘close at hand’. Could the solution be close at hand? Right there, where he least expected it?
Philip set down the acetylene lamp and sat on a row of flat stone blocks. The atmosphere was stifling and stank of mould, but every once in a while a slight breeze would waft by, a kind of dusty puff of air drifting through those dark galleries. Philip strained his ears. What was that sound he’d just heard? He looked at his watch. It was late, nearly midnight, and the slice of bread and cheese that he’d forced down an hour before with a little water had certainly not been much of a dinner.
He got to his feet and realized that the stone blocks he had been sitting on were not part of the pavement; they belonged to the outer wall of an ancient Roman house and had been reused to support the wall of the tunnel dug out long years later in the volcanic tuff.
Philip heard the sound again, and in that absolute silence it made a chill run down his spine. It sounded as if it was coming from the other side of the wall. He lifted the lantern and saw, on the wall directly in front of him, faded and dust-covered, but still identifiable, an eye. An eye run through by an arrow, between an open-clawed crab and a scorpion. The ancient apotropaic sign displayed on the houses of Pompeii to ward off the evil eye. He’d seen one just like it a few days before, a mosaic, on the wall of a recently excavated house of the ancient city.
‘Under the eye’. He started to explore the wall with his hands, little by little, but all he found was a compact surface. He didn’t want to use his pickaxe, because he had no idea how thick the wall was, and because it was against his principles to blindly attack an ancient structure that might even be covered with precious paintings on its other side.
He dropped down to the pavement again and tried budging the blocks of stone. It didn’t take long to discover that a couple of them were loose, because dust had replaced the mortar that had once held them together. The mortar had been scraped away (by his father, perhaps?); small lumps of it were still mixed in with the dust.
Philip took a mason’s pick from his haversack and used the tip to work at the sides and then the bottom of one of the blocks until he managed to loosen and then remove it. A puff of air blew out at him from inside, proof that he had opened a passage with a room of some sort that had been closed off by the tunnel. And then he thought he heard a weak jingling that died out almost immediately. Was it possible? Could the legend of the bell that announced earthquakes have some basis in fact? Could it be announcing an earthquake now? The idea of being buried for ever in that catacomb made him shudder. Philip listened intently, but he could only hear the sound of his own breathing. He forced such worries out of his mind and started to cautiously remove the second block. He slowly scraped away enough of the earth underneath to make a crawlspace big enough to allow him to get to the other side of the wall.
He found himself in a smallish square room, surely a cubiculum. As he raised his lantern, he could in fact see a wooden bed frame which had fallen to pieces, as well as a chest with bronze latches, pushed up against a wall. The metal had a greenish patina while the wood, almost completely mineralized after centuries, had taken on a greyish colour.
He found himself in the home of an ancient Roman, almost surely sealed shut by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. He explored the walls of the room by lamplight and saw that it had been separated from the rest of the house by an earthslide, and it was plainly evident that the collapse must have happened more recently. His father may even have set it off himself as
he was trying to get to the inner rooms of the ancient house. And then perhaps he’d never had the time or the opportunity to come back and continue his exploration.
It was getting quite late and Philip thought it would be better to return the next day, after he’d rested and made a plan, but the thought of crossing that last threshold and roaming those silent rooms – he’d be the first person to enter them in almost two thousand years! – gave him the energy to go on. He ate a last chunk of bread and gulped down some water and then began to remove the tuff blocks and clear away the rubble, taking care not to start another cave-in. Two hours later, he had succeeded in opening a passageway. Dripping with sweat, his hair all white from the dust, Philip wormed his way through the opening, mindful not to bump against a beam that seemed to be miraculously keeping the whole structure from collapsing. His fingers grazed the beam, and he realized that long years of calcareous water infiltrations from above had once again mineralized the wood, preserving a certain solidity, although it was certainly fragile.
What he saw defied imagining. A fortuitous equilibrium of load and pressure had left most of the rooms standing. The house was largely intact, and mostly accessible. Only the large central peristyle had been inundated by ash, which had, however, settled and compacted behind the balustrade which encircled the garden on the ground level. In fact the ash had consolidated to such an extent that it formed a sort of barrier, allowing him to walk along the boundary walls at the sides.
Philip was amazed at the incredible state of preservation of the frescoes that adorned the walls. A flowered garden appeared in the halo of his lamp as he advanced, replete with splendid trompe-l’oeil effects: palm trees and fruit-laden pomegranate trees, apple trees with shiny red orbs, lentisks and myrtles, brambles full of blackberries. Through the boughs of that magnificent garden peeked blackbirds and magpies, goldfinches and chaffinches, turtle-doves and jays, multiplied infinitely by an artist’s hand at the behest of the master of the villa. It seemed to Philip for a moment, in the wavering light of his hand-held lantern, that those branches and leaves were moving, as if swayed by a sudden breeze. The birds seemed poised to burst into song and take flight under those dusty vaults.
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