The Last Gospel

by David Gibbins

  ‘It makes sense,’ Hiebermeyer murmured.

  ‘From what we know of him, Claudius seems to have been a gregarious man, as was Pliny,’ Jack said. ‘Claudius may have been forced to live as a recluse, but he had always enjoyed company. He may even have summoned Pliny in secret to this room when he heard that the other man had arrived to take up his naval post at Misenum. And Pliny would constantly have been searching for informants, people who could help with his Natural History. He was a practical, straightforward Roman, and Claudius may have been a breath of fresh air for him in this place which would have seemed infested with Greek-loving hedonists, Romans with more money than sense under the spell of weak-minded philosophers like Philodemus.’

  ‘And vice versa,’ Maria said. ‘Claudius probably felt the same about Pliny.’

  ‘Claudius would have greatly admired Pliny,’ Jack said. ‘Soldier, scholar, fantastically industrious, a decent man. Pliny claimed he once had a vision of Claudius’ father Drusus, telling him to write a history of the German wars. With his bust of his beloved father in front of him here, Claudius would have loved to hear that anecdote from Pliny himself, perhaps over a few pitchers of wine.’

  ‘Claudius would also have been extremely knowledgeable, hugely well read,’ Hiebermeyer added, pointing at the shelves. ‘It would have been a real meeting of minds. Claudius would have been a great source for Pliny on Britain, though I don’t remember much on Britannia in the Natural History.’

  ‘Possibly because Pliny died before he could incorporate it,’ Jack murmured. ‘He had only been based at Naples for a year before the eruption, and he probably hadn’t found time. He was too sociable for his own good, constantly doing the rounds of friends, the ladies too. But Claudius would have been a fantastic discovery for him, a tremendous secret. I believe Pliny was here, in this room. I can feel it. I think he came to visit Claudius often, and they had begun to work together. Pliny had given Claudius the latest copy of his Natural History, but he was probably poised to make additions, once he realized what a gold mine he’d found.’

  ‘Maybe this is where Pliny was really coming when he sailed towards Vesuvius during the eruption,’ Costas said. ‘That letter you read me, from his nephew Pliny the Younger. Maybe he only told his nephew he was coming here for a woman. Maybe it was really a secret mission. Maybe he was coming to rescue Claudius, this fabulous library.’

  ‘But he was too late,’ Maria murmured.

  ‘I wonder what did happen to old Claudius, if he really was here,’ Costas said.

  ‘He was here,’ Jack said fervently. ‘I can almost smell it. Stale wine, spilt by a shaking hand. A whiff of sulphur, maybe brought back from nocturnal visits to Cumae to see the Sibyl, who we know he consulted when he was emperor. The smell of old gall ink. He was here, all right. I know it in my bones.’

  Jack walked back to the desk as he spoke. He suddenly saw that words were visible where there had been none before. He realized that the sheet of papyrus below the blank one he had picked up was covered in writing, perfectly preserved for almost two thousand years. He peered down, and read across the top:

  HISTORIA BRITANNORVM CLAVDIVS CAESAR.

  ‘My God,’ he whispered. ‘So this was what he was writing. This was why he wanted to return to the life of a scholar. A History of Britain, by Claudius Caesar. Can you imagine what this contains?’

  He scanned the lines of fine, precise writing and then looked back at the title. Underneath it were two words, in the same hand but smaller:

  NARCISSVS FECIT

  ‘Of course,’ Jack exclaimed, his voice hoarse with excitement. ‘Narcissus did this. Narcissus wrote this.’ He looked back towards the doorway, where the outstretched arm of the skeleton was visible in his headlamp beam. ‘So it is you after all,’ he murmured to himself, then looked at the others, his face suffused with excitement. ‘You remember I said that Narcissus was Claudius’ freedman? Well, his official title was praepositus ab epistulis, letter-writer. This clinches it. We know who that skeleton was after all. He was Claudius’ amanuensis, his scribe. I know Pliny always had one, and Claudius must have had one too, especially with his palsy.’ Jack looked at the page again, then at some other pages scattered beside it on the table, with no writing but covered in dark red blotches like wine stains. ‘It’s amazing. I only hope we can find something in Claudius’ own hand.’

  The sound of the drill at the entrance to the tunnel had stopped, and a woman’s voice was shouting, in heavily accented English. ‘Dr Hiebermeyer? Dr Hiebermeyer? We are closing the tunnel now. Please come out immediately.’

  ‘Si, si, si,’ Hiebermeyer bellowed back. Maria immediately came over with her digital camera and began taking pictures, quickly moving through everything on the table, finishing with a close-up sequence of the page of writing before picking up the blank papyrus sheet and placing it on top to protect and conceal the writing.

  ‘We need to decide what to do, Jack,’ Hiebermeyer said in a low voice. ‘Pronto.’

  ‘As soon as we’re out of earshot beyond the villa site, I’m on the phone to my friend at Reuters,’ Jack said. ‘Maria should now have a disk full of images of everything we’ve seen here, and those can be e-mailed straight through. But we keep quiet until then. Leak any of this now, to the superintendency people, and we’ll never see the contents of this room again. You need to play the danger card, Maurice, big time. We found nothing of much interest, spent our time examining some masonry fragments sticking out of the wall. Far too dangerous for anyone to come beyond that grille again. Tell them their drill destabilized the tunnel even more, and there was a collapse. But by tomorrow morning, when these images are out, splashed across the headlines and TV news everywhere, they’ll have no choice but to open up this place. It’ll be one of the most sensational finds ever made in archaeology. And by the way, Maurice, and Maria. Many congratulations.’

  ‘Not just yet, Jack.’ Hiebermeyer murmured, making his way past the scrolls on the floor towards the extractor fan. ‘I’ve spent too long dealing with these people now to be so optimistic. Let’s stall the champagne until this place is more than just a figment of our imagination.’

  ‘Jack, there’s an open scroll here.’ Costas was standing beside the shelves, peering into the recess behind the marble jars.

  ‘There are scrolls everywhere,’ Jack said. ‘This place is an Aladdin’s cave. We’ll just have to leave it.’

  ‘You said you wanted to see Claudius’ handwriting. I’m not sure, but this one looks like it might be in two different hands, one of them a little spidery. Looks like someone’s jotted notes in the margin.’

  ‘Probably mad old Philodemus,’ Hiebermeyer said.

  ‘I doubt it. I think Claudius was having Philodemus cleared out,’ Jack said. ‘I think he was making room on the shelves for his own stuff.’ He walked over to Costas, who moved aside, and peered where he was pointing. The scroll was open, the two ends partly rolled back, with a few inches of writing visible in between. The scroll looked identical to those in the basket by the door, the volumes of Pliny’s Natural History, with the distinctive rounded finials on the handles. Someone must have been consulting it, then put it down opened at a page. The woman’s voice came up the tunnel again, shouting, insistent. ‘Dr Hiebermeyer! Jack! Please. Now!’ Jack looked up, suddenly distracted at hearing his name spoken by a voice from a past that had never been resolved, as if she were calling to him in a dream. For a second he felt an overwhelming need to leave everything and go back out of the tunnel, to find out what had gone wrong. Maria and Hiebermeyer were already out of the chamber, taking the extractor fan with them. Jack shook his head, looked at Costas and then back at the scroll, forced himself to concentrate for a moment longer, to read the words of the ancient script.

  He froze.

  He looked again. Two words. Two words that could change history. His mind was racing, his heart thumping.

  Then, for the first time in his life, Jack did the unthinkable. He lifted the scr
oll, carefully rolled the two wound ends together, and slid it into his khaki bag. He flipped over the cover of the bag and buckled the straps. Costas watched him in silence.

  ‘You know why I’m doing this,’ Jack said quietly.

  ‘I’m good with it,’ Costas replied.

  Jack turned to follow Hiebermeyer and Maria. ‘Right. Time to face the inquisition.’

  Fifteen minutes later Jack stood with Costas and Maria in the open air outside the archaeological site, waiting for the guard to unlock the door that led back out into the alleyway through the modern town of Ercolano. They had been hit by the heat as they left the tunnel, but the blinding sunlight of their arrival on the site had given way to a lowering grey sky, with dark clouds forming over Vesuvius and blanketing the bay behind them. They had doffed their safety helmets outside the tunnel and made their way past the workmen and the guards in the main trench, leaving Hiebermeyer to make his report to Elizabeth and a male inspector who had been waiting beside the tunnel entrance, impatient to close up the site. The Egyptian statue of Anubis had already been drilled out of the volcanic rock and stood partly crated outside the entrance, a cluster of tungsten lamps to one side ready for the impending media event. A concrete-mixer had already been drawn up next to the tunnel entrance, and workmen were laying wooden formers ready to fill and block up the tunnel for good. Everything seemed to be happening exactly as Hiebermeyer had predicted.

  The guard who had jostled Costas on their way into the site was ambling across the small courtyard towards them again, smoking, his sub-machine gun slung over his back. He came directly towards Costas, flicked away his cigarette and made an upwards gesture with both hands. Jack realized that he was planning to frisk him. Jack looked at Costas, then back at the guard, then at Costas again. This was not going to work. They had less to lose now that they had done what they came for, but the last thing Jack wanted was an incident that would lead to full body searches. He put his hand on his precious bag and tried to catch Costas’ attention, but Costas’ eyes were glued on the guard, expressionless, and Jack could see his hands slowly clenching and unclenching.

  At that moment there was a clatter behind them and Hiebermeyer entered the courtyard, followed by Elizabeth and the male inspector. Elizabeth snapped at the guard in Italian and he sneered at her, standing his ground. The man with Elizabeth then said something and the guard backed off a few steps, passing over a bunch of keys. The man went straight to the door and unlocked it, ushering them out. Maria and Costas ducked through. Jack was about to follow, then looked at Elizabeth, catching her eye for the first time. She looked back at him, imploring, and suddenly reached out and grasped his arm, drawing him into the shadows, past the slit-eyed gaze of the guard. For a fleeting moment Jack was back where he had been all those years before, held by those dark eyes that still had the same allure, but in a face more worn and anguished than the passage of time could explain. He barely registered what she whispered to him, a few tense sentences, before she pushed him forcibly away and left quickly the way she had come, back round the corner towards the excavation trench, disappearing out of sight.

  Jack was rooted to the spot, and then heard Costas calling him through the doorway. He stumbled past the guard who was now talking intently on a cell phone, his eyes following Jack, and past the inspector who nodded at him, and then through the entrance into the rubbish-strewn alley. The door clanged shut behind him and he heard the padlock being engaged. He looked up towards the dark cone of Vesuvius looming over the rooftops at the end of the alley, and began following the other three. He clutched his bag, feeling the shape inside, and felt his heart begin to pound. There was no turning back now.

  10

  The man in the black cassock swept past the baldacchino and towards the pier of St Andrew, making the sign of the cross towards the high altar as he passed. He was tall, late middle aged, with fine, aquiline features and scholarly glasses, but with the sinewy toughness of a Jesuit who had spent years in the field. He nodded curtly at the Swiss Guard who stood at the low entranceway into the pier, then glanced back at the baldacchino. The great black pillars had been cast by Bernini from bronze taken from the Pantheon, the pagan temple to all the gods, here transformed into baroque splendour and captured beneath the dome of the greatest church in Christendom. To the man this place always made the ancient Roman sense of mastery over nature seem puny, insignificant, just as it made the people appear puny who stood beneath it today. It was a place where all could know the ascendancy of the Holy See, over a congregation far larger than ever could have been imagined by the Roman emperors at the time of Christ.

  He sniffed, then wrinkled his nose slightly. The air seemed heavy with the exhalation of thousands of pilgrims and tourists who had passed through that day, as they did every day. They were the power of the Church, yet the man found the base reality of the common people distasteful and always relished passing beyond, into the sanctuaries of the ordained. He reminded himself why he was here, this evening. He recovered his stride and made his way purposefully down the steps into the grotto under the nave, to the level of the Roman hillside where there had once been a hippodrome of Caligula and Nero and a city of the dead, a necropolis, dug into the rock. Now it was the burial ground of popes, and the revered resting place of St Peter. The man made the sign again as he passed that holy spot, then weaved his way through the surviving foundation stones of Constantine the Great’s basilica to another door and another flight of steps, leading down into the depths of the ancient necropolis. The door had been opened for him, but as he passed through he took out a key from under his cassock, and with his other hand flicked on a small torch. At the bottom of the stairs the beam danced over rough stone walls lined with niches and shadowy recesses. He bent to pass down a low passageway to the right, descended a flight of rock-cut steps into an empty tomb and felt along the wall, quickly finding what he was looking for. He slid the key into the hole and a concealed door gave way, opening inwards. He ducked through, then turned and locked the door again. He was inside.

  He still remembered the thrill when he had first crouched at this spot. It was during the excavation of the necropolis, when all attention was focused on the tomb of St Peter. He and another young initiate had discovered this passageway, an early Christian catacomb sealed off since antiquity. It was better preserved than the rest of the necropolis, with the niches still plastered over and the burials intact. They had gone inside, just the two of them. Then they had made their extraordinary discovery. Only a few had ever been told of it: the pontiff, the head of the college of cardinals, the man who held the position he now held, the other members of the concilium. It was one of the greatest secrets of the Holy See, ammunition for the day when the forces of darkness might reach the holy gates, when the Church might need to rally all its reserves to fight for its very existence.

  He made his way towards a flickering pool of light at the end of the passageway. Along the way he passed the images they had seen that first day, simple, crude expressions of early faith that still moved him powerfully, more visceral than any of the embellishments in the church above. Christ in a boat, casting a net, a woman seated beside him. Christ on fire, rising with his two crucified companions above the flames, a burning mountain in the background. And names everywhere, on the tomb niches, names made from simple mosaics pressed into the plaster. Priscilla in Pace. Zakariah in Pace. Chi-rho symbols, incised images of baskets of bread, a dove holding an olive branch. Images that became more frequent as he drew closer to the source of light, as if people had been yearning to be interred near that spot, crowding in on it. And then he was there. The passageway widened slightly, and he could see that the light ahead came from candles on each corner of a plinth set in the floor, a tomb. It was a simple structure, raised a few inches on plaster, and was covered with large Roman roof tiles. He could see the name scratched on the surface. He made the sign again, and whispered the words that had long been suspected, but that only he and a few others knew to be
true. The Basilica of St Peter and St Paul.

  Two others were already there, cassocked figures seated in low rock-cut niches on either side of the tomb, their faces obscured in shadow. The man made the sign again. ‘In nomine patris et filii et spiritus sancti,’ he said. He bowed slightly to each in turn. ‘Eminences.’

  ‘Monsignor. Please be seated.’ The words were in Italian. ‘The concilium is complete.’

  The catacomb was damp, keeping the dust down, but the wreathing smoke from the candles made his eyes smart, and he blinked hard. ‘I came as soon as I received your summons, Eminence.’

  ‘You know why we are here?’

  ‘The concilium only meets when the sanctity of the Holy See is threatened.’

  ‘For almost two thousand years it has been so,’ the other said. ‘From the time of the coming of St Paul to the brethren, when the concilium first met in the Phlegraean Fields. We are soldiers of our Lord, and we do his bidding. Dies irae, dies illa, solvet saeclum in favilla.’