The Fourth Nail: An Historical Novel

by Paul Argentini

  As quickly as he could, Marius tore the bloody bent fourth nail out of the foot, jammed it under the front of his tunic, and took the spare.

  Marius started over. This time, he put the nail at the correct angle, and drove it through the heel bone. With the nail’s tip showing, and Angelus holding the legs in a bent position so the nail could go through the other heel bone, Marius struck the nail with all his might. It made a solid sound as it went through both heel bones and into wood. Marius hit the nail again and again.

  Captain Morgana told him the next task should be done quickly and with a light hand. Even though it had been decreed that no bones were to be broken, Captain Morgana said it was more important that the man die quickly than attention be paid to edicts. Death by crucifixion was a slow, painful death because the person was gradually asphyxiated. With the body hanging by the arms, the diaphragm is hardly able to push the air out of the lungs. Air had to be pulled in as well, and to do this, pressure was put on the legs to push the chest up. This would be a shallow breath at best, but with both legs bent and fractured, unable to take the pressure, and causing immeasurable pain, the breaths would soon not be enough to sustain life. Marius used the hammer to hit the big bones in both legs enough to fracture them, but not enough so the breaks would be seen. For all intents, the bones were not broken.

  Marius handed the hammer to Angelus who nailed the titulus at the top. It read: JNRJ, which he was told was for “Jesus Nazareno Rex Judorum,” or “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.”

  Angelus put back the ring of thorns and the rope around the top of the cross, which would be used to help pull it upright.

  Marius and Angelus struggled to right the cross, calling on nearby soldiers to help. With their assistance, and Angelus pulling on the rope, the cross fell into the hole. Marius kicked stones in the hole to hold it upright.

  Remembering Captain Morgana’s instructions, Marius took the stiletto, reached up and pierced the right side of the prisoner’s chest between the ribs pushing it far inside. The wound bled. It would collapse the lung, further decreasing the man’s breathing capacity, ensuring a quicker death.

  Marius looked up at him. Jesus was regaining consciousness. Marius expected to feel revulsion within himself. Was his freedom worth doing this? Instead, he was overwhelmed with a strange pulsing throughout his body. The mystical moment was short but intense. He absorbed it as deeply as he could, then it was gone.

  Marius dropped the stiletto, motioned for Angelus to follow him, and left the tools. Without so much as a backward glance, they walked as quickly as they could toward the forge. Marius stopped Angelus for an instant, yanked the iron collar from his friend, and with disdain, threw it away. Marius used his neck cloth to wipe off the condemned man’s blood that had spurted all over face, chest, and arms.

  At the forge, Marius pushed past Horace, and began to pile the fire high with coals.

  “What you do?” Horace demanded to know as he grabbed a sword that was waiting to be repaired.

  Marius turned around. He looked down at the sword, then up at Horace. “Put it down, Horace, and stand out of my way.”

  “Out!” Horace commanded, “I slit you!” Suddenly, he was aware of his precipitous position.

  Marius grabbed a sword out of the pile, and struck out at Horace.

  Horace also took a swing, the swords striking. Horace swirled around to get away, but was blocked by Marius.

  Horace, his back to the wall, shoved his sword forward. Marius slowly raised his until it was aimed for his throat. “Get out of here, Horace, and let us do what must be done!”

  “You out! They cut you balls!” Horace said spittle running down his mouth.

  “Balls!” Angelus said, walking in on them. He pulled a flaming red-hot poker out of the fiery coals. “I’m glad you brought that up. Eh?”

  “You go! My job to do you!” Horace shouted pleading his case.

  “I don’t hate you for what you were ordered to do, Horace,” Angelus said. “What knots my guts is that you took too much pleasure in your work! Eh?” With that, Angelus lunged forward, the rod scorching through the leather apron, into Horace’s flesh, burning through the breastbone, and finally, as he jammed it even harder, into the man’s heart. Horace let out a wild, hoarse scream, an echo of his own, Angelus thought.

  Screeching at the top of their voices, Therron and Jerold streaked out of the forge.

  Marius pumped the bellows until the forge was a blazing mountain of coals. Then, he overturned the forge, and using the sledge, smashed everything he could find. When he and Angelus walked away, it was an inferno. “So that no such work as that will ever be committed here on earth again,” he said as they strode across the training field to find Teresa.

  She slipped out of the door and fell into his arms. “Marius! Take me with you!”

  Marius held Teresa in his arms and kissed her for a long time. “My treasure! My love! I yearn to have you by my side. I will have you in my heart and mind every moment of every day. I love you completely. I will come back for you, I will.”

  “If I don’t see you again, I am doomed to die of a broken heart! You must not forget me, Marius. My entire being is yours.”

  “Whatever time it takes, I will be back for you. Wait for me, Teresa, wait for me.”

  “Yes. I will. Yes.” she said. “I’ll be waiting. Here’s all the gold I could find. It should get you both back to Rome. Find the ship in the harbor with the captain by the name of Hashifa. He is expecting you. Good journey to you both!”

  “Thank you,” Angelus said, “It will be very sweet if we make it.”

  Marius kissed Teresa, clinging to her lips, then holding her close for long moments before he walked away, afraid if he looked back that he would never leave.

  As they walked toward the harbor, Marius held out the fourth nail. “Good thing I made one as a spare.”

  Angelus took the nail. He inspected it carefully. “Poor Man.” He started the gesture to throw it away. “This has no more purpose.”

  “Wait,” Marius said. He took the nail. It was bent and covered with blood and flesh. “Ah! It will only remind me...” he started. “Know what I can’t get over?” he asked as he stopped walking. “The man didn’t have a thumbnail of flesh that wasn’t flayed, and he was about to die, and yet, he was so kind and caring...Did you notice how concerned he was about me and how I felt about what I was doing?” He shook his head and started walking again.

  “What are you saying?”

  “Angelus, we can’t do what we just did to a human being and not have it reach inside our bellies and pull them inside out. What we did? A man is not supposed to do to a man no matter what the cause. Then, the way He took it, you know? in such a majestic way as if it was His destiny...and ours! I have been tempered at the forge as Captain Morgana said, Angelus, in a way it will affect me all of my life.” They walked a short distance in silence, then Marius spoke in a serious, quiet tone, “He said I have three chores to complete. If that is true, I wonder what are the other two?”

  Suddenly, Angelus struck Marius on the arm. “Gods of all heavens!” Angelus had both hands under his tunic. He shouted, “Marius!” He lifted his tunic exposing himself. “Look! My sack is filled again! I’m a whole man again! My balls have feeling and they are no longer crushed!”

  “How can that be?” Marius said screwing up his face inspecting the genitals. He threw his hands in the air. “What?”

  “How did I know?” Angelus asked. “After you replaced the nail and put the fourth nail in your tunic, I felt my sack get cold, icy. I reached to feel them and they were round, with feeling.”

  For Marius, strange things had occurred for which he did not have an explanation. They were mysterious, magical doings, something mystical, like a power that belonged only to the gods. The act of sending the prisoner to death transformed something very deep inside him. He felt it as he felt the earth beneath his feet that he had been altered to the core. He would never look upon d
eath in the same way. He would understand more about man’s dealing with man. The crucifixion had unsettled him, and he knew he would contemplate it until the day he died. The nail, in changing the world for Angelus, now had changed the world forever for him.

  It was all revelatory, Marius thought, it had brought him into a sphere of mysterious, mystical contemplation. Especially, he thought, that he was destined to be in Jerusalem at that particular moment, at that particular place, to do that particular deed. He had been specifically chosen, so he knew his doings were special.

  Marius looked at the nail and pursed his lips. Then, he looked at Angelus and said on top of everything else the Prisoner knew his name. Unquestionably, Marius of Rome was meant to crucify Jesus. He told Angelus, “I cannot forget His words, ‘Marius, you will perform well all three of your assigned tasks.’” He would keep this, the fourth nail, as a constant reminder of the perplexing madness he had wrought this day. What were the other two tasks?

  20

  Roberto took an early flight up from Rome.

  On the drive from Milano Diura asked if he had been taking his medicine.

  “Not since you left me at the café,” he answered. “I forgot all about them.”

  “How is this possible?”

  He waved a hand. “I went to a doctor who said I didn’t need the medication any more.”

  “How did he explain it?”

  “I can’t really explain it to myself, how can he? He said perhaps the roborant Roman sun. Diura, come back to Rome. I really and truly need your help.”

  “I told my cousin we were coming to Italy to get married. They had hoped they could arrange it for us here, and have my mother and sister and Stella flown over.”

  Roberto covered her hand, which was on the gearshift. “In just this short time we have been together, I realize a break is exactly what I needed. Your leaving was much too precipitous. Diura?”

  “Yes?”

  He squeezed her hand. “I want to make love to you. Stop the car.”

  “Stop the car? Why? Are you handicapped?” He burst out into laughter, and she told him they would be at the villa soon enough.

  “Diura, I’ll offer you any bribe, any bribe at all. I feel I am so close to revealing the location of the fourth nail. Really. It’s not wishful thinking. With all the love in my heart, I plead with you. Think about it.”

  The sight of the massive sixteenth century Villa Viviani di Cuore, Diura’s family homestead on Lake Como, dissipated all guilt feelings about leaving his work it was so beautiful.

  They had no sooner entered the foyer than Diura’s uncle, Francesco, her aunt Carolina, and cousins Lena and Laura arrived to greet them. Roberto found himself hugged and kissed many times on both cheeks. Francesco and Carolina were on the thin side and smartly dressed. He had lost most of his hair while she wore hers in big hair, bouffant style. Both spoke English with a British accent, which arrived with their daughters’ tutor. The cousins, in their early twenties, were comely with olive skin, black hair, and ink jet buttons for eyes. They tried to appear sophisticated but their nervousness and easy laughter gave them away.

  Very soon, Carolina edged Roberto toward the stairs and said, “I will have you shown to your room where you may freshen up, and then to join us for cocktails on the patio overlooking the water?”

  Franco led Roberto to a third floor bedroom that was the furthest distance it could be in the Villa from her room. Diura explained her cousins did not approve of any amorous ingenuousness.

  “So you don’t think this would be a good time to ask your aunt and uncle to be godparents for our forthcoming child?” Roberto asked. Diura, caught in mid-sip, almost spit out her drink.

  “How nice. A surprise for you.” She told him they would play tourist until he screamed.

  “You know,” he said, “I really appreciate a café’s cloak room!”

  At dinner that evening she surprised even him when she announced she and Roberto would have to leave for Rome early the next morning.

  When they arrived in Rome at his apartment he thought only of making love to Diura.

  Inside he dropped the luggage, backed up against the door to close it, and grabbed her tightly. They kissed as if they had just discovered its pleasures for the first time. Then Roberto said, “The decoding!”

  “First time my competition was a cryptogram!”

  Roberto moved over to a large piece of white foam core he was using as a blackboard.

  “Listen to me, Diura, sticking with the star as ‘M’ for Marius, I concluded it would be reasonable, if I were encrypting, to have the alphabet start with the letter ‘M.’ Doesn’t that make sense if one is sticking to the Marius meaning?”

  “I’d think that was perfectly logical. I hope you’re going to tell me it worked out,” Diura said.

  He had used magic markers to list the alphabet in black, and in red the letters starting with ‘m’ at number one. “Look at this,” he said. “When I substitute the numbers in the message Father DiBenedetto put in the Breviary, I get the letters m-n-o-u-j. That was another false lead. Try as I might, I could not rearrange m-n-o-u-j into a word that makes sense! It’s just as cryptic as when I got star-b-s-i-x! I’ll have to start right from the beginning unless you see something I don’t.”

  Diura crossed her arms and took a stance looking at the numbers and letters on the board. After a short while of biting the inside of her cheek, she nodded her head. “How about, ‘When in Rome do as the Romans do?’”

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “Look! You’re using a 26-letter English alphabet. The Italian alphabet is just 21 letters. Father DiBenedetto was Italian. You must assume he used the Italian alphabet!” Diura said.

  “How dumb am I?” Roberto exclaimed! He grabbed Diura and kissed her. He walked to the board, took a marking pen and crossed off the letters ‘j,’ ‘k,’ ‘w,’ ‘x,’ ‘y,’ making the letter ‘l’ number 21. “That changes the first set of numbers to read: m-n-u-e-l. What the hell does that mean?” Roberto put the consonants in one group and the vowels in another and started juggling the letters about. ‘Lumen!’ I come up with lumen! It’s a word! A Latin word! Diura! We have the key! We found the key to Father DiBenedetto’s message! Quick! In the computer, put in the Latin disk, and key in ‘lumen,’ and let’s see what we get. Lumen in Latin means light, brightness, splendor, but let’s see if we can get more specific.”

  Diura was already seated at the computer. She keyed in ‘lumen.’ The machine hummed, the screen changed and filled with a long list of definitions.

  Roberto read the screen out loud. “Lumen, contraction from lucimen, from luceo, and the meaning ‘light.’ No. 1, a light, a lamp, a torch. No. 2, brightness, splendor, gleam. No. 3, a bright color. No. 4, daylight, day. No. 5, the light of life, life. No. 6, the light of the eye, the eye. No. 7, an opening through which light can penetrate, a light; and air hole, airshaft, window. No. 8, the light in a building. No. 9, the light in pictures. And the meanings in a figurative sense...look at that, Diura! look at that! ‘A light, that is, a most excellent or distinguished person or thing! an ornament, glory, luminary!’ Does that not refer to the fourth nail—a most distinguished thing!-- or what?”

  “Roberto! I think you’re on to the major clues! What do you make out the other words to be?” Diura asked.

  Roberto used a magic marker to correspond the numbers with the letters for the remaining three words. He then rearranged the letters into words. He came up with ‘monaco’, ‘mosca’, and ‘monticola.’ “’Monticola’ means a monastery. A monastery where? Now, if I include the ‘?-8-14-2-18-?-?’ then it’s ‘?-t-z-n-d-?-?.’” He stared at Diura and asked, “And what the hell is that?”

  “Easy,” Diura said. “Call Stella in New York.” His late father’s secretary was still working at the Estate. “She has all the computer translating and decoding machines.”

  “Diura! You are so brilliant, I wish to propose.”

  “Yeah! Dinner
, I suppose.”

  “That, too. Call Stella in New York. Give her these geographical locations. Send her these words: Monticola,Tzndrl, Kyrgyz, and Grand Silk Road.”

  Less than an hour later, Stella telephoned and was put on speaker phone.

  “Roberto! Diura! Cari! This is as it should be! Here are best choices. With Tzndrl I have come up with the ‘Tzndrl Hermitage.’ Do you get it? Hermitage is a monticola! A monastery, sort of. That is going back through antiquity but we are trying to look through a foggy glass at the world as it might have been. We have nothing certain to go by. In Dyrgyz we have six locations that could possibly fit. The hermitage, or retreat, is in the Kunlun Mountains somewhere between what once was Turkestan in Easten China and Ulugh Muz Tagh—and I’ll spell that for you if you wish, but for right now I can tell you it is a lone, five summited massive protruding from the Tibetan Plateau. That’s a stretch of about two thousand miles. I could get no confirmation that the place even exits today...or yesterday. This is known as high stakes Russian roulette.”

  “Stella, you have done a sterling job!” Roberto said. “Do we all agree that to go running off to those distant Kunlun Mountains would be stupid?”

  “More than stupid at this moment. I completely concur. Do you two think you can occupy your time while I continue searching? I’ll call you back one way or the other in two hours in case you think it’s important enough to go out, it must be dinnertime there. I’ve got a thought in the back of my mind, and maybe we’ll get lucky. Ciao!”

  Roberto and Diura went out for dinner and were back in time to get Stella’s call.

  “Carissimi!” Stella said on the speaker phone, “Just got two wonderful pieces of news! Maybe enough to get Roberto to church! Ha-Ha! We reviewed antiquity documents that we scanned almost ten years ago. When I added the cryptic words you deciphered, there was a connection! The origination of those documents was in what is now Naples. It was a fairly active seaport town back when. A good number of trading companies were there. We have a copy of what we call today ‘a bill of lading.’ This one is not labeled but may be called an inventory. It is in just terribly deteriorated condition. This is one of about two dozen others found in what could have been a storeroom of a storage facility. What I surmise is that this particular document is an inventory of goods that were being shipped. A trading company accepted for shipment from ‘M’ three “scrolls” to be taken to TZND. What caught the computer’s attention was the capital letter ‘M.’ My immediate thought is ‘Marius,’ of course. Or, it could be ‘Mary.’ But, we place Marius there, and Hello! the destination on the bill of lading is The Silk Trail! And, guess what? Tzndrl is on the Silk Trail!”