by Glenn Cooper
Tigellinus leaned over and asked Balbilus, ‘Why so glum?’
‘You know why. For the second time we have achieved what we always wanted: one of us as Emperor. And this is what he gives us. Listen to the Senators grumbling! I fear a revolt, perhaps violence against him. And us. They killed Caligula. It can happen again. We may not get a third chance.’
Tigellinus snorted. ‘There was a comet two weeks ago when Nero was in Beneventum, was there not?’
‘Yes. A clear sign of danger.’
‘And you advised him to expunge the threat by purging certain elements in the aristocracy.’
‘And you, good Prefect, chose well in your slaughter.’
‘And that is precisely why you shouldn’t worry.’ Tigellinus whispered the rest. ‘He will fulfill all our desires. He knows his destiny. Yes, perhaps he’s gone a little mad – this kind of power has that effect – but he’s not so mad as to have lost his way. Let him be merry and indulge himself in his own way.’ He winked. ‘This is what he does. This is who he is.’
Peter the Apostle was hobbled by bad knees and a constant ache which sent lightning bolts of pain down the back of one leg. The journey ahead was going to be arduous, as it would have been even for a younger man, but he’d risen early, washed himself in a trough behind the small stone house in Golgotha and watched the rising sun brighten the hills.
The house had been owned by a brother of Phillip, one of Jesus’s twelve, and upon the man’s death it had passed to his wife Rachel. She had been the second to awake that morning and when she saw Peter was no longer in his bed she sought him out.
‘Must you go to Rome?’ she asked.
He was seated on the stony orange ground. ‘I must.’
‘You’re precious to us,’ she said. ‘We don’t want to lose you. Matthew is gone, and Stephen, and James, and Matthias, and Andrew, and Mark, all martyred like him.’
The rising sun caught Peter’s eyes and made him squint. ‘When I was a young man, Jesus said something which has stayed with me during my long life. He said, “When you are old you will stretch out your hands and another will dress you and take you where you do not want to go.” I do not want to leave you and my beloved brothers and sisters, Rachel, but I fear it is my destiny.’
She did not try to argue with him. ‘Well, come on then, at least let’s get some hot food into you before you climb onto that mule.’
Fresh breezes swirled through the central courtyard and gardens of Nero’s villa at the Campus Martius. Out of sight the vast party heaved and groaned its way toward dawn. Nero sat on a padded marble bench, absently throwing tidbits of food from a crystal bowl to the lampreys in his fish pond while Balbilus and Tigellinus paced and debated.
‘May I enter?’ Acinetus called out from between a pair of peristyle columns.
‘Be quick,’ Nero demanded.
Acinetus tugged two handfuls of cloth, each from the shoulder of a young girl’s toga. ‘Do they please Your Excellency?’
Nero looked the flushed, sobbing girls up and down. ‘Who are they?’
‘The twin daughters of Senator Vellus.’
Nero smiled. ‘Good. I hate that bastard.’
‘I knew you’d be pleased,’ Acinetus said.
‘How old are they?’
‘Twelve or thirteen I should think.’
‘Take them to my rooms and wait there.’ He called Acinetus over and whispered, ‘When I’m done with them be sure to make good use of their tender flesh. My fish, dear Acinetus, are famished.’ He turned back to the other men. ‘You were saying?’
‘I was telling Balbilus what he already knows – that the mood in the city is pleasantly ugly,’ Tigellinus said. ‘The Roman mob has come to hate the Christians even more than they do the Jews.’
‘Of course they do,’ Balbilus agreed. ‘The Christians are an arrogant, loathsome lot who don’t even pretend to pay homage to you. At least the Jews go through a pantomime.’
Tigellinus added, ‘And the Christians grow in numbers by the month. They breed like mice.’
‘I utterly despise them,’ Nero said, yawning. ‘Their piousness is nauseating. The way they pretend that their weakness is a strength – “Turn the other cheek,” they say, “so they may strike you again.” To which I say, when they turn a cheek don’t waste time by striking them again: run them through with a sword and be done with it.’
‘Sound advice,’ Tigellinus said.
‘Listen to me,’ Nero said. ‘The Christian cult grows stronger by the day. They challenge my authority. Their leaders, like this scabby dog who calls himself Peter the Apostle, slip in and out of my city without so much as a lashing. If we allow them to escape our wrath we’ll live to regret it, mark my words. Pontius Pilate had the right idea when he crucified that hideous little man Jesus of Nazareth. Pilate knew this cult was going to cause us trouble and interfere with our interests.’
‘Pilate cut off the cult’s head and twelve more heads grew in its place – Jesus’s filthy apostles,’ Tigellinus said.
‘We need to be smarter than Pilate and eradicate all of them!’ Balbilus stated. ‘Our Emperor tells me that he has conjured a way to use the power of the Roman mob to kill them off once and for all and make ourselves ever richer in the process. My job, as Imperial astrologer, will be to tell him the best date. And you, Tigellinus, your job will be to implement it.’
Nero rose and started to make his way out of the courtyard. ‘What this city of ours needs,’ he said, looking back over his shoulder, ‘is a very large, very hot fire.’
SIXTEEN
ON HER WAY back home from the police station, Elisabetta had the taxi drop her off at the Basilica Santa Maria in Trastevere. Her session with Inspector Leone had been difficult and she was exhausted by the mental challenge of giving him enough to be truthful without violating her Church confidentiality.
The basilica was quiet and peaceful with only a few tourists wandering through, snapping pictures and seeking out the church’s treasured relics – the head of Saint Apollonia and a portion of the Holy Sponge. Elisabetta bowed at the altar, crossed herself and took her usual position directly under the painting on the wooden ceiling, The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin by Domenichino. The only others in the pews were a handful of older local women who always seemed to be there.
Elisabetta lost herself completely in prayer. The dry coolness and low light which had preserved the church’s antiquities so well for centuries had a similar effect preserving her sanity. When she had said the last of her amens, she looked around and was surprised to see that there were many more people in the pews. She felt calmer and refreshed. She checked her watch. An hour had slipped by. Back at the school the girls would be finding their desks for geometry.
She rose and tried to keep herself in a state of prayerfulness but it was impossible to control the thoughts moving through her mind.
Vani’s hideous back.
The skeletons.
De Stefano’s bloody head.
Marco’s body laid out in his dress uniform.
And as Elisabetta felt the tears coming the comforting image of Lorenzo’s open, friendly face drifted in. Instead of crying she smiled, but when she realized what her mind was doing she shook her head hard, as if doing so would dislodge his image.
Better to look for her mockingbird mosaic high up in the apse, she thought, and that was what she did.
Elisabetta walked back to her father’s apartment, stopping only at the greengrocer and the butcher. It was Carlo’s day off and she intended to make him a nice supper.
As soon as she let herself in, she heard him calling from the sitting room and fast-walking toward the hall. ‘Where have you been?’ he said irritably. ‘We’ve been waiting for you.’
He looked uncomfortable.
‘“We”?’ she asked. ‘Who’s “we”? What’s the matter?’
‘Christ, Elisabetta, you didn’t tell me you were having visitors. They came all the way from England!’
&n
bsp; She closed her eyes in embarrassment. ‘My God! I totally forgot! With everything that’s happened …’
Carlo gave her a quick, reassuring hug. ‘It’s okay: you’re here, you’re safe. You had a rough night. I gave them a glass of wine, told them every story I know about Cambridge. Everything’s fine. Give me the bags. Go see your guests.’
Evan Harris looked precisely like his photograph. He was slight, bland in appearance, lean but not athletic. His sandy hair, combed to one side over a rounded forehead, made him appear younger than he probably was but Elisabetta thought he must be approaching fifty. He hadn’t come alone. A woman was with him, expensively dressed, proper in posture, perfectly coiffed and smelling of good perfume. Her unlined Botox-pricked face and her figurine smile made it hard for Elisabetta to judge her age.
Harris and the woman both stood, blinking their confusion in harmony.
‘I’m so sorry I’m late,’ Elisabetta said. ‘I’m Elisabetta Celestino. I think my father didn’t tell you I’m a nun. For that matter, I’m afraid I neglected to mention it too.’
‘I’m so pleased to meet you,’ Harris said graciously. ‘And I must apologize for the fact that I neglected to tell you I was bringing a colleague. May I introduce Stephanie Meyer, a very distinguished member of Cambridge University’s governing body, the Regent House. She is also a generous donor to the University.’
‘I’m delighted to make your acquaintance,’ Meyer said with the careful elocution of the British upper class. ‘Your father is absolutely charming. I told him I would suggest to the Chairman of our Mathematics Department that he be invited to give a talk on his Goldberg Conjecture.’
‘Goldbach,’ Elisabetta said, gently correcting her. ‘I hope he didn’t force a lecture on you.’ Suddenly she remembered that he’d been working on her tattoo puzzle. The last time she’d checked, his jottings had been all over the sitting room. There was a messy stack of lined yellow papers covered by some journals on the sideboard. Fortunately, he’d tidied up to some extent.
‘Not at all,’ Meyer said. ‘I hope he cracks it. And I hope his department will treat him with the respect he so clearly deserves.’
‘Is there anything he didn’t tell you?’ Elisabetta said, shaking her head.
‘Only, apparently, that you were a nun,’ Harris said, smiling.
‘So please, sit,’ Elisabetta said. ‘What can I bring you?’
‘Only the book,’ Harris said. ‘We’re very keen to see it.’
It was in her old bedroom, on her small student desk. She took it out of its envelope, brought it back and put it in Harris’s outstretched hands. She watched the anticipation on his face, like that of a child receiving his first Christmas present. His hands were trembling.
‘One should use gloves,’ he mumbled absently. He rested it on his pinstriped trousers and slowly opened the mottled leather cover of the quarto to reveal the front plate. ‘Ah, look at this,’ he said, almost to himself. ‘Look at this.’
‘Is it authentic?’ Meyer asked him.
‘There’s not a shred of doubt,’ Harris said. ‘B text, 1620.’ He carefully turned several pages. ‘The cover’s a little shabby but the book is in remarkably good condition. No water damage. No mold. No tears that I can see. It’s a remarkable copy of a remarkable book.’
He passed it to Meyer who searched her purse for a pair of reading glasses and perused it for herself.
‘And you said you obtained it in Germany,’ Harris said. ‘In Ulm.’
Elisabetta nodded.
‘Can you divulge any details?’ he asked. ‘Provenance is always of interest in these kinds of circumstances.’
‘It was given to me by a baker,’ Elisabetta said.
‘A baker, you say!’ Harris exclaimed. ‘What was a baker doing with an extraordinary treasure like this?’
‘She was the landlord of a tenant who passed away without next of kin. It belonged to him. He’d been a professor at the University at Ulm.’
Meyer looked as though she was attempting to arch a brow but the Botox was defeating her. ‘And do you know where he obtained it?’
‘The only information I have is that he received it as a gift,’ Elisabetta said.
Just then her father came back in, apologizing for the intrusion. He was looking for an article he’d copied from a math journal but as he sorted through the stack of material on the sideboard he couldn’t help inserting himself into the proceedings.
‘What do you think of her book?’ he asked Harris.
‘I think it’s genuine, Professor Celestino. It’s a very fine copy.’
‘Is it worth anything?’
‘Papa!’ Elisabetta exclaimed, scarlet-faced.
‘I believe it’s quite valuable,’ Harris said. ‘It’s rare. Very rare, indeed. That’s why we’re here.’
‘I’m interested in finding out more about it,’ Elisabetta said.
‘May I ask where your interest lies?’ Meyer asked. She was still holding the book on her lap and didn’t seem inclined to hand it back.
Elisabetta shifted in her chair and smoothed her habit, a show of nerves she’d developed when forced to tell half-truths. ‘As I told Professor Harris, the work I’m doing concerns attitudes of the sixteenth-century Church. Religious themes run large through Faustus.’
‘Indeed they do,’ Harris said. ‘And you indicated that your work pertains particularly to differences between the A and the B texts.’
Elisabetta nodded.
‘Well, let me give you some background which might be useful and I can steer you to a host of scholarly work on the subject for further inquiry. I’ve spent my career on Marlowe. You might say I’m a bit obsessed with him.’
‘More than a bit,’ Meyer added, pressing her lips into a fleeting flat smile.
‘I concentrated on English literature as an undergraduate at Corpus Christi College, which was called Benet College in Marlowe’s day, the same college that he attended. And I spent two years living in the same rooms as him. I went on to get my D.Phil. in Marlowe studies and have been teaching at Cambridge since then. I suppose every Marlowe scholar has his personal favorite play and, as it happens, mine is Faustus. It’s extraordinary in its scope and complexity and the power and beauty of its language. You can have your Shakespeare. I’ll take Marlowe.’
Uninvited, Elisabetta’s father slipped into one of the chairs and seemed to be listening with interest. She shot him a perplexed look, which was her silent way of asking what he was doing, and he answered with a stubborn pout, his way of saying it was his house and he could do in it what he pleased.
Harris continued: ‘Marlowe received his Master’s degree in 1587 under somewhat mysterious circumstances, concerning absences from College and his alleged covert activities on the Continent on behalf of Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster Francis Walsingham. He most probably left Cambridge for London to take up a career as a playwright. While we don’t know the precise order in which he wrote his plays, it’s well documented that the first one to be staged in London was Dido, Queen of Carthage, an interesting but somewhat sophomoric work.
‘The best information we have on Faustus is that Marlowe wrote it in 1592. The first documented performance was in 1594, a production by the Admiral’s Men troupe with Faustus played by Edward Alleyn, the greatest actor of his day. Marlowe was killed in May of 1593. Did he ever see Faustus performed? I would hope so. Perhaps there were earlier performances.’
‘And this performance in 1594, was it the A text?’ Elisabetta asked.
‘Well, that’s an excellent question but the short answer is that we don’t know. You see, the first known publication of the A-text quarto was in 1604, well after his death. There was a second publication in 1609 and a third in 1611. All told there are only five known original copies of A text in existence, one at the Bodelian Library in Oxford, two at the Huntington Library in California, one in the Hamburg State Library and one at the National Trust’s Petworth House in West Sussex. They’re all essentiall
y the same, so one might be tempted to say that they represent the earliest stage versions, but that would be a supposition.
‘The first B text wasn’t published until 1616. That quarto is similar to yours in that it’s the first to use the now famous woodcut on the title page that shows Faustus raising the Devil while he, Faustus, stays inside his magic circle. That copy is in the British Museum. The next edition to surface is a 1619 one, essentially the same as the one from 1616. There is a single known copy in the hands of an American collector in Baltimore. Then we come to yours, the 1620 edition. Here, curiously, there’s a misprint on the title page – printers were notorious for misprints back then – the word “History” is printed as “Hiftoy”. There’s a single copy in the British Library. We know that three copies have appeared in the saleroom in the past forty years. All of them have been lost to follow-up. Until now, I’d say. Yours is undoubtedly one of them.’
Elisabetta’s father had been scratching at his stubble. He never shaved on his days off. ‘So the B text is a third longer than the A text. What else is different?’
Harris looked surprised. ‘I’m impressed you know that!’ he said. ‘I thought your field was mathematics.’
‘My father has eclectic interests,’ Elisabetta said quickly, begging him with her eyes to stay quiet.
‘Well, to be precise,’ Harris said. ‘The B text omits thirty-six lines of the A text but adds 676 new lines.’
‘Who made the changes?’ Elisabetta asked. ‘Marlowe?’
‘That we don’t know. Perhaps he wrote a second version. Perhaps an unknown collaborator or hired hand made changes to suit the Elizabethan audience after Marlowe’s death. As a playwright of his era, Marlowe would have had nothing to do with the publication of his plays and only a very limited control over the content of the performances. Scenes could have been added or deleted by another writer, by actors – by anyone, really. Unless future handwritten manuscripts turn up we may never know.’
‘What would you say are the truly significant differences between the A text and the B?’ Elisabetta asked, conjuring the envelope note in her mind: B holds the key.
