by Glenn Cooper
‘Yes,’ he answered with surprise. ‘I knew Ottinger quite well. We were colleagues for many years. He died some years ago, you know.’
‘Yes, I know. Perhaps you can help me, then. I came into possession of one of his treasured possessions – an old book – through a mutual acquaintance. It made me curious. I wanted to try to find out something about him.’
‘Well, I have to say that Ottinger wasn’t the easiest man in the world. I got along with him fairly well, but I was in the minority. He was quite hard, quite tough. Most students didn’t like him and his relations with other faculty members were strained. Some of my colleagues refused to speak with him for years. But he was a very brilliant man and an excellent mechanical engineer and I appreciated his work. And he appreciated my work, so that was the basis, I think, for an acceptable departmental relationship.’
‘What did you know of his life outside the University?’
‘Very little, really. He was a private man and I respected that. To my knowledge he lived alone and had no family. He acted like an old bachelor. His collars were frayed, his sweaters had holes – that sort of thing.’
‘You knew nothing about his non-academic interests?’
‘I only know that his politics were a little on the extreme side. We didn’t have big political conversations or anything like that, but he often made small comments that showed which direction he tilted.’
‘And that was?’
‘To the right. To the far right, I’d say. Our University is quite liberal and he was always muttering about socialist this and communist that. I think he also had some biases against immigrants. The students we had from Turkey and such places, well, they knew Ottinger’s reputation and they stayed away from his courses.’
‘Did he belong to any political party?’ Elisabetta asked.
‘That, I wouldn’t know.’
‘Did he ever mention an interest in literature?’
‘I don’t recall.’
‘Did he ever talk of Christopher Marlowe or the Faustus play?’
‘To me? I’m certain he didn’t.’
‘Did he ever bring up someone he called “K”?’
‘Again, not that I recall. These are very odd questions, young lady.’
Elisabetta laughed. ‘Yes, I suppose they are. But I’m saving the oddest for last. Are you aware of any anatomical abnormalities that he might have had?’
‘I don’t know what you could possibly mean.’
She took a breath. Why hide it? ‘Bruno Ottinger had a tail. Was that something you knew?’
There was a longish pause. ‘A tail, you say! How marvelous! Of all the characters I’ve known in my life, Ottinger, that old devil, would certainly be the one man to have a tail!’
Once Elisabetta had pulled back the heavy curtains and let the light pour in she discovered that her father’s bedroom wasn’t the disaster she had expected. True, his bed was unmade and books and clothes were strewn everywhere but there wasn’t much dust and the en suite bathroom was acceptable. The cleaner, it appeared, had periodic access to his inner sanctum.
She stripped the bed, gathered the towels and dirty clothes and began to assemble a load of laundry.
She left the second bed untouched. The bedspread was perfectly draped, the decorative pillows in precise rows of descending size. It seemed as though it was protected by some force field – the only surface unencumbered by her father’s things.
Her mother’s bed.
Returning to the bedroom, hands on hips, Elisabetta surveyed the untidiness. She reckoned there’d be hell to pay for organizing his books and papers but she was determined to take a stab at it. Besides, she could do it with more care than anyone else: Goldbach monographs in one place, Goldbach notebooks and scraps of paper in another. Lecture notes here. Detective novels there.
One bookcase was neat as a pin, the one next to her mother’s bed. Flavia Celestino’s books, most of them on medieval history, remained in the same exact order as on the day she died. Elisabetta reached for one, Elizabeth and Pius V – The Excommunication of a Queen, and sat on the bed. The dust jacket was bright and clean, a pristine copy of a 26-year-old book. She opened it to the inside back flap and gazed at the author’s photo.
It was like looking into a mirror.
Elisabetta had forgotten how much she looked like her mother; the photo had been taken when Flavia was about her own age. The same high forehead, the same cheekbones, the same lips. Even though she’d been a young girl when the book came out, she remembered the soirée her parents threw and how proud and radiant her mother had been over its publication. Her academic career at the History Department at La Sapienza was launched. Who could have known she’d be dead within a year?
Elisabetta had never read the book. She had avoided doing so in the same way that one avoids dwelling on the memory of a painful love affair. But at that moment she resolved to take a copy to Africa. She’d start reading on the flight. It would be a long-neglected conversation. Absently, she thumbed through the pages and dipped into a paragraph or two. There was a light turn of phrase evident in the style. Flavia, it seemed, was a good writer and that pleased her.
An envelope dropped onto her lap – a bookmark, she supposed. She turned it over and was surprised to see the Vatican seal. The envelope was unaddressed, unused, never sealed. There was a card inside. With a curious anticipation she pulled it out and instantly froze.
There it was!
She had seen it before. She remembered.
The bedroom door loomed large and scary.
‘Go in,’ her father said. ‘It’s okay. She wants to see you.’
Elisabetta’s feet seemed to be stuck.
‘Go on!’
The doorknob was at a child’s eye level. She turned it and was assaulted with the unfamiliar smells of a sickroom. She crept toward her mother’s bed.
A thin voice called to her. ‘Elisabetta, come.’
Her mother was propped up on big pillows, covered by bedclothes. Her face was hollow, her skin dull. Every so often she seemed to be fighting off a wince so as not to scare her daughter with facial contortions.
‘Are you sick, momma?’
‘Yes, sweetheart. Momma’s sick.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know why. The doctors don’t know either. I’m trying my hardest to get better.’
‘Should I pray for you?’
‘Yes, why not? Praying is always good. When in doubt, pray. Are you eating all your food?’
Elisabetta nodded.
‘Your brother and sister too?’
‘Yes.’
‘And Papa?’
‘He’s just picking.’
‘Oh, dear. That won’t do. Elisabetta, you’re only young but you’re the oldest. I want you to promise me something. I want you always to take care of Micaela and little Zazo. And if you’re able, try to take some care of Papa too. He gets distracted by his work and sometimes needs to be reminded of things.’
‘Yes, Mama.’
‘And don’t forget to take care of yourself too. You’re going to have your own life to lead. I want you to try always to be the happy little girl I love so much.’
Her mother had a spasm, strong enough that it couldn’t be denied. She clutched involuntarily at her stomach and when she did a small pile of papers slid off her belly. A card slipped off the bed onto the floor. Elisabetta picked it up and looked at it.
‘What’s that?’ Elisabetta asked.
Her mother snatched it from her fingers and tucked it in back among her papers. ‘It’s nothing. It’s just a picture. Come closer. I want to kiss you.’
Elisabetta felt dry lips against her forehead.
‘You’re a good girl, sweetheart. You’ve got the best heart I know. But remember: not everyone in the world is good. You must never let your guard down against evil.’
Elisabetta held the card in her hand and sobbed. At that moment her mother’s death felt as raw and fresh as the day it had ha
ppened. She desperately wanted to reach back and speak to her one more time, ask for an explanation, ask for help.
There was a sharp rapping coming from the front door, the sound of a single insistent knuckle against heavy wood. She tucked the card back in the book, dried her face with her palms and began to wonder how someone had got past the entrance without being buzzed through. Was it a neighbor?
She put her tearful eye against the peephole and pulled back with a start.
The pale, elongated face of Father Pascal Tremblay filled the fisheye lens and Elisabetta’s first confused instinct was to run and hide underneath her mother’s bed.
NINETEEN
Rome, AD 64
IT WAS MID-JULY and many of the noble families of Rome had retreated from the scorching heat to the breezier climes of their villas on the western coast or their estates high in the piney hills. A million of the less fortunate were left behind. The shimmering air above the metropolis reeked of smoke from tens of thousands of cooking fires and a thin layer of black ash settled on roofs and cobbles like a sinister summer snow.
Everything was parched: men’s throats, the sandy soil, the fissured timbers and rafters of the ancient tenements. Water, always important to Rome, was never more vital than during the rainless drought of that hot summer.
A thousand freedmen and slaves worked perpetually in the city’s water gangs, keeping the aqueducts, reservoirs and kilometers of pipes in order. A hundred public buildings, five hundred public basins and bathhouses and dozens of ornamental fountains received running water around the clock but for weeks the loudest sound that the system produced had been grumbling.
Water wasn’t flowing as it should; it was trickling. The basins were dangerously low, the bathhouses were raising their prices, the brewers were charging more for beer. The vigiles, the night-owls of the city, knew the hazard. Organized into seven cohorts of a thousand men each, they slept by day and by night they patrolled the impossibly narrow dark lanes of the vast capital, prowling for incipient house fires. Their only effective weapons were bronze and leather buckets which they passed from hand to hand in human chains from the nearest basin or, if close enough, the Tiber. But this season the water levels were too meager to do much good and the vigiles knew why. It was more than drought.
The puncturers were relentless and the water commissioner, a close relative of Prefect Tigellinus, was getting rich.
Before decamping for Antium a fortnight earlier, Nero had told Tigellinus, ‘Have your brother-in-law bleed it dry,’ and virtually overnight corrupt water bosses had their gangs of puncturers tap into the system with illegal pipes. Torrents of tax-free water rushed to Lemures privateers and the vigiles could do little more than bite their nails to the quick as they watched Rome turn to kindling. It had been twenty-eight years since the last major fire.
July was a festival month and the chariot-race season was in full swing. Nothing distracted the masses from the misery of the heat and humidity like a day of sport at the Circus Maximus. Up to 200,000 Romans crammed into the stands to root for one of their teams, the Blues, Reds, Greens or Whites, each controlled by a corporation. Quadrias – four-horse chariots – raced around the long narrow U-shaped track and if the drivers and animals survived the hairpin turns the prizes were great. Below the stands were several bustling floors of wine bars, hot-food shops, bakeries and plenty of prostitution dens.
The day was propitious in other ways, too. Balbilus had told Nero that it would be so after poring over his astrological charts. Sirius, the Dog Star, rose in the heavens that night, signaling the hottest days of the summer. But furthermore its path took it through the House of Death. That had sealed it. The time of destiny had come.
There was a full moon that night but because it was cloudy it shone little light on the thousands who were queuing at the Circus Maximus gates for a dawn admission to the grounds.
Deep in the bowels of the Circus’s grandstands, Vibius, Balbilus’s creature of the night, and another man crept through a dark passageway into a cheerfully lit shop. There a leather-aproned baker was sliding loaves into a roaring oven.
‘We’re not open,’ the baker barked.
Vibius walked calmly toward him and ran a sword through his gut upwards to his heart. The baker fell hard and when his wife ran from the second room where the dough was curing the other man killed her likewise with one hard thrust.
A man screamed. Out of the corner of his eye Vibius saw the baker’s son bursting from the curing room with rage in his heart and an iron bar in his hand. With a dull thud of crushed bone Vibius’s colleague crumpled. Vibius wheeled and pounced on the strapping lad, sliced his neck hard and clean and watched him fall onto his mother’s lap.
Cursing, Vibius stepped around the bodies and used the baker’s pallet to scoop embers from deep inside the brick-lined oven. With a flick of his wrists he dumped a red-hot heap into a corner. Instantly the floorboards began to smoke and hiss and in mere moments a line of flame crept up the wall to the rafters.
Vibius returned to the dark corridor and hustled down the stairs, his job imperfectly done. Soon he was mingling with the crowd, waiting for the show to well and truly start.
One floor above the baker there was a lamp-oil shop, laden with heavy amphorae. The clay vessels burst in the heat and fed the fire so spectacularly that the northeastern corner of the Circus Maximus exploded in a fireball. With a collective gasp, the crowd pointed at the blaze and began to stampede. The flames leapt skyward and almost immediately the fire bells of the nearby vigilis station of the district known as Regio IX began to jangle.
A cohort of vigiles mobilized but their bucket brigades quickly exhausted the meager local water supply and all they could do was shout evacuation orders into the night. The circus was ringed with rickety tenements, some with illegally built upper stories so shoddily constructed that they practically leaned onto each other across narrow cobblestone lanes. The blaze ran quickly through the blocks of tenements, leaving behind collapsed buildings and charred bodies. Whipped by a strong seasonal wind the fire spread south into Regio XII and then to Regio XIII before jumping the Servian Walls which had once marked the southern boundary of Rome before urban sprawl had stretched the city limits.
The streets filled with frightened, powerless people as the inferno hurtled down some blocks and danced across roofs. One narrow winding street after another was consumed by flames, often with masses of men, women and children trapped by fallen masonry or walls of fire. And although there would be tales of men helping others to escape and beating back pockets of flames, there would also be reports of shadowy figures moving through the city, throwing burning brands into hitherto untouched buildings.
By morning light a pall of heavy smoke hung over many of the southern regions of Rome and the fire was advancing up the Aventine Hill toward wealthy homes and temples. Then the winds shifted ominously and started to drive the fire in the north to the southern slopes of the Palatine and Caelian Hills. The city was doomed.
From the highest balcony of his villa on the Via Appia, Balbilus looked north to the billowing clouds of smoke. Vibius joined him, sooty from his exertions, and was offered a goblet of wine to slake his thirst.
‘It’s too close for comfort,’ Balbilus growled.
‘The wind is turning southerly,’ Vibius said.
‘I can predict the movement of the heavens, but not the wind,’ the swarthy astrologer said. ‘I would rather not lose my house.’
‘I think mine has already gone,’ Vibius said without a trace of emotion.
‘Your family can come here. All the Lemures families who are in peril can come. Put the word out.’
A Praetorian cavalry contingent arrived at Antium as the sun was setting. The city had a new port which Nero had built but the Praetorians trusted their horses more than boats. Nero had turned Antium into a protected enclave settled by Praetorian veterans and retired centurions. He had rebuilt the seaside palace of Augustus to his liking and included a raised
columned complex that extended for two thousand meters along the seafront. For his amusement he had built numerous gardens, temples, pools and most importantly, a theater where he could practice his art.
When the cavalry arrived to inform him about the fire in Rome Tigellinus received the report impassively but refused to let the messenger, who was carrying a personal dispatch from the Prefect of Rome, see the Emperor. Nero was in the wings preparing to take the stage for an evening competition. Dressed in an unbelted, Greek-style tunic he mingled with his competitors, all local lads who knew with certainty that Nero would be the judges’ favorite. When it was his turn he took to the stage of the half-moon theater and peered out at an audience of toadies – retired soldiers, senators in his entourage, local Antium magistrates and a cohort of his special troops, the German bodyguard. Though Antium was a good distance from Rome, there was a faint smell of ash in the air and the news of the fire was beginning to take hold. The audience whispered and fidgeted and if not for the royal performance they would have sought out the messengers for more information.
Nero lifted his lyre and began to sweetly sing a song, The Sack of Ilium, about the destruction of Troy by the Greeks during the Trojan War. He would win the competition, of course, but no one seemed pleased to be entertained about a great city being laid waste by fire.
In the slums of the Esquiline Hill stray embers settled onto roofs and balconies and were stamped out by vigilant citizens and slaves before they caught hold. Peter the Apostle was there on one of his pastoral missions as Bishop of Rome. He was a weary but persistent traveller, enduring the months-long mule-train journeys to Jerusalem and Rome from his home in Antioch in Greece where he also served as bishop. Rome had been a tough assignment. His disciples were converting as many slaves and freedmen as they could but the citizens were hostile to the Christian cult, as they called it. But Peter had a small flock and, like lambs, they needed the guidance of a shepherd’s staff from time to time.
Cornelius the tanner had become a priest of the new church and his house was one of their common prayer and meeting points. Peter stood by one of the tenement’s windows in a room packed with devotees. A glowing ember floated by and Peter watched it for a moment before turning back to the papyrus in his hand. He had recently written an epistle to his faithful followers and he wanted them to hear it come from his own lips. ‘So, dear brothers and sisters, work hard to prove that you really are among those whom God has called and chosen. Do these things, and you will never fall away. Then God will give you a grand entrance into the eternal Kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Therefore, I will always remind you about these things – even though you already know them and are standing firm in the truth that you have been taught. And it is only right that I should keep on reminding you as long as I live. For our Lord Jesus Christ has shown me that I must soon leave this earthly life, so I will work hard to make sure you always remember these things after I am gone. For we were not making up clever stories when we told you about the powerful coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. We saw His majestic splendor with our own eyes when He received honor and glory from God the Father. The voice from the majestic glory of God said to Him, ‘This is my dearly loved Son, who brings me great joy.’ We ourselves heard that voice from heaven when we were with Him on the holy mountain. Because of that experience, we have even greater confidence in the message proclaimed by the prophets. You must pay close attention to what they wrote, for their words are like a lamp shining in a dark place – until the Day dawns, and Christ the Morning Star shines in your hearts.’
