by Jack Hyland
Caroline nodded. “The cryptoporticus of the Academy’s Main Building contains the lower section of the library and, besides that, there was only a vast storage area. Until our recent renovations, people rarely went down there.”
The waiter brought their meal, and they began to eat.
“By the way, Lucia said that a number of reporters have called to see if they can interview you.”
“I expected that. I’d prefer not to be involved.”
“Lucia will run interference for you, but all this attention isn’t good for the Academy. We operate in Rome on the goodwill of the Italian government so we have to be careful. The embassy reminded me of that as well.”
Caroline looked at her watch. “I expect Eric’s parents have landed and are probably on their way to the Academy right now. I need to get back.” She signaled the waiter for the check. “The memorial service for Doc is tomorrow at four in the afternoon at the Protestant Cemetery. You’ve been there before, haven’t you?”
“Several times—a beautiful place. Of course I’ll be there,” Tom said.
As they walked back to the Academy, Tom asked, “Do you know the director of the Swiss Institute?”
“Reasonably well,” she replied, “Georges Lundell. Quiet guy. Good scholar. Oddly enough, he loves to polka. Why do you ask?”
“Call me crazy, but this work order has me intrigued, and I’d like to read their records of the time.”
“I’d be happy to call him to set up a meeting for you when I get back to my office. Lucia will let you know.”
“Thanks. Good luck today, with Eric’s family.”
4
It was late afternoon. Tom was back in his apartment, working on his book, when his cell phone rang.
“Dr. Stewart, it’s Lucia. Dr. Sibelius asked me to tell you that you have a meeting with Dr. Lundell at 10 a.m. tomorrow at the Swiss Institute.”
“Thanks, Lucia. I’ll be there.”
Taking a break, he checked his NYU e-mail. There was a message from Alex asking him if there was any news and, if there were, to call her. He took out her card and called.
“Pronto.”
“Alex, it’s Tom Stewart. Just got your e-mail.”
“Thanks for calling. I was wondering if there were any new developments.”
Tom told her that he’d spoken with Gabrielli and that Stefano Pulesi of the Laboratory of Communicable Substances would be taking over the investigation.
“That’s unusual.”
“Yes. It seems it’s all superconfidential. He would not give us any information.”
“Not surprising. That agency is very secretive. Did they mention anything about precautions about the remains, like cremation?”
Tom was surprised at Alex’s remark. “In fact they did. How did you know?”
“Standard procedure for containment, but it seems strange in this situation.”
“That’s what I thought when I heard it.” Tom had to admit to himself that he didn’t have anything else to say about the Roman Forum incident, but the idea of seeing Alex again appealed to him, so he plunged ahead. “Are you by any chance free for dinner tonight? Maybe at eight?”
“Yes, if we can make it a bit later. I’ve got a paper to finish.”
“Perfect. Say around nine?”
“That’s fine. Why don’t you come to my place for a drink, and then we’ll go to a little place around the corner.”
“Via del Pellegrino, right? Near the Campo dè Fiori?” he said, looking at the card.
“Yes, that’s right. See you then. Ciao.”
He returned to working on his book, and became so engrossed that he lost track of the time. It was 8 p.m. when he finally looked at his watch. Tom quickly showered and changed. He got a taxi to take him to Alex’s address.
When the cab let him off on Via del Pellegrino, he walked through a stone archway into a courtyard. Diagonally across from the arch, Tom saw Alex’s house, a three-story stone building painted a Roman burnt red color. He rang the buzzer, and Alex appeared at the little balcony one floor up. She waved and then buzzed him in. Entering on the ground floor, Tom passed through the kitchen where he saw an Italian woman bent over a stove. She looked up when he passed through, giving him a smile and a wave. There was a beautiful, ancient wooden table in the middle of the kitchen/dining room.
Tom walked up a narrow spiral stairway. Alex stood at the landing in the living room, waiting for him to arrive. Off the living room was the small balcony containing planters filled with geraniums and ivy. The plants spilled over the edge of the balcony and swayed with the slightest breeze. Alex described the floor above as a bedroom, bathroom, small study, and a second terrace over the first, also filled with planters. “I guess you passed Ana, my cleaning lady, in the kitchen. She doubles as a cook when she has the time, and I’ve asked her to make soup for tomorrow. It’s always better when it rests overnight.”
There was a pitcher of flowers on a sideboard in the living room as well as two glasses and a carafe of red wine and a bottle of white wine. “Would you like some white or red wine, or, perhaps, something else?” she asked Tom.
“Some white wine would be fine,” he replied. Tom watched her as she moved to the sideboard to fill their glasses. She was dressed informally in a loose red blouse and jeans that fit her well.
“I was sorry to see your name in the paper this morning,” she said, handing him his wine. They sat down on the sofa. “Now the reporters will never leave you alone.”
“Yes, but forewarned is forearmed. Caroline is handling the press. So far I’ve been able to avoid them.”
“Are there any more developments?”
“Lieutenant Gabrielli called the Academy this morning to say the authorities are putting a lid on further publicity. They sealed the passageway and stopped excavation. Then they handed the case over to Pulesi. At the moment, we know nothing else.”
“There’s got to be more to it,” Alex said. “Sealing the passageway and stopping excavation—very unusual. And assigning someone from the Communicable Substances Lab? It may be that what killed Doc and Eric was not only very lethal but highly contagious. Remember the green moss that Greg mentioned? Maybe it’s involved somehow.”
“Killer green moss? It all sounds more like a sci-fi movie,” Tom said. “Doc was an archaeologist, not a terrorist.”
“If Gabrielli or Pulesi is worried about contagion, there may be some real danger.”
“Still, it doesn’t fit,” Tom said. “Traces of a deadly virus in a Roman emperor’s palace buried for two thousand years? How could that be?”
“Epidemics are frightening and hard to control. Viruses or plagues—periodically, they appear and do cause horrendous destruction.”
“You seem to be quite interested in this.”
“I’ve made human plagues a specialty,” Alex replied, “particularly ones that had devastating impacts on society. Some plagues, like the black death, wiped out huge numbers of people. There was widespread panic. Even powerful institutions like the Catholic Church were affected. Think about it. If death kills most of your family and most of your neighbors, just how mighty would you think God is? Or, His Church? I could talk about this for hours, but I don’t want to bore you.”
“This isn’t boring to me,” Tom said. “When was the first plague?”
“You’ll find the earliest recorded plague in the Book of Exodus. Ten plagues fell on the Egyptian people sometime around 2000 BC during the reign of Pharaoh Ramesses II. The plagues nearly destroyed Egypt, though we don’t know the numbers of people killed.
“You could say Moses was the first leader to use plagues as weapons against his enemy. Essentially biological warfare.” Alex paused, embarrassed because she was doing all the talking. “I told you I could go on for hours. You must be hungry. Let’s go to dinner.”
“Yes, let�
��s go,” said Tom, laughing. “We can finish this discussion later.”
Passing through the stone archway, Alex turned left onto Via del Pellegrino heading away from the Campo dè Fiori. Almost immediately, she turned left again.
Tom hesitated for a moment, though he wasn’t sure why. They were in a passage so narrow Tom guessed traffic couldn’t get through.
Alex, sensing Tom’s hesitation, laughed. “This is an alleyway called Arco di Santa Margherita—it’s a shortcut to the restaurant. It’s perfect for me.”
The alleyway ended at the front door of La Taverna di Lucifero, on a quiet side street that also ran into Campo dè Fiori.
Alex explained that the restaurant was built around a column from Pompey’s gladiatorial arena.
The restaurant itself was busy, but the owner knew Alex and showed them to a quiet table in the back. After they ordered, Tom asked, “So, how’d you get into archaeology? You don’t seem like most of the graduate students I’ve known.”
“It’s a long story.”
“We’ve got time.”
“My father was an Italian diplomat and my mother’s an art historian, born in the United States.”
“No wonder your English is so perfect.” Almost without realizing it, Tom was leaning forward, just slightly, over the table to catch every word Alex spoke. He was having a great time. She, too, seemed totally engaged in their conversation. At one point, Tom caught himself, wondering if he had been served yet, then looked down and saw his plate empty of food, waiting to be picked up by their waiter. Alex saw Tom gaze downward, realized what he was thinking, laughed, and said, “Yes, we’ve eaten and are waiting for coffee.”
She laughed. “Thanks for your compliment about my English. I appreciate that. My mother and my father eventually divorced when my mother found out that my father was not only a very good diplomat, but that he turned out to be devastatingly attractive to younger Italian women, too. My mother left him and returned to live in New York. She never remarried. I am an only child, and, when they divorced I bounced between New York and Rome. I know living in New York and Rome sounds glamorous, but I never wanted to live that way.
“I went to college in the States—Smith College, where I majored in European history. Afterward? I moved to New York City. I loved the city, but living with my mother turned out to be too claustrophobic for me. She’s wonderful, but she never got over my father.
“So, I moved back to Rome. Every street goes back two—or three—thousand years. That’s when I really discovered history because I was living in the middle of it. For me, there’s so much to learn. I quickly decided to get my master’s degree in ancient European history at the University of Rome and that led to my working on my PhD.”
Tom asked, “Is your father still alive?”
“My father died five years ago. Despite his philandering, I loved him and enjoyed the meals we had together in his favorite restaurants. He left me some money, and I bought my house.”
“You never married?” Tom asked, and immediately blushed. “I’m sorry—that’s pretty forward of me.”
“I’m not going to take that as an intrusive question, which of course it is,” Alex said. “I’ve had plenty of opportunities,” she said, looking straight at Tom. “But, I’ve never found the right person at the right time.” Then she added, “I’m thirty-one, and my birthday’s March 1. I thought I’d save you the trouble of asking.”
“Thanks,” replied Tom, blushing again. “I can congratulate myself for my discretion. But, I’ll persist, how did you become interested in archaeology?”
“A man I met at the university is an archaeologist and last summer joined the team at the American Academy’s excavation in the Roman Forum. I was intrigued. This spring I signed on as a volunteer.”
Tom asked, “Is this friend of yours on the dig as well?” He tried to sound casual.
“I’m not seeing him, if that’s what you’re getting at. He’s in Greece at an excavation with the American School in Athens. Now I’ve told you my story, what’s yours?”
“I’m forty-five, by the way, with a birthday on January 29,” Tom began.
“Aquarius,” Alex said. “But why are you telling me your birthday?”
“Turnabout is fair play. Anyway, I grew up in Saginaw, Michigan, with a mother and father who married very late. My father was sixty before he married for the first time. I was born five years later. My mother, thirty years younger, was an adjunct instructor at the University of Michigan where my father was an English professor. They fell madly in love with each other and, when I was born, spoiled me rotten.
“Still, I never had a father to play baseball with or toss a football to. He was more like my grandfather, but there were compensations. I often wondered what it would have been like to have parents who were much younger.
“I couldn’t wait to get away from Saginaw to go to college. I went to Columbia where I studied archaeology as an undergraduate and then stayed on for my PhD.”
“Why archaeology? It seems like an unusual major for an undergraduate.”
“I wrote a paper senior year in high school on Howard Carter’s discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb in Egypt. I read everything I could find on the topic. I got an A+. I guess that I never lost my enthusiasm for archaeology.”
“Was your specialty Egypt?”
He smiled. “At first, of course. I wanted to follow in Carter’s footsteps. But my advisors said Egyptology was too crowded a field. I became a generalist, eventually specializing in forensic archaeology.”
“And are you married?” Alex asked politely, but directly.
This time it was Tom’s turn to smile. “Never found the right person. Several long affairs, some for the right reasons, one for the wrong, but none that worked out.”
Alex said nothing.
After dinner, as Tom followed Alex to the restaurant’s front door, he caught the scent of her perfume. It smelled of jasmine. He liked walking behind this striking woman, with olive gray eyes and brownish black hair.
“Why not treat ourselves to a gelato at the most famous café of them all, Giolitti’s?” Alex suggested. “It’s only two blocks from here, near the Pantheon.”
“Beautiful night for a stroll. Lead the way,” Tom replied.
Alex walked with Tom through the Campo dè Fiori, where crowds of people were still wandering around, though the shops were closing down for the night. As they passed by the center of the piazza, Tom and Alex paused at the tall, hooded, brooding statue of the philosopher Giordano Bruno. Tom said, “Burned at the stake by the Catholic Church because he chose not to believe that the earth was the center of the universe.”
“Slight correction,” added Alex. “Bruno was burned because he wouldn’t shut up about the matter.”
“Noted. Do you think things have changed that much?”
“That’s rhetorical, right?” said Alex, as they continued toward their destination.
They enjoyed the walk, watching the crowds filling the old narrow side streets even this late in the evening. Cars and motor scooters threaded through the streets, picking their way carefully to avoid the pedestrians. Somehow, they all coexisted peacefully.
At the Pantheon, Tom and Alex stopped in front of the massive entrance. The façade was lit up.
“This building is a miracle,” Alex said.
“What I admire,” Tom replied, “is that it has survived emperors and popes, pillages and wars. It has stood proudly through two millennia. I imagine it will be here in another thousand years.”
“The Eternal City?”
“Yes. I guess that’s why I love it.”
As Tom and Alex moved on, they failed to see a man standing in the shadows watching them. He followed them at a discreet distance. A few minutes later, Tom and Alex were inside Giolitti’s, the glittering Belle Epoque café, crowded with tourists anxiou
s to sample from the café’s wide range of desserts, ice creams, and coffees.
“I’m interested in learning about your work in forensic archaeology,” Alex asked. “It sounds fascinating.”
“Basically, I’m a theoretical archaeologist, which means I’m rarely at work at an archaeological dig. But I spend my time with the results of such digs, analyzing the finds, particularly human remains, but also other objects, all of which create a picture of the society and lives of the group being studied. I teach the methodology of forensic archaeology at the graduate level.”
“Sounds very analytical.”
“Not really. I’ve had my best results when I’ve played my hunches—like a gambler in Vegas. I deal with fragments—often there’s no complete picture. Imagine a jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces missing. It’s very practical. Also, the police academy in New York City has me lecture their detectives. I create a scenario and show them how to analyze the physical clues at the scene of the crime. ”
“Sherlock Stewart?” Alex joked.
Tom laughed. “Hardly, but it’s fun. I like working with the police. Right after the events of 9/11, I spent several weeks with the police in the rubble of the World Trade Towers helping to find and identify human remains. There was often so little left that all we had to go on were teeth and body fragments that yielded their DNA.”
“What a depressing experience that must have been,” Alex said.
“Identifying someone, however, gave that person’s family some sense of closure. That was satisfying. Oh, here’s something less gruesome. I’m also called by WNBC, Channel 4 News—when there’s some crime being reported on, either local or national. Chuck Scarborough, the veteran news anchor, interviews me for my opinion about the facts of the case. This makes me a minor, a very minor, television personality. It’s been interesting, however, and taken me into situations in which I wouldn’t have otherwise been involved.”
“You know,” Alex confessed, “I’ve never been able to help myself. When I saw actors and film equipment in the process of making a movie in New York City, I was one of the crowd who loved watching. And once or twice I went to NBC television broadcasts at their studios in Rockefeller Center.” She smiled. “I’m hooked. I’m intrigued by your ‘celebrity.’”
