The Sacred Spoils

by The Sacred Spoils (retail) (epub)

  She nodded at the A.C. Milan sticker on the side of his van. ‘Is that your team?’

  He shook his head. ‘I bought it second hand.’ But then he smiled. ‘Though maybe we should make them our team.’

  ‘How do you figure that?’

  ‘They’re known as the red-and-blacks, from their club colours. Il Rosso Neri. We’re the Rossi Nero. The reds-and-black.’

  ‘So close.’

  They climbed in. He set off for the exit then waited for a gap in traffic before pulling out. He proved an unexpectedly cautious driver, constantly looking around and checking his mirrors, almost as though he was worried about being seen. ‘You still have family here?’ she asked.

  His expression flickered briefly. ‘No.’

  ‘Friends?’

  ‘We left when I was fourteen. You know what it’s like at that age. I was heartbroken. My life was finished. My girlfriend and I hugged for ages. I made tearful promises that I’d never forget her, that I’d be back to see her as soon as I could get away. I meant it too. Then I started at my new school and never thought of her again.’

  ‘You beast. Where did you go?’

  He slid her an amused look. ‘My father worked in insurance. He got promoted to head office in Milan. So that’s where I went to school. Then I read archaeology at Bologna and went to Oxford for my doctorate.’

  ‘Why Oxford?’

  ‘Because it’s the best. And because it looks so beautiful in the photographs. They don’t tell you about the fucking rain until it’s too late.’

  She laughed. ‘How did you find it?’

  ‘Oxford? Or the doctorate?’

  ‘Either. No. The doctorate.’

  ‘You’re doing one yourself, aren’t you?’ he replied. ‘Then you know.’

  ‘I’m sure everyone’s is different.’

  ‘I’m sure they’re not. Mine wasn’t, for one. Mine was exactly how everyone warned me it would be. On my own, suddenly, while all my old friends moved on. Earning obscene salaries, getting promoted, marrying, starting families. You think, before it starts, that this won’t matter. That the life of the mind will be its own reward. Then you realise you were wrong. So there I was. Working in a restaurant to make a little cash while living in a damp bedsit with not enough money for heating or good food, struggling for four years on a thesis I’d already lost faith in, which no one would ever read. It was lonely and frightening and dispiriting, and frankly it was shit.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. And she felt a great weight falling from her, because she’d never admitted this truth so bluntly before – not even to herself.

  He smiled again, more brightly than before. ‘But the good news is, I got through it. As you will too. And it was worth it in the end. For me, at least. And always remember that the people ahead of you in the line have been through the exact same thing themselves. You can trust them.’

  She gave a little snort. ‘I wish!’

  ‘Aha!’ he said. ‘So that’s it.’

  ‘That’s what?’ she asked irritably.

  ‘All day, I’ve been wondering. A beautiful bright young doctoral student like you, coming to Italy without first getting to grips with our language. This makes no sense to me, not unless you left America in a great hurry for some reason. Your supervisor, yes? What was it? Was he already married?’

  ‘Fuck you,’ she said.

  He laughed heartily. ‘God, we men are such pigs.’

  ‘Yes, you are.’ She took a long breath. ‘But it wasn’t like that.’

  ‘Sure, it wasn’t. It never is.’

  ‘It really wasn’t. Charlie wasn’t my supervisor. Not officially, at least. He was just one of my predecessors in the programme, and very knowledgeable in my area. And he wasn’t married either. In fact, we were considering it ourselves. It was… I got pregnant, you see. But then I… I had a miscarriage.’

  Silence fell in the van. Cesco looked anguished. ‘Shit, Carmen. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘It’s okay. It happens. But Charlie and I, we had very different reactions. I was… I was broken. He… he tried his best to be sympathetic but the truth is he was relieved. I could see it in his face. So I couldn’t be with him any more. I couldn’t be in America. It hurt too much. All that fucking sympathy.’ She took a deep breath to calm herself, then found a smile. ‘So yes, Sapienza let me come here ahead of schedule. And yes, I thought I’d be able to learn Italian once I got here. But I’ve failed miserably. It takes much more effort than you realise, especially when your heart’s not in it. It’s not been in anything, to be honest. But please let’s not talk about all that, eh? It’s too bleak. Tell me something else about yourself. Something cheerful. Like yours, for example.’

  He frowned at her. ‘My what?’

  ‘Your supervisor. The one you could trust. The one who supported you so well.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he said. They came to a junction. He leaned forward in his seat to look all around him before indicating right and turning down a side street. ‘Forgive me,’ he said, gesturing at the road. ‘Everything’s changed so much since I was a boy. Mind you, I was only fourteen at the time, so not that much of a driver. It’s really weird revisiting childhood haunts, don’t you find? Everything’s so much smaller.’

  ‘You were telling me about your supervisor,’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’ He stopped at another junction, then indicated and turned left. ‘Her name was Karen Porter.’

  ‘Karen Porter?’ She looked at him in surprise. ‘But she’s fabulous. I loved her book on Syracuse.’

  He smiled again. ‘I’m glad to hear that. I helped her with it.’

  ‘You didn’t? That’s brilliant!’

  ‘The TV series more than the book, to be fair. I have family over there, you see. And of course I speak the language. Not Italian. Karen speaks that perfectly, unlike some.’

  ‘Oi!’

  ‘I mean the language of how to get shit done in Sicily. I went on a couple of trips with her, introduced her to certain people. The kind you need for a project to run smoothly.’

  ‘You don’t mean…?’

  He laughed. ‘No, no, no. Not Mafia. But Sicilian politics and bureaucracy is very intricate, very personal. The right connection beats a thousand forms.’

  ‘What’s she like?’

  ‘Enthusiastic. Knowledgeable. Gorgeous. Just exactly as she appears on TV. Except for the snoring. I never expected that.’ He made a gesture to indicate drinking. ‘Particularly after she’s had a few.’

  Carmen squinted at him. ‘You and she…?’

  ‘No, no, no. Strictly between you and me, I think you’re more her type than I am. We had neighbouring rooms, that’s all. And thin walls.’

  ‘Karen Porter!’ she sighed. ‘You’re so lucky. I’d love to meet her.’

  ‘Then I’ll arrange it, no problem. But let’s find Alaric first, eh? Trust me, if we do that, it will be Karen begging for the introduction.’

  II

  The breach was made late afternoon. Zara and Kaufman were both standing by the pit to witness the moment the weakened bedrock finally ceded to the relentless pounding of the jackhammer. The ground shuddered at the impact and a cloud of dust erupted from the hole, sending them into a scurried retreat. Then she, Kaufman and the ministry lawyer all drew closer again to look.

  The hole went straight down for a good three metres before opening up into a velvety blackness that somehow suggested a large space. Zara found a stone to drop down, then waited for its clatter. It took a moment longer than she expected. She grinned up at Kaufman, who grinned back at her. For archaeologists like them, nothing quite matched a virgin site.

  They fed down an extensible ladder to make sure it was long enough. It was, but only just. They worked its feet until it was solidly bedded, then the lawyer called a halt until Avram Bernstein arrived. It was late enough now that he took the decision to wait until Shabbat was over. It grew cool. Darkness fell with its usual rapidity. The first few stars appeared. Avram duly arrived
in the back of a black limousine, attended by a humourless bodyguard and a willowy young redhead dressed in photographer chic with three camera bags on her shoulders.

  Kaufman issued them all with safety helmets, torches, goggles, masks and gloves, while saving the rock hammers, trowels and find-bags for Zara and himself. Then he exercised his right, as site discoverer, to lead the expedition down. The hole swallowed him like a python with a kid goat. It was tight enough that for a moment it looked as though he might get stuck. But then he was through and into the open space beneath. He stepped off the ladder and vanished, save for the flutter of his torch.

  Zara pushed forward to be next. The ladder creaked as she stepped upon it. Then the python took her into its belly too. The strata changed from honeycomb to slate, marking her passage from Palaeocene to Late Cretaceous. Then suddenly it opened up and she was in a long, narrow, high-ceilinged aisle between walls of square-mouthed apertures, like drawers in a city morgue – which was effectively what it was. She looked down. Around the jackhammer rubble lay a macabre carpet of skulls and bones and other human remains, hauled from the various loculi by robbers many centuries before, the better to strip them of their jewellery and other grave goods. At once, any hope of a major find died.

  ‘We still need to make sure,’ said Kaufman.

  ‘Of course,’ she said.

  The others now arrived one by one, gathering on the rubble mound like shipwreck survivors on a rock. Avram came last, trying his best to look dignified while his camerawoman filmed his descent for posterity. But he couldn’t hide his disgust and disappointment when he saw the bones – the empty eye sockets and the clumps of black hair still stuck to wizened scalps. ‘After all that,’ he said.

  ‘We still need to make sure,’ repeated Kaufman.

  They’d arrived, exactly as intended, at the far end of the chain of chambers as they led away from the prison. The walls around them still bore chisel marks where new loculi had been planned but not yet cut. Kaufman led them in the other direction, treading delicately between the bones. There was a slow creaking noise above their heads, like a giant turning over in his bed. Flakes of stone fell in a gentle cascade and motes swirled in their torchlight, making Zara wonder what cracks and fissures might have been weakened or even opened by the jackhammer.

  ‘Is it safe?’ asked Avram warily.

  Zara hesitated. But if they left now they might never get another chance. She turned to Avram with a confidence she didn’t altogether feel. ‘New sites are always full of strange noises,’ she told him. ‘It’ll be fine.’

  They pressed on, reaching a short arched passage low enough to make her stoop. A second chamber was set at an angle to the first, like two carriages of a train going around a bend. And this one was clearly first class. It wasn’t cut in columns but rather in small alcoves, like private chapels in a cathedral, and its walls were sculpted with tableaux rich in Christian symbolism: fish and birds, fruit and flowers, angels and saintly looking men. There were fewer bones, too, owing to the fewer burials, and all covered by a grey dusting that puzzled Zara until she saw a massive cave-in ahead that had deposited a great mound of rubble across their path. They came to a halt, looked upwards at the cause: the flat grey base of one of the prison wall’s vast concrete slabs, whose immense weight had evidently triggered this collapse many years before, covering the chamber in its fallout dust.

  ‘My prison!’ muttered Avram.

  The way ahead looked so precarious that Kaufman came to a stop. But Zara wasn’t having that. She edged past him then clambered up the rubble mound. The walls and ceiling creaked again, more loudly than before. A cascade of dust and small limestone fragments pattered like hailstones. She shook her helmet and brushed it off her neck and shoulders then shone her torch beyond. The passage continued another four metres or so before ending in a wall, and it was all buried beneath the same high mound of rubble. Kaufman arrived beside her. He gave a shrug and gestured to turn back. But Zara ignored him and crawled on.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asked. ‘There’s nothing there.’

  ‘Does that look like nine metres to you?’

  ‘Nine metres?’

  ‘You told me yesterday that there was a chamber directly beneath the map mosaic. And also that it was nine metres from the wall.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said.

  ‘What’s going on?’ asked Avram.

  ‘There may be another chamber, Minister,’ said Kaufman slowly. ‘A hidden one.’

  Silence fell. Zara crawled onwards over the top of the fallen rubble. The roof creaked yet again and sprinkled her with dust. A lump of sandstone landed by her hand and threw up more. She tried not to think of the immense weight of the concrete slab above her head, the fractures it had put in the bedrock, the damage their jackhammer had done. But she kept thinking it anyway. If it came down now. If it came down on top of her… Her heart began to beat ever faster. Her breathing came quick and loud. In the constricted space, it echoed back at her, a vicious cycle that made her feel ever more vulnerable. But she pressed on all the same and finally reached the end wall. She placed her palm flat upon it then rapped it with a knuckle. It looked and felt like bedrock. She struck it with her rock hammer to listen to the sound it made. She struck it elsewhere then turned the hammer around in her hand and smashed the wall so hard with it that it spit back chips. She kept hitting it until a clump of stone the size of her fist fell away, revealing a glimpse of a different wall behind, the join of a pair of crumbling brown bricks held together by grey mortar. Her head swam a little. She became possessed of a dreadful urgency. Kaufman and the others were shouting questions at her but she ignored them, hammering at the wall until she’d exposed four complete bricks, each the size of a small loaf. With the point of her hammer, she scraped away the powdery mortar, then worked one of the bricks back and forth until she’d pulled it free.

  She reached her torch into the gap to see what lay beyond. There was another wall perhaps two or three metres away, carved into fantastic designs with a skill that far surpassed anything she’d seen elsewhere. She turned on her phone’s video camera then reached that through too, twisting it this way and that to capture every nook and cranny. Scuffling behind. Kaufman and then Avram arrived alongside her. She pulled her phone back out, held it so that they could watch its screen together, then started playing the footage she’d just taken. There was a blur of light and dark as she fed her phone through the hole. Then suddenly the space opened up. There was a mosaic in the dusty floor, an eight-pointed golden star against a backdrop of royal blue. Then she turned the camera to the left-hand wall, to reveal a pair of niches, each containing a silver trumpet.

  ‘Dear God,’ murmured Kaufman.

  The ceiling next, domed and vaulted. Then the floor again. Now finally to her right. And there it was, standing by itself in a large oyster-shell alcove: a seven-branched candelabra that, even in her camera’s modest torchlight, and despite its thick covering of dust, shone with the unmistakeable gleam of gold.

  Chapter Twelve

  I

  There was a church next to their apartment, and evening service had just begun, so that all the nearest parking spots were taken. But they found one on a nearby side street, then walked back together. Cesco had already taken the single bedroom, Carmen noted appreciatively, leaving her the en suite. To her absurd excitement, it had a bath in it. Her room in Rome had a shared bathroom with only a feeble shower, so it had been months since she’d enjoyed a proper bath. She excused herself and ran one now, logging her phone on to the apartment’s Wi-Fi, then lying there in blissful warmth.

  The church’s organ seemed to be positioned right against the wall. Whenever it played, it sent little shivers through the bath, like a broken jacuzzi. She logged on to the late antiquity message board. There were no further breakthroughs, but one of the other members had asked anxiously how she was bearing up after her ordeal. She replied with a cheerful update, hinting at her and Cesco’s self-appointed mission, illus
trating it with her snatched photo of him and another of the Busento from her balcony that she took from the apartment’s online listing.

  It was dark out by the time she dressed and went through. Cesco was sitting in an armchair, illuminated only by the soft glow of his laptop screen. She turned on the main lights then dimmed them back down a little. The main room was just as the photographs had shown, with distinct areas for cooking, eating, working and entertaining. ‘Mission command, huh?’ she said.

  ‘They’ll have a plaque up outside one day,’ he said. ‘Cesco and Carmen, discoverers of Alaric’s lost tomb.’

  ‘Who gave you top billing?’

  He grinned up at her, his blue eyes twinkling. ‘Fair enough. Priority to whoever makes the greatest contribution. Agreed?’

  ‘And who decides that?’

  ‘You’re not saying you don’t trust me, are you?’

  She laughed and slipped through the glass doors onto a balcony ringed with tubs of bright spring flowers. She leaned on the rail and gazed down at the Busento, running darkly beneath, except for a strip of luminescent foam churned up by the weir – and she experienced one of those inexplicable moments of pure happiness that seemingly come out of nowhere. She went back in. Her red roses were in a vase of bubbled green glass. She breathed their fragrance in once more, then stole a glance at Cesco. Since arriving in Rome, she’d been hit on by Italians of every sort, whose attentions had filled her only with such dreadful fatigue that she’d begun to fear she’d never again feel that sweet thrill. She wandered over to him, leaning her leg against the coarse fabric of his armchair. He had Google Maps up on his screen, a satellite view of the thin blue thread of the Busento river as it wound its way through Cosenza, before turning into a wider green swathe as it was swallowed beneath a canopy of trees.

  ‘Do you truly believe Alaric’s out there?’ she asked. ‘I mean truly?’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ he said, glancing up at her. ‘A lost tomb filled with plundered treasure. It sounds too like folklore to be true, yes? Especially that bit about hiding it beneath a river. I mean, do you know how difficult that would be? You can’t divert a river without massive hydraulic works. Even if they could somehow have hidden those while they were being built – which they couldn’t – they’d unquestionably have left traces in the ground. Everyone within fifty kilometres would have had at least some idea of where the tomb was.’