Odoacer was no Saxon. Odoacer and his successor, Theodoric, were advocates of harmony and a reverence for the past, and they tried to ensure continuity and preservation. Theodoric imposed a tax on wine, and used the revenue to restore the imperial palaces. He repaired the amphitheater after earthquake damage, and he instructed watchmen to listen for the subtle ringing sound that would betray a thief trying to steal an arm or leg or head from one of the city’s thousands of statues.
In the time of these first barbarian kings of Rome, there were many rumors of hoards and treasures to be found underground, and even of rich convents full of beautiful women, perhaps nuns, laden with gold and jewelry. The lieutenants of Theodoric searched for the truth behind these legends, even going so far as to break open some of the old Catacombs along the Appian Way and elsewhere. But nothing of importance was ever found.
THREE
Chapter 37
The da Vinci Airport is a few miles southwest of Rome. I got a cab to the city center. The driver might have been fifty. His face was like brown, crumpled leather. He seemed cheerful enough. He had a little wooden puppet hanging from his rearview mirror, like a red-painted Pinocchio.
We drove through rings of development. The outermost belt was the most modern, as you’d expect, a string of deeply ugly modern residential suburbs — tower blocks that would have shamed Manchester at its worst — and industrial sites, power plants, and other necessary but unattractive infrastructure. There were posters for British and American movies and pop stars, and an awful lot of kids in MANCHESTER UNITED soccer shirts and Yankees baseball caps. I could have been anywhere.
But within that concrete girdle there was a more attractive zone, of apartment blocks laid out around narrow roads and small greened squares. It looked like a nineteenth-century development. Here the traffic knotted up. My driver edged forward, honking, muttering, and gesturing.
We were close to the people now, pedestrians who squeezed their way along the narrow roads, mopeds that buzzed around us. Romans looked small, dark, round, a bit careworn. There was dirt and litter everywhere. Evidently the Romans had cleaned up their city in a great burst of enthusiasm to greet the year 2000. If that was so, I’d have hated to visit in 1999. The apartment blocks had rows of shuttered windows, and they were painted startlingly bright colors, yellow, orange, purple, even pink. It didn’t look British — colors like that don’t work well in the rain of London or Birmingham — still, I could have been in any great European city, I thought, in Paris or Brussels.
But then we reached the Aurelian Wall. “Mura, mura,” said the cabdriver, pointing. It was a great shoulder of brick, looming high above the road, dark, brooding, powerful, and the cars crept around its base like tinfoil toys. Even this first great slab could have absorbed all the scraps and fragments of wall I had seen in London, I thought, awed.
There was graffiti on the mura, though, in among the ads for trashy pop music and the political posters. I had no Italian, but I could recognize that the slogans were about immigrants and crime. The graffiti was everywhere, on every wall and doorway, every lamppost and bus shelter. Not the sign of a contented society.
* * *
I had twenty-four hours free before I was to meet Claudio Nervi, the tame Jesuit whose name I had extracted from Gina, and the resumption of my search for my sister. Twenty-four hours to decompress.
I had booked a hotel close to the Forum area, just like a regular tourist. The receptionist was a thin, neat young man in a black suit. His English was broken but serviceable: he was actually the first Italian I’d encountered since landing who had any English at all beyond a couple of words.
My room was small, and had a view of what looked like a back alley. But the Roman Forum was in sight from my room, just as the hotel’s brochure promised, although you had to peer through alleyways of brickwork to make out the fallen pillars and strolling tourists. But that brickwork, I found out later, was itself a ruin of a development called Trajan’s Market, a kind of giant shopping mall of antiquity. Anyhow the restricted view kept the price of my room down.
I unpacked, and searched unsuccessfully for a tea maker. The only English-language TV channel was CNN. But the room had an Internet connection, workable through the TV for the hire of a portable keyboard for a charge of a few euros, or a few thousand lira, according to the yellowing, outdated note on the TV cabinet.
I found a series of emails from Peter, sent from wherever he was ensconced with his Slan(t)ers in America. I paged through most of it, filing it in my mental category of “Peter’s spooky stuff” — and enduring the occasional heart-stopping moment as the connection, always slow, threatened to freeze altogether. Some of it was kind of interesting, though.
One of the Slan(t)ers’ principal activities was to search the world’s media for “anomalies” — any peculiar patterns, inexplicable events, that might show the fraying of the fringe of our worldview. It’s a hobby that’s been enjoyed by the UFOlogists since the fifties, I understand. And of course the rise of the Internet has turned this into an industry: the Slan(t)ers had search and pattern-recognition software, more powerful than the fastest commercial search engine, Peter boasted, capable of picking through the vast slurry of information, rumor, hoax, and plain garbage that pours onto our information superhighway every day.
And, Peter said, while he had been in the States this endless searching had turned up something about his mysterious dark matter.
“If a chunk of dark matter were to pass through the Earth, we wouldn’t see it. It would just pass through the planet’s substance. But its gravitation would trigger seismic events: shock waves in the Earth’s structure radiating away from its path. And, happily, we monitor seismic activity quite comprehensively …”
There is a global network of some five thousand government-sponsored seismic survey sites. They listen for the songs of the Earth, the great low-frequency waves that travel through the planet’s crust. What the government monitors specifically look for are waves emanating from a single point source, which could be the location of an earthquake, say, or an illegal underground nuclear test. “Clean” signals of that kind are extracted from the data and published. The rest of the information is written off as meaningless noise. “And much of it probably is,” said Peter. “You can get a seismic signature if a heavy truck passes by your station.”
But all the data was put online nowadays by the U.S. Geological Survey and the Australian Seismological Network, and the Slan(t)ers had been able to get their hands on it. And in the disregarded “noise,” they had seen “linear signals,” as Peter put it — signals that emanated not from a point, but from a straight line. “What you have is a track through the Earth’s layers,” said Peter, “as if you’d fired a bullet through a wedding cake.”
There had been occasional observations of linear signals for years. The Slan(t)ers, though, seeking patterns ignored by the seismologists, had found three such events in the last year.
Peter said, “Knowing the timing of the events, you can unwind the turning of the Earth to trace the path back beyond the planet to its origin, or destination. We can’t find a unique destination for our three tracks — but they do seem to have a common origin. The sun. Somehow the sun is firing out dark matter nuggets, and some of them are passing through the Earth. What does this mean? Damned if I know. But there’s more … I’m attaching a graphic file.” Which I wouldn’t be able to download here.
I skimmed Peter’s verbose description, trying to get to the meat. Apparently, this particular “linear track,” actually the second observed by the Slan(t)ers, wasn’t so linear after all. “A little while after penetrating the upper mantle,” said Peter, “this nugget’s track diverged through about forty degrees. Then it skimmed the core and shot out of the Earth, in the vague direction of Mars. George, you see the significance? Dark matter passes through the Earth’s core like a hot knife through butter. Earth’s gravity field isn’t intense enough to impose a deflection like that. This nugget cha
nged course…”
Well, it was intriguing. But throughout my relationship with him, much of the information Peter tried to give me was simply too much for me — the ideas too big, too dislocated from the everyday, the stretching of my worldview too much to take. This was just such an example.
I sent him a note about how extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Then I shut down the system.
I ate that night in a little open-air tourist-trap restaurant, a complicated walk of a few blocks from the hotel. Most of the menu was seafood, served with or without pasta.
* * *
The next morning I walked around Rome. It was a voyage of discovery; I knew nothing about the city. My geographical research before setting off had been restricted to renting The Italian Job, which, it turned out, was set in Turin.
In the ancient area of the forums, embellished by all the Caesars and ruined by time, herds of tourists grazed. I passed a couple of old ladies, American, who were debating whether to go with their guide into yet another site, the Forum of Augustus. “I’m getting a little tired,” said one. “I think I’ll go back to the bus. Will you do this one for me, dear?” She handed her tiny digital camera to the other. So, I thought unkindly, it’s the camera that is actually taking the tour.
The area was cut through by a wide, attractive road called the Via dei Fori Imperiali, which led from the Colosseum to the National Monument. The Monument had been erected in the nineteenth century to celebrate Italian national unity. The locals called it the Vittoriano, after the king Victor Emmanuel — or, less respectfully, the Typewriter. And meanwhile that great via had been built by Mussolini, who had bulldozed his way over the ruins of the forums with barely a squeak from compliant archaeologists, in order to build a route for his fascist processions.
The National Monument dominated the broad, open square of the Piazza Venezia, the hub of the Roman traffic system: if all roads lead to Rome, they said, so all Roman roads led to the Venezia. And in the piazza the Roman drivers just drove at each other, neither giving nor expecting mercy. In Rome, the cars were clearly fueled by testosterone as much as petrol. And yet, I thought, watching for a few minutes from a pavement cafй, the crowding traffic actually cleared its way through quite efficiently. Somehow amid the apparent chaos, things sorted themselves out — just not the way I was used to.
I spent the morning poking around shopping streets. As the sun climbed so did the temperature, and I was soon sweating through my heavy English shirt; I stopped frequently at cafй s or grocery stores for bottled water.
I quickly formed an impression of the Romans. Small and dark they were, and they all talked constantly. And they were intense: I decided that the characteristic Roman tone of voice was aggrieved exposition, just this side of exploding. They all seemed to have cell phones clamped to their ears, almost all the time — even quite small children — their eyes glazed, their free hands gesturing eloquently, futilely. The cell phone might have been invented for Italians.
But I did wonder what they had to talk about. The monuments all seemed to close for siesta periods in the middle of the day, the post offices all shut at one, the banks would open for maybe an hour in the afternoons if you were lucky, and everything closed on Mondays. The xenophobe in me wondered how I would feel if I were German or French, a fellow traveler on the great adventure of the single European currency. And yet, I knew, the Italian economy was actually large and healthy.
Somehow, like the traffic, the work got done, things sorted themselves out.
* * *
The Jesuit mother church is called the Gesu, just a block from the Venezia. Claudio Nervi was waiting for me on the pavement outside. “Call me Claudio,” he said, shaking my hand, after I greeted him as “Father.”
He was perhaps fifty and his hair was neatly combed silver-gray. His eyes were blue, but his thin face was deeply tanned — he was handsome, in an aging-patrician way. He wore a black suit with the regulation priest’s white collar, but the suit was suspiciously well cut, and I wondered if it came from a design house. He seemed poised, confident, intelligent.
“Well now—” He stretched his long arms. “ — welcome to Rome. It’s good to meet you, and I hope I can help you with your difficulty.”
I thanked him. “Your English is good.” It was, with the kind of upper-crust accent so familiar from Noлl Coward films that nobody in England dares use in public nowadays.
He smiled. “I spent some years studying in a seminary near Oxford. Look, are you in a rush? Would you like to see the church? …”
I followed him into the gloom of the Gesu.
A handful of worshipers, old folk, sat patiently in the pews. The church was sumptuously decorated, as many Roman churches are, with a lush Baroque painting on one wall.
But on one high side altar, a human arm was on display.
At first I couldn’t quite believe my eyes. I stepped closer. On top of that altar was a reliquary, an elaborate oval casket in gold and crystal, with an angel floating beside it. And inside the casket there was indeed a human arm, intact from the elbow socket down. There were even bits of flesh, black and withered, clinging to the bones.
Claudio was murmuring softly, “Many visitors are struck by the wealth of Roman churches. One looks at every surface, and the eye is greeted by treasure, and dazzled. But they are after all the result of two millennia of dedicated wealth accretion — one can’t put it any other way — although today the Vatican is not stupendously rich; it is less wealthy than many of the larger American dioceses, for instance … Oh. I see you have met our hero.”
The arm turned out to be a relic of Saint Francis Xavier, who in the sixteenth century had been a Jesuit missionary to India and Japan. He had died of a fever on an island off the coast of China, and had been buried there. The Jesuit general in Rome had ordered the body exhumed and reburied on Goa — and that the right arm be cut off at the elbow, to be enshrined back in Rome.
I shuddered. “The Catholic Church always did major on relics.”
“It’s all rather primitive, of course. But such things do actualize religion in the popular mind. And besides—” He waved at the gruesome body part. “ — aren’t we all fascinated by relics, of one kind or another, by physical traces of what went before — even in our own lives? What is your quest now, if not driven by relics of your own past?”
I said, a bit ruefully, “You know, I can tell you’re a priest. When I was a kid, the parish priest spun every last sermon out of an analogy like that.”
He smiled. “Then on his and my behalf, I apologize.”
“And besides, I’m just looking for my sister. I never thought of it as a quest.”
“What else could it be?”
I glanced around the church. I felt self-conscious with the worshipers present. “You have, um, an office here?”
“No. I’m conducting a project for the Pontifical Institute for Christian Archaeology. The Vatican, you know. I work out of an office there. Perhaps you’d be interested in seeing where I actually archaeologize. It’s not far from here.” He rubbed his hands together. “But first, lunch.”
He wouldn’t listen to my protests that I had eaten a sandwich in the hotel, and wasn’t swayed by the fact that it was already past three. He took me to a small restaurant a few minutes’ walk away from the main road, where, he said, we would find the best cucina romanesca, what the Romans themselves ate.
The waiter was round and smiling, dressed in an implausibly white shirt and bow tie. Although the cooking smells made me salivate, I knew I really wasn’t very hungry, so we both settled on soup. It was tagliolini alla baccorola, which is little tubes of pasta stuffed with bacon and cheese and drowned in a hot chicken broth. That and a few bread sticks and a glass of fruity white wine went down very well, but I knew it was going to make me sleepy later.
The real reason Claudio wanted to buy me lunch soon began to emerge: so he could mess with my head.
“So,” Claudio said around his soup,
“you seek your sister. But it isn’t a quest.”
“It’s a loose end,” I said.
“But if you pull on loose ends your sweater can unravel.” He smirked at this sally. “I’m just interested in why you need to find her.”
“My father’s death. I feel as if the whole thing won’t be over until I find Rosa.”
“But what will you say to her?”
“Hell, I don’t know—”
“Will you talk about your father?”
“Probably. What else?”
He put down his spoon. He said gently, “You see, I think you’re curious. Perhaps even envious. You want to understand why she was sent away, to this opportunity — or to this prison, depending on how it’s turned out for her — and why not you. Isn’t that true? But it’s really your father you should have spoken to.”
“It’s a little late for that,” I snapped. I had spent too many years breathing Catholic air. I felt deep responses kick in to the gentle prying, the effortless assumption of moral superiority. “Look — Claudio — why are we having this conversation?”
He steepled his fingers over his soup bowl. “The encounter you are planning could be very painful. I’ve seen such meetings before — for instance, among long-separated refugees — and, believe me, I know. And the information I am providing for you is setting up that encounter. I feel I would be avoiding my responsibilities as a human being if I didn’t raise that.”
“Are you saying you won’t give me the contact for the Order?”
“Oh, I’ve said no such thing.” But on the other hand, he wouldn’t give me the details, not yet; it seemed I had more intangible barriers to hurdle yet. “What do you know about the Order?”
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