On the Fifth Day

The Executive was a stone’s throw from the retreat house, on the corners of Via del Cerriglio and Sanfelice in the heart of the old city and less than a mile from the castle and harbor. Had it been a longer walk, Thomas—suffering the combination of a sprained knee and a rising indignation about how he had just been treated—would have been too distracted to find it. But he checked in to the renovated convent building without incident and within moments found himself standing on a third-floor balcony overlooking the crazed traffic in the street below and wondering how he would ever sleep through the noise.

It was thinner than he would have liked, and the back half was empty. The notes were arranged by location: Pompeii, Herculaneum, Castellammare di Stabia, Paestum, and Velia. The only one that meant anything to Thomas—and not much at that—was Pompeii, the ancient Roman town destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79.

Each section seemed to be a list of locations, Pompeii being the longest at fifteen closely written pages, then Herculaneum. The lists seemed to be places within the site, many of them sounding like private residences (the house of the dancing fawn, the house of the Vettii, the house of the wooden partition), though others were temples and public buildings. Paestum featured a single, lengthy entry, added to in different-colored inks and scribbled pencil. The other two bore the same inscription: “No visible evidence.”

His first response was a sense of deflation. Ed may well have been poking around ancient Roman sites for his book on early Christian symbols, but that didn’t seem terribly promising as a link to terrorism, the Far East, or anything else that might have somehow gotten him killed.

He gazed down at the street to where a young Asian man was tentatively edging through the constant stream of little cars and scooters, and suddenly felt tired beyond the capacity to think. He closed the glass door to the balcony, electronically lowered the outer screen—nicely cutting out most of the street noise—shed his clothes, and flopped heavily onto the bed. In seconds he was asleep.

He woke an hour later, still tired but somehow sure he couldn’t get back to sleep. He showered, put on shorts and a T-shirt, and went down to the tiny lobby, where the concierge took his key.

“Five minutes,” he said, eyeing Thomas’s shorts skeptically. “When you get to the station, look for the Circumvesuviana line. And watch your wallet.”

The station was dirty, chaotic, and packed with people, including huddles of uniformed policemen with dogs. No one seemed to pay them any attention, so this was, Thomas surmised, a routine presence. Buying a ticket proved complicated, requiring him to go to a different area of the building and then follow a grimy subway down to the track. He carried only a small digital camera that he had borrowed from Jim in Chicago, and Ed’s notebook, which he studied as the train pulled out into the sun.

After the second stop, a band of musicians boarded and launched into an effusive song accompanied by accordion, tambourine, and—improbably—double bass. Most of the passengers ignored them, but Thomas dropped a couple of euros into their hat as they moved to the next coach. Afterward he wondered whether he should be spending his money rather more carefully. It was not as if he had an income anymore.

The train’s passengers were about a quarter tourists, some of them Americans. There was one group sitting close by who were pale and large, and oddly dressed in pastels and baseball caps. They talked loudly to each other, clutched their cameras, and puzzled over the foreign currency as if it were written in Sanskrit. It was as if they were playing tourists in a movie.

Thomas considered the people around him and thought it unlikely, though he couldn’t put his finger on exactly what marked out the Italians as so clearly Italian. Tanned skin, dark eyes, and manes of black hair dominated but were by no means the rule. It was something in the way they dressed, the way they carried themselves that made them so conspicuously different, an elegant nonchalance that made even the most ordinary of faces strikingly intriguing. The only one who might be American was a woman in the brown habit of the nun he had seen at the retreat house.

Thomas looked out over the Tyrrhenian Sea to his right as the track traced down the coast with its fishing boats and black lava beaches. There were two Ercolano stops, one of which would probably take him to the ancient town of Herculaneum, should this blind search seem worth pursuing elsewhere. At the moment, with no idea what he was looking for and deeply skeptical that there was anything valuable to be found, Thomas thought that unlikely. He had a vague sense of mission that served only to make him anxious and uncertain, but to all intents and purposes, he was no different from the tourists. The idea depressed him.

But it was only after the train left him at the Pompeii station and he got his first glimpse of the site that the enormity of his problem truly registered. This was no huddle of stone fragments dotted with statues, no cluster of columns on an acre or two of patchy mosaic. The place was huge. It was, in fact, a town, vast and breathtaking, its streets radiating out for what seemed like miles in all directions.

He began by buying a glossy guidebook and spending ten long minutes under the shade of a palm tree studying a map of the remains, marking every site he could find listed in Ed’s notebook.

She smiled back. She was perhaps thirty, maybe a little more, though it was hard to tell with the habit and headdress that revealed only her face and hands. She wore a silver crucifix around her neck, a white rope belt around her waist, and heavy, buckled sandals on her feet. If she was Italian, her English was flawless.

“I didn’t mean to interrupt you,” she said, smiling and taking a step backward as if ready to leave. “I just thought you were looking lost. You seem slightly familiar too, but I expect I’m thinking of someone else.”

He could just about hear it now that she said it, that slightly Nordic inflection and the flat, open vowels of the upper Midwest.

“God, no,” said Thomas. “Again, no offense. I was just . . . visiting. I’m staying at the hotel around the corner.”

“I’d say it was a coincidence, but since this is the major tourist attraction in the area, I guess it’s not that surprising,” said the nun. “I’ve been here since Wednesday but I was so jet-lagged at first that I haven’t seen much yet. My retreat doesn’t start for another few days so I thought I’d better get some sight-seeing in. I came here yesterday for a few hours, but it was just too much to process. I figure you really need a week to see the place properly.”

“Well, you’ve only got a couple of hours left today,” said the nun. “The site closes at six. Was there something special you wanted to see this afternoon?”

Thomas glanced at the map and chose one of the places he had circled at random, glad he didn’t have to produce Ed’s notebook.

“I’m Thomas, by the way,” he said, as he followed her into a stone-flagged tunnel that climbed up into the ancient town.

“Sister Roberta,” said the nun. “I’m glad to have someone to talk to. My Italian is patchy at best, so it’s been a pretty quiet couple of days.”

They climbed the Via della Marina toward the Roman forum, passing the Temple of Apollo on the left. Thomas was amazed. Few of the structures had roofs, but he’d seen early-twentieth-century buildings that had decayed more completely than these two thousand year old remains. The streets were bustling with tourists, most in large guided groups, so that he wondered how different the place would have been the year the mountain—looming in the distance over the brick columns of the Temple of Jupiter—had blown its wooded top, showering the area in a killing rain of lava and rock and suffocating ash.

“They didn’t know it was a volcano,” said Sister Roberta, distantly, following his gaze to the broken summit of Vesuvius. “A few scientifically minded folks had made connections to other known volcanoes like Etna, and there were more concerns after the earthquakes of AD 62, but the ordinary people had no idea at all. One day they were just living their lives in a fairly average Roman town, and the next . . . Everything gone. Everyone dead.”

“Funny, isn’t it,” she said. “It should be sad. Should make you think about mortality and such. But it’s just so amazing that you can’t get past the awe. It’s like a movie set abandoned in the desert, but it’s all real: a museum that people lived in!”

“Let me show you something,” she said, suddenly girlish in her excitement. “It’s a bit out of our way at the other end of the forum, but you really have to see it to see what I mean.”

She led him quickly across the great expanse of the forum—once the city’s marketplace and formal piazza—edged with white columns, and skirted the Temple of Jupiter, pointing out features she noted as she walked. Thomas smiled at the way her enthusiasm transcended the harshness of her attire.

“That was the Temple of Vespasian,” she said. “And that there was the public Lararium, a kind of shrine to household gods, I think. There’s a carved marble relief somewhere that shows the citizens making sacrifices to the gods after the earthquake here. The Macellum was the food market proper. You can imagine the townsfolk coming here to buy bread and fish . . .”

She led him through a brick arch and onto the Via di Mercurio, its great flagstones rutted with years of cart traffic before the eruption, and stood proudly pointing at the entryway of a building generally known as the House of Tragic Poet.

“There,” she said. “See? They were just regular people. It’s like they just stepped out for a while, except that they’ve all been dead for two thousand years.”

What she was pointing at was a large floor mosaic in the entryway to the house, made mainly of tiny black and white squares, each only a half inch or so across. They depicted a large chained hound with a red collar, its teeth bared. Set into the mosaic beneath the beast, were the words Cave Canem.