On the Fifth Day

Herculaneum was different from Pompeii. For one thing, it was much smaller and most of the remains were residential, not the grand temples and official buildings of its more famous sister in disaster. The size of the place had less to do with the scale of the original town than it did with the positioning of the present one: the site went right into the edge of the modern city. Without relocating large numbers of people, the excavators just couldn’t go any farther.

Herculaneum had perished in the same eruption as Pompeii, but had been buried not by ash and falling stone but by a river of volcanic mud that had swamped the city, producing quite different conditions in terms of preservation, even carbonizing wooden furniture.

The place had been excavated pretty much at random after a local cavalry officer digging a well chanced on part of the theater in 1709. Under Charles III, the arbitrariness of the digging continued, teams tunneling in at random, taking what they could find for their private collections, donating to local museums or spiriting stuff away. Buildings were uncovered, but there was little scientific or systematic about the excavations for more than two hundred years.

The remains sat well below the level of the modern city that had been built on top of it, in some cases almost forty yards below, and entering the site meant a long descent down a ramp. Thomas immediately noticed that the streets were narrower than those in Pompeii, the houses more complete, many with intact second stories. He recalled the lines from Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” about the abandoned city:

Sister Roberta had agreed to meet him back at the entrance in two hours. Since his crack about not understanding nuns and religion she had barely spoken to him, so the decision to see the ruins separately had come as a relief. He wasn’t sure whether she was offended or just unsure of what he thought of her, but he would have to apologize and go into more of his personal history than he wanted if he was to smooth things over. He sighed at the prospect, wondering why he cared. He barely knew the woman, after all.

Still, for all your isolated-maverick routine, it was nice to have someone to talk to. Someone who didn’t judge you, or didn’t do so out loud.

On the train he had been struck by a strange idea. It had occurred to him that Pietro might think him unworthy of his brother, which was why he had burned Ed’s papers. The possibility angered him even though he thought it might not be so wide of the mark. There was no question that what Ed had shared with Jim, Giovanni, and Pietro spoke more to who he was than did any contact he had had with Thomas in recent years.

He blinked, stared at the map, and tried to get a sense of where everything was. Ed had listed several locations, underlining some. One—the House of the Bicentenary—had been set apart in a box drawn with red pen and marked with a single question mark. It seemed like a good place to start.

It was about as far from the entrance as he could get, right back in the shadow of the modern city, but Thomas walked quickly, pausing only to check where he was, looking at what he could see from the street: stone-flagged roads with raised sidewalks, houses with ornate doorways and second-floor balconies, the now-familiar thermopolia with their jars set in the counters.

The House of the Bicentenary was one of the better preserved two-story structures and he found it with no difficulty at all, but it was completely locked up, all windows and doors shuttered with padlocked panels of steel mesh.

Thomas peered in. He could see paintings on the walls, a deep skylit atrium some way back in the house, and a flight of treacherous-looking stairs. There was scaffolding all over the place, but it was too dim inside to see anything noteworthy.

He flagged down a guide at the corner of the street, a short, officious-looking woman wearing huge sunglasses that made her look like a mantis.

“No,” she said, turning back at him and glowering through those dinner-plate shades of hers, but she was back in guide mode and talking primarily to her group. “If you look around you, you will notice that there is work going on all over the site to consolidate the existing remains, reinforcing walls that are sagging, bracing arches and lintels that might collapse. Conservation of the existing remains,” she spelled out as if she were dealing with an idiot child, “not excavation. Maintaining the site is an expensive and time-consuming project. We are fortunate to be supported by a grant from the Packard Foundation. Now, if you don’t mind . . .”

Thomas stood there, listening to the sound of machinery to the south. He walked down Decumanus Maximus and turned right onto Cardo V, another street of astonishingly well-preserved house fronts. Inside a cordoned section of crumbling brickwork and scaffolding a group of men were mixing concrete and taking measurements. Between him and them was a table with clipboards, folders, and tools. The workers hadn’t seen him yet.

Thomas stepped out into the street. A few yards away was a large notice board explaining the reconstruction work being done by the Packard Foundation. Thomas stowed his camera and map and marched back into the work zone with an air of someone who knew what he was doing. As he walked in, he picked up a clipboard and a yellow hard hat.

“Excuse me?” he said over the drone of the concrete mixer. The workers looked from him to each other. They were all Italians. One of them, a shirtless young man in dungarees with a deep and complete tan, stood up, his eyes neutral.

“I just need a quick look to check something,” said Thomas. The words were vague, and he instantly regretted them, but the young man—he was probably a graduate student—didn’t seem unduly concerned. “It will take two minutes. Less.”

“No,” said Thomas, smiling. “I’m from administration . . .” he began, then waved away the rest of the sentence as if it were all tiresome and pompous. “I’m the money,” he concluded with a jokey, self-deprecating shrug.

The young archaeologist walked slightly ahead, his gait easy, the bunch of ancient keys he had retrieved from somewhere dangling carelessly from his left hand, his long, brown, muscular arms swinging as he walked. Thomas stared straight ahead and said nothing. He doubted he was about to make some great discovery, but he felt a thrill of anticipation at his minor deception.

At the house, the archaeologist opened a juddering gate and brought him inside, snapping the padlock back in place as soon as he did so.

He paused, as if waiting for his guest to take the lead, so Thomas walked purposefully into another room and consulted his clipboard in a businesslike way. The floor inside was a different-colored marble and there were extraordinarily detailed paintings on the walls. He considered a delicate fresco in russet and sea green of cupids playing some kind of oversized lyre, scribbling random numbers on his pad for the benefit of his guide before going quickly into the next room, and the next.

There was a garden surrounded by porticoes and a large hall, all bespeaking the opulence of the place and its impressiveness as an archaeological find, but why his brother had marked it out for special study, Thomas still had no idea.

He pointed to one of the rickety wooden stepladders and Thomas began to climb. The upper story was divided into two sections. Thomas paused, peered into the deep shadows, and saw immediately what had interested his brother.

Against one wall was a charred wooden cabinet, its doors open. Above it, in a square of unusually pale plaster, was a dark shadow, an outline, as if it marked where something had been mounted on the wall, something sufficiently precious to the owner of the house that it had been pulled from the plaster as the deluge of volcanic mud bore down on the town. It was shaped—quite unmistakably—like a crucifix.

The cross was tall, the horizontal beam short and high. It would have been at home in every Catholic church Thomas had ever been in, except that this one had been put up no more than forty-five years after the death of Christ.