CHAPTER 41
Roberta talked constantly, first on the crowded number two bus that collected them from outside the tobacconist’s across the street from the Executive, then on the Circumvesuviana platform, then on the train, and finally in the hot and shadeless site itself. She talked about Italy and Italians, Italian food, the Italian language and how she wished she understood more of it. She discussed her nervousness about the upcoming retreat. She offered various reflections on Thomas’s horrific night, the imminence of mortality (“it can come any time: the trick is to be ready”) and the necessary spiritual preparedness for death. She talked about the wonders of archaeology and history, and how being confronted by the past changed one’s sense of the present. In short she said much of what she had said before, and while it had formerly sounded like thought, it now sounded like something she’d read. While she was listening in on a guided tour in the forum, Thomas ducked back toward the Temple of Apollo and waited till she had given up scanning the faces around for him, and wandered off alone.
Thomas felt a little bad for ditching Roberta, but it was what he had planned to do from the outset. He hadn’t seen the magic square firsthand, and knew it was in a house that wasn’t open to the public. The plan that was forming in his head on the train was that he would find a place to hide, maybe in the amphitheater, which was well-removed from the most frequented parts of the site, and wait the day out. When the site closed, he would locate the house of Paquius Proculus, break in, and see what the square might have to show.
In the meantime, Thomas made for all the places Ed had listed, places he had largely missed in his last visit: the bathhouses with their sea-creature mosaics, and—most important—the Temple of Isis, which he had somehow walked past twice last time without noticing. All the while he tried to process what he knew, about Ed’s research, Parks, how Satoh wound up with the little silver fish, the tale of the Herculaneum cross, and, most insistently, the circumstances of Satoh’s death. The rambling chaos of his thoughts was mirrored by the sites he looked at: fragmented mosaics; half-intact structures of crumbling brick, stone, and tile; nameless houses stretching down empty streets. There was no order, no sequence; nothing was making any sense. He stood in the Temple of Isis and saw only pieces of a puzzle he could not hope to solve. What had his brother seen here that was so important? What had this place been? What function had this column and that altar served? Why was an Egyptian god being worshipped in a first-century Roman town anyway?
The last question was new and gave him pause. Rome had had territories in North Africa. He recalled Cleopatra’s links to Julius Caesar and Mark Antony from Shakespeare. So the cult of Isis had been imported, absorbed into the Roman pantheon as foreign cultures were absorbed into the empire, as Christianity would be absorbed and made official three centuries later?
He considered the remains of the temple. It was laid out as a square courtyard surrounded by a walkway lined with columns, and with steps up to the shrine in the center. Several large stone blocks were arranged around the open space, though whether they were statue bases or altars he wasn’t sure. In one corner of the square was a blockish building covered in white plaster. Thomas checked his guidebook. This was the purgatorium, a building containing a subterranean, vaulted room that once held water from the Nile: holy water.
He approached the pale structure, his gaze sliding over it, already frustrated and a little bored. Then he shaded his eyes, caught by a familiar image, and looked again. A little over head height was a plaster frieze of fish. Strange ones, with oversized fins at the front and, in some cases, triangular teeth like alligators.
Fish again.
His mind flashed quickly over the other sites he had seen that day, and the ones Ed’s notes had pointed to elsewhere, and the image of the fish suddenly seemed to be what he had been seeing constantly since he arrived. He had seen it in the mosaics of the bathhouses and the underground swimming pool in Herculaneum, in the Christian tomb of the diver with the red water in Paestum, in the silver votive stolen by Parks and found on Satoh’s corpse, in locations all over Pompeii, and most clearly, here in a Greco-Roman temple to an Egyptian god.
Thomas felt his pulse starting to race. Was this it? And if so, what could it possibly mean?
He stared at the plaster reliefs of the curious fish, with their bulbous snouts, wriggling tails, the toothed jaws, and those massive forefins that looked like . . .
Like legs.
It was an Egyptian cult, and one of the beasts most clearly linked to Egypt was the crocodile. Could these odd images be representations of those animals made by Italians who’d never seen one? But he’d seen the paintings from the temple in the museum in Naples and they had been full of detailed Egyptian divinities with jackal heads and motifs that came from real knowledge of Egypt. He’d also seen plenty of representations of fish from all over Pompeii and Herculaneum, many of them not only lifelike but recognizable. But then there had been the others, the weird ones with the large fins that looked like legs. They hadn’t all come from Egypt. They’d come from here, had probably been local images grafted onto the imported Isis cult as Hera’s pomegranate had been grafted onto the Virgin Mary.
So the legged-fish symbol was local and was old, and—as the Paestum tomb demonstrated—had been adapted for Christian use. Giovanni had said that the fish in its familiar form had plenty of symbolic resonance for Christians, but the legged fish would surely have even more. A legged fish could cross between land and water, could—now that he thought of it— echo Christ’s own walking on water as the terrified apostles cowered in their boat on the sea of Galilee. If the earlier Paestum tomb used the symbol of the diver as an image suggesting the passage into death, wouldn’t the Christian use of a legged fish suggest a kind of transcendence, moving through death and beyond it: the ability to live in both elements?
What had Ed’s note to Giovanni said?
“ian symbol-wise, I might have hit the mother lode (should that be father lode??!!), but it’s pointing outside Italy now and I have to follow.”
Was the legged fish the mother lode symbol of early Christianity? The supreme icon of Christ’s triumph over death? If so, why didn’t it become part of the mainstream iconography of the church, and where had Ed followed it next? And how could such a quest have gotten Ed—and Satoh—killed? He had no idea, but he felt it in his veins, a humming energy. He was on to something at last.