CHAPTER 42
Thomas found Roberta waiting at the Marine Gate. The magic square was, he decided, a moot point. Ed hadn’t been interested in crosses and probably didn’t believe that they were Christian symbols as early as AD 79. If there was truth to Satoh’s story about the Herculaneum cross, the key was surely the fact that the cross was marked by the image of a “strange fish.” That would certainly have piqued Ed’s curiosity.
“So now what?” said Roberta as they rode back.
He had given her the gist of his ideas in a muted and unspecific way as a way of salving his conscience for abandoning her. She was probably lonely, as so many religious seemed to be, doubly so here.
“I have to talk to Pietro,” said Thomas. “No evasions, no hostility, no excuses. If he doesn’t tell me what I need to know, I’ll give his name to the police.”
“You think he was connected to the death of that Japanese man?”
“No,” he said. “But I do think he was implicated in a larger puzzle centering on my brother.”
“He’s doing sick visits this afternoon,” she said. “He won’t be back till six. Let’s take a break for an hour or so, think it all through, then go and talk to him.”
For a long moment Thomas considered her pale round face and serious eyes. He probably could use some time to make sense of what he had learned.
“What kind of break?”
“We’ll get off at the Ercolano stop,” she said, clearly excited. “I have an idea. Come on, Thomas, my retreat starts tomorrow and then I won’t be able to leave the house. One last excursion for a couple of hours, and then you can see Pietro, okay?”
For once she let him just sit and think, and as the train sped along the seawall with its patches of black sand beach, she produced a silver cell phone from a pocket in the sleeve of her habit. Thomas raised his eyebrows at the phone.
“Oh,” she said, with a playfully dismissive wave, “we’re all very modern these days.”
Thomas smirked.
“Pronto,” she said into the phone, then mouthed “Father Giovanni.” She introduced herself in faltering but competent Italian and asked a series of questions. The answers seemed to satisfy her.
“What was all that about?” asked Thomas.
“Wait and see,” she grinned, girlish.
The surprise was waiting for them in the street by the Ercolano station: a white, two-door Fiat rental car.
“We have to drop it off at seven, so that gives us two and a half hours,” she said, pleased with her scheme. “I’ve been wanting to do this since we got here.”
“Do what?”
“Visit the cause of all the trouble,” she said, as if this were obvious.
For a moment Thomas’s heart skipped. What was she talking about? What did she know.
“Vesuvius!” she said into his baffled face, “the volcano.”
“Oh,” he said. “That trouble.”
She fumbled with the keys, shaking her head at his slowness, chuckling to herself.
She was a surprisingly good driver, which was just as well, because the road across town was narrow and hazardous, and the moment they began to ascend the mountain itself, things deteriorated. Roberta clearly enjoyed the hairpin turns, the blaring of horns at every bend, the skirting of the precipices on the passenger side, but Thomas quickly wearied of it all, and after ten minutes, he was getting nauseated. Twice they had to inch past great lumbering coaches descending from the summit, and other cars were constantly rocketing by at wholly unreasonable speeds.
“Wow!” said Roberta, as a tiny white van shot around the corner toward them, missed by inches in a blaze of horn, and headed down toward the town without slowing one iota. “He was moving!”
She seemed quite delighted by the whole thing. Thomas stared out at the purplish cone of the volcano above the tree line, and tried to ignore their zigzagging ascent.
When they finally stopped in a parking lot of pinkish-brown gravel, he took several minutes gazing down over the trees to the gleaming sea for his stomach to calm.
“Come on,” said Sister Roberta, as if she were leading a Girl Scout hike.
Thomas looked bleakly around and up. They were still a long way from the crater.
“Now we walk,” said the nun, as if this were a special treat.
She marched away in the lowering afternoon sun, her crucifix swinging with each pounding stride of her sandals so that their buckles jingled faintly with each step.
There was a gate at the entrance to the trail. Most of the tourists were on their way down. The thin, long-haired woman at the turnstile checked her watch.
“Straight up and down. No more than fifteen minutes at the crater,” she said, tearing off tickets from a spool without looking at them.
A few yards beyond the gate the path began to climb steeply, cutting back on itself and then slanting hard up the mountain.
This will be no picnic, thought Thomas, wearily. His feet already ached after the day’s walking.
Maybe he shouldn’t have come. But a part of him did want to see the volcano. As Roberta had suggested, it was the heart of the story of Pompeii and Herculaneum, towns that would otherwise have evolved normally, their first-century glories forgotten.
The rock and cinder path was straight, fenced on one side with wooden beams, cut away from the slope up to the summit on the other. Up here there were no trees, and the mountaintop rose smooth and featureless save where stray boulders of the same porous rock jutted out of the cone. He had expected the stone to be gray, but the base colors were browns, pinks, and violets, the rock grainy like pellets and pitted with air pockets. Here and there were straggling grasses and lichens, but for all the fertility of the lower slopes, there wasn’t much growing up here. The summit was a dead landscape, barren, but with a savage beauty of its own.
Everyone was going home. A party of Italian teenagers jogged jauntily past, but a lot of the others—many of them in their fifties and sixties, none of them locals—looked exhausted. As Thomas trudged wearily up, letting Roberta get ahead, he checked behind him a couple of times. They might have been the last people admitted.
It took them twenty minutes to reach the top, and when they did the little stall selling drinks and postcards was closing for the day and the summit was all but deserted. On the inside of the path the jagged crags that marked the crater’s rim were broken by stretches where only a single looping chain separated the visitor from the hollow below. Thomas peered down, not certain what to expect, and found a vast conical depression of tiny stones. The sides showed blasted and splintered rock, scorched black and white, stone that looked as hard as flint but had been shattered by the force from below. Smoke drifted up in lazy gusts from spots all around the crater walls, but the center of the depression looked still and tranquil. There was no heat, and only the merest tang of sulfur in the air.
“This way,” said Roberta, leading away from the edge toward a narrower path than the one they had ascended. The trail slotted down the outer slope of the cone and out of sight.
“Where does that go?” Thomas asked, with a sour look.
“Around the crater,” she said, cheerily. “Got to go around the top. Got to do the thing properly. Come on, Thomas.”
He trudged in her dusty wake as the sun began to set and the last of the tourists began their descent.
“On the other side,” she shouted over her shoulder, “we’ll be able to look across the crater to the bay.”
“I can hardly wait,” muttered Thomas.
“And we can say a prayer.”
Better and better.
Thomas’s feet hurt.
“Slow down,” he called. “I think I’m getting the Stigmata.”
“The what?” she said, turning, looking quizzical.
“The Stigmata,” Thomas replied. “You know, when your hands and feet bleed. Feet, in this case.”
“Oh, the Stigmata,” she said. “I misheard.”
She still looked a little confused, maybe even offended.
“Sorry,” he said. “Bad joke.”
“That’s okay,” she replied. “I’m used to people not understanding miracles.”
“And you believe in things like that?” he said. It was a sincere question and there was no mockery in his voice. “Manifesting the wounds of Christ?”
“Of course,” she said. “The Lord works in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform,” she intoned, seriously.
“But Stigmata,” Thomas pressed. “I mean, what’s the point? Why would God inflict open wounds on people? I don’t get it.”
“Well, I’ve never actually encountered it,” she said. “Though I’m sure it happens. The world is full of sin, and sometimes the Lord sees fit to punish sin miraculously.”
Thomas stared at her, but she kept walking and did not meet his eyes.
“Look,” she said. “We’re almost at the other side.”
“Yes,” said Thomas.
“I think we should pray for the repose of the soul of that man who was killed. This place is full of the grandeur of God.”
She climbed the shifting shingle to the rim and looked out across the volcano’s great mouth to the sea. The sun was low and amber now, so that the inside of the crater was slashed in half, part in deep shade, part seeming to burn with an orange light vibrant as flame. There was no one else around.
“Kneel with me,” she said, dropping, her face lit by the same glow so that she seemed passionate, radiant in her conviction.
Thomas climbed up beside her, but he did not kneel, and his brain was racing.
“What did you say his name was? The dead man?” said Roberta, her eyes closed, her hands joined in front of her, fingers pointed skyward like a statue of the Virgin.
“Satoh,” said Thomas, absently.
“We thank the Lord for this bountiful day, and pray for the souls of Mister Satoh and for Father Edward Knight,” she began. “May they rest in peace. Our Father, who art in Heaven . . .”
She intoned the words slowly, so that Thomas could join in. He did, but awkwardly, his cracked voice barely more than a whisper. He had expected something more appropriate: Eternal rest give unto him, O Lord . . . Something like that. But she had chosen the Lord’s Prayer.
“. . . give us this day our daily bread . . . ,” she continued.
Thomas was staring out over the great smoking hollow. The climb weighed heavily on him, and there was something surreal about this place, about praying—for the first time in years—for his dead brother, with this woman he didn’t know.
“. . . as we forgive those who trespass against us . . .”
The whole thing felt dreamlike, as if all his doubts and sadness had drifted unexpectedly to the surface, but other things were nagging at him. Pietro had given a sermon on the Immaculate Conception, he recalled, as if hearing the account of it through an echoing tunnel . . .
“I didn’t understand most of it, of course—my Italian is not good enough—but it was a beautiful sermon, full of devotion and piety. At the end he was close to tears at the thought of Our Lord being conceived without sin, then entering this dreadful world . . .”
He had been irritated at the time, but it had been turning over at the back of his mind ever since. Surely the Immaculate Conception wasn’t about the birth of Christ at all? He barely remembered such things anymore, but he was almost sure it was about the birth of the Virgin Mary, the only person since Adam and Eve to enter the world without the stain of original sin. Frowning, Thomas stopped mouthing the old familiar words, and Roberta’s voice went on alone.
“For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory . . .”
Thomas’s drowsiness, his drifting toward grief, left him instantly.
“Forever and ever. Amen.”
Another phrase came back to him.
“Sometimes the Lord sees fit to punish sin miraculously.”
Punish? With Stigmata?
Stigmata was a sign of piety, a manifestation of a saintly devotion to the crucified body of Christ.
“For thine is the kingdom . . .”
And while many Catholics wouldn’t give much thought to it these days, surely you would expect a Franciscan to know . . .
“Forever and ever . . .”
Particularly since the most famous of all Stigmatics was . . .
“St. Francis,” he whispered aloud.
As he did so, he became aware that Roberta was no longer kneeling beside him. She was behind him.