Really, I can’t see what use all that science is to you.
-King “Big-Nose” Ferdinand (1751–1825)
Chapter Twenty-Six
I am an anonymous Egyptian woman once again.
After sending John to Naples, I walk. The streets are getting dark, but I am not afraid. Cairo is pulsating. I am amazed to find a nightlife akin to Las Vegas. Loud music pours from large boats docked at every twist and turn of the Nile. The overlapping cacophonies of techno beats might have come from any night club in the United States, but the lyrics are in Arabic.
Pockets of galabia-clad men sit in the shadows of the docks. I watch them stopping the groups of tourists passing through the streets, offering boat rides and shows with belly dancers. But they leave me alone.
I walk slowly in my black galabia and niqab. I limp heavily, favoring my wounded leg, but the fresh breeze wafting beneath my long gown feels healing. I envision the wings of Isis.
The isotope is out of my hands now. If it exists, and I must believe it does, then it is incumbent upon a chemist I have never met to create it from a collection of building blocks I have provided. A chemist my husband trusted above any other. And if Moretti is able to create the isotope, then it is up to John to get it to Alexis in time.
I have picked the right people to finish the job, and there is nothing more I can do. In this regard, I feel helpless.
But now I have another life to consider as well. There is a new life inside of me. There is a reincarnation of Jeff growing there, developing.
What world will I bring this young life into? Not one where his mother remains at large in Egypt, hiding from the authorities as well as from his father’s killer. No. I need to finish this.
“You can make them kill each other.”
Those were Alyssa Iacovani’s final words to me. But who are they? What do they want?
“I’m still trying to sort out the details of exactly who knew about… the papyrus scrolls… over the centuries…”
I realize again that Alyssa had never finished telling me what she had been trying to tell me in Naples. She had been answering my question as to why the Villa dei Papiri was never excavated, when we were interrupted by the earthquake. She had arrived at the rise of Napoleon and the rule of Naples by King Ferdinand and his wife Maria Carolina.
I need to know the rest.
I step into a twenty-four-hour Internet café, and I drop enough money for the entire night.
In 1765, excavations at Herculaneum were halted, and the focus shifted to Pompeii. Two years later, King Charles’ son Ferdinand came of age and officially became the king of Naples, a ruler so unpopular among his subjects that they began to refer to him publicly as “King Big-Nose.”
Although Ferdinand had no interest in the papyrus scrolls from Herculaneum, his queen, Maria Carolina, was fascinated by them. Maria Carolina befriended Padre Piaggio, the Vatican calligrapher tenaciously working to unroll and translate the papyrus scrolls from the Herculaneum villa. She wholeheartedly supported these efforts despite—or perhaps because of—the complete lack of interest by her husband.
Then a world event utterly personal to Maria Carolina interrupted the priest’s work. Louis XVI of France was overthrown and beheaded, and shortly thereafter Louis’ queen also fell to the guillotine. Maria Carolina’s outrage was two-fold. First, the infamous queen, Marie Antoinette, was her much-loved younger sister. Second, Napoleon was now marching toward Naples.
As Napoleon’s army approached, Maria Carolina packed up the scrolls and fled south to Sicily with her husband.
After pillaging what the royal family had left behind in Naples, Napoleon’s interest in the ruins of Herculaneum escalated to obsession almost overnight. From Italy, Napoleon headed directly to Egypt, and from there back to France, from where he immediately established a new Institute of Egyptian Studies in Cairo.
Seven years later, Napoleon returned to Naples. This time, the papyrus scrolls were still there for him to seize.
The kingdom of Naples was granted to Napoleon’s sister Caroline and her husband. Caroline personally financed excavations at Pompeii and took an interest in the scrolls of Herculaneum. She raised the wages of workmen unrolling the scrolls and funded the hiring of additional apprentices. When Napoleon became emperor, Caroline sent him her prized scroll as a gift. It described in detail the Battle of Actium and the fall of Cleopatra and Mark Antony.
Then Napoleon was defeated, and King “Big-Nose” Ferdinand was back on the throne in Naples for a third time, but without his queen. Maria Carolina had died while in exile.
By 1870, Naples was in shambles following a long succession of Ferdinand’s offspring, all of whom were as incompetent as he. The king that finally ended this legacy was Vittorio Emanuele, who brought about the Unification of Italy that has remained to this day. He was the first king of a united Italy in over a thousand years.
Under Emanuele, the church and state divided. The fledgling unified Italian state used every weapon imaginable to defeat the Catholic Church. The secularism of ancient Rome proved to be an invaluable one and sparked a new interest in the ruins of Pompeii. Emanuele and the architects running renewed excavations posed—literally with shovels in hand—for the recently developed medium of film. The perfectly preserved slice of ancient Rome that was Pompeii inspired an Italian nationalism never seen before.
This set the stage perfectly for a young journalist coming to power as Italian premier in 1927. Benito Mussolini exploited the nationalist fervor that was sweeping the nation and developed a cult that tightly associated Roman antiquity with Italian racial superiority. According to Il Duce, the ruins of Pompeii held the archaeology to prove that superiority.
The ancient Eastern good luck symbol that was found repeatedly in the ruins, and that I had noticed in the pattern on the floor of di Sangro’s chapel, was picked up by Mussolini’s German counterpart. Hitler’s hijacking of it as the symbol for his political party tarnished the swastika globally and forever.
By the end of World War II, Pompeii and Herculaneum had been excavated, bombed, and excavated some more. But the Villa dei Papiri remained submerged. By that time, approximately four hundred scrolls had been opened and read. With approximately only one in ten of those scrolls written in Latin as opposed to Greek, despite the fact that most ancient Roman authors wrote in Latin, it was believed that a still-buried Latin library probably existed within the house. If so, it is still there.
Throughout the 1980s, the 1990s, and the first decades of our new millennium, the Villa dei Papiri excavations have been reopened but then halted several times. There have been three obstacles in the way.
The first is the constant flooding and poisonous gases of the ancient ruins, which lie several feet below sea level.
The second is the now-contested location of the Villa dei Papiri. The first map of the villa was generated in the 1700s by Karl Weber. Weber’s contemporaries were amazed at its accuracy and detail, and the exact location of each room within the villa was undisputed for two hundred years. Until today.
The most recent effort to excavate the Villa dei Papiri was initiated in the 1990s. Following the reliable maps of Karl Weber, an excavation crew bored into the belvedere, or pavilion, first described by Weber’s men in the 1700s. They discovered that Weber had only identified the uppermost story of the building; in fact, there were three levels to the sprawling villa.
Then the modern crew changed their minds. Weber’s original map of the villa was declared erroneous. The tunnels proving otherwise were filled back in, and the Villa dei Papiri has been inaccessible ever since.
The third obstacle is the modern town of Ercolano, which now sits directly on top of the ruins of Herculaneum.
The sun is beginning to come up as my Internet search takes me to modern news articles, white papers, and petitions centered around Ercolano. And I am beginning to understand exactly who Carmello Rossi is, and the extent of the blood bath Jeff has involved us both in.
&nbs
p; With no identification and little money, I return to the same filthy Cairo hotel in which I slept during my first night in Egypt.
I am taken by surprise when, in broken English, the concierge bubbles forth with enthusiasm at my arrival. He has placed my voice and my accent. I smile beneath my niqab at the realization that the hotel staff probably doubled their annual income with the contents of the suitcase I left behind on my previous visit. And at the realization that they almost certainly think that I have now converted to Islam. The concierge asks me to wait in the lobby while my room is prepared.
The hotel upgrades me for free to their best room, and I am surprised to discover that, while much more basic than the hotel rooms of my former life, this one is reasonably sized and—more importantly—spotless. They have prepared it especially for me.
I deadbolt the door and draw the curtains, and in just minutes I am in bed, well aware that I need to be rested for what I am about to do.
Women are nothing but machines for producing children.
Doctors will have more lives to answer for in the next world than even we generals.
History is a set of lies agreed upon.
-Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821)
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Somewhere, a phone is ringing.
I drift into consciousness. Is it daytime? Is it nighttime?
There is light filtering in through the closed curtains of my bedroom. My prison. So it must be daytime. I don’t really care.
The phone stops ringing. I pull a pillow over my head to shut out the light, and I beg sleep to come to me once again.
A door creaks, and a moment later there is a warm, soft hand on the small of my back.
“Trina,” my sister says. “The police called. They caught him.”
Lawrence Naden. My son’s killer.
I am sure Kathy’s words should be comforting, but they are not.
There is light filtering in through the closed curtains. I wake up. Slowly, lazily, I open my eyes. The light seems to be keeping any cockroaches at bay. I glance at the bedside clock. It is mid-afternoon.
The familiar dream is still rolling in a constant loop through my mind. Lawrence Naden was a gangster, an American who ran drugs out of Mexico.
And I understand now why Herculaneum was never fully excavated.
The modern town of Ercolano sits atop the ancient ruins. Ercolano happens to be Italian crime territory. From within the town, a two-thousand-year-old drug network is run.
Ercolano is the hub of camorra, the Neapolitan Mafia. But unlike Sicilian Mafia, which is largely centralized, camorra operates as a loosely tied network of families or clans. Because there is no centralization, the individual members of the camorra network—much like those of al Qaeda—are much more difficult to flush out and prosecute. The Italian government, Europol, and Interpol have been trying without success for a very long time.
I am pleased to find a modest assortment of toiletries in the bathroom, and I bathe slowly. My bandaged leg juts rudely from the bathtub like an inappropriate erection, and I wince as I gently sponge the skin surrounding the crocodile bite. When I am finished, I step out of the bathtub and don my galabia—the only clothing remaining in my possession—but I leave the niqab sitting on the hotel room bed.
I understand now why the Villa dei Papiri was never fully excavated.
If a major medical find authored by Queen Cleopatra were unearthed from the ruins of the Herculaneum villa, the modern town of Ercolano would be swarmed. The Pompeii and Herculaneum fever of the Enlightenment and beyond would once again explode. The area surrounding the ruins would become a veritable hotbed for archeology, tourism, and international press. And as the legitimate money poured in, the clandestine drug network running out of Ercolano would be destroyed.
So I was not surprised to learn, during my overnight Internet searching, that the landowners of Ercolano—mostly camorra bosses—repeatedly block the excavations of Pompeii and Herculaneum. They demand exorbitant sums of money from the Italian government for even a cursory, non-disruptive dig. And they interfere with every effort made to re-enter the Villa dei Papiri.
The tension between camorra and the government has been increasing dramatically since 2010. That was when a new, massive eruption of Mount Vesuvius was predicted to occur within the next eight years.
It is now five years overdue.
The situation is becoming desperate. Many of the buildings of Pompeii and Herculaneum, as well as many of the major historical sites of Naples, have begun to crumble. Some of this is attributable to natural wear-and-tear, and some not.
On February 15, 2013, a corruption probe into the most recent excavation of Herculaneum was announced. This had been the dig that revealed the second and third stories of the Villa dei Papiri, just before the maps of Karl Weber were declared erroneous and the excavation halted.
Two weeks later, arson destroyed a prominent Naples museum. Camorra was highly suspected. No charges were ever filed.
And so the rift continues between archeologists, the Italian government, and the ubiquitous camorra. The camorra bosses seem to be winning, and the evidence of this is the fact that one of the richest archeological databases in history remains virtually untapped despite the fact that it may soon be lost forever.
This time, I drape my purse over my shoulder, unconcerned about whether or not its soft camel-colored leather is recognizable. I grab the pistol off the nightstand and eject the magazine. There are only three bullets remaining. I hope that two will be enough.
My shoulder-length brunette hair is flowing freely as I limp slowly out of the hotel.
I ride the subway to the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities. I enter the baggage claim area and find an employee who speaks English. I explain that I lost the claim check for my bag. A description and a wad of cash are sufficient to retrieve it.
I sit in a café long enough to charge my iPhone, and then I find a secluded park. I walk to a bench and sit. When I am sure I am alone, I withdraw my phone, and I begin making calls.
Although I desperately want to, I cannot call Jeff’s mother because what I need to say to her must be said in person. And I’m not in a position to do that. Not yet.
So I call my own mother, even though she has no idea who I am anymore. I call her just to hear the familiar voice of someone who I know holds no hidden agenda. I need to hear the voice of someone I can trust.
“Hi, Mom. It’s me!” I say enthusiastically.
“Oh, hi, honey,” she says in her relaxed, tired, carefree tone. “How are you?”
“I’m great!” I say, always as cheerful as possible when speaking with the woman whose only connection to reality is the voice of another person.
“That’s wonderful,” she says. “Who is this?”
“It’s me, Mom. It’s Katrina.”
“Are you my sister?”
“No, Mom. I’m your daughter.”
“Oh,” she says. “Do you live with me?”
“I live next door to you.”
“Have you seen my parents? I’m looking for my parents.”
“Mom, your parents died a long time ago.”
“Oh.” Silence for a moment. “Who is this? Are you my sister?”
And the conversation begins again.
My mother’s caregiver assures me that all is fine at home, and I hang up the phone.
Then I call Alexis. My sister Kathy answers the phone.
“Alexis is sleeping,” she says quietly. “She sleeps a lot these days.” Her voice becomes barely more than a whisper when she says, “Trina, I don’t know how much longer she’s going to hold on.”
“Wake her up,” I say.
“Hi Mom,” Alexis says groggily.
“How are you feeling, sweetie?”
“Like ass,” she says, and a distant memory comes back to me. I push it aside.
“Listen to me,” I say. “I’m almost there. I swear to you, I am so close. You just hold on. It can’t be more than a
nother day or two. So hold on. Because I’m going to need you. When this is all over, you will have a new little brother or sister to babysit.”
I hear Alexis laughing softly for a moment before she answers.
“Are you serious?” she finally asks. “Aren’t you a little old?”
“I’m forty-two!” I say indignantly. “And I have wanted Jeff’s baby since the day I first saw him naked on the beach.”
I call John. When he answers his cell phone, I ask him if he found Moretti.
“Yeah, I found him,” John says. “He’s here now. I’m in the lab in Naples. We’ve been working our asses off. But, Kat, we’re not having any luck. What did you expect to see? Did the document give any hint about what to do with the two plants?”
“Not really,” I say. “It read ‘when the sky opened and the gods cast their anger upon our enemies, the wine soured and the nardos by the bedsides turned from green to red.’ It also indicated that the effect was quite transient, over in just a matter of moments.”
“Well, the gods aren’t doing anything now,” John says.
“Let me speak to Moretti.”
“Sure,” John says, and his voice becomes more distant as he holds the phone away from himself to call for the Naples chemist.
“Romano,” he says. “Jeff’s wife is on the phone. Her name is Katrina Stone. She’d like a word with you about the isotope.”
I hear a muffled voice in the background and the shuffle of feet.
I know that voice, I think.
Then there is a thud, and the line is disconnected.
The Vesuvius Isotope Page 27