I reach into my bag and withdraw the map I purchased at the entrance to the city. I turn and continue down another street. At its end, the ancient city opens into a large pair of cemeteries, separated by a narrow walkway. One cemetery, historically, is Greek Catholic. The other is Greek Orthodox. But within them, I see a diversity I would never have imagined.
Each cemetery contains hundreds, maybe thousands of final resting places ranging from simple headstones to elaborate mausoleums. They are inscribed in Aramaic, Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and, occasionally, even English. Some of the monuments are centuries old, and others quite recently erected. Some of them are graced with flowers. Some with photographs.
I brush the fallen leaves off of a stone bench, shaded beneath a tall tree, and sit down to wait.
It is our second date. We step out of the Louvre, and Jeff takes my hand for the first time. I am terrified.
“Are you going to contact the chemistry teacher?” I ask. “The one who told you the bogus story of the caduceus?”
“Hell yeah!” he says. “I can’t wait to call Dr. Bond and gloat!”
I giggle and elbow him in the ribcage. “Why am I not surprised?”
“Because we are two of a kind,” he banters back and throws his arm around me as if it is the most natural of things.
We wander without speaking into the quiet solitude of the Tuileries Gardens behind the Louvre. The rain has now abated to a soft drizzle, and we walk through the garden slowly, hand in hand. At first, neither of us speaks. My eyes, always avoiding his, shift between the ground before my feet and the soft grassy area surrounding us. I feel drunk with the words echoing through my head.
We are two of a kind.
Never before have I met a man whose intellect aroused me as much as the chemistry between us. Forever skeptical of the old cliché that I would know when I met the right man, I now feel with conviction that I know. And it has only been two days. I struggle to retain my comfort zone of logic, but my heart is pounding.
We reach a large circular fountain in the center of the garden, and Jeff voices my inner thoughts exactly. “You seem too good to be true,” he says. I stop walking and am grasping for a safe response when he pulls me toward him and kisses me for the first time. And every remaining shred of my instinctive resistance dissolves.
I hear quiet footsteps, and I awaken from my daydream. She is approaching.
Her gait is light, and I am happy to see that she seems to have made a full recovery since the last time I saw her. She smiles and slowly, cautiously raises her arm to wave. It is then that I realize that her shoulder may have suffered permanent damage from the bullet that passed through it six months ago.
I stand and hug Alyssa Iacovani gently, taking care not to crush either her injured shoulder or my own swollen belly.
“Now I understand,” she says as we sit back down on the bench. “I did not know.” She smiles and looks down at my stomach.
“Neither did I!” At first, I laugh gently, but then a familiar tear wells into each eye. “I’m so glad he survived,” I say softly. “He survived a near drowning, a crocodile attack, and an emotional nightmare unlike any I have ever experienced. And he is still strong. It’s almost a miracle.”
“He?”
“Yes. The baby is most certainly a boy.”
“Jeff Junior?”
“No,” I say, and Alyssa looks surprised.
“He is all I have left of his father. But he is a different person. I don’t want to try to recreate Jeff. I want our son to be… whoever he is. I can’t wait to meet him.” My eyes are still brimming with tears, but I am smiling again.
“And that’s why you needed to see me,” Alyssa says with certainty. “You need to know if he is safe in this world.”
“I can’t step out onto my terrace without scanning the bedroom behind me for shooters,” I say. “I’m not sure if I will ever be able to again.”
“Have you considered moving out of the house?”
“I’ve thought about it. But what good would it do? If Rossi’s family has a vendetta, they will find me no matter where I go. And anyway, I can’t leave the house. My mother is next door. And there are too many good memories there. Every square inch of the house we bought together reminds me of Jeff. And I want our son to share in those memories. Except for the last one.”
The image of my husband’s dead body is still as fresh as the day I found it, but, slowly, I am becoming accustomed to that memory as a permanent fixture in my mind. I am grateful that I have years to decide just how to explain his death to our son, but our son will know that his father died a hero.
“As to your concern,” Alyssa says. “I don’t know if you will ever be safe. But I think you can probably relax. Ever since the healing properties of Vesuvium were made public, the excavations at Herculaneum have gone forth full bore—pardon the pun. The Villa dei Papiri has become to researchers what your California gold territory once was to prospectors. Everyone wants to dig. Everyone wants to know what additional surprises are hiding in those documents.”
I frown, deep in thought.
The superheavy isotope proved efficacious. But the transient phenomenon only occurred when using papyrus from Cleopatra’s era. Just enough of the precious resource had been made available to us, most of it unearthed from an ancient crocodile cemetery in the Fayoum Oasis. The isotope was only effective on the rare, new, HER2-elevated, pancreatic cluster cancer that John named Wilson’s Disease—after my husband. Jeff. John’s best friend, and Patient Zero.
I, too, cannot help but wonder—despite all that has happened—if there is still a secret lying buried in Herculaneum or elsewhere, a further explanation of what Queen Cleopatra once observed in a bouquet of nardos at a bedside in an ancient hospital.
“Since the excavations were renewed,” Alyssa continues, “the camorra families that were operating from within Ercolano have almost entirely been displaced. The majority of their estates have already been bulldozed to the ground to facilitate the excavations. Moreover, your friend Dante has royally fucked the Rossi crime family. His testimony, along with the testimonies of John and the homeless man, and your voice recording, has put away more than a dozen of the camorra bosses. And killed one of them, as you know.”
The image of a dead Carmello Rossi lying on the floor of a Naples laboratory is a striking parallel with that of Jeff on the deck of our yacht.
“By the way, whatever happened to them?”
“Who?” I ask.
“John and the homeless man.”
Suddenly, I am grinning. “Believe it or not, Aldo de Luca—the homeless man—did not accept a lump payment of the money I owed him. He preferred I help him monthly—a sort of trust fund—just until he gets back on his feet. I’ve put him up in a modest home in Naples, and I’m paying for his counseling, and his education.”
Alyssa laughs. “Oh my! Education in what?”
“Child psychology. He wants to help troubled kids, kids like he was once. He wants to see if he can stop some of them from making the same bad choices that he made.”
For the millionth time, I envision my daughter at fifteen—arrogant, angry, tortured, spiteful, and brilliant Alexis. I imagine her attempting to lie to Aldo de Luca in a counseling session.
“He will be perfect,” I say.
I do not share with Alyssa the bond that has grown over the last six months between myself and John—the only other person in the world who really understands what I have gone through. It is still far too early to tell where our friendship will lead. But something tells me that Jeff would approve.
“You haven’t really made me feel any better,” I say. “I mean, I’m glad to have broken up the drug ring, and I’m particularly glad to have discovered Vesuvium in time to save the lives of the Wilson’s Disease patients. Not least because my daughter is still alive to meet her new brother.
“But I know how these things go. If you cut off the head of a Naples crime boss, ten new heads spring up in
its place. Why wouldn’t they continue to come after me? Or you, for that matter?”
To my surprise, Alyssa is now the one grinning. “I knew you wouldn’t believe me,” she says. “That’s why I insisted you meet me here. Let me tell you a little story.”
She stands and motions for me to follow her through the cemetery.
“After the death of Cleopatra,” Alyssa says, “Egypt was absorbed by Rome. Octavian, the Roman who defeated Cleopatra and Mark Antony, became Emperor Augustus. Augustus became obsessed with Egypt.
“I think that he was looking for something he knew Cleopatra possessed. I think that something was the source of her power. Many believed it was magic. But it wasn’t really magic at all, of course. It was science. Chemistry. The creation of poisons and medicines.
“We have ample evidence that Cleopatra was a scientist. But all this time, for reasons unknown, we have thought she was exploiting some extraordinary political skill—or, even more preposterous, her feminine wiles—to raise herself to a deity as Caesar had been raised. I realize now that we were all mistaken. She did not intend for her peers to elevate her to a god. They already thought she was a god.
“Cleopatra dedicated her life to developing the image of herself as the New Isis. The goddess of magic and medicine. And she produced one magic trick after another, to the fascination of her peers. The vinegar and the pearl. The nardos and the cancer patients. Even her own mysterious death.
“I think Octavian was the only one who saw through her charade. I think she fooled everyone—Mark Antony, Julius Caesar, all of them—except for Octavian. I think that at one point he might have even seen the nardo document, or another like it, and learned that her ‘magic’ was actually explicable and reproducible through natural phenomena. I think he was the only one who realized she was just a woman with extraordinary knowledge, and not a goddess, or even a magician. And I think that is how he was the one who finally had the courage to defeat her.
“Katrina, Octavian was the one who brought the aqueducts into Pompeii and initiated the agricultural pursuits there. I think he brought them in to reproduce her nardo phenomenon. I think he knew that if he himself could do what she had done, it would prove there was nothing supernatural about her, and thus he could destroy her.
“But she also took up residence in that very city and usurped the aqueducts he had established there for exactly the same purpose. And that was the initiation of the world’s first drug war, the one that continues to this day.”
We approach a row of elaborate mausoleums beneath a cluster of enormous, aging trees. I admire the architecture of the buildings while simultaneously reflecting upon Alyssa’s words. I begin reading the names and dates upon the monuments. And I come to understand why she has brought me here.
The moon herself grew dark, rising at sunset,
Covering her suffering in the night,
Because she saw her beautiful namesake, Selene,
Breathless, descending to Hades,
With her she had the beauty of her light in common,
And mingled her own darkness with her death.
-Eulogy for Cleopatra Selene
Chapter Thirty
The mausoleum at which we are standing holds a photograph. It is the black-and-white image of a woman—a dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty. I glance into her lovely black eyes for a moment and envision the Cleopatra of Hollywood—the Elizabeth Taylor, the Angelina Jolie. The woman’s epitaph is inscribed in Greek; I know the letters from science. The dates of her life and death are listed: 1873–1957. The woman’s name is Selena Zenobi. It is a name I recognize.
“What happened to Cleopatra’s other children?” I ask Alyssa. “I know that Augustus killed her first-born, Caesarion… what happened to the other three?”
Alyssa smiles. She must know I have caught on to her game.
“I’m sure you won’t be surprised,” she says, “to hear that the boys disappeared from history. Cleopatra had borne twins by Mark Antony, a boy and a girl. The boy was named for the sun—Alexander Helios. The girl, the moon—Cleopatra Selene. Cleopatra’s third boy, her second son by Mark Antony, was named Ptolemy Philadelphus, after Cleopatra’s own lineage.
“Augustus allowed Cleopatra’s three children by Mark Antony to live but brought them to Rome to be raised by his sister, Octavia—the very woman who was Mark Antony’s wife prior to Cleopatra. Further details about the upbringing of the three children are murky until the marriage of Cleopatra Selene to King Juba II of Mauretania. The memoirs of Cassius Dio inform us that the two boys were still alive at the time of the marriage. Subsequently, they disappear from the record.
“I’m sure it won’t surprise you that, together, Juba II and Cleopatra Selene built a large library and a lighthouse in Mauretania. She bore two children: a son, named Ptolemy, of course; and a daughter, Drusilla. In this generation, it was the daughter who was lost to history. But her name survived.
“The son of Cleopatra Selene was educated in Rome and became part of the court of Antonia Minor—the niece of Augustus and daughter of Mark Antony and Octavia and, thus, Cleopatra Selene’s half-sister.
“Ptolemy enjoyed a very long reign as King of Mauretania, as both co-ruler with his father, Juba II, and as his successor. He married Julia Urania of the royal family of Emesa in what is now Syria. They had a daughter—again, Drusilla.
“Drusilla first married Marcus Antonius Felix, the Roman governor of Judea, and then King Sohaemus of Emesa—also known as Gaius Julius Sohaemus of Emesa. Thus, Drusilla became Queen of Emesa and bore a son, Gaius Julius Alexio, who later succeeded to the throne of Emesa.
“It is through Alexio that Zenobia, Syrian Queen of Palmyra, is descended. Zenobia was nicknamed the ‘Warrior Queen’ for having led a powerful revolt against the Roman Empire. She rode out in front of her army and fought alongside them. She also conquered and ruled Egypt for a period of time.
“Zenobia married a Roman governor, whose name has been lost, and, by him, had multiple offspring. Several were daughters, who later married into Roman noble families. Their one known son was Septimius Odaenathus. And it is from Queen Zenobia through Odaenathus that Cleopatra’s lineage descends to Zenobius—the first Christian bishop of Florence.
“We find Zenobius throughout Florentine art—”
“I’ve seen him,” I interrupt. “I have traveled to Florence numerous times and toured the art museums there. Botticelli. Three Miracles of Saint Zenobius. Saint Zenobius?” Suddenly, I am shivering.
“Yes,” Alyssa says. “As depicted in that piece and others, Zenobius was sainted for miracles of resurrection, the exact skill—the exact magic, if you choose to believe in it—first attributed to that ancient Egyptian goddess, Isis. And it is through the lineage of Cleopatra that he acquired it.”
“Descending from Cleopatra is an entire legacy,” I say.
“Indeed,” Alyssa agrees. “The legacy begins with the birth of Cleopatra Selene—which, by the way, occurred on December 25, exactly forty years before the accepted birth of Jesus Christ. And if you follow Cleopatra’s bloodline, you find her miracles throughout.
“Johann Winckelmann selected a very wrong metaphor in 1762 when he said that Alcubierre knew as much of antiquities as the moon knows of crabs. The moon—Cleopatra Selene—was nine or ten years old when her mother was documenting the conditions of ten terminally ill cancer patients on a sheet of papyrus. So the moon might have known a great deal about the plague of the crabs. Cleopatra’s knowledge of science and medicine has flowed through her bloodline for two thousand years. And so has some of the ‘magic’ that accompanied it.
“When we exposed one of Cleopatra’s magic tricks to the world, we defeated the camorra in battle. They can never reverse what we have done, so I don’t think they have any reason to come after us again. But the war continues, as it has all along.”
Alyssa reassuringly pats my shoulder. “And that is why you need not worry, my friend. Today’s descendants of Octavian have many other
s to concern themselves with besides you.”
The sun is beginning to fall behind the mausoleum, and I am growing cold in my short-sleeved shirt. I still need to find a hotel for the night, before my return tomorrow to the United States.
“How many are there?” I ask. “How many descendants of Cleopatra?”
“I have no idea.”
“Do you think Raimondo di Sangro was one of them?”
“It’s possible. He certainly went after those papyrus scrolls with a fire in his belly. He certainly followed the cult of Isis. And he certainly produced science the world had never seen—some of it with acid, much like Cleopatra with the pearl. And, like her, he hid his work for the purpose of forever maintaining his own immortality. His eternal flame. Even if he wasn’t Cleopatra’s descendent, he was unquestionably her follower.”
“Will you try to contact them?” I ask. “Her living descendants?”
“No,” Alyssa says. “What would be the point? You don’t really think they would tell me anything, do you?”
I imagine a cemetery of mummified crocodiles, each one a vault filled with secret information.
“I suppose not.”
We exit the walled city and board the Metro, this time together. Again, the women move aside to offer me a convenient seat, and again I am grateful. Alyssa stands, holding onto the metal railing with her strong arm. She looks as tired as I feel.
For a moment, we ride the rocking train in silence. When I can contain my thoughts no longer, I speak. “Rossi killed your family. Your husband and your son and your daughter.”
I remember their images from the photos I had seen in her office the first day I met Alyssa Iacovani. I had thought she was having an affair with my own husband. And possibly that she had killed him.
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