Pliny's Warning

by Nicholson, Anne Maria

  The young associate professor saw little of her hotel room, merely a place to leave her clothes and change. For five nights she shared the chancellor’s king-sized bed and from then on became the other woman.

  On her return, she was offered a university apartment at a peppercorn rent. It had been used for visiting fellows but, conveniently, was now surplus to needs, or so she was told. Alfonso travelled extensively on day trips to Rome, Florence, Pisa, Milan, Bologna and Palermo. He told his wife, Helena, that it was too exhausting to return after a day’s hard work and he needed to overnight in the other cities, but always came back to Camilla and the apartment. She made sure she never crossed paths with Helena. The last thing she needed to see was another crushed expression.

  Her telephone rings on her desk. ‘Camilla, are you coming?’

  ‘Yes, now.’ She hangs up.

  She picks up the folder and one of the newspapers and walks down the grand corridor with vaulted ceilings, marble statues of long-dead Neapolitan scholars and gilt-framed portraits of past chancellors towards Alfonso’s office.

  He rises from his large, elegant seventeenth-century wooden inlay desk and strides across the rich red and blue Persian carpet to greet her. He pulls her close. Not a tall man, with her high shoes she reaches his shoulder. She tilts her face to his and briefly kisses him on the lips. Then she pulls away. ‘Evening, Alfonso. Something to sign and something to savour,’ she smiles at him.

  ‘Ah, good. Luigi will be very happy. Let me sign that straight away.’ He takes the contract with the newspaper to the desk to sign his nephew’s appointment. He gazes at the photo and article of Camilla. ‘Brava, Camilla, another well-deserved triumph.’ He beckons her over and embraces her again, more tightly than before. ‘It’s been too long, cara,’ he whispers in her ear.

  She knows what’s coming and gives in to his grasp, closing her eyes and thinking instead of her new lover. Once, Alfonso would have taken her on the desk there and then. He’d done it many times before. But since his heart operation, his potency had faded. Their twenty-five-year age gap had widened and, almost overnight, he had insisted on becoming the giver of pleasure rather than the taker.

  ‘Relax, darling,…’ he coos as he runs his hand up her leg and strokes the soft skin above her stocking. She drapes her arms around his neck and forces herself to surrender. It won’t be long now before he’s seventy and edged out the door.

  His fingers move under her pants and inside her. He’s practised, persistent and patient. As her body tenses and she starts to shudder, he fondles her breasts until she relaxes in his embrace. ‘Cara, can I stay with you tonight?’

  He releases her and she kisses him tenderly. ‘No, Alfonso, but soon. I must do some more work on Progetto Vulcano. It really can’t wait. And anyway, won’t your wife have your dinner ready?’ She curls her lip.

  ‘Ah Camilla, you can never resist the final shot, even after all these years. You know I would have married you if I could.’

  She blows him a kiss and turns to leave. ‘Goodnight, Alfonso.’

  One day she might just tell him that marrying him was never on her agenda and now, as he enters his declining years, she can’t think of anything worse than sleeping next to him night after night.

  She looks at her watch. Nearly eight, she runs in a panic to the bathroom. She sits on the toilet and relieves herself then switches to the bidet and lets the cleansing hot water surge between her legs. She dries herself quickly then checks her reflection in the mirror. Her cheeks are glowing and she buffs them with loose powder. She smooths back her hair and just as she’s applying a coat of glossy red lipstick her cellphone rings.

  ‘Where are you?’ he asks abruptly.

  ‘Two minutes away.’ She hurries to her office, grabs her briefcase and within minutes she’s on the street, cursing her heels as they clatter on the hard pavement towards her rendezvous a block away, out of sight of the university.

  The late model black Mercedes with tinted windows is parked against the kerb ahead. As she approaches, the back door opens and she slides onto the leather seat next to him. ‘You’ve kept me waiting more than five minutes,’ he says without a smile.

  ‘Sorry. An unavoidable delay with the project.’

  As his driver accelerates into the night, he pulls her close and plunges his tongue into her waiting mouth.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Just as the early morning light sneaks through the shutters and caresses her eyes, Frances hears a low rumble. Her eyes flicker open and in the semi-gloom of her white-washed room, her body tenses as she feels the vibrations. Disoriented, she sits up, for a few seconds terrified she is caught up in another eruption.

  ‘Stefano, Lorenzo, viene qua. Viene, qua subito!’ She hears Laura calling the twins, urging them inside as a wave of thunder heralds a Naples storm.

  Frances pushes open the shutters. The curtain buffets her face and a gust of wind whistles through her room, blowing papers from her desk onto the floor. She shivers in her thin white cotton nightdress, brushes her hair from her eyes and looks out, beyond the forest of satellite dishes and television aerials on top of buildings, to the mountain. Although still autumn, Vesuvius is dusted with snow.

  ‘Il plena. If furo viene. Stefano, Lorenzo. Viene!’ Frances leans over and below in the courtyard Laura chides the boys and orders them in from the rain.

  Lorenzo rushes through the front door of the apartment building. But Stefano defies his mother. ‘No, Mama, voglio restare con i miei amici!’ He pleads to stay with the gaggle of other small boys dressed almost identically in T-shirts and jeans loitering on the wet cobbled laneway. They ridicule him as he wriggles in her strong arms. She drags him towards the doorway and despatches him inside. For now, the child is no match for the determined Laura.

  A streak of lightning strikes a pole across the street and as thunder roars almost simultaneously, the three other little boys scream. Heavy drops of rain pelt their tousled black hair and they scatter.

  The rain bites into Frances’ face and she quickly pulls the shutters closed. She picks up the pages of a report she had been meaning to read for ages. They have spread around the room and she drops to her knees to retrieve several under her bed. A diagram on one of the pages grabs her attention and she sits on the floor and studies it. In the centre is Mt Vesuvius. Branching out from it are blobs of different colours illustrating the fallout of ash for the eight eruptions during the last twenty-five thousand years. The largest blob by far, drawn in green, shows the vast extent of the Avellino eruption of 1780 BC, the one Riccardo and Marcello have been talking about. A large red blob shows the Pompeii eruption.

  Marcello had insisted this report on wind patterns for the Campania region from the Italian military weather stations was vital to their research, though she struggled to see the relevance.

  Now she is drawn into what at first appeared to be a very dry report. The red blob covers all of the area southeast of Naples and far out into the sea. She hadn’t realized how huge it had been, the ash covering more than three thousand square kilometres.

  Blobs in blue, yellow, purple and the big green one show areas far to the east and north of Naples that were covered in ash.

  She flicks to a page of graphs. They interpret the wind directions throughout a full year. For the thirty years of the study, the pattern didn’t alter. The wind blows in the same way at the same time, year in and year out. Frances stands up and opens the shutters again. The rain has eased but the cold wind fills her night dress with air. She spins around imagining people through the millennia being blown by the same winds in this very place.

  Her cellphone rings on her desk. She slams the shutters closed, grabs the phone and flops onto her bed. It’s Marcello. ‘Glad you’re awake, what are you doing?’

  ‘Trying to keep warm.’ She pulls her blanket over her, enjoying hearing his warm voice. ‘And reading the wind report.’

  ‘I’m impressed. What do you think about it?’

  ‘Not a
s dull as I thought.’

  ‘Good. There’s a reason I wanted you to see it. I’ve discovered something that will now make a lot of sense to you. Do you have time to come to my laboratory today?’

  ‘Sure. It’s an easy day. I feel like walking so I could be there in an hour.’

  Frances pulls on her jeans, warmest sweater and leather jacket. She searches in her suitcase for gloves and a woollen beanie she hasn’t needed until now. Pasquale is playing the cello as usual as she skips down the stairs. She pauses outside his door—sounds like he’s strangling the classics today.

  The streets are unusually quiet for a week morning. The rain has stopped but the cool southeasterly is blowing strongly. Frances jogs along Corso Vittorio Emanuele until she reaches a wide stone stairway. Looking across the bay, banks of puffy black clouds have blanketed Mt Vesuvius. She descends quickly, two steps at a time, counting in her head. Once she gets to a hundred she stops and looks back up. She is alone. Everyone else must be taking the funicular to the old city. She jumps as a skinny grey cat meows at her. At the bottom of the stairs a narrow laneway twists between rows of tiny terraced houses until it widens into the market streets.

  It’s a quiet day for the vendors. The biggest group of shoppers clusters around the fish stall. Frances moves closer to watch. A big swordfish, its large eye staring heavenwards, lies on its side. Too big for the table, its spear stands tall in midair. The fishmonger chops off large pieces of the flesh and slices them up. His wife works alongside him, packing the slices.

  ‘Spada, spada fresca!’ she calls continuously, in a high-pitched voice, handing small parcels of the swordfish to customers shouting out their orders. The man cuts further and further up the body of the fish and flings off-cuts of bone and skin into a bucket on the ground. As much as she likes eating fish, Frances turns away, repelled by the smell and the sight.

  Further along, she stops outside the bakery, pressing her nose against the window to admire displays of fresh cakes and pastries. She can’t resist and goes inside. ‘Two pieces of that one. What is it?’

  ‘Ah, caprese! Made this morning.’ The young woman cuts two wedges, packs them into a small box and ties it with a pink ribbon. ‘Almond and chocolate, molto buono. Very good. Enjoy!’

  She dashes across Via Toledo through a sea of cars and bikes and into the gloom of Spaccanapoli. No cars are allowed in this long straight street that splits the heart of the ancient city but she has to dodge between students on motorinis and lovers lingering in doorways. High-walled shops rise up on both sides and she searches for clues to the city’s earliest days when its Greek founders called it Neapolis, but realizes all the evidence is below the ground, not above.

  An old painting of Vesuvius in the window of a bookshop distracts her; a large and familiar romanticized nineteenth-century image of the mountain, a plume of smoke rising out of the crater, something that disappeared in 1944, when it last erupted. In the middle of the painting is the silvery blue of the Bay of Naples and in the foreground, elegantly suited men and women in long flowing dresses strolling beneath parasols. Frances studies their faces then looks at the people around her. Nothing to worry about then, nothing to worry about now. That seems to be the measure of Neapolitans. She’s seen some of their dark side but also the light, and their ‘live for the day’ philosophy is more and more appealing.

  She must have been smiling to herself because suddenly a young man with a wheelbarrow piled high with neatly cut firewood is walking alongside her. ‘Sei bellissima!’

  She understands he is telling her, very matter of factly, that she is beautiful. He says it with the confidence of a man much older than his twenty or so years. He’s so assured he might just as well have been commenting about the state of the weather. His head is shaved and his expression is earnest. They chat together like old friends until they reach a pizzeria where he is delivering the wood for the oven. ‘Best pizza in Naples. You must try!’

  ‘Don’t worry, I will.’

  A few minutes later she spots the marker she uses to find her way to Marcello’s laboratory, a marble statue of Nilo, the ancient Egyptian river god. His face looks down on her with a grumpy expression, prompting her to buy some mood-lifting coffee from the café opposite. She balances two espressos as she rings the bell of his building.

  ‘Come up!’ Marcello replies on the intercom as he clicks open the door. ‘Let me help.’

  He descends the stairs and takes the two small plastic cups of coffee and the box of cakes from her. ‘Great, I’m starving. I’ve been here half the night.’

  ‘There’s quite a crowd in here, I should have brought more coffee and cake.’ Frances reels in mock horror around his laboratory. Three full skeletons stand to attention on plinths. Skulls and other human bones are placed in groups along two walls.

  ‘Yeah, they’re great companions, always quiet and cheap to feed. They’re from Herculaneum, Pompeii, Stabiae, Nola.’

  They drink the coffee quickly and devour the cakes. Then he guides her to a stool. ‘Now sit up here because I have something to show you—booty from Pompeii that will bring that dull old wind report to life.’

  Dozens of gold, silver and bronze coins are arranged on a long bench. All different sizes, they’re worn and misshapen, but the markings on a few are clearly distinctive.

  ‘Wow! How did you get your hands on those?’

  ‘They’re all from Pompeii. I’ve found them on excavations.’

  ‘Finders keepers?’

  ‘No, don’t be crazy! Eventually they’ll go to the museum. What do you think I am? A grave robber?’

  She laughs. ‘I don’t know you well enough to say.’

  He runs his hand along a line of the coins. ‘Once you understand the marking on the coins, you can trace the precise date they were made. All of these have the faces of Roman emperors and the honours they were awarded.’

  He selects one silver coin. ‘This little coin is dynamite. I believe it will change our view of history.’

  ‘That’s a big statement. Let me see.’ Frances holds it in her hand. The head of a man wearing a laurel crown is on one side and a flying goat on the other. Marcello’s eyes are burning with excitement as he watches her turn it over several times. Latin inscriptions border each side and she strains to read them. ‘What do they mean?’

  ‘I’ll show you.’ Marcello places the coin face up. ‘This is Titus, who was emperor at the time of the 79 AD eruption. So these letters here,’ he traces his finger around the edge of the coin, ‘IMP TITVS CAES VESPASIAN AVG PM, are abbreviations for his full name: the Emperor Titus Caesar Vespasian, after his father, Emperor Vespasian; then Augustus, Pontifex Maximus—the highest priest of the ancient Roman religion, a position that went with his crown. Literally it means the greatest bridge maker and today the Pope has the same title. Now look at the other side.’

  He flips to the side with the flying goat. ‘This is the rest of the inscription: TR P VIIII IMP XV COS VII PP, which is an abbreviation for Tribunicia Potestate VIIII, Imperator XV, Consul VII, Pater Patriae—all his awards and decorations.’

  ‘You’ve lost me, Marcello. What’s the significance?’

  ‘I sympathise, I’ve studied coins and inscriptions for decades and it’s not easy. OK, let me take you through it one step at a time. Tribunicia Potestate VIIII means he was given wide-ranging powers and protections by the senate nine times over. And although Rome was a republic, it gave him the powers of a king. Then, more significantly for us, is Imperator XV, which means Titus had received an imperial acclamation fifteen times. I’ll explain more about that in a minute. Consul VII means he held the republican office of Consul seven times, and Pater Patriae, that he was the father of the country.

  ‘Now, coming back to the crucial letters…’ He points to the letters IMP XV. ‘This is short for Imperator XV. Imperator is an award a battle commander received from his troops after a victory, and Titus made his reputation as a soldier long before he became emperor. He conquered
Jerusalem in 70 AD and destroyed the Great Temple. The only surviving piece is the Wailing Wall, so he made quite a name for himself throughout the empire by defeating the Jews. But it’s the XV, or fifteen, that is the most significant, because it means he was acclaimed for fifteen war victories and the question for us is when did that happen?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘Do you remember the date of the 79 AD eruption?’

  ‘August, I think it was the 24th of August?’

  ‘That’s what everyone believes, but when you look at those wind patterns in the military report—and they’re right up to date—it doesn’t add up. The windspeed in August, when the eruption is supposed to have happened, is low and could never have spread the ash to Pompeii and so far beyond. So for years scientists here have always regarded it as an anomaly. The markings on this coin prove there was no anomaly—the eruption must have happened later in the year.’

  Marcello reaches for a folder. ‘A number of researchers have been searching for the truth. And now we have it. Look at this.’ He pulls out a photograph and two documents and spreads them along the bench. The photograph is of a skeleton lying on a dusty floor. ‘I found the coin in a bag wrapped around the waist of this skeleton at Pompeii, a woman who died during the eruption.’

  Frances glances around the laboratory at the dangling skeletons. ‘Er, she’s not with us today, is she?’

  ‘No, she’s safely at rest in the museum.’

  He points to the documents. ‘And these pieces of paper prove beyond doubt that the coin was made after August. In August, Titus had only received his fourteenth imperial acclamation. The fifteenth, or the IMP XV,’ he points again to the initials on the coin, ‘came later in the year.’ He picks up one of the pages with Latin inscriptions. ‘This is a copy of a letter found in a museum in Spain, written by Titus to the rulers of the city of Munigua. And you can see at the top,’ he points to some small lettering, ‘he describes himself as Imperator XIIII, the fourteenth acclamation. The date of the letter is VII idus Septembres, seven days before the ides of September, which is the seventh of September. Now there’s no way an emperor is going to deprive himself of an extra honour!’