The Heretic Scroll

by Will Adams

  The cloud slowly thinned, revealing a large and oddly shaped chamber, neatly squared off to their left, but elsewhere craggy as a cave. Started but never completed. The true end of the line. Which presumably explained why the Villa’s greatest treasures had been brought here to be sealed in against the looters. Their torchlight fell everywhere upon marvellous objects. Toppled stacks of silver and gold bowls and platters lay alongside great stone caskets too choked by goblets, candlesticks and the like for their lids to close. Bowls and vases overflowed with uncut gems and fistfuls of gleaming coins. There were stacks of metal ingots too, jars of precious spices, unguents and dyes. A line of life-sized male statues against the wall were dressed like mannequins in gorgeous armour and crested helmets, too pristine and unwieldy for the battlefield, designed surely for the triumph. There were masterpieces of sculpture too. A porphyry mother nursing her infant. Alabaster children playing catch. A hunting dog with a bird in its mouth.

  They clambered over the tumbledown wall, picked their careful way between the treasures. An ornamental chest contained ivory combs, a mirror of polished silver, jewelled hairpins and brooches and coloured glass vials, as though someone had swept a dressing table with their forearm. Large silver caskets were filled with emerald brooches, ruby bracelets and sapphire earrings; with gold pendants and innumerable rings set with carnelians, jet and other lustrous stones. The silver links of a pearl breastplate rattled quietly as Carmen held it against her chest.

  ‘Over here.’

  Carmen glanced across. Lucia was standing by the mannequin soldiers. But it wasn’t they themselves that had caught her eye so much as an opening in the rock behind them. Carmen went to join her. A short flight of stone steps led up to a second block wall, only this one wasn’t plastered. Carmen picked at the crumbling mortar with her fingernail. ‘We shouldn’t,’ she murmured.

  ‘You did downstairs,’ said Lucia.

  ‘I shouldn’t have done that either.’

  ‘And if Vesuvius really does go? When will we have another chance?’ She didn’t wait for an answer, but rather swapped her torch for Carmen’s hammer then scraped away the mortar around a limestone block, the better to jiggle it out. It thumped the floor so hard that it sent shivers through their soles. Carmen shone her torch into the cavity, but all she could see was plaster. She understood, then, what was going on. Two separate strings of storerooms dug into the hillside behind the Villa had unwittingly converged. That was why work had stopped on the chamber below, save for these stairs being added as an afterthought, to make a virtue of that mistake. When Vesuvius had erupted, and they’d chosen this to be their vault, both entrances had therefore needed walling up.

  With the butt of the hammer, Lucia punched a hole in the plaster. Then she took back her torch from Carmen and shone it through.

  II

  When Vesuvius blew, all Izzo could think of was getting to his son. By the time he’d reached the ground floor, however, he’d formulated a plan. The eruption had been so violent it had almost certainly ripped up all the roads out of town or blocked them with fallen footbridges and collapsed buildings. Their best hope was the ferry, if they could get to it in time.

  Mario was screaming in anguished bursts that pierced his heart. He swept him up in an arm, yelled at Isabella to follow. They ran out into the storm. He grabbed Valentina by her elbow as she reached her Renault. ‘Take Mario for me,’ he said. ‘Get him on that ferry. Isabella too.’

  She stared at him in bewilderment. ‘But… what about you?’

  He nodded at Cesco. ‘We’re going for Lucia and Carmen. We’ll join you there.’

  ‘That’s crazy. Stay with your son. I’ll go for them.’

  ‘This isn’t police business. This is personal.’

  ‘I don’t care.’

  ‘I do. This is an order. Get Mario safe.’ He took her hand. ‘Please. Promise me.’

  She bit her teeth together. ‘Very well,’ she said.

  ‘Good. Thank you.’ He hugged Mario, then buckled him in in the back of the Renault. ‘Go with Auntie Valentina,’ he told him. ‘Do exactly as she says. I’ll join you in no time. Be brave now. Remember I love you.’

  Valentina was away first, with Izzo and Cesco close behind. She sped across the junction at the foot of the road while they screeched into a sharp right. The shortest route to the Villa ran against the one-way system, but this was no time for worrying about that. He sped through a red light, then squealed up into the old town, tooting his horn in warning. But everyone had already left. The first fragments of volcanic material began to patter back down around them, skipping off the road, clanging their bodywork. His windscreen was so misted by the rain that he missed the Villa entrance. He skidded to a stop on the wet cobbles, reversed back up. The gate was wedged half open, just wide enough for them to fit. The gatepost still dinged his wing mirror and clawed his side. Cesco buzzed down his window and leaned out to peer over the escarpment edge. ‘Lucia’s car’s still there,’ he said.

  ‘You’re sure it’s hers?’

  ‘A gold Ford Ka, yes.’ He frowned, then repeated it. ‘A gold Ford Ka.’

  Izzo dared not even glance at him; the hairpin track down to the escarpment floor was so awash with foamy rainwater it demanded all his concentration. ‘What?’

  ‘The lane Taddeo lives on,’ said Cesco. ‘It peters out beyond his house into a kind of parking area. There was a Ka there last night. A gold Ford Ka.’

  ‘Lucia? Are you nuts?’

  ‘Taddeo murdered her brother, Detective. He raped her and dozens of her friends. And now we have her car maybe at the scene.’

  ‘No way,’ insisted Izzo. ‘No way.’ He braked too violently into the next hairpin so that they aquaplaned for a moment before their tyres gripped tarmac again. ‘Lucia’s not like that.’

  ‘Except it explains everything. Even the honey and the knife. They didn’t belong to Alberts. They were hers. She promised Carmen she could prove me innocent. That was how. Staging her own abduction while I was still in jail would have cleared me and sent you guys off after wild geese too. Only Alberts came for her keys. She tried to defend herself with the knife, but he wrested it off her. Which is how he worked out what she’d done. Because why else would she have all that shit? And what possible motive…’ He broke off as a chunk of volcanic tuff smashed into the escarpment above their heads, showering them with mud and shrapnel. ‘What possible motive could she have had, other than revenge for Raff? Hence his little sermon. Eye for an eye, life for a life. He was talking to her, offering her absolution, taking her sin upon himself. The one thing I can’t work out is how she figured Taddeo for Raff’s murder. She was in the car with him when it happened.’

  ‘Oh God,’ groaned Izzo. ‘That was me. I told her he’d been out to see him the night before he died. And about the Rohypnol too.’

  ‘And who else has Rohypnol to hand, except a serial rapist?’ said Cesco. ‘So she buys a stun gun, forces him to confess, takes her revenge, then goes for his DVDs. Only I show up. So she zaps me and legs it.’

  They rounded the final turn to the escarpment floor, only to find a lake instead, already up to the Ka’s undercarriage. Izzo pulled his handbrake on tight and reached across Cesco for the torch in his glove compartment.

  ‘You don’t have to come,’ Cesco told him.

  ‘You kidding?’ muttered Izzo. ‘It’ll be safer in there than out here.’

  They nodded at each other for courage, got out and held their arms above their heads for such small protection as that might offer, then waded through the water and up the muddy ramp to the Villa’s front, slipping between the tarpaulins and inside.

  III

  Lucia’s torchlight fell first upon a long table of white marble with a bench beneath it and several objects upon it too indistinct to make out. Beyond the table, the facing wall was cut with columns of square-mouthed alcoves so like the drawers in a morgue that Carmen’s immediate thought was that this must be the family tomb. Except their c
ontents didn’t look much like bones. Then she realised and spoke the word beneath her breath.

  ‘Scrolls,’ she said.

  Lucia grunted as though punched. Carmen glanced at her. The light beneath her chin and glinting off her eyes gave her a frenzied look. She stepped back, then kicked the wall with the sole of her foot. It bulged a little. She kicked it again and it collapsed, spilling noisily out into the new chamber. Carmen stared at her, unnerved. She’d never suspected Lucia to be capable of such violent passion. But she clambered over the fallen blocks with her anyway, to explore their new discovery.

  The chamber was tall, wide and so long that there wasn’t just the one marble table running down its centre, but three set end to end. The objects on them resolved into oil lamps, inkwells, weights and wooden rollers. Above them, a cloudless summer fresco, joyful with cavorting birds. Below, a woodland lake mosaic surrounded by water lilies and other bright flowers. No simple storeroom this. A showpiece whose natural insulation had clearly compensated for the lack of light and ventilation. After all, the extreme variations in humidity and temperature on this coast would have been ruinous for scrolls. And when you owned this many of them… For everywhere they turned their torches, they lit up yet more alcoves crammed with them, mostly loose but a few in cylinders of stone, bronze or ivory.

  ‘It’s Alexandria,’ muttered Carmen. ‘We’ve found Rome’s Alexandria.’

  Several of the alcoves had bronze plates beneath them, their inscriptions illegible with age and tarnish. She rubbed one with her thumb, then angled her torch so that its own shadows would give it definition. ‘Gaul,’ she murmured. ‘These must all be about Gaul.’

  ‘And I have botany,’ said Lucia, from across the chamber. ‘Look at them all!’

  They went from column to column, finding ranges on medicine and mathematics; on astronomy and history; on geography and statecraft; on schools of philosophy and religion that Carmen recognised, others that she didn’t. Her heart gave a sudden great thump. She flooded with an indescribable joy. She panned her camera slowly around, the better to capture it all. Forty columns of eight alcoves on either wall, each containing some fifteen or more scrolls. She did the calculation in her head. Ten thousand in this chamber alone, and a red velvet curtain at its end that hinted at another beyond. She went up to it, tried gently to draw it aside, only for it to fall from its rail, throwing up another small cloud of dust. She stepped over it into an almost identical chamber with another arched doorway at its far end whose curtain had already fallen, allowing her to see two more chambers beyond, as though she were standing at one end of a railway carriage looking down the full length of a train. Ten thousand scrolls in each meant at least forty thousand already. Forty thousand! And who could say it ended there? Because logically this line of rooms must be the same length as the one beneath, and that had gone on for ever. She went to a nearby alcove. Not ordered by subject matter, this, but rather by author. ‘Lucius Annaeus Seneca,’ she read out.

  ‘Marcus Terentius Varro,’ said Lucia, who’d joined her in the new chamber. And they both spontaneously began to laugh. But after the laughter came dizziness. The Library of Alexandria had held one hundred and sixteen lost plays of Sophocles. One hundred and sixteen! Seventy others by Euripides. Copies of Aristotle’s lost Poetics and Homer’s lost Margites. Why shouldn’t those and other lost treasures be here too, along with works completely unknown to the modern world? How many great poems would they find? How many masterpiece plays? How many wild hypotheses, laughed at in their time, that had later proved correct? Ideas so crazy no one else had ever dared write them down? How many biographies of remarkable yet forgotten people? How many illustrations, maps and portraits? How much new history of Rome and its empire? Of Italy and Spain, of France and Britain? Of Greece and Egypt, Persia and Africa, Israel and Galilee? Of pagan gods and mystery religions? Of oracles and cults? Of Judaism, Christianity and other faiths?

  ‘It’s too much,’ wailed Lucia. ‘What do we do?’

  Carmen looked around. The sheer number of scrolls was indeed daunting, and it went against her instincts even to touch them, let alone expose them to the flooded passage through which they’d come. Yet this might be their one chance. By knocking down those two block walls, they themselves had exposed these texts not just to the volcano but to humidity too. ‘We take four each,’ she said. ‘The ones in ivory cylinders. They look the most valuable and best sealed.’ She went along the rows looking for interesting candidates until her eye was caught by a particular inscribed bronze plate. Paulus Tarseus, it read. Paul of Tarsus.

  St Paul himself.

  There was no ivory cylinder for her to take. No cylinder at all. Yet she had to have a look. Her hands trembling, she took the topmost scroll and set it on the dusty marble tabletop. The papyrus was astonishingly fresh and supple. She unrolled it gently to expose just about the last thing she might have expected: a map of Judea and the ancient eastern Mediterranean, instantly recognisable despite its distortions of scale and shape thanks to the familiar names of the islands and cities, spelled out in different inks that were all now converging on the same shade of sepia.

  Her first thought was that it must be a record of St Paul’s wanderings or perhaps the cities with which he’d corresponded. Except that it bore a date on its top corner: 762 Ab Urbe Condite. Seven hundred and sixty-two years after Rome’s founding, which translated to 9 CE, well before St Paul or Christianity. She could only think that, after Vesuvius had blown, panicked librarians had gathered scrolls from other parts of the Villa to bring here for safekeeping, while making a crude attempt to keep like with like.

  For some reason, the thought sent a shiver through her, as though at another tremor, although the place was still.

  A new berth. A best effort. A map that almost fitted.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Lucia, coming to join her, drawn as much by the look upon her face as the scroll itself.

  Carmen looked up at her. ‘I know what drove Alberts mad,’ she said.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  I

  The corrugated plastic roofing above the portico had been smashed open by volcanic fallout, allowing streams of rainwater to splash noisily onto the bare stone floor. A string of lights was already on, illuminating a passage into the hillside. Cesco could see a trail of footprints in the dust, all headed in, none coming back out. He followed them up a flight of steps onto a wooden walkway, then down a stone staircase to a low passage ankle-deep in alarmingly warm water and blocked by a fallen slab beneath which a pipe had been dug, and from which more water was bubbling. Two pairs of white overalls were neatly folded atop the slab, along with a pair of safety helmets. They could only be Carmen’s and Lucia’s. He felt sick with anxiety and began at once to strip. ‘Stay here,’ he told Izzo when he arrived behind him, breathing hard. ‘I’ll be five minutes. Ten at the most.’

  ‘But what if—’

  ‘Ten minutes,’ he said, trading his phone for Izzo’s torch. ‘Then get the fuck out of here. Your son will need you.’ He ducked his head, crawled into the pipe. More water was pouring in through an opening low down in its side. He could hold his breath for a good three minutes, he knew. That gave him ninety seconds before he had to turn back. He packed his lungs with air, then began the count as he pulled himself through the opening to find himself in a narrow long passage completely flooded with water, murky with sediment and crowded with ancient statues. No time to wonder, only to propel himself along. He’d only been at it for twenty seconds when some space opened up above him. He lifted his head for a fresh breath and shone his torch ahead. The passage cambered slowly upwards. He called out for Carmen and then Lucia. There was no reply. He swam onwards, first in a breaststroke and then, when headroom allowed, in a crawl. He reached a flight of steps. The water became shallow enough to wade. He splashed quickly through it, aware his ten minutes were running out fast, shouting for Carmen and Lucia as he went, dreading to think what their silence might mean.

  II


  Lucia added her torchlight to Carmen’s on the papyrus map, making it look like a stage being lit for a grand entrance. ‘Well?’ she asked. ‘What did drive Alberts mad?’

  ‘Tertullian,’ said Carmen. ‘More precisely, Marcion as recorded by Tertullian.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Your scroll. It doesn’t map perfectly onto the letters of St Paul in the Novum Testamentum Graece, does it?’

  ‘You wouldn’t expect it to,’ replied Lucia. ‘We’ve known for ever that St Paul’s letters were patched together and revised a little along the way.’

  ‘Yes. But that’s the point. The scroll does map perfectly onto the letters of St Paul in Marcion’s canon, as recorded by Tertullian. At least, I’m betting that it does. Alberts was already unnerved by your scroll, by its potential to undermine nearly two thousand years of Church teaching. That was why he was so desperate to stop the excavations, to prevent you from finding anything even worse. But then he read Tertullian yesterday morning and he realised it was already worse. Because your scroll proves Marcion right. Or not right exactly. It proves him honest. It shows that at least one letter included in his canon is effectively identical to one that existed in 79 CE, plausibly written by St Paul himself. Think of the implication. If that carries on, our current letters of St Paul will have to be thrown out and replaced by these earlier, more authentic Marcionite versions. And the thing is, we know exactly where study of those will lead us. We know because that’s what Marcion and his disciples did all those centuries ago. And it led them to reject the Old Testament and the Jewish God, even to deny Christ’s humanity. Three of the great pillars of Catholic teaching knocked down at a stroke.’