The Heretic Scroll

by Will Adams

  ‘I haven’t even started yet. Not until Monday.’

  ‘Oh. Well, you look stunning anyway. Radiant. As though…’ He tailed off uncertainly. His eyes flickered to her stomach.

  She couldn’t restrain her smile; her glow grew beatific. ‘Yes,’ she said.

  He stood there dumbly. He didn’t know what to say. ‘How long?’

  ‘Three months or so.’

  ‘And…? Is it…?’

  ‘I don’t know. Not for sure.’ She gave a little shrug. ‘Except that with him, we always used protection.’

  He nodded. His eyes dropped again. There was nothing yet to see, but he felt the strangest tingling anyway. Parenthood had always been Emanuela’s dream rather than his, yet he now entered an almost dreamlike state, as though the world were cotton wool. ‘May I?’ he asked.

  ‘If you’d like.’

  He approached her slowly, placed his palm upon her belly. All he could feel was her warmth, yet he couldn’t take his hand away. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he blurted out suddenly. ‘I fucked everything up.’

  ‘We both did.’

  ‘No. I mean from before it all went crazy. I wasn’t the husband I thought I’d be. It made me resentful.’

  ‘I know. That’s what I meant too.’

  ‘I’d do anything…’

  ‘Anything?’ she asked. ‘Do you truly mean that?’

  He frowned. It had been an expression of regret rather than a pledge. Yet her words suggested that that was how she’d taken it. Or, at least, that she was prepared to pretend. He took a few moments to think it through. Marriages took work; he’d learned that much the hard way. Vows were serious business and needed proper consideration. So, then. If Emanuela wanted to stay in Naples, would he brave the jeers, dirty looks and cold shoulders of neighbours and old friends? Would he give up drinking and take more exercise? Do his fair share of housework for once? Could he swallow his pride to become a stay-at-home dad? Could he truly forgive her infidelity? Most of all, if it turned out that way, would he love Conte’s child as his own? He mulled each of these questions both separately and together. Then he weighed them against the wretchedness of his life since she’d walked out. ‘Yes,’ he said soberly. ‘I mean it. I’ll do anything.’

  His hand was still on her belly. She covered it with her own. ‘Good,’ she said.

  II

  They spent the afternoon painting the kitchen and the dining room. Both had been in dire need of a fresh coat, as indeed was this whole house, but it left them too pungent to eat in. They wrapped up warm, therefore, and carried the gas heaters out onto the porch to dine at the long wooden table. Izzo rustled up a salad and vinaigrette while Valentina cut bread and grated Parmesan to go with the huge bowl of gnocchi alla sorrentina his sister Teresa and her daughter Emilia had brought over, finished off by delizie al limone from his favourite Eboli pastry shop.

  Their new landlord had left them six bottles of red from his own vineyard, part moving-in gift, part apology for how shabby the house was, but mostly in exchange for Izzo’s promise to tart it up. It was a little raw in the throat, sure, but it undeniably warmed the heart. And the heart was going to need plenty of warming these coming months, for the house was essentially a summer refuge, with thin walls and spacious tall rooms that would become iceboxes over a hard winter. But the eruption had left Izzo so straitened that it was all he could afford.

  Not everything was bad, however. Mario had settled with unexpected ease into his new school, thanks largely to his blossoming friendship with his young cousin Emilia. His own transfer had been approved, making him Eboli’s new Head of Serious Crime. Not that there was much of it compared to Herculaneum. He spent most of his days tossing paper balls back and forth with his new colleagues. Better yet, he’d driven the few kilometres down the road to Battipaglia to introduce himself to his counterpart there, a formidable woman who’d put off retirement until she could find a replacement she was prepared to trust her town to. On the strength of Izzo’s recommendation, she’d given Valentina a month to prove herself. And – seeing that Valentina’s finances were as screwed as his own – he’d offered her his couch to crash on too.

  Late last night she’d slipped into his room. ‘For warmth,’ she’d mumbled, as she’d climbed beneath his duvet. He still didn’t quite know what to make of that. She’d never shown much sign of fancying him and it had undeniably been chilly. Yet Valentina was tough as they came, scornful of sympathy and famously impervious to cold. But sometimes even the toughest need a friend.

  Dinner finished and cleared away, he passed out shot glasses and then took around the bottles. Amaro for the adults. Apple juice for the kids. He put a fond hand on Isabella’s shoulder as he reached over her to pour. She was one of them, now, thanks to her having saved Mario. When he’d told her it was his dear wish that she’d stay with them for ever, it had been as though a hard glass phial had shattered inside her chest, allowing out all the happiness, vulnerability and kindness that she’d bottled up in it. Remarkably, she even burst out laughing sometimes. And she’d started taking real trouble in the kitchen too.

  He returned to the head of the table. ‘Alla nostra,’ he said, raising his glass. To us. Our family. He looked around at them, raising their own glasses in return, huddled in their winter clothes, faces shining from the cold. And he felt a sudden hot love for them all in his chest, even before he drank; a glad certainty that life was going to get better now, that it even might get good again. He drained his Amaro in one draught, then sought out Valentina with his eyes, to tip his glass to her.

  ‘For warmth,’ he said.

  III

  The roads had all been closed off by police barriers, from the top of Herculaneum down to the sea. Lighting had been set up too, as if for a parade. Which it was, in its own way, if an unusually macabre one. Tourists and locals alike spent hours there, transfixed by the hot grey sludge still spewing from Vesuvius’s broken peak and creeping slowly down towards the sea, its thin crust constantly ripping open to reveal the molten orange lava beneath before scabbing over again. A whole town swallowed, with only the tops of a few sturdy buildings still protruding, like the last traces of a sunken fleet. And hot too. So hot that, even at this distance, Carmen could feel it on her face.

  Cesco tapped his wrist to indicate the time. Their time in Naples was almost over. Her research was complete, Raff’s photographic studio successfully closed, their apartment handed back. Tonight they’d be taking the train back up to Rome for one last weekend together there before Carmen flew back to the States for another stint with her mother and a chance to catch up with her professors. And, with her mother’s condition so precarious, who could say for sure when she’d next be back?

  ‘So, then,’ murmured Cesco, standing beside her at the barrier. ‘The thing that lady said. Any thoughts?’

  Remarkably, despite the violence of the eruption and the pyroclastic avalanche, only a few dozen people were known to have died or were still missing. Everyone else had got out in time. If the evacuation hadn’t been called when it had… It was unthinkable. But it had been called, thanks to Fatima Zirpoli, transformed overnight from tiresome scold into national celebrity.

  ‘I mean she is a lawyer,’ persisted Cesco. ‘A US immigration lawyer. A high-priced US immigration lawyer.’

  ‘I know who she is,’ said Carmen. ‘I was on the call too, remember?’

  ‘I’m just saying, I think we she should accept that she knows what she’s talking about. What’s the point of paying her otherwise?’

  Carmen crouched to lay her white chrysanthemums against the barrier. They felt all wrong to her, for she connected them with celebration. Yet here in Naples they were the flower of mourning. But perhaps both meanings were equally fitting, for it wasn’t just Fatima Zirpoli whose reputation had been transformed by the eruption. The revelation of Taddeo Santoro as murderer, thief and rapist had justified to most Lucia’s killing of him. And the way she’d given up her life to protect the scrolls had t
urned her into a posthumous heroine too, though the success or failure of her sacrifice wouldn’t be known for years or even decades yet, what with the Villa buried once more beneath a good thirty metres of volcanic material.

  ‘So how about it?’ continued Cesco. ‘Considered purely as a legal strategy, I mean?’

  That made her laugh. ‘Is this really your way of asking?’

  ‘I tried the other way,’ he pointed out. ‘It did not go well.’

  Their lawyer had been blunt. Under ordinary circumstances, and considering the current climate, Cesco’s criminal history and his failure to declare it on his original application would have meant curtains for a visa. But circumstances were not ordinary. He still had three plausible paths available to him, each of which might help the other. The first was their recent adventure. News of the St Paul scroll had electrified the Christian world. As did the Villa’s vast library, of which Carmen had exclusive footage, while the scrolls they’d brought out had earned them a lot of goodwill with Victor, who was entrusted with them since being appointed the new head of the library’s special collections. Universities, churches and other institutions around the world had inundated them with invitations to talk. They’d made it clear to the American ones that they’d only give such talks together, thus hoping to recruit powerful allies to their cause. Then there was Cesco’s colourful and sympathetic life story. Despite his general wariness of the media, he’d given interviews to everyone who’d asked, retelling the painful story of how his family had been massacred by ’Ndrangheta gunmen, forcing him into hiding; and how he’d survived hand to mouth in part by committing crimes for which he was truly sorry and had already been making reparations. But there was a third possible path too. One to a different kind of visa.

  ‘Well?’ said Cesco. ‘How about it?’

  But Carmen only shook her head, if a little sadly. ‘Your lawyer also made it clear that the INS don’t much like it when people marry just to get around them.’

  ‘But we wouldn’t be.’

  ‘I know. But that’s how it would look. Anyway, she said it could still take years.’

  ‘Then what do you suggest?’

  She slipped her hand into his. ‘We’re in this together. That much is settled now. So how about we let your lawyer deal with the INS, and we get on with our lives as best we can?’ Then she added with the slightest of smiles: ‘Besides, first Alaric and now this. Who the hell has any idea what’s going to happen next?’

  Acknowledgements

  The New Testament is such a foundational text in Western culture that it can be easy to take for granted. I was certainly guilty of that myself. I’d often heard, for example, that the Gospel of Mark had likely been written before that of Matthew, probably in Rome at some time around 70 CE. But I had no real idea why people might think that, or how strong the evidence was, one way or the other. And there were multiple other associated questions of which I was also nebulously aware, but which I’d never got around to studying properly. How accurate were the various gospels? What was the relationship between them? Who were their authors? Where did they get their material? And how were they chosen to be part of the New Testament? As is so often the case with my books, The Heretic Scroll began as an effort to get to grips with those and other questions.

  Many thanks must go first of all to David Inglis, both for his wonderful website on the Synoptic Problem, Marcion and associated matters, and also for his generosity with his time and knowledge in helping me to understand some of the more obscure and difficult topics I touched on while plotting out this book. It truly wouldn’t have been the same without him – though of course he shouldn’t be blamed for any of the mistakes I’ve no doubt made, or for any of the wilder inferences I’ve drawn. Thanks also to my friend Clive Pearson, for talking the story through with me, and to Christopher Bowkett for letting me read a copy of his thesis on anti-Mafia policing in Herculaneum. I’d also like to thank Michael Bhaskar, Kit Nevile, Jacqui Lewis and the rest of the team at Canelo for their invaluable help and feedback in getting the book done.

  I’ve tried to keep the history as accurate as I reasonably can, though I’ve allowed myself the liberty of tweaking the layout of Naples and its surrounding suburbs here and there for dramatic effect. No doubt I’ve made a fair number of unwitting errors too. As always, these belong to me and me alone.

  The Rossi & Nero Thrillers

  The Sacred Spoils

  The Heretic Scroll

  Find out more

  About the Author

  Will Adams is the author of a number of acclaimed adventure thrillers, including the Daniel Knox series, in which the underwater archaeologist hero explores some of the great mysteries of the ancient world. His novels have been published in over twenty different languages. He writes full-time and lives in Suffolk.

  Also by Will Adams

  The Rossi & Nero Thrillers

  The Sacred Spoils

  The Heretic Scroll

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2020 by Canelo

  Canelo Digital Publishing Limited

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  Oxford OX2 0DF

  United Kingdom

  Copyright © Will Adams, 2020

  The moral right of Will Adams to be identified as the creator of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 9781788637145

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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