the place erupted.
In the fifth second, dead silence, except for the tinkling of glass hitting the floor. We were cramped into the corner behind the doorframe, staring across at Max and Tauber still clinging to the precarious staircase.
At the same time, I still saw the other angle as well, the same doorway but now from down the hall, through the eyes of my L Corp contact, as his crowd waited for us to show, for a clear shot at us.
“You wrecked the other staircase,” said a dry voice from down the hall. Through the L Corp side of my head, I could see the head blueshirt-a bullethead with a full red beard-talking and Marat slinking up behind him. How’d he get back downstairs if there was no other staircase? “So there’s no place else for you to go.”
“Like hell,” Max muttered. He and Tauber were hanging onto the monkey-bar staircase, their weight threatening to pull it down altogether at any moment.
“That’s all you got?” Max answered loudly, moving hand-over-hand very deliberately toward the landing. “Volkov offered three-quarters mill and a country house.”
“Offer?” Redbeard answered, sounding almost amused. “You’re taking offers?”
“We need an escape route before I run out of bullshit,” Max whispered. “Anyone has suggestions, now’s the time.”
The staircase shrieked and sagged sickeningly toward the outside wall of the building. If I’d ever heard that sound onboard a ship, I’d be looking for life rafts. The whole apparatus now hung entirely over the wide-open stairwell, Max and Tauber literally clinging to the handrails.
“The Italian police just want accomplices; you’re better off with us,” came Redbeard’s voice again.
I don’t know if Kate had risen to her feet or if I’d just lost track of her, but suddenly she was at the back of the stairwell, sheltered behind the doorframe, out of the line of fire, peering down into the dim landing.
“I think I can get a better offer,” Max yelled. In seconds, he and Tauber were either going to have to swing over onto the landing-in full view of our attackers-or plummet two stories down into the stairwell.
“I think you’re misinformed,” Redbeard answered drily, clearly close to the end of his patience.
“It’s a plumb-bob!” Kate mumbled, talking to herself, gazing into the stairwell with an idiotic level of excitement. It’s a cannon, I’d have understood. A plumb-bob?
“Are we outside the walls of Rome?” she demanded.
“ What walls?” Tauber rasped. His fingers were slipping; he was in no mood.
“The ancient city had walls!” she burst, like this was absurdly obvious. And, looking over the railing, I saw the plum-bob, conical, pointed, ridiculous, string looped over the doorknob two flights down. “We have to be outside the ancient city,” she muttered to herself.
“Time’s up, Renn! Come out or we come in!”
“What’s the point, Kate?”
She was smiling now, which was insane. “We go,” she said softly.
“Go? Where?”
“ Down,” she answered. She was already working her hands back and forth, in and out. A moment later, she leaned into the doorway and threw an air ball down the corridor. I had to grab the doorframe to keep from being sucked out after it. Marat’s team scattered in twenty directions as it flew between them, ripping pictures off the walls and pulling potted trees, newspapers, doormats, pairs of shoes and every bit of dirt and lint and paper in the hall into a crazy, swirling, rolling tide.
“Go!” Kate yelled, jumping brazenly across the landing into the stairwell. Max and Tauber swung and landed hard on the steps. We scrambled down two flights, breakneck, to the basement door. Max threw it open and then melted the lock, sitzing and sparking, behind us.
A rickety wood staircase plunged two more stories in seconds through a rough-cut chamber that looked carved out of the earth instead of built. An ancient narrow stone archway blocked the view below. I heard the others gasp as they reached it-when my turn came, I couldn’t help but do the same.
Stretched out below, under floodlights, lay the open-air courtyard of the Emperor Nero’s summer house. Two huge fountains framed an archway like the Lincoln Memorial but fancier; behind that stretched an open-roofed courtyard with a wading pool and a mosaic floor hand-painted by a cast of thousands.
“What’s the point of a museum education?” Kate whooped. “I know excavating equipment when I see it, that’s what.” Behind us, I could hear fists pounding at the melted doorway.
We ran a central corridor, between rooms painted with flat pre-perspective murals-mountain and garden landscapes, well-dressed Roman citizens dancing, drinking, bathing and some other stuff. Some of it looked pretty dirty, actually. I wouldn’t have minded spending a little more time there, under better circumstances. The lights cast dramatic shadows behind the pillars and the timber skeleton bracing the cavern ceiling.
“What the hell is this?”
“Rome is built on top of ancient Rome,” Kate yelled back. “They just buried the old neighborhoods and used the old buildings for foundations.”
She dashed to the last chamber, the largest, deepest room, where picks and trowels and paint brushes lay among wheelbarrows and two-by-fours in a disorderly pile.
“Lecture later!” Tauber yelled. “We need outta here, dammit!”
Kate lit a torch from the pile and threw it at me. Everyone grabbed one and she ran to the farthest corner, kicking over a construction pile with a clattering roar. She poked her torch into the corner, close to the ground, where a small oblong hole appeared just above the base of the wall.
It wasn’t a place you’d think of going on your own. It looked like the floor had given way. If you were going, you’d at least want a wetsuit.
“ That’s the way out,” Kate said. “But I’m not going first.”
Just at that moment, we heard a groan above us as the door to the apartment building began to give way.
I dropped my torch into the gap. It landed on a nearby floor with a muffled clatter. The walls within shown with an eerie glow. I took a breath as though diving underwater, swung into the hole and let go.
I fell further than expected and landed in a kind of silt that cushioned the impact. But it didn’t feel right from the first second-I got shivers just trying to get my footing. The torch was above me and only a few feet away but the floor was unstable-every time I reached for it, the ground underneath would shift under me.
“You okay?” Tauber called but I kept my mouth shut-I didn’t like it.
When I finally got the torch over my head, I saw…bones. The whole floor was bones, bones in layers, bones several layers deep, bones that turned to dust as soon as I touched them. All I wanted was to jump and run, get the hell away from this place as fast as I could. But with every movement, the ground kept dissolving under my feet.
I probably would have lost it right there except for hearing the door above give way with a crash. That was it-panic was something we couldn’t afford. I remembered what they said in the movies about quicksand-instead of struggling, I slowed down, moving slow and deliberate and suddenly, I was making headway. A solid stone ledge lined the room; I climbed up onto it and took a quick survey. The room was vast, the walls lined with small chambers covered with painted images.
“C’mon down. Just move slow,” I called and the others started dropping through the hole.
Several passages ran into the black distance. I ventured in that direction, torch in hand, and came face to face with Jesus, an ancient flat-perspective version painted three times life-size, rough-featured, stark, a whole lot edgier than the greeting-card Jesus I grew up with. This guy looked like a carpenter. I could see him losing his temper, tossing the money-lenders bodily out of the Temple. A working-man’s savior, with a wand(!) in hand.
“Catacombs,” Kate said, scrambling up the ledge. “Common people couldn’t bury in the Holy City, so outside the walls, it’s all catacombs, miles and miles of them.” She leaned her torch into the passages, the light dancing into the distance.
“We should split up,” Max said.
“Bad idea,” Kate answered sharply. “These bones aren’t all ancient. People go into catacombs and don’t come out.” She ran down the center passage and we followed, bunched into the narrow space.
The passage quickly got so tight, we could barely scrape through. Rough-hewn walls ran to several-story-high ceilings, miles of stone wall, every few steps bringing another row of chambers floor-to-ceiling, some wide-open displaying loose bones or skeletons, others marked by stone blocks with handwritten legends in Greek.
Everything was painted chalky white, set off with bright borders, flat-perspective trees, real and mythical
