this.’ She dropped the brick and selected a grey friable chunk the size of a small cat. ‘
‘Yes, I agree,’ De Stefano said. ‘The diggers of the Liberian Area catacombs were only a few swipes of the pickax away from the surprise of their lives.’
‘It
‘Just as you suggested during your student days,’ De Stefano agreed, ‘it does appear to be an underground funeral chamber for pre-Christians. The above-ground monument was probably razed and likely disappeared before the catacombs were built.’
He took a clear plastic specimen bag from his pocket. ‘If the first-century dating was ever going to be in doubt, this settled it. We’ve found several so far.’
Elisabetta took the bag. It contained a large silver coin. The bust on the obverse showed a flat-nosed man with curly hair who was wearing a laurel wreath. The inscription read ‘NERO CLAVDIVS CAESAR’. She flipped the bag over. The reverse was an elaborate arch flanked by the letters S and C –
‘Precisely,’ Trapani said, visibly impressed by the nun’s acumen.
‘But this isn’t a typical columbarium, is it?’ she said, glancing at the tarps.
‘Hardly.’ De Stefano waved his hand at the hanging wall tarp. ‘Please take it down, Gian Paolo.’
The men pulled the tarp free of its pins and gathered it up. Underneath were rows of small dome-shaped niches carved into the cement, many containing stone funerary urns. The array of niches was interrupted by one smooth panel of creamy plaster. Gian Paolo trained a floodlight on it.
The plaster was covered with a wheel of painted symbols.
Elisabetta approached it and smiled. ‘The same as my wall.’
The horns of Aries, the Ram.
The twin pillars of Gemini, the Twins.
The piercing arrow of Sagittarius.
The complementary scrolls of Cancer, the Crab.
The crescent of the Moon.
The male symbol, Mars. The female symbol, Venus.
All of the zodiac. The planets. A circle of images.
De Stefano drew close, almost rubbing against Elisabetta’s shoulders. ‘The plaster you studied must have come from the interior wall of a smaller room. It took this cave-in to expose the main chamber.’
One symbol particularly drew her attention. She stood beneath it and raised herself on her toes for a better look.
It appeared to be a stick-figure, the trunk a vertical line, the arms C-shaped upwards as if raised, the legs C- shaped downwards. The vertical line extended above the arms to create a head or neck but it also extended below the legs.
‘It’s surely the symbol for Pisces, but it’s traditionally portrayed on its side. Vertically, it looks more like a man, doesn’t it? My original wall had the same variant. And if it’s meant to be a man, what do you suppose that is?’ Elisabetta asked, pointing at the segment between the legs. ‘A phallus?’
The archeologists seemed embarrassed at hearing a nun utter the word and De Stefano quickly rejoindered, ‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘What, then?’ she asked.
The old professor paused a moment and told Trapani, ‘All right, pull back the ground tarps.’
The men worked quickly, almost theatrically to accomplish their version of a dramatic reveal, exposing the length and breadth of the debris-strewn floor.
Elisabetta put her hand to her mouth to stifle an oath. ‘My God!’ she whispered. ‘How many?’
De Stefano sighed. ‘As you can see, our excavations have been hasty and there’s undoubtedly jumble and stackage from the cave-in, but there are approximately eighty-five adults and twelve children.’
The bodies were mostly skeletal, but because of the sealed atmosphere some were partially mummified, retaining tan patches of adherent skin, bits of hair and fragments of clothing. Elisabetta made out a few faces with their mouths agape – fixed, it almost seemed, in mid-gasp.
The remains were only incompletely exposed; hundreds of man-hours would be required to extricate them thoroughly and carefully from the rubble. There were so many that she found it hard to focus on one at a time.
Then, out of the tangle of arms, legs, ribs, skulls and spines one singular feature emerged, crashing into Elisabetta’s consciousness like a huge wave pounding against a rock. Her eyes darted from one to another until she felt her vision blur and her knees go liquid.
It was undeniable.
Every body, every man, woman and child stretched out before her possessed a bony tail.
FIVE
JANKO MULEJ HABITUALLY cracked his knuckles when he became impatient. The gesture wasn’t lost on Krek.
‘What’s the matter?’ Krek demanded.
Mulej was in his forties, a decade younger than his host, ugly as the back of a bus, as Krek liked to say, even to Mulej’s face. He was almost twice Krek’s size, a giant of a man who would have had to go around in tracksuits were it not for his excellent tailor in Ljubljana. ‘Perhaps we should pack it in for the night.’
The great room at Castle Krek never got warm even in the height of summer and on this spring night Krek had deemed a fire to be in order. He liked his flames to leap high and throughout the evening he liberally piled on fresh logs to keep the massive fireplace roaring hotly.
The medieval manor had been in his family for four hundred years though it was nominally out of Krek hands during the unpleasant decades of Communist rule. Nestled in several hundred hectares of Slovenian woodlands, a few kilometers from Lake Bled, its original squared-off keep dated from the thirteenth century. The deep moat was stocked with carp and from outward appearances the ragged stonework of the castle suggested a certain shabbiness and disrepair.
That impression was obliterated upon entry. Krek’s father had been a reclusive man who had rarely left the grounds. Throughout his life he lavished greater attention on his basement-to-parapet renovation of the castle than on his son. Ivo Krek had concentrated on the guts of the house, the masonry, the plumbing, furnace, wiring. His son shared his father’s devotion to the castle but turned his keen eye toward furnishings and trappings of modernity. The reception rooms with their Romanesque arches were lavishly appointed with period antiques but Krek blended in contemporary overstuffed pieces to make the rooms inhabitable. Flat-panel televisions coexisted with medieval walnut carvings. A sixteenth-century cabinet with painted hunting scenes contained a €400,000 Danish audio system. The state-of-the-art chef’s kitchen could have sprung from the pages of a decorating magazine.
He chose to receive Mulej and others in the great room. Its magnificent scale dwarfed men, even one of Mulej’s size, and Krek liked his people to feel small in his presence.
Krek glanced at the grandfather clock. It was ten o’clock. ‘I’ve been up since four and you’re the one who’s tired?’ he asked Mulej, his voice rising. ‘Don’t you know what’s at stake here? Don’t you realize how little time we have?’
Mulej shifted his considerable weight on the armless leather sofa. He was seated uncomfortably close to the fire and was sweating profusely but he would never move from the spot because this was where Krek had placed him. The table between them was piled high with corporate folios, financial reports and a selection of
