Sam heartily and slapped his back. “Good to see you, Sam.” He took Remi’s hand and kissed it. “Remi, it is a delight to see you again. You soothe my eyes after the long drive.”
“Please come in and make yourself part of the party, Captain,” she said. “Do you have any of your men with you? They’re welcome to join us too.”
“No,” he said. “You remember the trouble we had last time because we were noticed leaving Napoli. This time we’ve split up and divided the stops we must make. I gave myself the most pleasant.”
“Thank you,” said Sam. “Let me get you something to eat and drink. If we don’t yet have what you like, we can order anything. We’re in a hotel, after all.”
“I’ll have a soft drink,” he said. “Otherwise, water. I still have meetings this evening.”
Sam gave him a glass of ginger ale, and they sat at the table. Boiardi said, “The Ministry of Culture has approved our proposal of a joint project in the catacomb. They have also granted a permit to excavate, secured the cooperation of the Divine Word Missionaries, and sent my squad to assist. When do we go in?”
“We’d like to start Tuesday, when the catacomb is closed to visitors.”
“Perfect,” said the captain. “We’d rather not waste men on crowd control.”
“How did you get the Ministry to act so quickly?”
“You placed the first treasure—the one from Mantua—with the Ministry voluntarily and that showed you to be responsible and legitimate. You fought and saved Carabinieri from criminals, proving yourselves to be true friends of the nation, of historical study, and of me, Sergio Boiardi.”
“I’m certainly glad we did,” said Sam. “We plan to ask the Ministry to take physical custody of what we find this time too.”
“Excellent,” he said. “We’ll be prepared to transport any finds to a space in Il Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli right away.”
“Will you be coming down in the catacomb with us?”
“Yes. I and two other men will join you. I will also have three men at the entrance with trucks, a radio link with the Rome police, and a first-aid station.”
“Thank you,” said Sam. “Can you be ready to go in on Tuesday?”
“We could go tomorrow.”
“Tuesday will be fine,” Sam said. “What time do you think we should start?”
“Four a.m. would be good. The traffic in Rome became impossible the day Caesar was assassinated,” said Boiardi. “We’re waiting for it to clear.”
AT FOUR A.M. TUESDAY, THE MEMBERS OF THE EXPEDITION gathered inside the walls of the Catacomb of Domitilla at 282 Via delle Sette Chiese. It was not yet light out, but a representative of the Divine Word Missionaries named Brother Paolo was there to admit them. He wore the brown robe of a monk, but his bespectacled face seemed more like that of a businessman than a monk, and his socks and shoes were like those someone might wear going to an office. The total effect was like a man caught in his bathrobe before leaving for work.
They followed him down a set of narrow steps to the front doors of a fourth-century church. Only the roof and a single row of windows were visible above ground level, and the interior of the church seemed very old. It was bare, more a relic now than a place of worship. The group brought their gear down into it, and Brother Paolo showed them its three naves, then pointed out the doorway that led to the catacomb and sent them on their way.
It took the explorers about a half hour to get their carts down the first three sets of stone steps to the level where they were to begin their search and then to fill it with their equipment and supplies, which was in backpacks. In the days of preparation, the quantity of these items had been gradually pared down to the essentials—light, photographic gear, tools, water, and food. Now each of the explorers strapped a light to the forehead with an elastic strap.
As they made their way through the first tunnels, what they saw were empty shelves, a few small Roman frescoes plastered and painted over stone or brick, a few empty rooms built as crypts. There were shrines, chambers that were painted, but most of the burial places were unadorned, shiny tufa stone. As they went on, they saw more and more spaces that were still occupied. Now there were large stones to seal the tomb niches. Albrecht began to deliver lessons. “In this section we can relax a bit. The tombs are from the period around 550 to 600 C.E., long after Attila was buried. He can’t be in a tunnel that hadn’t been dug when he died. We want the sections with tombs that were dug before the year 453. You will notice that none of the seal stones gives the date as a number. During that era, the Romans used the Julian calendar, which began in 45 B.C.E. Years were not numbered. Instead they were given the names of the two consuls who took office on January first. The year Attila died, the consuls were Flavius Opilio and Johannes Vincomalus. Remember those names. Attila was still encamped at his stronghold by the Tisza River when he died, meaning it was too early in the year to go off to war. That means he probably died in
Remi said, “Will it give his name?”
“Almost certainly not, unless it’s disguised in some way. He was cunning, clever. He would not want a Roman to find his tomb. But I think he wanted it to be found some day.”
“Certainly he gave us all the clues,” said Remi.
“He made us work backward, from his most recent treasure to his very first. I believe he wanted a Hun to find the treasures and then use the wealth to do something in the world—but first to conquer it. Perhaps he wanted a descendant to find it. Apparently none of his three sons was up to the task of ruling the world and he undoubtedly knew it.”
“Now that we’re here, I feel as though I must have missed something along the way, some way of distinguishing his tombstone from the others,” Remi said.
“Finding the tomb is part of his test too. We’ll use what we’ve got—date and age—and see what else there is. The catacomb was used between the second and the seventh centuries. His will be somewhere in the earlier ones. And I’m guessing that there will be something that outsiders wouldn’t recognize—maybe a linguistic signal, something that’s not in Latin.”
“I hope he didn’t make it too hard for us non-Huns.”
“I have faith that he didn’t. Think about what you and Sam have just been through. He’s been teaching you about himself. He’s been forcing you to go and stand in each of the places where his life was changed. He’s taken you from the final days, when he was at the height of his power, marrying the beautiful Gothic princess Ildico in his stronghold on the Hungarian Plain surrounded by his hundreds of thousands of fanatical followers, all the way back to the very first moment of his career. Now we know that the start wasn’t a triumph. It was the moment when an orphaned twelve-year-old stood in his father’s grave, about to be sent away as a hostage. And what he did was vow to conquer Rome and be buried here.”
“But he didn’t conquer Rome.”
“He reached the point where it was in his power to do that but chose instead to preserve his overpowering army for another day.”
“And he died before he could come back.”
“True,” said Albrecht. “His death was a complete surprise to everyone. During the long period while he was burying his hoards of pillaged treasure and leaving messages, I’m sure there was never a doubt in his mind that he would take Rome and declare himself emperor. When he turned back at the Po River in 452, he was aware that there was nobody left who could stop him. Flavius Aetius, who had prevented him from extending his kingdom to the Atlantic coast, no longer had an army that could stand against him. It turned out that Aetius’s nominal victory at Chalons-en-Champagne was the last victory by any Western Roman army anywhere, and I believe Attila was astute enough to see it that way. I think that in 453, in late spring or early summer when campaigning season began, he would have gone back to attack Rome. Instead he died.”
