Naples, Italy
They arrived at the Bay of Naples on an afternoon favored by sun, warmth and the ever-present scent of olives wafting over the calm waters. The Royal Palace, its immense southern facade of red and gray, with hanging trellises and countless windows, could be seen a mile away as they stood on the front deck of the tourist-laden ferry.
After docking, they walked down the ramp and passed through a small plaza. Waxman efficiently handled the customs procedures, then strode ahead with Helen, who only glanced back once to make sure Caleb and Nina were following. Helen’s urgency showed in the way her arms swung forward and back and the strides she took bounding up the plaza stairs.
Her enthusiasm was catching, Caleb thought. Despite the nagging fear that Waxman had tricked him, that this was all part of a setup to get him back into the group, and despite the stationary in the briefcase-and the certainty that Waxman was more than he seemed-this was exciting. He couldn’t help but feel that unavoidable thrill, that rush of adventure scholars only fantasize about while locked away in their libraries or rectangular classrooms in front of bleary-eyed students.
He and Nina tried to keep up, but soon decided on keeping their own pace. The other members of the team had stayed in Alexandria with instructions to continue remote viewing, focusing on the harbor and a way into the chambers under the lighthouse.
Caleb felt more than a little awkward being around Nina; he hadn’t had a girlfriend in two years, nothing more recent than a few passing crushes from infatuated students. But compared to those innocent and naive flirtations, Nina was a lioness, a tempting and refined young woman with skin like molasses and eyes so green they blinded him to the very fact he was staring. He had been caught snatching glimpses at her more than twice during the ferry ride. She had merely smiled, amused by his fawning interest.
“Let’s keep up,” she said in a low voice, nudging him with her elbow as she pulled ahead. She wore a summer blouse, red and white, colors that reminded him of the billowing sails of a visionary boat, and shorts that showed off her golden legs ending in high-heeled sandals. Mirrored sunglasses nestled on the soft-gelled curls of her thick black hair.
Caleb picked up the pace, his pulse rising in time as he caught up, painfully tearing his eyes away from her body as she climbed up a marble staircase toward the palace.
Up ahead, Helen and Waxman were talking about how to document this part of the project. “If we find what we’re looking for, the discovery will be documentation enough of our success,” Helen argued.
They crossed the square as pigeons flew away, parting biblically before them, then resuming their settled positions after they had passed. Caleb held the door open for Nina, whose bright lips peeled back into a playful smile before she slipped through, and gave a lingering glance to the palace grounds, to the lush lawns, manicured rose bushes and polished statues on the terrace overlooking the shimmering harbor.
Once inside the palace, Waxman directed them away from the crowd of tourists and went to a side door where a dour-faced man in a blue suit waited impatiently. When Waxman introduced himself, the man looked quite relieved.
“Giuseppe Marcos,” he said. “Director for the Biblioteca Nazionale, the largest collection of books in Italy outside the Vatican archives, here in the Royal Palace.” Caleb took a look around, marveling at the architecture and contents of this first hall alone. Apart from its great collection of Renaissance artwork and sculptures spanning several centuries, the palace also contained the Officina dei Papiri, which analyzed and preserved the ancient scrolls recovered from nearby Herculaneum.
Despite his lack of personal charisma and his occasional stumbling over English vocabulary, Marcos had a fluid, beautiful voice; in another life he could have been a tenor in the Royal Opera. Nina seemed to adore hearing him speak, sticking close, making the man uncomfortable. Giuseppe briefly covered the palace’s construction in the early seventeenth century, begun as a suitable resort home for Spain’s King Philip III who, ironically, had promised to visit Naples but never quite got there.
Waxman, in his usual tactless manner, cut off the history lesson and the tour. “Can we move on? We’re short on time, and we came to see the laboratory.”
Apologizing, the guide led the way, glancing over his shoulder frequently. “This is very irregular, no? We do not get many visitors to see the papyri, or the library. They think it is, how do you Americans say… lame. ”
“Others might,” Caleb protested, “but I’d like to see your library very much.” He was salivating at the chance to actually touch the leatherbound spines of books hundreds of years old. He pictured lonely monks working away in dusty monasteries, copying down the Classics while the world toiled in ignorance through the Dark Ages.
Giuseppe smiled. “Well, you will get a look, sir. But I must say, Mr. Waxman and Ms…”
“Mrs.,” Helen said. “Mrs. Crowe.”
Caleb saw Waxman make a face Helen missed.
“Or just Helen,” she added. “Please, Signore Marcos. I realize what we’re asking is very unorthodox, but we have good reason to believe that a certain scroll in your Herculaneum collection is of great archaeological interest to Alexandria.”
“I respect that, Miss-eh, Helen, but I fear you may have come all this way for nothing.”
They passed from one marble-tiled corridor into the next, where large tapestries hung side by side, presenting dull-faced members of Bourbon royalty observing the humble approach of visitors through their ancestral home.
After stepping through a mahogany doorway, Caleb’s heart skipped a beat when he saw a wall-spanning series of bookshelves. He tried to peer around Waxman’s shoulder to see the rest of the library foyer.
Giuseppe said, “You must understand. Of the two thousand or so scrolls recovered from the excavation at the Villa dei Papiri, we have only succeeded in opening some fifteen hundred. And that has taken two hundred years.”
They entered the library wing. Then quickly, before Caleb had a chance to peruse the titles or even to see how deep the shelves went, they hurried after Marcos down a central staircase. Caleb grinned and followed quickly. The smell of ages past, of old, musty paper, was exhilarating to him.
Giuseppe stopped at a brightly lit, bookshelf-lined room that reminded Caleb of his high school library. “The Officina dei Papiri,” their guide said. “Here we work on the scrolls. It is a difficult process. First, we paint the burnt exterior of the rolls with gelatina. When it dries we separate and unroll them, sometimes only millimeters at a time. This is a new process, developed recently by Norwegian papyrologists. It is much better than the previous method-a machine designed by Antonio Piaggio in 1796.”
He made a depressing face.
“But you must understand the situation: hundreds of scrolls were lost when the first excavators tossed them into the trash heaps. They believed the pieces carbonizzati to be lumps of coal. Also, early attempts to open the scrolls, they destroyed many. If the scroll you seek is not among those already opened, I fear your odds are not very good.”
Caleb saw his mother’s expression fall.
Nina sighed.
Giuseppe pointed to where seven men and three women, all in white coats, peered into microscopes at tiny fragments. Others worked at aligning blackened shreds on a steel table. Another woman held a magnifying glass and examined some fingernail-sized fragments.
Caleb cleared his throat. “What if we were to give you some help and tell you where this scroll had been located in Piso’s library?”
Giuseppe made a perplexed face, as if he feared his knowledge of English had failed. “What do you mean?”
Helen offered a weak smile. “We may be able to tell you in what part of the library this particular item was stored at the time of the eruption.”
“That,” he said, looking at them sideways, “would be impressive indeed. I should like to know how you came by such knowledge. However, it would still do no good. All the recovered scrolls were found in great heaps, buried by five-hundred-degree mud, then compressed through time.”
Waxman coughed. “So you’re telling us you can be of no help?”
“I am sorry. As I said, you are welcome to look through the scrolls we have already managed to catalog. Mostly we have discovered the writings of Philodemus, a first-century philosopher. Apparently a friend of Piso-”
“So you’ve come across nothing unusual?” Helen asked. “Maybe something astrological?”
Giuseppe shook his head. “Regrettably, no. Such findings would be of great interest to me personally.” He spoke under his breath so the others wouldn’t hear. “To be honest, philosophy has always bored me. I spend many, many hours dreaming of finding some treasure map or magical incanta-”
“So,” Waxman interrupted him again, pointing to a room in the back, where great shelves were stacked with the assorted chunks of what appeared to be black rock, “in there might be what we need, but your little team here won’t get to it for, what… decades?”
Giuseppe nodded. “Manpower is short, and the process is-”
“Difficult,” Helen said with a sigh. “So you said.”
“ Mi dispiace.” Giuseppe shrugged and sighed. “There is always hope that new techniques will aid our search. Some new application of MRI technology perhaps? But until then, this is the way we must work. We know there is also another section of the library still buried, and we are waiting for permission to excavate. Maybe we find thousands more scrolls.”
Caleb hung his head so he didn’t have to see the expression on his mother’s face.
“But it is ironic, no?” Giuseppe smiled, and he seemed surprised that his guests didn’t join in the joke. “Don’t you see? Vesuvius, the very event that caused such destruction, also preserved these scrolls. They exist far beyond the normal lifespan of papyrus and ink. Frozen in time, just waiting”-he motioned to the lab and the shelves and the people all diligently poking and teasing the material free with tweezers-“waiting here for future generations to give new life to history.”
Caleb lifted his head, and gave him a smile. “Just like the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi texts were preserved in caves or underground.”
“Yes, yes. These scrolls are like… who is it, Rip Van Winkle? They go to sleep for a long time and wake up to a different world. And best of all, they escape the elements and the persecutions, the fanatismo of book burning and intolerance of the Dark Ages.”
Caleb thought for a minute, and was about to give away their real purpose. He was about to say how the same thing applied to the lighthouse: if there really was some kind of treasure down there, the earthquakes had sealed it in and prevented intrusion by another ten centuries of curiosity-seekers and treasure hunters. Sealed it in, possibly, until technology-or our developing psychic powers-could offer a way inside. Maybe that time was now. As much as he hated to admit it, he was starting to feel the contagious sting of his mother’s obsession.
Waxman pulled Helen out by the elbow. In the stairwell he said, loud enough for Caleb to hear, “A wasted trip, then, unless we can RV the exact scroll and then wait for these guys to unroll it and hope we can actually read something of what’s left.”
“I know. But there has to be another way.” Helen looked away from him and met Caleb’s eyes. “We’ll review the scrolls they’ve already translated-”
“But it doesn’t sound like they’ve found it.” Waxman shook his head at Caleb as he walked past. “Thanks for the wild goose chase.”
After they all went back up the stairs, Caleb returned to the library. He thanked Giuseppe and shook his hand. Then he lingered for a moment, looking about the room with envy. Every one of those scholars in there, peering into the creases of time… he wanted to join them, wanted to pull up a microscope and hunker down for hours, days and weeks, sifting through the past. But that dream would have to wait.
He found Nina in a courtyard, standing between the paws of a massive marble lion. Sunlight danced among the ferns and tomato plants, and a large iron fountain bubbled nearby. The scent of espresso carried on the breeze from a street-side cafe. They were surrounded by three-story walls lined with gorgeous balconies and doorways beckoning into splendid rooms. Through two archways in the western wall Caleb could see the colorful sails of the pleasure boats basking in the glittering Bay of Naples.
Helen and Waxman were standing in the shadows under the east section, engaged in a heated discussion. Helen waved her hands, at times pointing in their direction, then to the ground. Her bright shawl made her stand out, even among the European tourists in their colorful outfits and wide-brimmed hats.
Nina playfully put her hand into the stone lion’s mouth to feel its teeth. “So what do you think they’re talking about?”
Caleb shrugged. “Probably blaming me for slowing down their project.”
“Probably,” she said, laughing and petting the lion’s head. “Sorry Caleb. Just kidding. You know, your mother thinks you’re the most powerful psychic she’s ever seen.”
“What?”
“It’s true.” Nina tilted her head, resting it against the lion’s mane as she stared around the courtyard with a contented eye, as if she imagined herself a princess and this whole palace was hers. “It’s true. I heard them talking earlier, on the boat. She told Waxman that you seem to pick up things without even trying, unlike the others. Visions just come to you.”
“Only the ones I don’t want,” he muttered. “Visions of… my father, images everyone says can’t be real. What about those?” He glared at his mother. “How could she think I’m so talented while she denies those visions?”
“I don’t know.” Nina closed her eyes. “Maybe… maybe she does believe you. Did you ever think of that?”
“What do you mean?”
She shrugged and peered into the lion’s mouth this time. “Maybe she sees him too.”
“What?”
“But she can’t do anything about it, so she tries to shut them out.”
“Of course she could do something!” Caleb’s hands were fists at his side. “She could tell the State Department!”
“And they’d believe her?” Nina’s fierce eyes, like jade buttons, held him in place. He had barely talked to this woman before, and now to speak so bluntly, like they were old friends… or as he imagined Phoebe would be speaking to him if she were here. Phoebe was always the logical one to poke holes in his fantasies-at least as far as Dad was concerned. “Why would they believe a woman who claims to be seeing her dead husband?”
“Because she-I could tell them where to look! I’ve seen landmarks that they could search for. A river by a hill. The layout of buildings on the hillside. They could triangulate by the shadows or the direction of the sun, anything!”
Nina shrugged, stood up and stretched like a cat. A silver necklace sparkled and drew his attention to the curves around the V in her dress. The eye-tattoos on her bare shoulders seemed to stare at him. “Maybe you’re right.”
“I am.” Caleb turned from her and plodded over to the fountain. The chaotic bubbling and splashing calmed his nerves. She had him thinking, questioning, second-guessing his anger. He glanced sideways and for a moment Helen looked over and met his eyes. Something passed between them, a mutual softening of emotions maybe.
Then Nina was at his side, digging into her purse for change. “One Euro,” she said, looking at the shiny coin. “Whatever that’s worth these days.” She tossed it in, closed her eyes and whispered to herself.
“What did you wish for?” Caleb asked.
She gave him a wink. “Not supposed to tell, but I’ll let you know. I wished that your mother gets her wish. That we find it.”
They’re all the same, Caleb thought. Every one of them.
“We need to find it,” Nina whispered. “So we can go home.”
“What?”
“I want to go home,” she said. “I don’t care about the treasure. I don’t even want to know what it is anymore. I just want to go home. I miss my family. We have a cherry tree orchard in Virginia. This time of year the air is filled with the scent flowering blossoms, the buzzing of bees, and the sound the wind makes through them at night.”
Caleb blinked, gaping at Nina in a new light, as if the sun striking her features now revealed an even deeper beauty emerging from the shade. “I had apple orchards,” he said.
“Really?”
“Apple trees. Back home, in Upstate New York. Haven’t you been there, with the group? Waxman said he’s been using the house as a base.”
Nina blinked at him, smiling. “Nope, haven’t had the pleasure. I’m new, but it sounds divine. Bet you had some delicious apple pies every fall.”
“Twice a day,” Caleb said. “After lunch and for dessert. At least until Dad left and Mom, well… she got caught up in this crowd. No offense.”
“None taken. I’m-well, this is all new to me.”
“So you really can see things?”
Nina blushed. “Yeah, sometimes, but I don’t think I’m all that good at it. Can’t control it very well. Still, Waxman seems to think I can help.”
“I’m sure you can,” Caleb said. “But just be careful of him, Nina. He’s… not what he seems.”
“Really?” Her voice cracked. “How do you know? Did you see something?”
Caleb shook his head. “No. Don’t worry about it. I’m probably just overreacting.” He looked over Nina’s shoulder to where Waxman was holding Helen’s shoulders and talking in animated tones.
“Sorry about your father,” Nina said. “I heard he was interested in the Pharos too. He would have loved to be here.”
“He came to Alexandria a couple times right after I was born. Did a lot of research and even made a couple dives himself. At least he told me that much. Sometimes, while we were up in our little lighthouse-a museum now, really, since they put up a new one a mile away at the pier-he’d tell me all kinds of stories about the Pharos, about Alexandria at the time of its construction, about Sostratus and the Great Library and the temples and everything.”
Nina folded her arms, chilled suddenly. “Maybe you’ll see it soon. Like it was in your mind.”
“Maybe,” Caleb said, remembering the all-too brief glimpse he’d had while nearly drowning, and his gaze grew distant.
Nina absently scuffed the sole of her sandal over the thin layer of gravel on the flagstones. “What are you thinking about now?” she asked.
Caleb blinked, smiled. “Actually, thinking about Dad still. How he’d take us out to see the other landmark historic property on our land: ‘Old Rusty.’”
“Old what?”
“Rusty, it was my sister’s favorite thing. An ancient, rusted lightship. You know, the kind they used to send out in the foggiest of nights, with lanterns on its masts, to guide ships into the harbors. Phoebe loved the sound its hull made when we threw stones against it, and then we’d run before anyone could catch us. We used to sneak aboard, make up stories and pretend to be in great sea battles, captain and first mate, raiding the high seas.”
Nina sighed. “Sounds like you had a one-of-a-kind childhood. But you’re right, you should have been allowed to grow up there without racing all over the world with your mother.”
Caleb smiled. “Well, too late now.”
Nina closed her eyes and turned her face toward the sun and breathed in its warmth, then looked back to where Helen and Waxman were still arguing. “Do you think we’ll find the way in to the lighthouse vault?”
“Nope. I think old Sostratus hid it too well.”
Nina looked depressed. “Then they better accept defeat soon.”
“They won’t. My mother won’t, either. She’s obsessed.”
“So was your father.”
Caleb winced as if she had reached over and smacked him across the face. He thought for a moment, remembering his father’s eyes, the tenderness in his voice, the way he would crack open a book, spread out its spine, and sometimes take a deep sniff of the pages, savoring the old smell of the paper. “Yes,” Caleb said, “but for a different reason. He didn’t want the treasure, didn’t care about money.” Caleb was getting excited, and felt a strange energy fueling his cells. “Dad just wanted knowledge. He loved everything about ancient Alexandria, and he wanted to understand the lighthouse completely. Just as he was intrigued with the library and…” A strange connection tugged at him-a spark of a great inferno waiting to be ignited. Suddenly he was certain that his father had known more than he’d let on.
The sun ducked behind a cloud and the courtyard flickered into shadow. In mid-thought, nearly at a revelation, he noticed someone watching them, standing in the opposite section from Helen and Waxman, beside a pillar in the deeper shadows.
Who is that? How long has he been there?
He waited, narrow and trembling, with long arms and ragged hair, so out of place amidst the tourists who just walked by, snapping their pictures, ignoring him.
Caleb’s blood went cold and the hair on his arms stood on end. He shuddered.
“Caleb?”
“Do you see him?” he tried to raise his arm to point but couldn’t.
“See who?” Nina asked, whipping her head around.
The sun reappeared, dazzling off the stone tiles and the limestone pillars. Caleb blinked and the figure was gone.
Someone’s throat cleared. Caleb looked up and saw Waxman with Helen standing beside him. “Let’s go,” he said. “We’ll see if the team has fared any better.”
When he walked past, Caleb looked at his mother and saw that she had taken off her glasses and was staring across the courtyard, squinting.
“What?” he asked.
She shook her head, blinked and put her glasses back on. “Nothing, come on.” She took one last look around. “I still think what you saw in your dream is the key, Caleb.”
“You do?”
She nodded. “But it’s just so frustrating. The Pharos is taunting us from the past, giving us scraps and keeping the larger secrets to itself.”
Caleb looked warily at Nina. “Maybe,” he urged, “we should let it keep them.”
Helen chuckled and pushed a strand of hair from her eyes. “You’ve got a bad attitude, you know that? What would your father say?” She rubbed his head in a rare display of affection, and then followed after Waxman.
Caleb gave Nina an “are you coming or what?” look, to which she smiled and followed after Helen and Waxman. He couldn’t help but take her in once more before he threw a tentative glance over his shoulder to where the figure had stood, watching.
Before they boarded the ferry, Waxman used the payphone to call the other Morpheus members who had remained at Alexandria. When he hung up, he was smiling.
“They’ve found the entrance!”