Authors: A. J. Hartley
Tags: #Fiction, #Thrillers, #Fiction - Espionage, #Thriller, #American Contemporary Fiction - Individual Authors +
Giovanni looked at it. "You are sure you want to do this?"
he said.
"No," said Thomas, honestly. "But I think it's what Ed would have wanted."
The two men looked in silence at the skull.
"I used to be afraid of this place," said Giovanni. "It seemed to me morbid. Horrific. Then when I first came here after Pietro's death it felt merely sad. But after a time . . . I don't know. I started to feel that the dead here were like fam
ily, that I was to look after them as I would an old aunt whom I didn't know well but who was too sick to take care of herself. Is that crazy?"
"Probably," said Thomas, smiling. "But I think I understand."
"Anyway," said Giovanni. "Now I am not afraid of the place and it does not make me sad. There is a purity to it, a clarity. It helps to keep things . . . what? The right size?"
"In perspective," said Thomas. "Yes."
"You don't mind that Eduardo will have no gravestone?"
"I do, but he spent most of his life working with the poor, the people whose names no one remembers. I think he would prefer to lie with them in death."
"And this is not him," said Giovanni. "Only the remains of his earthly body. Eduardo is long gone."
"Yes," said Thomas, his eyes prickling at the thought, and of the thought of Jim, his friend, who had given his life that Thomas might live.
A good man,
he thought, remembering what Jim had said about Ed.
Yes. Both of them.
"Are you ready?" said Giovanni.
Thomas wanted to speak, but the words would not come. Kumi stepped forward, took his hand, and said, for both of them, "Yes."
Then Giovanni crossed himself and, in the words of the 402
A. J. Hartley
Italian mass that he knew so well and so dearly, he began the funeral service for Ed, for Jim, for Senator Zacharias Devlin, for Ben Parks, even for Hayes, for those misguided souls who followed him, and for the nameless dead who lay around them.
AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
On the Fifth Day
is, of course, a work of fiction, though ele
ments of the story are rooted in fact, and I thought it might be of interest to readers to know what some of those elements are.
The fish at the core of the story is my own invention, but the story's use of the "living fossil" fish, the coelacanth, and the details of the recently discovered
Tiktaalik roseae
are all as factually accurate as I could make them. I stand indebted to Peter Forey (formerly of the Natural History Museum, London) and to Susan Jewett (of the Smithsonian Institution), and feel obligated to point out that the much discussed
"Florida scale" supposedly sent to the Smithsonian in 1949 is almost certainly a myth. Silver votive fish like the one in the novel do exist, however, and their origin continues to be de
bated.
The locations in which the story takes place and the arti
facts associated with them are all real, with a few small ex
ceptions. Pompeii does indeed contain a "magic square" of disputed significance, and Herculaneum's House of the Bi
centenary does have a shadow "crucifix" on the wall of an up
per room. No cross matching that shadow has ever been discovered, and most archaeologists of early Christianity would agree with Deborah that the crucifix did not become a core element of Christianity until considerably later. The strange fish images found throughout the ancient sites I pres
ent in the book are all real (and you can see some of them on my website), though the idea that they refer to some hitherto unknown species is purely my own imaginative whimsy. The description of Paestum is accurate with the exception of the second diver grave, which I invented.
404
Afterword and Acknowledgment
s
The Fontanelle cemetery is real, and though it is currently closed to the public, there are plans to reopen it soon. I am especially grateful to Claudio Savarese and Fulvio Salvi of Naples Underground for showing me around during a recent visit, and to Larry Ray for fielding some questions there
after. Again, I will be posting images from the Fontanelle and other locations from the book on my website. The Cap
tain legend does come from Fontanelle lore, as does the be
lief that the cemetery has housed local Mafia meetings. The legend of the crocodile in the passages beneath the Castello Nuovo is also authentic, though such stories accrue around lots of places.
Having lived a couple of years in Japan and visited several times since, much of the data on which I based those parts of the book came from memory, though I'm grateful to Masako Osako for her willingness to supply information where I was either forgetful or just wrong.
I am indebted to C. Loring Brace of the University of Michigan's Museum of Anthropology for his advice on dating and the racial classification of bones; to Janet Levy of the Uni
versity of North Carolina, Charlotte, for her help on the ar
chaeological uses of pollen; and to C. T. Keally for all manner of help concerning Japanese archaeology, recent scandals therein, and how I might perpetrate a fictional one of my own. Thanks also to my brother, Chris, for his help on issues of satellite monitoring.
My sense of Catholicism is derived largely from my own experience, though I have been fortunate enough to speak candidly to several priests in preparing the book. My thanks especially to my old friend Father Edward Gannon and to Reverend Philip Shano, S.J. Another old friend, Jonathan Mulrooney, introduced me to the extraordinary writings of Father Teilhard de Chardin, for which I am deeply grateful. I intend to post images, links, and other information rele
vant to these subjects on my website (www.ajhartley.net), through which I can also be reached, if readers have com
ments or questions.
Afterword and Acknowledgment
405
s
As ever, a book like this gets a lot of input along the way, and I would like to especially acknowledge those who saw early drafts and assisted in making the book what it is, partic
ularly my wife, Finie; my parents, Frank and Annette; my brother, Chris; and my friends Edward Hurst, Ruth Morse, and Bob Croghan. Special thanks also to my agent, Stacey Glick, and my editor, Natalee Rosenstein, without whom none of this would be possible.
--A. J. Hartley (November 2006)