The Devil Will Come (6 page)

‘He’s a man, I’m a woman, end of story,’ Micaela said.

‘They can’t be that sexist,’ Elisabetta said. ‘In this day and age?’

‘Come on! You work for the single most sexist organization in the world!’ Micaela cried out.

Elisabetta smiled. ‘The hospital is secular. The Church is most decidedly not.’

The apartment buzzer rang.

‘Who the hell is that?’ Carlo growled. ‘On a Sunday?’ He lumbered toward the hall.

‘Maybe it’s Arturo,’ Zazo said, eliciting a snort from Micaela.

Elisabetta quietly put her fork down and got up.

They heard Carlo shouting into the scratchy intercom and when he returned to the dining room he had a puzzled expression.

‘There’s a guy downstairs who says he’s Archbishop Luongo’s driver. He says he’s here to pick up Elisabetta.’

‘He’s early,’ Elisabetta said, adjusting her leather belt. ‘I was going to tell you.’

‘Tell us what?’ Zazo asked.

‘My old professor, Tommaso De Stefano, visited me. He’s still with the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archeology. He wants my help with a project. I said no but he insisted. I’ve got to run. I’m sorry to leave the dishes.’

‘Where are you going?’ Micaela asked, dumbstruck. In fact, they all stared. Elisabetta’s life was so predictable
that
this deviation from routine seemed to catch them mightily by surprise.

‘The catacombs,’ she said. ‘St Callixtus. But please don’t tell anyone.’

It seemed as though a lifetime had passed since Elisabetta had last entered these grounds. The entrance to St Callixtus was off the Appian Way which, on a late Sunday afternoon, was nearly deserted. She’d forgotten how quickly the land turned rural when one passed through the ancient southern walls of the city.

Off the main road, the avenue leading to the catacombs was lined by stands of tall cypresses, their tops glowing orange in the dwindling sunlight. Beyond was a large tract of wooded and agricultural land owned by the Church and containing an old Trappist monastery, a dormitory for the catacomb guides and the Quo Vadis? church. To the west lay the Catacombs of Domitilla. To the east, the Catacombs of San Sebastiano. The whole region was sacred.

The driver – who had remained mute during their journey – sprung out and opened the car door before Elisabetta had a chance to work the handle herself. Professor De Stefano was waiting at the public entrance, a low structure which resembled a simple Mediterranean villa.

Inside, De Stefano led her past the policeman who stood guard at the visitors’ iron gate. From there they headed down a stone stairway into the bowels of the earth.

‘It’s a walk,’ he said. ‘Halfway to Domitilla. There’s really no short cut.’

Elisabetta lifted her robes just enough to prevent herself from tripping. The subterranean air was dead and familiar. ‘I remember the way,’ she replied. She felt a disturbing blend of apprehension and excitement course through her as she remembered her previous times here and thought ahead to the imminent new revelations.

They moved briskly through the normal tourist areas. The galleries, cut by pickaxes and shovels from the soft volcanic tufo from the second through the fifth centuries
AD
, were somber remains of a broad sweep of history. The Romans had always buried or cremated their dead in necropolises outside the city walls for it was strictly forbidden to do so within the city limits. The wealthy built family tombs. The poor were crammed into mass graves.

Yet the early Christians stubbornly refused to mix their dead with pagan bones and most of them were too poor to afford proper tombs. A solution was found on the rural estates of sympathizers. Dig your necropolises, they were told. Burrow as extensively as you please, come and visit your dead freely, but leave our fields intact. Thus the catacombs were spawned at all compass points outside the city walls but especially to the south, off the Appian Way.

Over the centuries vast networks of subterranean galleries were tunneled to hold the remains of Popes and martyrs, commoners and the lofty. The Popes had
elaborate
frescoed vaults where pilgrims came to venerate them. The poor had small loculi, not much more than stone shelves cut into the rock to hold their wrapped bodies. Perhaps their names were inscribed in the stone, perhaps not. Loved ones left behind the holy symbols of their new religion, the fish, the anchor, the dove and the chi-rho cross. As time went on, the galleries were extended into multi-level mazes, miles of tunnels to accommodate hundreds of thousands of the dead faithful.

Though Christianity’s early history was troubled, fortune eventually favored the new religion when, in the fourth century
AD
, the Emperor Constantine himself converted to it, banned the persecution of Christians and returned confiscated Church properties. Gradually, the remains of the Popes and important martyrs were removed from catacombs and buried in consecrated ground within the grounds of churches. The sack of Rome by the Goths in
AD
410 put an end to the use of the catacombs for fresh burials, though for centuries pilgrims continued to visit them and Popes did their best to preserve and even embellish the important vaults.

Yet their preservation would last only so long and by the ninth century relics were transferred with increased frequency to churches within the city walls. The catacombs were doomed to a form of extinction. Their entrances became overgrown by vegetation and they were lost in time, completely forgotten until the sixteenth century when Antonio Bosio, the Christopher Columbus of subterranean Rome, rediscovered one,
then
another, then thirty of them, and systematically began their study.

But tomb robbers followed and over the next two centuries most marble and precious artifacts disappeared until, in 1852, the Church put all Christian catacombs under the protection of the newly created Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archeology.

Elisabetta had always felt a sense of peace inside these rough-cut narrow passageways, the color of deep sunset. How the walls and low ceilings must have come alive with a sense of motion as pilgrims passed through, clutching their flickering oil lamps! How excited they must have felt, plunging through the darkness, glimpsing the corpses in their
loculi
, the colorful inscriptions and paintings in the
cubicula
– the chambers reserved for families – until, bursting with anticipation, they reached their destination, the crypts of the Popes and of the great martyrs like St Callixtus!

Now the loculi were empty. There were no longer any bones, lamps or offerings, just bare rectangular recesses cut into the rock. Elisabetta lightly touched a remembered fragment of plaster on one of the walls. It had the fragile outline of a dove holding an olive branch. It made her sigh.

De Stefano walked quickly and confidently for a man of his age. From time to time he turned to make sure that Elisabetta was keeping up. For the first ten minutes of their journey the tunnels were those open to the public. They passed through the crypts of Cecilia and the Popes, skirted the tombs of St Gaius and
Eusebius
until they came to an unlatched iron gate, its key in the lock. The Liberian Area was off the tourist path. Completed in the fourth century, it was the last sector to have been dug out, a twisting three-level network of passages.

The cave-in was at the outermost reaches of the Liberian Area. When De Stefano paused at a poorly lit intersection of two galleries and momentarily seemed at a loss, Elisabetta gently advised him to take a left.

‘Your memory is excellent,’ he said appreciatively.

A faint sound of metal against rubble grew louder as they approached their destination. The plastered wall which had sparked Elisabetta’s interest years ago was gone, turned into dust by the collapse. Now there was a gaping opening, irregular like the mouth of a cave.

‘Here we are,’ De Stefano said. ‘The heavy work’s been done. There’s good timber erected. If I didn’t think it was safe I wouldn’t have brought you.’

‘God will protect,’ Elisabetta said, peering into the harshly lit space.

Inside the chamber there were three men who were shoveling a mixture of tuff, dirt and bricks. Some kind of manual hoist system was in place to lift their buckets out of the cave-in. The men stopped working and stared at Elisabetta through the entrance.

‘These are my most trusted assistants,’ De Stefano said. ‘Gentlemen, this is Sister Elisabetta.’ The men were young. Despite the cool subterranean temperature they were soaked through with sweat. ‘Gian Paolo Trapani
is
directly responsible for all the catacombs of the Via Antica and he’s acting as foreman for the operation.’

The pleasant-looking young man who came forward had longish hair, reddened by tufo dust. He didn’t seem to know if he should extend a grimy hand so he made do with, ‘Hello, Sister. I heard you studied here once. It’s a pity that it took a quake to make an excavation. It’s such a mess now.’

Elisabetta followed De Stefano through the opening. The chamber was irregularly shaped, generally rectangular. But the margins were ill-defined because of the piles of rubble. Wooden supports, thick as railway ties, had been laid in to support the sides and the earth overhead. The space was at least fifteen meters by ten, she thought, but the cave-in made it hard to be precise. There was a shaft of light coming in from a good ten meters above. A head appeared and another fellow yelled down. ‘Why are you stopping?’ He was manning the block and pulleys of the bucket rig.

‘Go take a break!’ Trapani shouted and the head disappeared.

Elisabetta’s first impression was that their work was favoring speed over science. There were no excavation grids, no signs of measurement and documentation, no camera tripods or drawing tables. The ground seemed to have been cleared in one frantic effort rather than deliberately, meter by meter. Blue tarps covered much of the floor. Only one of the walls was reasonably vertical. It was covered by a suspended tarp.

‘Sorry it’s so untidy,’ Trapani said, looking at her
shoes
and hemline, which were covered in tuff dust. ‘We’ve been moving faster than we’d like.’

‘So I see,’ Elisabetta said.

She was surprised at how seamlessly she made the shift into the observational mode of an archeologist. For twelve years she’d focused on an interior space, the realm of emotion and belief, faith and prayer. But at this moment, her mind won out over her heart. She stepped gingerly through the chamber, avoiding the ubiquitous tarps, taking in details and sorting them.

‘The bricks,’ Elisabetta said, stooping to pick one up. ‘Typical first-century Roman – long and narrow. And this.’ She dropped the brick and selected a grey friable chunk the size of a small cat. ‘
Opus caementicium
, Roman foundation cement.’ Then she picked up one of the many pieces of blackened, charred wood and thought,
There was a fire
. ‘This chamber predates the earliest part of the catacombs by at least a century. It’s just as I proposed. The fourth-century extension of the catacombs stopped right before it encroached on it.’

‘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
is
a columbarium, isn’t it?’ Elisabetta said.

‘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 –
Senatus Consulto
, the Senatorial mint mark. ‘The lost arch of Nero,’ she said. ‘
AD
54.’

‘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.