The Last Cato (26 page)

“I’ve got it! I’ve got it!”

“What’s going on?” Farag asked in a sleepy voice. “What time is it?”

“Get up, Professor! Get up, Doctor! I need you! I found something!”

I looked at my watch. It was four in the morning. “Lord!” I sobbed. “Will we ever get six or seven hours of sleep at one time?”

“Listen closely, Doctor,” the Rock cried, rushing toward me like a force of nature.
“‘I saw him who was supposed to be the noblest creature of creation.’ ‘I saw Briareus on the other side…’ ‘I saw Thymbraeus, saw Pallas and Mars…’ ‘I saw the mighty Nimrod by his tower…’
What do you think?”

“Aren’t those the first verses that describe the reliefs?” I asked Farag, who gave the captain a puzzled look.

“But there’s more!” continued Glauser-Roist. “Listen:
‘Oh, Niobe, I saw your grieving eyes!’ ‘Oh, Saul, transfixed by your own sword…!’ ‘Oh, mad Arachne, I could see you there…!’ ‘Oh, Rehoboam, the image of you here no longer threatens…!’”

“What’s happening to the captain, Farag? I don’t understand a thing he’s saying!”

“Neither do I, but let’s see where he’s going with this.”

“And, finally,
fi-nal-ly
…” He waved the book in the air, then looked at it again.
“‘Verily, he pointed out the hard pavement…’ ‘Verily, he pointed out how they were sent…’ ‘Verily, he pointed out the crude example…’ ‘Verily, he pointed out how they fled defeated…’
Pay attention, now—this is very, very important. Lines sixty-one to sixty-three of the canto:

“I saw Troy gasping from its ashes there:
O Ilium, how you were fallen low,
Depicted on the sculptured road of stone.”

“It is a series of acrostic strophes!” Boswell exclaimed, snatching the book from the captain. “Four lines that begin with
‘I saw,’
four with
‘O,’
and four with
‘Verily, he pointed out.’”
In its original Italian, the first four lines started with a
‘V,’
the second four with an
‘O,’
and the third with an
‘M.’

“And a last tercet, the one about Troy, has the key!”

My head really hurt, but I understood what was happening. I even figured out before they did the acrostic relationship of those strophes with the mysterious word Farag found in the rocking slab:
VOM.

“What could
Vom
mean?” the captain asked. “It has to mean something!”

“It does, Kaspar, it does. That brings to mind good Father Bonuomo. Right, Ottavia?”

“I already thought of him.” I struggled to my feet, rubbing my face. “I ask myself how many poor aspiring Staurofilax have lost their lives trying to pass these tests. You have to be very shrewd to tie up all the loose ends.”

“Would you two please kindly explain? Now,
I
don’t understand
you.
”

“In Latin, Captain, the
U
and the
V
are written the same, like a
V.
So
Vom
is the same as
Uom,
‘man,’ in medieval Italian. Our charming priest is named Bon-Uomo, or Bon-Uom—that is to say,
Good man.
See where I’m going with this now?

“Will you consider locking this guy up, Kaspar?”

The captain shook his head. “Nothing has changed. Father Bonuomo will have a solid alibi and an inscrutable past. The brotherhood already has surely covered its back, especially that of the guardian of the Roman test. He would never voluntarily reveal he’s a Staurofilax.”

“Okay, gentlemen!” I said with a sigh. “Stop the chitchat. Since we’re not going to get any sleep, let’s stay focused. We have Dante’s acrostic, the word
UOM,
and some stone floodgates. Now what?”

“Some of these skulls are labeled
Uom sanctus,
” Farag suggested.

“Then, hop to it.”

“But, Captain, the torches are almost burned out. It will take a while to look for more.”

“Collect what coals are left, and begin. We don’t have much time!”

“Hear me out, Captain Glauser-Roist!” I exclaimed, angry. “If we get out of this, I refuse to continue if we don’t get some rest. Do you hear me?”

“She’s right, Kaspar. We’re worn out. We should stop for a few days.”

“We’ll discuss that when we get out of here. Now, please, look around, Doctor, start over there. Professor, you go to the opposite end. I will examine the presbytery.”

Farag crouched down and grabbed the two torches still burning among the coals. He gave me one and kept the other. A while later, after checking out all the relics, we had found no saint or martyr named Uom. It was disheartening.

The sun was rising outside, when it finally dawned on us that maybe we should be looking for a name besides
Uom.
Maybe it was like the acrostics, every skull beginning with
V
or
U, O
or
M.
And we guessed right. After another long, tedious search, we found four saints whose names began with
V:
Valerio, Volusia, Varrón, and Vero; four martyrs whose name started with
O:
Octaviano, Odenata, Olimpia, and Ovinio; and four other saints whose name began with
M:
Marcela, Martial, Miniato, and Mauricio. There was no doubt we were on the right track. We marked the twelve skulls with soot, in case their location had anything to do with the answer, but they didn’t seem to be in any order. All the twelve skulls had in common was that they were whole. In that warehouse of broken junk, that was proof enough. After this breakthrough, we still didn’t know what to do. Nothing seemed to be the key to opening the floodgates.

“Are there any sandwiches left, Kaspar?” Farag asked. “When I don’t sleep, I get ferociously hungry.”

“There are some in my knapsack. Look and see.”

“Want some, Ottavia?”

“Yes, please. I’m getting weak.”

All that was left in the captain’s knapsack was a miserable, dried-up salami and cheese sandwich. We split it up with our dirty hands and ate it. It was divine.

While Farag and I tried to deceive our stomachs with our food, the captain paced like a caged animal. He was focused, engrossed. From time to time, he repeated the tercets he had obviously learned by heart. My watch read nine thirty in the morning. Somewhere above us, life was rousing for the day. The streets were jammed with traffic and children were headed to school. Way underground, three exhausted souls tried to escape from a rat hole. The half sandwich had appeased my hunger. I felt more relaxed. I sat down and leaned against the wall, looking into the last embers of the fire. Very soon, they would go out for good. I felt a deep stupor, and I closed my eyes.

“Sleepy, Ottavia?”

“I need to rest my head. Do you mind, Farag?”

“Me? No. Why would I mind? Just the opposite, I think it’s a good idea for you to rest a while. I’ll wake you up in ten minutes, okay?”

“Your generosity overwhelms me.”

“We have to get out of here, Ottavia. We need your input,” chimed the captain

“Ten minutes. Not one minute less.”

“Go ahead. Sleep.”

Sometimes ten minutes can feel like eternity. I rested more during those ten minutes than I had in the four hours we slept the night before.

We inspected everything again and lit a couple of torches from the box next to the cave-in. Clearly the Staurofilakes had meticulously programmed the entire process and knew exactly how long the test would last.

Desperate and crestfallen, we returned to the church.

“It has to be here!” Glauser-Röist shouted, crouching on the ground. “I am sure the solution is here, damn it! But where, where?”

“In the skulls?” I suggested.

“There is nothing in the skulls!” he roared.

“Well, actually…,” the professor said, pushing his glasses up to his eyes, “we haven’t looked inside them.”

“Inside?” I was surprised.

“Why not? What other possibility do we have? Let’s at least check it out. Shake the skulls of those twelve saints and martyrs—give them each a rattle.”

“Touch them?” That seemed to me very irreverent and loathsome. “Touch the relics with our hands?”

“I’ll do it!” Glauser-Röist shouted. He went up to the first skull with a soot mark and raised it in air, shaking it with little respect. “There’s something in there!”

Farag and I hopped around as if we were on a trampoline. The captain studied the skull carefully.

“It’s sealed up. All its orifices are sealed up: the neck hole, the nasal cavity, and the eye sockets. It’s a container!”

“We need to empty it somewhere,” Farag said, looking around.

“In the altar,” I proposed. “It’s concave, like a bowl.”

It turned out that Valerio and Ovinio contained sulfur (unmistakable by its scent and color); Marcela and Octaviano, a gummy, resinous black substance we identified as fish; Volusia and Marcial, two sticks of fresh butter; Miniato and Odenata, a whitish dust that burned the captain’s hand slightly (he deduced it was quicklime); Varrón and Mauricio, a thick, shiny black grease that, given its intense smell, had to be crude oil, or rather, naphtha. Finally, Vero and Olimpia contained a fine ochercolored dust we couldn’t identify. We put all those substances into separate small piles. The altar became a lab table.

“I believe I am right when I say,” began Farag, with the intense look of someone who has reached a worrisome conclusion, “that what we have here are the components of Greek fire.”

“My God,” I raised my hand to my mouth, in horror.

Greek fire was the Byzantine armies’ most lethal and dangerous weapon. Thanks to it they were able to keep the Muslims at bay from the seventh to the fifteenth centuries. For hundreds of years, the formula for Greek fire was the best-kept secret in history. Even today we aren’t completely sure what it was made of. According to the legend, in the year 673, Constantinople was besieged by the Arabs and on the verge of surrendering when, one day, a mysterious man named Callinicus appeared, offering the worried Emperor Constantine IV the most powerful weapon in the world: Greek fire. It had the strange property of catching on fire on contact with water and burning mightily. Nothing could extinguish it. The Byzantines hurled Callinicus’s mixture through tubes erected on their boats, completely destroying the Arab fleet. The surviving Muslims fled in fear of the flames that seemed to burn even under water.

“Are you sure, Professor? Couldn’t it be something else?”

“Something else? No way. These are the elements that the most recent studies show are the ingredients of Greek fire: gasoline or crude oil, which floats on water; calcium oxide or quicklime, which ignites on contact with water; sulfur, which gives off a toxic steam when it burns; fish or resin, to set off the combustion; and fat, to hold it all together. The ocher-colored dust that we couldn’t identify must be potassium nitrate—in other words, saltpeter. When it comes in contact with combustion, it gives off oxygen and keeps the fire burning under water. Not too long ago, I read an article on this in a magazine called
Byzantine Studies.
”

“What good is Greek fire to us?” I asked, remembering I had read the exact same article.

“All we’re missing is one element,” Farag said, looking at me. “We could mix all this together and absolutely nothing would happen. Can you guess what ingredient would catch the mixture on fire?”

“Water, of course.”

“And where is water in this place?”

“Do you mean the water in the channel?” I said, frightened.

“Exactly! If we mix up a batch of Greek fire and throw it into the water, it will catch fire with incredible force. It’s very likely that the floodgates are opened by heat.”

“If it’s not too much trouble,” the Rock looked worried, “before we perform such a dangerous task, I would like to know how heat opens the floodgates.”

“Ottavia, correct me if I’m wrong. Weren’t the Byzantines big fans of all mechanical things, hinged toys and automated machinery?”

“Sure. The biggest fans in history. One emperor made a pair of roaring mechanical lions that paraded single file in front of foreign ambassadors. Other rulers had devices in their thrones that triggered lightning and thunder to frighten courtiers. There was the fantastic Golden Tree of the royal garden, with its mechanical singing birds. It was very famous back then; it’s all but forgotten now. There were priests—Christian priests, I mean—who made ‘miracles’ happen during Holy Mass, such as opening and closing church doors and things like that. In Constantinople there were coin-operated fountains that dispensed water. I could go on and on. There’s a very good book on the subject.”

“Byzantium and Its Toys,
by Donald Davis.”

“That’s the one. I believe we have the same taste in reading materials, Professor Boswell,” I exclaimed with a wide smile.

“True, Dr. Salina,” the Professor replied, also smiling.

“Okay, okay… You are twin souls, great. Would you mind getting to the point, please? We have to get out of here.”

“What Ottavia is saying, Kaspar, is that there were priests who voluntarily opened and closed the doors of the temples. The faithful thought it was a miracle, but in fact it was a very simple trick. It was triggered—”