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.”