They made their way along the sinuous snaking river for an hour. It wasn't very exciting as sightseeing trips went; the great buildings and monuments of Rome had been built farther upstream, centered on the city's seven hills. For the most part all there was to see was the pastoral weed-choked banks of the river and the spans of various modern bridges. The advantage to Holliday and his companions was that taking the sightseeing boat made pursuit unlikely, if not impossible.
The Horatio eventually turned in toward shore and docked at a comfortably ramshackle pier at Ostia Antica. The ruins, an entire city of them, were spread out over hundreds of acres. The buildings, no more than crumbling walls and tiled floors, were silent testament to the ancient port city's violent end.
In A.D. 67 bands of roving pirates had descended on the city in ragtag fleets, burning everything as they went, eventually leading to the enactment of the Lex Gabinia, the law of Gabianus, its creator, giving the emperor of Rome far-reaching and completely arbitrary powers that were reminiscent of the panicked regulations enacted after 9/11.
Power corrupts, Holliday reminded himself as he stepped off the boat, and absolute power corrupts absolutely; Father Thomas and his minions were proof enough of that. The pastoral teachings of a wandering prophet had been perverted into a tool of war.
Instead of following the rest of the passengers up the path toward the ruins, Holliday, Rafi and Tidyman turned right, taking a barely visible dirt track that ran beneath the old trees along the riverbank.
"This is like something out of a really bad Disney movie," said Tidyman. "Tales of the Riverbank or something. You expect Bambi to come out of the trees or bluebirds singing a merry tune and dropping daisies on our heads."
"What do you know about Disney movies?" Holliday asked.
"I used to run home from school every day just to watch Annette Funicello's breasts grow on the Mickey Mouse Club," said Tidyman. "Zorro. Davy Crocket."
"Thumper," added Holliday. "Bambi."
"Just remember what happened to Bambi's mother," cautioned Tidyman, laughing.
"You've got a very strange sense of humor for an Egyptian," said Holliday.
"What are you old men mumbling about now?" said Rafi, bringing up the rear of the little procession filing through the trees.
"I think it is called whistling in the dark," said Tidyman. "Smiling in the face of adversity."
A hundred feet farther along the low bank they came upon an old man fishing with a long pole, just as Vince Caruso had described. The man had white hair as fine as a baby's over a spotted skull, white stubble on his chin. Probably one of the army of relatives that Caruso seemed to have just about everywhere. There was a plastic bucket of squirming silver-bellied eels beside the man.
"Qual e il tranello?" Holliday asked, carefully repeating the phrase just the way Caruso had told him. "What's the catch?"
"Oggi c'e la pesca del salmone," the old man answered with a gap-toothed grin. "Salmon is the catch of the day." It was the correct response.
"La barca?" Holliday asked. "The boat?"
"Li," said the man, pointing with his sandpaper chin.
They found it a little farther along the bank, half hidden by artfully concealing shrubbery and weeds. It was a sixteen-foot classic drift boat with a high pointed bow and a narrow transom fitted with an oddly shaped outboard motor.
The boat was filthy, with a pile of rancid-looking throw net in the bow and half a dozen long bamboo poles hanging off the sides. The seats were covered in fish scales and the paint on the sides was peeling. There was a pair of scruffily painted oars shipped along the gunwales and a variety of tackle boxes, boat hooks, gaffs and other equipment littering the flat bottom. The boat smelled of dead, rotting fish left too long in the sun.
"Is this somebody's idea of a joke?" Rafi asked, staring at the boat tied up to an overhanging willow branch. "Because I don't think it's very funny."
"It's not a joke," said Holliday. "It's protective coloration. My course in the history of camouflage was the only thing Vince ever got an A in." He grinned broadly. "I always knew the kid would go far even though he got such lousy marks." Holliday shook his head. "It's perfect-what do you do on a river? You fish. That's an electric outboard, a trolling motor, which means it'll be silent. Look at the current out there: the tide is going out; we'll be sucked down the river like a freight train." As if to prove his point a waterlogged tree limb went swirling by in the rushing center of the river.
"How far?" Tidyman asked.
"According to Vince, two miles," answered Holliday. He undid the line from the willow branch. "Climb aboard, gents, this is the endgame. Let's go get Peggy."
26
"How will we know the place?" Rafi asked, sitting in the bow of the drift boat as they slid rapidly down the ever-widening river.
Tidyman answered the question.
"It's called a chiesetta, a chapel. They're like little fishing cottages on stilts. There's dozens of them built on the breakwaters at the mouth of the river. They've got these purse seine nets they hang into the water at the end of huge pole cranes. The chiesetta we want is the last one nearest the open sea on the left bank. It's bright red with a brand-new sheet-aluminum roof."
As the river broadened the color changed, going from a silty brownish green to a deeper blue as they neared the sea. The terrain on both sides of the river was mostly reclaimed marsh, the land divided into neat fields of grain. The banks of the river were lined with long rows of sailboats and small sport cruisers moored against short-piered docks. There were fishermen in boats like theirs everywhere, mostly following the gentler currents closer to shore. No one paid the three men the slightest bit of attention.
The Tyrrhenian Sea was visible now, a darker shimmering blue against the cloudless sky directly ahead. The banks of the river were lined with huge tumbled rocks used as breakwaters to prevent erosion, the ramshackle chiesetta fishing shacks standing like shabby long-legged insects poised above the boulders. They all looked much the same, standing closely together, each one with a rickety decklike balcony fitted with one, two and occasionally three of the fifty-foot-long cranes dangling over the water, cantilevered, braced with long guy wires connected to the roofs of the shacks. Now, with the tide rushing out, the cranes and their nets had been hauled up. As the tide reversed itself and the water flowed upriver once again the poles and nets would be lowered into the water.
"What do they catch?" Rafi asked.
"According to Vince, mostly mullet and eel, like the old man back there."
"Gross," said Rafi, making a face. "Who eats eels?"
"Eel pie," murmured Tidyman wistfully. "What a treat. Jellied they are very good, too."
Seated in the narrow stern, Holliday started up the little outboard and silently eased the boat out of the main current and to the northern bank of the river, now more than a hundred yards wide.
"Drop the anchor," said Holliday.
Tidyman hauled the pile of netting to one side and uncovered the heavy little Danforth anchor. He eased it overboard, letting out the nylon line slowly and steadily until the anchor flukes bit and held in the silt. The boat swung around to face the current and they were at the mouth of the river, the sea behind them. A thousand feet away across the river was the red chiesetta, its shiny roof flashing in the sun, a red spider with twin pole cranes swung inboard like long antennae.
Tidyman took the binoculars from around his neck and passed them up to Rafi, who handed them on to Holliday.
"Look busy," said Holliday. "I'm going to check the place out."
"Aye, aye, Captain," said Tidyman. He and Rafi pulled long bamboo poles out of the bottom of the boat and they both dropped their hooked and unbaited lines over the side.
Holliday raised the binoculars.
The fishing shack was about twenty by thirty, the narrower end facing the river. There was a wide opening in the front leading out to the balcony deck where the swinging pole cranes were set up. The flat corrugated aluminum roof sloped front to back. The only proper entrance appeared to be from the rear of the shack via a walkway that crossed the boulders to the unpaved street behind. Half hidden by the building Holliday could see part of what appeared to be a compact closed-sided white van parked at the end of the dirt road. The opening facing the sea was lost in shadow. No one appeared to be watching.