The guard motioned for them to enter as he scanned the street to ensure they were alone. The bars slammed shut behind them with an ominous finality, echoing in the empty church. Gesturing with an outstretched hand to signal silence, he guided them to the stairway that led to the lower levels, then did a pat-down of Steven, pausing when he found his phone and keys. Next, he performed a cursory inspection of Natalie’s small black clutch purse before handing it back to her. One look at Natalie’s outfit had convinced him that if she was hiding anything on her person he’d need an X-ray system to find it. Satisfied, he pointed to his watch.
“Thirty minutes,” he said in Italian. “You know the rules, eh?”
Natalie looked at Steven uncomprehendingly; he tersely summarized the man’s message for her. They nodded, and he opened the two wooden doors that shuttered the foyer for the stairs to the lower level. Once they were through, he closed them again. They heard a chain wrap around the handles. Steven experienced a moment of foreboding but it quickly passed. It was only a half hour, and they’d soon find out whether their mission was a dud or a winner.
They stepped down the stairs into the dank middle basilica, the walls of which were mostly worn stones and crudely-made brick held together with mortar, with odd patches of plaster covering stretches where it hadn’t yet crumbled away. They made their way quickly through the first gallery, which ran perpendicular to the main chamber. The middle level, much like the upper modern church, was composed of a large central room punctuated by a series of supporting columns and arches, with a long, narrow gallery on either side.
From their position across the main room, Natalie pointed at the fresco of Saint Alexis on the far wall, near the entry to the left gallery. They moved soundlessly across the floor. Once at the fresco, Steven paced off six long strides — five feet each — and after fishing a small stub of chalk out of his pocket, made a light mark on the floor. He walked twelve paces in the opposite direction and repeated the process. They both moved away from the fresco and inspected the ceiling, floor and the two walls on either side, by the chalk marks. There was no cross anywhere. Steven strode into the left gallery, the wall of which was the back side of the fresco, and after counting the paces to the entryway, repeated the calculation process. Natalie watched him, and they peered at the two points. Nothing. Just ancient stone walls dotted haphazardly with art.
Frustrated, they moved back into the main chamber and stared at the Alexis fresco.
“Like we saw today,” Steven whispered, “there’s no cross. Now, either that means that this is the wrong place, and I somehow garbled the parchment data, or in the last five hundred years a cross in this room was removed.”
“What if it was painted on the wall and over time the plaster came off? Most of the walls are just bare stone, but you can see some of the original plaster in places, like the frescoes,” Natalie said, kneeling as she extracted the tools from her boots.
“Anything’s possible, but we could just as easily speculate that it was somewhere on the floor in a six pace radius. Point is, that’s a lot of space to cover. If the cross was a statue on some sort of a base, it’s long gone. I’m afraid the short answer is, looks like we’re screwed.”
“Maybe a pace is more like a yard?” she mused.
“No. It’s five feet. Even in 1450 the yard was well understood as a unit of measurement. If the parchment had meant yards, it would have said yards.”
Natalie walked to the wall near the first chalk mark and lightly tapped on the stones with the handle of the screwdriver, starting from the bottom and moving as high as she could reach. Steven watched her stretching on her toes. He absently wondered what her workout regimen consisted of. He felt a stirring and quickly shifted mental gears.
She shook her head and made a noise, then moved to the far chalk mark and repeated the process. Steven decided to occupy his wandering eye in some other fashion than ogling his partner in crime and walked to another fresco at the far end of the chamber — this one of Saint Clemente celebrating mass. According to his watch, they’d burned seven minutes. This wasn’t going anywhere.
“Steven. Come here,” Natalie called.
He spun around and moved to where she was crouched by his second chalk mark. “Look up at the ceiling. Is that what I think it is?” she asked.
He squinted in the meager light, then rooted around in his pocket for his phone. He selected the flashlight function and a bright beam of light stabbed into the darkness above them. There, faintly embossed in the plaster remnants, was the unmistakable labyrinth crest from the Scroll. Natalie and he exchanged a look, and she redoubled her tapping on the wall below it. The wall was solid stone and mortar.
“Kneel down,” Natalie urged. “I need to climb onto your shoulders and try higher up the wall. That’s the crest. There has to be something here.”
“What if it was a stand-alone cross on the floor below it…which is now gone? Or what if it’s up in the ceiling?” Steven asked, crouching down as he did so.
“Then we’ll borrow some scaffolding and get up there somehow.” She threw her legs around his head and, once in place, tapped the top of his skull. “Giddy up, big boy.”
Steven ignored the erotic implications of having Natalie straddling his shoulders and obligingly stood. She couldn’t have weighed a hundred pounds, so it wasn’t much of a burden. He noted that even her suede jumpsuit legs smelled good, while she busily tapped against the wall with the screwdriver. After a few seconds, the tone of the tapping changed.
“I think I found something. Hold still,” she instructed and began chipping at the mortar. Dust and chips landed on Steven’s face. He closed his eyes and spat out the small bits that had found their way into his mouth. After several minutes of this, she nudged his shoulder with the screwdriver blade, which he grabbed as she retrieved the battery-powered drill from her boot. The little motor whined alarmingly, but the grinding bit ate through the old mortar like it was butter. Eventually the din stopped, and Natalie slid the drill back into her boot. He blew mortar dust from his lips and shook some fragments off his head.
He heard something above slide grudgingly out of the wall, then Natalie handed the object to him. It wasn’t a rock, but rather a ceramic block crudely molded to look like one.
Natalie squinted at the cavity. “There’s something in here, in a cubbyhole. I…Steven, I don’t want to ruin it…”
“Take my camera and get some photos. Then we can figure out how to extract whatever it is without damaging it.”
Steven fished his phone out of his pocket and handed it to her. A few seconds later the blinding flash went off, once, then again.
“Okay. You can see it clearly. Let me down for a second.”
Steven obliged, kneeling on the floor so she could get off his shoulders. They both looked at the image on the tiny screen.
“It looks like a parchment,” Steven said. “The bad news is that it’s going to be in terrible shape after five centuries in these damp walls. It’s a kind of miracle that it’s even intact,” he warned. “It looks like it’s folded in half. See if you can gently lift it out, and we’ll place it here on the floor and have a look at it. I’d use the screwdriver.”
Natalie nodded and, screwdriver in hand, hopped back up onto Steven’s shoulders, wedging her feet under his armpits as he gripped her legs. Within a minute, she’d painstakingly slipped the metal blade under the document and extracted it from its hiding place.
“I’m clear,” she said, then as Steven kneeled, both watched in horror as the ancient parchment tumbled from its precarious position and fell to the floor, where it shattered into six fragments. The ancient vellum had indeed degraded to the point where it was as brittle as an eggshell.