The Vesuvius Isotope (The Katrina Stone Novels) (12 page)

A tour guide was leading a group and reciting a monologue in Italian. We attached ourselves to his group and followed him.

“He says that we are at the thermal baths,” Dante translated. “Romans would go through a few rooms: a cold bath, a warm bath, and a hot bath. The Pompeii baths were heated by slaves. Water would flow in from the aqueducts. Then the slaves put wood into a big heater under the floor to heat the water, and pipes carried the hot water to the baths for the Romans up on top.”

I nodded and silently passed beyond the bath complex. Dante remained quietly by my side as I began following the streets of Pompeii and my own thoughts.

It was a stark mental image—obscenely wealthy, hedonistic bathers sprawled lazily in the bright, luxurious baths, socializing and fornicating. Directly beneath them, the slaves—blackened from toiling in a smoky, soot-filled chamber to generate the appropriate water temperature for their masters. The “haves” above, and the “have nots” below. Heaven and Hell.

I am now one of the “haves,” after spending most of my life as a “have not.” The Heaven I shared with Jeff seemed like a reward for surviving Hell for so many years.

I married my first husband, Tom, while still an undergraduate. Alexis was born six months later. Motherhood and financial struggles delayed my undergraduate degree, but I finally finished college and entered a Ph.D. program at twenty-four, all the while working in addition to attending classes—I had run through a large assortment of odd jobs before settling on bartending for the exceptionally high graduate-student wage of ten dollars an hour plus tips.

When Tom and I divorced, I got virtually nothing from him, and I still had three years of a five-year Ph.D. program in front of me. Mercifully, my Ph.D. program offered waived tuition and a small stipend, which I continued to supplement by bartending. It was a decent income, but with a young child to support it was not sufficient to make ends meet.

My daughter was my reason for living but also my heaviest financial burden. I reduced Alexis and myself to such modesties as living in a garage for a full year and eating nothing but spaghetti for days at a time in order to meet the high costs of child care and living in San Diego. Financially similar is the story of nearly every Ph.D.-level scientist I’ve known. But very few of them were also single parents during their training, as I was.

Relentlessly, stubbornly, obsessively, I fought through the impossible double shifts and scraped by from paycheck to paycheck for an agonizing three more years. I graduated first in my class.

My hard work paid off. In my first few years as an independent researcher, I developed a treatment for a virulent form of anthrax, and the federal government paid me handsomely for it. Alexis and I were finally able to live comfortably. Then I met Jeff, who had always been wealthy, and who had become even more so through his own dedication and brilliance.

I now live in a different world than the one I was born into. I have left behind the smoky slave chamber below for the bath complex above. It is no wonder my daughter would so cling to Jeff, the first man she ever met whose life was untainted by the blackness of the soot.

My thoughts were interrupted by the whiteness of a human corpse. I halted and then timidly stepped forward to examine the pale body before me.

It was encased in glass, a man. Every inch of his body was displayed in painfully granular detail. He was lying on his back, tilted slightly to one side. Both of his arms were held up, forearms parallel to his body, as if he were shielding his face from an attacker.

His face was frozen in an expression of sheer terror—an expression I had seen far too recently. I looked away as quickly as possible, blinking back tears once again.

“It’s plaster,” Dante said from beside me. “This is one of the things many people come to Pompeii to see.”

“I don’t understand.” I was still holding back tears.

“When Mount Vesuvius erupted, people in Pompeii were buried alive in ash—you can see that this man tried to block the ash with his arms. Then the ash became very hard around their bodies. When the bodies… eh, decomposed?… it left holes inside the hard ash. When Pompeii was found centuries later, these holes were also found and filled with plaster. So now, this plaster cast shows exactly how this poor man died.”

I peered through the glass for a moment, in awe of the detail within the agonized face. I tore my gaze away, only to be confronted by a second glass case containing another example of human horror.

“There are other places here with plaster bodies,” Dante said. “Most are people, but I think there is also a dog, and a pig too.”

In the single anonymous man’s face, I had seen enough. I stepped away from the glass cases and returned to the streets, walking slowly, aimlessly, staring mostly at the ground.

A white, horrified face in a glass case, arms raised upward to protect himself from falling death.

A white, horrified face on the deck of a yacht, arms splayed out sideways to break a deadly fall.

The two images melted into one.

What am I doing? Did I really think that here, in this ruin, I would find a form of plant life from two thousand years ago? And that this plant would somehow help bring my husband’s killer to justice?

I stepped out of the street, seeking a quiet corner to shrink into. I brought my hands up to my face and wiped from my cheeks and chin the tears that were now falling freely. I rubbed my eyes and looked down at my feet. On the ground beneath my tennis shoes was a large mosaic. Its tiny rocks were arranged to spell a single word:

HAVE

Glistening, naked bathers, reclining shamelessly in baths heated to the exact temperatures of their choosing. Glistening, sweating slaves, stoking the fires beneath. The “haves.” The “have nots.”

I glanced up and saw that I was standing at the entrance to a villa. I could not distinguish its boundaries—the villa was enormous.

A tour group came up close behind me, its guide speaking Italian-accented English. “This villa is called the ‘House of the Faun,’ ” the guide was saying, “and this mosaic is a… welcome mat!” The tour group laughed. “
Mi scusi
,” he said quickly to me, and I stepped aside to let them pass.

The volume of the guide’s voice began to wane as he led his group deeper into the villa. “The mosaic,” he said, “means ‘hail to you’ in Latin, and the villa was named after the dancing faun you see here in the atrium. This villa is one of the biggest and most luxurious in Pompeii. While its owner is unknown, the decorations show an Egyptian influence, especially from the Alexandrine era. Its garden, among the largest in Pompeii, featured everything from food plants to opium poppies…”

“… abnormally high levels of opiates in the system…”

“… its garden featured everything from food plants to opium poppies…”

“… the nardo document is the first writing in existence in the hand of Queen Cleopatra…”

“… the decorations show an Egyptian influence…”

Suddenly, the notion that the ruins of Pompeii could lead to an extraordinary plant, and that this plant could lead to a killer, did not seem so absurd after all.

I spun on my heels and chased the guide and his tour group into the vast House of the Faun.

Nothing could part us whilst we lived, but death seems to threaten to divide us.

Cleopatra to Mark Anthony

-Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans

Plutarch (ca. 46–120 CE)

Chapter Nine

“What kind of Egyptian influence?”

I practically shouted the question as I bolted into a large central atrium surrounded by multiple rooms. Within the atrium was the bronze statue of the dancing faun that had given the villa its modern name. A second large atrium lay to my right, and as I approached it I could once again hear the English-speaking tour guide. He was describing the opulent living quarters of the mysterious occupant of the house.

“Excuse me. What kind of Egyptian influence were you referring to?” I asked again. I shoved my way past the small tour group and brazenly withdrew a twenty euro note from my purse, handing it to the tour guide.

“Right this way,” he said.

Beyond the main living areas was a massive peristyle garden. The guide led me through it, and his somewhat irritated tour group followed. Trailing behind, a silent, curious Dante.

The garden was relatively nondescript—a very large open green space—but I could easily envision the well-tended foliage that must have existed there in the days of abundant slave labor. Surrounding the garden were tall colonnades.

Beyond the colonnades, something caught my eye. This was the object the guide was leading me toward.

We passed through the garden and into a once-enclosed room. Covering the room’s floor was a large mosaic, a heavily damaged image of a battle scene. The central figure was a soldier on a horse.

“This mosaic,” the guide said, “is a depiction of Alexander the Great. It is a replica of one of the most priceless works from Pompeii. The original is preserved in the National Archeological Museum in Naples. The scene shows Alexander’s victory over the emperor of Persia. When Alexander conquered Egypt, he founded the city we know today as Alexandria, and it became the capital of Egypt. The first Ptolemy king was the first ruler of this city, and many of you probably know that the last Ptolemy ruler of Alexandria was Queen Cleopatra.”

I had seen the same image earlier that day. It was the mosaic marking the entrance to the Ptolemaic Dynasty display. The display Alyssa had made a point of showing me. The display that explained the legacy of Queen Cleopatra and her ancestors.

My neck broke out in gooseflesh.
This was not a villa
, I thought.
It was a palace.

It was one of the largest residences in the wealthy Roman resort of Pompeii. Its décor paid tribute to Queen Cleopatra’s heritage. It could only have been owned by the highest of the elite. And its owner has never been revealed.

It might have belonged to her
, I thought, and the realization guided my gaze toward the vast expanse that was its most prominent feature.

Beyond the mosaic room was yet another peristyle garden. This one even larger than the first. Easily envisioning my entire home seated within its cavity, I estimated that this garden alone was probably in the range of fifteen thousand square feet. It was almost as large as the rest of the property combined.

“There were opium poppies in this garden?” I asked the tour guide, and he gave me a look of shock.

“
Yes!
” he said. “That’s so strange. Someone else asked me that same question just a couple of weeks ago.”

My hands were trembling as I rifled through my purse. I finally managed to extract my wallet, from which I withdrew a dog-eared photo. I deliberately avoided looking at the image as I held it out for the tour guide. “Is this the person who asked you?” I whispered hoarsely, my voice on the verge of breaking.

“Yes!” the tour guide said enthusiastically. But then he sucked in his breath as if suddenly realizing he might have said too much.

“And,” I pressed, “was he with a blonde lady, about my age?”

This time, the guide just looked down at his feet, a silent acknowledgement. Then he said quietly, “I only remember him because he did something very strange. After asking about the opium poppies, he went over there into the garden and started digging in the dirt.”

I could feel him.

I sat in the dirt, grabbing handfuls, letting it slip slowly through my fingers. As he had.

Jeff was collecting soil samples.

Suddenly, it was all so obvious, and I was sickened to reflect upon what I had been thinking, what I had been suspecting.

How could you, Katrina?

Dante Giordano sat quietly beside me. “Are you OK?” he asked softly.

“Yeah,” I lied. “Just resting for a moment.”

“Your husband was here a couple of weeks ago. With a blonde lady. And that had something to do with his death.

“Katrina, I know it is not my business, but… please, just try to forget it. Don’t seek revenge. It will only eat you alive. I beg you again. Go home.”

I smiled sardonically. Of course Dante would say that. Of course he would think that, as I had.

But now, I knew differently.

“I can’t,” I said. “I can’t go home. I can’t stop looking. I need to find the plant. I need to finish what my husband started. I owe him that. And I’m not out for revenge, not anymore. Jeff was not having an affair.”

… Jeff became practically obsessed with the document…

… nature produces phenomena that no scientist in the world has ever managed to harness…

… so do you want to be a part of it? Your husband certainly does…

Dante looked at me questioningly but did not speak.

“Don’t you see?” I asked, and then I was sobbing again. “Jeff came to Naples because of the Herculaneum document, because the document described a cure for cancer. He dug through this garden looking for that cure, knowing that poppies would accompany it. Because opiates are the standard-of-care painkiller for terminally ill cancer patients, as they have been for thousands of years…”

“Where were you for four days, Jeff?”

“Sweetheart, listen, I can’t tell you. I am sorry for that, I really am. I have never lied to you before. I have never kept anything from you. I am sorry for lying to you about the conference. I hate myself for that. But I can’t tell you now, either. Please, you just have to trust me…”

My sobs faded to sniffles, and I stared at the ground.

“As the cancer progresses, the opiate dosage increases,” I said quietly, more to myself than to Dante.

… abnormally high levels of opiates in the system… only survivable following repeated exposure and increasing desensitization…

“Jeff came to Naples to try to save his own life before I could ever find out he was dying.”