The Dark River

“The equipment is not the problem. You’re my friend’s daughter-which means I want to help you-but no one has explored this area since the flooding. I want you to promise that you’ll turn around and come back if it looks dangerous.”

Maya’s first reaction was to say Harlequins don’t promise, but she had broken that rule with Gabriel.

“I’ll try to be careful, Simon. I can’t agree to anything more than that.”

Lumbroso bunched up his napkin and dropped it on the table. “My stomach doesn’t like this idea. That’s a bad sign.”

“But now I’m famished,” Maya said. “So where’s the waiter?”

34

The next evening Maya met Simon Lumbroso in front of the Pantheon. She had spent the day buying scuba equipment at a dive shop in the western suburbs and had stuffed everything into two canvas bags. Lumbroso had also gone shopping, buying a large battery-powered lantern, the kind of equipment miners carried in caves. He gazed at the tourists eating gelato in the square and smiled.

“The Greek philosopher Diogenes of Sinope wandered around Athens with a lantern looking for an honest man. We’re looking for something equally rare, Maya. You need to take a photograph-just one photograph-of the directions that will lead us to another world.” He smiled at her. “Are we ready?”

Maya nodded.

Lumbroso led her over to Campo Marzio, a side street near the Parliament building. Halfway down the block, he stopped in front of a doorway between a tearoom and a perfume store.

“Do you have a passkey?” Maya asked.

Lumbroso reached into his suit coat pocket and pulled out a wad of euros. “This is the only passkey you need in Rome.”

He knocked loudly and a bald old man wearing rubber boots opened the door. Lumbroso greeted the man politely and shook his hand, paying the bribe without the vulgarity of mentioning money. The bald man let them into a hallway, said something in Italian, and then left the building.

“What did he tell you, Simon?”

“‘Don’t be a fool and lock up when you’re done.’”

They walked down the hallway to an open courtyard filled with lumber, scaffolding, and empty paint cans. Families had lived in the tenement for hundreds of years, but now the building was empty and the stucco walls were stained from flooding. All the windows were smashed, but iron bars still formed a grid in the window frames. The rusty bars made the building look like an abandoned prison.

Lumbroso pulled open an unlocked door and they climbed down stairs covered with plaster dust. When they reached what appeared to be the building’s cellar, Lumbroso switched on the lantern and opened a door labeled with red paint: PERICOLO-NO ENTRI.

“There’s no electric power from this point on, so we’ll have to use the lantern,” Lumbroso explained. “Be very careful where you step.”

Holding the lantern low, he moved slowly down a passageway with brick walls. The floor consisted of plywood boards placed over concrete crossbeams. Fifteen feet beyond the doorway, Lumbroso stopped and knelt beside a gap in the floorboards. Maya stood behind him, peered over his shoulder, and saw the Horologium Augusti.

The excavated section of the emperor’s sundial had become the floor of a stone-walled cellar about eight feet wide and twenty feet long. Although the sundial was underwater, Maya could see its travertine surface as well as a few bronze lines and Greek letters inlaid in the limestone. The German archaeologists had removed all the rubble, and the room resembled a looted sepulchre. The only modern touch was a steel ladder that ran from the gap in the plywood boards to the floor of the cellar nine feet below.

“You go first,” Lumbroso said. “I’ll hand you the equipment; then I’ll come down with the lantern.”

Maya placed the two sacks of equipment on a plywood board and removed her jacket, shoes, and socks. Then she climbed down the ladder to the sundial. The water was cold and about three feet deep. Lumbroso handed Maya the equipment sacks, and she looped the drawstrings around the steps of the ladder so that they hung from opposite sides.

While Simon took off his fedora, suit coat, and shoes, Maya inspected the cellar. As she moved around the room, little waves sloshed back and forth, breaking against the walls. Over the years, the minerals in the water had transformed the white travertine sundial into slabs of grayish stone; in various places it was pitted, cracked, and stained. The bronze lines and Greek symbols that had been embedded in the limestone had once been a bright gold color that glittered brightly in the Roman sun. The metal had oxidized completely and now the letters were dark green.

“I don’t like ladders,” Lumbroso said. He put one foot on the top rung as if to test the ladder’s strength, and then climbed down slowly with the lantern. Maya walked over to the corner and found a drainage hole in the gray stone wall. The hole was about two feet square and completely underwater. Its bottom edge was flush with the surface of the sundial.

“The water flows out here?”