The Reincarnationist (13 page)

G
abriella sat by the professor's bed watching the man who had been her mentor as he fought for every breath. His sudden frailty made no sense. Just two days ago they were underground, dirt clinging to their faces, sweating, doing what they both were meant to do. Except for the time she spent with Quinn, her almost three-year-old daughter, whom she missed terribly while she was away, nothing stirred her like digging out the dead and their secrets. During the past few years, Gabriella Chase's life had changed more than it had stayed the same. It was the trips back to Rome and the field outside the city gates to the excavations that had kept her sane.

There was nothing that competed with the moments of discovery. And there had been so many on this last dig. It was perhaps the proudest moment of her career when, only three weeks ago, the professor stood by her side, held his breath and watched as she brushed the first thick layer of dust off of the square object in the corpse's hand, revealing a wooden box. Another sweep exposed an intricate pattern of carvings.

“Well, look at that,” Rudolfo said, sotto voce. “I
think…” He peered down, inspecting the bas-relief carefully. “Yes, it's a phoenix,” he said, naming the bird that symbolized rebirth to countless ancient cultures.

Her eyes met the professor's and they exchanged a look. Both of them knew the Egyptian legend dating back to the reign of Ramses III about a wooden box very similar to this one and the treasure of precious stones that the phoenix on its cover was purportedly protecting.

Neither Gabriella nor Rudolfo dared to say out loud what both were thinking—was this the Egyptian box? Here, in Rome, in this fourth-century tomb?

Patiently, Gabriella continued to brush off the remaining dirt and debris from the deep recesses of the small wooden casket, but she felt anything but patient. Typically, archeology itself destroys as it discovers; but, for the first time in her career, that had not been the case here. In fact, nothing about this dig had been emblematic of what had come before. It already had proved to be a significant find for her. Depending on what was inside this box, it might be the most important one of her career.

Normally, a site can take a decade to uncover, but this tomb hadn't collapsed in on itself. Other buildings had never been erected above it. That was one of the mysteries she and Professor Rudolfo had marveled at—how pristine this whole area had remained; how, after so many centuries, there were still parts of the world, even in metropolitan areas, where the past was so very close to the surface.

Everything about an excavation was a mystery, but, to both of them, this one seemed more mysterious than most—including the way they had discovered the site itself.

It had been snowing that Sunday morning four years before, and the old Yale campus had been shrouded by a thick white blanket. Walking across the quad, Gabriella was glad she'd gone out early. It was one of those perfect
winter mornings, quiet and sparkling, and she was almost enjoying it.

Since childhood she'd been going to services at Battell Chapel, where her mother had been the choirmaster of the Beethoven Society. When she'd died, the chapel had been the only place where Gabriella could still feel her, where she didn't miss her quite so much. Maybe that was because she'd always sat without her mother beside her, or maybe it was because there, God's grace offered her some peace.

The unusual acoustical effect in the chapel that day, she later read in the
Yale News
, was a result of the heavy snow quieting the world outside and insulating the building at the same time. The singers' voices rang out like bells, pure and crystalline, and it felt as if the organ's deepest tones were vibrating inside of her body, not just in the brass pipes.

The storm had kept a lot of people away, and there wasn't much of a crowd; still Gabriella hardly noticed the priest sitting in the row in front of her. There were often visiting clergy at Battell, some who officiated, and others, like him, who just came to pray. Nothing out of the ordinary happened until, after the service ended, he approached her while she put on her coat and greeted her by name. She was surprised that he knew who she was until he explained that he'd driven up to Yale specifically to see her and that the chaplain had pointed her out when she'd walked in.

The priest introduced himself as Father Dougherty and asked if she could spare him a few minutes, and she agreed. They stayed in the chapel while everyone else left.

Gabriella could still remember how quiet it was.

The snow altered the sound of the silence, too.

Because of the storm, the interior of the chapel had
been dark during the whole service, but the sun had come out and suddenly the dozens of richly colored stained-glass windows were illuminated, casting their jewel-toned shadows across the pews. Across the two of them.

Battell is a lovely building. The interior is carved from solid oak, and the walls are stenciled with complicated patterns. There is so much going on visually inside the chapel that, in retrospect, Gabriella realized she wasn't always focused on the priest's face.

He'd been so average looking. Almost too average, if that made any sense. He was at that indiscriminate age—somewhere between fifty and seventy. He wore wire-rimmed glasses. They must have been thick or slightly tinted, because she couldn't remember what color his eyes were. Or maybe his eyes were just brown. He had a very slight Boston accent.

Father Dougherty said he'd come to give her a document that had been written in the late nineteenth century. “It's stained with blood, but you can wipe it clean,” he said as he handed her a manila envelope.

Inside were several sheets of rich vellum paper covered with spidery, hard-to-read handwriting. After a few seconds of staring at them in the semidarkness, it became clear what she held was torn from someone's journal.

“The diary those pages come from is safely put away,” the priest explained. “It was in the possession of a parishioner who turned it over to his priest in the 1880s during confession, and because confession is sacred I can't tell you any more. I know I'm being cryptic and I'm sorry. But you really don't need to know the whole story or to read the rest of the diary, you have all you're going to need right there.”

“All I'm going to need for what?”

The priest stared into the apse, an intensely meditative expression on his face, and didn't answer for a few seconds.

“If what's written there is true, you'll be famous.”

“What about you? What will you get out of this?”

“I'm just the messenger. All this happened a long time ago, but my bishop believes that it's wrong for us to continue to keep this part of the document a secret.”

Unexpectedly, he stood and pulled on his coat. “Just read it, Professor Chase. Do the right thing.”

“What's the right thing?”

“Shed light on the darkness.”

He left quickly, not waiting for Gabriella, and by the time she gathered her things and went outside, she couldn't see the black-clad figure anywhere. Just an expanse of white snow and a woman wearing a red parka trudging across the campus.

The sheets outlined directions to five separate locations that were all potential archeological digs of historical and spiritual importance, the notes said. It took Gabriella a few days to ascertain that all the sites were in Rome. Having made that connection, she contacted her mentor and partner in a recent dig in Salerno, Professor Aldo Rudolfo, who was equally intrigued. Of course he knew the general areas referred to, and he told Gabriella that just two years ago a spot nearby had been excavated, but nothing had been found.

A few weeks later he e-mailed her to say that all the sites in question were on land owned by the descendants of an archeologist who had died in the late 1800s and he was negotiating with them, hoping they'd allow a team to excavate.

It took a year, but he worked out a contract with the family and they'd finally been able to go to work.

Nothing would ever replace trowels and shovels once
you got to the heart of the find, but the advanced laser and infrared surveying devices she and the professor had been using enabled them to pinpoint the exact areas to dig with more accuracy than ever before possible. The first two sites had not yielded anything of significance, only some walls, some ancient shards of pottery and glass. Typical detritus for an old field outside of the city gates.

But this site, number three, had been different.

The professor opened the box, extracted a dried-out leather pouch and untied it. The sound he made when he shone the light into it was somewhere between a cry and a shout. “Look, Gabriella, look at what our Bella is holding. It may be that you've found your treasure.”

Now, with the professor lying in a hospital bed, suffering from a gunshot wound and a substantive loss of blood, fighting a critical infection, it appeared that someone thought the treasure had been worth killing for.

Rome, Italy—Wednesday, 3:10 p.m.

T
he light changed to green, a car horn blasted and the priest crossed the street past a row of vendors, giving cursory glances at their merchandise. If he made eye contact with any of them it wasn't visible to any strangers who happened to see the middle-aged, overweight cleric. Twenty yards farther, he huffed as he climbed the few steps at the bottom of the Via Vittorio Veneto next to the Piazza Barberini and entered the dingy church of Santa Maria della Concezione.

No one at the sidewalk cafés across the street paid any attention to him as he disappeared behind the wooden doors. The church wasn't nearly as popular a pilgrimage destination as the Vatican or the Pantheon. Compared to Rome's grand and glorious houses of worship, a visit to the crypt at della Concezione was a macabre adventure, though, so it had its share of tourists. Another priest walking in didn't attract any notice.

The change from the bright afternoon to the dark interior took some adjusting to. The church was musty
and lackluster except for the gold cross glinting above the nave. He looked at his watch. Stepped up to the font, dipped his fingers into the basin of holy water, crossed himself, walked up the main aisle, entered a pew, knelt down and prayed for a few seconds. Or at least it appeared that he was praying.

He was really keeping his eye on his watch. The tour, he knew from the guidebook, would begin on the hour. His heart jumped around in his chest.

After six minutes passed, he lifted his head, stared at the altar, got up and made his way to the back of the church, where the curious gathered.

The scent was different down in the crypt, but the ancient smell of dirt and moisture was not unpleasant. The smell of antiquity, he thought. A monk with a dour face escorted the six of them down a narrow corridor, through iron gates and into the five chambers of the underground cemetery that contained the remains of four thousand Capuchin monks.

But not buried remains.

Every wall and each ceiling was covered with baroque decorations made up entirely of the monks' dried out and bleached bones. Altars, chandeliers and clocks: everything a human relic.

He barely listened as the monk who led the tour droned on, explaining that
la macabra composiziones
in the series of tableaux had been made out of the bones of the dear departed monks dating back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and that the spectacle had not been created to inspire fear, but, to encourage prayer and meditation.

This was not his first visit to the crypt, yet he still was amazed that the thousands of skulls, ribs, teeth, leg and arm bones, pelvises and vertebrae had lost their semblance to human remains and became the medium the artists had employed to create their spectacle.

When the tour ended, he obediently followed the other tourists up and out of the church and into the street, careful to watch the crowd scatter. No one lingered on the steps; everyone dispersed. After being certain they had all walked away, he strolled to the corner and passed the same group of street vendors he had walked by before going into the church. This time he slowed and took more notice of them.

The first sat behind a table covered with cheap Italian souvenirs: Leaning Towers of Pisa, bronze St. Peters, refrigerator magnets of the glorious Sistine Chapel ceiling.

* * *

The next table had been transformed into a handbag and briefcase store. Leather goods of every imaginable shape and color were lined up invitingly, and the proprietor was doing a brisk business. The third vendor was selling cheap costume copies of very costly jewelry. Prevalent were thick gold chokers featuring facsimiles of Roman coins. There were also silver and gold ropes studded with pearls, and hanging earrings encrusted with faux diamonds. Surprising quality for street goods.

He fingered a silver necklace. Six glass gemstonelike pendants hung from the heavy links. Rubies, emeralds and sapphires.

“Gucci,” the vendor said.

The priest nodded. A smile passed his lips. “Gucci? Really?”

“Good copy.” The vendor spoke in heavily accented Italian. “Not expensive.”

“Do you have three of these? Identical ones?”

The vendor nodded and reached under his table to pull out first one, then another and a third, each in a box with the word
Gucci
stamped on it in a similar typeface to the one the high-end retailer used. Almost but not quite
exact. Close enough so that most people wouldn't notice it unless they had the real thing to compare it to.

The price was negotiated and paid. The vendor slipped the bills into his apron and watched as the priest put the necklaces into his briefcase and walked off.

Continuing down the block, he turned the corner and then entered the next café he came to, where he ordered a cappuccino in honor of the dead friars.

He put the briefcase on the bar and rested his elbows on it.

He was almost positive that no one had followed him to the church. He'd made sure of that. Certainly, no one had followed him into the crypt. And it didn't appear that anyone had been loitering nearby, watching him buy the bargain tourist fare.

The coffee was strong and hot, but he finished it quickly and went to the men's room, where he pocketed all the jewelry and put the faux Gucci boxes back into his briefcase.

Back out on the street, he strolled, stopping often to look in store windows, checking on the reflections to make sure he wasn't being followed.

If they tried to take the briefcase from him, he would put up a struggle. But he would let them have it. What he wouldn't let them have was what was in his pocket.