There was a sharp rapping coming from the front door, the sound of a single insistent knuckle against heavy wood. She tucked the card back in the book, dried her face with her palms and began to wonder how someone had got past the entrance without being buzzed through. Was it a neighbor?
She put her tearful eye against the peephole and pulled back with a start.
The pale, elongated face of Father Pascal Tremblay filled the fisheye lens and Elisabetta’s first confused instinct was to run and hide underneath her mother’s bed.
NINETEEN
Rome, AD 64
IT WAS MID-JULY and many of the noble families of Rome had retreated from the scorching heat to the breezier climes of their villas on the western coast or their estates high in the piney hills. A million of the less fortunate were left behind. The shimmering air above the metropolis reeked of smoke from tens of thousands of cooking fires and a thin layer of black ash settled on roofs and cobbles like a sinister summer snow.
Everything was parched: men’s throats, the sandy soil, the fissured timbers and rafters of the ancient tenements. Water, always important to Rome, was never more vital than during the rainless drought of that hot summer.
A thousand freedmen and slaves worked perpetually in the city’s water gangs, keeping the aqueducts, reservoirs and kilometers of pipes in order. A hundred public buildings, five hundred public basins and bathhouses and dozens of ornamental fountains received running water around the clock but for weeks the loudest sound that the system produced had been grumbling.
Water wasn’t flowing as it should; it was trickling. The basins were dangerously low, the bathhouses were raising their prices, the brewers were charging more for beer. The vigiles, the night-owls of the city, knew the hazard. Organized into seven cohorts of a thousand men each, they slept by day and by night they patrolled the impossibly narrow dark lanes of the vast capital, prowling for incipient house fires. Their only effective weapons were bronze and leather buckets which they passed from hand to hand in human chains from the nearest basin or, if close enough, the Tiber. But this season the water levels were too meager to do much good and the vigiles knew why. It was more than drought.
The puncturers were relentless and the water commissioner, a close relative of Prefect Tigellinus, was getting rich.
Before decamping for Antium a fortnight earlier, Nero had told Tigellinus, ‘Have your brother-in-law bleed it dry,’ and virtually overnight corrupt water bosses had their gangs of puncturers tap into the system with illegal pipes. Torrents of tax-free water rushed to Lemures privateers and the vigiles could do little more than bite their nails to the quick as they watched Rome turn to kindling. It had been twenty-eight years since the last major fire.
July was a festival month and the chariot-race season was in full swing. Nothing distracted the masses from the misery of the heat and humidity like a day of sport at the Circus Maximus. Up to 200,000 Romans crammed into the stands to root for one of their teams, the Blues, Reds, Greens or Whites, each controlled by a corporation. Quadrias – four-horse chariots – raced around the long narrow U-shaped track and if the drivers and animals survived the hairpin turns the prizes were great. Below the stands were several bustling floors of wine bars, hot-food shops, bakeries and plenty of prostitution dens.
The day was propitious in other ways, too. Balbilus had told Nero that it would be so after poring over his astrological charts. Sirius, the Dog Star, rose in the heavens that night, signaling the hottest days of the summer. But furthermore its path took it through the House of Death. That had sealed it. The time of destiny had come.
There was a full moon that night but because it was cloudy it shone little light on the thousands who were queuing at the Circus Maximus gates for a dawn admission to the grounds.
Deep in the bowels of the Circus’s grandstands, Vibius, Balbilus’s creature of the night, and another man crept through a dark passageway into a cheerfully lit shop. There a leather-aproned baker was sliding loaves into a roaring oven.
‘We’re not open,’ the baker barked.
Vibius walked calmly toward him and ran a sword through his gut upwards to his heart. The baker fell hard and when his wife ran from the second room where the dough was curing the other man killed her likewise with one hard thrust.
A man screamed. Out of the corner of his eye Vibius saw the baker’s son bursting from the curing room with rage in his heart and an iron bar in his hand. With a dull thud of crushed bone Vibius’s colleague crumpled. Vibius wheeled and pounced on the strapping lad, sliced his neck hard and clean and watched him fall onto his mother’s lap.
Cursing, Vibius stepped around the bodies and used the baker’s pallet to scoop embers from deep inside the brick-lined oven. With a flick of his wrists he dumped a red-hot heap into a corner. Instantly the floorboards began to smoke and hiss and in mere moments a line of flame crept up the wall to the rafters.
Vibius returned to the dark corridor and hustled down the stairs, his job imperfectly done. Soon he was mingling with the crowd, waiting for the show to well and truly start.
One floor above the baker there was a lamp-oil shop, laden with heavy amphorae. The clay vessels burst in the heat and fed the fire so spectacularly that the northeastern corner of the Circus Maximus exploded in a fireball. With a collective gasp, the crowd pointed at the blaze and began to stampede. The flames leapt skyward and almost immediately the fire bells of the nearby vigilis station of the district known as Regio IX began to jangle.
A cohort of vigiles mobilized but their bucket brigades quickly exhausted the meager local water supply and all they could do was shout evacuation orders into the night. The circus was ringed with rickety tenements, some with illegally built upper stories so shoddily constructed that they practically leaned onto each other across narrow cobblestone lanes. The blaze ran quickly through the blocks of tenements, leaving behind collapsed buildings and charred bodies. Whipped by a strong seasonal wind the fire spread south into Regio XII and then to Regio XIII before jumping the Servian Walls which had once marked the southern boundary of Rome before urban sprawl had stretched the city limits.
The streets filled with frightened, powerless people as the inferno hurtled down some blocks and danced across roofs. One narrow winding street after another was consumed by flames, often with masses of men, women and children trapped by fallen masonry or walls of fire. And although there would be tales of men helping others to escape and beating back pockets of flames, there would also be reports of shadowy figures moving through the city, throwing burning brands into hitherto untouched buildings.
By morning light a pall of heavy smoke hung over many of the southern regions of Rome and the fire was advancing up the Aventine Hill toward wealthy homes and temples. Then the winds shifted ominously and started to drive the fire in the north to the southern slopes of the Palatine and Caelian Hills. The city was doomed.
From the highest balcony of his villa on the Via Appia, Balbilus looked north to the billowing clouds of smoke. Vibius joined him, sooty from his exertions, and was offered a goblet of wine to slake his thirst.
‘It’s too close for comfort,’ Balbilus growled.
‘The wind is turning southerly,’ Vibius said.
‘I can predict the movement of the heavens, but not the wind,’ the swarthy astrologer said. ‘I would rather not lose my house.’
‘I think mine has already gone,’ Vibius said without a trace of emotion.
‘Your family can come here. All the Lemures families who are in peril can come. Put the word out.’