The Chamber of Ten (2 page)

“Sadly, yes. The bricks are wearing away on the outside. On the inside—what would you do if your first floor was flooded four months out of the year? They’re sealed off, left to the water.”

“And then what? It keeps rising, they move up another floor?”

“I’ve wondered the same thing myself,” she admitted, but didn’t dare comment further.
Nothing negative
, Tonio had instructed, and Geena had no wish to jeopardize her stewardship of this project.

Besides, they had other things to talk about.

Finch had come to Venice on a scouting trip to find out if the Biblioteca project might be worth some air time on the BBC, or if the whole thing would amount to as much hot air as Geraldo Rivera opening Al Capone’s vault. Geena didn’t mind the idea of a film crew coming in to do a short documentary on the Biblioteca, especially if it would mean some attention would be paid to the broader aspects of her project.

As Venice sank, history was being sucked down into the lagoon. Even the oldest buildings in the city were built on top of the foundations of more ancient structures. The sinking was nothing new. Once upon a time, Venetians had simply raised the ground floors of their buildings every so often to combat the rising water. But with every inch that the weight of Venice dragged it down, and every inch that the sea level rose, more of that ancient architecture was being lost forever.

There were frescoes on walls, secret chambers, and artifacts in long-abandoned rooms and buildings across the city that were being eroded away by salt and sewage
and prolonged exposure to the water. Her team—which for a time had mainly been herself and a group of graduate students—had been rescuing what they could and documenting whatever they couldn’t in some of the oldest buildings in the city. And then one day, tearing away a crumbling brick and mortar wall in a semi-hidden alcove at the back of the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana—the National Library of St. Mark’s—Geena herself had noticed that the salt from constant flooding had worn tracks in the original wall. But the tracks weren’t consistent, and upon closer inspection, she discovered that they marked the seams around a secret door, long since sealed but now being undone by salt and time.

Behind the door, they had found a hidden staircase. Some of the graduate students had been amazed, but Geena had taken it in stride. In centuries past—perhaps in Italy more than anywhere else in the world—secrecy, betrayal, and paranoia had been the order of the day, and hidden passages and chambers had been commonplace. The trope of the secret room existed in fiction because it had so many real-life examples. But people loved that crap, and if it helped to continue to get her work funded, Geena was all for having the media make a big deal out of the city’s secret history and mysteries.

The water taxi pulled up to the dock and they waited while a crewman hauled the boat snug against the bumpers before disembarking. Normally Geena used the
vaporetti
—the boats that functioned as buses in this streetless city—but the university would reimburse her for the additional cost of the taxi.

They set off along a tree-lined path toward the wide cobblestoned entrance to the Piazza San Marco. Small
waves from passing boats rolled up onto the stones, but the plaza was not flooded today. The Doge’s Palace loomed ahead. Over the tops of buildings she could see just the tip of one of the domes of St. Mark’s Basilica. But they did not have even that far to walk.

“Before we get there,” Finch said, “I must ask … do you really believe what you’ve found is Petrarch’s library?”

They walked alongside the Biblioteca, its wall visible through the trees. When they reached the cobblestones, Geena turned left and pulled Finch along in her wake. On such a perfect day the Piazza San Marco was breathtakingly beautiful, the sun making it all seem almost pristine. An illusion, Geena knew, but a lovely one.

She stopped twenty feet from the Biblioteca’s front door.

“How much of the history do you know, Mr. Finch?”

He smiled, and a flicker of hidden intelligence shone in his eyes. “Call me Howard,” he said. “And I’ve done my research, Dr. Hodge. Petrarch had what was essentially a circus train of wagons that traveled around with him so he could keep his library close at all times. But eventually he realized how impractical that was. Inspired by ancient stories of public libraries like the one at Alexandria, he arranged to set one up in Venice. In—what was the year?—1362, I think, the poet moved his entire library here, hundreds of volumes of writing, much of it from antiquity, detailing philosophies and histories and the lives of the ancients, not to mention poetry, of course. Priceless works, many of which modern scholars consider lost, or even pure myth. The Venetians set him up with a posh house—”

“Palazzo Molina,” Geena put in.

Finch waved away the interruption, nodding. “Time goes by, he has a falling-out with the city and pisses off to Padua—a major slap in the face to Venice. A few of the items turn up later in the Vatican Library and other places. Some are in the Doge’s Palace. But the bulk of them were lost or ruined. The only thing most scholars have agreed on is that when Petrarch left Venice, his library left with him.”

By now, Geena found herself smiling. Finch might not know a hell of a lot about the current state of the high-water crisis in Venice, but he had certainly done his homework where Petrarch’s library was concerned.

“Something funny?” Finch asked, apparently irritated by her smile.

“No, no. Sorry. I’m just glad I don’t have to go through the whole backstory for you.”

“Fair enough. But you still haven’t answered my question.”

“Well, Professor Schiavo showed you some of the best preserved examples of the books we’ve already taken from the chamber. We’ve recovered hundreds of pieces.”

“And they are impressive, no doubt, and their antiquity is not in question. But how can you be certain of their origin? You’re convinced that all those scholars were wrong—that Petrarch never removed his library from Venice after all and instead just moved it into this secret chamber of yours?”

“We’ve found ample evidence,” she told him. “Records that include a catalog of all of the works collected in the library, some written in Petrarch’s own hand and noted as such. My assistant, Nico Lombardi, will give
you access to all of that and run it down for you. Those records are evidence enough, but the architectural details support the finding as well.”

Finch smiled and opened his hands. “Let’s pretend I know nothing about architecture.”

Geena could not help smiling in return. Finch might be pompous, but he wasn’t utterly lacking in charm.

“While we walk?” she said.

“By all means.”

“Like most cities,” she said as they approached the library’s front doors, “Venice is far older than what you can see, going back the better part of a thousand years. Scholars have been frustrated for centuries by the lack of any written record of the city’s origins, but most agree that the bulk of its original settlers came here fleeing the constant invasions of Roman-era cities by barbarians and Huns.”

They reached the door and, though the Biblioteca was her province, Finch opened it for her. The quiet from within seemed to reach out and draw them in, and Geena lowered her voice as she entered.

“The Doge’s Palace was constructed over a period that spanned most of the 14th century and beyond, on top of what remained of much older fortified buildings that we know very little about. The years that Petrarch lived in Venice fall squarely within that period.”

A woman behind a desk glanced up and smiled at her, and Geena waved as she guided Finch through the foyer and into the vastness of the Biblioteca. They made their way to a room that had once been more a shrine to books than a library. Several people sat at long tables, studying or reading in silence, but the books they were perusing
had come from the stacks upstairs. None of the books were shelved or stored on the ground floor anymore.

“This building is not the original library,” she whispered as they passed through the room. “It dates only from the 16th century. But the staircase we found and the chamber below it are much older. They had been completely sealed, and Petrarch’s collection extraordinarily well preserved. We’ve found documents that indicate the existence of the room was a closely guarded secret.”

“And no water damage? No evidence of flooding?”

“None.” Geena led him through a narrow corridor. “At some point, we theorize that all of those who knew of the chamber died and the secret of its existence died with them.”

The corridor ended at the double-doored entrance to another room that had once housed books. Two large staircases inside the vaulted room led up to the second floor. The corridor turned to the right just in front of those doors, but to the left was a little jog in the corridor, and it was through this fragment of labyrinth that Geena led Finch. There lay the small alcove room where she had discovered the hidden door.

Finch glanced around the room—the ruined fresco on the south wall, the Murano glass window that looked as though it would have been more at home in a Gaudi church than in this little corner of a Venetian library, and the carved old-wood shelves that had surrendered to rot. He paid little attention to the most interesting characteristic of the room—the remains of the early 17th century brick wall, and the ordinary stone wall behind it that dated from three hundred years earlier.

She would not be able to impress him with the ingenuity of the hidden door, for it stood open. Geena always felt a bit melancholy at the idea that something that had been so secret and had remained sealed in silence for so long now hung perpetually open and exposed, but she consoled herself that they weren’t grave robbers. Their motives were pure.

Lights had been strung through the open door and down the stairs into the chamber. Even from the alcove, she could hear the chatter of voices echoing up from below, where preservation efforts were still under way.

And then the back of her neck prickled with a once-strange sensation that had now become quite familiar.
Hello, sweetheart
.

Nico had felt her arrive, and now he reached out to touch her with his thoughts. From the moment they had first met, she had sensed something different about him, had felt a kind of intimacy that had seemed unlikely and inadvisable for her to share with one of her grad students. But only when they had made love for the first time and she sensed his thoughts in her head, shared what he felt and desired in a way she could never have imagined before, had she really understood.

After that, of course, he could no longer hide it from her. It wasn’t telepathy, exactly—not mind-reading in the simple pop-culture sense—but Nico could touch the minds of others with his own and share images, memories, and thoughts. Such things were not concrete, but rather a sense of what she felt, an understanding of what she was thinking without a need for words.

Like their relationship, his touch could not be hidden completely from others. He knew whenever anyone was about to enter the chamber—knew who it was—and
the other members of their team often looked at him oddly. But, again like their relationship, Nico’s touch was treated with a respectful silence. And perhaps also with confusion. Their co-workers might gossip about them after hours, but such things went unspoken in their company.

“Dr. Hodge?” Finch prompted. “Are we going down?”

Geena smiled. “You didn’t come all the way to Venice to see an open door.”

But as she started down the stone steps, she was distracted by a kind of giddiness that swept over her. She felt as though she might laugh out loud, and it took a moment to realize that the emotion flooding her belonged not to her, but to Nico. And it was not merely her arrival that had filled him with such joy.

She felt the touch of his mind, her name in his thoughts, and she picked up her pace. Finch hurried to keep up, muttering about caution and the lack of a handrail, but Geena did not slow. Nico had found something major, but she had no idea what could have excited him so much.

The stairs curved to the right and she trailed her hand across the cold, dry wall. They had yet to figure out exactly how the chamber’s architects had sealed it off so completely, making it airtight and moisture-free. Even with the door opened there was no humidity here, and no evidence of water past or present, despite the depth of the chamber and its proximity to the Grand Canal.

At the bottom of the steps another old door stood open, and she stepped through into a warren of plastic sheeting illuminated by work lights and the glow of laptop screens. A preservation tent had been set up in the far corner of the large chamber, and members of her
team carefully prepared manuscripts for transport to a room at Ca’Foscari University that had been specially built for the care of ancient documents.

“Dr. Hodge?” Finch called behind her.

But Geena was drawn through the anthill industriousness of the recovery team by the giddy urgency she felt in Nico’s mind. Several members of the team tried to speak with her as she passed, but she waved them off with a tight smile. This was not the way she had imagined Finch experiencing the size and delicacy and historical significance of the Biblioteca project, but she could not stop herself. Nico did not get this excited about just anything.

Plastic curtains covered an archway that separated the two wings of the chamber. As Geena rushed forward, Nico pushed through, and she saw the smile that she’d felt in her mind. His olive skin shone in the glare of the work lights. Mischief and glee danced in his dark eyes.

“Dr. Hodge!” Finch called from behind her.

Geena stared at Nico. “What is it?” she said, the words almost a sigh.

“We found another door,” he said, reaching for her hand. And then he was tugging her along in his wake, back through the plastic curtains, Howard Finch forgotten, and they were rushing into an area of the chamber they had barely begun to catalog.

“You opened it?” she asked.

“Of course!” Nico said, but she could feel the touch of his mind and knew he was toying with her.