The Vesuvius Isotope (The Katrina Stone Novels) (40 page)

Women are nothing but machines for producing children.

Doctors will have more lives to answer for in the next world than even we generals.

History is a set of lies agreed upon.

-Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821)

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Somewhere, a phone is ringing.

I drift into consciousness. Is it daytime? Is it nighttime?

There is light filtering in through the closed curtains of my bedroom. My prison. So it must be daytime. I don’t really care.

The phone stops ringing. I pull a pillow over my head to shut out the light, and I beg sleep to come to me once again.

A door creaks, and a moment later there is a warm, soft hand on the small of my back.

“Trina,” my sister says. “The police called. They caught him.”

Lawrence Naden. My son’s killer.

I am sure Kathy’s words should be comforting, but they are not.

There is light filtering in through the closed curtains. I wake up. Slowly, lazily, I open my eyes. The light seems to be keeping any cockroaches at bay. I glance at the bedside clock. It is mid-afternoon.

The familiar dream is still rolling in a constant loop through my mind. Lawrence Naden was a gangster, an American who ran drugs out of Mexico.

And I understand now why Herculaneum was never fully excavated.

The modern town of Ercolano sits atop the ancient ruins. Ercolano happens to be Italian crime territory. From within the town, a two-thousand-year-old drug network is run.

Ercolano is the hub of
camorra
, the Neapolitan Mafia. But unlike Sicilian Mafia, which is largely centralized,
camorra
operates as a loosely tied network of families or clans. Because there is no centralization, the individual members of the
camorra
network—much like those of al Qaeda—are much more difficult to flush out and prosecute. The Italian government, Europol, and Interpol have been trying without success for a very long time.

I am pleased to find a modest assortment of toiletries in the bathroom, and I bathe slowly. My bandaged leg juts rudely from the bathtub like an inappropriate erection, and I wince as I gently sponge the skin surrounding the crocodile bite. When I am finished, I step out of the bathtub and don my galabia—the only clothing remaining in my possession—but I leave the niqab sitting on the hotel room bed.

I understand now why the Villa dei Papiri was never fully excavated.

If a major medical find authored by Queen Cleopatra were unearthed from the ruins of the Herculaneum villa, the modern town of Ercolano would be swarmed. The Pompeii and Herculaneum fever of the Enlightenment and beyond would once again explode. The area surrounding the ruins would become a veritable hotbed for archeology, tourism, and international press. And as the legitimate money poured in, the clandestine drug network running out of Ercolano would be destroyed.

So I was not surprised to learn, during my overnight Internet searching, that the landowners of Ercolano—mostly
camorra
bosses—repeatedly block the excavations of Pompeii and Herculaneum. They demand exorbitant sums of money from the Italian government for even a cursory, non-disruptive dig. And they interfere with every effort made to re-enter the Villa dei Papiri.

The tension between
camorra
and the government has been increasing dramatically since 2010. That was when a new, massive eruption of Mount Vesuvius was predicted to occur within the next eight years.

It is now five years overdue.

The situation is becoming desperate. Many of the buildings of Pompeii and Herculaneum, as well as many of the major historical sites of Naples, have begun to crumble. Some of this is attributable to natural wear-and-tear, and some not.

On February 15, 2013, a corruption probe into the most recent excavation of Herculaneum was announced. This had been the dig that revealed the second and third stories of the Villa dei Papiri, just before the maps of Karl Weber were declared erroneous and the excavation halted.

Two weeks later, arson destroyed a prominent Naples museum.
Camorra
was highly suspected. No charges were ever filed.

And so the rift continues between archeologists, the Italian government, and the ubiquitous
camorra
. The
camorra
bosses seem to be winning, and the evidence of this is the fact that one of the richest archeological databases in history remains virtually untapped despite the fact that it may soon be lost forever.

This time, I drape my purse over my shoulder, unconcerned about whether or not its soft camel-colored leather is recognizable. I grab the pistol off the nightstand and eject the magazine. There are only three bullets remaining. I hope that two will be enough.

My shoulder-length brunette hair is flowing freely as I limp slowly out of the hotel.

I ride the subway to the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities. I enter the baggage claim area and find an employee who speaks English. I explain that I lost the claim check for my bag. A description and a wad of cash are sufficient to retrieve it.

I sit in a café long enough to charge my iPhone, and then I find a secluded park. I walk to a bench and sit. When I am sure I am alone, I withdraw my phone, and I begin making calls.

Although I desperately want to, I cannot call Jeff’s mother because what I need to say to her must be said in person. And I’m not in a position to do that. Not yet.

So I call my own mother, even though she has no idea who I am anymore. I call her just to hear the familiar voice of someone who I know holds no hidden agenda. I need to hear the voice of someone I can trust.

“Hi, Mom. It’s me!” I say enthusiastically.

“Oh, hi, honey,” she says in her relaxed, tired, carefree tone. “How are you?”

“I’m great!” I say, always as cheerful as possible when speaking with the woman whose only connection to reality is the voice of another person.

“That’s wonderful,” she says. “Who is this?”

“It’s me, Mom. It’s Katrina.”

“Are you my sister?”

“No, Mom. I’m your daughter.”

“Oh,” she says. “Do you live with me?”

“I live next door to you.”

“Have you seen my parents? I’m looking for my parents.”

“Mom, your parents died a long time ago.”

“Oh.” Silence for a moment. “Who is this? Are you my sister?”

And the conversation begins again.

My mother’s caregiver assures me that all is fine at home, and I hang up the phone.

Then I call Alexis. My sister Kathy answers the phone.

“Alexis is sleeping,” she says quietly. “She sleeps a lot these days.” Her voice becomes barely more than a whisper when she says, “Trina, I don’t know how much longer she’s going to hold on.”

“Wake her up,” I say.

“Hi Mom,” Alexis says groggily.

“How are you feeling, sweetie?”

“Like ass,” she says, and a distant memory comes back to me. I push it aside.

“Listen to me,” I say. “I’m almost there. I swear to you, I am
so close
. You just hold on. It can’t be more than another day or two. So hold on. Because I’m going to need you. When this is all over, you will have a new little brother or sister to babysit.”

I hear Alexis laughing softly for a moment before she answers.

“Are you serious?” she finally asks. “Aren’t you a little old?”

“
I’m forty-two!
” I say indignantly. “And I have wanted Jeff’s baby since the day I first saw him naked on the beach.”

I call John. When he answers his cell phone, I ask him if he found Moretti.

“Yeah, I found him,” John says. “He’s here now. I’m in the lab in Naples. We’ve been working our asses off. But, Kat, we’re not having any luck. What did you expect to see? Did the document give any hint about what to do with the two plants?”

“Not really,” I say. “It read ‘when the sky opened and the gods cast their anger upon our enemies, the wine soured and the nardos by the bedsides turned from green to red.’ It also indicated that the effect was quite transient, over in just a matter of moments.”

“Well, the gods aren’t doing anything now,” John says.