to be agreeing with what she said and nodded along with her tirade. When she was done, he climbed up the ladder and stayed perched there, half in and half out, as he called over the two policemen who had first arrived at the scene and had spoken to them.
Gabriella waited by the bottom of the ladder, watching him, listening to what he was saying. Beneath her anger, she was still extremely anxious. Twice, she glanced at her watch. Several times she looked over at Sabina with a curious, questioning expression in her eyes. And although Josh didn’t know Gabriella yet, he knew she was wishing that the mummy could communicate, that Sabina could tell them what she’d seen, who had come down here and invaded this sacred space.
For the next few minutes, while the detective continued his discussion with the two officers, Josh struggled not to lose touch with reality and give in to where his mind wanted to go. Tried not to think. But the images were crowding in, demanding attention, refusing to go away. He held his camera up to his face and focused on Gabriella while she listened to the detective talk with his minions. From behind the lens he examined her face—the broad forehead, the high cheekbones. The intelligent eyes.
He remembered a sculpture in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a head entitled The Muse, by Brancusi, made of highly polished bronze: golden, spare, cerebral. Wide almond eyes, perfect oval face.
She could have modeled for it.
Using her expressions as clues, he tried to decode the discussion the detective was having with the policemen. Several times she almost interrupted but stopped herself. Without thinking, Josh took a shot of her. The flash went off. She looked up and over at him, annoyed. Josh lowered the camera.
Finally the detective climbed back down.
“Professor Chase, I don’t want to corrupt your site any more than you do. After all, my job is protecting Italian treasures. I know something about archeology, and from the look of this tomb and its location, this woman might be an early Christian martyr. She might be a saint. As we can see, she’s barely corrupted.” He gestured to Sabina with a flourish, trying to impress her with his knowledge. “The police understand. They will come down now and work both quickly and carefully. Luckily, this is a very small space and it will not be complicated. Then you can shut down the site until this ugly matter is dealt with. As long as you agree to give us access if we need it again.”
She said, “Of course,” and bowed her head for a second as if a prayer was being answered.
Then he turned to Josh. “Mr. Ryder, I need you to come with me, please. I still have additional questions for you, but we can take care of them up there.”
Out of the tomb, the detective led Josh away from the clearing and closer to the line of oak trees that stood like sentinels at the edge of what seemed to be a forest. Leaning against one of these massive trees that probably had been standing since the tomb was built, since Sabina had been buried there, Tatti made Josh repeat what had happened since he’d left his hotel.
“I simply don’t believe your story, Mr. Ryder,” he said when Josh finished. “You walk all the way here before dawn when you already have an appointment in the morning? Why?”
“I was restless.”
“But how did you know where to come?”
“I didn’t.”
“And you expect me to believe a coincidence like this? You think I’m stupid, Mr. Ryder?”
Josh knew how preposterous it sounded. But the truth would have sounded more like a lie.
I felt propelled here, even though I didn’t know where I was going.
“If you were me, what would you do if you heard this crazy recital? Would you believe a word of it?”
What should he tell him? What could he tell him? And then he realized the truth in this case might work. “No. Probably not. But honestly, there’s just nothing else I can tell you.”
Tatti threw up his hands. He’d had enough for at least the time being. Grasping Josh by the arm, with greater pressure than was necessary, he escorted him over to an unmarked sedan, opened the back door, waited for him to get in and then shut the door and locked it after him.
“I won’t be long. Make yourself, how do you say it? Oh, yes, at home.”
Despite the open window, the detective’s car was hot and smelled of strong cigarettes and stale coffee. He watched Tatti interrogate Gabriella, watched how she glanced over in Josh’s direction. Again. And again. As if she was putting the blame on him, or as if she was asking him to come to her rescue and save her from any more questions.
As if she was asking him to save her.
How familiar that thought seemed.
Had someone else once asked him to save her here in this grove?
Was that his imagination? Or was it his madness?
Chapter 15
While Josh waited, he lifted the camera to his eye and looked through the viewfinder. As he snapped shots of the woods bordering the site to the right and the landscape off to the left, the sound of the shutter reverberated in his ears, like an old friend’s greeting.
Right now he preferred the world framed in this oblong box, all peripheral excess and activities cut out. Reframing the image, Josh went for an even wider shot and saw a break in the line of trees that suggested an opening into the forest.
As if he were standing there, not sitting in the car, he could smell the pine sap—fresh and sharp—and feel the green-blue shadowed space undulating around him. No. He didn’t want to leave this present, not now.
Struggling, Josh brought himself back, to the car, to the metal camera case in his hands. To the smell of the stale cigarette smoke.
Rome and its environs were triggering more episodes than he’d ever had before in one time period. What was happening?
He knew what Malachai would say. Josh was experiencing past-life regressions. But despite these multiple memory lurches, Josh remained skeptical. It made more sense that reincarnation was a panacea, a comforting concept that explained the existential dilemma of why we’re on earth and why bad things can happen—even to good people. It was easier to believe reincarnation was a soothing myth than it was to accept the mystical belief that some essential part of a living being—the soul or the spirit—survives death to be reborn in a new body. To literally be made flesh again and return to earth in order to fulfill its karma. To do this time what you had failed to do the last.
And yet how else to explain the memory lurches?
Josh had read that even past-life experiences that seemed spontaneous were precipitated or triggered by encountering a person, a situation, a sensory experience such as a particular smell or sound or taste that had some connection to a previous incarnation.
He hadn’t seen a single movie in the past five months, but he’d devoured more than fifty books on this single subject.
Something the Dalai Lama—who had been chosen as a child from dozens of other children because it was believed he was the incarnation of a previous Dalai Lama—had written in one of those books had stuck in Josh’s mind.
It was a simple explanation for a complex concept, one of the few things he’d read that made Josh feel that if what was happening was related to reincarnation, then perhaps it wasn’t a curse, but an enviable gift.
Reincarnation, the Dalai Lama explained, was not exclusively an ancient Egyptian, Hindu or a Buddhist concept, but an enriching one intrinsically intertwined in the fabric of the history of human origin—proof, he wrote, of the mind stream’s capacity to retain knowledge of physical and mental activities. A fact tied to the law of cause and effect.
A meaningful answer to complicated questions.
Something was happening to him, here in Rome. Time was twisting in on itself