The Far Time Incident Read online

  He left it at that. I felt Nate’s eyes linger on me as Helen finished her sketch. Another few minutes passed by, and we were finally able to leave the Forum. We took a drink of water at a fountain decorated with a somewhat spooky face of a Gorgon, where children splashed in the water, leaving the pavement wet, and continued out of the Forum to the double-arched Marine Gate, which faced the sea. The larger of its two archways served cart traffic coming up the steep road from the harbor and its warehouses, and the smaller was reserved for pedestrian traffic. Helen stopped to sketch the houses that sprouted above the town walls on either side of the gate. “The people living up there must have nice views of the harbor,” I commented in an effort to prove to everyone that I could be as calm and dispassionate about the fate of the town as they seemed to be. I had, after all, asked to go on a time trip.

  Xavier pointed to a terraced, three-story villa to the left of the gate. “That one, over there, belongs to Secundus’s main competition. One Aulus Umbricius Scaurus, the number one garum producer and exporter in town. Scaurus owns extensive facilities and warehouses down in the harbor. His ex-slaves sell the stuff in shops all around town and he exports it, too.”

  I imagined the garum maker on the terrace of his villa, keeping an eye on his warehouses and watching merchant ships carrying his fish sauce sail to faraway lands.

  The security chief’s ears had perked up, but, “That’s quite a place,” was all he said.

  “What, you suspect him of trashing Secundus’s shop because Secundus is elbowing in on his turf? But Secundus’s shop is such a small place,” I protested.

  “Small businesses are the ones most easily intimidated and driven out of town. We should go in and talk to the man.”

  “Is that a good idea?” I asked.

  “I’m a police officer. If I suspect someone of wrongdoing, the first thing I do is talk to them. I don’t speak Latin, but one of you can translate for me.”

  I would have probably tried to spy over Scaurus’s garden walls but Nate’s method made sense, too.

  “It will only take a few minutes,” Nate said.

  Xavier hesitated, then said, “Just the chief and I.”

  Helen, our two grad students, and I were left to cool our heels (literally) by the Gorgon fountain with its wet pavement. We didn’t have to wait long for Nate and Xavier.

  “What happened? What did Scaurus say?” I asked.

  “We didn’t get to talk to him. One of his slaves, a burly overseer—the kind you don’t argue with—informed us that his master wasn’t accepting visitors, at least not rabble such as ourselves. He said we should come back tomorrow at dawn,” Xavier said.

  “At dawn? Why at dawn?” asked Abigail. The invitation did have the suggestion of a duel about it.

  “Of course. For the patron visits,” Helen said.

  “Patron visits? Who is the patron?” I asked.

  “Scaurus himself. Those of lower socioeconomic status come by to ask him for favors. It’s a measure of his power and influence,” she explained.

  “It put us in our place,” Xavier said.

  “We could spy over his walls,” I suggested.

  Nate sent a look in my direction. “If Scaurus did have something to do with the damage to Secundus’s shop, he wouldn’t have gotten his own hands dirty. I don’t like the look of that overseer—Thraex, you said his name was, Xavier? Latin sounds like gibberish to me, but even I picked up on his tone. I’d like nothing better than to get my hands on his fingerprints and dust off Secundus’s shop.”

  “What about Secundus’s landlord?” I asked.

  “Nigidius? What about him?” Xavier said.

  “Maybe he was irked that Secundus was late with the rent, or he doesn’t like the fact that Secundus is subletting one of the rooms above the shop to you to make extra income. He could have sent his slave to trash the shop as a warning.”

  “I doubt it,” said Xavier. “I’ve seen Primus around the neighborhood. Mousy-looking fellow. Warts on his nose. Goes around painting Rental Quarters Available signs. Wouldn’t hurt a fly. He was most apologetic when he told Secundus he would have to leave if he didn’t come up with the rent.”

  “We’ve met his wife,” Helen remarked. “Nigidius’s, I mean.”

  “We have?” I asked.

  “At the baths. Claudia.”

  “You mean the portly woman with the hovering attendant, the large earrings, and the sagging—Did she say anything of note?”

  “She wanted to know all about us when she heard we were staying in her block. She thinks her cook uses some of Secundus’s fish sauce. I told you about the rest—we mostly talked about the strange goings-on with the water pipes, and how she was forced to come to the public baths after the pipes to her house ran dry. A kink appeared where the pipes meet up with the street…meet up—” She stopped and sucked in her breath. “Yes, of course. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before.”

  “Helen?” Xavier asked.

  “You may be content to live in the past, Xavier, but I am not.”

  “Oh?” Xavier said.

  “I’ve thought of a way to get us home.”

  20

  “Am I correct, Julia?” Helen said. “I thought I remembered that Dr. May wanted to propose a run to Rome in the spring.”

  I was burrowing in the wooden chest of the Nigidii tomb, where we had stashed most of our twenty-first-century things, stuffing the cloaks and lamps back on top to hide them. I wondered if the fact that we had been able to leave them there meant that the members of the Nigidii family weren’t likely to visit their ancestors anytime soon—or if they did, perhaps wouldn’t open the chest? My cell phone had STEWie’s roster in its memory. I hoped there was enough battery life left to turn it back on. I had almost drained it the night before, when we’d used the phone as a flashlight to guide us to the tomb.

  The phone was dead, very much so. I shook it, which didn’t help in the least, and said, “As I mentioned the other day, Dr. May was up next after Dr. B and Dr. Little. She was planning to go to 41 BC Egypt to try to snap photos of Cleopatra. But I’m pretty sure she was on the roster for another run during the spring semester… The dedication of the Roman Colosseum, yes, I think you’re right, Helen.”

  “Do you remember what month and year she’s jumping to, Julia? Have we missed it?”

  “Don’t you know what year the Roman Colosseum was built, Helen?” Xavier asked.

  “No, I don’t. Not offhand.” Her cheeks were crimson. “Do you?”

  I was beginning to see why Xavier and Helen had gotten a divorce—it wasn’t just the fourteen-year age difference. Their strong personalities grated against each other. On the other hand, a sharp cheddar was best paired with a strong wine (or so I had once read on a cheddar cheese wrapper).

  Still kneeling by the chest, I closed my eyes and tried to visualize STEWie’s roster. I remembered the note I’d included in the information field for the Colosseum run: Lavish and over-the-top affair, lasted a hard-to-believe hundred days. An easy target for a run. A hundred days of celebration and carnage, with gladiator battle after gladiator battle. And the year…was AD 80, I was pretty sure. I opened my eyes. We hadn’t missed it.

  “It’s going to be tricky to meet up with Dr. May’s team given that we don’t know the exact day they’ll arrive, but we can worry about that later,” Helen said, restacking our items back into the chest.

  “We can let her know to be on the lookout for us in the cheese-and-craker-package note,” I said “I’m glad we don’t have to decide whose name to put on it. Still—”

  “Yes, I’d like to have a good idea of who to confront when we return home,” Nate finished my thought. Was there a slight emphasis on the “I” in that sentence, as if to remind me this was his investigation?

  “For now, the main thing is to get ourselves to Rome,” Helen said. “We have a comfortable buffer of a few months to find our way there. Then we can try to cross paths with Dr. May to hitch a ride back h
ome in her basket. Assuming they haven’t shut the program down, that is,” she added.

  “Why would they shut the program down?” Abigail asked with all the optimism of youth. “STEWie is so important.”

  “They think they’ve lost six people. It’s going to be hard to justify continuing the program in its current format to the board of trustees,” I explained.

  Helen agreed. “It could very well set the program back a decade or more.”

  Xavier took the opposite view. “It will make the news and Lewis can use that to bring in new funding. And no, I’m not suggesting that as a motive for whoever sent you here. Lewis will have his work cut out for him. Meeting up with Dr. May isn’t a bad plan, Helen,” he added.

  “You can stay here if you prefer.”

  “I can’t. You’ll need funds to go to Rome. I’ll have to sell off my wares. Rome, huh? I’ve heard a few things about Rome while I’ve been here. Some of them good. By the way, if we really wanted to move along freely in the Eternal City, we could use the Cloaca Maxima.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Rome’s great sewer. I don’t think so, Xavier,” Helen said, speaking for all of us.

  Xavier lifted a coarsely sewn woolen sack filed with peppercorns—it left behind a small pile of black granules—into my arms. We had all squeezed into his rental room to help him carry what was left of his wares downstairs so that he could make a circuit around town in the morning to sell everything off. “There’s a notebook under my bed with the notes and sketches I took when I first arrived in town,” he mentioned. “Since then I’ve mostly tried to keep my activities limited to the quarter of town between the Vesuvius Gate—the one you’ve been coming in and out of—and the Nola Gate to the north, where the road leads inland to the town of Nola.”

  “Why only that part of Pompeii?” I asked.

  “It hasn’t been excavated yet. In 2011, I mean. I theorized that I’d have more freedom of movement than in areas that had already been thoroughly explored and documented.”

  “Makes sense,” said Kamal, who was sitting cross-legged on the professor’s bed.

  “Xavier, you’ve been contaminating a future archeological site for six months,” Helen said, aghast.

  “My presence has left only traces. I’m living as a local, doing what they do. I’m a single bee in a beehive, a worker ant in an anthill. The didgeridoo is the only nonessential item I brought along, and I chose it because it’s wooden and therefore will not survive the eruption. I’ve played it a few times for Secundus and Sabina, by the way. Other than the didgeridoo, everything I brought with me is made from perishable or time-accurate materials…except for—well never mind that.”

  “Except for what?” Helen wanted to know.

  “I said never mind.”

  “Xavier, you’re not keeping anything from us, are you?”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Maybe you could play the didgeridoo for us one evening, Professor, before we leave,” Abigail suggested in a clear effort to diffuse the tension. The instrument stood propped up against one wall.

  If we didn’t manage to connect with Dr. May in Rome, the professor would have time to play it for us on many an evening, I thought but did not say.

  “You said you had a tough time getting this stuff past Oscar—how did you do it?” I asked as we carried the woolen sacks and the silks down to the ground floor, leaving a trail of peppercorns on the steps.

  “You wouldn’t believe what you can hide in a down jacket, Julia.”

  The tavern across the street from Secundus’s shop was bustling with locals who were out for dinner, a dice game, a celebration, their faces illuminated by table lamps. Shouting a bit to be heard above the din and cacophony of voices, Xavier explained to us that except for the owners of luxury villas, Pompeians lived in small apartments with no kitchens, like his own rental quarters, and ate out—in taverns, snack stands, marketplaces. It was in the villas of the wealthy, like Nigidius and Scaurus, that slaves prepared food in small kitchens and served it in elaborate dining spaces with couches instead of chairs. It all sounded very—Roman.

  “Is there pork in this?” Kamal asked of the stew the tavern proprietor had doled out for us. At the table behind us, four locals, fisherman perhaps, played some sort of gambling game, one of them rubbing a phallus-shaped good-luck charm that hung around his neck before each throw of the dice. To my admittedly untrained ears, it sounded like they were speaking something other than Latin, and Helen hissed, “Oscan,” under her breath and looked like she would have given an arm and a leg for an audio recorder.

  “It’s goat. I can’t complain about the local cuisine,” said Xavier, then proceeded to do so. “It’s just that I’ve been missing some foods.” He ticked off items on the fingers of one hand. “Coffee. Potatoes. Tomatoes. Pumpkin pie. Chocolate. I ate as many pumpkin pies and chocolate bars as I could before I left.”

  “No tomatoes? But we’re in Italy,” I protested.

  “Tomatoes are a sixteenth-century import to Europe from North America,” Helen explained. “Same with chocolate.”

  “Interesting,” I said, marveling at History’s quirks. I dipped some bread in the stew, then had to drop it in. “Ow.”

  “What is it, Julia? Stew too hot?” Xavier asked.

  I shook my head, staring at my right hand.

  “My finger hurts where I cut it on my glasses when we arrived on Vesuvius.”

  “Let me see,” Helen said. “Looks a bit red. It might not have been a good idea to go to the public baths with an open cut. Why don’t you pour some wine on it as an antiseptic?”

  “Rinse it in saltwater tomorrow morning before we leave,” Abigail suggested. “In the sea.”

  Kamal looked away. “Ugh, let’s not talk about this at the dinner table.”

  I took Helen’s suggestion and poured a tiny bit of wine on my hand, earning a puzzled look from one of the game players at the next table. Kamal’s squeamishness aside, since we were already talking about a medical issue, I took the opportunity to say to Xavier, “You don’t seem ill. Except for being a bit thinner.”

  “It’s all the walking I’ve been doing. And the change in diet. I have to say, I think something in the food itself—perhaps the lack of sugar—is helping to control my symptoms. All those pumpkin pies and chocolate bars I ate before I left probably didn’t do my body any favors.”

  “Ad multos annos!” came the cheerful call from a nearby table. A quartet of locals raised their cups in celebration. “It’s someone’s birthday,” Helen explained.

  “I’d like to try garum,” Nate said out of nowhere.

  “It’s flavoring the olives, I believe,” Xavier said, nodding toward the side dish. “But if you want the undiluted thing—”

  “I expect it’s similar to Thai fish sauce, which I’ve cooked with, but I’d like to be sure. It might have motivated Scaurus’s act of intimidation and I always like to experience everything related to a possible crime. It’s why I wanted to come on a STEWie run when I thought we were investigating your murder, Dr. Mooney.”

  “Even if we figure out who did the damage to Secundus’s shop, we might not be able to tell him,” I pointed out.

  “Maybe we have more leeway because the whole damn place is going to go up in flames anyway, in October or November.”

  Xavier got up, went to the counter, and came back with a small dish filled with a reddish-brown liquid. The chief took a whiff, then downed a good bit of it, all without a change of expression.

  The rest of us stared at him.

  A sweaty redness broke out where his brow met his hairline and spread to his nose and cheeks and down to his square jaw. He coughed violently and grabbed his cup and downed the wine. “More,” he croaked.

  Xavier hurried to pour more wine for him.

  After the red tinge in Nate’s cheeks had subsided, I asked, “Well?”

  “Piquant. And salty. Very salty.”

  Merriment and melody
emanated from the neighborhood bars and taverns in the warm Pompeii evening as shopkeepers closed up for the night. Secundus’s shop had been shuttered, but the side gate had been left unlocked for us. “I obtained a second room for the night from Secundus in exchange for some of my wares,” Xavier explained, sounding pleased with himself. “Ah, there’s the man himself.”

  Secundus had been attending to something on the upper floor. The clay lamp in his hand illuminated his way down the steps, his sandals tap-tapping on the wood. On his heels was Celer, moving his squat body down in a sort of swinging motion. The scruffy brown dog’s name, pronounced with a hard k, translated to “Speedy” in what was clearly meant to be a joke. The bags under Secundus’s eyes seemed deep in the flickering lamplight, but he greeted us warmly. The shop had been mostly set to rights, except for the stains on the floor and the walls. Celer gave us a lazy look, then toddled off into the darkness of the garden. Under the pear tree was where, after further discussion, we had decided to bury the message for Dr. May at the next opportune moment.

  As Xavier and Secundus chitchatted, I found myself unable to meet the garum maker’s eyes. Guilt on my part. How had Xavier managed to spend six months here knowing what he knew?

  “Tell him I’d like to examine the side gate more closely in the morning,” Nate said. “After our visit to Scaurus—and Nigidius, too. Why not.”

  I threw a glance in the direction of our two grad students. “Wait, I thought we’re leaving in the morning? I’d like to help him out, too, but we have a responsibility to the students. We don’t know how long it will take us to reach Rome. We’ll undoubtedly keep getting time-stuck, like in the pomegranate orchard.”

  Kamal looked like he was about to say something, but Abigail beat him to it.

  “We’re not kids, Julia,” she said angrily. “We can be told—things—even if they are bad, right?” She was pointedly not looking at Xavier Mooney. “And we can certainly decide for ourselves if we’re willing to stay a day or two longer to help Sabina and her father. We have plenty of time to get to Rome and meet up with Dr. May.”