Rosa was leaning toward me. “Don’t let it get to you. I know how you feel. But it’s always like this here. Come on . . .” Holding my hand, she pulled me forward, and we waded into the streams of people.

Suddenly I was surrounded by faces, all young, many smiling, few showing curiosity at this big sweating Englishman who had been thrust in among them. They all seemed to be talking, and the hubbub battered me, like a wind. But they parted around us, accepted us into the flow.

We passed offices with desks and partitioned cubicles, potted plants and coffee machines. They all seemed very mundane, if crowded and noisy compared to most offices I’d seen, almost as crowded as the corridors. In some places there were copies of the kissing-fish infinity symbol of the Order, done out in chrome strips and fixed to marble walls. All very corporate.

On many of the walls slogans had been incised—in places crudely, by hand, and in others more professionally. They were in Latin, which I can’t read. I tried to memorize them, meaning to ask Peter about them later; there seemed to be three key phrases.

Rosa said that the varying sizes of rooms had names, in the Order’s peculiar internal language—basically modern Italian, I would learn, but laced with terms derived from Latin, and other sources I didn’t recognize. The room names seemed to be a macabre joke, a remembrance of the Crypt’s origin. The largest vaults of all were called cubicula, like the family tombs in the Catacombs, the next largest arcosolia, like the large tombs of the wealthy and the popes—and the smallest of all loculi, like the lonely niche-graves of the poor.

But there were few loculi, I would learn, because members of the Order were never alone: the bigger the room, the bigger the crowd, the better.

The deeper in we penetrated, the more powerful that animal smell became. It was like walking into a lion’s cage.

I tried to keep a clear head. “The workers here seem young,” I said. “Nobody much over twenty-five or thirty?”

“Actually, most people here are older than that.”

“They don’t look it . . .”

“There are some youngsters, of course. Everybody has to learn. But most of the Order’s younger members work downbelow.”

“Downbelow?”

“On the lower levels.”

“There are lower levels?”