Once Philip and two others set on one woman at the same time. When they were done, they found they had crushed the breath out of their victim. She was left where they had finished her, for the dogs and birds to take. The other women were taken back into the city, where four of them were sold to a group of Germans, and the other gambled away.

Sated, occupied with the women, the men didn’t try to penetrate the Catacomb further, and left the pit in the ground gaping open.

A few nights after that Clement and some others went back along the Appian Way, searching for the door once more. Clement’s memory was good, and he had not been terribly drunk that night. But search as he might he could find no trace of a doorway in the ground, or of the debauchery that had been committed here, or of the woman killed. When he thought back, to that vision of the pale women writhing on the ground like uncovered worms, it seemed like a dream.

Chapter 43

Chapter 43

We agreed to meet Daniel and Lucia inside the Colosseum. Peter and I grinned at each other when Daniel, through his emails, suggested this cloak-and-dagger rendezvous. But anyhow we went along, one bright early-November morning.

The Colosseum was only a short walk down Mussolini’s majestic boulevard from our hotel, and its ruined grandeur loomed ahead of us as we approached. In fact the Colosseum had been a key motivation for Mussolini to build his imperial way where he did, for he wanted a clear view of it from his palace off the Piazza Venezia. Its size was deceptive; it seemed to take us a long time to reach the foot of that mighty wall, even longer to walk around the tarmac apron at its base.

By the time we got to the public entrance, Peter was puffing and sweating profusely. He seemed agitated today, his untroubled demeanor gone, but he wouldn’t say what was on his mind.

We joined a glacier-pace queue of more or less patient visitors before the glass-fronted ticket office. Hucksters worked the crowd: water sellers, tropical-shirted vendors of bangles and felt hats and fake-leather handbags, and a few plausible-sounding American-accented girls who offered “official” guided tours. Groups of blokes in fake legionary uniforms, all scarlet and gold and plastic swords, volunteered to have their photos taken with tourists. With my British sensibility I vaguely imagined these were “official,” somehow sanctioned by the city or whichever authority controlled the Colosseum, until I saw them cluster around one hapless American tourist demanding twenty euros for each photograph they’d just taken.

But above all this indignity loomed the antique walls, to which marble still clung, despite fifteen hundred years of neglect and despoliation.

Peter wasn’t comfortable in the gathering heat. “Fucking Italians,” he said. “Once, you know, they could get fifty thousand people inside this stadium in ten minutes. Now this.”