I turned away from Joseph and crawled the few feet to the mouth of the grave. With reflected light from the pale stone I could see inside, directly ahead of me, the outline of a shelf carved in the rock, long enough and wide enough to hold a body. It was bare. To my left was another shelf. It, too, was bare. And to my right was the third shelf. Nothing! Still kneeling, in a four-point stance, I lowered my head and cursed. A faint smell of rose water clung to the stone floor. There was no other clue, of any sort, that even one dead body had ever occupied the small chamber.

I backed out of the cave slowly. Disappointment had quickly turned to weariness. I began to shake until I pushed myself to a standing position. Joseph was watching me anxiously, still kneeling exactly where I had left him.

“What have you discovered, Matthias, tell me?”

“Only a few worms, Joseph,” I cried, “just as you said. Only a few worms.”

eight

I HADN’T HEARD A ROOSTER CROW since my youth, but I opened my eyes, positive that I had just heard one. How symbolic, I thought, that the crowing of a cock should wake me on the morning I hoped to meet and talk with Peter.

I had already bathed and shaved when the first timid knock on my bedroom door announced the arrival of my morning meal. Nicholas, the Syrian orderly assigned to me by Joseph, was standing outside, flashing his usual obsequious smile, but today he wasn’t pushing his bronze cart stacked with covered serving dishes.

“Master Joseph apologizes for any inconvenience,” be said timidly, “but he would like to have you join him in the peristyle, this morning, to dine with him and his guest.”

“Guest? Let’s go.”

Joseph’s villa, built on the side of a hill, was actually two octagon-shaped wings connected by the long statue-lined hall we were now descending. All the sleeping and dining quarters were located in the upper wing. Our destination, the lower wing, housed what Joseph had modestly called his cultural center. Two rooms contained his collection of sculptures, and in one of them the old man had introduced me, yesterday evening, to Hermogenes, according to Joseph one of the most talented sculptors ever produced by Greece. The small head of a child was coming alive in marble under Hermogenes’ gentle hammer and chisel, and I had asked my host how all his precious possessions in stone were condoned by the priests despite the Second Commandment’s injunction, ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.’ Joseph had only smiled and reminded me that he didn’t make the images himself, and there was no law against one’s being a patron of the arts.