Chapter 46

But she just sat back in her chair and sipped her coffee.

I tried to keep up the pressure, tried to maintain my angry front. But it was hard. For one thing we weren’t alone. Inside the Crypt, you were never alone.

I had finally succumbed to Peter’s pressure, confronted my own complicated fears, and returned to the Crypt.

This time Rosa brought me to a place she called the peristylium. It was a small chamber, crudely cut out of the rock — but it contained a kind of garden, stone benches, trellises, a small fountain. There were even growing things here, exotic mushrooms sprouting in trays of dark soil, their colors bright and unreal. The garden was obviously very old, its walls polished smooth by centuries of soft contacts. A small stand supplied coffee, sweets, and cakes. Anywhere else this would have been a Starbucks concession, but not here; there were no logos on Crypt coffee cups.

Like everywhere else, the little garden was full of the ageless women of the Crypt. It was like an open- air cafй in a crowded shopping street, maybe, or a crowded airport concourse, with a dense, fluid, constantly changing, never thinning crowd. But the grammar of this crowd was different, the way they squeezed past each other, smiled, touched — for all these people were family. They talked brightly, loudly, and continually, sitting in circles cradling their coffees, close enough that their knees or shoulders touched. They would even kiss each other on the lips, softly, but not sexually; it was as if they were tasting each other.

And, sitting with Rosa with our own coffees, I was stuck right in the middle of it, in a bubble of unending conversation, constantly touched — an apologetic hand would rest briefly on my shoulder, a smiling gray-eyed face float before me — and my head was full of the powerful animal musk of the Crypt. It was like being immersed in a great warm bath. It wasn’t intimidating. But it was damn hard to think straight.

As Rosa surely knew, which was why she had brought me here.

And on top of that I had to deal with my own complicated emotional situation. I still found Rosa’s face extraordinarily disturbing. She was, after all, my sister. She was so familiar, and something warm in me responded every second I spent with her. But at the same time it was a face I hadn’t grown up with, and there would always be a glass wall between us. It was quietly heart wrenching.

I tried to focus. “Rosa, if there’s nothing wrong, why not show Lucia to me?”

“There’s nothing that the doctors can’t handle. You’d only disturb her.”

“She came to me for help.”

She leaned forward and put her hand on my wrist — more of her endless touching. “No,” she said. “ She didn’t come to you. That hacker boyfriend found you.”

“Daniel isn’t her boyfriend.”

She sat back. “Well, there you go. Anyhow, I don’t think all this really has anything to do with Lucia.”

“All what?”

“Your insistence on coming back to the Crypt. This isn’t about Lucia. It’s not really about me. It’s about you.” Her eyes were fixed on me. “Let’s cut through all this. The truth is, you’re jealous. Jealous of me.”

“Rubbish,” I said weakly.

“You know I got the better deal, don’t you? Our family failed, as so many little families do.” She said that, little families, with utter contempt. “It wasn’t just the money problems … Mother and Father saw a way to give one of us a better chance. They knew that this opportunity was sitting here. It had to be me — this is mostly a community of women. If anybody should be envious, maybe it should be Gina, my sister, not you.”

And perhaps Gina was envious, I reflected. Perhaps that was what underlay her sourness, and her decision to get about as far away from Manchester and her past as she could.

But I protested, “I don’t envy you. That’s ridiculous. I just think the Order keeps getting in the way.”

“Of what?” Again she touched my wrist, and her fingers moved in that circular motion, a brief, tender massage. “Look, George — I can’t be separated from the Order. Can’t you see that yet? We come as a package. And if you want to ‘connect’ with me you have to deal with that.” She stood up and brushed down her skirt. “You came all the way to Rome to save me, didn’t you? What a hero. And now you’ve found out I don’t want to be saved, you’ve decided to rescue poor Lucia instead. But don’t you think you have a duty to figure out what it is you’re saving us all from?” She held out her hand to me. “What, are you stuck in that chair? Come on.”

Her tone of command, the outstretched hand, were compelling. And we had, oddly, become a center of attention, her standing, me sitting, a kind of eddy in the endless stream of people. I was surrounded by faces, all turned on me with a kind of half smile. I felt the most intense pressure to go with Rosa.

I drained my coffee, reached up, took her hand, and stood.

She was, of course, still working on my recruitment into the Order, or at least on neutralizing me as a threat. I knew that. She was following her own agenda. But by now, so was I.

We were brother and sister. What damaged goods we were.

Walking still deeper into the Crypt, we took the stairs.

That wasn’t as simple as it sounds. The structure of the place internally was very complicated, with floors and partition walls and bits of mezzanines all over the place, and we had to walk sometimes hundreds of yards from one staircase to the next. Everything was bathed in a pearly, sourceless fluorescent glow, and looked the same in every direction. As I got turned this way and that I was soon lost. But that was probably intentional; inside the Crypt you weren’t supposed to know where you were.

Still, it soon became clear that we had passed below what I had roughly labeled as Level 1, the uppermost, most modern-looking area of the Crypt, where schoolchildren studied purposefully and the scrinarii worked amid their computers and card indices and steel library shelves. It was a big place; Level 1 was actually several stories and mezzanines. Now we clambered down steel staircases into the heart of the level below, Level 2, which I had only glimpsed before from the mezzanine levels above.

The furniture, partitions, ceiling tiles, lighting, and other equipment were modern, just as above. Nevertheless there was a different atmosphere down here. The corridors seemed narrower, lower, more confining, darker, while most of the chambers were big — if not huge — mighty, open cubicula each of which could have held hundreds of people. The businesses of the Order, like the genealogy service, were run from Level 1, but most of the rooms down here were given over to functions that served more basic needs. I was shown an immense hospital, equipped with modern gear but oddly open-plan, a refectory the size of an aircraft hangar, and dormitories in which rows of bunk beds, jammed close in together, marched into the distance.

I never saw a room empty, anywhere in the Crypt, and so it was here. The hospital seemed to have few patients, but swarmed with activity. People were sleeping in some of the dormitories, even in midmorning, perhaps night-shift workers tucked into their bunk beds like rows of insect pupae in their cocoons. The corridors, too, were always packed with people, squeezing to and fro on their endless chores.

Crowding around me, they would touch, squeeze past, smile just as politely as above, and I saw the same faces, the family face, as I thought of it now, with low cheekbones, pale gray eyes. But the denizens of Level 2 had a slightly different look about them. Many were very pale, and they seemed to have exaggerated features — large, flaring nostrils, big eyes, even prominent ears. They were all a similar size, smaller than either Rosa or me. Compact, to fit into a compact space, I thought idly. They weren’t freaks. None of them would have looked out of place in one of Rome’s ancient piazzas. But cumulatively, there was an impression of subtle difference, even from the level above.