I pulled my hand away from Rosa. I dug out the phone, and raised it to my face. The screen was a tiny scrap of plastic, backlit with green, that glowed bright as a star in that enclosing gloom. A text showed: GRT DNGER GET ARSE OUT PTR I turned off the phone. The screen went blank.

Rosa was watching me. Around her the steady stream of white-robed women pushed past her, as they always did.

“Get arse out,” I said.

“What?”

“He’s right.” I shook my head, trying to clear it. “I need to get out of here.”

Rosa’s eyes narrowed.

The others, the women nearest me, reacted, too. Some of them turned to me, even breaking their stride, looking at me in a kind of mild dismay. Their reaction spread out farther, as each woman responded to what her neighbor was doing. It was as if I had detonated an invisible bomb down there, and ripples of dismay were spreading out around me.

At the focus of all that, I felt ashamed. “I’m sorry,” I said helplessly.

Rosa moved closer to me and put a hand on my shoulder. At that touch the posture of the strangers around us relaxed a little. There were even smiles. I felt a kind of relief, a forgiveness. I wanted to be accepted here, I realized; I couldn’t bear the thought of exclusion from this close, touching group.

“It’s okay,” said Rosa. “You don’t have to go. I can sort everything out. Tell me where your hotel is — did you say it was near the Forum? I’ll call them—”

But I stuck to my thought of Peter. “Get arse out, get arse out.” I repeated it over and over, an absurd mantra. “Let me go, Rosa.”

“All right,” she said, forcing a smile. “You need a little time. That’s okay.” She led me down the corridor. A part of me was glad to get away from the little knot of bystanders who had seen what I had done, who knew how I had betrayed them; I was glad to walk away from my shame. “Take all the time you want,” Rosa said soothingly. “We’ll always be here. I’ll be here. You know that.”

“Get arse out,” I mumbled.

We came at last to the steel door of a modern high-speed lift. We rode up in silence, Rosa still watching me; in her eyes there was something of the pressure of the gaze of those deep Crypt dwellers, their mute disappointment.

As we rose I’ll swear my ears popped.

I emerged into a sunlit modern office on the Via Cristoforo Colombo. I was nearly blinded by the light, and the dry oxygen-rich air seared into my lungs, making me giddy.

Peter had hired a car. It was waiting for me on the Cristoforo Colombo, outside the Order’s office. Now, to my utter dismay, he insisted on taking me for a drive.

Chapter 47

“I was full of theories. Basically I thought the Order was just a wacko religious cult. Then, when we met Lucia, and found out about this girl Pina, I started to wonder if it was some kind of bizarre psychosexual organization, perhaps with a religious framework to give it some justification. But now, with what you described about what you found down there, George — and after I discussed it with some of the Slan(t)ers — I think I’ve put it together at last.

“The Order isn’t about religion, or sex, or family. It isn’t about anything its members think it’s about — they don’t know, any more than any one ant knows what an ant colony is for. The Order exists for itself.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.

“I know you don’t. So listen.”

We headed straight out of town until we hit the outer ring road, the GRA. Soon we were stationary, one in a long line of cars, whose roofs and windscreens gleamed in the sun like the carapaces of metaled insects. Even at the best of times this road is a linear parking lot, and now it was the end of the working day, the rush hour. We inched forward, Peter thrusting the car into the smallest gaps with the best of them, blaring his horn and edging through the crowds. I’d have been scared for my safety if not for the fact that our speed was so slow.

The car was a battered old Punto. With a head still full of the Crypt, I felt utterly disoriented. I said, “This car belongs to the Pakistani ambassador.”

He looked at me oddly. “Oh. Michael Caine. I saw that movie, too …”

“You’re making some kind of point, aren’t you?”

“Damn right,” he said. “You won’t understand, not at first. And when you do understand you probably won’t believe me.” His knuckles were white where he gripped the wheel, and he was sweating. “So I’ll have to make you see. This might be more important than you can imagine.”

I smiled. “ Important. This from a man who thinks that alien ships are making three-point turns in the core of the Earth. What could be important compared to that?”

“More than you know,” he said. “George, what causes traffic jams?”

I shrugged. “Well, you need a crowded road. Roadworks. Breakdowns.”

“What roadworks?”

There were no works ahead, no obvious breakdowns or crash sites. And yet we were stationary.

Peter said, “George, to make a traffic jam all you need is traffic. The jams just occur. Look around. All that makes up the traffic is individual drivers — right? And each of us makes individual decisions, based, minute to minute, on what our neighbors are doing. There’s not a one of us who intends to cause a jam, that’s for sure. And there’s not one of us who has a global view of the traffic, like you’d get from a police chopper, say. There are only the drivers.

“And yet, from our individual decisions made in ignorance, the traffic jam emerges, a giant organized structure involving maybe thousands of cars. So where does the jam come from?”

We were moving forward by now, in fits and starts, but, scarily, he took his eyes off the road to look at me, testing my understanding.

“I don’t know,” I admitted.

“This is what they call emergence, George,” he said. “From simple rules, applied at a low level, like the decisions made by the drivers on this damn road — and with feedback to amplify the effects, like a slowing car forcing a slowdown behind it — large-scale structures can emerge. It’s called self-organized criticality. The traffic always tries to organize itself to get as many cars through as possible, but it’s constantly on the point of breakdown. The jams are like waves, or ripples, passing back and forth along the lines of cars.”

It was hard for me to concentrate on this. Too much had happened today. Sitting in that lurching car, I felt as if I were in a dream. I groped for the point he was trying to make. “So the Order is like a traffic jam,” I said. “The Order is a kind of feedback effect.”

“We’ll get to the Order. One step at a time.” He wrenched the wheel, and we plunged out of the traffic toward a junction that would lead us back toward the center of the city.

We roared up Mussolini’s great avenue, hared through the Venezia, lurched left onto the Plebiscito. Peter rammed the long-suffering Punto into a few feet of parking space. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it.

We got out of the car, locked it up, and made for a bar. I wanted coffee. Peter went to order while I found a table.

Peter returned with a bottle of beer. “You need this more than coffee, believe me.”

And oddly, he was right. Something about the heft of the bottle in my hand, the cool tang of the beer, that first subtle softening of perception as the alcohol kicked in, brought me back to reality, or anyhow my version of it. I raised the bottle to Peter. “Here’s to me,” I said. “And what I truly am. An appendage clamped to the mouth of a beer bottle.”