“Listen to your sisters,” she said.

“Regina?”

“That’s all you need to do. And the mosaic will emerge …”

She slept.

Chapter 35

Lucia arranged to meet Daniel at the Diocletian Baths. This was a monument just to the northwest of the Termini, Rome’s central station. She arrived early. It was a hot, humid August day, and the sky, laden with clouds, threatened rain.

She walked around the walls. These baths had been built in the fourth century, and like many of Rome’s later monuments they actually presented an ugly face to the world, great cliffs of red brickwork. Over the centuries such monuments had been steadily stripped of their marble, so that all that was left was a kind of skeleton of what had been.

But the monument was still massive, still enduring. Walls that had once been interior were now exterior, and she could make out the shapes of domes, broken open like eggs. The exedra, once an enclosed space surrounded by porticoes and seats where citizens would gather to talk, had been given over to a traffic- choked square.

The rain began to fall. She paid a few euros to enter the museum that had been built into the baths.

There were only a few tourists here. Bored attendants sat on plastic upright chairs, as still as robots switched off at the mains. The exhibits were sparse, cluttered together, and poorly labeled, for, she learned, the museum was in the middle of a long, slow process of being rehoused. Lucia wasn’t very interested.

At the center of the museum she found a kind of cloister, a colonnaded covered walkway surrounding a patch of green. More antique detritus had been gathered here, all unlabeled. There were fragments of statues, bits of fallen pillars, broken inscriptions whose huge lettering told of the size of the monuments they had once graced. Some of the monuments had been set in the garden, where they protruded from the untidy green.

There were no seats, but she found she could perch on the low wall that fenced off the garden. She put her feet up on the wall’s cool surface, rested her neck against a pillar, and cradled her hands on her belly. Her back was hurting, and to sit was a relief. The rain fell steadily, though not hard. It hissed on the grass, and turned the streaked marble of the fragments a golden brown. There was no wind. Some of the drops reached her, here at the edge of the cover of the roof, but the rain was warm, and she didn’t mind. It was a peaceful place, away from the city’s roar, just her and the dozing attendant, the antiquities, the rain hissing on the grass.

The time she had been due to meet Daniel came and went. She waited half an hour, and still he didn’t come.

The rain stopped. A murky sunlight broke through smog the rain had failed to clear. By this time the attendant was watching her suspiciously — or perhaps it was just that he wanted to close up early.

She swiveled her legs off the wall and got to her feet. Her back still hurt, and the cool marble had made her piles itch, maddeningly, comically. Feeling very old, she made her way out of the museum.

She went back to the Crypt, for she had nowhere else to go.

That night, and the next day, whenever she found a little privacy, she made more covert calls to Daniel’s cell. But the phone was switched off, and he didn’t reply to the messages she left on his answering service.

The second day she tried to resist making any more calls. She was wary of scaring him off. She seemed to be aware constantly of the phone’s mass in her pocket or her bag, though, as she waited for it to ring.

By lunchtime she lost her nerve. She went to a corner of the scrinium offices, shielded by filing cabinets, and made another call.

This time he picked up. “… Hello?”

“I—” She stopped, took deep breaths, tried to be calm. “It’s Lucia.” She sensed hesitation. “You remember—”

“The girl in the Pantheon. Oh, shoot.” He used the English word. “We were going to meet, weren’t we?”

“Yes. At the baths.”

“Was it yesterday? I’m sorry—”

“No,” she said, forcing herself to keep an even tone. “Not yesterday. Two days ago.”

“You turned up and I didn’t. Look, I’m really sorry. That’s me all over.” His voice sounded calm, faraway, untroubled save for a little embarrassment. A voice from another world, she thought. “Let me make it up to you. I’ll buy you lunch. Tomorrow?”

“No,” she snapped.

“No?”

“It doesn’t matter about lunch … Let’s just meet,” she said.

“Okay. Whatever you want. I owe you. I don’t want you to think badly of me. Where, at the baths?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll find you.”

“Today,” she gasped. “It has to be today.”

Again she heard him hesitate, and she cursed herself for her lack of control.

“Okay,” he said slowly. “I have a study break this afternoon. I can get away. I’ll see you there. What, about three?”

“That will be fine.”

“Okay. Ciao … ”

She put away the phone. Her heart was hammering, her breath short.

She made an excuse and got out of the office. She changed into a shapeless patterned smock, loosely tied by a belt at the waist.

She caught a taxi back to the baths.

This time she walked around the complex until she came to the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli. In the sixteenth century this had been built into the ruins of the baths, to designs by Michelangelo. The church’s name proudly adorned one of those broken-open domes.

Inside, the church was bright, spacious, and open, nearly a hundred yards across, richly decorated. There was an elaborate sundial inscribed on the floor, a great bronze gash that cut across one nave. She followed it to a complex design at its termination, where a spot of sunlight would map the solstices of years far into her own future. Here and there she made out relics of the building’s origin, like seashell motifs on the walls. Michelangelo and the architects had used this great vaulting space well, but once this had been nothing more than the tepidarium of the tremendous complex of the baths.

She had chosen this place for Daniel’s sake. She had been nervous about how he would react to her, especially in her changed condition. She thought the baths would pique his interest in the deep history of Rome, and how its buildings had been used and reused. Maybe he would come for the buildings, if not for her.

“… Lucia.”

She turned, and there he was. He wore what looked like the same faded jeans, a T-shirt labeled ROSWELL U RUNNING TEAM, and he clutched a baseball cap in his hand. The light behind him caught the unruly hair around his face, making it glow red.

He grinned. “You’ve changed. You’re still beautiful, of course. What’s different? …”

At the sight of him, the sound of his voice, the tears seemed to explode from her, fueled by longing, unhappiness, grief. She dropped her head and covered her face with her hands. How she would have reacted if he had come to her and taken her in his arms, she didn’t know.

But he didn’t. When she was able to look up, she saw that he had actually backed away a couple of steps. He was holding his baseball cap up before him, like a shield to fend her off, and his mouth was round with shock. “Hey,” he said uncertainly. He laughed, but it was a brittle sound. “Take it easy. People are staring.”

She struggled to get herself under control. Her face felt like a soggy mass. “Well, fuck them. Even if it is a church.”

He was staring at her, eyes wide, mouth still agape.