Old women and children and nuns on their knees and aged men with whiskery jowls and canes trying to get up these steps one at a time, steep and narrow too, and I was at last overcome, why do we have to do this to ourselves, why do we spend our treasure and our time and our tears like this, why does it have to be so? A place into which you can't go, but only peer, led to by stairs you crawl up on your knees. Ah no, no. When the Labyrinth of the World comes disguised as the Paradise of the Heart, that's when it becomes terrible.

His last morning in the city, Pierce woke late, the desk at the pensione had forgotten his wake-up call or he hadn't made himself clear; then it was a long way across the crowded and complex city to the Stazione Termini, and the cab, one of those that had always seemed so fleet, so crazily speedy in the circling streets, was held back as though in some thick substance or gum and unable to make lights, get across intersections, through indifferent and clotted crowds. When Pierce at last got out, thrusting into the hairy outstretched hand the remains of his tens of thousands of lire, he found that he wasn't exactly in front of the station, and began walking, circling the great building. Like half the city it was scaffolded, clothed in great blue billowing plastic sails; the way around it narrowed to muddy paths, duckboards, then debouched into open areas without fingerboards or any help.

Somehow he found his way within. Vast dark dome like the Pantheon's. Crowds eddying around the great central clock, gilded and eagle-topped. Gentle loudspeaker giving admonitions and advice, whose echoes canceled each other out. And the signs and notices in an unfamiliar font, something European and proprietary, he couldn't read it though he could guess at meanings. He guessed he could sit and wait. He turned, orientating. A man coming toward him stooped to pick up something from the floor, examined it, dropped it again, his lips moving slightly in private speech. It was his father.

"Axel."

"Pierce. Oh wonderful. Wonderful. This is what I hoped. Just what I hoped and prayed for."

"Axel."

"Wonderful wonderful and again wonderful,” Axel said. Pierce supposed he was drunk. “Here. Here in the Eternal City. They say Rome fell. Rome never fell. That thug Mussolini tried to pretend he had resurrected it. But its spirit. Its spirit."

"Axel,” Pierce could only say. Axel went on talking, seeming to be unaware of the scandalous impossibility of this, which was all that Pierce could think of. “How do you come to be here?"

"Well, it was the Chief,” Axel said. “He's right around. He went to the pissoir, I believe. Oh, Pierce. Rome."

"What do you mean? The Chief? Is he here?"

"He brought me. A birthday present. Because you see we're doing so well. You know it was always my dream. Oh son."

"What do you mean, doing well?"

"Pierce, the most remarkable thing. The boys found something. You know, fishing around in their buildings there. Well, you know they bring me these things, pretty things, some of them quite valuable. Oh but this. This."

"Axel, are you okay?"

"It's all all right now. From now on."

"Axel."

"You see, you didn't have to go at all,” Axel said. He was white and obviously ill, unshaven gray bristles on his cheeks. “Oh you did the right thing, setting out, and you've learned so much. Yes. But you don't have to go on farther. Because it's found. All along it was right there in Brooklyn."

"Axel, no."

"Right there all along. Down there at the very bottom.” He put his hand in one blazer pocket, then the other, rooting around with a face that made Pierce's heart fill with terror.

"Axel!"

"See,” Axel said. “See?” The thing in Axel's pocket began to come forth, it was large or small or bright or dark but it shouldn't be here or anywhere, and of any place not in his father's hand. Spirit forces filled the air; their horripilating hands were on him. Pierce cried aloud again as the thing was shown him, the thing at last, and then he woke in his bed in his pensione hearing his own ghastly moan.

* * * *

No, he took no cab; after his first night in Rome when one had apparently pitied him he never snared another. He wouldn't learn till he came back to the Eternal City years later that taxis weren't really allowed to stop when hailed but only when called, that's what the phones at taxi ranks are for. In a stiff rain he trundled his bags aboard the Number 64 bus, which was hurrying away from St. Peter's to the far city gates, as he was himself.

The Stazione Termini, which was not at all the place he had dreamed of, unlike it in every respect but most unlike it in being real, its stubbed cigarettes and ads and the smell of coffee bars and engines. No odors in dreams.

He shuddered, ghost mice up his spine, remembering. Axel. You didn't have to go.

He had his Eurailpass, somewhat greasy and weary, less from being much used than from being so often sought for, make sure it's not lost. The morning direttissimo to Bologna, then Venice, Vienna, then north and west to Prague. The way Bruno might have gone if he'd really escaped; heading for Rudolf's city by way of Venice, where he had once had friends, the bookseller Ciotto had actually defended him as best he could before the Venetian Inquisition. He would have skirted imperial Vienna, though, maybe going instead by way of Budweis and Pilsen, seeking for Giordanisti among the Budweisers and Pilsners; and on to kindly Prague.

He studied the guidebook, measured with thumb and finger the thickness of pages through which he must make passage. In Venice he might be able to go into Ca’ Mocenigo, the palazzo on the Grand Canal where Bruno first came after returning to Italy from his adventures in the north, summoned there to train a young man of the Mocenigo family in memory arts, and other arts too, a weird young man who thereupon turned him over to the Inquisition. But of course it would likely be chiuso. He knew the word for closed in four languages now.

He turned pages. Could it be that Prague's most popular brand of gas, with stations in many places, was Golem gas? Hadn't such enterprises perished with socialism? And could it be that on a hill above the high castle (how could there be a hill above the high castle?) there was a maze, as this guidebook said, and in the maze a suite of distorting mirrors, and a vast painted panorama of armies fighting for the bridge below during the Thirty Years’ War? That's what it said.

A maze, armies, mirrors, a bridge.

The once-vast imperial collections in Prague are now largely dispersed, and those seeking the paintings of Hofnaegl, Spranger, DeVries, the famed collections of medals, stones, and maps, to say nothing of the automata, weird mandrake roots in the shape of persons, portraits done in fruit or meats or books or kitchenware, nose saddles, carved cherrystones, etc., etc. will have to go elsewhere. After the Battle of White Mountain the victorious Maximilian of Bavaria is said to have carried away fifteen hundred cartloads of plunder from Rudolf's city, and the Saxon armies continued the spoliation later in the war. The Swedes took whatever of worth remained, including several of those surreal portraits; Queen Christina received an itemized list of the appropriated valuables in 1648, just as the long war was at last ending. The Number 22 tram will take you to the battlefield, not a mountain at all but a low chalk hill amid pleasant suburbs (five crowns.)

It was Kraft's story that whatever it was that came to be in Prague city in the reign of Rudolf, whatever was concealed in Oswald Kroll's black trunk that the emperor and Prince Rozmberk both chased after, whatever drew the fated couple thither in 1618, it must have been later lost or carried off by captains and camp followers in the awful depredations of thirty years of war. Whether you were Protestant or Catholic you evenhandedly looted church and castle, took whatever of value you could carry, pyxes and chalices, reliquaries, jeweled caskets, vestments sewn with gold thread, until they grew too heavy or the plague or the fever weakened you and you dropped the stuff by the side of the road or were killed for it. And this thing too, perhaps, probably; it was just one more among the countless refugees, it was disguised as something else, it changed ignorant hands over and over, was bought and sold, suffered, died, and was buried. Gone. The best we could do now was learn its name.