"I suppose I could. A lot of it."

"We'd come home different,” she said. “I mean by a different way. Barney used to say—I don't know where he got this—that the Roman legions when they went somewhere to conquer something always came back by a different way. That's how they mapped the world.” She did that herself, in the states of the New World, accumulating knowledge. She liked houses that were planned so that you could go from room to room in a circle to return to where you started, rather than having to retrace your steps. She never wanted to retrace her steps. Pierce seemed to himself to be one who never did anything else.

He was right, though, that the City, however Eternal, was not there to return to. The place to which they arrived, after passing eastward through the night and raising the sun over the Middle Sea, was not the place he had been before, only resembling it in certain sly ways, places with the same names and histories but otherwise different. It was midsummer, and the streets and squares were filled with crowds of people young and old but mostly young, and from all over the world, laughing girls with bare brown midriffs and crowds of boys behind them, passing from place to place, standing six deep to toss coins into the Trevi Fountain, clustered beneath Bernini dolphins and playing guitars and flutes and radios for one another in the transfiguring sun.

But it wasn't just that, the crowds and sun, it was the place itself, which had somehow shrunk or contracted into a small brightly colored place, a toy-town, all its funny old monuments and historic sites open and the people passing in and out. Places it had taken him so long to find, places he had never found, turned out to be mere steps from one another, clustered together like a theme park, no longer containing the past, just a pleasant setting for the present to occur in. Where were the endless dark avenues he had trod in confusion, the puzzles of entwined streets impossible to escape from? Where were the shuttered prisons and palaces he had come upon by chance, so far from one another?

"Oh, hey,” Roo said. “Look at the elephant!"

It was in a little piazza no more than a New York block from the Pantheon; he must have walked around it again and again without ever stepping through this little passage, or that one, or the other one. For a long time he stood before it, watched Roo walk up to pat it. She laughed at the little beast, more Dumbo than Jumbo in size, and the absurd great weight of the figured obelisk it bore on its back.

"What's it say?” Roo said to him, pointing to the tablet beneath the elephant, the writing that explained it all, in a dead language. “What's it mean?"

Pierce opened his mouth, shut it again. As though in a Rose Bowl parade or carnival or mass demonstration, he observed a set of explanations proceeding to the forefront of his mind from the deep old interior: a line of floats and figures great and small, in groups and singly, mounted and afoot, led by the elephant they stood before. Hooded sodalities bore the Crux ansata and papyrus rolls brought from the fall of Constantinople, Colonna and Botticelli the great folio of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, open to the page where the elephant is shown. There came theriomorphic deities of Egypt, made into parables by Baroque symbologists, Hermes with finger to his lips bearing a smaragdine tablet, rendered with hieroglyphics that supposedly said As above, so below but actually didn't. Athanasius Kircher, the Jesuit who studied the Egyptian picture language, including the symbols cut into this very obelisk, and proved they were the unsayable terms of a mystic philosophy. Sir Flinders Petrie and the Invisible College in its winged car, Pope Alexander and Io, queen of Egypt, the crater of Mercurius, the arcana of the Masons carried by apron-wearing men in drip-dry shirts and fezzes. Walking alone, the gloomy Huguenot figure of Isaac Casaubon who showed that Hermes Trismegistus wasn't really Egyptian at all. All moving forward, and then moving past, moving on. The Monas, in Father Kircher's version, that collected a Cobra, a Scarab, the Ptolemaic planetary nest, and more into John Dee's bare bony symbol. The same symbol cut in a ring. His cousins on a ragged hill in Kentucky marked with it. Charis feeding him snowy coke from her poison ring, asking why people think Gypsies can tell fortunes. Julie Rosengarten in a New York slum apartment lifting her hand to him, the nails painted with symbols, Sun, Eye, Rose, Heart, saying, It makes a lot of sense. Rose Ryder moving her finger over a wineglass rim and raising a faint eerie wail.

"I don't know,” he said. “I can't say."

He did tell her that the church before which the elephant stood was called Santa Maria sopra Minerva—a church of Mary over a temple of Minerva, and before that a temple of Isis too. He said that in the Dominican priory opposite, Giordano Bruno had been tried and condemned to death when at last the Dominican inquisitors stopped trying to get him to renounce what he believed he knew. He tried to tell her something of what Bruno believed: infinities, transmigrations, relativities. He told her what Bruno had been heard to say when the judges pronounced sentence on him: I think you are more afraid to hand down this sentence than I am to receive it.

"What did he mean?"

"I don't know.” They walked out of the square. The Dominican priory looked like an office building, though perhaps it was church offices. Blue glow of fluorescent bulbs. A blind just then drawn. “It may be he was saying that if the church officials felt they had to kill a philosopher investigating the nature of things in order to keep their power, then it couldn't last as an institution. Someday it would lose. And someday after that it would just dry up and blow away. And he thought they knew it."

"Did it?"

"Yes. It did. A hundred years later it had no power to kill people anymore. And it has less now."

"So he was right?"

"No. If real power could be annihilated by wisdom or shame it would have been, long ago. But look at the Soviet Union today. Still there."

They wandered on. The empires were gone, here where tourists trod.

"Did they really kill him?” Roo asked.

"In public. Here in Rome. At a place called the Campo dei Fiori."

"Oh? And where's that?"

"Well, I guess it can't be far,” he said. A strange burble of laughter arose in his breast or throat. “I guess. Right around here somewhere."

"Have you been there?"

"No."

"Okay,” she said. “First off, I've got to go buy some things. I need some tampons. I don't want to go any farther without some. Dumb I didn't get them before."

"Okay."

"There was a whatchacallit, a farmacia, a few streets back that way.” She turned, her outstretched hand moving like a clock's, and pointed. “That way. I'll go back and get stuff, and meet you."

"Okay."

"So what's the place again we're going?"

"Campo dei Fiori."

She pulled out the map from her bag, and together they found the little square. “Yeah,” she said, “see, it's a triangle from here. So you go on and I'll go back and we'll meet there."

"Okay."

"Okay?"

"Okay."

She started to put the map back in her bag—she had glanced at it once that morning to orient herself, then refolded it and put it away, and they had just wandered together—but instead she withdrew it and gave it to Pierce. Then she was gone.

Pierce looked around himself to see where he stood relative to the map. He found the intersection of streets where he was, and could trace with a finger the way to the Campo dei Fiori.