A Season for the Dead

Eight

Jay Gallo sat on the dry turf of the Esquiline Hill,not far from the Via Mecenate, eating calzone from the pizza rustica shop around the corner: zucchini flowers and salty anchovies wrapped inside mozzarella. The dig was in its fourth day and halted once again. He wondered how long it would be before some anxious producer in New York read the latest accountant’s report and pulled the plug on the show, taking his meal ticket with it. Gallo desperately wanted out of this job. There was better money to be made running rich tourists around the city and spinning them rare and occasionally racy stories.

He hated TV crews. He hated their dirigible-sized egos. He hated their organizational incompetence. But most of all, Jay Gallo hated their dishonesty. Once, before the drink and the dope took hold and sent his life swerving off in a different direction, Gallo had been a promising scholar at Harvard. He knew his subject: late imperial Rome, though it was now greatly expanded to embrace the needs of a hungry translator and tour guide. Watching this fake archaeology show dig up what may or may not have been an unimportant chunk of the Domus Aurea, Nero’s Golden House, and imbue every shard of pottery, every rusting iron nail, with some dubious link to the past was agony. For all his personal deficiencies, Jay Gallo understood intellectual rigor and recognized when it was being tarnished for the sake of pecuniary gain.

Scipio Campion—even the name made his teeth grate—personified this sin completely. A minor Oxford professor with very little chin and an accent that could cut glass, he was born with the fake English academic poise American television adored.

If the show were to be believed, Campion had—in one single season—found the camp from which Spartacus’s army had surveyed Pompeii, uncovered the remains of a palace in Glastonbury, complete with wall paintings, which he was able to pass off as a possible site of Avalon, and, on the outskirts of modern Alexandria, revealed the tomb—and within it, to much excitement, the decapitated skeleton—of Caesarion, the son of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra. It was all so unseemly. Undeserved too.

Jay had watched Campion go through the motions on camera. There was nothing to it. Jay Gallo knew he could do better if they gave him a chance. The bitch of a producer had laughed in his face when he just happened to mention it.

He finished the calzone and listened in silence to the latest argument between Campion, the producer, and the camera crew, which seemed to focus largely on how the star should be lit.

“Morons,” Jay Gallo said miserably to no one, wishing he were not in such an evil mood. Business had been bad of late. He’d been reduced to playing errand boy for people he despised, delivering packages that contained God-knew-what to addresses he never wanted to see again. Being stuck on the set of some lousy TV show was better than jail. Just, he mused.

Then his mobile phone vibrated in his shirt pocket and with a sweaty, tired hand he pulled it out, got up and walked away from the crew to make sure they didn’t start yelling at him for talking on set.

“Mr. Gallo? My name is Delgado. I work for a tour company in the Borgo. You won’t have heard of us. I have an urgent problem. Are you busy?”

“Very.” It was a stock answer. There was always this ritual with the last-minute customers. You had to make them feel very grateful—and very generous.

“Ah. I’m sorry. Perhaps some other time then.”

“I didn’t say I was unavailable,” Gallo snapped. “Just busy.”

“But we need someone right now. I’ve been let down badly by one of the agencies. We have a party of very important people due to visit Ostia. I must find a translator for them within the hour.”

“What’s the gig?”

“The what?”

“What kind of tour? What am I supposed to talk about?”

“Late imperial finds. The harbor. Nothing too detailed.”

Gallo smiled for the first time that day. “Hey. I can go into as much detail as you want. I worked on that at Harvard.”

“So I heard. Then you’re free?”

Gallo knew when a sap was rolling over. “Let me be honest with you. I’ve got some personal business. If I’m going to cancel it’s got to be double time. Six hundred dollars for the day.”

The voice on the end of the line hesitated. “That’s a lot of money.”

He could only say no, Gallo reasoned. There was just one more day of filming anyway. The crew had paid him in advance. He didn’t normally jerk people around but on this occasion it would be a pleasure.

“Take it or leave it.”

“Can I pick you up in thirty minutes? Where will you be?”

“At the bar of the Osteria Capri. In Labicana, the Colosseum end.”

“Drinking coffee?”

“Drinking coffee,” Jay replied, puzzled. Had people been talking?

“I’ll be there,” the man said and ended the call, before Gallo even had time to ask how they’d recognize each other.

He walked over to the crew. They were back to filming now. Campion was holding up a piece of broken pottery and speculating on whether it was an imperial wine goblet which Nero himself had once gripped.

Gallo stepped straight into the scene and prised the shard of unglazed brown ceramic from his fingers. “Let me interrupt this pile of fancy with a fact,” Gallo said, smiling for the camera. “Nero lived here two, three years at most before he had his slave kill him to stop the Romans tearing him apart limb from limb. Emperors weren’t into Mediterranean peasant chic. They ate off fancy plates. They drank from fancy glasses. This is stuff that never got out of the kitchen. This is stuff a slave would have been ashamed to own. You have excavated imperial Roman Tupperware, my man. And don’t you tell those good people out there otherwise.”

Jay Gallo felt good. Maybe he would fit in a quick beer before the agency man turned up. It could hardly do any harm.

The producer, a small woman with a malevolent dark face, stabbed him in the arm with a podgy finger. “You’re fired, mister,” she hissed.

“Oh calamitous day.” Gallo chuckled and set off down the hill, so happy he began to whistle.

There was time for two beers before the man arrived. Gallo had a pleasant smile on his face. He could do a good job when he felt like this. Everybody loved him.

They went outside and left in a long black Mercedes.

Gallo remembered thinking when he climbed in that it had Vatican number plates, which seemed very odd indeed.