Matthew was annoyed.  He was annoyed at the figure in gray for distracting him, but he was more annoyed with himself for allowing this mysterious stalker to distract him.  He was in Rome, walking across the top of the Palatine Hill, and all he could think about was some crazy person that was following him for an unknown reason (ordinarily all he had to worry about was Jack, a crazy person who followed him primarily out of force of habit, as far as Matthew could tell).  He was walking through the ruins of the house of Augustus, or possibly Domitian, and he couldn’t appreciate it.  He couldn’t even remember which house it was.

“Hey, what are you looking for?”

At that moment, however, he was mainly annoyed at Jack for noticing how distracted he was.

“I’m not looking for anyo-anything in particular,” Matthew replied, doing his best to sound calm.  “I’m just looking at the ruins around us.  That’s what you’re supposed to do when you visit monuments and other attractions—you look at them.  Did you expect me to spend the whole time on the hill with my eyes pointed down at my feet?”

Jack shook his head.  “No, you’re looking for something specific.  I can tell.”  Matthew had little doubt that his friend would be able to recognize the attitude of someone searching for some particular detail, because it was the attitude that his friend always adopted whenever they went somewhere.  Matthew had no idea what Jack was looking for, though he had always assumed that it was occult symbols or ambigrams or some other ridiculous “clue” to the ancient, international conspiracy he liked to go on about.

Unfortunately, Jack was right.  Matthew wasn’t just taking in the sights; he was looking for the gray-clad figure, but he still did not feel comfortable explaining that to him.  He told himself that his reluctance to share his concerns was a safety precaution, protecting innocent bystanders from his inevitable overreaction.  It was not, Matthew insisted, out of fear that his friend would think he was losing his mind.  Considering Jack, Matthew wasn’t even sure whether being thought insane would be a good thing or a bad thing.

Being harassed by Jack at least kept the thoughts of the figure in gray from dominating Matthew’s mind, which allowed him to remember a few things about their current location and come up with a plausible excuse.  “I’m looking for the cave,” he said.

“The cave?” Jack asked.  Matthew tried to keep from grinning at the glint in his friend’s eyes.  He doubted that he could have picked anything more likely to intrigue him.

Matthew nodded, working to maintain a serious face.  “It’s called the Lupercal.  According to legend, it’s the cave where Romulus and Remus were suckled by the she-wolf.”  Matthew was surprised to see the light on his friend’s face fade into a confused frown.  “You . . . you do know who Romulus and Remus are, right?”

“Who?” Jack asked.  “I thought they were planets.”

Matthew sighed.  It had always been both disappointing and perplexing to him that his friend knew so much more about the history of various fictional universes than he did about his own.  “They’re the mythological founders of Rome,” he explained, “although some historians believe that Romulus at least may have been an actual historical figure.  They were two brothers abandoned by the river as infants.  They were found by a she-wolf and raised here, in a cave in the Palatine Hill.”

The light returned to Jack’s eyes.  “A cradle of kings . . .”

“Well, one king, anyway.”  Jack looked puzzled again.  “Romulus killed his brother in a dispute.  That’s why the city of Rome is named after him.”

“That’s good, I guess,” Jack said, nodding sagely.  Now it was Matthew’s turn to look puzzled.  “I mean, if the other brother had won, then the city would have been named Reme, wouldn’t it?  That would have been terrible!”

“Uhh, right . . .”

“So where is it?” Jack asked.

“No one knows.  I don’t think there is any way to know for sure about something so tied up with mythology.  They found something a few years back that they claimed was the Lupercal, but some people disputed it.”

“The mystery remains,” Jack said solemnly, leaning on a nearby railing and staring out at the ruins.  “Hey, do you think this could be it?”

“What?”

“This, right here!” Jack said excitedly, pointing at the lowered area in front of them.

Matthew stared at his friend.  Was there nothing he couldn’t get wrong?  “You do know what a cave is, right?” he asked.  “Caves have ceilings.”

“But this is an ancient cave,” Jack pointed out.  “Maybe the roof eroded away over the centuries and now it’s open to the air.”

Matthew had no counter to this argument.  Any science above about the eighth-grade level was beyond him.  Fortunately, he had another perfectly good objection.  “The walls are clearly man-made.  This isn’t a cave—it’s the ruins of a brick building.  It looks like it might have been an arena or a race track of some sort.”

“But Romulus and Remus were the founders of Rome,” said Jack, refusing to be put off his idea.  “They were powerful men.  You think they’d let the cave they grew up in stay as just a simple cave?  They probably went back later to fancy up the place.  Or at least Romulus did.  You said this was Palace Hill, right?  So he came back and turned it into a palace.”

“It is not a cave,” Matthew insisted.  “And it never was.  We’re on top of the hill, not down in it.”

“How can you be so sure?” Jack asked playfully.  “I don’t think you can say that without going down there to check.”

“Forget it,” Matthew said wearily.  “I’ve jumped down into enough off-limits pits for one day.”

Jack grinned.  “I thought you said you were pushed.”

“Right.  I was pushed.”

“Uhh, where are we going?” Jack asked.

Matthew was not thinking clearly.  He was using too much oxygen for running, and not enough was getting to his brain.  He was paying the price for never having been on the track team, never jogging, never owning a treadmill.  Matthew did not believe that even professional athletes were capable of complex thought while running with all their heart, but he figured that they at least could tell where they were going.  In his condition, the best he was able to come up with was: “Up.”

It may be true that the simplest answer is most likely to be correct, but that doesn’t mean it’ll be the most satisfying.  “Can you be any more specific than that?” Jack pressed.  He was no track star either, but he was much better at running and talking at the same time.  It suited him.

“No,” Matthew replied breathlessly.  Even if his brain had been functioning perfectly, his lung capacity would have kept him from producing anything but one-syllable answers.

“Maybe we should slow down for a second and figure out where we are, then,” Jack suggested.

“Okay,” Matthew agreed.  He was running on fumes anyway.  The moment the word was out of his mouth, he came to a sudden halt and collapsed, as if his friend had lassoed his feet and pulled back hard.  Matthew sank gratefully into the grass, very glad that his friend’s suggestion had jolted him out of his running trance.  There was no reason for him to continue, and there hadn’t been for the past several minutes either.  He had lost sight of the person he was chasing a while ago, but he kept running, his legs taking over decision-making powers usually assigned to the brain and propelling him forward for no reason other than the primal pleasure of sprinting.

“So where are we?” Jack asked after some quantity of time had passed.  Minutes, hours, days, something like that.  The sun was still up.

Matthew cautiously opened his eyes.  Then, when that did not immediately make him feel like he was about to vomit, he lifted his head and looked around.  “We’re on the Palatine Hill,” he said after a brief scan.  It was as much news to him as it was to his friend.

“Alright then.”  Jack grinned appreciatively.  “And what’s special about it?”

Matthew rotated into a seated position, treating his legs as gently as possible.  He turned his eyes away from the ruins to face the street.  He forced himself to stare at the blankness of the pavement while he gathered his thoughts.  He knew the question Jack really wanted to ask was, “Why are we here?”  Matthew had no answer to that.  Not one that he was willing to admit to, anyway.  So he answered the question his friend had asked.

“It’s one of the Seven Hills of Rome,” he explained.  “It’s located in the center, and some believe that it’s the first place where people lived here.  Later on it was where many rich and powerful Romans built their homes.  The ruins and excavations you can see are of the palaces of emperors—‘Palatine’ is where the word ‘palace’ comes from.”

Jack nodded.  “I see.”  The look of concern in his eyes faded, replaced by the more common light of mischief.  “So this is where the upper crust lived, huh?  All those scheming politicians sitting up here in their ivory towers and looking down on all the poor schmoes in the Forum over there?”

“Something like that,” Matthew said.  Jack’s description was closer to the truth than usual.

“Sounds like it could be worth a look,” Jack declared, standing and offering a hand to his friend.

Matthew wasn’t sure that he would be able to walk, but when he got to his feet, his legs, though sore, were not as crippled as he had expected them to be.  He continued to stare away from the hill for a few seconds, afraid of what he might see there, but when he finally looked up he saw nothing but ancient walls and seemingly harmless tourists.  No one was dressed entirely in gray.  No one was staring at him.  No one appeared to be beckoning him to follow.

He was . . . “relieved” was not exactly the right word, but it was something close to that.  He was glad that, for a while, he did not have to worry about the identity or purpose of the gray-clad figure, but he did not think that the problem was gone for good.  Matthew was beyond thinking that the person was a trick of his mind.  When he saw the figure in the Forum he had been sure.  It wasn’t a ghost, it wasn’t Jack’s powers of suggestion, it wasn’t a residual character from his Forum fantasy; the person was real, and for some mysterious reason (Matthew was sure it couldn’t be anything good) it was following him.

He couldn’t mention any of it to Jack, not because Matthew was afraid he wouldn’t believe him, but because he was afraid he would.  Jack’s madness was bad enough when he didn’t have anything to go off of other than the crazy ideas in his own head.  Matthew did not want to see what his friend could do with live ammunition.

“Man,” said Jack, staring up at what was left of the upper floors of some ancient noble’s house and then turning back to look at the Forum.  “There wasn’t anything subtle about those old Roman aristocrats, was there?  They were just a bunch of wealthy puppeteers with those . . . you know, those cross things with the strings.  Do you think the common people down there could feel it when the schemers up here stared down at them?”

“Oh, I’ll bet they could,” Matthew answered quietly.  He had felt it himself when he stood in the Forum, and he was not entirely sure that he wasn’t still feeling exactly the same sensation.

Matthew stopped.  He closed his eyes.  Inside his head, the Forum came alive.

“What are you doing?” Jack asked.  “Are you tired again or something?”

“No,” Matthew replied.  He could barely hear his friend over the mixed sounds of conversations and lively debate, bartering and negotiating, threats and outright attacks.  He was not able to recreate it perfectly, having forgotten some of his Latin from college, but the sheer size of the crowd in his mind meant that a few scattered words here and there were enough.  “I’m simply taking it all in.”

“Well, do you think you could find somewhere else to do it?” Jack pressed.  “People are going to bump into you.”

“Isn’t that the whole point of the Forum?” Matthew said, chuckling slightly.

“You’re starting to weird me out a little, man,” Jack said, his voice unusually anxious.  “Normally you would be telling me all about who built this building, and when, and why, and then who tore it down to get the materials to build this one over here, and so on.”

Matthew paused in the middle of his conversation with an Egyptian merchant who was telling him the latest news from Alexandria and opened his eyes.  “And what about you?” he asked curiously.  “Shouldn’t you be spouting some wild nonsense about impossible conspiracies or the ghosts of the past?”

Jack shook his head.  “I don’t know this place,” he replied.  “I liked the Colosseum better.”

Matthew grimaced.  To be in Rome and not know the Forum . . . “The Forum is just as interesting as the Colosseum,” he countered.  To those who really appreciated history, of course, it was much more so, but he didn’t want to push the issue too much with his friend.  “It just takes a little more imagination.”

“Ah, my imagination’s not that good,” Jack said.

Matthew raised an eyebrow.  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” he said.  “After all that garbage about restless spirits that you made up in the Colosseum, you’re trying to tell me that you don’t have a good imagination?”

Jack shrugged.  “That wasn’t imagination.”

Sadly, Matthew knew that his friend was telling the truth.  Jack didn’t make all these things up.  He got them from movies like Spartacus and Gladiator.  He got them from TV shows.  He got them from trashy novels.  He absorbed it all, like a sponge, and then, again like a sponge, he regurgitated it in such an unfamiliar way that the original source was often unrecognizable.

Matthew sighed.  His return to the mental Forum would have to wait.  Some things were too important to be left unexplained.

“The reason I’m not telling you about the buildings,” he began, “is that the Forum isn’t about buildings.  Sure, there’s the Rostra, the Regia, the temples, the house of the Vestals, but those aren’t what really define it.  The Forum is all about people.  This was the heart of the greatest city in the known world.  It was a conflux for people of many different walks of life, classes, and races.  Senators and beggars, masters and slaves, Africans, Jews, maybe even Britons.”

“So what did they do here?” Jack asked.

“They talked.  They interacted.  They spread gossip.  They traded.  They fought.  They rioted.  Ambitious politicians would stand here and give speeches, trying to discover the secrets to controlling the terrible power of the Roman mob.  A few lucky ones succeeded, though often not for long.  There’s an old saying, ‘Vox populi, vox dei’—the voice of the people is the voice of God.  Well, in ancient Europe, this was where that voice could be heard.  It was capricious and difficult to understand, but if you could learn to speak it, you just might be able to make yourself master of Rome.

“But it’s not really about the demagogues, either.  The Forum was the place of ordinary people.  They came to get the latest news and to chat with their friends, to watch and listen to the glorious chaos that was the city of Rome.  And now that’s what I’m going to go back to doing, if you’ll excuse me.”

He started to close his eyes, but he could see that his friend still looked puzzled.  “Tell you what,” Matthew said.  “If you can’t imagine it, then just try to strike up conversations with random people.  That’ll give you a better feel for the Forum than me explaining the history of the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina.”

“If you say so,” Jack said, shrugging.

Matthew returned to his Forum, but unfortunately he was no longer able to fully enjoy his conversation with the Alexandrian merchant.  His mind was too focused on the present to truly get into the fantasy.  He had realized only too late the potential danger of telling Jack to start conversations with whoever he happened to find, and thus a quarter of his brain . . . and then half . . . and then nearly two-thirds was focused on keeping track of what his friend was saying, just in case they were suddenly going to have to run again.

For a while Jack managed to avoid trouble.  At least he stayed in roughly the same place, so Matthew didn’t have to follow him and could therefore keep his eyes closed.  The things he said were not particularly intelligent—he asked people to speak because he wanted to hear the voice of God and suggested that they start a riot and march on the Colosseum to demand justice—but as long as the people he talked to kept ignoring him, it didn’t really matter.

But then he heard an unfamiliar female voice saying: “Really? You’re going to get everyone here to rise up in protest?  How?”

Followed by Jack: “Well, in the old days, politicians would give these great speeches to sway the hearts of the crowd.”

“Alright,” Matthew said, irritated.  “I think that’s gone far enough.”  He opened his eyes.

And then, off in the distance, he saw the gray-clad figure.

“Hey, what’s the matter?” Jack asked, slowing his pace so as not to lose Matthew.

“Oh, it’s nothing,” Matthew lied.  “I’m just . . . tired.”

Jack gave him an unusually shrewd glance.  “Are you still upset about getting kicked out of the Colosseum?”

“You’re right,” Matthew replied sarcastically.  “I can see why you would think I had already forgotten about that, seeing as it happened all of two minutes ago.  Look, can we just sit down over here for a while?”

“Sure,” said Jack.  “We’ll rest for a second while you tell me all about this big white thing over here.”

“It’s the Arch of Constantine,” he said as he sat down on the grass.  “Dedicated to him for his victory in the Battle of the Milvian Bridge.”  Matthew was not in the mood for giving a lecture right then, but he could not help explaining such very basic information to his friend.

“Constantine,” Jack repeated thoughtfully.  He remained standing, his usual manic energy preventing him from doing something as lazy as sitting down for a few seconds.  “Where have I heard that name before?”

“He was Emperor of Rome,” Matthew said, leaning back and closing his eyes.  “The city of Constantinople was named after him.”

“No, that’s not it.  Oh!” Jack announced, struck by sudden inspiration.  “It was the title of that movie!”  Matthew made no response.  “Seriously, man, what’s with you?” Jack asked, standing over his friend and blocking the warm sunlight that had been streaming down onto his face.

Matthew sighed.  “It’s just . . . I’ve never been kicked out of a place before,” he answered.

“Haha!” Jack cried triumphantly.  “I knew it!”  Then he paused.  “Wait a sec.  That can’t be right.  I’ve been kicked out of plenty of places before when you were with me.”

“That’s true.”  The images of those incidents had been rotating through Matthew’s mind ever since they had been first grabbed by the guards.  “But technically, on every one of those occasions, it was only you that got thrown out.  I just decided to leave at the same time.”

Jack shrugged.  “You say potato, I say potahto.  I still don’t see what the big deal is.  So you got tossed out of the Colosseum.  It’s not like that’s going to be affecting you for the rest of your life.”

It could, Matthew thought darkly.  The guards had not bothered to take their names or check their passports, but he saw no reason why they couldn’t have recorded descriptions of the two of them and sent them on to all the other important sites in Rome.  For all he knew he had just earned himself a lifetime ban for every major attraction in one of the most historical cities in the world.  “I’ve always tried to live my life according to the rules,” he said.  He did not add, “Which is something that’s always been much more difficult with you around.”

Jack laughed.  “My Dad always said that if you never get chucked out of somewhere for breaking the rules, you’re not doing things right.”

“Hmm.”  Matthew had heard a lot about his friend’s father over the years.  He always wondered how the man had been able to go his whole life without ever being thrown in jail.  “It’s not just that I broke the rules,” he explained.  “It’s more that the whole thing was so stupid.  There was no reason to go down there,” he insisted, talking mostly to Jack but also somewhat to himself.

“That’s not true,” said Jack, sounding unusually serious.  “Jumping down there was a crazy risk that no one in their right mind would have taken.”  Matthew wanted to mention that that was exactly what he was trying to say, but his friend cut him off.  “And sometimes you have to do stupid things like that, otherwise you’ll never get anywhere and life just isn’t interesting.”

Matthew thought it was an intriguing paradox that he and Jack had been able to remain friends for so long despite the fact that their definitions of “interesting” were so radically different.  “Give me an example,” he said.  “And don’t just tell me another story about your father.”

Jack faltered, but he recovered quickly.  “Well, how about this Constantine guy right over here?” he asked, pointing to the arch as if it was the Emperor himself.  “You said he won the Battle of London Bridge or something like that, right?  I bet he had to take a pretty wild risk to do that.”

“I suppose he did,” Matthew said.  He opened his eyes and looked over at the arch.  “Constantine had all the momentum going in, because Maxentius had just been sitting in Rome and waiting for him, but some sources say that he was still outnumbered roughly two-to-one.”

“See?” said Jack, who seemed rather impressed that his random suggestion had panned out so well.  “If he hadn’t led his smaller army against this Maximilian guy, then he never would have gotten to be Emperor, right?”

“Actually, he already was an emperor.  Sort of.”  Matthew did not think he would gain anything from attempting to explain the complexities of the Tetrarchy to his friend.  “He was involved in a convoluted civil war for control of the entire Roman Empire.  And most reports, including this arch, say that he won by divine intervention.  So I don’t think his situation really compares to ours at all,” he said, standing and brushing the grass off of his pants.

“But . . . my example has inspired you to find the energy to move on anyway?” Jack asked, a little perplexed at his friend’s sudden revival.

“No,” Matthew answered, “but it has reminded me just how easy it is for you to get into a situation that you don’t understand.  Someone has to follow you around and protect you from yourself.”

“That’s the spirit!” Jack cried.  “Now, you wanna walk under the arch?”

“It’s fenced off.”

“But if we . . .”

“No.”

“Let go! This is an outrage! You can’t do this to me! The Colosseum is a piece of cultural history that belongs to the entire world! You can’t dictate who stays and who goes just because you have some stinkin’ badge! It’s not right! The ancient Colosseum was free to all!”

“Jack, just shut up,” Matthew muttered.

Jack and Matthew were being led out of the Colosseum by what seemed to them like an excessive number of security guards. They were clearly being made an example of; their unceremonious (and distractingly loud, thanks to Jack) procession went through the outer arc of the building, directly past the long line of tourists waiting to get in. The message was clear: fail to obey the rules inside and we’ll parade you out here like a couple of teenage shoplifters for all the world to see. At least they weren’t handcuffed, though if things kept going the way they were it was likely that one of the guards would need to come up with some sort of gag to deal with Jack.

Their trip to the hypogeum had not lasted long. The large number of tourists inside the Colosseum made it all but impossible for two men to jump and/or fall into the underground area without being noticed. It only took a couple of minutes for the security staff to get down there and forcibly (much more forcibly in one case than in the other) extract the American delinquents. Matthew thought with regret that on what was almost certainly the only chance he would ever get to enter the chambers below the Colosseum, he had spent the entire time arguing with his friend about how exactly they had gotten in there in the first place. No one disputed that Jack had jumped in of his own free will to follow Matthew; it was just the first part of the entry process that merited debate. Of course, because he had been too busy yelling at his friend about all the trouble they were soon to get in, Matthew had had no opportunity to look for the elusive gray-clad figure.

“I am an American citizen!” Jack protested vehemently. “I have rights! You’re going to hear from my embassy about this! I’m going to—”

“Just shut up,” Matthew repeated sullenly, this time loud enough for his friend to actually have a chance of hearing him. “Aren’t we in enough trouble already? You know you’re only going to make it worse.”

“But this is an injustice!” Jack roared. “The Colosseum should be free to all—all parts of the Colosseum should be free, including the high-pojeeum! These people can’t be allowed to drag us out here in this shameful manner just because we were exercising our right as citizens of the world to explore our own history! That’s blatant tyranny! The spirits of the gladiators would—”

“You know what?” Matthew said angrily, unable to wheel to face his friend because of the security guard’s firm grip on his shoulders. “You can take your spirits of the gladiators and . . . and . . . just shut up,” he finished with a sigh. Being marched past everyone was plenty mortifying, but that wasn’t the worst of it in Matthew’s mind. To him, the most embarrassing part of the whole day so far was that he had actually let his friend’s talk about spirits and ghosts of the past get to him. That was the only explanation he could come up with for what he thought he had seen in there. After being around Jack for so many years, Matthew had thought that he had finally gained immunity to his friend’s power of suggestion, but the visions of the person in gray in his memory proved that blatantly wrong.

Amazingly, Jack went quiet, and he stayed that way until the guards finally decided they had paraded them around long enough and pushed them outside. “So,” said Jack, as bright as the sun that was once again beating down on them, “any last thoughts on the Colosseum before we leave?”

Matthew reflected that it would be impossible for him to have any last thoughts on the subject, because he was sure to remember that trip for the rest of his life. “Like what?” he asked glumly.

“Anything notable,” Jack said. “I know we kind of rushed on the way in, so now as we’re going back out I thought we should move more slowly to take it all in. Is there anything on the outside that we should particularly look at or appreciate?”

Matthew looked up. They had not yet moved from the spot where the guards had roughly deposited them, meaning that they were too close to get a good view of the mighty building. “You can’t really see much from here,” he pointed out, “other than the fornication.”

“The what?” his friend asked, looking around rapidly.

“It’s not what you think.” Even in his extremely sour mood, Matthew could not help but grin. “The word fornix means ‘archway’ in Latin. In Ancient Rome, prostitutes would hang out under archways to proposition people. So under the fornication you got a lot of, well, fornication. That’s where the word comes from.”

Jack laughed. The sound was strangely comforting to Matthew; it always had been. “I guess we shouldn’t feel so bad about getting kicked out after all,” Jack said, his eyes sparkling. “What do you say we ditch this oversized brothel and move on?”

As the two of them headed west, a figure dressed all in gray watched them from the very top of what remained of the third level of the Colosseum. The person attempted to drop stealthily down to the second tier, landed awkwardly, and almost pitched down to the ground below. Upon regaining balance, the figure retreated backward into the fornication so as not to be seen and lifted its wrist up to its face. “Targets leaving,” it said softly. “Probable destination: Foro Romano.”

“And,” Jack continued, ignoring both Matthew’s sudden pause and the statement that surrounded it, “what better place to look for the restless spirits of the past than in the dark depths of the ancient crypt?”  He pointed down below.  “That horrible pit of death, the final resting place of all the mighty warriors who fell victim to the Romans’ legendary bloodlust, where they now spend their days pacing, regretting, wishing for revenge on the spectators who had them put to death with a simple flip of the thumb.  For centuries it was hidden beneath the floor of the arena, but now that barrier is no more, and the ghosts of the gladiators are free to come up into the world of the living and walk among us once again!  Doesn’t the thought chill you to the very bone?”

“It’s not a crypt,” Matthew informed him, finally pulling his eyes away from the spot where he very much hoped he had not just seen someone pretending to be a ghost.

Jack was stunned.  “But . . . it’s underground,” he protested.  “Directly under the sandy floor where millions of men lost their lives.  Surely it must be—”

“It’s called the hypogeum,” Matthew explained, shaking his head.  “It means ‘underground,’” he added, though he was pretty sure that even Jack would be able to use context clues and figure out that this did not refer to a “high podium.”  “And of course they didn’t use it for burying the dead.  Would you want to go to a stadium that had the corpses of all the deceased former players under it?”

“So what did they use it for?” Jack asked, looking disappointed.

“I believe it was primarily used for storing the gladiators and animals prior to their appearance in the main arena.  They kept cages down there for that purpose.”  He saw the eager light rekindle in his friend’s eyes for some reason, so he quickly tried to make the hypogeum sound as boring as possible.  “There was also a lot of machinery down there that was used for lifting things, and . . .”

His friend, however, was clearly no longer listening.  “Cages, huh?  So what you’re saying is this place was basically an ancient underground prison?”

“No, that’s not what I’m saying at all—”

“Just as much an abode of the damned as a crypt would be!  A pit where doomed men lay with nothing to do but ponder their inevitable death, without even the sight of the world above ground to relieve them.  Like an ancient death row, except that these gladiators did not even get the certainty of knowing when they would die.  They might survive the next day’s battle, or they might fall; all they knew for certain was that death would come for them eventually.  It’s like the ancient saying goes: ‘Death is certain, its time uncertain.’  And, of course, the end that was awaiting them had very little in common with a relatively painless lethal injection or gassing.”

Matthew could not think of anything to say to that.  “We need to get a closer look at this,” Jack decided, moving swiftly down the stairs.

“Careful,” Matthew said as he followed his friend, though he had little hope of stopping him if he determined to do something foolish.  “I don’t think we’re supposed to get too close.”

Jack’s legs stopped before the railing, but his torso carried a few inches beyond.  “Oh, you wouldn’t want to get too close,” he agreed, grinning at his friend.  “Those who fail to respect the boundary this railing represents could end up plunging into the depths of the . . . high-pojeeum.  And once they’re in, they’re at the mercy of the dead gladiators.  Those who go in never come back.”

Probably true, Matthew thought, but most likely because those that failed to respect the railing received lifetime bans from the officials that curated the Colosseum.  “You know there aren’t really any dead gladiators, right?” he asked, only mildly concerned for the moment.

“What are you talking about?” Jack asked back, perplexed.  “You think that the millions of gladiators who entered this arena through the centuries all came out alive?  You expect me to believe that these desperate warriors participated in nothing more dangerous than a series of slap fights, where the loser was let off with a mild reprimand?”

“No, I mean . . . you know there aren’t really any dead gladiators here, right?”

“Where else could they be but here?” Jack said grandly, spreading his arms wide.  “In this place they fought and died.  Sure, they may have been forced into it, but this was still the place that gave their lives meaning.  Here in the Colosseum they expended the full extent of their life force.  Why shouldn’t their spirits follow suit?”

“Yes, that makes sense, I guess,” Matthew said.  “I’m just checking to make sure that you don’t actually believe in ghosts.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Matthew,” he said with a patronizing grin.  “What sane person could seriously believe in ghosts in this modern age?  I’m just saying that if they did, this high-pojeeum would be the perfect place for them.”

“Right,” Matthew said, looking down into the hypogeum and trying to imagine how the ancient mechanisms worked.

“I would like to go down there to get a better look at it, though,” Jack noted wistfully.

“Oh no,” Matthew said fervently.  “Can you imagine the trouble we’d get into for doing that?”

“Sometimes a little trouble is a good thing,” Jack said with a roguish grin.

“No thank you.”

Later on, Matthew would insist that Jack had pushed him over the railing, a point the two of them disputed for many years to come.  He could not imagine that he jumped in himself, whatever his friend might say.  The only thing Matthew remembered for sure was that just before he entered the underground area he saw a mysterious figure dressed all in gray lurking down there.

“Now this is what I’m talking about!” Jack declared, throwing his arms wide and laughing.  It was a strange sound, like a cross between the cry of a carefree child and the insuppressible glee of a maniacal supervillain watching his plans come to fruition.  As usual, whether they could understand what he was saying or not, the other tourists kept their distance.

Matthew was feeling much better on his second day in Rome.  A good night’s sleep had done wonders for his mood.  When they first returned to the hotel he had worried that his roommate would keep him up with wild stories or nonsensical planning, but for once Jack had calmed down and gone straight to bed.  He said he needed to keep his strength up for the days ahead, whatever he meant by that.

The day was bright, and the waiting line had not been as painfully long as the guidebook had indicated.  If Matthew was forced to complain about something, it would be that his friend had not totally followed through on his promise to let him pick their destination.  Matthew had wanted to visit the Forum first, but as soon as they exited the subway station and Jack laid eyes on the white stone walls of the Colosseum, shining in the sun, he knew that it would be impossible to drag his friend away.  Matthew was not, however, inclined to be particularly upset about this detour.  After all, it was pretty much illegal to visit Rome without going to see the Colosseum.

“The Colosseum!” Jack announced, for what Matthew counted as the thirty-seventh time since they had come up the escalator from the subway station (named, appropriately, Colosseo).  “If this isn’t a place for excitement and intrigue, then I don’t know what is.  Back in the old days, this was the heart of Rome!  The living, breathing, beating, and above all bleeding heart of Ancient Rome!  No other place existed in the entire world at that time that had such power to draw people in!  This was their entertainment!  This was their life!  Every Friday and Saturday night, Romans would call up their buddies . . . I mean, send messages by birds or yell across rooftops or whatever they did before they had telephones.  Anyway, my point is, the question everyone wanted to ask was: ‘Hey, you going to the Colosseum?’”

“No, it wasn’t,” Matthew corrected politely.  He had been leaning on a railing and staring upward, trying to imagine what the building had looked like when it was first built, when it had been around for only a hundred years, when it was filled with screaming fans and when it was inappropriately silent at night.  “No one would have said that back then.”

Jack stumbled as if Matthew had physically tripped him.  “What?” he asked.

“No one would have said that,” Matthew continued, “because it wasn’t called the Colosseum back then.  Its original name was the Flavian Amphitheatre.”  As usual, there were any number of things from his friend’s speech that he could have corrected, from contrasting the importance of places like the Forum and the Circus Maximus as gathering spots to pointing out that the modern weekend originated primarily from Judeo-Christian traditions.  But Matthew knew how to pick his battles, and he believed that names were important.  “And before you ask,” he added, “the word ‘Flavian’ just refers to the dynasty of emperors that built it.  It doesn’t have anything to do with flavors, or flares, or flakes.”

Jack’s brow furrowed.  “But . . . this is still the place with the gladiators, right?”

“Yes,” Matthew said, chuckling.  “This is the place with the gladiators.”

“Well alright then!” said Jack, regaining his earlier momentum.  “Gladiator combat!  Battles to the death!  Two men enter, one man leaves.  That’s what Ancient Rome was really all about.  Fighting for your life, sword to sword, knife to knife, fist to fist, and all the while the citizens of the greatest city in the world watched as you struggled to survive.  Now that is a performance.  Anyone who entered this pit knew that if he did not perform to his very best, and maybe even if he did, he would surely die.  That would be something worth watching.”

Matthew did not agree that watching men die made for good entertainment.  “You know they don’t do that anymore, right?”

“Of course,” said Jack, slumping down onto the railing next to his friend.  “The great gladiator fights all took place centuries and millennia ago.  But,” he added, grinning slyly, “don’t believe that there’s nothing left here from those brutal days.  The blood of the gladiators has seeped into the ground, taken hold, changed this place in a way that no amount of history can undo.  The ghosts of hundreds, thousands, maybe even millions of men that suffered horrible, horrible deaths reside in this ancient amphitheatre.”

Oh God, thought Matthew.  Now he’s going to have us chasing after ghosts.  “There’s no such thing as ghosts.”

“Sure, you know that, and I know that.  But what about those who want to reawaken the past and prey on the fears of the superstitious?  Wouldn’t this be the perfect setting for a ghost like that?”

Matthew groaned.  “You think there’s going to be someone running around the Colosseum wearing a bedsheet and saying ‘Boo?’  That’s ridiculous.  This isn’t an episode of Scooby D—”

Matthew froze for a moment, because he thought he had seen a figure moving through an archway across from where they were standing.  It was not a ghost, just a person whose features were concealed entirely behind faded gray clothes.  The figure walked with a halting step, as if it had recently fallen and twisted an ankle.  He stared at the spot for a minute or two, but the shuffling apparition did not come back.

“Like I said,” he repeated, though with less certainty and more directed at himself than at his friend, “this isn’t an episode of Scooby Doo.”

Matthew followed Jack through alleyways, down streets, and across the river before his friend finally came to an abrupt halt in another piazza.  “Hey look, Matthew,” he said brightly, sounding not nearly as out of breath as he deserved to be after running for at least a mile nonstop.  “It’s another one of those whatchacallits—obelisks, right?”

Matthew clutched his knees and sagged toward the ground, unable to respond.  If he had been able to speak he could have told Jack that he was technically right, and that the object before them was, in fact, an obelisk.  He would also have been obliged to point out that Rome (and various other European cities, for that matter) was littered with obelisks, that these obelisks had no deeper purpose than to look cool, and that by this point they had no more to do with Egypt than french fries had to do with France.  Since he was still recovering his breath, however, all he could do was attempt to get his meaning across by means of a painful wheezing noise.

“Wait here for a second.  I’m going to go check it out.”  Matthew had no choice but to wait there; moving was still not an option.  So he stood there, panting, while his friend went over to examine the obelisk.  Eventually, when he was able to muster the energy, he put his hands back in his pockets, because there were a fair number of people in the area and there was no way of telling which of them might be out for his wallet and passport.

Jack came back, shaking his head.  “I can’t make heads or tails of this Egyptian stuff,” he said, disappointed that he had not discovered his own personal Rosetta Stone in the past half an hour.  “Oh, hey, do you think we lost them?” he asked, seeming to suddenly remember that they had just been “escaping” from the Swiss Guard.

After having taken time to collect his thoughts, Matthew was relatively certain that, had the guards actually been chasing them at any point, they would have been caught.  What he said to his friend, however, was: “Yes, if by ‘them,’ you mean our minds!”

“Huh?” said Jack, his smile faltering.  He had been just about to boast of escaping certain death at the hands of the Vatican enforcer squads.  “What do you mean?”

“You’re right,” Matthew responded harshly.  “I should clarify: you’ve lost your mind, and I’ve just somehow managed to become infected by your craziness!”

Jack frowned.  “Are you saying . . . that I should have waited until I had more evidence before confronting the guards?”

“I’m saying that you’re completely insane for thinking that confronting the guards would even be an option!”  Matthew tried to calm himself down, and he succeeded, to a certain extent.  “I think you’ve been reading too many books,” he said, most likely the only time in his life he would ever make that accusation.  “You think that just because we’re in a big city with a lot of history there must be some sort of ancient mystery or massive, global conspiracy that we’re supposed to unravel.  But real life isn’t that dramatic.  Those kind of cheesy adventures don’t actually exist, and even if they did, do you really think that we would be the ones that are supposed to do all that stuff?  We’re not secret agents or spies.  We’re just two ordinary people.”

Jack regarded Matthew with a peculiar look on his face.  “So what do you think we’re supposed to do here?” he asked.

“What anyone else does, of course!  Stroll around, see the sites, take pictures.  Gawk at things that seem strange to us but are perfectly normal to the people that live here.  I want to walk through historical places and visit art museums.  I don’t want to spend my time running away from dangerous people who may or may not be pursuing us.”

“You want to be a tourist?” Jack asked, making a sour face.

“Yes!  What’s wrong with being a tourist?  That’s what people like us do.  We tour.  Leave the sensational intrigue to the hack novelists.”

Jack stared at his old friend for a long time, as other people, Romans and tourists alike, flowed around them.  Matthew was a little unnerved, because he was not used to seeing his friend look so thoughtful.  Then again, he was no longer racing around and making loud, public accusations, so maybe it was a change for the best.

Eventually Jack smiled.  “You don’t believe that there’s any adventure left in the world, huh?  What a sad life you must live, Matthew.  But don’t worry.  I’ll make a believer out of you yet.”  Matthew groaned.  So much for change.  “I’ll tell you what, though,” Jack continued, “I’ll let you pick where we go tomorrow.”

“So,” said Jack, after Matthew had spent a few minutes trying to figure out if he knew of anywhere they could go where his friend wouldn’t fly off the handle and get them into an awkward situation.  “Tell me about this place.”

Matthew looked around, examining his surroundings for the first time since they had arrived.  “This must be the Piazza del Popolo,” he declared.  “You can tell by those twin baroque churches over at the opposite end, the Santa Maria dei Miracoli and the Santa Maria in Montesanto.  Way back in ancient times this was the site of the Flaminian Gate, where the Flaminian Way left Rome to head north.”

Jack scratched his chin and looked thoughtful again.  Matthew worried that his friend was coming up with a new conspiracy theory, possibly linking the ancient Egyptians to some sort of mutant “pizza people.”  Instead, he said, “If this is where that road left Rome . . . then that means we must be in Rome now, right?”

“Yes,” said Matthew, “this is actually part of Rome.”

“Hey!”  Jack smiled broadly and slapped a friendly arm around Matthew’s shoulder.  “Welcome to Rome.”

“Hey, who are those guys over there?” asked Jack, after he had determined that there were no clues on the obelisk that he had any hope of understanding.

Matthew followed his friend’s ever-capricious finger with his eyes.  “They’re part of the Swiss Guard,” he answered.  “We went past them on our way inside.  Don’t you remember?”  Despite their colorful uniforms, he was not surprised that Jack had missed them on the way into the basilica.  His friend, eager to look down on the city for the first time, had gone through as quickly as the more sedately dressed security people had allowed, practically sprinting to the top of the dome and causing a bit of distress to the other, less energetic visitors.

“Swiss?” Jack asked, frowning in confusion.  “We’re not in Switzerland.  Are we?”  After experiencing the complexity of the “Rome vs. Vatican City” issue he had accepted that sometimes it was difficult to be sure about these sorts of things.

“No, this is still the Vatican,” Matthew said, wondering how his friend could possibly think that they had crossed a national boundary without leaving the square.  “A long time ago it was common for kings, popes, and other important figures to hire Swiss mercenaries for use as bodyguards.  They served all over Europe.  The king in Hamlet makes reference to having Swiss guards, and Denmark doesn’t even border Switzerland.”

“Hmm . . . so this was a really long time ago?” Jack asked.  If Shakespeare talked about it, he thought, then it must be ancient history.  “Like . . . centuries?”

Matthew nodded.  “The Swiss Guard that protects the Pope was founded in the early 1500’s, I think.  I seem to remember reading about them celebrating their 500th anniversary recently.  They’re the only group that’s still around today.”

Jack considered these facts for a while.  “So what you’re saying is that these guys are some of the last remnants of an ancient secret society?” he asked.

“No,” Matthew replied firmly.  “They’re just bodyguards.  They guard the Pope.  That’s all they do.”  He knew that there must be more to it than that, but he preferred that Jack not see it that way.

His efforts, however, were in vain.  “Guarding the Pope means guarding his secrets as well,” Jack explained patronizingly.  “Look at that tunnel behind them.  I bet it goes underground.”

“That’s entirely possible, but it doesn’t mean that it leads to anything having to do with some sort of ridiculous conspiracy.”

Jack grinned.  “Can’t hurt to ask.”

Matthew was about to comment dryly that he felt that saying no longer applied when one of the people being asked was carrying a halberd.  Then he realized that his friend was actually walking over toward the guards and waving to get their attention.  Shaking his head in disbelief, he followed hurriedly after.

“Excuse me,” Jack announced self-importantly (and, of course, in English).  “As a citizen of the world, I demand to know: does this tunnel, or does it not, lead to the secret oil well underneath this plaza, whose existence this very church has been plotting for centuries to keep hidden from the poor citizens of this fair city?”

Matthew’s eyes widened as he heard his friend speak.  He had no idea if the Swiss Guard were required to learn English, but the hand gestures Jack made to accompany his accusation appeared none too friendly, so it could go badly either way.  “What the hell are you doing?” he whispered fiercely the moment he caught up, removing his hands from his pockets for the first time in order to seize his maniac friend by the arm.

“I’m just trying to get to the bottom of this,” Jack explained loudly, turning toward the nearby crowd waiting to get into the basilica and smiling and waving to show that everything was okay.  The crowd, for the most part, stared blankly back.

“Are you out of your mind?”  Matthew was not sure why he was whispering.  Perhaps, subconsciously, he was keeping his voice down because he thought that speaking too loudly might attract the attention of the guards.  This would also explain why he was trying to hide as much of his body as possible behind his friend’s.  “This isn’t a game!  The Swiss Guard aren’t recruited for their sense of humor!”

“Wait,” said Jack, suddenly lowering his voice to a conspiratorial whisper.  “Are you saying that our lives are in danger?”

“Yes!”  In other circumstances Matthew most likely would have understood that the Swiss Guard were unlikely to kill a couple of tourists in broad daylight just for acting like idiots.  At the time, however, he was unable to take his eyes off the pointed tip of the halberd.

“Then I guess we’d better run!” Jack announced, breaking into a broad grin and dashing away from the scene as fast as he could.

Matthew stood there, frozen.  Some part of his brain knew that running would only make him appear more suspicious.  On the other hand, it also had the potential to take him far away from the guards and their weapons.  Plus, if he did not run he would almost certainly lose Jack, who had, among other things, the only key to their hotel room.  So he ran, hoping desperately all the while that the guards would not give chase.

The two guards turned their heads slightly, exchanged a brief glance, and then turned back.  They had, in fact, understood every word, but they had no thought of pursuit.  Chase two incompetent tourists through the city?  Who had that kind of time?

No one saw (because no one was looking for) a gray-clad figure crouching on top of the colonnade surrounding St. Peter’s Square.  The figure twisted its head back and forth frantically as Jack and, a few seconds later, Matthew disappeared down a narrow alleyway just beyond the boundary of the piazza.  It held its wrist up near its mouth and said, “Targets lost,” before jumping toward the nearest rooftop.

“Ah, finally!” Jack declared as he walked through the columns into the open, circular area.  “Now we’re in Rome!”

“No,” said Matthew, who was following behind him cautiously, keeping his eyes peeled for potential pickpockets.  “This is St. Peter’s Square.  We’re still in Vatican City.  Remember St. Peter’s Basilica, the one we were just inside a minute ago?  The one that’s right over there?” he added, pointing.

Jack frowned.  “Yeah, but I thought that was Vatican City.”

Matthew might have thrown up his hands in disgust if they weren’t deep in his pockets, tightly clasped around his wallet and other valuables.  “You can’t have a whole city contained entirely in one church.  Vatican City is small, but it’s not that small.”

“Oh,” said Jack.  “Well, I guess this is nice too.  What did you say it was called?  St. Peter’s Square?”  He suddenly snapped his fingers.  “Of course!  St. Peter’s Square!  Now I remember!”

Matthew braced himself.  “Remember what?” he asked hesitantly.

“St. Peter’s Square is where what’s-his-name . . . Mike Redmond landed his plane!  You know, back in World War II.  Boy, he sure showed Mussolini a thing or two!”

“That’s true,” Matthew replied, grimacing.  Then he added under his breath, “If you replace ‘St. Peter’s Square’ with ‘Red Square,’ ‘Mike Redmond’ with ‘Mathias Rust,’ and ‘World War II’ with ‘The Cold War.’”  He could have admonished Jack with these facts, but he was honestly impressed that his friend had managed to correctly match World War II with Mussolini, so he stayed quiet.  Instead he tried to figure out how Jack had made the mistake.  Had “St. Peter’s” caused him to think of “St. Petersburg,” which he had then gotten confused with Moscow?  Or were all famous squares the same in his head?  Matthew wondered if in a few minutes his friend would be telling him the story of the guy who stood up to that tank.

“Just imagine it,” Jack went on, staring at the sky and presumably still thinking about the plane.  “It can’t have been an easy landing.  I mean, this place isn’t very big, and it’s not long and straight like a runway, it’s a circle . . . hey, how come it’s called a square when it’s actually a circle?” he asked, turning back to his portable encyclopedia.

Matthew shrugged, pulling up the sides of his pants.  “It’s a problem of translation, I suppose.  In Italian the name is Piazza San Pietro, so a more geometrically-faithful rendering might be ‘St. Peter’s Plaza.’  We call it St. Peter’s Square for consistency’s sake, because we think that all important gathering places in the middle of big cities should be some kind of square: Times Square, Trafalgar Square . . . Red Square,” he added meaningfully.

“Mistranslation, huh?” said Jack, nodding knowingly.  “Happens all the time.  But to think that it doesn’t even really have anything to do with St. Peter.  ‘The Plaza of Sand and Petroleum’ . . . interesting.”

Matthew stared at him in total incomprehension for a few seconds before he understood the error.  His friend spoke no Italian, and no language other than English, for that matter.  He tended to assume that the definition of any foreign word was the same as the English word that was closest to it, or at least whichever similar-sounding word in his native tongue he was able to think of first.  Matthew considered trying to explain this to Jack, but then he saw the gleam in his friend’s eye.

“But what if it’s not a mistake?” Jack asked, halving his speaking volume but doubling the intensity.  He walked back toward Matthew and threw a conspiratorial arm around his shoulder.  “What if it’s a plot to conceal the fact that there’s oil underneath the ground?  It all makes sense.  That’s where the Church gets all its money, from a secret that they have kept since ancient times: an oil well hidden beneath the so-called ‘St. Peter’s Square’ itself, immediately outside their headquarters of Vatican City!  Or, in Vatican City, I guess.”  Jack did, on occasion, remember the things that his friend attempted to teach him.

“Hey, what’s this thing?” he asked, releasing Matthew and crouching down on the ground, staring at a picture.

“It’s a relief,” Matthew explained, thinking that this new discovery was anything but.  “It’s just for decoration.”

“You mean it looks like it’s just for decoration,” Jack corrected.  “See these lines?  They could be pointing toward a clue!”  He stood and looked around to see where the lines were pointing.  It seemed pretty obvious to Matthew that they were just part of the relief, and also that they were aiming in too many different directions to possibly indicate any one place.

Jack, however, did not see it that way.  “What’s that thing?” he asked, indicating the center of the square, one of the hundreds of spots that the lines could be said to be pointing at.  “It looks like the Washington Monument.  Do you think they stole the idea from us?”

“It’s called an obelisk,” said Matthew, “and they didn’t steal the idea from the United States; they stole it from Egypt.  Probably stole the obelisk, too, for that matter.”

“Egypt, huh?” said Jack, his brain working furiously.  Matthew wished he had kept his mouth shut, for he was sure that his friend was now developing an intercontinental conspiracy theory.  Before he could let Matthew in on the details of the new plot, however, he dashed off to more closely examine its inspiration.

Matthew followed slowly, paying far more attention to the crowds full of possible sneak thieves than to his overexcited friend.  His lack of enthusiasm was mostly relative; he was glad to be in Rome (technically still Vatican City), despite his initial misgivings about the trip, and he agreed with his friend that it was a fascinating place.  But Jack was expecting things that could have come straight from a trashy thriller novel.  Things like that, Matthew knew, just did not happen.