We picked our way through the warrens for several minutes, turning this
way and that. I was lost in the first minute. Then the sexton stopped
before a flat stone that had a crude, faded sketch of a fish on it;
he leaned on it, and the stone discovered itself to be a door. We
followed him through it into a metal-walled, high-ceilinged tunnel,
utterly unlike the meandering Catacombs. I began to hear sounds; we
went through another door, and light struck at our eyes.
I blinked and focused on a long room, half a dozen yards wide, almost
as tall, at least fifty yards long. It appeared to be a section of an
enormous tunnel; it appeared to be, and it was. Benedetto and I set
Zorchi--still cursing--down on the floor and stared around.
There were people in the tunnel, dozens of them. There were desks and
tables and file cabinets; it looked almost like any branch of the
Company, with whirring mimeographs and clattering typewriters.
The sexton pinched out the taper and dropped it on the floor, as people
came toward us.
"So now you are in our headquarters in Rome," said the man dressed as a
sexton. "It is good to see you again, Benedetto."
"And it is much better to see you, Slovetski," the old man answered
warmly.
* * * * *
This man Slovetski--I do not think I can say what he looked like.
He was, I found, the very leader of the "friends," the monarch of this
underground headquarters. But he was a far cry from the image I had
formed of a bearded agitator. There was a hint of something bright and
fearful in his eyes, but his voice was warm and deep, his manner was
reassuring, his face was friendly. Still--there was that cat-spark in
his eyes.
Slovetski, that first day, gave me an hour of his time. He answered
some of my questions--not all. The ones he smiled at, and shook his
head, were about numbers and people. The ones he answered were about
principles and things.
He would tell me, for instance, what he thought of the
Company--endlessly. But he wouldn't say how many persons in the world
were his followers. He wouldn't name any of the persons who were all
around us. But he gladly told me about the place itself.
"History, Mr. Wills," he said politely. "History tells a man everything
he needs to know. You look in the books, and you will learn of
Mussolini, when this peninsula was all one state; he lived in Rome,
and he started a subway. The archives even have maps. It is almost all
abandoned now. Most of it was never finished. But the shafts are here,
and the wiring that lights us still comes from the electric mains."
"And the only entrance is through the Catacombs?"
The spark gleamed bright in his eye for a second. Then he shrugged.
"Why shouldn't I tell you? No. There are several others, but they are
not all convenient." He chuckled. "For instance, one goes through a
station on the part of the subway that is still in operation. But it
would not have done for you, you see; Rena could not have used it. It
goes through the gentlemen's washroom."
We chuckled, Slovetski and I. I liked him. He looked like what he once
had been: a history teacher in a Company school, somewhere in Europe.
We talked about History, and Civilization, and Mankind, and all the
other capitalized subjects. He was very didactic and positive in what
he said, just like a history teacher. But he was understanding. He
made allowances for my background; he did not call me a fool. He was a
patient monk instructing a novice in the mysteries of the order, and I
was at ease with him.
But there was still that spark in his eye.
Rena disappeared almost as soon as we were safely in the tunnels.
Benedetto was around, but he was as busy as Slovetski, and just as
mysterious about what occupied him. So I had for company Zorchi.
We had lunch. "Food!" he said, and the word was an epithet. "They offer
this to me for food! For pigs, Weels. Not for Zorchi!" He pushed the
plate away from him and stared morosely at the table.
We were given a room to share, and one of Slovetski's men fixed up a
rope-and-pulley affair so Zorchi could climb into his bed unaided. He
was used to the help of a valet; the first time he tried it, he slipped
and fell on the stumps of his legs. It must have hurt.
He shrieked, "Assassins! All of them! They put me in a kennel with the
apprentice assassin, and the other assassins make a guillotine for me
to kill myself on!"
We had a long talk with Slovetski, on the ideals and principles of his
movement. Zorchi stared mutinously at the wall. I found the whole thing
very interesting--shocking, but interesting. But Zorchi was immune to
shock--"Perhaps it is news to you, Weels, that the Company is a big
beast?"--and he was interested in nothing in all the world but Zorchi.
By the end of the second day I stopped talking to him entirely. It
wasn't kind. He disliked me, but he hated everyone else in the tunnel,
so he had no one to talk to. But it was either that or hit him in the
face, and--although many of my mores had changed overnight--I still
did not think I could strike a man without legs.
And besides, the less I saw of Zorchi, the more time I had to think
about Rena.
* * * * *
She returned on the third day, without a word of explanation to me of
where she had been or what she had done. She greeted me and disappeared
again, this time only for hours. Then she came back and said, "Now I am
through, for a time. How have you liked our little hideaway?"