Umbria

Two hours later

Off the Auto Strada, they passed a cluster of motels that would have been at home anywhere along an American interstate. They followed a procession of trucks through modern Orvieto before turning off the main road and beginning the climb uphill.

Orvieto was the only hill town Lang had ever visited that was not hilly. Instead, the old walled city perched on top of a rock formation that was flat on top, a geological phenomenon any resident of the American Southwest would recognize as a mesa. There was little traffic. Tourists had not yet discovered the place, although the huge empty parking lot below the main piazza gave an indication of the citizens' aspirations.

Winding through the narrow streets, Lang guided the BMW into the Via Maurizo and the Piazza Dumo, a square dominated by the cathedral. The late morning sun danced along the gilt mosaics covering the facade of the exuberantly Italian Gothic building. Unlike the more famous towns of Tuscany to the north, there were few cars on the square. Lang parked and held the bike steady as Gurt swung a long leg over the seat to dismount.

They entered the narthex of the church, standing still while their eyes acclimated to the dim light. Inside the nave, candles flickered in side chapels, shadows giving movement to frescoes. A brightness came from somewhere beyond the choir, the raised platform where the transept crossed the main body of the church.

An elaborate altar held more candles, their wavering light making Christ seem to writhe on His cross. To the right of the sanctuary, another side chapel blazed with -electric floodlights anachronistic in a setting centuries old. The floor was covered with dropcloths. Brushes, putty knives and bottles of pigment were scattered everywhere. Even the clutter did little to detract from richly colored figures tumbling into the abyss, that favorite of Italian frescoes, the Final Judgement.

No matter whether painted by Michelangelo, Bernini or some other artist, the subject always reminded Lang of late Friday night at a singles bar.

On scaffolding halfway up the wall of anguished souls consigned to damnation (or those who would sleep alone), three men were examining one of the figures. Two wore overalls. The third was in a paint-splattered cassock.

"Fra Marcenni?" Gurt called.

The man in the cassock turned. He could have been one of the saints pictured throughout the church. His white hair stood around a pink circle of scalp, catching the powerful light in an electronic halo. He was small, about the size of the pensione's owner and about the same age.

"Si?"

"Do you speak English?" she asked, shading her eyes as she looked up at the top of the scaffolding.

The halo shook: no.

Gurt fired off a burst of Italian.

The monk smiled and replied, pointing behind Lang and Gurt.

"He says he'll come down in a minute or two, that he'll be happy to speak to us. We are to enjoy the art of this magnificent church while we wait."

Lang's lack of interest in religious art applied equally to the magnificent or otherwise. So, instead of feeding coins into boxes to illuminate the paintings in the various chapels, he amused himself by deciphering the Latin epitaphs marking the tombs of prelates and nobility who had contributed generously to this church. The burial places of the poor, no doubt, had long since been forgotten.

The meek might someday inherit the earth but it will be one that doesn't remember them.

Lang studied a small glass vial embedded in the altar, trying to ascertain what holy relic might be enshrined there. A nail from the True Cross, a finger bone of St. Paul?

He never found out.

Gurt took him by the arm. "Fra Marcenni is taking a break. We'll have coffee on the square."

The good brother preferred wine.

They sat alfresco at a table only a few yards from the massive doors of the cathedral. Gurt and the monk exchanged what Lang supposed were the banalities of commencing a conversation with a stranger.

Signaling for a second glass, the old monk said something to Gurt and looked at Lang. "He would like to see the picture we have come to ask about," she translated.

Lang handed it across the table. "Tell him I need to know what it shows."

The monk stared at the Polaroid while Gurt spoke. He replied and Lang waited impatiently for the English.

"Three shepherds are looking at a tomb."

Lang had never considered this possibility for the enigmatic structure. "The woman, who is she?" The old man listened to Gurt and crossed himself as he replied.

"A saint, perhaps the Blessed Virgin herself," Gurt said. "She is watching the shepherds at the tomb, perhaps the tomb of Christ before He arises."

Swell. Lang had come all this way to understand another religious painting. Although the tomb of Christ had always been pictured as a cave, one from which a stone could be rolled. The difference was hardly worth the trip.

He was reminded of the two shipwreck survivors floating in a lifeboat in a fog. Suddenly, they see shore and the figure of a man.

"Where are we?" shouts one of the men in the boat.

"At sea, right off the coast," comes the answer.

"Imagine that," the other man in the boat says. "Running into a lawyer out here."

"Lawyer?" his companion asks. "How the hell do you know he's a lawyer?"

"Because the answer to my question was absolutely accurate and totally worthless."

Like the old priest's answer.

Brother Marcenni must have sensed Lang's disappointment. He took a magnifying glass from somewhere in his cassock and squinted at the picture before speaking again to Gurt.

"He says the letters on the tomb are in Latin, written without spaces in the manner of the ancient Romans."

This was again telling Lang he was at sea. "That much I knew."

As though understanding the English, Brother Marcenni read in a slow, quivering voice, "Et in Arcadia ego sum."

"Makes no sense," Lang said to Gurt. "Both sum and ego are first person. Sum means 'I am' and ego is the first person pronoun."

Gurt looked at him as though he had grown another head.

Lang shrugged apologetically. "Latin is sort of a hobby."

"I never knew that."

"It didn't seem relative to the relationship. We usually communicated in grunts and groans. Ask the good brother if sum and ego aren't redundant."

After treating Lang to a glare that would have singed paint, Gurt and the monk exchanged sentences. He gesticulated as though his hands could solve the mystery.

Finally, Gurt nodded and said, "He says the second denotation of the first person is perhaps for emphasis. The phrase would translate as 'I am also' or 'l am even' in Arcadia but is peculiar usage. Perhaps the artist was speaking alle… alle…"

"Allegorically," Lang supplied.

"Allegorically. As if he were saying, 'I am here also: meaning that death is present even in Arcadia."

"The tomb of Christ is in Canada or Greece? Ask him how that might be."

In reply to Gurt's question, the monk motioned the waiter for yet another glass of wine and laughed, hands moving expansively.

"He says the artist, Poussin, was French. The French are too busy with women and wine to be exact about geography. Besides, Arcadia was frequently symbolic for a place of pastoral peace."

Or anything else, by Lang's observation.

Since he had to drive back down that curving road, Lang was drinking coffee. His cup had gone cold and he motioned to the waiter as Brother Marcenni produced a metrically numbered straightedge and began to measure the Polaroid. He turned the picture sideways and upside down, nodded and spoke to Gurt.

"He says this is not only a picture but a map."

Lang forgot about warming up his coffee. "A map? Of what?"