Duane shook himself out of it, pushed his glasses into place, and reviewed the notes he'd taken.

First, Lucrezia Borgia seemed to be more a victim of bad press than the guilty party in all the legends he'd been aware of: no poison ring wiping out lovers and dinner guests, no banquets with bodies stacked like cordwood by the time dessert was served. No, Lucrezia came across as the victim of spiteful historians. Duane looked at some of the volumes stacked on his study table: Guicciardini's History of Italy, Machiavelli's The Prince and his Discourses and extracts from The History of Florence and the Affairs of Italy, Picco-lomini/Pius's chatty Commentaries, Gregorovius's volume on Lucrezia, Burchard's Liber Notarum with its notes on the day-to-day trivia of the papal court during the period.

But nothing more about the bell.

Then, on a hunch, Duane checked original sources on Benvenuto Cellini, one of the Old Man's favorite historical personages, even though Duane knew that the feisty artist had been born in 1500, eight years after Rodrigo Borgia became Pope Alexander VI.

At one point, Cellini wrote about his imprisonment in Castel Sant' Angelo, the huge, hulking mass of stone Hadrian had built as a family tomb fourteen hundred years earlier. Pope Alexander-Rodrigo Borgia-had ordered the immense sepulcher fortified and modified as a place of residence. Rooms and shafts in stone which had known only corpses, darkness, and decay for well over a thousand years had become the home and fortress of the Borgia pope.

Cellini had written about it:

I was imprisoned in a gloomy dungeon below the level of a garden which swam with water and was full of spiders and venomous worms. They flung me a wretched mattress of coarse hemp, gave me no supper and locked four doors upon me. . . . For one hour and a half each day I got a little glimmering of light which penetrated that unhappy cavern through a very narrow aperture.

The rest of the day and night I abode in darkness. And this was one of the less terrible of cells. From my fellow unfortunates, I learned of the doomed souls who spent their last days in the foulest of Pits, those deeper dungeons set at the bottom of the airshaft to the infamous Bell of the evil Borgia Pope. The word was spread throughout Rome and the provinces that this bell had been cast of unholy metal, consecrated with foul deeds, and hung even now as a manifest sign of the pact between the former pope and the Devil himself. Each of us in our cells, crouching in rancid water and eating our foul scraps, knew that the tolling of that bell would announce the end of the world. There were, I confess, times that I would have welcomed that knell.

Duane scribbled notes. Curiouser and curiouser. There was no later mention of the bell in Cellini's autobiography or notes, but an earlier passage about the artist Pinturic-chio-evidently a contemporary of the Borgia pope rather than Cellini himself-seemed relevant:

On the command and behest of his Pope . . .

Duane checked to make sure that this was Alexander, aka Rodrigo Borgia. It was.

On the command and behest of his Pope, this deaf and undersized little artist . . .

Duane skimmed to make sure Cellini was talking about Pinturicchio, Borgia's artist. He was.

. . . mean in person and appearance as he was, set about painting the murals which filled the Torre Borgia with such bizarre effect, culminating in the Room of the Seven Mysteries in the dismal Borgia Apartments.

Duane called time-out from Cellini's passage to crosscheck the Torre Borgia. A guide to Vatican structures said that it was the massive tower Pope Alexander VI had ordered added on to the Vatican palace. A previous addition by Pope Sixtus had been a dark and drafty warehouse called the Sistine Chapel. Pope Innocent had opted for a lovely summer house in the far reaches of the Vatican gardens. Borgia built a tower. A note in an 1886 architectural tome mentioned that the Borgia Torre had been designed with a massive belfry at the apex of the columnar fortress, but no one other than the Pope and his illegitimate children were allowed to ascend that high in the tower through the maze of locked doors and passages.

Duane returned to Cellini's notes:

Pinturicchio, upon his Pontiffs command, descended into the Dead City beneath the City for his inspiration and models for the Borgia Apartment murals. There lay not the Christian Catacombs with their sanctified bones, but the random excavations of Heathen Rome in all its decayed glory.

It was said that Pinturicchio led apprentices and curious colleagues on these subterranean expeditions: imagine then the torchlight through these tunnels filled with the rubble of the Caesars, entry into chambers, corridors, entire dwellings, entire streets of the Roman dead, lying like forgotten arteries beneath the weed-choked lanes of our living but lessened city. . . imagine the exclamations when Pinturicchio, after braving the giant rats and hordes of bats which fed on offal and darkness there, raised his torch to illuminate the pagan decorations set there by men dead fifteen centuries and more.

This little man and ungodly artist brought these designs and heathen images to the apartments of the Borgia Pope in his Tower. Within the most private of the Corrupt Pope's secret chambers, these pagan images prevailed-covering walls, arches, ceilings, and even the massive iron bell which was said to be the Borgia talisman high in the Torre.

To this day, the lost paintings are called, by the ignorant, grotesques, because they were found and copied from the unholy subterranean caverns, or grotte, in the darkness beneath Rome.

Uncle Art leaned over Duane's shoulder and said, "Ready to go yet?" The boy jumped, reset his glasses on his nose, and managed a smile.

"Just about."

While Uncle Art wandered restlessly in the nearby stacks, Duane flipped through the final volumes. He found only one more mention of the bell, and again it related to the art of the wizened muralist named Pinturicchio:

But in the chamber which led from the Room of the Seven Mysteries to the locked staircase ascending to the belltower where only the Borgias might tread, the painter had reproduced the essence of those buried and forgotten murals which he had studied by the light of torches while water dripped from broken stone. Here, in what later would be called the Room of the Saints because of the seven great murals there, Pinturicchio had fulfilled his commission by filling every space between the paintings, every arch, nook, and column, with hundreds-some experts say thousands-of images of bulls.

The mystery is not that bulls should appear in his work or this hidden place; the bull was the emblem of the Borgia family; the benevolent ox had long been the metaphor for the papal procession.

But these bulls, as repeated almost endlessly in the dark hallways and grottos and entrance to the forbidden stairway above the Room of the Seven Mysteries, were neither of these emblems.

These were not the noble Borgia symbol, nor the peaceful ox. Reproduced countless times in these apartments was the stylized but unmistakable figure of the sacrificial bull of Osiris, the Egyptian god who ruled over the kingdom of the dead.

Duane closed the book and took off his glasses.

"Ready yet?" asked Uncle Art.

Duane nodded.

"Let's try that McDonald's drive-in place on War Memorial Drive," said his uncle. "Their hamburgers have gone up to a quarter, but they're pretty good."

Duane nodded, still thinking, and followed Uncle Art out of the basement and into the light.

The footsteps outside of Camp Three had stopped. Not receded, not gone away, merely . . . stopped. Mike, Dale, and Lawrence crouched by the low entrance and waited, barely breathing in their effort not to make noise. The sounds of the woods were quite distinct: a squirrel scolding someone or something far up the hill toward Dale's Uncle Henry's property; an occasional shout from Chuck Sperling's gang, farther away now, probably south of the quarry; the screech of crows in the treetops up the other hill toward Calvary Cemetery. But no sound from where the unseen soldier waited just outside the ring of bushes.