The Devil Will Come by Glenn Cooper

chamber there were three men who were shoveling a mixture of tuff, dirt and bricks. Some kind of manual hoist system was in place to lift their buckets out of the cave-in. The men stopped working and stared at Elisabetta through the entrance.
    ‘These are my most trusted assistants,’ De Stefano said. ‘Gentlemen, this is Sister Elisabetta.’ The men were young. Despite the cool subterranean temperature they were soaked through with sweat. ‘Gian Paolo Trapani is directly responsible for all the catacombs of the Via Antica and he’s acting as foreman for the operation.’
    The pleasant-looking young man who came forward had longish hair, reddened by tufo dust. He didn’t seem to know if he should extend a grimy hand so he made do with, ‘Hello, Sister. I heard you studied here once. It’s a pity that it took a quake to make an excavation. It’s such a mess now.’
    Elisabetta followed De Stefano through the opening. The chamber was irregularly shaped, generally rectangular. But the margins were ill-defined because of the piles of rubble. Wooden supports, thick as railway ties, had been laid in to support the sides and the earth overhead. The space was at least fifteen meters by ten, she thought, but the cave-in made it hard to be precise. There was a shaft of light coming in from a good ten meters above. A head appeared and another fellow yelled down. ‘Why are you stopping?’ He was manning the block and pulleys of the bucket rig.
    ‘Go take a break!’ Trapani shouted and the head disappeared.
    Elisabetta’s first impression was that their work was favoring speed over science. There were no excavation grids, no signs of measurement and documentation, no camera tripods or drawing tables. The ground seemed to have been cleared in one frantic effort rather than deliberately, meter by meter. Blue tarps covered much of the floor. Only one of the walls was reasonably vertical. It was covered by a suspended tarp.
    ‘Sorry it’s so untidy,’ Trapani said, looking at her shoes and hemline, which were covered in tuff dust. ‘We’ve been moving faster than we’d like.’
    ‘So I see,’ Elisabetta said.
    She was surprised at how seamlessly she made the shift into the observational mode of an archeologist. For twelve years she’d focused on an interior space, the realm of emotion and belief, faith and prayer. But at this moment, her mind won out over her heart. She stepped gingerly through the chamber, avoiding the ubiquitous tarps, taking in details and sorting them.
    ‘The bricks,’ Elisabetta said, stooping to pick one up. ‘Typical first-century Roman – long and narrow. And this.’ She dropped the brick and selected a grey friable chunk the size of a small cat. ‘ Opus caementicium , Roman foundation cement.’ Then she picked up one of the many pieces of blackened, charred wood and thought, There was a fire . ‘This chamber predates the earliest part of the catacombs by at least a century. It’s just as I proposed. The fourth-century extension of the catacombs stopped right before it encroached on it.’
    ‘Yes, I agree,’ De Stefano said. ‘The diggers of the Liberian Area catacombs were only a few swipes of the pickax away from the surprise of their lives.’
    ‘It is a columbarium, isn’t it?’ Elisabetta said.
    ‘Just as you suggested during your student days,’ De Stefano agreed, ‘it does appear to be an underground funeral chamber for pre-Christians. The above-ground monument was probably razed and likely disappeared before the catacombs were built.’
    He took a clear plastic specimen bag from his pocket. ‘If the first-century dating was ever going to be in doubt, this settled it. We’ve found several so far.’
    Elisabetta took the bag. It contained a large silver coin. The bust on the obverse showed a flat-nosed man with curly hair who was wearing a laurel wreath. The inscription read ‘NERO CLAVDIVS CAESAR’. She flipped the bag over. The reverse was an elaborate arch flanked