Act One starred my husband, a river of blood flowing from his abdomen, steadying himself with our terrace railing, turning to look at the shooter in our bedroom whose face I could never see. In Act Two, Jeff would lie dying on the deck of my otherwise gleaming anniversary gift, a circle of blood expanding around him, a red death slowly enveloping his life. In Act Three, a black blanket would enfold his naked corpse, and then a black hearse would enfold the blanket, and then a black night would enfold the hearse.

I was the star of the finale, desperately sopping blood from my home, where it continued pouring in faster than I could clean, like a macabre variant on Mickey Mouse's unruly swirling basin in The Sorcerer's Apprentice.

Three times, this grisly Shakespearean tragedy was interrupted by flight turbulence, which brought on highly uncharacteristic airsickness. By the time the plane landed at ten o'clock in the morning Italian time, I was exhausted, hungry, dizzy, and cross.

"Ma'am, we have arrived," the limousine driver said, waking me. I shook my head to clear the fuzziness.

I stepped out of the car and entered the museum.

I passed through a ground floor lobby adorned with marble sculpture to arrive at the museum's coat check desk, where I checked my hastily over-packed luggage. Following the directions given at the desk, I went back across the lobby to the stairwell, my pace and my heart rate increasing with every step. By the time I reached the lower floor, I was practically running.

I rounded a corner and skidded to an abrupt halt as I almost collided with a six-foot-long crocodile. Mummified and encased in glass, the large reptile appeared a bit thin, but otherwise it looked almost normal and as if it were sleeping. An accompanying description, written in both Italian and English, explained that crocodiles were thought by the ancient Egyptians to have special powers.

I glanced around the room and realized I was in the section of the museum I had been looking for. Several mummified human forms surrounded me, along with a second crocodile, this one just a baby. It was bright green, no more than a foot in length, and could have been confused with someone's pet lizard. It, too, was impeccably mummified.

"Dr. Stone?" a voice behind me inquired.

I turned and sized her up for a moment before answering. I had been expecting Alyssa Iacovani to be a brunette, given the Italian last name and slight accent. Instead, straight pale blonde hair flowed like spun gold to her shoulders, which were tan beneath a lightweight sleeveless top. Her green eyes were both intelligent and inquisitive.

I briefly remembered the first time Jeff passed a hand through my waist-length auburn hair. "I love that you're a redhead," he had said. "I've always thought redheads were the sexiest."

"We have the most fun, too," I teased. "My sister always told me that was supposed to be blondes, but, then again, she's a dumb blonde."

"I have never been into blondes, dumb or otherwise," Jeff had responded with a smile.

"Dr. Iacovani," I said, stepping forward to shake the hand of the lovely blonde woman who might have been my husband's classmate.

"Please, call me Alyssa," she said.

"Katrina," I said in kind.

"Nice to meet you, Katrina, and thank you for coming so quickly. I'm sure you have gathered that time is of the essence, so I apologize for dispensing with any small talk. I'll get straight to the point. How well do you know your husband's research?"

I raised an eyebrow. "I am the co-founder of our company," I said.

"Of course"-Alyssa appeared unfazed by the jab-"but you are the head of the biology division. Jeff is head of chemistry. What I was asking is this: How well do you understand the chemistry? Do the biologists and chemists fully understand each other's work, or are the two areas too different from one another?"

"We have a loose understanding of each other's work," I said. "He and the other chemists design and chemically synthesize the molecules, but once I see the synthesis scheme I can follow it. My function is to design and implement the biological assays, but Jeff and the other chemists can follow what we biologists are doing once we explain it to them. Why do you ask?"

"Ugh, where do I begin?" Alyssa looked around and made a sweeping gesture with both hands, calling my attention to the artifacts in the museum exhibit. "I noticed you surveying the Egyptian rooms when you arrived. I put these rooms together.

"I did my doctoral work at the Yale Egyptological Institute in Egypt, mostly doing field research at the Fayoum Oasis outside of Cairo. After graduate school, I came here.

"Il Museo Archeologico Nazionale is the direct descendent of the Royal Bourbon Museum, one of the largest and oldest museums in all of Europe. It contains one of the world's most valuable collections of Roman and Greek antiquities.

"I believed that my expertise in Egyptian antiquities could be a valuable asset here. As I'm sure you are aware, it is impossible to fully appreciate any one of these ancient cultures without an in-depth knowledge of the others. I came to Naples to strengthen my understanding of the Greek and Roman cultures while bringing my extensive background in Egyptian culture to the museum. I have been here ever since." She smiled. "People tell me I have even picked up the accent a little."

"Indeed," I said.

"As I mentioned to you on the phone, I was an undergraduate at UCLA with Jeff-"

"Excuse my rudeness," I said, "but I don't remember Jeff ever mentioning you in the past. I only heard your name for the first time a few weeks ago." It was a lie. I had first heard her name the previous day-from her-on the phone.

"He probably didn't remember me," she said, shrugging. "We were not friends in college; in fact, I doubt he even knew who I was." She smiled sheepishly. "In my required freshman chemistry sequence-which I loathed, by the way-I knew him by name and by sight as the guy who was in the habit of throwing off the curve. I even knew people who tried to sabotage his efforts. They didn't succeed, as Jeff published his first paper in Nature one year later, as a college sophomore. Aside from that, Jeff was gorgeous, charming, brilliant, and an outstanding surfer. He was hard to miss, and everyone knew he would one day do something extraordinary. After graduation, I read about Jeff from time to time when he would receive yet another prestigious award, so I was always vaguely aware of his career path.

"Recently, I stumbled upon a puzzle in my own research. I believed that this puzzle had a strong and unique chemical component. Knowing that Jeff would be the absolute best person on Earth to riddle it out, I decided to give it a shot. I looked him up and I called him. I don't think he had any idea who I was.

"The thing that surprised me, to be honest, was his eagerness to help. Jeff became practically obsessed with the document. He started calling me daily, sometimes several times a day. I think he forgot about the time difference between Naples and San Diego because a few times he even woke me up in the middle of the night." She laughed heartily.

I felt a sudden, intense wave of nausea and struggled to process the information I had just been hit with. Ancient Egypt? Unique chemical component? What document? Panic welled up inside me when I realized I was supposed to already know.

Jeff should have told me.

"Of course," I bluffed. "As you said, he is certainly very excited about... the document. But I must admit, I have been so busy lately that I haven't followed the development of the situation as closely as I should have. Perhaps it's best for you to bring me up to speed from the beginning."

Alyssa gave me a strange look.

"Would you like a cup of coffee?" she asked then.

"No, thank you, I'm fine." It was another lie. I felt dizzy and nauseous. I looked again at the mummified humans and animals surrounding me and wished for a moment of fresh air.

"Katrina, how well do you know ancient Egypt?"

"Not very well," I said, gazing longingly out the open door of the room.

"Of course not. That's what I was afraid of. History is not your area any more than biology is mine.

"Obviously, I cannot make you an expert on the subject in one conversation, but there are certain concepts that you must grasp. Please feel free to stop me if I am either speaking over your head or insulting your intelligence."

Alyssa motioned toward the mummified crocodile. "One thing you need to understand about the ancient Egyptians is that they were a culture of superstition. Natural phenomena were explained as acts of the gods. The Greeks were similar, and the Romans borrowed heavily from both cultures.

"During the time of the first Caesars, just before the birth of Christ, all three cultures were heavily intermingled. And it was during that time that a powerful change in thinking began to evolve.

"The ancients became increasingly motivated by empirical data, things they observed. They began to build hospitals instead of temples to cure their sick. They conducted autopsies to explain causes of death. They developed sophisticated surgical instruments, some of them similar to instruments still used to this day. They developed scientific methods and drew conclusions based on hard, experimental evidence-"

I snapped to attention. "Sorry, what?"

"In short," she said, "during this era, these three cultures began a shift in thinking, from superstition to true science."

"And this is the era you study?" I asked.

"It is."

"What caused the change? What led these cultures toward science and away from superstition?"

Alyssa smiled. "That is the central question around which my research has been focused for nearly twenty years," she said. "I believe it was the work of one woman."

Alyssa guided me to an elevator. We stepped inside, and she pushed the button for the top floor of the museum. When we stepped out, in sharp contrast to the mummified crocodiles, ordinary objects now surrounded us.

Curio cabinets lining the walls contained a large assortment of metal and ceramic dishes and vases. Centered in the room was a large case containing a single blue vase, clearly a treasure from a lost era. I approached one cabinet that caught my eye. Inside it, several blue-and aqua-colored pieces of glassware sparkled elegantly, the lighting in the room passing through the glass of the curio cabinet and ricocheting playfully back from the glass of the objects.

"They're lovely," I said offhand.

"They are two thousand years old," Alyssa replied. "We are now in the part of the museum dedicated to artifacts retrieved from Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabiae. All of the objects in this room were preserved, untouched, beneath several feet of volcanic lava, ash, and mud following the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE. That eruption, and the stunning preservation of those cities that accompanied it, gave us the most complete picture of the ancient world we have ever been able to observe."

I peered more closely at the fragile glass items. "How did they survive the eruption without being crushed?"

"Because a four-hundred-degree-Celcius pyroclastic flow of hot gas enveloped the area with such intense heat that the water vaporized out of organic objects, and ash fell steadily for hours, reaching a depth of more than ten feet. Objects were essentially carbonized before the ash fell, and then the ash encapsulated everything, forming a seal which remained for seventeen hundred years."

"Whoa," I said, trying to imagine a heat so intense that it could instantly desiccate an entire city.

We passed through a series of spaces and corridors into another small room containing glass exhibition cases. In the center of one was an instrument that resembled an old, battered loom. Long, knotted strands of a charcoal-colored substance hung suspended from it. I read the English version of the description and then leaned forward, gaping in disbelief. The suspended cluster looked more like curing meat hanging in a slaughterhouse than what it actually was.

"That jumbled mess is made of paper?" I asked Alyssa.

"It's papyrus," she said. "This room is dedicated to the Villa dei Papiri-Villa of the Papyri. The villa is named for its large library containing approximately two thousand papyrus scrolls. These scrolls were among the objects buried in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. They were rediscovered during the excavation of Herculaneum that began in the 1700s. They are still legible to this day.

"What you are looking at is the tool developed in 1756 to unroll them, and that 'jumbled mess' is one of the actual scrolls from Herculaneum. It took four years to unwind the very first scroll. We are still in the process of unwinding some of them-an extremely laborious procedure, even with today's technology."

I tore my eyes away from the slaughterhouse meat and scanned the room. On its walls were flattened papyri-torn, faded, and smudged in places but, indeed, legible. I walked over to examine one of them more closely. It was written in Greek.

"This is the focus of my research today," Alyssa said. "As I mentioned on the phone, I am the director of an effort called the Piso Project. The project was named after a man called Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus. He was the owner of the Villa dei Papiri. He was also the father-in-law of Julius Caesar.

"The Piso Project seeks to unravel, translate, and archive a specific subset of the scrolls unearthed from the library. We believe these scrolls may contain information that can disprove a vast range of common dogma regarding ancient Rome, Greece, and Egypt.

"It was during this work several weeks ago that I translated the section of one of the scrolls that compelled me to phone your husband. At first, I was not sure what I had found. To be honest, I'm still not certain.

"I consulted Jeff to ascertain whether or not the phenomenon described in my translation was even possible from a chemistry perspective. Jeff suggested that it probably was but that to identify the isotope with any degree of confidence would be like finding a needle in a haystack. And, as you know, we have been working intensely toward that goal ever since. With Jeff away on-did you say a family emergency?-I was hoping you could take his place in these efforts."

"Of course," I said, with absolutely no idea what I was agreeing to.

"Bulging tumors on his breast" means the existence of swellings on his breast, large, spreading and hard; touching them is like touching a ball of wrappings; the comparison is to a green hemat fruit, which is hard and cool under thy hand, like touching those swellings which are on his breast.

There is no treatment.

-The Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus, 1600 BCE Paper of whatever grade is fabricated on a board moistened with water from the Nile: the muddy liquid serves as the bonding force. First there is spread flat on the board a layer consisting of strips of papyrus running vertically... After that a cross layer completes the construction. Then it is pressed in presses, and the sheets thus formed are dried in the sun and joined one to another.

-Natural History Pliny the Elder (2379 CE)

Chapter Four.

Alyssa Iacovani led me away from the exhibition rooms and into a hallway of private offices. We stepped into one of them, and she closed the door behind us.

Alyssa walked over and sat down in the desk chair while I looked around the cluttered space. Bookshelves lining the walls were double stacked with a collection ranging from various history texts to archeological case studies to basic biology, chemistry, and physics books.

The books were interspersed with a number of small statues and trinkets that I imagined might have come from the museum's gift shop. A large wall calendar resembled a book of papyrus scrolls. Various dates were scrawled with appointments in scarcely legible Italian.

On the desk near a badly scuffed computer lay several disheveled piles of notepads, binders, and manuscripts. Beside them, a small cardboard shipping box lay open, with packing peanuts strewn about it, its precious treasure already pillaged from within.

Also on the desk stood two framed photos. One was a portrait of a dark-skinned middle-aged man with a crooked-toothed but attractive smile and a full head of salt-and-pepper hair. His rounded black eyes shone brightly, but beneath them were heavy bags.

Beside the man's photo was an image of two black-haired youths in their mid-to-late teens. The boy stood casually behind the seated girl, her thick tresses pouring like oil over one shoulder to her slender waist. Both children shared the same dark complexion and rounded black eyes of the man in the photo beside them. I wondered if the teenagers were twins.

I examined the photos on the desk for a moment and then glanced into the golden face and cat-like green eyes of Alyssa Iacovani. Her eyes, too, fell to the photographs for an instant before returning to meet mine.

"Would you like to see the document?" she asked.

Alyssa switched on the desktop computer and sat back in her chair for a moment while the aging machine hummed to life. She clicked with the mouse, and across the room a printer began to whirr.

She stood to snatch up a single page and then handed it to me. "This is the English translation of that section of the scroll I was telling you about. This is what I showed Jeff. The original is much, much longer.

"Each of these texts spans many papyrus scrolls; the ancients were wordy, to say the least. Furthermore, many of the scrolls are horribly fragmented. As researchers, we are tasked with piecing together the full-scale works. This aspect of antiquities research is quite literally the assembly of a large jigsaw puzzle..."

As I read and re-read the document, I barely heard her.

I have in my charge the care of ten, all stricken with the plague of the crabs.

Agariste and I created two extra beds from the feathers of pigeon to accommodate the six men. The gods granted the comfort of more spacious surroundings to the four poor women in the adjacent room, but they wail without stopping nonetheless.

All ten of my charges have failed the scalpel and the fire drill. Their tumors continue to grow. The crabs continue to devour them.

"Excuse me," I said. "Wasn't it Hippocrates who coined the word 'cancer,' meaning something about crabs?"

Alyssa looked impressed. "Yes, it was!" she said. "Cancer, carcinoma, carcinogen... all of these words descend from karkinos, the ancient Greek for 'crab.' Hippocrates' hypothesis of cancer, that it was caused by an excess of 'black bile,' remained fairly unchanged from about 450 BCE all the way until the Renaissance."

"And did the word tumors, as used here, have the same meaning in the ancient world that it has today?"

"Essentially," Alyssa said. "Of course the ancients' descriptions reflect a lack of technology-so any deformity of the skin or other imperfection that resembles a tumor will have been written as such. But true tumors have been documented in ancient papyri for thousands of years. The first known case study is a papyrus scroll from ancient Egypt, known today as the Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus after the man who found it. The scroll dates to 1600 BCE but is believed to be a copy of much older texts. It describes breast cancer-in men, oddly enough. The ancients could even distinguish between malignant and benign, based predominantly on the same gross differences in tumor composition that are still utilized for preliminary assessment today."

"Vascularization, asymmetry, et cetera?" I asked, and Alyssa nodded.

"And recurrence," she added.

I glanced again at the last three sentences of text.

All ten of my charges have failed the scalpel and the fire drill. Their tumors continue to grow. The crabs continue to devour them.

"What is the fire drill?" I asked.

"That was essentially a cauterizer. They basically treated the tumors by burning them off. Each of these patients had endured it, as well as the procedure that today we would call 'surgical resection' or 'de-bulking.' Yet the tumors recurred. These points are strongly indicative of an aggressive malignancy."

"I agree," I said.