The Mithras Conspiracy

by M. J. Polelle

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The Hotel Elysian staff squeaked open the ceiling-to-floor French doors to the terrace overlooking the Bay of Naples. A breeze from over the water refreshed Marco Leone as he admired the purple velvet sky at twilight. The hydrocortisone tablets for Addison’s disease made him a new man. His energy and weight returned. And so did his appetite. The decision to attend the banquet was the right one. Aside from the sumptuous cuisine he looked forward to, he would do both himself and his good friend on the Naples police force a favor.

  During his recuperative vacation at the friend’s home in Naples, Leone had received a call from Professor Will Fisher. Unable at the last minute to attend, Fisher wanted Leone to replace him at a fund-raiser banquet for the Villa of the Papyri sponsored by Lucio Piso, the new superintendent of Herculaneum excavations. Piso had arranged for Dr. Wesley Bemis and Don Perugino to attend as guests of honor and receive awards.

  Leone’s friend urged him to attend. The Naples police needed an unknown face to keep tabs on Don Perugino as part of their undercover program for the continuous shadowing of the most powerful gangster in Calabria. They hoped Leone’s attendance would provide some answers to their questions about the affair.

  Why would the superintendent named international CEO of the year by the Worldwide Business Review suck up to the camorra clans by inviting Don Perugino as an honored guest? Even more surprisingly, he wondered why Don Perugino, the head of the most powerful camorra crime family, had accepted. The mobster’s hunger for respect and recognition must have overcome his legendary caution.

  The hundred or so camorra clans led by Perugino had moved beyond prostitution, robbery, bribery, kidnapping, and the corrupt waste disposal business, threatening to make Naples a cesspool of toxins. With speedboats, they now facilitated the bootlegging of drugs, illegal aliens, and tax-free cigarettes beyond the Bay of Naples. A Nigerian criminal mafia called the Black Axe had entered Sicily concealed within the swarms of illegal and desperate immigrants fleeing Africa in rickety boats. They had recently entered Calabria. After a bloody showdown caused by their invasion of camorra turf, the two criminal organizations made their peace. The Black Axe paid a tax on their illegal activities to the camorra and handled prostitution, still considered shameful by some old-timer camorristi.

  For opium and cash, the camorristi even smuggled Islamic jihadists from offshore ships to the slums of Naples, where their terrorist cells incubated. From there, the mobsters guided them north beyond Italy through a network of safe houses before injecting them into the arteries of Europe in preparation for terror attacks.

  Aside from helping out a fellow officer in Naples, he had his own reasons to attend, one professional and the other personal, both involving Wesley Bemis, the Mormon American archaeologist from Brigham Young University. The presence of the archaeologist’s skis in Fisher’s office when he visited the Pontifical Gregorian University showed that Bemis had access to the office and, therefore, could have stolen the Festus parchment.

  He would have to keep his personal issue with the American separate from the professional interests as best he could. The Mormon had converted dead Jews in Switzerland. According to Shlomo, Rabbi Elia Sforno wanted him to do something about it. In other circumstances, he might have done exactly nothing for his least-favorite rabbi. He had enough problems in this world without hypothetical ones in the next. But Uncle Benjamin was one of the dead Jews. And that indignity made all the difference.

  ***

  Interrupting his thoughts, guests breaking for dinner entered the ballroom at the conclusion of the cocktail hour in the reception hall. The hotel manager approached with two men and rubbed his hands together. “Would you be so good, Commissario Leone, as to take a seat at another table?”

  “Why?”

  “May I present Don Perugino?” The manager bowed toward the don. “He has brought an unexpected companion to dine with him.”

  “How does that concern me?”

  A pencil-mustached man with a beach-ball stomach, the don scowled at the commissario. His beefy companion, no doubt the bodyguard, assessed the room and nearby tables with deep-set eyes.

  “I’m afraid there’s a misunderstanding. We need places at this reserved table for our honorees and their companions and . . .” The hotel manager cleared his throat. “And Professor Fisher is absent. So, I would appreciate your most gracious understanding in letting Don Perugino’s companion take your place.”

  “Professor Fisher asked me to take his place at this table, so I’m now the companion of Dr. Wesley Bemis, an honoree.” Leone pointed at the bodyguard. “I’ll bet this man’s name wasn’t even on the guest list.”

  The bodyguard stepped toward Leone. The don touched the man’s wrist. The bodyguard stepped back.

  “Please be so kind as to sit at another table.” The manger held out his hands in supplication. “You would do me a great service.”

  “This place card has my name on it.” The commissario held it up. “I’m staying.”

  Damned if I’ll move for the likes of this hoodlum and his goon.

  Frozen in a deadlock of eyeball intimidation with the don, Leone waited while the hotel manager stepped up to the dais and interrupted Piso’s conversation with the mayor. The superintendent of Herculaneum excavations left the dais and came to the table. With a smile and arm around the don, Piso invited the leading racketeer of Naples and his bodyguard to join him and the mayor on the more prestigious dais looking down on the tables.

  Piso reminded the don to first have his picture taken on the terrace. If he would but hurry over to the balcony, Piso assured the don the city dignitaries would soon join him for a group picture. The don’s stone expression looked like it might crumble in gratitude. His face quickly recovered its death-mask appearance. Before leaving for the terrace with his companion, the don whispered into the commissario’s ear, “Up yours, flatfoot.”

  “Why,” Leone asked Piso, “does a man like you stoop to honor that slimeball?”

  “Are you always so brash, Commissario?”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “Not every question deserves an answer.” Piso sighed. “What a pity. So much energy misdirected.” Piso waved to a guest across the room. “I must leave . . . but I feel we shall meet again.”

  ***

  While Leone went round and round with theories of why Lucio Piso acted so warmly toward Don Perugino, a slender man with bright eyes sat next to him and introduced himself as Dr. Wesley Bemis.

  “I am Commissario Marco Leone from Rome,” he said in English. “Professor Fisher asked me to take his place.” He hoped his English, boned up at night school, would put the archaeologist at ease. “For long, Dr. Fisher, I desired to discuss an affair with you.”

  “Vall me Ves.” Bemis shook hands with Leone. “Vill ed yewd vantid to awk vid me.”

  “More clearly, please.” Leone touched his ear. Was this some unfathomable American dialect?

  To his astonishment, the American pulled out a wad of bubble gum from his mouth and folded it discreetly into a napkin.

  “Sorry, but the gum helps me avoid stimulants, like coffee and alcohol.”

  “I do not understand, Dr. Fisher.”

  “Call me Wes.” He shook hands again as though the prior handshake wasn’t valid. “I’m a Latter-day Saint . . . Mormon for short . . . and it’s against my religion to imbibe.”

  “Not to beat the bush.” Americans liked getting right to the point. “Someone stole an ancient parchment from Professor Fisher’s office. What do you know about it?”

  “Oh, you mean beat around the bush.”

  “Only answer my question, please.”

  Leone fumed over the garbled idiom his night school instructor had given him.

  “I know nothing about the theft.” The Mormon looked perplexed. “I never knew about the parchment unt
il it was stolen. Will promised to tell no one what he was working on. And he kept that promise.”

  “I have no reason now to believe he didn’t.”

  “May we speak Italian? I used to be a Mormon missionary in Italy.”

  “As you wish.”

  Bemis pushed away the shrimp appetizer. “Cooked in wine.”

  “No coffee? No wine?” The Mormon’s religious rigor reminded Leone of the Talmudic dietary injunctions dulling whatever religious appetite he once had. “I fear you have come to a most unsuitable country. Now, back to the parchment,” Leone said. “Between the time Professor Fisher last saw it and the time he discovered it missing, you were in Rome. Weren’t you?”

  “No, I was not.”

  “But I know you were not excavating at Herculaneum.”

  By suddenly switching topics, he hoped to put Bemis on the defensive and crack open the truth about the parchment when he doubled back.

  “By the way, you must stop converting dead Jews to Mormonism in Switzerland. Even the Church of Latter-day Saints has agreed not to—”

  “The interfaith settlement only prohibits conversions in Italy. Not in Switzerland.”

  “Look here. You baptized and converted my dead uncle, someone born a Jew and died a Jew, a hero in the Resistance, one who knew nothing of Mormonism. You violated his memory and stand to create legal trouble for yourself. If you don’t stop these baptisms, I intend to call a fellow detective in Switzerland . . .” Leone sounded absurd to himself. Theological mind games would not bring back Uncle Benjamin.

  “I plan no more baptisms and conversions in Switzerland.” Bemis held up a hand of appeasement. “Golly . . . I’m sorry for any offense.”

  “I accept your apology, but what about the Festus parchment?” Leone leaned closer to Bemis. “You had a key to Professor Fisher’s office. You even kept your skis in his office.”

  “Correct.”

  “Now we are getting somewhere.” Leone waved away a waiter. “If you tell me everything, it will go better for you.”

  “I’ve nothing to hide.” Bemis cleared his throat. “At the time of the theft I was in Switzerland baptizing dead converts. Troublemakers told all sorts of lies to the police about our activities. To calm things down, I agreed to let Detective Mattias Boller check up on me. He said you two were good friends. I’m certain he’ll support my alibi. Any more questions, Commissario?”

  “Nothing more.” He had come up empty-handed. All he could do was leave a hook dangling in the water without any bait. “But if you think of anything, let me know.”

  A staccato burst of gunfire rang out. Screaming guests stumbled into the grand ballroom from the terrace. Leone raced toward the terrace along the wall to avoid any bullets in case the firing resumed. Two attackers carried AK-47s and wore beaked masks of black in the shape of ravens’ heads. They had hooded the don and were dragging him off the balcony onto the platform of a hydraulic lift the commissario had seen earlier at a nearby construction site. As the platform descended, Leone sprinted to the balustrades, almost stepping on the don’s bodyguard sprawled out on the terrace in a pool of blood. He looked over the balustrades and ducked when a gunshot sprayed wall plaster around him. The sound of a racing motor came from below. A black van roared out from underneath the terrace to the shoreline down the road. The kidnappers hustled the don out of the van and into a docked speedboat.

  The boat churned up a trail of milky spume on its way into the Bay of Naples.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  In the foothills of Mount Vesuvius, Marco Leone shrank from the supine body of a naked and dead Don Perugino sprawled beside an abandoned well from which the police had extracted him. Angry puffs of ruptured red flesh pockmarked the remains of the most feared gangster in the Campania region. In place of the eyes, only bloodied sockets remained. Raven scouts circled in a cloudless sky bleached faded blue by the noonday sun. The main flock, larger than any he had ever seen, retreated to the roof of an elongated farmhouse and the branches of nearby oak trees. They waited to return to their feast once the meddling humans left.

  Mondocane barked and tugged at his leash, straining to get at the birds until Leone hushed him. He ordered the dog to sit. Mondocane cocked his head as if to say he didn’t understand.

  “Animali . . . those bastards who did this,” the local police inspector repeated to himself, kneeling over the corpse. He raised and kissed a lifeless hand.

  The obsequiousness of the gesture repelled Leone. The inspector either had a questionable relationship with the deceased or at least wanted the bystanders behind police lines to believe he did. The ambiguousness of southerners in their relationship with the underworld eluded his comprehension.

  After rising unsteadily to his feet, the Neapolitan inspector issued his pronouncement to the commissario: “Camorristi committed this atrocity.”

  A barely tolerated interloper from Rome, Leone had scant chance of challenging that rush to judgment. But his doubts remained. No camorra thug would dare make a move against Don Perugino. It was joked that if an underling even farted, Perugino knew about it. Everyone assumed the deceased’s cutthroat brothers would have made short work of any would-be assassin. True, the clans clashed in periods of underworld anarchy. But they now enjoyed unprecedented peace with a remarkable increase of illegal profits. They had no reason to risk police intervention in their affairs through the commission of this theatrical abomination.

  Kidnapping the chieftain of the most powerful clan and penning him up nude without food or water, to be pecked dead in a dried-up well swarming with starving ravens was a sure invitation to public outrage and clan revenge. Even the lowest Neanderthal in the camorra understood the distinction between a murder of criminal necessity and what he now saw before him—an act of sociopathic savagery amounting to a death warrant for the perpetrators.

  No, he would not press his doubts on the Neapolitan inspector working the case. The understaffed police force of the region would not take kindly to a stranger depriving them of another opportunity to blame yet another unsolved murder on the camorra. It might even cause trouble for his friend on the Naples force to know such an unbeliever. Better not to cast doubt on their faith in the all-pervasive influence of the camorra. Such faith absolved the police of the duty to look beyond the obvious, confirmed the public cynicism that organized crime got away with murder, and pleased the dons by making them appear omnipotent and omnipresent when they were neither.

  The banshee wail of a woman shoving her way through the crowd to the corpse unnerved the commissario. Leone pulled Mondocane back on the leash so the woman could pass. She struggled with a police officer and broke free, accidentally ripping her black dress across the waist. She flung herself on the dead body and kissed it between her sobs and petitions to heaven. No matter how vile Don Perugino, Leone realized love was bestowed, not earned. If he were to die that day, no one would mourn him like this woman mourned the dead mobster. Perugino had died a lucky man. At least one person truly mourned the don. Mondocane whined and worked his moist muzzle into the commissario’s hand.

  Ravens circled in the sky.

  What did they signify?

  Chapter Thirty

  “How much farther?” Nicole Garvey asked.

  “Not much.” Will Fisher stopped to adjust his LED-lit helmet. “Watch out. The ceiling’s lower here.”

  She followed through the twists and turns of a shaft leading down to unexplored levels of the Villa of the Papyri. A chill ran through her. Was it due to the temperature drop? Or her vision of the Mount Vesuvius eruption in AD 79?

  The avalanche of molten rock, mud, and ash—what professionals called the pyroclastic flow—skinned alive the inhabitants of Herculaneum with gases over four hundred degrees Celsuis, almost a thousand degrees Fahrenheit, and buried the remains over thirty meters underground.

  They entered a small rectangular room, poss
ibly an ancient bedroom. Their flashlights skittered across the walls, revealing fruits, fish, and geometric designs. The workmen had left a wheelbarrow filled with hardened mud and rocks. The flooring consisted of an interlocking pattern of apple-green and white floor tiles in the shapes of pentagrams, many broken or crumbled into powder.

  “This is the first room we uncovered.”

  “Find anything?”

  “Nothing.”

  He thought a treasure trove of the ancient world waited down here. She couldn’t share his optimism. The occupants had probably removed all valuables before disaster struck.

  “Wes’ll meet us here any minute.” He looked at the floor. “It’s time I come clean.”

  With rapt attention, she listened as he told her the story of the Festus parchment entrusted to him by Commissario Marco Leone and his involvement as a consultant in the homicide of Father Abramo Basso. He explained how Porcius Festus had agreed to arrange a meeting between Saint Paul and Seneca, the famous Roman, in the Villa of the Papyri.

  Why hadn’t he told her earlier about the Festus parchment? She didn’t like secrets. Her stepmother had so many nasty ones. But he confided in her now, and that was the important thing.

  “Commissario Leone blames me for the parchment theft.” He rubbed his hands over his face. “It was my responsibility.”

  “Not so.” She wanted to reassure him with a touch. “The police were in charge.”

  The low warble of a whistle floated up the shaft.

  “It’s Wes.” Fisher blew his own whistle in reply. “He’s coming.”

  ***

  From the shaft, Wesley Bemis popped into the room and brushed off his clothes.

  “Great news, pardner,” he said, eyes fixed on Fisher. “I discovered a library today. I think we struck gold . . . the Latin library of lost Roman literature.”

  “Congratulations.” Fisher pumped his colleague’s hand. “Excuse me. This is Nicole Garvey. I hired her to help you with the archaeology.”