The Mithras Conspiracy

by M. J. Polelle

  “Lucio Piso told you, didn’t he? He doesn’t have his facts right.”

  Leone had had enough. “What does his service in Vietnam have to do with Otto Fischer?”

  “If you persist, Commissario Leone, you’ll have to leave . . . and miss the part of the interrogation you wouldn’t want to miss.” The special deputy turned back to Soames. “Otto Fischer, now in our custody, also denies Piso knew about his Nazi past.”

  “They both lie.”

  “Beware.” The special deputy became agitated. “Superintendent Piso is a respected citizen, a recipient of a knight’s title, and a confidant of the prime minister himself.”

  “Maybe I should get a lawyer.”

  “You’re only a witness, not a suspect. You’re not entitled to one.” The special deputy seemed hesitant. “Anyway, things will go better for you without one.”

  “When is this over? I must meet my church members at the Colosseum.”

  “Very soon.” The special deputy gave Leone an oddly sympathetic look. “The Nazis captured your grandfather in Rome,” he told Soames. “A woman called La Sirena betrayed him, and he in turn betrayed the underground Resistance.”

  “How dare you smear his name.” Soames rose. “The Nazis tortured him.” Cadets moved forward out of the shadows. He quieted down without need for restraint.

  Taking the special deputy aside, Leone warned he could not let him harass the witness with irrelevancies. Unless the harassment stopped, he would leave.

  The special deputy advised Leone that if he left, he would regret missing important information.

  The special deputy resumed questioning.

  “In fact, didn’t your grandfather reveal the identity of Benjamin Leone, a partisan fighter, later killed in the Ardeatine Caves?”

  “That was my uncle.” Leone stood up.

  “Easy, Commissario.” The special deputy put his hand on Leone’s shoulder and coaxed him back into his seat. “Just one more question. Who shot Benjamin Leone in the Ardeatine Caves?”

  “Fischer admitted he did. That’s why I reported him to the carabinieri.” Soames rubbed his hands as though washing them. “I knew Piso wouldn’t.” He turned to Leone. “Please forgive my grandfather.”

  “Will forgiveness bring back my uncle? Forgiveness changes nothing.”

  ***

  The day after the interrogation, what seemed to be a workaday homicide report crossing Leone’s desk riveted his attention.

  A bystander summoned a police patrol to the Colosseum, where they found the dead body of one Jesse Soames. At the Colosseum, he had met tourists from his Baptist congregation to show them around Rome. The suspect, who wore a “What Would Jesus Do” T-shirt and claimed to be a Baptist convert, asked Soames to pose for a picture with a co-suspect costumed as a street performer playing the role of Roman soldier. Witnesses described the so-called Roman soldier as wearing the usual gear of breastplate, red tunic, plumed helmet, and what appeared to be a cardboard sword. The sword was in fact one of sharp steel. While the suspect with the T-shirt photographed the pose, the other suspect fatally stabbed Soames. A black getaway vehicle with false license plates appeared on the scene. A police officer on his day off mortally wounded the man with the T-shirt as the suspect tried to escape into the vehicle. The suspect with the T-shirt was later identified as a low-level pimp known to hire himself out for sundry forms of criminal activity. The co-suspect street performer escaped in the vehicle.

  Putting down the report, Leone realized Professor Fisher’s Mithraism interpretation could no longer be dismissed as improbable. The links in the chain of events were too many. Raven, Lion, Bridegroom, Persian, and now . . . the Soldier. It fit the few cloak-and-dagger tidbits Shlomo had fed him before falling off the radar screen.

  Which rank of Mithraic killer would strike next, and who would die?

  Where was Shlomo?

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Leone found his informant outside the Domus Aurea—Nero’s Golden House.

  On a folding step stool near the imperial mansion, Shlomo, in Giorgio Armani sunglasses with a tall-stemmed plastic sunflower in hand, lectured a tourist crowd. Over the entrance, he said, once loomed a hundred-foot statue of Nero. After Nero’s death, the Romans refashioned this Colossus Neronis into the image of the unconquered sun god—Sol Invictus. Twenty-four elephants moved the statue to Rome’s amphitheater, named the Colosseum after the giant bronze sculpture.

  “Where’s the statue?” asked a matron in pixie-gelled hair.

  She clenched the hand of a boy in black horn-rims.

  “Vanished.” Shlomo sipped from his thermos. “No one knows how or when.”

  She clapped a hand over the boy’s mouth as he struggled to speak.

  Leone aspired to Shlomo’s command of English. Amazing what a subsidized year in London could do if one had an indulgent mother. Enough history. Time for answers.

  He elbowed up to Shlomo. “Let’s talk.”

  They moved to a private spot under a shade tree.

  “What kind of new scam is this, Shlomo?”

  “No scam.” Eyes darting to the sides, Shlomo licked his lips. “I needed a plausible cover job, and they needed tour guides for the reopened Domus.”

  “You’re supposed to work for us. What do you have?”

  “Not here.” Shlomo licked his lips twice. “They might see us together.”

  “When do we talk?”

  “Inside. Safer there.”

  “Why did you cut off contact?”

  “Things are moving fast. I have to be careful.”

  “Take it easy.”

  Shlomo’s edginess meant he knew something.

  Behind Shlomo’s sunflower held on high, the tour group shuffled down the decline of an underground corridor to a honeycomb of interior walls fanning out before them. Outside the octagonal room, Shlomo mounted the folding step stool.

  “Two major events occurred in sixty-four AD.” Shlomo waved his sunflower for attention. “First, Nero’s Great Fire. I’m sure you heard about it. But I doubt many of you know about the second. A failed conspiracy to assassinate Nero.”

  The hand over mouth came a second too late. “Whatabouttheorgies?”

  “Adult tour only,” Shlomo said, winking.

  He pumped his plastic sunflower to quiet the crowd.

  “As I was saying . . . the conspirators wanted to replace Nero with Gaius Calpurnius Piso, whose family owned the Villa of the Papyri. Nero discovered the plot afoot. He suspected Seneca, his former tutor and adviser, a philosopher, a statesman, and a dramatist, all rolled up into one. To no avail, Seneca retired from public life to avoid the emperor’s wrath. Nero executed Seneca, Piso, and many others on his march into madness.”

  Working his way through the crowd, Leone kept his voice low but insistent.

  “Step down so we can talk.”

  “We’re taking a short break, ladies and gentlemen.” Shlomo waved the plastic sunflower. “Go inside the octagonal room with its wonderful cupola open to the sky. What did Nero use it for? A dining room? An art gallery? After the break, I’ll continue my commentary.”

  Making sure no one tailed them into the off-limits hallway, Shlomo waved Leone into the room of the Gilded Vault. “We can talk in here.”

  “What have you found out?” Leone asked.

  “They call themselves Roma Rinata. Something big is cooking.”

  “What? I need to know.”

  “I don’t know. I suspect an assassination.”

  “Of course.” Leone clapped his hands. “The prime minister. They can pin the blame on the Egyptian Phoenix.” He needed specifics. “When and where?”

  “I don’t know. Until my initiation, I’m in the dark.”

  “They’re initiating you?”

  “Rocco hinted it would be soon.”

/>   “Good.” Leone studied the stuccoed rectangles of the barrel-vaulted ceiling. “Where’s Rocco?”

  “I don’t know.” Shlomo touched the commissario’s arm. “Leave him alone. If you contact him, they’ll know I’m a snitch.”

  “I want more information.”

  “Did you know,” Shlomo said, pointing to the ceiling, “Raphael and Michelangelo shimmied down the shafts into the half-buried rooms of the Domus Aurea to study Roman frescoes?”

  “Quit stalling.”

  “I gotta get back. Break’s over.”

  “When do I get details?” He shook Shlomo’s arms. “Terrorism isn’t good for the tourist business.”

  Shlomo slumped, dropping the plastic sunflower.

  “For God’s sake, stand up straight like a man. Are you on drugs?”

  Shlomo broke away and bumped against a wall. “I want out.”

  “Out?” Leone cursed. “Remember our deal?”

  “I’m the one dealing with madmen.” He picked up the sunflower. “They think they can resurrect the Roman Empire.”

  “You owe me.”

  “I sure don’t owe you my life. I know what they do to traitors.”

  “You can’t stop. Lives are at stake.”

  “You can’t bully people to do whatever you want.” Shlomo stepped up to the commissario. “No one owes anybody anything.” He threw the plastic sunflower. Leone ducked. The sunflower skidded across the floor. “I’ll quit if I want.”

  “If you drop out, they’ll know you’re a snitch. You’ll be a goner for sure.”

  “No, no, I don’t believe it.” Shlomo wrapped his arms around himself. “They won’t if I get out now. But once I get initiated . . .” Shlomo drew his index finger across his throat. “I gotta get out now.”

  “I do have an ace to play.” Leone tapped Shlomo’s chest. “If you don’t stay in, at least a little longer, it could just be . . . you know how bureaucracies are . . . leaking like a spaghetti sieve and all . . . and word may get out you were an informer and then . . .” Leone paused. “Fill in the blanks.”

  “You bastard. You’re bluffing.”

  “Try me and find out.”

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  In his private study adorned with African masks, Pope Celestine VI hung up the phone on the dire news. The ripple of earthquake tremors plaguing Rome had taken their toll. A consulting architect specializing in structural engineering warned that unless His Holiness shored up its foundation, St. Peter’s Basilica verged on catastrophic collapse.

  The basilica resembled a set of top-heavy building blocks, the present sixteenth-century structure built over Emperor Constantine’s fourth-century basilica, which rested on a Roman cemetery. The repair cost would be enormous. But if he did nothing, the cupola of the basilica threatened to give way. He shuddered, imagining the dome, forty-five stories high, raining chunks of death on worshippers below. He rocked his aching head from side to side with both hands.

  What to do?

  Every problem awakened his urge to resign like his namesake predecessor. The similarities disturbed him. In the thirteenth century, Celestine V had chastised his fellow cardinals for their procrastination in electing a pope, just as he had. As a result, the Sacred College of Cardinals elected him to the position, just as they had his namesake predecessor. God’s little joke on him for his sanctimoniousness. Like Celestine V in the Middle Ages, he yearned to shed the weight of the papacy for a life of simplicity.

  He could follow the more recent example of Benedict XVI by retiring and perhaps establishing a tradition for a papal age limit. But what about the expectations of his African brothers and sisters for the first undisputed African black on the throne of Saint Peter? How could he let them down? But the true letdown would be collapsing under the strain.

  What to do?

  His eighty-third birthday a week ago made him long for a return to the life of a priest ministering to the poor and sick in the Nigerian bush of his birth. The ten rooms of the papal apartments enclosed in the Apostolic Palace with far more rooms overwhelmed him. He had lived his early years in a single-room hut where his mother and an occasional medicine man tended his polio. He survived with a permanent limp in his left leg. Had the priest-doctor not appeared at the hut and called him forth like Lazarus into the world of Western medicine and Christianity, who knows what he would have become?

  He knew what he had not become. He was no skilled administrator, no learned theologian, no charismatic leader. As his Jesuit confessor intuited from the beginning, he had a need to be needed . . . and the truth was the Vatican Roman Curia neither needed nor wanted him. He could no longer tool around in the sidecar of a motorcycle driven by his private secretary, as he had done in the hinterland of Africa. Such behavior offended powerful acolytes devoted to Vatican conformity.

  The ring of the telephone shook him out of his despondency.

  His Nigerian private secretary.

  “Yes?” the pope answered, pleased to speak English.

  “Are you ready to meet the architect?”

  “I forgot.” The pope clamped his palm to his forehead. “I need to finish overdue paperwork. Please postpone the meeting for an hour with my apologies.”

  “Cardinal Furbone . . . you know, the pope in waiting . . . is fuming, as usual. As administrator of St. Peter’s Basilica, he insists on attending.”

  “Sounds like trouble.”

  “I told you not to appoint him administrator. You’re in soup all right.”

  He chuckled at his secretary’s Nigerian idiom.

  “Very well. Invite Cardinal Furbone . . . and please . . . be nice to him.”

  “Why did you appoint him?”

  “Whatever his flaws, he is my best administrator.”

  “Be careful. I’d shine my eyes on that cardinal if I were you.”

  He found his spectacles behind the graduation photograph taken at a Nigerian seminary. What a merry troupe of priestly pranksters they were, full of high jinks and hopes. Hiding his spectacles as a joke was something they would have done.

  Turning serious, he realized he had to stop his memory lapses. He must not go dotty like his papal namesake who doled out Church sinecures in the Middle Ages to whoever asked, sometimes awarding the same position to different persons. The anonymous gossips in the Vatican, the “crows” as insiders called them, had already spread the rumor that childhood polio had jumbled the Holy Father’s mind.

  He studied the petition signed by prominent members of a traditionalist society representing North American Catholics. It warned of his misguided outreach to the Muslims of Africa. That outreach would only accelerate the mixture of Christianity and Islam some scholars called a new religion of Chrislam. The petition condemned the contamination of the true faith with the heresy of syncretism. They said he had to draw a theological line in the sand. But they overlooked a problem. Lines didn’t last long in the African sand. He had just finished a draft of his response when his personal secretary telephoned.

  “Cardinal Furbone and the architect await you in the library.”

  “My leg’s acting up. Please bring them to my study.”

  “Remember the proverb, Your Holiness. Leopards lurk in dark corners.”

  His sly secretary meant the leopards rampant on the Furbone coat of arms.

  ***

  “I would prefer Cardinal Furbone stay.” At the pope’s words, displeasure spread across the architect’s face. The anticleric took it amiss that the cardinal had appeared without his prior knowledge.

  Despite the bad blood between them, the pope wanted to please both men. He needed the expertise of the architect renowned for his innovative work with reinforced concrete and floating foundations. But he also needed the cardinal to run St. Peter’s Basilica and interpret this alien country called the Vatican.

  The cardinal h
ad become his right-hand man and would like to take over the left hand as well. The ferocity of the cardinal’s career ambitions could be turned to his advantage. Given the prelate’s hunger for the triple-crowned papal tiara, Furbone would be delighted to facilitate his resignation from the throne of Saint Peter, should he so choose.

  “My staff had the good fortune of finding this in the Vatican archives.” The architect held up a photograph of an architectural draft of St. Peter’s Basilica in red chalk.

  “The peculiarity of the handwriting looks familiar.” The pope rose from his desk chair for a closer look. He ignored the cardinal’s warning about walking alone without help. The pope wiped from his mind the uncharitable image of a vulture impatient for its victim’s demise. “Who drafted this?”

  “Michelangelo.” The architect held up the photograph. “The master perfected earlier drafts. My proposal for repair keeps intact Michelangelo’s vision.”

  The architect explained that Emperor Constantine wanted to construct the original basilica on the side of Vatican Hill, slanting down toward a Roman cemetery. The emperor needed more than twenty-eight thousand cubic meters of soil to level off the foundation. To do so, he decapitated the top of the hill for landfill. Heedless of reverence for the dead, Constantine knocked off mausoleum roofs below and filled them with dirt.

  “Who are you to judge the first Christian emperor?” The cardinal glared at the architect. “The Orthodox Church declares him a saint.”

  “That’s a miracle in itself for a man who not only executed his wife and son but also declared himself a companion of the pagan god Sol Invictus.”

  “Please.” Celestine VI raised his hands in supplication for the bickering to cease. “Architect Moretti, be so good as to finish your report.”

  “The name is Manetti, Your Holiness.”

  “My apologies.” His memory had failed him again. The cardinal said nothing, but before the day was over, the shadow whisperers in Vatican corners would say His Holiness was losing it. And maybe they were right in a way. He was losing patience by pretending to be something he wasn’t. In defiance of what Furbone thought proper protocol, he removed his white skullcap. The cardinal winced. The thing never fit right, floating on his thick thatch of salt-and-pepper corkscrew hair. “Please continue . . . Architect Manetti.”