by Gregg Loomis
They made the ferry from Cagliari to Naples with only minutes to spare. During the drive, she pointedly changed the subject whenever he mentioned any future beyond the next few days.
JOURNAL OF SEVERENUS TACTUS
I know not how many days I remained in the tiny painted room, my only companions my fears and such spirits as might visit. On two occasions, cowled priests entered my cell to inquire as to my father, the more easily to summon his shade. ^1
From the darkness, I knew it was early morning when two young boys brought me forth from the painted room to sacrifice a ewe. By the light of a torch, a priest examined the liver of the animal and pronounced the signs to be favorable. I was removed to another room, this one much larger, where I was bathed in herb-scented water ^2 and given peculiar-tasting drinks I did not recognize.
Once so purified, I was clad in a white toga and my hair bound with white ribbon. I was girded with a belt with a bronze sword and given a golden branch of mistletoe to carry in my hand. ^3 To my surprise, the ancient crone, the Sibyl herself, appeared, Tobed in scarlet, to guide me on my journey.
Behind us came the priests, dressed in black with pointed headdresses and only slits through which to see. They drove the livestock I had purchased to he sacrificed at various stages.
We had gone but a short way along a dark and descending pathway when we reached the Dividing of the Ways. To the left went a return to the world, should I choose it. To the right, the final descent into Hades. I had come this far to consult the spirit of my father, and chose to continue into dark and the increasing heat and stench of sulfur. ^4
We took a turn, and, to my amazement, the sheep and cattle that had been following us were now awaiting our arrival! We paused for another sacrifice and another study of the liver before proceeding down a sharp incline. As we progressed, the odor of sulfur grew stronger, along with other noxious smells. At least twice we passed a sparse type of bush that immediately burst into flame but did not burn. ^5
The deeper we went, the hazier my vision became and the more uncertain my step. At last we reached a point where the black-hooded priests stood aside, framing the place where the River Styx impeded further progress. Between them I could see Charon standing in his small coracle. ^6 Though I could not see the dog, I could hear the howling of Cerberus.
The boatman wore only a ragged cape that looked as though it had never been cleansed, a supposition consistent with his filthy, matted white beard. Without a word being spoken, the Sibyl climbed into the fragile craft and I followed, leaving the priest on the shore.
Thus was I truly committed.
NOTES.
1. More likely to produce a credible likeness. By skillfully interrogating the pilgrim, the priests would learn something not only of the deceased’s appearance, but his personality.
2. See note 8, previous chapter.
3. Mistletoe had spiritual connotations throughout the ancient world. Since it bore berries in winter, when other plants were awaiting spring, it symbolized life amid death.
4. The origins of the Christian concept of hell as fire and brimstone?
5. Dictamuus albus, also known as dictamus fraxinella, native to Asia Minor and parts of southern Europe. The plant exudes a flammable vapor that is subject to spontaneous combustion of the gas without its own leaves being consumed. Likely this is the burning bush from which God spoke to Moses. Other flashing or sparking plants include henbane, white hellebore, and belladonna, all of which had their uses in oracular mysticism. It is odd that no one seems to have undertaken a study of self-combustible plants in modern times.
6. A craft used in nontidal waters made of skins stretched around a basketlike frame.
PART V
Chapter Thirty
Via Delia Dataria
Rome
Inspectore Santi Guiellmo, capo, le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Democratica, chief of Italy’s security force, removed his glasses and glanced down from his third-story corner office at the Piazza del Quirinale and its obelisk and fountain flanked by equestrian statues of the twins Castor and Pollux. Crossing to the other side, he noted the dress-uniformed carabinieri standing at attention outside the Palazzo del Quiriale, the old papal palace that now housed Italy’s president, the man whose security, along with the rest of the country, Guilellmo was sworn to protect.
The Chief, as he liked to be called, returned his attention to the hand-tooled, gilt-edged leather top of the boulle desk that rumor attributed to Victor Emmanuel I, the first king of a united Italy. Royalist sentiment had become unfashionable after the last Victor Emmanuel’s abrupt departure from Rome in 1944 in the face of determined German defenders and the equally resolute Allied advance. The desk had been relegated to oblivion until the
Chief had restored it, if not to its former glory, then at least enhanced status above that of the petty bureaucrat in whose office he had found it.
Guiellmo replaced his rimless glasses and scowled at the papers that blemished the usually immaculate desktop. He picked up the top of the stack as he plopped into a leather swivel chair.
As chief of national security, he had the job of keeping the country… well, secure. Secure from invasion, subversion, or infiltration, though it was hard to imagine by whom. After all, Italy had had sixty-plus governments in the last sixty years. Fascists, Communists, socialists, and everything in between, including a female porn star elected to parliament.
In this country, everyone’s allotted fifteen minutes of fame was their term as president.
Now this.
A week or so ago, the police in Taormina had found a man, apparently not Italian, shot to death in a rental house. Scorched paint hinted at some sort of explosion. A Chinese version of the Russian AK-47 automatic rifle had been nearby. Not the usual baggage for a tourist, a visitor to Sicily with no driver’s permit, no passport, no identification whatsoever. Nearby bloodstains suggested at least one other person had been wounded.
At the time, Guiellmo had paid scant attention. This was, after all, Sicily, home of the Mafia, which tended to settle quarrels on a permanent basis.
But the dead man in Taormina wasn’t Mafia. At least, not in the traditional sense. The cut of the clothes, the facial structure made it almost certain the man was from Eastern Europe. The poor quality of dental work-iron fillings, one steel false tooth-made Russia likely. The ideology of Marx and Lenin had produced dentists more qualified to repair Oz’s Tin Man than teeth.
Okay, so there was the possibility the Cosa Nostra boys had had a falling-out with one or more of the organization’s heroin suppliers from the poppy fields of Turkey,
Afghanistan, or Pakistan, trade the Russians crime cartels largely controlled. It was a guess, but a reasonable one.
One less narco trafficker, a slightly better world.
Then, two nights ago, the local polizia in the wilds of Sardinia had come upon a multifatality wreck. Nothing unusual about that in itself, either. After all, every Italian male fancied himself a Formula One driver.
But in Sardinia, all fatalities, all four, had been foreigners. Again, no identification but bullet holes and empty shell casings in abundance, as well as the AK-47s common to third-world militia, terrorists, and anyone else seeking the most inexpensive and easily obtained automatic the international arms market had to offer.
Again, dentistry that few who could find better would choose, dentistry peculiar to the USSR before its collapse.
Coincidence that there would be a double instance of Russians armed with automatic weapons? Mere chance that they had been shot?
Unlikely.
Then there were the reports of some sort of explosions earlier that same evening. Investigation had been cut short the next day when the American Embassy announced apologetically that somehow one or two of its special aircraft drones carrying little more than training fireworks had broken their electronic tethers and crashed in Sardinia somewhere in the neighborhood of the auto accident. Brief as it had been, the probe of the scene
had revealed harmless amounts of pyrotechnics but no trace of aircraft, drone or otherwise.
A fluke?
Why was it every time the Americans apologized for some sort of incursion across Italian boundaries, Guiellmo’s imagination could see Uncle Sam, his index finger just below his eye, tugging the lower lid down ever so slightly, the Italian equivalent of a knowing wink?
One was an isolated incident; the second part of a pattern.
A pattern of what?
The Chief hated mysteries and puzzles, he they involving words, like the English crosswords; numbers, like the current rage for Sudoku; or multiple homicides, like the reports in front of him. Mysteries and puzzles represented a form of disorder. Unlike his countrymen, he found confusion and turmoil to be anathema. He hated the snarled traffic, comic corruption of government at all levels, social disarray. He suspected somewhere in his ancestry lurked a non-Italian.
Perhaps a German.
He straightened the papers back into a perfect stack. He hated disarray. That was why he had never married. Sharing a dwelling with another human being, let alone one with lace underwear, hose, cosmetics, and other unimaginable accessories, was to invite bedlam into his well-ordered life.
As was letting these killings go unsolved.
The answer, of course, was to look at the problem logically.
First, although Italy had sent a small contingent to fight with the coalition in Iraq, there was no national enemy as far as the inspector knew. The killings, then, had to be either based on something else or committed by a non-Italian. For that matter, the shell casings and slugs in Sicily and Sardinia were definitely not all from Czech, Chinese, or Russian versions of the AK-47.
So far, he was unsure what that meant.
He had few leads as to who the warring factions might be.
Little clue, but not no clue.
He looked at the e-mail that had come in from Interpol at his request that morning.
A week or so ago, five, perhaps six men had perished in a fire someplace in the Caribbean. He thumbed the corner of a page. The Turks and Caicos Islands, a British crown colony. In itself, that was insignificant. The interesting fact was the only parts readily identifiable were dental work.
Russian dental work.
The house’s owner, one Jason Peters, holder of an American passport, had been suspected of setting the fire to conceal the deaths. A search of the ashes also turned up a number of firearms, both AK-47s and a couple of other, somewhat more exotic specimens. Even more intriguing was Mr. Peters’s escape from the local jail by stealing a plane under a barrage of gunfire from unknown gunmen who had made their own disappearance before the Royal Police, or whatever they called themselves in that part of the world, could arrest them.
Whatever was going on, there definitely was bad blood between this Peters and an as-yet-unknown group of Russians, a feud the island authorities had done little to squelch.
Guiellmo indulged himself in a snort of contempt. Ineffective police work was offensive to him no matter where.
The plane Peters had stolen turned up in… He turned another page. The Dominican Republic and Interpol concluded he had fled from there to parts unknown, presumably under some other name.
Jason Peters, American.
Guiellmo leaned back in his chair and stared out of the window without actually seeing the Roman skyline framed in fire by a setting sun. The Cold War was over. Why would Americans want to strew the landscape with dead Russians? Yet, it appeared that, in at least one instance, this Jason Peters had done just that.
A guess, admittedly. But then, few things were certain in the Chiefs line of work. The time line fit. He had found someone with an apparent if unknown reason to do violence to Russians. Now all he had to do was find Mr. Peters. And if the Chief were a betting man-which he most certainly was not-he would have bet a lot that Peters would be found in Italy, where the Russian fatality rate had taken a large jump.
Exactly where he might be was unknown, but, happily, there were leads.
The house in Sicily was owned by the Italian government, some obscure bureau that dealt with the study of volcanoes. The chief moved a couple of sheets of paper. The Bureau of Geological Studies, that was it. At the time of the incident, one of its employees, a Dr. Maria Bergenghetti, had been in residence, studying Aetna. The morning the local authorities found the shooting scene, she had called in to announce she was taking a few of the sixty or so vacation days enjoyed by government employees.
An explanation for the glacial speed at which the government accomplished anything.
Dr. Bergenghetti, though, had taken no leave for two years. This must be special.
He thumbed sheets of paper until he came to a photograph. Black-and-white, slightly fuzzy from being faxed. Still, the doctor was an extremely attractive woman-attractive enough, he hoped, to be remembered by the countless law enforcement officials to whom it had been distributed, along with the notation to notify him immediately if she were seen. Report, not detain.
Nor had there been an explanation as to the source of the Chiefs interest. He had learned the painful lesson that sharing information about an investigation was the same as calling a press conference. The story wound up in the papers either way.
Inspectore Guiellmo was curious as to the company she might be keeping.
Chapter Thirty-one
Piazza San Carlo
Turin, Italy
Late afternoon
The cobblestoned square had become world-famous from television coverage of the 2006 Winter Olympics. The only differences were that the red tile roofs were not snow covered and the crowds were nonexistent. As Jason and Maria sipped espresso in front of a trattoria, he studied the white limestone baroque churches of San Carlo and Santa Christina at the southern end of the piazza, his fingers drumming a nervous tattoo on the table. Somewhere nearby was the small cafe where, supposedly, vermouth had been invented, a mecca for martini drinkers worldwide. In the distance, purple shadows were blurring the jagged edges of the Alps.
This time there had been no unusual requests for rooms at the small hotel just off the arcaded Via Roma, the main street of the historic district. They had left a message for Adrian before Maria had called Eno Calligini, whose arrival they now awaited.
Maria glanced around the piazza as she took a Marlboro from her purse without exposing the pack. She ignored Jason’s grimace of disapproval as she lit up and exhaled a jet of blue smoke. “Did you watch the Olympics here?”
Jason shook his head. He had not owned a television since he left Washington. “Missed it.” He swiveled his head, scanning their surroundings. “This professor friend of yours usually on time?”
Punctuality was not an Italian virtue.
She leaned back in her chair, squinting through the smoke drifting into her face. “My, are not you the chatterbox?”
His attempt at a smile was a failure at best. “Don’t like sitting out here where we can be seen by people we can’t see. Makes me nervous.”
Maria took a long drag as she looked around the square. “You are paranoid.”
“I’m still alive.”
They sat in the silence of an uneasy truce until Jason leaned forward to pull the magazine containing the summary of Dr. Calligini’s book from his pocket. He had read all but the last two chapters on the train they had taken after the boat back to the mainland. Flying would have been quicker but would have involved security likely to turn up his weapon. The SIG Sauer would have been hard to explain.
“I appreciate Adrian giving this to us.” He held it out. “Want to read it?”
She stubbed her cigarette out in a small glass ashtray. “Read the book when it first appeared. I do not know if…”
She stood, leaving the sentence unfinished. Jason followed her gaze across the piazza to where a tall man was striding toward them. Hatless, with a full mane of shoulder-length silver hair that reached a shabby cardigan. Faded jeans were stuffed into rubber-soled boot
s. As the man approached, Jason saw tanned features, the skin wrinkled from exposure to wind and sun.
It was not until he stood at tableside, his long face split by a dazzling smile, that Jason realized the man was more than old enough to be Maria’s father. That did little to diminish a twinge of jealousy as the two embraced.
Jason stood as Maria turned to him. “Jason, I want you to meet Dr. Calligini…”
The doctor extended a hand with a firm grip. “Eno, please.” He immediately returned his attention to Maria with a stream of Italian before stopping and turning back to Jason. ” Mi displace. I’m sorry. I have not seen little Maria long time.”
Jason arched an eyebrow, looking at Maria. “‘Little’ Maria?”
Eno nodded. ” Si. Beeg Maria, she my seester, marry to Maria’s poppa.”
For reasons quite understandable, Jason felt relieved. “A pleasure, Dr., er, Eno. You speak good English.”
Jason was treated to a smile that could have served as an ad for toothpaste as the doctor held thumb and index finger an inch or so apart. “Only a leetle.”
The three sat, and Eno barked Italian at the waiter, who scurried away, returning almost immediately with a tiny cup of espresso.
The professor’s eyes fell on the magazine on the table, and he smiled even wider. “You read?”
“Interesting,” Jason said without commitment. “I’m not sure Greco-Roman mythology is going to be helpful in finding what I want.”
Eno turned to Maria, obviously seeking a translation.
They exchanged sentences Jason didn’t understand before she said, “It is no myth. He believes that the Roman’s journal is an accurate representation of what happened.”
Jason lowered the coffee cup he had almost put to his lips. “It’s real; he thinks it’s real? That there really is a hell?”
Eno apparently understood the gravamen of that. He shook his head. “No ‘hell.’ Hades.”
