Читать книгу The Secret Price of History - Gayle Ridinger - Страница 15

The useless wear and tear on tires was a trademark of the Italian Police force. Pointless machismo that Special Inspector Filippo Dardanoni couldn't stand. Nine times out of ten the crime had already happened, and it made no difference to solving the case whether one arrived on the scene at two-hundred miles an hour or at a less-than-cinematographic speed.

Dardanoni was in a nit-picking mood all around when he arrived in front of the church of Santa Prisca in the Aventino quarter. In the small square tarred over as a parking lot, he found three other police cars, a handful of curious bystanders, and an aggressive platoon of TV reporters acting as if they'd lucked on the crime of the century. He had no time or patience for anyone in his sight line, and what made it worse was that they were all Romans. Romans were notoriously sloppy or approximate on the job, and Dardanoni, who hailed from Milan in the North, found plenty of daily examples to confirm this. There were this morning, for instance, a glaring number of problems with how the police were marking off the crime zone and guarding the area—starting with the fact that they were arrayed in the wrong spots, and by God if he also hadn't seen a cop or two passing information to the reporters.

He needed such goings-on this morning as much as he needed a hole in his head. Especially if what his superiors had told him on the phone was true.

"Ispettore!"

A semi-obese policeman with a plastic cup of coffee in hand (and if he had to chase down a criminal? Dardanoni wondered) hailed him as he got out of his car. His assigned task was to lead Special Inspector Dardanoni up the steps towards the church.

"The coffee—," said Dardanoni, making an irritated gesture at the cup.

The Roman policeman did a double-take, as if it were the first time in his life that he'd heard such reproach. Offended, he moved slowly towards a trash can and tossed the cup in.

Dardanoni always reminded himself at a moment like this that the only reason he was in the police force was that he hadn't been able to find another job. Pure mathematicians were, and had always been, pretty unhireable in Italy. Knowing English and German hadn't been any real plus either. Things were changing now for the new generation but for 35 year-olds like him, success in finding a job had nothing to do with merit. He hadn't had a mentor or any sort of sponsor to help his cause along, and so he had been doubly unlucky. His landing his first entry-level job with the police had boiled down to one thing alone: his genes. He was tall, and tall cops are a desirable commodity, all the more when they are broad-chested. As for his looks, he was what women called 'acceptable'; his beard was OK because he kept it short (he hated to shave), and fortunately this both passed muster on the job and appealed to women…in the good old bad days when he'd had time to meet a woman or two. On the down side, his necktie was usually askew and he was constantly misplacing his cell phone and having to call himself to find it, but compared to the men of his squad, or even his section director Giuliani, he was an altar boy, living alone in a small apartment in a city that was not his and trying (the way all people his age tried—meaning with constant setbacks or re-scheduling) to go hiking or running.

He followed the Roman cop's fat ass across the nave of the narrow Baroque church and through a wooden door that led to a corridor and more stairs. The passageway tunneled lower and lower into stone and rock, lit by a naked light bulb every few meters. They stopped in the threshold of a deep, cave-like room. This was the ancient mithraeum where the dead man was. In the center there were two long parallel stone slabs from pagan antiquity and between them, a narrow but high modern steel cage. The victim--white, middle-aged, flabby in his nakedness—was stuffed in this cage like one of those Chinese bears put under torture for their bile; damn it if he didn't have the same sort of tube sticking out of his abdomen. There was a photo of some medallion or coin nailed to his chest. What a nasty bit of work—the man must have fought desperately to get out of that cage, for his head was full of bashing bruises and his collarbone looked broken. The eyes were closed, but his open hand groping for help was thrust out of the bars. Dardanoni felt a chill cut from one of his shoulders to the other; it was how he experienced horror. The victim's right knee was almost in his mouth, which was open and with the teeth showing. Dardanoni turned to the fat policeman. "Go out and tell your colleagues that if they talk to those reporters I'll--."

"But maybe they've already talked," the policeman shrugged.

Dardanoni shot him a dirty look, and approached within inches of the cage. He saw that there were burn marks on the body.

"They must have done something to him with a blow torch."

"But what is all this?" The policeman gestured at the cage.

"Have you ever heard anything about Chinese bears?"

The other shook his head.

"They put them in tiny cages to keep them still and then they cut a hole in their gallbladder and use a catheter to extract the bile as their body makes it. The bile goes into traditional medicines, shampoo, grease, and sometimes even wine. Barbaric and centuries old as a custom. I read about bears that go so crazy with pain that they paw their own guts out. They commit suicide, get it?"

From behind the fat cop, a policeman who Dardanoni knew and respected appeared: a small Sicilian named Mineo, with the sort of quick mind and slow fuse that one could rely on in difficult moments. He was another one who'd been kept down, not given a chance at a career, so that the relatives and friends of politicians could be guaranteed one instead.

"Chinese bears at least remain alive, for years even, in their cages," Mineo commented.

"That's right."

"While this fellow here died from a nail wound to the chest, probably after spending a night in agony. At a certain point towards morning, whoever it was decided to finish him off by pounding a nail into his heart. Jesus, can you imagine?"

"Is that what the forensic doc said?"

Mineo nodded.

"Who discovered the body?"

"The parish priest. He found that the front door to the church and also the inner one leading to the mithraeum had been forced open. We don't know where the fellow's clothes went to."

"You got any hunches about all this?"

"I keep thinking about the photo on his chest. It shows some mythical figure. Like those that on the walls." Mineo gestured at a winged lion-man behind them.

"You're right," Dardanoni said.

The two men made their way back into the nave of the church, where a policeman was questioning the priest. They agreed that the dead man must have known something that the assassin or assassins wanted to find out. It had to be related to the mithraeum under the church. Dardanoni called the lab and asked them to do an in-depth analysis of all possible traces inside the underground room. (At the very least, he thought grimly, I'll find a report on the DNA and drops of coffee left by fatso.) Then suddenly new doubts came to him. "A ritual murder?" he asked. "A human sacrifice to a pagan god to some other divinity currently in vogue among weirdo groups?" He reflected on this hypothesis, found it weak, cast about in his mind for yet another. It was his way at the start of an investigation. "The Chinese Mafia," he conjectured.

Mineo smiled. "I've phoned my informant from the Chinese quarter. He says they have nothing to do with this."

Once again Dardanoni admired the Sicilian's resourcefulness.

"Good job," he said. He gazed at the cage. A weirdo group lugging something like this into a mithraeum in order to sacrifice a man to some deity? Too much work. "Whoever it is is trying to put us off track, Mineo. We've got to reason through this carefully. We have a cage, a photo, and a body." Dardanoni waved three fingers in the air. "Let's take the cage first. What purpose does a cage serve?"

"To lock up an animal."

"Exactly. To keep it from escaping and to not allow it to move around freely. Which means that he didn't have many torturers—maybe just one in fact. That person had to think about how to immobilize the victim being tortured. And perhaps concern himself with how to keep the victim from moving while he was searching for something. I just wonder who must have brought the cage in here. Check out the moving companies, especially the little guys."

"Not worth it."

"Why?"

"The cage was already here. It was used by a man next door, who every time he had to call in a plumber or repairman would lock up his ferocious dog in it. You know, one of those breeds which are banned in other countries."

"What happened to the dog?"

"Poison in its food. Some other neighbor did it. Just last week."

Mineo had all the contours to the basic situation under control. "And how did the neighbor's cage find its way into the mithraeum?"

"He gave it as a present to the parish priest the day after the dog died last week. The priest wanted to ship it to one of his missionary friends in Africa. It's the kind of thing that they have a use for in those places."

"And the priest put it in the mithraeum?"

"That's right. The guided visits are only twice a month, and the priest couldn't think of anywhere else to put it."

"So why not stick it in a national historical monument," said Dardanoni ironically. "He might likewise want to store his wine here and, while he's at it, his cured hams and salamis. Perfectly logical."

"But the lock on the cage is a kind—a brand name—not sold in Italy," Mineo said. "The murderers must have brought it with them. It's neither the priest's nor the dog owner's."

Before Dardanoni could wonder if the victim was not Italian but a foreigner, they were interrupted by yet another policeman from the square outside, who told them that the only reported disappearance from the previous day was that of a priest who had arrived last night at a church-run residence hotel for the clergy, taken a room, and immediately gone out again, without resting or sleeping there. He was missing since that moment. The physical description matched.

"There's someone here from the Ministry for the Fine Arts who says he knows the mithraeum like the back of his hand. You want to see him or should I send him away?" the policeman asked.

"No," said Dardanoni, "let me talk to him."

The man who approached was grey-haired, visibly underweight, and dressed in the type of poorly cut shirt and pants that one found for a couple of euros at the open-air market stalls now in the hands of the Arabs.

"Inspector? I'm Professor Ghirimoldi from the Ministry," he said, his face lighting up with pleasure as if by necessity he might have other identities as well but preferred this one. He gave proof of this by being zealously gregarious and helpful. Another guy who's under-paid. All that culture dressed in old clothes, Dardanoni thought. The school teachers, the lab assistants, the art curators. The professor described the beliefs and history of the Mithraic religion and told him that Mithraic ceremonies had always been held underground in real or artificial caves, where the purpose of killing the bull was to collect its blood and proceed to baptize initiates in it.

"Blood, right? Not bile?"

"I know it may sound disgusting but it actually echoes the body-and- blood aspect of Christianity."

"Could you follow me, Professor?"

Dardanoni led the way down to the mithraeum. Two lab experts were working on fingerprints on the bars of the cage, under a sort of suspended sheet, which concealed from view the victim.

"Now then," Dardanoni said. "Can you tell me if anything's been touched or possibly dug up in this space?"

The Professor toured the room, wall by wall. "What I see is what I expected," he said. "This is a truly fine example of Mithras slaying the bull. Powerful. Completely intact as a sculpture. The sacrifice of the bull brings into being a new world, into which Mithras bursts, leaving behind the cave where he was born. He becomes in that hyper cosmos the preeminent ruler, equal to the sun in our world." Ghirimoldi glanced around another minute or two and concluded, "No, I see no evidence of anything here being dug up or removed."

"O.K., thank you, Professor. I don't want to take up any more of your valuable time."

"That's....all?"

"For now, Professor," Dardanoni said encouragingly. In his previous life he too had lived through moments of imagining his professional recognition had just been cut off like air. He made a point of asking the professor if he had a card to give him, then called Mineo back into the room. He wanted to know more about the photo.

"I don't know what to think, boss. It's on photographic paper, recently done, the sort you get off a digital computer printer. A bit blurred. Makes me think it's an enlargement of a photo that someone happened to find somewhere, maybe in a newspaper or magazine."

"Or on line."

"Yes. Even."

"They found this cage already in this room...," Dardanoni said pensively. "The murderer or murderers came up with this theatrical horror show in a burst of creativity—is that what we're supposed to believe? It doesn't add up. They are trying to get us to lose time and direction. Find for me the country where they make this sort of lock and then research whether in any of the magazines or newspapers of that country during the last week or so there were any articles about Chinese bears. Meanwhile I want to concentrate on the victim himself and on that photo."

When he returned to his car, Dardanoni saw that the fat policeman was talking with the TV reporters. At the sight of the detective, he stopped in mid-sentence, embarrassment stamped on his face.

"A classic case of revenge among illegal Chinese immigrants," Dardanoni told the reporters with his falsest smile. "But we should have the report from the lab soon, which will in all probability allow us to make an arrest within the next few hours."

Fatso stared at him in astonishment.

It was fun making it all up as he talked, Dardanoni found. How perversely easy it was to invent news. Harmless mostly. Some might say better for detective work. It was a completely different thing when CSI units leaked to the press important evidence or theories in investigations and caused them to fail. That made his blood boil. As he was backing out of his parking place, a policeman tapped on his window to inquire if he wanted to wait for the magistrate, who was on his way over to the scene. Dardanoni shook his head; he was in a hurry and had no faith in any magistrate's promise to be anywhere shortly after dawn; he'd send him a written report later in the day. Driving away, he began running over the facts in his mind. 'Who knows,' he asked himself, 'if Little Chinese Bear talked before he died or not. Let's consider the possibilities. One: if he didn't talk, he must not have known what it was that the murderer/ murderers were looking for. No one would have been able to keep a secret under such torture. Two: if he did talk, there are two possibilities—seeing that nothing seems to have been touched inside the mithraeum. The first possibility is that what they were looking for wasn't in Santa Prisca after all but in some other mithraeum. In this case, we've got to put under surveillance all the mithraeums in Rome and the surrounding area. The second possibility is that the poor man really didn't know anything and was simply caught up in a game that was too big for him. Dardanoni considered this last hypothesis at length. The most obvious consequence of such a version of events is that the murder/murderers are still out there looking for whatever it is. A totally dangerous thing. But what are they looking for? Drugs? A mithraeum could hardly be called a brilliant hiding place for stashing drugs in. No, there's got to be something else under all this...something hard to imagine.'

It was definitely not his day, Dardanoni thought a few hours later. There were more of the usual cops, cigarette or espresso in hand, stationed outside the church-run residence hall for clergy in the center of Rome. There were just too damned many of these guys. Why weren't they stationed out in the rough neighborhoods instead of piling up in front of a pension for priests and missionaries? What did they think they were going to discover with their fucking coffee cup in hand? Who were they supposed to be protecting here? At this point, the game was over and done with; they had their dead body. It was perfectly pointless collecting here en masse just to frighten three or four monks or whoever they were, who were patiently waiting to have access to their rooms once again.

This residency hall riled him, too. For all practical purposes it was a four-star hotel. Exempt from all taxes by Italian law, which considered it not a profit-making operation but a charitable organization. Oh, what a profit! Mussolini's little present to the Vatican one could call it. And it had never been erased from the books.

The fellow behind the reception desk was clearly a frightened immigrant—he looked Peruvian—possibly illegal and probably paid under the table. His eyes were constantly moving, which made Dardanoni want to scare him all the more, to get him to reveal something. As things stood, all he had done was to recognize the dead man as the customer who had made a phone call in the entrance hall and then hurried out the door.

"I want you to tell me how many bags and suitcases and folders or whatever he had. I want you to tell me every move or movement you saw him make. If he stooped to tie his shoe, you tell me that, I want to know. In return I won't ask you for an ID or immigration papers, got it?"

That son of the Andes made a very loud sigh of relief.

When Dardanoni had finished at the desk, he climbed the stairs to the third floor rather than taking the elevator. He preferred it that way. The police were inspecting the room. The door was open and the usual two corpulent cops stood like useless statues on either side. Grunting at them, he went in. An ass-licker in uniform left his industrious colleague crouching down on the carpet with a tape measure and came over to him. He informed Dardanoni that the victim had been a visiting American priest. First reports had it that he had never had to deal with other countries or been mixed up with any extremist ethnic groups, so he wasn't likely to have had any contact with the mafia—let alone the Chinese mafia in the States.

The ass-licker seemed to be waiting for new orders. Dardanoni met his eyes impassively before turning his attention to the chaotic heap of clothes and personal effects on the hotel bed. The police had already opened and gone through the victim's luggage.

"How many bags did you find?"

"Two. A suitcase with clothes and a computer bag."

"Was the computer there?"

"Yes. They're having a look at it now, but it seems that there aren't any files that were opened yesterday."

"What were the most recently opened ones?"

"A couple of PDF files about something strange. It seemed like archaeological stuff."

"What do you mean by 'it seemed'?"

"I don't know English. It seemed…"

That an urgent examination of the computer of an English speaker might be made by a lab expert who didn't speak English was beyond belief, Dardanoni thought, but there you had it.

The policeman continued, "Well, strange, anyway, that there was a desktop picture of a woman on it."

"A naked woman?"

"No, a normal one. A close-up of her face."

"What's so strange then?"

"Nothing, I guess. We also found his wallet on the nightstand."

"Empty?"

The policeman nodded.

So the Son of the Andes hadn't been lying. The dead guy really did take some bills from his wallet and put them in his pocket,' Dardanoni said to himself.

"We recovered his passport," the other added.

"Any recent stamps from China?"

"No."

"And so what didn't you find?"

The policeman's face went blank.

"I'll tell you what you didn't find. His cell phone! The desk porter said that he'd seen the priest phoning with it. So where is it?"

Before the cop had time to do another cat-got-his-tongue routine, Mineo came striding into the room.

"I've got news," he said heartily. "The priest was seen by witnesses in two other mithraeums."

"Two." Filippo Dardanoni wasn't asking a question. He just wanted the number to hang in the air, and Mineo knew it. Sometimes, Mineo had noticed, he seemed to have a thing about numbers.

"I'm going back to my office," Dardanoni announced. "See you there."

Entering the elevator, he did his mental assemblage of the facts to date: an important priest arrives from the U.S; after a long tiring trip, he doesn't go to bed but rather scurries off to visit two mithraeums, followed by a third one in which he is murdered. The only thing missing is his cell phone.

Downstairs he found that his Son of the Andes had gone home and in his chair there was a monk with a short grey and gold beard who didn't seem much at his ease with the central phone system and who was having trouble passing calls to rooms. 'This church guy doesn't know the first thing about manning a reception desk,' Dardanoni thought, 'but he's got a free ride for life, doesn't he? Poor Son of the Andes can be as efficient as he pleases, but with the state the economy's in he's never going to have the right to a pension.'