The Mithras Conspiracy

by M. J. Polelle

  Thinking it foolish to run from a miserable mutt, he slowed so he and the pointer could walk side by side. The mutt would leave him at some point anyway, like his ex-wife, like his daughter . . . maybe to forage in another backstreet for scraps, or . . . this is life after all . . . to be run over by a vehicle. No one would mourn this bundle of mange.

  He came into a familiar neighborhood not far from his apartment. He would read the discovered dossier about his father and the Ardeatine Caves. And then, after downing leftovers for supper with so-so red wine, he would follow his routine of dozing off on the sofa with the TV left on.

  At the door to his apartment complex, the pointer lay down shivering.

  “God help me . . . You can stay.” He scratched the pointer behind the ears. “I name you Mondocane after this dog world of ours.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Looking at the time on her cell every quarter hour wouldn’t make the Circumvesuviana train arrive any sooner in Sorrento for her bus connection to Amalfi. It wasn’t just the wedding of her girlfriend she would miss if the train arrived late. Professor Fisher was interrupting his return trip to Rome from the Villa of the Papyri just to interview her in Amalfi.

  Nicole Garvey had double-checked the train schedule and even arrived forty-five minutes early at the Naples central station. But how could she know a wildcat strike would delay train service just long enough to jeopardize her plans?

  The train streaked past yellow buildings smeared with soot and hurtled into a tunnel, plunging her into darkness. Falling back into the plush seat, Garvey remembered her father’s disturbed look when he had seen her off in Rome on the first leg of her trip to Naples. He seemed happy enough when he had opened up the social service center in Rome. What was bothering him now? His heart again? He didn’t believe in talking about his own problems but only in trying to solve hers.

  If she landed the position of assistant archaeologist for the Villa of the Papyri, her father wouldn’t have to help her out to tide her over until the divorce settlement came through. He had done enough. She wanted back into the trenches of archaeology and away from the dust of research stacks and classroom chalkboard. Italy would recharge her life after waking from the evaporated dream of her marriage and the cloistered world of Harvard. She wasn’t going to let her experience with Wesley Bemis scare her away from a chance to advance her career. If she got the job, she’d figure out how to deal with the Mormon lecher.

  As soon as the train rocketed from the tunnel into the sunlight, she prepared for the interview by reviewing the modern technology Bemis planned to use in the renewed exploration of the Villa of the Papyri. Overlooking the Bay of Naples before the modern era, the Villa of the Papyri sank into the earth after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. The volcanic explosion left nearly two thousand charcoal-like scrolls buried under the mud, waiting for archaeologists to discover them. The brittle sheets of carbonized papyrus, baked together like rolled filo dough in a Greek pastry shop, contained lost writings of the Greco-Roman world.

  She’d had enough of the thumping bass leaking out from the headphones of her teenage seatmate. She didn’t have to take it anymore. She tapped his shoulder and asked him to stop. He glared. She glared back. He turned the music down and broke off eye contact.

  She resumed preparation at her weakest point . . . the breakthrough technology promising to resurrect the carbon-based ink absorbed into the papyrus fabric blackened by the fire and heat of Mount Vesuvius. Multispectral imaging picked out the light wavelength reflected by the carbon in the ink. The ancient writing sprang, revived, from the papyrus background and became readable once again.

  The problem remained of opening the bonded sheets of papyrus in order to apply imaging technology. Thanks to innovations of the space age, scientists had created a special gelatin that allowed the sheets of carbonized papyrus to loosen and unfold like flower petals. She learned from his Harvard lecture that Bemis, although a raunchy jerk in her eyes, had further advanced the potency of the gelatin beyond all expectations. His variation exponentially reduced the time needed to unravel the papyrus sheets. She had to face facts. The jerk was a genius. Dropping the name of Dr. Wesley Bemis, the professor’s colleague in the excavation project, should score her some points in the interview.

  “We have arrived in Sorrento,” the conductor announced, just before the train doors jolted open.

  She gathered her things and bolted down the aisle. The first to exit, she sprinted to the Amalfi-bound bus pulling out of the parking lot. She stood in front of it and waved her hands. The bus driver hit the brakes and honked the horn.

  Behind the windshield, he waved her away.

  She refused to move until he let her on.

  Chapter Twenty

  Convertible top down in his red Maserati, Marco Leone snaked around hairpin turns, cliffs shearing down on his right into the foam-swept sea on the road to Amalfi. Hotels and villas hugged the mountainside below. Vehicles moved forward like windup toys on an asphalt ribbon past a medieval watchtower on the lookout for pirates long gone.

  Cardinal Gustavo Furbone had given him the slip in Rome to avoid discussing Abramo’s death. He’d outfox the prelate by ambushing him at the Amalfi wedding reception in honor of the cardinal’s politician nephew and his American socialite bride.

  Once he gave Carlos Stroheim a promise of confidentiality, the prefect of the Vatican Library revealed that the cardinal had threatened Abramo with harm for keeping the Festus parchment. The cardinal not only threatened Abramo but, according to Professor Fisher, had charge of the murder knife stolen from the Vatican collection. With luck, he’d wrap up the case and be off to Chicago.

  He tried to stay focused on the case, but the dossier on his father found by Inspector Renaldi prevented that. Leone had pored over it the night before in disbelief. His father, an influential officer in the Polizia di Stato, could have saved Uncle Benjamin. An SS officer involved in the Ardeatine Caves executions had owed his father a favor. The Nazi offered the option of replacing Benjamin with a prison inmate to be selected by the Italian police. His father refused on the pretext it would violate proper police procedure. In cold blood, his father had let Benjamin die wrapped in the rhetoric of sanctimonious claptrap.

  Except for a black Audi darting in and out of sight in his rearview mirror, no other vehicles traveled the road. Wind tousled his hair, just like those film clips of JFK at play with a full head of disheveled hair, so young and virile. He ran his hand through his own, feeling so free and alive, trying to channel his hero, until he touched the bald spot spreading like a stain at the crown of his head. Cold reality set in. He was no JFK.

  He pressed the pedal harder to distance himself from the black Audi.

  Commissario Leone, you have Addison’s disease, his doctor had told him. You’re risking your health unless you take medication and change your lifestyle. You are no longer a young man, Commissario. Have you thought of a disability leave?

  The triumph of JFK over the same affliction gave him hope. But like his hero, he needed to keep his vulnerability hidden from those who wished him harm. Not a word to Inspector Renaldi, already circling around to grab his job title. To be ill was to be vulnerable in the world of mondo cane.

  In his rearview mirror, the Audi speeding closer straddled the two lanes of travel.

  Shifting to ease back pain, he daydreamed his youth alive again—the time Miriam and he, those many years ago, had spent a long weekend at the Luna Convento in Amalfi, both young and ignorant of how fate would tear them apart. He had serenaded Miriam amid the scents of lemon and orange trees with star sparklers pinned to a midnight-blue sky above a courtyard fit for Romeo and Juliet. He longed to claw back those times, to enchant her once again like a snake charmer, to rush with her, hand in hand, to their room, where he would . . . He caught the Audi zeroing in like a torpedo.

  Does the idiot want to pass?

  Losing sigh
t of the Audi, he rounded a curve and slammed on the brakes to avoid crashing into road barricades. Two men in road-repair uniforms stood wearing masks shaped like ravens’ heads.

  “Stop. We have something to tell you,” the shorter man said, as they sprinted toward the convertible.

  “What the hell is this all about? Some kind of carnival stunt?”

  The black Audi screeched to a stop behind him.

  In his rearview mirror, the driver of the Audi wore a lion’s mask.

  A trap, his gut warned. He gunned the engine with a roar. The taller raven-headed man pulled out a pistol from his overalls. The convertible bucked forward, tossing aside the barrier, fishtailing for a few seconds, until Leone took control and raced down the highway with the Audi in pursuit.

  Banging his horn before rounding an S curve with hands glued to the steering wheel, he swayed back and forth across the two lanes of travel without knowing if a vehicle was about to barrel around the mountain from the opposite direction.

  The Audi dogged his tail. He steadied the Maserati on a straight patch of road before the next curve. A bullet from behind hit the dashboard.

  The Audi closed in, its front tapping the Maserati’s rear.

  Horn blaring, Leone careened around a curve and hugged the mountainside lane to avoid a tumble over the cliff beyond the right lane. He prayed no car approached from the opposite direction. He’d won this round of Russian roulette.

  The lion-masked driver of the Audi appeared on his right, neck and neck with the Maserati. The driver wasn’t trying to pass. He wanted to smash the Maserati into the mountain. For a split second, the lion man turned toward him, his mask sparkling in the sunlight, impassive as death. In tandem, the Maserati and the Audi rounded a wide bend.

  A flock of mountain goats materialized. Clipping goats on the right, he turned left and scraped the mountainside while braking. The lion driver veered right, catapulting the Audi off the road and down the mountainside.

  A bloodied goat crashed through the Maserati’s windshield.

  The world went dead.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “The Festus parchment’s gone. Someone broke into my filing cabinet.” Soaked from the rain, Will Fisher leaned on his umbrella at the foot of the bed. “I stopped by to tell you on my way to Amalfi from the Villa of the Papyri to attend a wedding . . . and of course to cheer you up after your accident.”

  “You have a strange way of cheering me up,” Marco Leone said. Hospitalized near Amalfi because of his brush with death on the way to his destination, Leone’s headache grew worse with the news. He fished across his bed for a pack of Marlboros smuggled into the nightstand drawer. He needed to clear his brain. The hospital orderly had confiscated the contraband. He fell back, defeated, against the stack of pillows just as an officer from the Leone Squad brought in Mondocane for a visit. Leone asked the officer to wait outside.

  “Where were the guards?” he asked Fisher. Mondocane’s wet-dog smell from the rain cleared Leone’s head. The pointer shook off rainwater from its back, almost slipping on one of his three legs.

  “At the catacombs.”

  Mondocane nuzzled his nose into Leone’s hand dangling over the bedside. “Inspector Renaldi was supposed to provide a guard.”

  “He had a tip the Egyptian Phoenix schemed an attack on the catacombs. He said he went there with the guard.”

  Patting the pointer on the head, Leone resolved to pursue disciplinary charges against Renaldi. Even if the Egyptian Phoenix threat were credible, he had an order to guard the parchment at all times.

  Fisher snapped open his umbrella to dry and laid it at the foot of the bed.

  “I hadn’t planned on showering.” Leone wiped the umbrella’s scattered raindrops from his face. The gauche American perplexed him.

  Renaldi’s background check had been uncharacteristically superficial. The inspector blamed American privacy laws for the limited information. But with Renaldi, one never knew when his personal agenda took precedence.

  Fisher’s father had served in the German military, but Renaldi provided no details. Otto Fischer filed for bankruptcy and divorced. Arrested for shoplifting. Charges dropped. The son changed his surname from Fischer to Fisher and left Milwaukee for New York to become an actor of middling abilities. For reasons unknown, the son withdrew from the Jesuit order before taking vows but became a leading scholar on early Christianity and comparative religions.

  “What do you know about the parchment’s disappearance?”

  “Absolutely nothing.” Fisher’s cheeks flushed red, and the color ran up his neck. “I’m an academic. Not a thief.”

  “I told you not to leave Rome.” He struggled into a sitting position on the bed.

  “Wesley Bemis needs an archaeological assistant immediately. I’m going to Amalfi, not just for the wedding, but to interview a candidate.”

  “Ah yes.” He had almost forgotten. “Bemis. Your colleague with the skis in your office.” The commissario sipped water. “You mentioned the parchment, didn’t you?”

  “He didn’t steal it.”

  “Why so sure?”

  “You told me to keep the parchment a secret.”

  “Just like I told you not to leave Rome?”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  At an outdoor table in the Piazza del Duomo of Amalfi, Nicole Garvey sipped limoncello and looked up the sixty-two cathedral steps. Cindy posed on high for photographs with her aristocrat husband, a rising political star in the Italian parliament. The sun reflected honey gold off the twelfth-century bell tower of green and yellow glazed tiles. Her friend looked picture-perfect in her strapless, thigh-high wedding dress with a ruffled train of tulle. Cindy had not lost her sassy sense of fashion.

  To their own internal tune, a gray-haired couple danced a fox-trot before a platform decorated with red, white, and green bunting. An official orated from the platform with the same Italian tricolors on the sash crisscrossing his chest. Above the music, she heard the words tutti . . . all . . . and frutti . . . fruits, something about protecting Amalfi fruits.

  Her stepmother had ordered her not to chew Tutti Frutti gum. It was unladylike. Being unladylike had not prevented Cindy from snatching the gold ring of happiness as life rushed past them both, leaving the archaeologist to dig in the dirt for broken things left by the dead. Everything always seemed to work out for Cindy.

  “Hello, Dr. Garvey?” said a voice from behind.

  She turned. “Yes?”

  “I’m Professor Will Fisher.”

  His introduction sounded on the perimeter of her attention, which was fixed on his starlight-blue eyes. “Oh, I thought we were meeting later.” She offered her hand. His grip felt warm and firm.

  “I finished my work at the Villa of the Papyri earlier than expected. So, I took up Cardinal Furbone’s invitation to attend the wedding.”

  “You know the cardinal?”

  “He attended the Pontifical Gregorian University of Rome where I teach.” A dimple accentuated the smile on his left cheek. “Everyone at the school knows him. He’s a go-to alumnus, a mover and shaker.”

  Behind him, Cindy floated down the stairway to a gaggle of relatives at the bottom, a butterfly bride in her lemon-chiffon dress under a barrage of colored confetti thrown by guests lining the path of descent.

  “This won’t take long.” He held her résumé.

  Had he made up his mind already? Her study of the Villa of the Papyri and the state-of-the-art technology had paid off. She aced the professor’s questions.

  Fisher said he knew an Italian archaeologist she had worked with as a graduate student at the Etruscan excavation of Populonia in Tuscany. The professor let slip his interviewer poker face for a moment by remarking that the colleague from that archaeological dig had recommended her. The wind was at her back.

  The presence of Wesley Bemis on the
project still troubled her. On her résumé, she mentioned meeting Bemis when he had lectured at Harvard about his breakthrough technology. The lecherous advance of the Brigham Young whiz kid on that occasion left him as a wild card in her new job. Fisher didn’t say anything about his colleague, so she said nothing. She refused to let the presence of Bemis in the project influence her decision.

  “That’ll do.” Fisher put away the résumé. “No need for more questions. I’d like you to join us in excavating the Villa of the Papyri.”

  “With pleasure, Professor Fisher.”

  “Call me Will. Glad to have you on our team.” He looked at his watch. “I should go back to the villa. Wes . . . Dr. Bemis . . . thinks we’re close to finding the Latin library in the villa.”

  “Latin library?”

  “Aside from snippets of Latin comedy and history, the works recovered so far were written in Greek. The most famous recovery to date concerns writings by Philodemus, the Greek poet, probably a house-guest. We suspect a treasure trove of lost works still exists somewhere in the villa.”

  “Like what?”

  “Horace, the Roman poet, dedicated his Ars Poetica to the owner’s sons. He must have given them an original copy. Virgil was friends with Philodemus and Horace. I’ll bet early editions of his epic Aeneid are still in the villa. Somewhere in that mansion my gut tells me rests the heart of Piso’s library. Undiscovered works not just of the Greeks, but also a wealth of Latin writings, including Livy, Cicero, and Julius Caesar, Piso’s son-in-law.”

  His passion for discovering the mother lode of classical literature, so obvious in the rising tone of his voice and the sparkle in his eyes, captivated her. Neither her father nor her ex had shown this in their work. She disliked dampening his flame, but she had to speak up. “Isn’t it possible the occupants removed the library before the eruption obliterated the villa?”