“The Castra Praetoria,” Vignola answered.
“Wiped it out completely. And here, too, I guess,” Abati added. “It’s creepy, really. Did anyone know about this place until Giorgio came along?”
“Of course not!” Vignola squealed. “Don’t you think it would be in the books? This is the best mithraeum in Rome. Perhaps the best in the world.”
Abati thought about this.
“And Giorgio’s not sure whether he dare tell people? That’s nuts. He can’t keep it hidden forever.”
Vignola shook his head, dragged himself off the floor, and rubbed the grime off his hands.
“He can keep it hidden for as long as he likes. The department has charge of this entire excavation. Bramante can just carry on as he is now, working quietly with Judith Turnhouse and whoever else is in on the secret. Then someday, when the time’s right, he calls up the right people and says, ‘Look what we found.’ Behold, Giorgio the hero. The discoverer of unknown wonders. Schliemann, Howard Carter, all rolled into one. Wouldn’t he just love that?”
“This is holy ground,” Torchia said abruptly, without thinking.
“So what are we supposed to do, Ludo?” Abati demanded in that infuriating slow drawl of his. “Sing a few songs? Kill the rooster? Bow before the god, then go home and complete our assignments? You shouldn’t take this Mithras thing too seriously. It was all just a bunch of us messing round. Hey! Hey!”
He was shouting now, suddenly animated and angry. He flew across the dimly lit room and seized Toni LaMarca, who was about to stumble down a small rectangular exit on the far side, behind the altar and its figures.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Abati yelled.
“Looking…” LaMarca replied, his voice thick with dope.
“Don’t…”
“But…”
Something in Abati’s face silenced him. Then the figure in the red caving suit, who looked so much at home here, picked up a rock from the ground and threw it into the black hole ahead of them, where LaMarca had been about to enter. There was no sound. Nothing at all. Until, eventually, a distant echo of a hard, lost object falling into water.
Dino Abati gave each of them a filthy look in turn.
“This is not a playground, children,” he said with venom. “There’s a reason you should be afraid of the dark.”
The light was so bright it hurt. Alessio Bramante looked at the switches on the wall and knew he’d have to do something about them, that he couldn’t sit on his own under this incandescent yellow sea much longer. It was like being beneath the eyes of some harsh, electric dragon. He was happy in the dark. Not the total darkness his father entered when he was working. Just the quiet, half light of dusk or early morning, an hour when there was room in the world for imagination. A time when Alessio could think about the day ahead, and that walk down to Piranesi’s piazza, the moment when he would peer through the keyhole, locate the distant shining dome, and say to his father, for both of them, “I see it. The world is still with us. Life can go on.”
He couldn’t think straight now, not with the constant flood of illumination pouring down on him from the lines of bulbs above his head. And how long was he supposed to wait? He didn’t have a watch. His grandmother had given him one for the previous Christmas. It had a picture of Santa Claus on the face. He didn’t wear it. Watches were hateful, intrusive things, unnecessary machines ticking away the minutes of a person’s life without mercy, without feeling. The face with its red hat and snowy beard grinned back at him all the time.
He knows when you’ve been bad or good… … said the old American song they played on the sound system sometimes, very loud, when they’d been drinking.
Santa Claus was an invention out of a fairy tale. A face on a dial. A spy on the wrist. Alessio didn’t like the idea of someone watching him like that. It wasn’t right.
Just as leaving him alone in this bare, bright chamber, in the red earth and grey rock, wasn’t right either. The place smelled of mould and decay. Not what he’d hoped for, the sharp citrus aroma of old fruit skins squashed underfoot.
They’re oranges on the surface only, he thought. Something else lies beneath. Bones and dead things, all the decay of the centuries.
He recalled staring through those stupid spectacles that morning, wondering who was right. The way he saw — or didn’t see — things. Or the multiple worlds envisioned by a fly.
Alessio sat at the table and said, in a calm, flat, unemotional voice, tinged only slightly with anger, more for himself than anyone listening, “Giorgio.”
Then again.
“Giorgio!”
He’d never used his father’s first name like that before. There was a rule, a law, that forbade children from speaking their parents’ real names out loud. Giorgio — Alessio had thought of him this way for months now — had told him stories about magical names. Of how the Jews had a word for God which no one but the highest priest could utter, and then only in special circumstances, deep inside the holiest of places. And now he knew about the followers of Mithras, with their secret rituals too, enacted in this underground labyrinth.
Seven orders of humanity. Seven trials. Seven sacraments. Precious rites, never shared with outsiders. Not until the moment of initiation, the point at which the blank, empty page of the novice gained a single scrawl, the birth of knowing.
The beginner became Corax.
After… what?
Giorgio had disappeared into the darkness minutes before. Alessio thought he’d heard distant sounds from down one of the black corridors. A faraway voice. Perhaps more than one. Perhaps it was his father watching from the shadows. Or maybe it was merely an echo of his own voice, deepened by the tunnels chasing off from those seven exits cut into the rock of the chamber in which he now sat, not afraid, just thinking, trying to work out what this was.
Games.
Giorgio played games sometimes. A few months before, Alessio’s father had taken him into a warren of excavated houses on the Palatino, had found, through a labyrinth of ancient stone rooms, the kitchen of someone called Livia, wife to a famous emperor, Augustus, and a woman of fearsome reputation, cruel and controlling, determined to do the utmost for her clan. A kind of Pater, but in a dress.
Giorgio was nowhere when Alessio had turned a corner and found himself in some dark rocky alcove, green with algae, alive with insects, centipedes and beetles, bristling with furry moss that clung like crude living skin on the damp stone walls, yellowing with the onset of decay. The boy had stood there for a long time, glad he’d never brought the watch because that would have made everything seem longer, placed a stamp on the act, one that said “guilty.”
He hadn’t done what Giorgio had wanted. Hadn’t broken down, cried, whined, kicked, and yelled, hammered his new white sneakers against the green, gunky stone until they were ruined.
Afterwards Giorgio had bought ice cream and, for Alessio, a toy he didn’t want. All in return for a promise never to tell his mother, one he readily agreed to, because men needed secrets, bonds, just like those of Mithras, whispered in this place two thousand years before. Secrets bound men together more tightly, made Giorgio tell him more stories, daring ones, frightening ones sometimes. About the darkness and the old things that lurked there.