Alessio waited. When Giorgio didn’t give the final name, he asked.
“Who was the last one?”
“The leader was called Pater. Father.”
“He was their father?”
“In a way. Pater was the man who promised he’d always look after them. For as long as he lived. I say that to you because I’m your real father. But if you were Pater you were a great man. You were responsible, ultimately, for everyone. The men in the cult. Their wives. Their families. You were a kind of greater father, with a larger family, children who weren’t your real children, though you still cared for them.”
“You mean a god?”
“A god living inside a man, perhaps.”
“What kind of sacrament do you need? To become like that?”
Giorgio Bramante looked puzzled.
“We don’t know. We don’t know so much. Perhaps one day…” He looked around him. There was some disappointment in his features at that moment. “If we get the money. The permission. You could help me find those secrets. When you grow up…”
“I could help now!” Alessio said eagerly, certain that was what his father wanted to hear.
All the same, he wasn’t so sure. There was so much that was unseen in this place, lurking at the edge of the flood of yellow light bulbs above them, seeming to cling to one another, as if they were afraid of the dark. And the smell… it reminded him of when something went bad in the refrigerator, sat there growing a furry mould, dead in itself, with something new, something alive, growing from within.
His father wasn’t being entirely frank either.
“You do know some of the gifts they gave. You said. About Miles and the lion.”
“We’re familiar with a few. We know what Corax had to undergo….”
Giorgio hesitated. Alessio knew he’d say what was on his mind in the end.
“Corax had to be left on his own. Probably somewhere down one of those long, dark corridors. He had to be left until he became so frightened he thought no one would come for him. Ever. That he’d die.”
“That’s cruel!”
“He wants to be a man!” his father replied, his voice rising. “A man’s made. Not born. You’re a child. You’re too young to understand.”
This casual dismissal annoyed him. “Tell me.”
“In a cruel world a man must sometimes do cruel things, Alessio. This is part of growing up. A man must carry that burden. Out of practicality. Out of love. Do you think it’s kind to be weak?”
Giorgio’s face creased in distaste when he said that last word. Weakness was, Alessio Bramante realised, some kind of sin.
“No,” he answered quietly.
“Cruelty can be relative, Alessio.” His father calmed down somewhat. “Is a doctor cruel if he cuts off a diseased limb that could kill you?”
Alessio Bramante had never thought of doctors this way. It left him uneasy.
“No,” he replied, guessing this was the right answer.
“Of course not. Men are here to make those kinds of decisions. I learned this. You will, too. What hurts us can also make us strong. That’s why Corax had to endure what he did. If it was a way of reaching some kind of god…”
“It was still cruel. What happened to him? Corax? In the end?”
“Someone, not Pater perhaps, but someone who hoped to become Pater one day, would rescue him. And the boy would be reborn. As Corax. Overjoyed to be a part of everything that was happening in this place, wondering where he’d rise next on the ladder. Whether he might, perhaps, become Pater himself in time.”
Alessio felt an acute sense of injustice on behalf of all those tortured adolescents, one mitigated only slightly by the thought that came fast on the heels of his outrage: they must have inflicted the same torture on those who followed.
Then a question occurred to him.
“What was there left for Mithras to do?” he asked. “If they all cared for each other so much?”
His father smiled. “You like words, don’t you? I did when I was young. We’re so similar in many ways. Here’s a word,” Giorgio Bramante went on. “Psychopomp. Mithras mattered to them all because, among many other things, he was their psychopomp.”
It sounded like a made-up word, one not quite real.
“Couldn’t Pater be a psyche… psycho…?”
“No,” Giorgio said firmly. “A human being is mortal. A man could never be anyone’s psychopomp. He — or she or it — is something people all over the world believe in, whatever their religion. A being — perhaps an animal, a spirit, a ghost or something we simply don’t comprehend — whose job it is to find the souls of those who’ve died and lead them home, to their place of rest. Heaven, if you like. These people believed Mithras would be waiting for them, ready to perform an act of kindness that was beyond even Pater at the very end. To bring them to peace.”
Alessio Bramante shivered. He didn’t like the idea of a psychopomp. Not at all. For one very good reason, which occurred to him immediately. What if they forgot, or became lazy or confused? Where did all those lost souls go then?
“What do we do now, Daddy?”
“We could always play a game.”
Giorgio Bramante had his head cocked to one side, like a blackbird listening for worms in the garden, Alessio thought. “Did you hear that?” he asked.
“No…”
“I heard something,” Giorgio said, getting up, looking at the dark entrances of the corridors. Seven of them. Wondering which to choose.
“It’s safe here, Alessio. Just stay in your chair. Wait for me. I have something to do. Be patient.”
Alessio shivered. He stared at the scarred surface of the cheap table, trying not to think. Giorgio had brought a thick jacket with him. It occurred to his son that his father had known all along that they would end up in this chill, damp chamber beneath the ground. Alessio wore just a pair of thin cotton school trousers and his white T-shirt, a clean one that morning, with the symbol his mother had designed for the school outlined in distinct colours on the front: a star inside a dark blue circle, with a set of equidistant smaller stars set around them.
Seven stars. Seven points.
“I will,” he promised his father.
It began, Torchia knew, with Giorgio’s lecture the previous month, three hours of a long, warm afternoon in the airless aula in the Piazza dei Cavalieri di Malta, one he’d never forget. Bramante was in his finest form: brilliant, electrifying, incisive. The subject, nominally, was what little was known about the philosophy of the Roman military Mithraic sects. But it was about much more than that, though Ludo Torchia suspected he was the only one in the class who knew it. What Bramante was really talking about was life itself, the passage from child to man, the acceptance of duty and deference to those above, and the need, absolute, unquestionable, for obedience, trust, and secrecy within the tight, closed ranks of the social group to which an individual belonged. He was talking about life itself.