Torchia had listened, rigid in his seat, unable to take his eyes off Giorgio, who sat on his desk, fit and muscular in a tight T-shirt and Gucci jeans, a leader at perfect ease with his flock.
One part came back to Torchia now. Bramante had been discussing the seven-ranked hierarchy. Vignola had asked a question that seemed, on the face of things, sensible. How did structures like this begin? At what point, in the nascent stage of Mithraism’s emergence, did someone dictate that there would be seven ranks, with set rituals for the progression from one to the next? Where, he wanted to know, did it all come from?
Bramante had smiled at them, an attractive, knowing smile, like a father indulging a son.
“They didn’t need to ask that question, Sandro,” the professor replied in his measured, powerful voice. “They knew the answer already. Their religion came from their god.”
“Yes, but… in real life,” Vignola objected. “I mean, it didn’t happen that way. It couldn’t.”
“How do you know?” Bramante had asked.
“Because it couldn’t! If Mithras was real, where did he go?”
“They murdered him.” Torchia said it without thinking, and was pleased, and a little disturbed, too, by Giorgio’s reaction to his impulsive answer. Bramante was staring at him, an expression of surprise and admiration on his handsome face.
“Constantine murdered Mithras,” the professor agreed. “Constantine and his bishops. Just as they murdered all the old gods. If you talk to the theologians they’ll give you other answers. But I’m not a theologian, nor is this a theology class. We’re historians. We look at facts and deduce what we can from them. The facts state that much of the Roman army followed Mithras for the best part of three centuries. Then, with Christianity, Mithras died, and with him the beliefs of those who followed him. Whether you view that literally or not, that is, inescapably, what happened. If you want more complicated answers, you’re in the wrong department.”
“It must have been terrible,” Torchia remarked, unable to take his eyes off his professor.
“What?” Bramante asked.
“Terrible. To have lost your religion. To have watched it ripped from you.”
“The Christians had to put up with that for three centuries,” Bramante pointed out.
“The Christians won.”
There was a flicker of something — knowledge, perhaps even self-doubt — in Giorgio Bramante’s eyes. Torchia couldn’t stop looking at it.
“What would have been truly terrible, I think,” Giorgio continued, “would have been if one were denied a final chance to make peace with what one was losing. A Christian would hope to confess before dying. To have that last comfort snatched from your hands…”
He said nothing else. It would be two weeks before Ludo Torchia understood the misty, almost guilty look in his eyes at that moment.
“But…” Vignola complained, then fell quiet. There was an expression in Bramante’s face that indicated this was the end of that particular thread. Giorgio was a patient, knowledgeable professor, but he led them like a general led his troops. What he sought was their understanding, not their approval. Torchia understood this implicitly, and understood, too, that the rest of them were still just kids really, and he knew what to expect from kids. Fear, interest, then the onset of boredom before, with the right leader, in the correct, ritual circumstances, comprehension.
So he hadn’t just brought the live cockerel from the market in Testaccio. While he was there he’d visited a dealer in one of the tenement blocks, purchased, on long credit, two ready-rolled smokes, harsh black Afghan mixed with cheap cigarette tobacco. He’d read there’d been some kind of drug down here in the beginning. The Romans knew hemp. They introduced the drug from the colonies they’d absorbed over the years. They knew alcohol too. Many of the Mithraic rites had been stolen and incorporated into Christianity. For the winter solstice, celebrated around December 25 each year, they drank wine and ate bread together, a symbolic feast upon the blood and the body of the sacrificial bull. Torchia wondered how many good Catholics knew that when they were on their knees taking Holy Communion under the candles.
Toni LaMarca fell greedily on one of the two joints straightaway and sneaked into the shadows like the fool he was. Raul Bellucci and the Guerino oaf were now choking on the second, giggling, alive with that childish pleasure of being an illicit visitor in a strange and forbidden place. Torchia hadn’t any intention of joining them. There was too much to think about in this magic site. Nor was the arch-geek midget Sandro Vignola much interested either. He’d been goggle-eyed since they entered the temple. Now he was down on his little hands and knees in front of a slab next to the altar, looking for all the world like some overweight choirboy come to do homage to the deity who stood above him, sword in hand, straddling the bull, blade buried in its writhing neck.
Torchia watched Vignola mouthing the Latin inscription on the stonework, set beneath a cut-out half moon, and wished he were better at languages himself. He nodded at the slab.
“What does it say?”
Latin was rarely simple, old words for new. It was a tongue from another era, a lost culture, close yet unknown too, a code, a collection of symbolic letters, each with a meaning obvious only to the initiated.
He shone his torch on the carving in the dusty white stone.
DEO INV M
L ANTONIUS
PROCULUS
PRAEF COH III P
ET PATER
V S • L • M
“What does it say?” Torchia asked again, more loudly this time when Vignola ignored him.
“Deo Invicto Mithrae, Lucius Antonius Proculus, Praefectus Cohors Tertiae Praetoria, et Pater, votum soluit libens merito.”
The bright round eyes stared at him from behind the oversize spectacles.
“‘To the invincible God Mithras, Lucius Antonius Proculus, Praefect of the Third Cohort of the Praetorian Guard, and Father, willingly and deservedly fulfilled his vow.’ I can’t believe you don’t understand that,” Vignale said.
“I don’t read Latin well.”
Dino Abati joined them. He’d been poking around in the corners with his gear, bright ginger hair bouncing around in places he didn’t belong.
“You should still know the name,” he told Torchia. “We covered it in class, remember? Lucius Antonius Proculus was with the Praetorian Guard for the battle of the Milvian Bridge. The Praetorian backed Maxentius. The one who lost. Remember?”
“I don’t waste time on old names,” Torchia murmured. He didn’t like being treated like a moron. “So you think he was here?”
Abati shot a glance towards the anteroom, where the dead were.
“Perhaps he still is,” he suggested. “Constantine wiped out the Praetorian Guard completely after he entered Rome. They’d backed the wrong side. He felt he couldn’t trust them. So he razed that headquarters of theirs… what was it?”