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