brand name—not sold in Italy," Mineo said. "The murderers must have brought it with them. It's neither the priest's nor the dog owner's."
Before Dardanoni could wonder if the victim was not Italian but a foreigner, they were interrupted by yet another policeman from the square outside, who told them that the only reported disappearance from the previous day was that of a priest who had arrived last night at a church-run residence hotel for the clergy, taken a room, and immediately gone out again, without resting or sleeping there. He was missing since that moment. The physical description matched.
"There's someone here from the Ministry for the Fine Arts who says he knows the mithraeum like the back of his hand. You want to see him or should I send him away?" the policeman asked.
"No," said Dardanoni, "let me talk to him."
The man who approached was grey-haired, visibly underweight, and dressed in the type of poorly cut shirt and pants that one found for a couple of euros at the open-air market stalls now in the hands of the Arabs.
"Inspector? I'm Professor Ghirimoldi from the Ministry," he said, his face lighting up with pleasure as if by necessity he might have other identities as well but preferred this one. He gave proof of this by being zealously gregarious and helpful. Another guy who's under-paid. All that culture dressed in old clothes, Dardanoni thought. The school teachers, the lab assistants, the art curators. The professor described the beliefs and history of the Mithraic religion and told him that Mithraic ceremonies had always been held underground in real or artificial caves, where the purpose of killing the bull was to collect its blood and proceed to baptize initiates in it.
"Blood, right? Not bile?"
"I know it may sound disgusting but it actually echoes the body-and- blood aspect of Christianity."
"Could you follow me, Professor?"
Dardanoni led the way down to the mithraeum. Two lab experts were working on fingerprints on the bars of the cage, under a sort of suspended sheet, which concealed from view the victim.
"Now then," Dardanoni said. "Can you tell me if anything's been touched or possibly dug up in this space?"
The Professor toured the room, wall by wall. "What I see is what I expected," he said. "This is a truly fine example of Mithras slaying the bull. Powerful. Completely intact as a sculpture. The sacrifice of the bull brings into being a new world, into which Mithras bursts, leaving behind the cave where he was born. He becomes in that hyper cosmos the preeminent ruler, equal to the sun in our world." Ghirimoldi glanced around another minute or two and concluded, "No, I see no evidence of anything here being dug up or removed."
"O.K., thank you, Professor. I don't want to take up any more of your valuable time."
"That's....all?"
"For now, Professor," Dardanoni said encouragingly. In his previous life he too had lived through moments of imagining his professional recognition had just been cut off like air. He made a point of asking the professor if he had a card to give him, then called Mineo back into the room. He wanted to know more about the photo.
"I don't know what to think, boss. It's on photographic paper, recently done, the sort you get off a digital computer printer. A bit blurred. Makes me think it's an enlargement of a photo that someone happened to find somewhere, maybe in a newspaper or magazine."
"Or on line."
"Yes. Even."
"They found this cage already in this room...," Dardanoni said pensively. "The murderer or murderers came up with this theatrical horror show in a burst of creativity—is that what we're supposed to believe? It doesn't add up. They are trying to get us to lose time and direction. Find for me the country where they make this sort of lock and then research whether in any of the magazines or newspapers of that country during the last week or so there were any articles about Chinese bears. Meanwhile I want to concentrate on the victim himself and on that photo."
When he returned to his car, Dardanoni saw that the fat policeman was talking with the TV reporters. At the sight of the detective, he stopped in mid-sentence, embarrassment stamped on his face.
"A classic case of revenge among illegal Chinese immigrants," Dardanoni told the reporters with his falsest smile. "But we should have the report from the lab soon, which will in all probability allow us to make an arrest within the next few hours."
Fatso stared at him in astonishment.
It was fun making it all up as he talked, Dardanoni found. How perversely easy it was to invent news. Harmless mostly. Some might say better for detective work. It was a completely different thing when CSI units leaked to the press important evidence or theories in investigations and caused them to fail. That made his blood boil. As he was backing out of his parking place, a policeman tapped on his window to inquire if he wanted to wait for the magistrate, who was on his way over to the scene. Dardanoni shook his head; he was in a hurry and had no faith in any magistrate's promise to be anywhere shortly after dawn; he'd send him a written report later in the day. Driving away, he began running over the facts in his mind. 'Who knows,' he asked himself, 'if Little Chinese Bear talked before he died or not. Let's consider the possibilities. One: if he didn't talk, he must not have known what it was that the murderer/ murderers were looking for. No one would have been able to keep a secret under such torture. Two: if he did talk, there are two possibilities—seeing that nothing seems to have been touched inside the mithraeum. The first possibility is that what they were looking for wasn't in Santa Prisca after all but in some other mithraeum. In this case, we've got to put under surveillance all the mithraeums in Rome and the surrounding area. The second possibility is that the poor man really didn't know anything and was simply caught up in a game that was too big for him. Dardanoni considered this last hypothesis at length. The most obvious consequence of such a version of events is that the murder/murderers are still out there looking for whatever it is. A totally dangerous thing. But what are they looking for? Drugs? A mithraeum could hardly be called a brilliant hiding place for stashing drugs in. No, there's got to be something else under all this...something hard to imagine.'
It was definitely not his day, Dardanoni thought a few hours later. There were more of the usual cops, cigarette or espresso in hand, stationed outside the church-run residence hall for clergy in the center of Rome. There were just too damned many of these guys. Why weren't they stationed out in the rough neighborhoods instead of piling up in front of a pension for priests and missionaries? What did they think they were going to discover with their fucking coffee cup in hand? Who were they supposed to be protecting here? At this point, the game was over and done with; they had their dead body. It was perfectly pointless collecting here en masse just to frighten three or four monks or whoever they were, who were patiently waiting to have access to their rooms once again.
This residency hall riled him, too. For all practical purposes it was a four-star hotel. Exempt from all taxes by Italian law, which considered it not a profit-making operation but a charitable organization. Oh, what a profit! Mussolini's little present to the Vatican one could call it. And it had never been erased from the books.
The fellow behind the reception desk was clearly a frightened immigrant—he looked Peruvian—possibly illegal and probably paid under the table. His eyes were constantly moving, which made Dardanoni want to scare him all the more, to get him to reveal something. As things stood, all he had done was to recognize the dead man as the customer who had made a phone call in the entrance hall and then hurried out the door.
"I want you to tell me how many bags and suitcases and folders or whatever he had. I want you to tell me every move or movement you saw him make. If he stooped to tie his shoe, you tell me that, I want to know. In return I won't ask you for an ID or immigration papers, got it?"
That son of the Andes made a very loud sigh of relief.
When Dardanoni had finished at the desk, he climbed the stairs to the third floor rather than taking the elevator. He preferred it that way. The police were inspecting the room. The door was open and the usual two corpulent cops stood like useless statues on either side. Grunting at them, he went in. An ass-licker in uniform left his industrious colleague crouching down on the carpet with a tape