houses with running porches and porticoes, and I could play for hours with my cousins and friends in the street. Then one day, after an emergency phone call—my maternal grandmother was dying—my Indian grandparents found out that my mysterious mother, who they'd thought was bedridden, was in fact a perfectly healthy, if sobbing, Italian woman. My father and I were immediately booted out."
"And you've never been back."
Arjan gave her another half-rueful smile. "Hard, you know?" he said. "I was eleven. But today I keep up with a couple of buddies. I go to restaurants for my spicy chicken, my sali murghi."
"And now….you are up in Holland."
"Researching mithraeums. Like Kevin, but with a different twist. The Mithras cult was important for Zarathustra, the founder of our Parsi religion."
Outside there was a flat green landscape dotted with sheep and dairy cows, neat two-story modern buildings, hot-air balloons, bike paths, and irrigation canals. Conversationally, and at in a way that piqued Angie's interest, Arjan explained about his research. "The ancient Roman city where Utrecht stands today was called Traiectum, and more or less where the central canal, Oude Gracht, is was once the border between the Empire and the barbaric tribes. I'm investigating evidence that there was a mithraeum here, in the vicinity of one of the Roman limes forts, each with five hundred soldiers and nearby to them, their families and groups of artisans. With Emperor Claudius's decision that the Empire should extend no further north than Utrecht along the Rhine, this became from about 50 AD to 275 AD a crucial point along the Germanicus defense line.
"Something um, like the Great Wall of China?"
"Not really," replied Arjan amicably. "The purpose of the limes was control of the traffic of people and animals. This knowledge of all groups crossing the border was important for the Roman Empire. Almost all of the legions were based close to the frontiers. Any hostile group who managed to pass this area of defense could travel within the empire without significant resistance. This concentration and contact with the enemy on the other side explains why and how the Romans learned from and copied other civilizations. If there are mithraeums in these places, or in England, it's because Roman soldiers had already come into contact with this Oriental religion—along the opposite, eastern borders of the empire, in particular from the Persian soldiers they were fighting."
He watched her get out a little notebook and write his words down.
"Why don't you use a voice recorder?"
"Doesn't work. I mean I don't remember things unless I write them down. Like at a lecture."
"And this is turning into a lecture." He smiled. "So are you in college, Ms. Cebrelli?"
"Yes and no. I'm currently doing the weather on a local TV station."
He didn't say anything but smiled more or less innocuously, like the Buddhas in restaurants that seem ready to tolerate harmless tricks.
They emerged from the long glass shopping tunnel adjacent to the Utrecht Centraal and found that it was a splendid late morning, as cool and clear as only certain windy days in Holland are. There was an seventeenth-century feel to the narrow brick streets, which then opened onto a square with the most imposing post office building Angie had ever seen, in terms of its massive black gambrel roof in any case. Arjan Gupta insisted on waiting in the hotel lobby while she checked in, and, once she'd changed her clothes, on taking her to a café down on one of the water-level quays of the embanked canal.
"That photo of the medallion really got to you, I know."
As she assented, her mouth full of burning hot coffee, he added, "Basically, Kevin was in that mithraeum looking for figures similar to the one on what he termed the 'refound' medallion. He said that he had with him an enlarged photo, a scan from a newspaper."
"So it was his," she said. "But what did you mean by that business about the medallion re-appearing?"
"There is an ancient papyrus in Sanskrit…which one of my friends from college, Damien Brandeau, was able to physically examine, I don't know where or when."
"I know who Damien Brandeau is."
He gave her a questioning look.
"Father Giovanni Martini at Georgetown told me."
He continued blandly, "So you know Damien is, or at one time was, a leading scholar in his field. The papyrus in question once belonged to a certain Guézennec, a young disciple of Champollion, who was the first to figure out how to read Egyptian hieroglyphics…you know, the Rosetta stone. Damien found the papyrus while he was doing research down in Louisiana. There's mention in this papyrus of a medallion which, if the translation is right, serves as a key to a treasure. This treasure has gone undiscovered for a thousand years. Because of Guézennec's follow-up research on Latin documents from the time of the Inquisition, we simply know that at a certain point the medallion was buried in Rome."
"I don't get it. Why should the medallion have to be hidden for centuries?"
"I don't know the answer to that," admitted Arjan. "Might the medallion have opened doors that should go unopened? All we know now is that it resurfaced sometime during your great-great-great- grandfather's life. You said that you found it among his things that your family has kept in a suitcase. But Ms. Cebrelli, what else was there besides the medallion?"
"A lot of things." She felt too tired from her night to put together a careful list. "Newspaper clippings, letters written by my ancestors who were Garibaldi supporters, a pouch with a strange pin and vial in it, a red soldier's shirt…and other stuff that I'm forgetting."
"Have you read the letters?"
"I don't read Italian. My mom does a little, though."
"You must read them absolutely. They might provide valuable clues to the answers you're looking for…there might be in them those insignificant details that in reality represent something important."
"To the usual mysterious Damien Brandeau anyway?"
In silence Arjan studied the empty bottom of his coffee cup.
"Are you in contact with him?"
"I can't reveal a thing about him. I don't know where he lives. I only have a way of signalling to him that I want to talk to him. Then he phones me."
"Does he know about the murder?"
Arjan nodded.
"Will he talk to me? Let me put that differently. Take me to him. I have the medallion he's looking for."
Shaking his head, Arjan gave his trademark smile again. "I can arrange a meeting all right. But how can I tell him that you have the real medallion?"
Angie pertly unbuttoned the top two buttons of her short-sleeved yellow blouse.
"The medallion is this."
"Here?" he started. "You have it here?"
As she offered it to him—its chain still round her neck—he didn't speak for a long time but continued to turn it over and over between his hands just as he would a dollar coin. After the first minute, he didn't even look at it; he just 'felt' it, his eyes averted, his thoughts goodness-knew-where.
"This lion-headed figure, it's Mithraic, isn't it?" she coaxed. Every time the subject was touched, she'd noted, new particulars were added.
"A sort of demon god. Related to time." He fell silent again. "You're crazy to have this with you," he said finally. "As you said, we could very well be in danger."
"We?"
"You and me for sure with this, but potentially many other people, too."
She frowned. "I don't get it."
"Well, Ms. Cebrelli, it's not just a matter of ancient religions or Proto-Christianity here. That treasure which I mentioned is reputed to be immense. To begin with, this medallion of yours is the key to Queen Zenobia's ransom." He seemed to have recovered his good-natured, savvied air.
"Zenobia?" She groped for her notepad.