Ring of Fire (26 page)

“Hao!
Harvey!” he says, greeting him.

“Sheng! When did you get here?”

“An hour ago, maybe two?”

“That’s impossible. I’ve been gone less than thirty minutes.”

“Where’ve you been? Why isn’t anyone here?”

Harvey pulls out a set of keys and unlocks the garage.

“I went to a restaurant down the street. It was fantastic! I’d never eaten
bucatini
before!”

“Gee, you seem so worried …,” Sheng chides him. “Elettra? Ermete?”

The garage door goes up with a metallic hum. Harvey goes over everything he knows: the trunk full of teeth that Elettra found, Ermete taking off in his sidecar, and his own meeting at the restaurant with the man’s really shady friend.

“So what’s the guy like?”

Harvey shakes his head, disappointed. “He didn’t make a very good impression on me. Actually, we didn’t talk much at all. Also the guy wasn’t really talking … he … he was wheezing through a little box. But when I asked him about the man with the violin …”

“What did he tell you?”

Harvey snorts. “Barely anything. But when I asked if he knew him, the moment I brought up the subject, it’s like he … woke up. He had me sit down, he ordered me a dish of
bucatini
and he asked me around three hundred questions.”

“And you?”

“I ate my pasta.”

“And his questions?”

“I made up a bunch of stuff.” Harvey smiles. “I’m getting to be almost as good as you are at inventing stories. But I’m telling you, I don’t like that guy one bit.”

“Did you tell him about the briefcase?”

“What do you think I am, an idiot?”

“Hao!
You’re great, Harvey. … So did you tell him or didn’t you?”

“No!” the American boy snaps. “I didn’t tell him anything!”

Sheng goes to open the fridge and comes back with an ice-cold Coca-Cola. “I don’t know. …”

“You don’t know what?”

“There are so many things I don’t know right now. … I wonder if it was a good idea to tell Ermete about all this.”

“I’ve wondered that, too,” admits Harvey.

“And …?”

“And I thought he might even be one of them.”

Sheng gapes at him. “How come?”

“We know he was working with the professor, but we have no way of knowing if the professor really trusted him. …”

“But in his journal he wrote down Ermete’s name right after ‘Study the tops and the wooden map. Find out how it’s used.’”

“The fact is … I don’t know how to explain it to you, Sheng, but I had the funny feeling … that Ermete’s friend knew all about the man with the violin.”

“What made you think that?”

“He never asked me anything about him. He just asked questions about me and how I knew Ermete. Listen …” Harvey starts to count points off on his fingertips. “Ermete knew Professor
Alfred Van Der Berger. Ermete’s friend knows the man with the violin. The man with the violin kills the professor. What’s the only common denominator?”

“Ermete,” Sheng admits, but then he adds, “But he helped us. And he showed us how to use the map.”

“Of course, but we were the ones who had the map,” Harvey reminds him.

Sheng is silent for a moment, thinking things through. “And we basically brought it over to him.”

“Exactly. Speaking of which, what did you find out about the house over in Coppedè?”

Sheng shows him the photos and admits how he was suddenly so scared he turned around and ran off.

“Scared of what, exactly?”

“I don’t know. Just plain scared. It’s like, in that house, there was something … something scary, I guess.”

Harvey looks at his friend with a faint smile. “Well, that explains it.”

Just then, a phone call comes in. The sudden, metallic ring makes them start.

“Should we answer it?” Sheng asks on the second ring.

“It might be Ermete’s mother. She’s called ten times already.”

“How do you know that?”

“Just listen. The answering machine picks up automatically on the fifth ring.”

And, in fact, on the fifth ring, they hear the woman’s shrill, nagging voice. The boys exchange a grin and then the answering machine cuts off the monologue with a beep.

“We’d better get out of here,” suggests Harvey when the room is quiet again. “The more I think about that guy I talked to, the more I feel like putting a few miles between him and me.”

“And if he knows Ermete, he must know where he lives, too. … So where should we go?” asks Sheng. “We don’t know where Elettra and Ermete are, and—”

“Unless…” Harvey suddenly remembers Ermete’s cell phone number. He tries calling, but hangs up again after a moment. “It’s switched off. Or dead. In any case, it’s not working.”

“That’s bad news.”

“We’ve only got two alternatives.”

“Try out one of these fantastic board games?” suggests Sheng.

“No. The first is going back to the hotel and calling it a day. At least for today.”

“And the second?”

“We could—”

“No!” cries Sheng, guessing what Harvey’s going to suggest.

“I haven’t said anything yet!”

“But I can already tell. …” Sheng continues to nervously pace across the room with long strides.

“Sheng? What can you tell?”

The Chinese boy picks up his backpack and puts all their gear into it. “Let’s at least pack up all our stuff first.”

“Do you want to hear the second alternative or not?”

“I know …,” sighs Sheng. “We go back together to the Coppedè district. And we look for Mistral.”

Harvey tosses the journal into his friend’s backpack. “Sometimes you amaze me.”

“Hao. …,”
mumbles Sheng. “But I’m warning you: to get there we’ll need to take a bunch of buses. And we’re almost out of tickets.”

A few minutes later, Harvey and Sheng walk out of the apartment. The overcast sky threatens to snow. They reach the sidewalk and look around suspiciously. But the few people who are walking along, chilled, don’t seem to take any interest in them.

“How can you tell if someone’s following you?” asks Sheng.

“You just keep your eyes open,” Harvey answers.

They head toward the bus stop.

“Harvey?”

“What?”

“This is all really exciting …,” Sheng admits. “But … now … I almost wish it was over.”

“So do I,” the American boy replies.

Behind them, the telephone in Ermete’s empty apartment rings five times. The answering machine automatically clicks on. “Harvey! Sheng!” the engineer’s voice is heard shouting as it’s recorded on the tape. “I just saw that you called! You’ve got to come immediately to the Basilica di San Clemente! I repeat: the Basilica di San Clemente! We might just have found … well, the you-know-what. … Come on! We’ll be waiting for you!”

T
HE
B
ASILICA DI
S
AN
C
LEMENTE LOOKS LIKE AN ANIMAL CROUCHED
beneath the snow. Inside, the golden dome over the altar is filled with the whispers of the few tourists and the echoing of their footsteps.

Elettra and Ermete walk in through a side door.

“I’ve never been in here before …,” says the girl, looking around. “It’s a very pretty church.”

Ermete points at the nave to their left, where the ticket booth is. “Lucky you,” he sighs. “This must be my thirtieth time here. I think I know all the churches in Rome inch by inch.”

Elettra glances at him inquisitively.

“My mom made me be an altar boy,” the engineer explains. “Back when she was still proud of me.”

The ticket booth is closed, but Ermete takes advantage of his old acquaintances and, after a brief chat with the priest, who’s as tall and gaunt as a sardine, he’s given keys that unlock a very large door. On the other side of the door is a stairway that makes its way steeply underground in a long series of white steps.

“Where’s the
mitreo
?” asks Elettra.

“Way, way down,” replies Ermete.

* * *

Below the church of San Clemente is a second church. A row of floor lamps turns on with a chorus of clicks. Once she’s reached the foot of the stairs, Elettra has the impression she’s walked into a stone forest lit up by torches. The ancient walls are like canopies of intertwined branches. The tombs carved into the walls, the niches and the writings on the tombstones are like wrinkled bark. There are Latin inscriptions and fragments of mosaics. Frescoes paled over time. Faded images with dull colors.

And a damp silence.

“Is this it?” Elettra asks, making her way through the strange forest of bricks and stone like a nocturnal animal.

“No. This is the old church. The
mitreo
is even farther down,” replies Ermete, leading her toward the nave on the left, to a strange sculpted stairway that looks like a well. On the floor are the remains of columns, which jut up like truncated tusks. “We have to go down this way,” he says.

Beneath the old underground church is an even older temple.

They can hear the river now.

The temple beneath the church is dark and damp. Water gurgles around it, inside the walls. Elettra has the sensation she’s been caught up in the current of an invisible river held back by only stones and darkness.

She fights back a shiver.

“It’s this way, if I remember correctly …,” says Ermete, turning down a corridor with a tall, narrow ceiling and then down a second one illuminated by a single beam of electric light reflecting off its golden archways.

All around them is the sound of the water. And it’s cold. But since the very moment they stepped into the temple, into the damp embrace of the underground river, Elettra’s felt hot.

“We’re close. … I can feel it …,” she whispers.

The
mitreo
is a long, narrow room with a vaulted ceiling and a row of seats carved into the stone walls. In the center is an altar, rising up over which are four head-shaped sculptures. Elettra stares at the altar through the bars of the gate, the only way in.

“That’s the third altar, the oldest one of them all,” Ermete says, pointing. “If I remember well, over it is a sculpture of the god Mithra battling a bull. Funny, don’t you think?”

“Yeah,” replies Elettra, although she doesn’t see anything funny in it at all.

Ermete kneels down by the gate’s lock. “An altar to the sun god, located underground and surrounded by water.”

Maybe that’s what he finds funny. …

“An altar over which is the depiction of an ancient god defeating a bull …,” murmurs Ermete, examining the lock carefully. “Who knows what the bull ever did to him?” He pulls a Swiss Army knife out of his pocket. “I used to be crazy about locks. And I found that basically none of them are really foolproof.”

“You’re going to pick the lock?”

“Something like that, yes,” the engineer admits. “If I’m lucky, that is.” At first, the little knife turns around uselessly, and then, suddenly … the lock gives off a clack. “Done.”

The gate creaks open.

“After you,
mademoiselle!”
jokes Ermete, spreading his arm out into the empty room.

Elettra takes a deep breath and walks in.

“See anything?” the engineer asks, his hand brushing over the seats carved into the walls.

“No. But it’s really small.”

“Hey, are you all right?”

“I’m burning up,” replies Elettra.

They walk all the way around the room twice. The altar to Mithra is a sculpted parallelepiped with the image of the god in human form. The floor around it is slick and smooth, having been worn down over the centuries. There are eleven openings in the ceiling.

“Is this where Emperor Nero worshiped the sun?” Elettra asks in a hushed voice, afraid she’ll disturb the atmosphere of such an ancient place. Her hand brushes over the bas-relief work on the altar and she can feel her skin burning.

Ermete shrugs. “I haven’t got the slightest idea. But if you need to search a
mitreo
, this is the right place to start.”

“We don’t even know what we need to look for.”

“Or how to look for it. Ring of Fire?” whispers Ermete. “Ring of Fire, you there?”

Elettra can’t help but smile. “I don’t think you can just call it like it’s your pet cat. …”

“Who knows?”

It’s not easy to find anything unusual in the ancient simplicity of the room. Stone, shadows and eleven niches in the ceiling. An altar with four heads sculpted over it. And the water flowing by on the other side of the walls.

“Well, unless you have any ideas, I give up,” Ermete says after
a while. He leans against the damp wall. “It’s like playing a game when you don’t know the rules.”

“Ring of Fire … Ring of Fire …,” repeats Elettra, standing in the center of the room. “It’s hot in here.”

“You think so? I’m freezing.”

The girl kneels down on the ground and rests her hands against one of the stones.

Cold. Cold. Cold.

She starts to move, crawling along on the floor.

Cold. Cold. Cold.

“What are you doing?”

“Shhh…,” responds Elettra. “You can’t understand how much energy I’ve got inside of me.” She shuts her eyes and tries to concentrate, keeping her hands resting on the stones. The further she goes, the more her fingers start to move on their own, like antennas. They’re sensing the
mitreo’s
ancient signals, which have remained unchanged over time.