David Hewson - The Villa of Mysteries

Falcone sighed. “Point taken. And this book says what exactly?”

She waved the cover at them. Costa glanced at the terrified woman there. It seemed such a modern image. “Dionysus was a cult imported from Greece. You probably know him better as Bacchus.”

“Booze?” Peroni wondered. “You mean this is the result of a drunken orgy or something?”

She grimaced. “You watch too many bad movies. Dionysus was about much more than drink. This was a secret cult, banned as a pagan one even before Christianity because of what went on. Not easy to stamp out either. There were Dionysian rituals going on in Sicily and Greece until a few centuries ago. Maybe they’re still happening and we just don’t know about them.”

Falcone stared pointedly at his watch. “My jurisdiction ends at Rome.”

“OK, OK,” she conceded. “Rome.”

Teresa Lupo opened the book at a page marked with a yellow sticky note. “Here are some pictures, from a place in Ostia. Still suburbia, but around the time this girl was put in the bog this was Rome’s harbour town and a sight bigger than Pompeü. Lots of rich people. Lots of substantial villas on the edge of town, including this one…”

She pointed at an outline on the map then turned the page. There was a series of photographs of an old, churchlike building, then some interior shots of wall paintings. One of the scenes was the image from the front of the book. The rest was a frieze of dancing figures, human and mythical, dancing, coupling.

“Pompeü has a much fuller set of wall paintings. What they seem to show—at least the book claims—is the initiation ceremony for the cult. Not that anyone much understands them these days. The point is that they were all over the place. At Ostia. In Rome too. Probably with the big one hidden somewhere not far from the centre. The holy of holies.”

“What he calls the Palace of Mysteries?” Costa asked.

“Exactly,” she said, nodding. “Which is probably where this poor kid died. I took a good look at the dirt beneath her fingernails. It’s not estuarial. It didn’t come from Ostia. It could be from anywhere in central Rome.”

Peroni looked lost. “You mean these were temples or something? And they kept them hidden?”

“Not quite. More like fun palaces in the dark they could use when the time came.”

Peroni put his finger on the page and traced over the paintings. “Use to kill people?”

Teresa shrugged. “I dunno. You read this book and sometimes you think the guy is sure of what he’s saying, sometimes he’s making it up. What he thinks is that there could be bad consequences if the initiation went wrong. There was some kind of mysterious act which had to be performed with a representative of the god. Sexual, probably. Everyone got doped up to the nines so I imagine most of the time they didn’t have a problem getting their way with these kids. But if the initiate backed off…” She didn’t need to say the rest.

“She a virgin?” Peroni asked.

“I told you. I put off performing a full autopsy until I could get some idea of the date. Now we know I can pass it on to the archaeology people at the university. They can try to find out. From what I’ve seen it’s going to be impossible to tell. Sorry. Do you need to know?”

“Maybe not,” he admitted. “Look. Like I said, I’m no detective. But it seems to me there’s not a lot of meat here. Could be it’s all coincidence. Also—and I hate to point this out—that dating stuff just dates the dirt beneath her fingernails. Don’t date her.”

“I know, I know,” she said firmly. “Stay with it. I’m building a case here. You see what’s in her hand?”

The girl was holding some kind of wand or standard about a metre long, clutched to her side, the head disappearing under her arm. At the base was a protuberance of some kind, round and knobbly.

“This is exactly what the book describes, and that isn’t conjecture. It’s based on historical sources. I took samples. It’s made from several bound stems of fennel. At the top there’s a pine cone, wound into the staff. The thing’s called a ”thyrsus.“ It’s standard issue for Dionysian rituals. Look—”

She turned the pages of the book. There was a picture of a female figure, half dressed, holding the same kind of object, waving it in the face of a satyr, half man, half goat, leering at her.

“It’s used for protection. And purification.”

“Have you dated that?” Falcone asked.

“Radiocarbon costs,” she snapped. “You want me to spend time and money on this instead of something fresh off the street?”

Falcone nodded at the book. “Just asking. You’ve worked very hard, doctor. Congratulations.”

He still didn’t seem that interested.

“There’s one thing left,” she said quickly, as if she thought they might leave the room any moment.

“That is?”

“They found it with a metal detector, remember. How? There’s nothing metallic on her body. No necklace. No rings. No armlet.”

She wanted them to come up with an answer. It didn’t happen. Teresa Lupo went back to the desk and returned with an X-ray of the head. She placed it on the cadaver’s stomach. “See?”

It was a straight-on image of the girl’s skull. There was a bright object there, quite small, in the lower third.

“A coin beneath the tongue,” she said. “To pay Charon, the ferryman who took the dead across the Styx to the Underworld. Without it you never got there. I didn’t need any book to tell me that. I loved mythology when I was a kid.”

To Nic Costa’s surprise, Falcone was abruptly animated by this discovery.

“You’ve got it? The coin?”

“Not yet,” she said. “I was waiting for you.”

“Please—”

“Hey! I have other work, you know.”

They did know that. They also knew how much she liked to be right, and seen to be proved so.

She looked at the face, the half-open mouth, the perfect stained teeth. Then she examined the X-ray again, wondering where to start.

Teresa Lupo picked up a scalpel and, with one careful, clean movement, made an incision in the girl’s left cheek, level with her lower lip. She put the scalpel down then picked up a small pair of shiny steel forceps.

“They dated coins in those days. If this one’s anywhere in the range I outlined I expect you gentlemen to buy me dinner, one by one, in a restaurant of my choosing.”

“It’s a deal,” Falcone replied immediately.

“Ooh!” Teresa squealed with a fake girlish glee as she exercised the forceps, making sure they would do the job. “Dinner with cops! Aren’t I the lucky one? What will we talk about? Football? Sex? Experimental philosophy?”

The forceps entered the slice in the cheek. She turned the instrument deftly, probing, feeling, pushing. Then the arms clamped on something.

“Pass me one of those silver trays,” she said to Costa. “This is going to cost you guys plenty.”

Slowly, she retrieved the forceps from the girl’s mouth and placed an item in the dish. Then she poured some fluid into the pan and cleaned the thing gently with a tiny brush.

The object was a small coin which came up quite shiny. It was silver on the edges with a bronze centre, though both colours looked as if they were slowly transforming to copper through the stain of the peat. It was also familiar.

Teresa Lupo pulled over a large magnifying glass on a swan neck stand. The four of them crowded around the lens, peering at the thing. She turned it over. Twice. Just to make sure.

Peroni stood next to her, shaking his head. “My boy used to collect coins until someone told him it was uncool,” he said. “I helped him sort out his collection. Bought him one of those, mint condition. Dated the first year they issued it, 1982. Five hundred lire. You know something? It was the world’s first bi-metallic coin. No one had made one that was silver on the outside and bronze in the centre before. One other thing. If you look at the obverse, above the picture of the Quirinale, you’ll see the value written in Braille. That was unique too.”