24
THE LETTERS
“OKAY. DON’T MOVE!” ERMETE SHOUTS INTO THE PHONE. “I’LL BE right there!”
“Where are we going?” asks Harvey, watching the engineer rush from one end of the house to the other, his sparse hair still damp. He opens and shuts all the drawers, one by one. As always, the keys to his motorcycle have disappeared.
“How is this possible?” he yells furiously. The phone rings again. “You get it!”
Harvey picks up the receiver and hears a woman’s voice shrieking nonstop. Guessing who it is, he covers the receiver with his hand and calls out, “Ermete! It’s your mother!”
“Tell her I’m not here,” the engineer replies, rummaging around in a pile of dirty T-shirts. “Where the heck did I put them?”
Harvey uncovers the receiver and stammers, “Um, ma’am? Right now Ermete is—”
“I’m not here!” the man shouts from the back of the room. He’s finally found his keys inside an empty vase. He grabs them, walks up to Harvey, yanks the phone out of his hand and says in Italian, “Hi, Mom. Listen, whatever it is, I don’t care. No no no no. Really. Today I can’t!” And with this, he hangs up.
Then he crouches down beside Harvey and explains, “Elettra called. She seems to have found … well, something incredible. …”
“What?” asks Harvey, his heart thumping.
“Oh, it’s an old legend in Rome. … Years ago there was this monk over on Tiber Island—”
“I’ve seen that,” Harvey bursts in. “That’s the island where all this started.”
Ermete ignores the interruption and goes on. “His name was Friar Orsenigo. He was a tooth-puller.”
“A what?”
“A kind of dentist. It’s just, he didn’t take care of teeth. He only took them out. And he did it with his bare hands.”
Harvey instinctively raises a hand to his mouth. “Not for me, thanks.”
“Well, all of Rome used to go to him because he didn’t ask for money. He’d slip his fingers into your mouth and … Crack! Goodbye tooth, goodbye pain. They say the pope even went to see him and that this was the only time the monk’s fingers were particularly gentle. The only thing Orsenigo asked in return for his services was that he be allowed to keep all the teeth he pulled. They say he collected almost two million of them during his lifetime.”
Something suddenly dawns on Harvey. “Does this have anything to do with the tooth we found in the briefcase?”
“It sure looks like it,” Ermete confirms. “Elettra found one of Friar Orsenigo’s trunks. Which, naturally, is full of teeth … and each tooth has something written on it.”
Harvey gapes. “You mean there’s some sort of message on them?”
“You got it. I’m going over to take a look.”
“I’m going with you.”
“No,” Ermete says, stopping him. “You’re going to see my friend. Without me.”
“But I’ll just get arrested—”
“I don’t think he’s under surveillance. He’s not a big fish. He’s more of a movie and music pirate. But he’s one of those guys who knows everything about everybody. You know the type.”
“No. I don’t know the type.”
“Try to work with me here. …” Ermete walks over to the table and scribbles something on a piece of paper. “He might just know something about the man with the violin. Like if anyone’s seen him. Or if there are rumors spreading around …” He hands him the piece of paper. “Go and tell him I sent you. Ask him for everything he knows. But don’t give him too many details, and most importantly, don’t tell him your real name.”
“It all sounds pretty shady to me,” Harvey remarks.
“And it is. But didn’t you want to do something, too?”
“So what’s ‘Bucatino’?” the boy asks, reading the note.
“It’s a restaurant a few blocks from here. Go down three hundred meters and take the first right. You can’t miss it.” Ermete opens the garage door.
“How do I recognize your friend?”
“That’ll be easy,” the man mumbles as he slips on his helmet. He climbs onto the motorcycle and revs the engine. “He looks just like Vasco Rossi.”
“Who?”
“You guys don’t get Vasco Rossi in America?”
“Never heard of him.”
The motorcycle roars like a military helicopter. “He’s a little guy, with a bit of a belly and long hair. His name’s Joe. You’ll recognize him because they operated on his vocal cords. In order to talk he needs to keep a little amplifier box pressed up against his throat.”
“Amplifier box,” Harvey says, making a mental note of it.
“And close the garage door!” shouts Ermete, peeling out through the snow.
Elettra and the Gypsy woman are sitting cross-legged on the plastic-covered floor of the shanty. Neither one says a word. They’ve begun to take the teeth out of the trunk, dividing them into little piles according to the letters engraved into them. So far, they’ve made five piles.
“Were the lines bad?” asks Elettra suddenly, fishing a handful of incisors and molars out of the trunk.
The Gypsy doesn’t reply. She continues to sort through the teeth with methodical precision. “There are no good or bad lines. There are only lines,” she explains after a moment.
“The lines about the end of the world are bad lines.”
“That depends on the world you live in,” the woman rebuts.
Elettra can’t think of anything to say to that. She lets more time pass before she says, “If I asked you to tell me what you saw in my palm … would you do it?”
“Only if you really wanted me to. Do you?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Then I won’t tell you.” The Gypsy’s eyes dart over to look at the door of the shanty. They hear footsteps drawing near.
“That must be my friend …,” Elettra guesses. She goes up to the door made of streetside posters and opens it up to let Ermete in.
“What a disaster …,” the man complains, brushing off his muddy jacket. “I tripped and almost took an ice-cold bath in the Tiber.”
Once inside, he raises his hand to greet the Gypsy woman. “Ermete!” he says, introducing himself. She replies, a hint of gold sparkling through her hair.
“This is incredible!” Ermete cries a moment later, staring at the trunk. “Why didn’t Alfred ever tell me about this?”
“There’s one letter on each tooth,” explains Elettra, showing Ermete the little piles they’ve made on the floor. “So far, we’ve found five different letters.”
“It would take a whole day to sort through all these …,” the engineer begins, looking at the hundreds of teeth still lying in the trunk.
“That’s why I called you. I was hoping you’d show up here with Harvey and Sheng.”
“They were busy. Besides, they wouldn’t both have fit in the sidecar. Let me see the letters …,” Ermete says, changing the subject.
The letters are “I,” “T,” “E,” “R” and “M.”
The man scratches his head. “What do you think this is all about?”
“I don’t have the foggiest idea,” the girl replies. “But the professor did, it seems.”
“Didn’t he explain any of this to you?” Ermete asks the Gypsy.
“He just said they were looking for it. And that they mustn’t find out where to look.”
“So there’s something we need to look for in this trunk. …” Ermete’s hands dive down into the teeth, all the way up to his elbows. “But what?” he wonders.
The three continue to sort through the teeth until, an hour later, the gas heater sputters off and the bitter cold once again starts to creep in through the walls of the shack. Elettra looks at the piles of teeth. “Still the same letters …,” she points out.
“The only thing I can think of is that you can spell my name with them …,” Ermete notes, rubbing his hands together to warm them. He picks up a canine, three molars and two incisors and lays them out one beside the other, forming a grinning yellowed ERMETE. Then he uses the teeth as tiles in a macabre mosaic, trying to form other words. “ ‘Meet’… ‘Rite’ …”
The Gypsy tries to get the heater working again, but it’s no use. Elettra rubs her fingers, which have grown numb.
“ ‘Tremiti.’ That’s the name of a group of islands. … Could that be it? Maybe what we’re looking for is there. Or … ‘terrier’…,” Ermete says aloud, still trying. “ ‘Meter’… ‘Miter’… ‘Remit’…”
Elettra’s fingers are tingling. “What did you say?”
“ ‘Term’?” mumbles Ermete. “ ‘Termite’?”
“No, wait. Go back. You said a word that made me think of … the sun god. Nero. Fire …”
“Maybe you’re just getting a little too cold,” says the engineer with a smile as he rearranges the teeth, one beside the other. “Anyway, I know what you’re thinking of: Mithra. But we can’t spell it with these. Unless there are teeth with the letters ‘H’ and ‘A’ in that trunk.”
“Hold on!” cries Elettra, struck by a revelation. “Actually, we do have another letter.”
“Which one?”
The girl thrusts her hand into her pocket and fishes out the tooth they were given by the professor. “There’s a letter here, too! I thought it was a circle, or a ring. … But what if it was actually the letter ‘O’?”
Elettra lays the tooth down beside five others.
OMITRE.
“Ah …,” Ermete murmurs, reading the letters. “That’s it! But the ‘O’ doesn’t go here. … It goes on the other end.”
MITREO.
“Meaning …?” asks Elettra.
“The mitreo!” Ermete explains. “That’s the name of the temple where they worshipped Mithra centuries ago.”
“Keep going. …”
“There was a really famous one in Rome, one underground, beneath two other churches.” Ermete grabs Elettra’s hand, clutching it tightly. “And it’s completely surrounded by water. An underground river that flows all around it. …”
“A ring of water?” asks Elettra.
“Precisely!” Ermete cheers. “What better place could there be to hide a Ring of Fire?”
“So where is it?”
“San Clemente,” replies Ermete, rising to his feet.
* * *
“We’ve got to go,” Jacob Mahler orders Beatrice. He’s as calm as a summer storm. He hurls an empty suitcase to the ground, slams the violin case on top of it and adds, “Immediately.”
“Go where?”
“You just get the car started.”
“And you?”
The man walks by her, leaving a trail of his characteristic cologne behind him. He opens up a wardrobe, yanks out his wheeled carry-on bag and throws it into the hallway. “I’ve got to talk with the girl.”
“To tell her what?”
“She lied to me.” Jacob Mahler walks back and kicks the empty suitcase, making the violin case tumble down at Beatrice’s feet. “And I don’t intend to let her get away with it again.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Ask her questions.”
“And if she doesn’t answer them?”
Jacob raises an eyebrow, as if to warn her that she’s pushing his buttons. “Go downstairs and get the car ready,” he orders.
But Beatrice insists. “If she doesn’t answer them?”
An instant later the wind has been knocked out of her. Mahler has pinned her up against the wall with catlike grace and thrust his face up centimeters from hers.
“Listen up,” he says. “Because I’m not going to tell you this a second time. I’m going in there to talk to the little brat. And she’s going to tell me what I want to know. Because it just so happens that, who knows how, she and her friends are keeping me from tracking down what my boss wants me to deliver to him.”
“Are you afraid, Jacob Mahler?” Beatrice hisses, suffocating in his grasp. “Are you afraid of Heremit Devil?”
Mahler strikes her with his open palm and throws her to the floor. The slap echoes through the room. “I told you never to say that name.”
“Heremit… Devil…,” the young woman coughs, staying on the ground, her face shielded behind her arm. And she repeats it again. “Heremit Devil.”
Jacob Mahler clenches his fists.
Beatrice props herself up against the wall. She slowly wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, noticing that her lips are red with blood. And then she says, “Behold! The great Jacob Mahler, the infallible killer … who beats women and gets fooled by a group of kids.”
The man glares down at her with a sneer. “You’re pathetic.”
“Maybe. But you need me.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Oh, but I think so,” replies Beatrice. “And I’m telling you, don’t go near that girl.”
“Who’s going to stop me? You?”
“If I have to, yes,” retorts Beatrice, pulling the gun out of her pocket.
Mahler lets out a laugh and turns his back to her. “You don’t know what you’re doing. It isn’t even loaded.”
“Oh, really?” Beatrice says threateningly.
“Go warm up the car …,” Jacob Mahler orders, leaning over to get something from his carry-on bag.
“And you go to hell!” shouts Beatrice, pulling the trigger.