The Seventh Sacrament Read Free Page A

now looked entirely at home in this man-made vein tunnelled by hand, every last, tortuous metre. The rest of them were beginners, in jeans and jackets, a couple even wearing sneakers. Aboveground Abati had scowled at them before they started work on the locks of the flimsy iron entrance gates.
    Now, just twenty minutes in, their eyes still trying to acclimatise to the dark, Toni LaMarca was already starting to moan, whining in his high-pitched voice, its trilling notes rebounding off the roughly hacked stone walls just visible in their lights.
    “Be quiet, Toni,” Torchia snapped at him.
    “Remind me. Why exactly are we doing this?” LaMarca complained. “I’m freezing my nuts off already. What if we get caught? What about that, huh?”
    “I told you! We won’t get caught,” Torchia replied. “I checked the rosters. No one’s coming down here today. Not today. Not tomorrow.”
    “So why?”
    “So we can leave you down here to rot, you moron,” someone said from the back, Andrea Guerino, judging by the gruff, northern voice, and he was only half joking.
    Ludo Torchia stopped. So did they. That much of his superiority, his leadership, he’d established already.
    “What did we say last night?” he demanded.
    “Search me. I was drunk out of my mind,” LaMarca replied, looking at each of them in turn, searching for confirmation. “Weren’t we all?”
    From dope and drink came dreams. It had been a long night in the bar in the Viale Aventino. They’d all spent too much money. They all, Dino Abati excepted, had smoked themselves stupid when they got back to the dingy house they shared near the old Testaccio slaughterhouse, the one with the statue Torchia couldn’t help but stare at each day he passed on the way to the tram and college. The abattoir was surmounted by the struggling figure of a winged man fighting to wrestle a bull to the ground, amid a sea of bones, animal and human. Mithras lived, Torchia thought. He was simply invisible to the masses.
    “We said we would finish this,” Torchia insisted.
    He held out his wrist, showed them the small wound each of them shared, made with the blunt razor blade he’d found in the bathroom, late that night.
    “We said we would do this together. In secret. As brothers.”
    They were all drones really. Torchia didn’t like a single one of them. Didn’t like anyone in Giorgio Bramante’s archaeology class if he was being honest. Except Bramante himself. That man had class and knowledge and imagination, three qualities Torchia judged to be supremely important. The rest were mere marionettes, ready to be manipulated by anyone who wanted to, though these five he’d picked with care and reason.
    LaMarca, the skinny offspring of some minor hood from Naples, dark-skinned, with an untrustworthy face that never looked anyone in the eye, was quick and crooked and could surely help if things went wrong. Guerino, a none-too-bright farmer’s son from Abruzzo, was big enough and tough enough to keep everyone in line. Sandro Vignola, the sick-looking kid from Bologna, short and geeky behind thick glasses, knew Latin so well he could hold rapid, fluent conversations with Isabella Amato, the plain, bright, fat girl Vignola adored so much he blushed whenever they spoke, and still didn’t dare ask her out. Raul Bellucci, always on the edge of terror, had a lawyer for a father, one who’d recently won himself a seat in the Senate, the kind of man who would always turn out to help his son, should the sort of influence LaMarca possessed fail to do the trick. And Dino Abati, the class cave-freak, fit, knowing, shorter than Guerino but just as powerfully built, was there to keep them all alive. Abati seemed to have spent half his life underground, and cast a greedy eye at every manhole, cave, and underground working he walked past in Rome, where there were many, most of them awaiting investigation.
    Abati didn’t say much. Torchia half suspected Dino didn’t believe in what they