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patient.”
    Alessio shivered. He stared at the scarred surface of the cheap table, trying not to think. Giorgio had brought a thick jacket with him. It occurred to his son that his father had known all along that they would end up in this chill, damp chamber beneath the ground. Alessio wore just a pair of thin cotton school trousers and his white T-shirt, a clean one that morning, with the symbol his mother had designed for the school outlined in distinct colours on the front: a star inside a dark blue circle, with a set of equidistant smaller stars set around them.
    Seven stars. Seven points.
    “I will,” he promised his father.
             

    I T BEGAN, TORCHIA KNEW, WITH GIORGIO’S LECTURE THE previous month, three hours of a long, warm afternoon in the airless aula in the Piazza dei Cavalieri di Malta, one he’d never forget. Bramante was in his finest form: brilliant, electrifying, incisive. The subject, nominally, was what little was known about the philosophy of the Roman military Mithraic sects. But it was about much more than that, though Ludo Torchia suspected he was the only one in the class who knew it. What Bramante was really talking about was life itself, the passage from child to man, the acceptance of duty and deference to those above, and the need, absolute, unquestionable, for obedience, trust, and secrecy within the tight, closed ranks of the social group to which an individual belonged. He was talking about life itself.
    Torchia had listened, rigid in his seat, unable to take his eyes off Giorgio, who sat on his desk, fit and muscular in a tight T-shirt and Gucci jeans, a leader at perfect ease with his flock.
    One part came back to Torchia now. Bramante had been discussing the seven-ranked hierarchy. Vignola had asked a question that seemed, on the face of things, sensible. How did structures like this begin? At what point, in the nascent stage of Mithraism’s emergence, did someone dictate that there would be seven ranks, with set rituals for the progression from one to the next? Where, he wanted to know, did it all come from?
    Bramante had smiled at them, an attractive, knowing smile, like a father indulging a son.
    “They didn’t need to ask that question, Sandro,” the professor replied in his measured, powerful voice. “They knew the answer already. Their religion came from their god.”
    “Yes, but…in real life,” Vignola objected. “I mean, it didn’t happen that way. It couldn’t.”
    “How do you know?” Bramante had asked.
    “Because it couldn’t! If Mithras was real, where did he go?”
    “They murdered him.” Torchia said it without thinking, and was pleased, and a little disturbed, too, by Giorgio’s reaction to his impulsive answer. Bramante was staring at him, an expression of surprise and admiration on his handsome face.
    “Constantine murdered Mithras,” the professor agreed. “Constantine and his bishops. Just as they murdered all the old gods. If you talk to the theologians they’ll give you other answers. But I’m not a theologian, nor is this a theology class. We’re historians. We look at facts and deduce what we can from them. The facts state that much of the Roman army followed Mithras for the best part of three centuries. Then, with Christianity, Mithras died, and with him the beliefs of those who followed him. Whether you view that literally or not, that is, inescapably, what happened. If you want more complicated answers, you’re in the wrong department.”
    “It must have been terrible,” Torchia remarked, unable to take his eyes off his professor.
    “What?” Bramante asked.
    “Terrible. To have lost your religion. To have watched it ripped from you.”
    “The Christians had to put up with that for three centuries,” Bramante pointed out.
    “The Christians won.”
    There was a flicker of something—knowledge, perhaps even self-doubt—in Giorgio Bramante’s eyes. Torchia couldn’t stop looking at it.
    “What would have been