The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [49]
Bobby said, “Your wife likes to shop, doesn’t she?”
“What are you talking about?”
“What she doesn’t like to do is pay her parking tickets.” Traden produced a more or less official-looking printout that he had manufactured on his computer. The tickets were real—most of them anyway—but the documentation was strictly for drama. “I bet you don’t even know about some of these. Out-of-state folks, they get a ticket in Chicago, they usually just pluck it off the windshield and drop it on the street. Some days it looks like the curb is painted orange. Anyway, Lorena was very lucky she didn’t get the Denver boot the last couple times. Must not have been one available.”
“What is your point, Detective?”
“My point is that the tickets can go away and your wife can drive in Chicago again without looking over her shoulder for the tow truck.” There was a knock, and before Cepeda could move, Bobby answered it. A student with a thick wave of moussed hair, textbook in one hand and an iPod in the other, started to open his mouth but stiffened when Kloska shoved his badge into the hallway.
“You get an A,” Kloska said to him. “Go play on the quad.” He slammed the door.
Cepeda clenched his teeth. “Do not talk to my students like that.”
“Yeah, he’ll probably go blog about that, won’t he? Maybe post it to one of those teacher-rating Web sites. Wait until you see what I tell the next one.”
Cepeda rubbed his face. “I really don’t know anything. It’s all speculation—”
“Then speculate.”
“The ramifications of my talking about this could be far more serious than a few parking tickets.”
“Convince me,” Kloska said.
Bobby watched the professor’s body language as he came to the conclusion that he was going to lose this battle of wills eventually. It was an old cop trick. You don’t really have to threaten to do anything, just get the subject to understand you’re capable of pushing a lot harder than he is, if it comes to pushing.
“The Thousand,” Cepeda said, more to the room than to Kloska.
“What?”
“The Thousand. Pythagoreans.”
Pythagoreans? Kloska groaned. He had been ready to move the questioning in an entirely different direction. “I thought you said Pythagoras lived before Jesus.”
“That’s right.”
“But there are still Pythagoreans?”
“There are still Christians, yeah? The followers of Pythagoras were exiled from Croton in a political coup and they spread out across the Mediterranean. They had incredible influence on art and religion and science and math. But most people thought the cult itself had basically disbanded, or been absorbed by other secret societies like the Freemasons. However, in 1738, a handful of students at Yale formed a debating society. Membership was extremely exclusive. It was the first secret society at that university.”
“You mean like Skull and Bones?”
“Skull and Bones, Scroll and Key, dozens of others. They are all just copies of Yale’s original secret society. And do you know what it was called, Detective?”
Kloska didn’t even bother to shake his head.
“It was called Crotonia.”
Bobby looked helplessly through his notes.
“Like Croton,” Traden said over Kloska’s shoulder. “Where Pythagoras started his school.”
Cepeda nodded, acknowledging Traden for the first time. “By the 1760s, Crotonia had basically disappeared from Yale without a trace. Nothing about the group except for the name is known. But some believe Crotonia was a clue to an ancient mystery, a rare visible manifestation of a wildly successful conspiracy of silence—an ancient brotherhood known as the Thousand. Unlike the groups Crotonia spawned—so-called secret societies with prominent placement on their members’ résumés and giant houses in the middle of campus, ridiculous tombs even—the Thousand might actually have a secret worth protecting.”
“Which is?”
Cepeda stood and ran his fingers over a number of old volumes on the dusty and drooping shelf above his desk. He removed one and scanned the table of contents.