by Tom Pollack
As was typical in September, mist shrouded the coastline when Amanda parked her jeep on an inconspicuous turnoff on PCH. Jogging across the highway with her board under her arm, she followed a nearly hidden path between two large properties. In a dark wetsuit, her figure was barely noticeable in the half-light.
It had taken her months of trial and error to find the narrow path. The estates on each side were lavishly, and almost impenetrably, landscaped with sprawling, ground-level bougainvillea and tall hedges of gorse, with its distinctive fragrance of vanilla and almond. Using thorns and spines—albeit tastefully—the wealthy owners had made every effort to choke off access to the ocean in order to maintain their precious privacy. Amanda smiled slightly as she threaded her way between the bushes. “Surfers are sometimes more resourceful than billionaires,” she thought wryly. The public still owned everything below the mean high-water mark, at least according to the California Coastal Commission.
Reaching the cliff’s edge, Amanda carefully negotiated the steep steps that led to the beach. Even in the semidarkness, she could see that the text message from SoCal Surfwatch had been right on. The swells stretched in perfect lines that reached to the horizon. Long, slow curls punctuated the break in even sets, shoulder high for the most part with a few overheads. As she attached her leash just above the small, ancient scroll tattooed on the inside of her right ankle, Amanda noted with satisfaction that she was in sole possession of the break. Taking a deep breath and clearing her mind, she positioned her five-foot-ten frame along the center of her board and began to paddle out. In half an hour, the sun would be up.
She paddled and caught, paddled and thought. It was a biorhythm by now. As she listened to the surf, the colors diffused through the thinning mist. “Why is this dawn special?” she wondered. Somehow one telephone call had lifted a weight from her shoulders. A longer interval between sets arrived and, with characteristic discipline, she made a mental inventory.
On the one hand, Juan Carlos had made an offer that was hard to refuse. Her job had begun to weigh on her. Dr. Walker never really criticized her, but neither did he seem likely to promote her. Exploring a major find in the nuovi scavi ruins might have a professional payoff. She had been to Ercolano a few times before, when she worked on papyri for the Philodemus Project for her PhD at UCLA. The Bay of Naples wasn’t hard to look at, even after Point Dume!
But there were questions in her mind, most of them about Juan Carlos. Was he aiming to rekindle the romance they had shared as undergraduates? Did she want him to? He had been her lifeguard when her dad died—a save that neither of them would ever forget. She’d been on the floor in her bathroom, with several Vicodin in her stomach and a fifth of vodka clutched in her hand. She vaguely recalled a breakneck ride to Cedars-Sinai Hospital, where they pumped her stomach. Although her religious life had seen its ups and downs, Amanda thought she had found a guardian angel. But how did that square with their drifting apart after graduation?
They had met eight years earlier, as juniors at UCLA, after he scored the winning goal in the conference championship game. The memory of Juan Carlos throwing his jersey in the air, displaying his impeccably chiseled torso to thousands of cheering fans, was etched in Amanda’s brain. She almost blushed while waiting for the next set of swells to form.
“What would Dad want me to do?” She was pretty sure of the answer. An ex-Marine, Roger James had always aimed for the jugular. Though not a classicist like his daughter, he would often quote the Roman poet Horace’s maxim, Carpe diem! By urging Amanda to “seize the day,” Roger let her know that, in his mind, anything was possible for a young woman growing into the twenty-first century.
Now the sun was up. Bits of mist still clung to the coastline in a golden halo shimmering around the palaces of Point Dume. As she rode her final wave, Amanda’s gaze fell on the largest mansion. This was, in fact, one of the properties bisected by the border path that led to the beach.
It had been completed only recently. From a segment on Entertainment Tonight, she’d learned that it belonged to Luc Renard, a tabloid billionaire with business interests around the globe. The property was about fifty acres, and the main house—as distinguished from numerous outbuildings—dwarfed all of the neighboring mansions. Renard had christened it with a distinctive name: Villa Colosseum.
“How odd,” thought Amanda absently. The Roman Colosseum was an arena of blood sports and death, so why would anyone name his house that way? But that thought drifted from her mind as her board glided lazily through the shore wash. It was time to go back to the apartment and get ready for work.
After jogging across the short stretch of beach with her board and climbing toward the path, Amanda recalled a tabloid story she had seen about an all-night party at Villa Colosseum. She found herself thinking about the mansion again. What did such a place look like on the inside? she wondered. Who made it onto the invitation list, and how?
Soon Amanda had forgotten all about Renard’s villa as she warmed up inside the Wrangler. The upbeat, mellow sounds of Jack Johnson’s acoustic guitar rang from her speakers, the perfect accompaniment to the brightening day. By seven thirty, she was back in the apartment, smiling at Plato’s usual noisy greeting at the door.
“I really have to hustle,” she thought. She realized that the surf session had done its work—she had already made an unconscious decision. She would go to Ercolano. But Juan Carlos wanted her on a flight from LAX tonight. She stepped into the shower, grabbed a razor, and tried to shampoo her hair and shave her long, well-muscled legs in record time. While the steamy water engulfed her body, she wondered what Juan Carlos would think about her newly toned shape. When they dated in college, she had not yet taken up surfing.
Amanda lived in a small one-bedroom apartment—all she could afford in the high-rent district of Malibu—but at least it had decent closet space. How long would her trip last? Since there was no way of knowing, she decided to play the odds and pack outfits that could be recycled every three or four days. Within twenty minutes, she’d slotted a basic wardrobe into her mother’s well-worn Louis Vuitton waterproof canvas. It held not only Amanda’s clothing, but also the memories from their many travels together during her childhood.
On an impulse, she grabbed her copy of The Town of Hercules for the fifteen-hour flight and stuffed it, along with a New York Times Saturday crossword puzzle collection, into her backpack, which she would use as a carry-on.
Now to arrange for Plato. They had never been separated, and she worried a bit about how he would adjust. There was no way she would put him in a kennel. It was way too expensive, and besides, there wasn’t time to find one.
Amanda called Laura Mendez, her sorority sister and billiards club buddy. The two of them played in tournaments together. Besides surfing, billiards was Amanda’s favorite pastime. Laura ran a grooming center for dogs in Pacific Palisades.
“Hello, Laura? I hope I’m not waking you up. It’s Amanda.”
“Of course I know who it is. You forget caller ID?”
“Yeah, well, I just wanted to know if you could take care of Plato for a week or two.”
“You going away? Eloping, perhaps?” Laura secretly hoped that her friend would find Mr. Right and ease up on the twelve-hour workdays.
“I have an offer to take a look at some excavations in Italy. I’m going to try to leave tonight.”
“Buenas vacaciones. Don’t worry, I’ll look after him.”
“You still have the spare key, right?”
“Yep. Now pack your bags and have a great time.”
“Thanks, Laura. You’re the best! Plato’s food is in the kitchen cabinet. Arrivederci … oh, by the way, I’ll say hi to Juan Carlos for you.”
“Juan Carlos! Amanda, what…”
“Sorry, Laura! Gotta run!”
CHAPTER 2
Getty Villa Museum, Malibu, California
AMANDA’S COMMUTE WAS BRIEF. The magnificent Getty Villa was only a fifteen-minute drive from her apartme
nt. Everything about the Villa had been meticulously planned. The access road from PCH, for example, was not just a long and winding driveway—it was paved with many-sided flagstones, just like the ones used in Herculaneum and throughout the Roman Empire in the first century AD. She never failed to relish the groves of sycamore, eucalyptus, pine, and coast redwood flanking the drive. And then the two-story south façade of the Villa would appear, the stuccoed and painted upper level spanning the canyon with its stately Corinthian colonnade. “I can’t believe I get to work here,” she thought for the hundredth time.
Amanda’s office was in the Spanish-style Ranch House. The building had been J. Paul Getty’s original residence in the canyon. Along with the Villa and the other outlying buildings, the Ranch House had undergone a nine-year, multi-million-dollar renovation, during which the museum was closed to the public. She had been in college and grad school back then, but since her doctoral work was supported by a scholarship from the Getty Trust, she visited the Villa regularly. Those were exciting years, with her grasp of conservation growing exponentially—not only because of the Getty’s commitment to antiquities, but also from her day-to-day involvement with the Villa renovation project.
The Ranch House was one of the buildings surrounding Conservation Court. Others included the conservation training laboratory, the nerve center for a UCLA masters program on the conservation of ethnographic and archaeological materials, as well as an office building for Getty staff. Staffers seldom used the court’s official name, calling it Monkey Court instead after a central fountain with three cast primates. Amanda punched in her employee code on the keypad and entered the building, all the while under the watchful scrutiny of security cameras and muscled guards dressed in stylish blue blazers. They wore electronic earpieces to ensure constant contact as they protected a collection of ancient art worth billions.
Like almost everything else at the Getty, her small office was sleek and stylish. After switching on the lights, she sat down at her desk, opened her laptop, and checked her e-mail. No surprise—since last night there had been four messages from her boss, Dr. Walker.
Archibald Walker was a museum pro. In his early sixties, he had the style exactly right. Tweeds in cooler weather, seersucker in warmer, and always ready with an ingratiating smile. Svelte, baritone-voiced, and trust-fund wealthy, he had been an undergraduate at Dartmouth, then studied for his doctorate at the New York Institute of Fine Arts. As a newly minted PhD, he did a turn at the American School in Athens. From there, it was on to the American Academy in Rome for a year.
Classical archaeology was in his blood, and the field needed people like Walker. He raised money effortlessly but brooked resistance with impatience, as if all those aristocratic bones in his body verged on the brittle. To cross Dr. Walker was virtually unthinkable.
He had been at the Getty since the Villa first opened in 1974. Amanda ruefully compared him to a skilled surfer. He had negotiated every tricky wave that came his way—the scandal of the Greek kouros forgery, the repatriation debates, the budget slashes, the departure of the Trust’s CEO under a cloud. Walker dodged the wipeouts and always seemed to catch the good rides. When serious doubts were raised about the authenticity of the kouros, Walker privately let it be known that he had harbored reservations about the archaic Greek sculpture in the Getty collection for years.
E-mail was one of Walker’s Achilles’ heels, however. In the early 1990s he had been a skeptic, but then he plunged into cyberspace with the zeal of the converted. E-mail afforded him the chance to calibrate what he disclosed or concealed to colleagues far more efficiently than face-to-face encounters. It was the key to a perfect poker face, he thought. But the tool he wielded to make himself inscrutable only resulted in making him seem authoritarian.
The gin bottle was Walker’s second failing. All the schmoozing to raise funds, perhaps, had contributed. It was not a glaring flaw, but still something that caught the staff’s attention. Yet Walker owed his position to the powerful Curator of Antiquities, who was enthralled with his fundraising prowess. It seemed unlikely that even a deluge of cocktails would dislodge him.
As Amanda scanned her in-box, she breathed a sigh of resignation while she made her way through the spam grams, as she had nicknamed them. The first was a department-wide “alert,” advising all members that the annual picnic at the Beach Club in Santa Monica had been suspended because of the slow economy. The second was addressed specifically to her: Walker wanted a briefing on the restoration of the antikythera device, a precious handheld relic of ancient engineering that had been dropped in the Getty’s lap six months ago. In the third message, Walker inquired if she could share with him her column for the upcoming issue of the Getty Conservation Institute Bulletin. Perhaps the next column might include something about the antikythera? he wondered.
Finally, there was a cryptic note: “Command appearance this evening at Point Dume. Please report to my office at 10 a.m. sharp.”
“Report?” Amanda thought with annoyance. “Does he think he’s running a police precinct or a museum department?” She shook her head and tried to focus on what needed to happen before her flight.
During the early morning, she busied herself with the antikythera, since Walker would be sure to ask about it at their conference. Often billed as the first mechanical computer, the antikythera mechanism was first scooped from the sea near the island of Crete in 1901. Now displayed in the bronze collection of the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, almost everything about it—function, origins, and purpose—had been the subject of lively debate. About the only thing agreed on by experts was that the antikythera was one of the world’s earliest known geared devices.
The recent receipt by the Getty of a second antikythera, however, might break the stalemate. The mechanism came to the museum from the Vatican. Although its origin was murky, the device itself was not. Virtually all seventy-two of its gears, with equilateral triangular teeth, were intact. And the two-thousand-character “instruction manual” on the first antikythera was dwarfed by the five thousand characters on the mechanism the Vatican had sent—not to mention the fact that this more sophisticated version could be dated to about 250 BC, at least a century before the one in Athens.
Was the antikythera built primarily for navigation? For calendar making? For astrological forecasts? For predicting celestial events or pinning down the dates of festivals like the Olympic Games? The Getty conservators, led by Amanda James, figured that their priceless bronze bauble might well yield the answer.
With the speed she had cultivated to neutralize spam grams, she zapped her current column to her boss, then typed a detailed report on the antikythera team’s progress to date. She attached a memo indicating that she felt there would be sufficient material for an update to the Vatican. Particularly interesting, she wrote, were the results from the ESEM (Environmental Scanning Electron Microscope) exams, which revealed most of the five thousand characters with stunning clarity. Then, as insurance, she prepared a bulleted list of talking points on the latest batch of Herculaneum papyri she had been restoring.
Amanda had been fascinated by papyri since her undergraduate days. The papyrus plant’s widespread distribution in tropical Africa and its adaptability into sheets and strips made it an ideal medium for writing in the ancient world, beginning as early as 3000 BC. There were alternatives, of course, notably ostraca, or potsherds, as well as leather. But for availability and price, no material bested papyrus.
After the earliest excavations of the Villa dei Papiri in Herculaneum began in the 1750s, a trove of nearly eighteen hundred papyrus rolls came to light, thus giving the Villa its name. The rolls were carbonized by the volcanic eruption of Mt. Vesuvius that buried the town in AD 79, and unrolling and reading them proved especially challenging. Two and a half centuries after the discovery, UCLA and the Getty were still busy with the task. By that time, it was clear that the Villa dei Papiri—by many accounts the most luxurious in either ancient Herculaneum or Pompe
ii—had been the repository for written works of exceptional interest. For the Getty, participation was natural—the Villa dei Papiri was the principal model on which Mr. Getty’s Malibu museum was based architecturally.
The Villa’s original owner, Lucius Calpurnius Piso, had a taste for philosophy. As the father-in-law of Julius Caesar, Piso’s wealth meant that he could indulge his leanings, and he commissioned Philodemus, a philosopher with roots in Syria, to shape the library collection. Not surprisingly, the collection came to include many of Philodemus’s own works, which focused on ethics, rhetoric, government, and music, as well as the history of philosophy.
Prior to the excavations of the 1750s, none of Philodemus’s prose works had been known. So Amanda’s deepening involvement in the UCLA/Getty’s Philodemus Project had a twofold cachet: she was part of a team that was carefully bringing an important ancient author to light, and the team was also advancing their technical know-how as they delved ever deeper into the only surviving private library from the ancient world.
By nine forty-five, Amanda felt ready for her meeting down the hall. She suddenly remembered her promise to confirm with Juan Carlos, yet she needed to raise the issue with Walker, who had clearly been brought into the loop. She wondered how much Johnny’s grandfather, Silvio, director of the nuovi scavi, had told her boss. She decided to carefully tease out the extent of Walker’s knowledge.
At the stroke of ten, Amanda knocked on his door. A resonant voice welcomed her inside the office. Archibald Walker’s digs were more than a shade snappier than hers. The department head presided from behind a Louis XV desk with ormolu mounts and marquetry inlay, placed so that a view of the Villa’s exquisite gardens could inspire executive decisions via floor-to-ceiling windows. Courtly as always, Walker rose to greet her, motioning her to the polished conference table near the desk.