“Ah, poor Signora!” Marta was saying as she caught up, “We had hoped to spare you this!”
For it was with the greatest surprise, Marta said, that, while Clare had been gone, one of the dogs had chased a rabbit to the cliff edge and Niccolo had noticed some stones that looked as if they had been moved and then hurriedly replaced. That was when Niccolo had gone to get Marta, just earlier today, and they had moved the stones more, and peered in and seen — Santa Maria! — an empty chamber carved into the rock. Yes, empty. Sì sì sì, totalmente vide! They were sure. For of course they had a flashlight — this was habit, from how often the power failed in Italy. What else could Signora Chiara think? Inside was all exactly as Signora Chiara would now see it! If this had once been a tomb — she crossed herself again — it contained nothing now.
“But we have also thought,” Marta added, “Now perhaps we know how Signor Kane has been able on his not-big salary to rent an expensive apartment in the best part of Rome, and then buy the yellow car which, at our place, we have been with much honour guarding in your absence!”
Clare took Niccolo’s flashlight, gripped the gun, and scrambled over the pile of rocks, with the two dogs right behind. Niccolo tried to follow. She waved the gun and said no.
She swept the beam of light around the space she’d clambered into. Dank rock on all sides: a carved-out chamber maybe twelve feet by twelve, the ceiling rising in step-carved bands that had once been painted deep blue, deep red, though chunks had broken away leaving a rough gravelly surface on the floor. Benches had been carved into the living rock of the walls on three sides. No — stone beds where bodies would have lain! The walls had crumbled over the years, too, sloughing onto these mortuary beds. On the fourth side of the chamber, bigger rock had crashed down to pile up against a wall that had some sort of niche cut into it.
On the mortuary beds debris was heaped thick in places, yet in other places the beds were almost bare, as if objects had quite recently been removed. (Now we know how Signor Kane has been able on his not-big salary …) So many things crowded her mind. Anger. Suspicion. Above all, disappointment. She sank down on the gravelly floor against one of the mortuary slabs. The dogs settled beside her, their hot breathy bodies welcome in the eerie chill. What had she expected when she saw the looming entrance? You weren’t supposed to think of treasure for its own sake; she’d heard that repeated often enough. You were supposed to think of what it could teach.
She fondled the ears of the darker dog, whose head was heavy on her knee. “Was he in it together with them, Nero? Was your master a tomb robber, too?” A bad voice added, And left nothing for me? Everything she had found out about her uncle left a greater gap. Would he have felt entitled to what was in here? Maybe not just because he owned the land, but because long ago he’d convinced himself he was the victim of a beloved girl who’d turned evil before his eyes, turned rotten, and then led him down the labyrinth of his own desires. Had he never lost the victim’s sense of being owed? Or, less dramatically, he’d simply excused his plundering because he needed something wondrous to make up for all he’d lost? The way I feel now, she thought. Yes, needing some tangible reward for saving Gianni from himself.
Then, in panic: but what if Gianni had followed her home? What if he was down there waiting, right this minute?
She sprang up. The beam of her flashlight made an arc, swung past the rubble wall — then darted back to where another much smaller cavity gaped through the rock, swallowing the light. She’d thought this was a niche. Now she saw that behind the fallen rock was a low stone entrance with walls some five feet thick, blocked almost to the top by the rubble.
HER HEART PUMPING WITH excitement, she managed to tug and push one of the rocks into a position to stand on. She shone her torch through the opening, flinched. The shadow of a horned figure sprang onto the far wall, along with others that might be cockerels, beasts, gods.
The gods before the gods we knew?
As her eyes adjusted, she understood she was seeing a great jumbled collection of smoky bucchero, urns, pitchers and vases. These were made fantastic by the bizarre appendages they sported: calf-headed spouts, wide-winged eyes, human figures springing from jug handles, faces peering over rims, the pieces made more extraordinary by friezes in relief around their curving bellies, processions of other gods or animals or birds, or creatures, both man and beast. Many pieces were still standing — others had toppled — but what a crowd. What a treasure trove was here!
Then, as Clare craned into the chamber farther, waved the torch to the side, she caught a mass of rich gleams of what was surely gold.
Gold, lying amid bones.
There were stories about bones in tombs. She’d heard a tale of someone bursting through into a just-discovered tomb and seeing a warrior in complete bronze armour. Then the figure vanished. Nothing remained but the bronze armour, the rest gone, disintegrated, just like that in the rush of new air. Perhaps that story was apocryphal. But Clare knew that finding intact skeletons was rare. In London she’d seen a display of a female skeleton, which had provided amazing details of the woman’s life: her age, her diet, her health — she’d had a tendency to a runny nose, facial abscesses, an arthritic hip. Her medical problems would have made her difficult to live with, according to a modern doctor who examined her bones. She’d had children. She’d been a horsewoman in her younger years, a fact unknown about Etruscan women up to then; that like men they’d ridden horses, and astride.
Clare stepped back and down.
Had Marta and Niccolo been interrupted here just at the point of forcing their way into this second chamber? Could she blame them? Wouldn’t she love to do that, too?
This was not a time to start balancing one side of the equation against the other.
“Dogs!” she said. “Move out of my way.”
Gingerly, she piled back one rock, then another, wedging, bracing, making sure that none would tumble until she had blocked off the opening. Then she pulled a sheet of notepaper from her pocket and tore tiny strips, which she secreted here and there so she would know later, just as a spy would, if the arrangement had been tampered with.
“I will believe everything that you tell me,” she said to Marta and Niccolo when she emerged. “So I will mention nothing to my lawyer for example about the car, nor to the police about what you have just this moment discovered here, in my field — if you will arrange to keep watch, night and day until il Signor Luke arrives from London!”
“Luke Tindhall is already at the Molino,” Marta said. “This morning I had to tell him that you went off with your Italian. I think he will not want to speak to you.”
“Boh! ” Clare said. She asked Niccolo for his phone. He said the battery was dead.
It worked just fine.
SEVEN
The Great Philanthropist
SIR HAROLD PLANK WAS flying to Tuscany to view a demonstration of archaeological exploration techniques. Luke Tindhall, the Plank Foundation’s representative in Tuscany, had invited archaeologists working in the area to help with the demonstration, which would employ equipment that the Plank Foundation had assembled to donate to worthy excavation projects afterwards. The event was to take place on property the Foundation was in the process of purchasing from the heir of the American writer Geoffrey Kane.
Would it work? Did Clare care?
She made her way up the dry stream bed, wincing at the trampled vegetation alongside. It was lunatic for this to be taking place in the middle of the day, in the middle of a heat wave — a time when sensible people closed themselves off behind shutters and tried to ignore the shrilling of cicadas and the dry scraping of insects of every other sort, echoed by the slither of snakes and lizards as they ate them up. Luke had a reason for the timing, of course.
The meadow was crackling with the intense dry heat. In the shimmering light that bounced off everything, her first sight was Luisa di Varinieri drifting from behind one of the little hills in another tomb-figure-from-Tarquinia o
utfit, grape-cluster earrings sending out wobbly bolts of gold as she made a slow tour among the hillocks with both arms stretched out in front of her, holding a willow rod. Then more people began to materialize, like those hidden animals in children’s puzzles. William Sands and Vittorio Cerotti, pulling a flat metal box. Anders trailing behind, with long wires. Carl Berhnoff on top of one of the hillocks, literally with his ear to the ground.
Clare sought out the shade of a little umbrella pine on the hillock closest to the eastern flank of the horseshoe cliff. Now, adding to the surreal scene, a figure in a yard-wide straw hat with a black curtain fluttering around the rim was emerging from the shade of the stream bed trail. Clare recognized the red-and-black harlequin pants as the figure approached with preoccupied springy little hop-steps, as if concentrating on a game she was making up, as if she didn’t care a fig about the rest but just on a whim had decided to come along.
When Nikki spied Clare, she clambered up to join her. She parted the ruffled curtain of her hat and peered out. It was a Hakka hat, she said. An old boyfriend had once sent it from Kowloon. A boyfriend her parents had not approved of, she said. She’d been young and listened to them. He’d gone off to the Orient. She had married William on the rebound. Years later the boyfriend, who was manager of an export company out there now, had sent her the hat. She said the Hakka people, famously, carried the bones of their dead around with them, and so she’d never been sure what to make of the gift.
“But it’s good for moments when I want to travel in disguise.”
Nikki hadn’t intended to come today at all, she said. It was ridiculous how Plank, the so-called Great Philanthropist, had all these people jumping to his will. But she’d decided it would be a good opportunity to give Clare back her pen, which — ta-da! — she’d discovered, after all, in the bottom of her satchel.
The nib was bent and the end was chewed. Clare pushed it into her pants pocket. Whatever she might have said was flattened by the heat. They both watched the peculiar scene in the field. Now on horseback, out of the heat haze, came Ralph Farnham and Federica Inghirami.
“But where is the Great Philanthropist?” Nikki said. “What’s with all the secrecy? I wasn’t to breathe a word to anyone.”
“You know about as much as I do,” Clare said. “It’s Luke’s show. He just told me that if word got out about Plank’s visit, a man who has so famously refused to travel, there might be a stampede of reporters thinking he was on to some remarkable find.”
“Is he?”
A GREAT ROAR RIPPED away any chance of reply. A helicopter tore in over the trees, blasting wind in all directions, flattening the grasses, spraying petals from the flowers, making the horses rear and snort.
Luke stepped from the machine and held out a hand to portly Sir Harold Plank, who was trying to hold onto what was left of his hair. The rotors slowly stopped turning. The pilot leaned out and flicked away his cigarette. The butt landed in a patch of crispy weed, sent up a spiral of smoke, then flared into a coronet of flame. No one seemed to have the wits to do anything about it, until Clare sprinted past the rest of them. The flames caught on so fast that they danced around her legs as she tried to stamp them out. She tore off her shirt, threw it down, threw herself on top of it and rolled around. She struggled up, sooty, bra-less, idiotic tears streaming down her face, shouting at Luke that this was the dimmest idea she’d ever heard of. To come here with a helicopter and do this damage to the plant life, when everyone with the smallest brain knew that the whole of Italy was tinder-dry.
She caught herself up, shook her head, then couldn’t restrain herself from dipping a knee in a mock curtsey.
“Sir Harold, welcome to my humble property.”
He smiled. He undid his tie, removed his crisp, striped shirt, exposing many folds of rosy flesh, and put it round her shoulders. He meekly begged her pardon. He hoped she would understand that the true culprit was the gout. He said that when Luke had explained the path they would have to climb, there was nothing for it but to telephone an outfit in Ravenna to send over a copter.
The awkward moment was broken by a different sort of racket, far down the field. Luke’s eyes widened. “Well well,” Clare said. “Someone must have let it slip.” A collection of journalists and TV crews was straggling from the trees.
Luke ran forward, demanding to know what this invasion was about, saying this was merely a small exploration on private land. Vittorio Cerotti moved his shoulders in a heating-up sort of way, as if to keep simmering the great minestrone of rules and regulations he encompassed. But after much talking back and forth, waving of hands, pounding of fists into palms, Luke finally allowed the press to stay; “That is, if Sir Harold agrees.” Then he began explaining, in a resonant TV archaeologist’s voice, how Sir Harold Plank, “the eminent British philanthropist,” had long suspected this area had the potential to reveal a collection of undiscovered Etruscan tombs. He walked the group over and around the hillocks, as he told the unseen television audience that there had been initial excitement at the thought that these might be tumuli, the so-called melon tombs of the Etruscan Orientalizing phase. But various tests had produced no such evidence. A major disappointment.
“So here you’ve caught us resorting to what one might, at first glance, think of as an example of Etruscan archaeology’s lighter moments, harking back even to the use of dowsing with a willow wand. Allow me to introduce my good friend, the Contessa Luisa di Varinieri,” he said with a flourish.
Luisa smiled an enchanting smile, before wandering off with her wand.
“However,” Luke continued, “The wand has refused to confirm our hopes that the mounds might be tumuli. Just before we were interrupted, the willow drew us back towards the hillside there …” Now Luke was striding between the mounds, propelling the Great Philanthropist forward. All the press followed. When he got to the cliff, he grabbed one of the overhanging branches and began to scrabble his way up, still half-turned to the TV crew, at the same time pulling the branch aside so he could get a purchase on the rocks. Then a rock gave way. He gave a cry of pain as he landed, his legs buried by rubble.
But no one rushed to help him. The cameras continued to whirr.
All the Pentaxes and Nikons clicked repeatedly. Everyone was staring at the suddenly exposed opening in the cliff face.
There would have been a stampede, if not for Vittorio. He grabbed one of the Italians from RAI by the arm, muttered, and the reporter put down his mike and gestured to the cameraman to do the same. Luke struggled up, clamped an arm around Clare’s shoulder and hobbled towards the cliff.
Harold Plank, though, in the few moments when attention was focused elsewhere, had managed to scuttle up and over the remaining rocks and disappear into the dark beyond. Vittorio was trying to hold the rest of them at bay, while at the same time both he and William were walking backwards as if drawn by a giant magnet.
It had worked.
This had been Clare’s gift to Luke: that he could “present” the tomb discovery in any way he thought best, making sure Sir Harold was front and centre. Luke had expected her to be part of the package, despite her having gone off with Gianni. She thought he’d relished the thought of her boomeranging back, so he could revel in his own humiliation, revel in the way they’d hate and need each other. Of course she couldn’t possibly be with him anymore. But at least she could do this.
As for what would happen as this “discovery” proceeded — Clare had insisted that the inner chamber stay untouched, just as she had left it, and that Vittorio Cerotti be present today, to make sure protocol was followed and none of the inner contents came to harm. She still had only the merest hint of what this would lead to. But she felt really queasy that she had allowed the whole thing to become a circus.
Once Luke scrabbled in, he pulled a flashlight from one of the pockets of his khaki vest and swept it around the first, empty chamber, expressing amazement. For the benefit of the press group — still held back at the entrance — he descr
ibed the funeral benches, the coffered ceiling, adding with resignation that the place had been looted centuries before.
Then he said, “Holy Jesus! What’s this?”
His flashlight broadened its arc, and the gloom disappeared in the glare made by television crews from RAI and CNN. Everyone stared at the pile of rock against the back wall, where the farther cavity barely showed. Harold Plank was in the lead again. Shirtless, but not caring about the rough stone, he got himself wedged into the opening like a cork, his flailing legs stopping anyone else from coming close.
When he finally eased himself back out, he held his pen light between his teeth. Gingerly, reverently, its weight distributed between two hands, he carried what might have been mistaken for a greenish, heavily encrusted ping pong paddle.
“Doctor Cerotti,” he said, “I turn this over to you with profound apologies for my injudicious haste.”
Before he relinquished it, his eyes under the grey bushy brows did a slow sweep of the place, meeting each camera in turn. “We must all step back, now, and allow the proper authorities to do their proper work.”
A SECOND HELICOPTER HAD roared in carrying the Carabinieri, as summoned by Vittorio. Two of the splendid fellows in their towering hats were now posted to prevent the press from further peering. To loud complaints, Federica and Ralph had been excluded by the time they had attended to the horses.
According to official regulations, no one should be inside the tomb, and certainly nothing in the tomb should be touched until an emergency team of excavators and conservators arrived from Florence. Clare was beginning to wish she had not been quite so fastidious when she’d had a chance to explore the inner chamber. Nikki whispered that any minute Vittorio was sure to get a call from his superiors officially kicking everyone out.
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