The Night Villa

by Carol Goodman

  At the villa, I find everyone gathered at the table on the peristylium.

  “Did you read it?” Agnes asks me. “I ended up translating the whole thing and distributing it because it wasn’t very long.”

  I nod as I collapse into one of the chairs. Looking around the table, I see that everyone has a slim sheaf of papers in front of them. Elgin and Lyros are still reading theirs—presumably because they’ve just gotten back from Herculaneum. Simon is using his to fan himself. Maria has rolled hers into a tube and is tapping it on the arm of George’s chair. “How could you stop just as he was going to the girl’s house?” she asks. “Were you trying to tease us?”

  George, the only one of the group who’s not holding his manuscript, drags his long bony fingers through his hair as though he were trying to pull it out by the roots, but from the way he’s looking at Maria I guess that it’s her hair he’d like to pull out. “As I told you, that part of the papyrus is badly damaged. I’m not sure we’ll be able to decipher it at all.”

  “You mean we may never know what happened in the house?” Agnes asks, her eyes wide. “Or who was screaming or why Iusta went in there?”

  “I imagine Phineas was right: she was engaged in some purification rite,” Elgin says. “The symbols sound like they could be associated with Isis.”

  “Then it really is a shame we don’t have this section,” Simon says. “The only details we know of the Rites of Isis are from Apulius and those are quite…tantalizing. It almost seems as if Phineas deliberately damaged the scroll at this point in the narrative to keep us in suspense.”

  “Or someone else did,” Elgin says, looking up from his copy, “in order to keep the rites secret.”

  “Where does the papyrus become legible again?” Lyros asks.

  George closes his eyes and recites from memory. “At the line: ‘As I walked back to the villa, I pondered over all I had learned of Iusta and her unusual situation and wondered what would come of the pact we had entered into together.’”

  A groan rises from the whole group.

  “Maybe he tells us later,” Agnes suggests. “I say we go on scanning and see if we can figure out what happened in the house from the rest of the papyrus.”

  Maria shakes her head. “It’s like reading a mystery with half the clues torn out—”

  “Or like coming into a Buñuel film half an hour late,” Simon adds.

  “Really?” Elgin asks, tilting his head toward Simon. “I can’t make head or tails of Buñuel even if I’m there from the beginning.”

  “We’ll just have to hope the rest of the journal explains the lapse,” Lyros says. “In the meantime, the good news is that we think we’ve located Phineas’s trunk. We should be able to open it by tomorrow. I thought perhaps some of you might want to be there.”

  “Well, I have to be there,” Maria announces.

  As the rest of the group wrangles out the details of tomorrow’s excursion I turn back to the bay and reach into my skirt pocket to touch the three cards left for me at the cafe. There was no scroll to scan or trunk to excavate that might throw light on their meaning. I wondered if I’d ever figure it out.

  At breakfast the next morning, Agnes offers to stay behind and work on scanning the next passage, but George insists she go to Herculaneum with the rest of us. “You really shouldn’t miss seeing the villa,” George says. “After all, you did your paper on the paintings there and you haven’t even had a chance to see them in person yet.”

  “I’ll be happy to show them to you,” Simon offers. “I have to make some sketches for the reproductions. There are some details I think you will find especially interesting.”

  Agnes blanches, no doubt envisioning that she’ll have to endure Simon Bowles pointing out the more lascivious features of the paintings. I’m expecting another outburst like those of yesterday, but to her credit Agnes composes herself and answers calmly. “Since I’ve studied the paintings, perhaps I could show you a thing or two about them. Why don’t I bring my paper on the murals with us? You can start by reading it on the boat.”

  “I think you’ve met your match, Simon,” Elgin says. Simon laughs, but when I look at Elgin I notice he’s not smiling, and I wonder if he’s worried that he’s got a competitor for Agnes’s attentions.

  On the boat trip across the bay Agnes seems to have completely forgiven Simon’s teasing from last night. She spends the whole trip down below in the cabin showing Simon her paper on the paintings of the Villa della Notte and discussing her theories. With Lyros at the helm, and Maria sunbathing on the prow of the boat, that leaves me with Elgin Lawrence for company, the last person I want to spend time with.

  “I’m rereading the description of Isis in Apulius,” I tell him when he settles down next to me.

  Elgin ignores the hint and instead leans close and whispers in my ear. “There’s something I have to talk to you about alone.”

  I pull back to look at him, to see whether he’s flirting with me, but his expression is masked by dark sunglasses. I look back to the helm and meet John Lyros’s gaze. I return his smile and say to Elgin in a low voice, “Why did you wait until today when we’re on a field trip? You’ve had plenty of opportunity to talk to me alone.”

  “No, I haven’t. You’ve been avoiding me.”

  “Me? You’re the one who took off to Sorrento when I was bedridden.”

  Elgin’s head moves back abruptly and his nostrils flare, looking a bit like the angry cobra on Isis’s headdress that I’ve just read about in Apulius. “Is that what you’re angry about? I couldn’t help that, Sophie, honest. I left only after I was sure you were safely on the island”—he looks over his shoulder at John, who, I notice, is watching us—“and then I had to go. I had an appointment.”

  “Well, I hope she was worth it.” As soon as the words are out, I’m ashamed of myself. Where did all this spite come from? Surely I’m long over my little fling with Elgin. It’s been five years, after all, and it isn’t like I’d ever really been in love with him. I’d turned to him out of anger at Ely, as a distraction—a distraction I’d paid heavily for.

  Elgin must think my reaction is strange, too, because he’s studying me with the same intent look he uses to examine difficult Latin inscriptions. “It wasn’t a woman,” he says at last. “I have to explain—”

  I’m spared Elgin’s explanation by a summons from our captain. “Professor Lawrence,” Lyros calls, pitching his voice to be heard above the roar of the engine and the slap of the waves. “Why don’t you take a hand at steering. You mentioned you were a yachtsman.”

  Elgin winces. True, he keeps a sailboat on Lake Travis, but even he wouldn’t refer to himself as a yachtsman. He clearly doesn’t want to disappoint our rich benefactor, though. As he rises to go he whispers in my ear, “Let’s talk when we get to Herculaneum. I’ll figure out a way for us to be alone.”

  Elgin’s rather transparent method of ensuring us privacy is to turn to me as we approach the excavation site and loudly ask, “Didn’t you say you wanted to take a walk through the town, Sophie?”

  Lyros, who’s unlocking the gate, looks back at us, puzzled, but Maria says, “That’s a good idea. We can’t all crowd around the workmen.” She glares at Agnes, but Simon comes to her rescue. “Don’t worry about Agnes and me. We’ll be busy looking at those paintings.”

  “Okay, then,” Lyros says, checking his watch. “We should be done by noon, so if you want to be there at the unveiling—”

  “Wouldn’t miss it,” Elgin says, winking at Lyros. Then he turns to the gate that leads back to the public excavations.

  “Sophie,” Lyros says before I can turn away, “I’ll make sure we don’t open it before you get back.”

  “Okay,” I say, unsure how I’m supposed to respond to this. “Thanks. I won’t be late.” Then I turn to catch up to Elgin who, unlike the gentlemanly Lyros, hasn’t waited for me at all. Finally, at the Porta Marina, the old entrance to the city, I catch up with him. He’s striding down th
e cobbled streets of the ancient town as if down an avenue in a modern city, only here the streets are paved with giant blocks of stone worn smooth by pedestrians of two thousand years ago and rutted by cartwheels. At each intersection there are square-shaped blocks in the center of the street to make crossing easier, but which now impede our progress. Although it’s only nine it’s already brutally hot, and I remember that after my last visit here I collapsed with pneumonia.

  “Slow down,” I say.

  “I will as soon as we’re far enough away from the others,” he says. “I don’t want to risk being followed.” We go three city blocks before Elgin slows down his pace to a manageable clip. I make him stop so I can catch my breath at the open doorway to a house. Looking inside, I can see that its atrium is still perfectly preserved from the open skylight to the mosaic floor of its impluvium—a shallow basin for collecting rainwater. The simple plan of the entrance hall, common to most traditional Roman houses, evokes a sense of order and peace, perhaps because the house seems to be welcoming rain and sunlight into it along with its guests.

  “I’d forgotten how amazing this place is,” I say. “It really feels as if you’re in an ancient city.”

  Elgin sees me looking longingly into the house and after taking a quick look up and down the street steers me into the atrium. “This is probably as good a place as any,” he says. “I think there’s a garden inside this house that’s pretty private.”

  As soon as we’re inside the house it’s cooler. The marble mosaic floor is buckled from the eruption, but it’s still beautiful and the proportions of the house are so perfect that I immediately feel peaceful inside its walls. I feel as welcomed as the long bars of mote-filled sunlight that slant across the walls. The Romans had a god dedicated just to thresholds, and I can still feel its presence in this entrance.

  “Do you know what this house is called?” I ask Elgin. But he’s busy peering into the side rooms to make sure we’re alone. I follow him into a small room off the atrium and gasp at the sight of the household shrine: it’s a green and blue mosaic, perfectly preserved, and glittering in the morning sunlight. It depicts a goddess rising from the sea surrounded by dolphins. Venus perhaps? Or Neptune’s wife, Amphitrite? Or even Isis, whom Apulius describes at the end of The Golden Ass as emerging from the sea, “shaking off the brine” before his eyes? But this figure has none of the other features Apulius described—no moon disk on her forehead or viper by her side or wreath of corn on her head. She could be one of many sea-born goddesses. It hardly seems to matter. The residents of this town wedged between sea and volcano no doubt prayed to every god of sea and underworld just to keep the ground beneath their feet steady.

  In among the shiny glass tesserae are seashells and tiny pearls. A small marble statue of the goddess stands in the little niche, her features so worn that her face is little more than a smooth stone. And yet some spirit still radiates from her. I’m surprised to feel my eyes stinging, moved by the ancient shrine in some inexplicable way. Is it the thought of generations kneeling before the pretty little goddess, praying for the daily blessings of food and children and another day, all to no avail? For the first time I feel acutely aware of this as a place where many people died, suddenly and unexpectedly, their daily routines interrupted in medias res and frozen for all time for us to gawk at.

  “There you are,” Elgin says, poking his head in. “Come on, you’ll love the garden. It’s been restored according to the research done by your beloved Dr. Jashemski.”

  I follow him to an open courtyard rimmed by slim marble columns. In the center is a small fountain with a bronze statue of a leaping faun. The partitioned beds have been planted with oleander and box hedges to replicate the plan of the original garden. “She’s not my beloved Dr. Jashemski…” I begin.

  “Ha! You wrote a poem about her. I think it was the first time a student of mine ever wrote an archaeological sonnet. Let’s see, how did it go?” He looks up at the sky, puts his hand over his heart in what his students always called his Cicero pose, and much to my embarrassment recites the poem I wrote for him.

  “When Wilhelmina F. Jashemski found

  Vesuvius had captured the ghost-roots

  of trees beneath the lava-sheeted ground—

  empty spaces traced with pebbles—long-lost truths

  of leaf and bark, species, were brought to light.

  Her plaster casts could resurrect the dead,

  at least as sculpture, art. And now the flight

  of sea hawks hints at pterodactyl blood

  while ancient sunlight shimmers on the Bay,

  and our thoughts turn to love, which if it lasts

  a year will flirt with immortality…”

  He stops before the final lines, recalling, I imagine, the way the poem ends and the occasion for which I had written it. “So look,” he says, sitting down on the edge of the fountain. “The reason I went to Sorrento—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Elgin, I don’t care!” I say much too loudly and with an embarrassing wobble in my voice. “I really am over you.”

  “Nice to hear, Dr. Chase,” he says, one side of his mouth quirking into a grin. “As I was saying, the reason I went to Sorrento is that I was meeting an FBI agent there.”

  “Why? What did they want with you? Are you in some kind of trouble?”

  Elgin laughs. “Your faith in me is touching, Sophie. No, I haven’t done anything wrong. I’ve been working with the FBI for some time to keep track of a certain cult operating in Austin.”

  “You mean you’ve been spying on the Tetraktys,” I say, unable to keep the emotion out of my voice. We both remember the last time we talked about the Tetraktys and what that conversation led to.

  “I suppose you could call it that. I’m not sorry about doing it; I’m only sorry I didn’t do it better. If I had, Odette Renfrew and Barry Biddle might still be alive.”

  I feel suddenly cold. “Because Dale Henry was a Tetraktys member?”

  “You knew about that?”

  “I knew he’d gone to a few meetings, but I didn’t know he was a card-carrying member. But even if he was, how do you know they had anything to do with the shooting?”

  “Because the gun he used has been traced to a dealer in New Mexico ten miles from the Tetraktys compound. Also, there’s a former member of the group who’s working with the FBI who says that Dale Henry was at the compound this spring.”

  “That’s when he and Agnes broke up and he disappeared from campus,” I say. “This former member—”

  “I can’t divulge his identity,” Elgin says quickly and without looking at me. “They’ve got him in a safehouse in Sorrento at great personal risk to him so that he can advise us on any new developments at the dig. I can’t risk anyone finding out who he is.”

  “Okay,” I say. “And has this informant…has he given you any useful information? Like why the Tetraktys would be interested in the Papyrus Project and the Villa della Notte?”

  “We think they’re interested in one of the scrolls that’s turned up at the villa…possibly by Pythagoras himself.”

  “Pythagoras never wrote anything,” I say.

  “Not that anyone has ever found.” Elgin shrugs and looks at me for the first time since he’s mentioned the Tetraktys. “I can’t vouch for these crazies’ scholarship, but I think they believe that Pythagoras’s Golden Verses were real and that Phineas had a copy with him when Vesuvius erupted.”

  “But how would they even know that Phineas was at the villa? You didn’t even know until recently…” I stop as Elgin looks away again. “There’s someone from the Tetraktys working on the project,” I say. “Do you know who?”

  “No, not yet. But I wanted you to know that someone is, so you’d be careful.”

  “How can I be careful if you don’t even know who it is? And how could you have invited me here knowing there was a Tetraktys member on the project after what they cost me? And what about Agnes? How could you endanger her?” My voice has
been steadily rising in pitch as my anger escalates. Elgin only nods glumly at each accusation, but suddenly he cocks his head and then holds up a finger to his lips to silence me. There are voices coming from the atrium heading in our direction. I see flashes of bright clothing and hear a child’s voice ask as he is shown the household shrine, “What did the pagans pray to if they didn’t believe in God?”

  Instead of waiting for the tourists to leave, I get up to go. Elgin tries to follow me but the father of the group waylays him to ask directions to the Villa of the Mysteries. If I weren’t so angry at Elgin I’d have to laugh. It’s not the first time that Elgin’s khakis and tanned good looks have gotten him mistaken for the resident tour guide. By the time Elgin explains that the Villa of the Mysteries is in Pompeii, I’ve gotten a substantial head start. He doesn’t catch up with me until the Porta Marina.

  “Sophie, please,” he calls, grabbing my arm, “don’t be angry. If I thought you were in danger I’d never have asked you here. I knew I’d be here to keep an eye on things.”

  “Oh, great. My protector. A lot of good you did when Dale Henry burst into that conference room. If I remember correctly, you dived under the table with me.”

  He looks so stunned that I instantly regret what I’ve said. After all, I was under that table, too. It’s not fair to have expected more from Elgin. Before I can apologize, though, he lets go of my arm and draws himself up to his full six feet two of dignified pique. “I’m sorry I was such a disappointment to you,” he says coldly. And then he turns and walks away, through the Porta Marina and past the bookstore and gift shop, turning left to follow the old sea wall to the Villa della Notte. I’m too angry to call him back, too proud to run after him. For a moment, standing here between the town and the old sea wall, I feel as trapped as the Herculaneans must have felt with their backs up against a wall of approaching ash and their only retreat a violent and impassable sea.