The Night Villa
Page 20
I catch up to Elgin at the entrance to the Villa della Notte. The gate to the site is locked, but Elgin surprises me by producing a key.
“Lyros gave it to me,” Elgin says, noting my surprise. “We are partners on the Papyrus Project after all.” He still sounds a little touchy.
“Listen—” I begin.
“It’s okay, Sophie, you’re completely right. I shouldn’t have asked you here. It was selfish. I suppose I hoped that being here together, well, I see how silly that idea was. I promise not to bother you anymore. And I promise to keep an eye on Agnes.”
It’s on the tip of my tongue to ask what his silly idea was, but Elgin’s already through the gate and then the noise is too loud to say anything without shouting. While the pit had been silent save for the croak of frogs on my last visit, now the air is full of the dull whine of a drill and a fine gray dust. We pass the boarded-up tunnels bored into the lower levels of the villa by eighteenth-century “excavators” (little better than tomb raiders). I notice that some of the boards have come loose. When I step onto the stairs I think I see why: the whole structure is vibrating.
“Is this drilling good for the rest of the excavation?” I shout at Elgin as we climb the stairs.
“It’s not ideal. Usually they’d use chisels and go slower to minimize damage to the rest of the villa, especially with a structure like this that’s been undermined by tunneling by eighteenth-century looters. Lyros must be pretty anxious to get to that trunk.”
When we step into the ancient courtyard, I experience a moment of vertigo—the result, I imagine, of all the time I’ve now spent at the restored villa on Capri. The space and proportions have become so familiar to me that for a moment an image of that villa is superimposed over the ruin, a veil of bright sunlight reflecting off the fountain’s spray and the burnished bronze of the statue of Nyx, and then all that brightness is eclipsed by the gray shroud of tufa dust, a pall of sadness that settles over me as if Vesuvius had just now erupted and I was watching the villa fill with ash and volcanic rock as it had on that August night so long ago.
“Here, you’d better put this on.” Elgin hands me a face mask and we dive into the thickest dust that’s coming from what I can’t help but think of as my room. A narrow tunnel has been bored into the room, at the entrance of which Lyros and Maria are crouching. Maria has a camera strapped around her neck, presumably to record the trunk in situ, but right now she’s not using it. The noise of the drill makes it impossible to get their attention. A workman crawls out, so covered in dust that he looks like a piece of living rock. He says something to Lyros in Italian, but before Lyros can respond, Maria answers in a stream of fast, angry Italian I can’t begin to decipher. A fountain of invective that reminds me of the woman on the Circumvesuviana. The man turns away from Maria, slips his mask from his face and spits in the dust.
“What’s going on?” Elgin asks.
Lyros turns to us and says, “They’re ready for their lunch break, but we’re within an hour’s work of freeing the lid to the trunk.” He turns back to the workman and in a less fluent, but politer Italian that I can understand, offers the man a bonus to continue work.
Maria rolls her eyes, but she doesn’t interfere. What is she hoping is in Phineas’s trunk, I wonder, that makes her so anxious to get to it?
The workman haggles with Lyros over the amount of the bonus for several minutes and then a deal is struck. I lean over Maria and ask where Simon and Agnes are.
Maria shrugs. “I think he offered to show Agnes some dirty pictures in the tunnels below.”
“Really?” Lyros asks. “I didn’t know that. Those tunnels aren’t safe. I’m going to go down and tell them to get out of them. Elgin, why don’t you take my place here?”
Elgin squeezes into the narrow opening beside Maria. I see right away that there isn’t room for me and Maria doesn’t look as if she’s willing to give up her place. “I guess I’ll go down with you,” I tell Lyros.
“Sure…or if you’d like you could log on to my laptop and see how George is getting on with today’s section of Phineas. It’s behind the west wall of the courtyard.”
Maria’s mouth twitches when she realizes I might get a head start on the Phineas, but she puts her mask back on and turns toward the tunnel with all the resolution of Cerberus guarding the mouth of Hades. Lyros is already heading down the stairs for the lower level.
I turn away and cross the courtyard and go behind the west wall, where I find a small field office in what might once have been a storage room. Plastic tarps hang around a couple of chairs and a folding table upon which is a silver laptop—a Lyrik, of course—a thermos and a stack of books, notebooks, and a packet of envelopes tied together with string: mail for the villa, which Lyros must have picked up at the dock before setting off this morning. The screensaver on the computer is a model of the solar system, the planets moving in elliptical orbits shown by dotted lines. When I touch the space bar the image fades and I see I’m already hooked up to the Internet. An Instant Message displayed from GPetherbrid reads, “You might want to see this.”
I click on the reply box and type in: “Hey, it’s Sophie. Lyros is busy with the excavation, but he said to check in and see how the Phineas is going.” I hit Send and turn to the stack of books, looking for something to distract me while I’m waiting for a response, but the laptop chimes and George’s reply pops up.
“Have they opened the trunk yet?”
“No,” I type, “but Lyros says we should be able to in the next hour.”
I hit Send and stare at the blank screen long enough for the screensaver to kick in again. What, I wonder, could the problem be? Had George found something in the next section about what was in the trunk? Whatever it is, how much difference could it make? There weren’t explosives back in AD 79—except for the volcanic kind. Still, I have a sense of foreboding as I wait for George’s reply, heightened by the tremors underfoot and the stultifying heat in my plastic lair. To distract myself, I untie the string holding the villa’s mail and leaf through it even though I don’t really expect anything for myself. M’Lou’s not much of a letter writer and she’s the only one I’ve given my summer address. I’m surprised, then, to find an envelope with my name typed across it. There’s no address or postmark, so it must have been hand-delivered. When I pick it up, I notice that it’s lumpy. For a second, I entertain the paranoid thought that it could be a letter bomb. I open it quickly, like tearing off a Band-Aid. Inside is a blank piece of white paper with three cardboard tiles taped across the page. A smiling crescent moon, a man falling down a flight of stairs, and a masked man. I turn the paper over. The reverse side is blank.
The computer’s chime startles me and I quickly fold the sheet, put it back in its envelope, and stuff it into my bag. Then I look back and find George’s reply.
“Read this,” it says, as succinctly as the command “Eat me” in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. And so I do. The section starts out with the line that George recited to us last night.
As I walked back I pondered over all I had learned of Iusta and her unusual situation. I wondered what would come of the pact we had entered together. I had, of course, heard of the cultus to which Iusta belonged, but I had to admit that I knew little about it and, in truth, I didn’t care if I learned more. Iusta’s secret, however, had been useful in extracting from her a promise to show me the mysteries practiced by her mistress.
As I approached the villa, I scanned its walls for any openings into the sea. I saw none, but I did see that part of the wall was under the level of the sea. There could be, as I had surmised last night and Iusta had confirmed today, an underwater entrance to the sea that led to the grotto where the rites were held. This part of the rites was limited to the women, and normally I would not have been allowed to witness them, but Iusta had promised to show me a way that I might spy on them from a secret room behind the grotto. As I entered the villa, I felt confident that I would soon be master of its secrets.
Outside the plastic tarps the air in the courtyard is so thick with dust that I can barely make out the figures crouched around the entrance to my—to Phineas’s—room. When I come closer, I see that Elgin is working with a chisel to clear the remaining scraps of tufa from the edges of a small trunk. Maria is sitting on her heels, her hands held in her lap grasping each other so tightly her knuckles are white under the gray dust. I gather from her rapt expression that she’s restraining herself from grabbing the chisel away from Elgin and hacking her way into the trunk. She also looks, curiously, as though she were praying.
“You guys,” I say, “I think you’d better hear this before you open that.”
Maria swings her head in my direction, her eyes gleaming white in her begrimed face. “Aspetta,” she hisses. “We’re almost there.”
“But listen, this is how the section George just scanned ends: My confidence in my mastery of the situation dissolved, however, when I entered my room. My trunk lay open…”
As if the words were a spell to release it, the lid of the trunk swings open. Maria and Elgin lean forward, batting the dust plumes out of the air to see better. But I don’t have to see or hear Maria’s anguished cry to know what they see. I read the last line. “My trunk lay open and empty. Someone had stolen my scrolls.”
“No!” Maria cries. “Who could have taken them?”
She sounds so despondent that I feel sorry for her. I move forward to put my hand on her shoulder, but as I do I feel the ground shift under my feet and hear an echoing thud from below me. It feels as if the foundations of the villa have been yanked out from beneath us and, for a moment, the only explanation I can come up with is that there’s been an earthquake. Another volcanic eruption that this time will split the floor of the villa and suck us all down into the underworld.
The motion stops. In the eerie silence that follows, Maria crosses herself and Elgin gets shakily to his feet.
“What was that?” I ask.
Instead of answering, Elgin gets up and rushes across the courtyard to the peristylium and looks over the edge of the railing. There’s so much dust in the air that it’s as if a premature dusk had descended over the pit. It’s hard to see anything at all. Then a dust-covered figure emerges from one of the tunnels. It takes me a moment to recognize John Lyros.
“Are you okay?” Elgin calls.
Lyros is coughing too hard to answer. He points at the tunnel and gasps something. I run back to where I’ve left my knapsack, grab the water bottle in it, and run down the stairs. Elgin is already down there examining the rubble outside the collapsed tunnel. I hand Lyros the water bottle. After he’s taken a long swallow, he manages to make himself understood. “Simon and Agnes,” he croaks. “I was trying to tell them to get out of there. They’re still in there.”
Elgin is the first to run to the tunnel. Lyros is leaning heavily on me, limping, so I’m unable to keep up with him. I watch helplessly as Elgin is swallowed up in a cloud of dust at the mouth of the tunnel. When I try to follow, Lyros pulls me back.
“There’s no sense risking your life, too,” he says. Lyros calls to the workmen, who have come down to the pit but are hovering far from the building as if they are afraid the whole villa is about to come down. He tells them to bring shovels and lights.
“What the hell were they doing in there?” I ask, still trying to get close enough to the tunnel to see what’s going on.
“You heard what Maria said, Simon was showing Agnes some paintings. The man’s a fool! He somehow got the idea that there were more paintings in there that could be copied for the restorations, but I’ve told him the tunnels aren’t safe….” A coughing spasm compels Lyros to stop talking. While I’m waiting for him to recover I wonder if this is what Lyros and Simon were arguing about the night before last on the sea-steps. I also wonder if the paintings were all Simon was looking for in the tunnels. Could it be that Simon is the Tetraktys member on the project? “When I got down here, I heard their voices coming from this tunnel so I followed them in. I got about three yards in when the ceiling started to collapse. I could see them, about another fifteen yards in, I would say. I saw the support beam over their heads come down and then the one just in front of me came down as well and tore out a piece of the wall. There was too much dirt for me to dig through so I came back out, but with shovels…”
Lyros turns to two workers who have arrived at the scene with shovels and shouts for them to start digging for the signorina Americana. They spring to attention to save the pretty American girl, moving far faster, I imagine, than if it were only old, fat Simon trapped in there. Simon’s lucky he’s got Agnes with him, but what about poor Agnes?
“Shouldn’t we contact the archaeological office?” I ask. “They must have more experience with this kind of situation.”
“They do,” Lyros says, “but it’s a holiday. By the time they assemble a crew Simon and Agnes could be dead. We should notify them, though, and tell them to call an ambulance. You and Maria should go…. Where is Maria anyway?”
“I don’t think she ever came downstairs,” I say. “I’ll get her.”
I leave Lyros crouched in front of the tunnel and run up the stairs to the third level of the villa. The courtyard is empty, though, save for the painted figures on the wall, still moving through their rituals as if nothing had happened. Hades ravages Persephone, Demeter in her grief scorches the earth and transforms her daughter’s companions into shrieking sirens who then lead a young girl through the steps of initiation. Even the brutal assault of the young initiate seems like a staged scene, both actors a little bored. They have, after all, been at it for nearly two thousand years; not even a volcanic eruption had fazed them. The only sound in the courtyard is a faint patter, like raindrops, coming from behind the west wall.
When I walk around the wall I see Maria seated at the field desk, typing on the laptop. Behind the plastic tarp she appears spectral and blurred, less substantial than the painted figures on the other side of the wall. When I lift the tarp, she startles and slams shut the laptop.
“Dio! You scared me! I was just letting George know what happened. Have they gotten them out?”
“No,” I say, wondering why she’d think alerting George, across the bay on Capri, would be a top priority, “but they’re going to go in. John wants us to go to the archaeological office to notify them of the accident and call an ambulance.” When she fails to get up, I add: “I need you to go with me to give the directions in Italian.”
She sighs and gets up, casting a reluctant parting glance at the laptop.
“How did George respond when you e-mailed him about Agnes?” I ask as we go down the stairs. “He’s so protective of her.”
“What?” Maria looks distracted by the scene at the bottom of the pit. The workers have returned with high-powered floodlights that they’ve trained on the opening of the tunnel. Elgin and Lyros must be inside already.
“George,” I repeat. “You said you e-mailed George to tell him what happened to Agnes and Simon.”
“Ah, I didn’t actually reach him,” she says. “Andiamo. We ought to hurry.”
She quickens her pace so that I have to jog to keep up with her. Clearly she’s trying to avoid my questions—probably because she hadn’t been e-mailing George at all. What could she have been doing on the computer? Checking her e-mail? Online shopping? Whatever she was doing, she’s clea
rly not going to tell me. The one good thing about her running from me is that it gets us to the archaeological office fast. By the time I catch up with her, she’s gotten them to call an ambulance and deputized two young men to go back to the site to help with the rescue mission.
“You lead the way,” Maria tells me.
“Where are you going?” I ask when I realize she’s not coming back to the site.
“Family emergency,” she says, gathering her thick dark hair and coiling it into a knot at the back of her head. Beads of sweat dampen her forehead and the collar of her gauze blouse. There’s a streak of gray tufa dust on her cheekbone, but after a few minutes of patting and smoothing she manages to look more put-together than I generally do after an hour’s primping. She takes out of her bag a lipstick and a pair of heels that she exchanges for the flat sandals she wore at the site. “Mia zia,” she says when she sees me eyeing the heels and lipstick. “If I’m not dressed properly, I’ll never hear the end of it from my aunt. Now go! Tell John I’ll meet you back on the island tonight.”
The two young men, who have decided to bring a portable stretcher even though it seems to me that the ambulance will have one, follow as I head back to the villa, and I feel as if I am leading some sacrificial procession. Every time I glance back at them I half expect to see them carrying a slaughtered lamb between them instead of the stretcher. Instead of chanting, though, I hear a low sibilant exchange that seems to concern various parts of my anatomy. By the time we reach the site, I feel as though I’m to be the sacrificial lamb, but when I hold the gate for them they return my glare with such open smiles that I find myself smiling, too. All our smiles vanish when we see what’s waiting for us at the bottom of the pit.