The Night Villa

by Carol Goodman

  I promised. Then I came back here to my chamber where I wrote down what had transpired.

  “So the very first thing he did upon leaving her was to break his word,” Maria states after I’ve closed George’s laptop.

  “Maybe he didn’t think anyone would ever read this,” Agnes says. Then, looking flustered, she adds, “I mean, this journal is so…intimate. I’ve never read anything from this period that feels so confessional.”

  George shakes his head. “That’s true, but still, Phineas always wrote for publication. He says himself that if he doesn’t retrieve his stolen scroll he’ll be penniless. He dealt in secrets. He was planning to sell this mysteries scroll to Gaius Petronius—and would have sold it to Calatoria if she hadn’t stolen it first. Why should he worry about keeping the secrets of a slave girl?”

  “Or of the hostess who had stolen his property?” I add, giving Agnes a sympathetic smile. I, too, am oddly reluctant to admit Phineas’s perfidy. I’m not sure why. I’ve never thought well of his character—and nothing in his journal so far has shown him in any better light—but I realize that I’m growing unaccountably fond of the man. Maybe it has something to do with what Agnes has pointed out: I, too, have never read anything of this period that is so candid. Phineas’s voice, rising out of this long-buried, charred scroll, sounds so alive. A phoenix rising from the ashes of Vesuvius.

  “You realize,” Elgin says now, “that we don’t know for a fact that Calatoria stole the scroll. I, for one, am not convinced by Phineas’s reasoning. It could have been one of the slaves.”

  Lyros nods. “Yes, but the only slave who sounds like she had enough education to recognize its value was Iusta.”

  “But what would Iusta want with it?” I ask. “She’d already made some kind of deal with Phineas to get her diary back. I have to confess that’s what I’d like to find: Iusta’s diary. Imagine a correspondence between a first-century slave and her master, who may actually have been her father. We have nothing like it; what an exciting find!”

  “Really?” Maria asks, arching one carefully plucked eyebrow. “It sounds rather banal to me. But this scroll on the mysteries, that sounds intriguing. I wonder what it could be.”

  “It could be about any of the mystery rites—” Agnes begins, but I interrupt her.

  “Actually,” I say, looking at Lyros, “On the Mysteries was another name for Pythagoras’s Golden Verses.”

  “I thought Pythagoras didn’t write anything,” George says.

  “There was debate about that in the ancient world,” Elgin responds, “and false manuscripts circulating that people called The Golden Verses or On the Mysteries. This could be one of the false manuscripts.”

  “Or it could be the real thing,” John says. Glancing at me, he adds, “There’s something I should tell the rest of you. Sophie and I already discussed this at dinner—” He takes out of his pocket the postcard printed with the red tetraktys and tells the rest of the group about its odd appearances at the project sites.

  I explain the sign’s significance to the cult of the same name. I notice that Agnes pales and I wonder if she’s remembering Dale’s connection with the group and beginning to suspect what role the cult might have played in the shooting.

  “Do you think this group—the Tetrads or whatever you call them—is targeting the project because they think their sacred master’s book is buried under the Villa della Notte?” George asks. “How would they even know? Only the people in this room have read these Phineas transcripts.”

  There’s a moment of silence during which I become aware of the splash of the fountain in the peristylium and the hiss of the waves hitting the rocky shore far below the terrace, and I sense that everyone is doing what I’m doing: looking around the circle of six assembled people and wondering who might leak information to a fanatic cult.

  “This is ridiculous,” Maria says. “So what if some crazy American cult is interested in this scroll. We’re not even sure it’s still there.”

  “That’s true,” I say, “we don’t even know if they went through with the rites. On the morning after this last journal entry Mount Vesuvius erupted. Wouldn’t they have fled?”

  “Possibly,” Lyros says. “But where to? The prevailing wind on August 24 was toward the southwest. Pompeii received most of the ash and volcanic stone debris—some pumice fell on Herculaneum but it probably didn’t look life-threatening right away. The pyroclastic flow that destroyed Herculaneum didn’t happen until midnight of the next day. Calatoria’s household might have thought they were safer staying where they were than trying to travel.”

  While John talks I look out at the calm, moonlit bay, trying to imagine the chaos and confusion that struck on that day, the horror of not knowing whether safety lay in fleeing or hiding. What I remember, suddenly, is the moment Dale Henry opened fire, how I’d found myself under the table and not wanted ever to come out from under it again. “Or they would have gone underground to the grotto,” I say aloud. “They might have thought that going ahead with the rites would appease the gods of the underworld and protect the household.”

  “But then they all would have been underground when the blast hit at midnight. They would have been buried under there!” Agnes cries, her voice trembling. “How awful!”

  Maria makes a clucking sound with her tongue. “It would have been quick. And if that is what happened it would be a lucky thing for us.”

  “Lucky!” Agnes echoes, staring at Maria.

  “Why yes,” Maria says, ignoring Agnes’s outraged tone. “It would mean the scroll is still there. Now all we have to do is follow those tunnels to the sirens’ grotto and we’ll have it.”

  I leave while the rest of the group make plans to explore the underground passages tomorrow. I suddenly feel too tired to keep my eyes open a minute longer. When I get to my room, though, something on my bed wakes me up: three cardboard tiles like the ones I’d found in the cafe and in the envelope addressed to me, laid out on my pillow like after-dinner mints.

  The first one is a picture I haven’t seen before: three soldiers in peaked caps carrying bayonets forked like lightning bolts. They look like they might have marched with Napoleon. The next two tiles are familiar: a hand lifting a frying pan and a man wearing a mask. I take the other six tiles out of my pocket and arrange them on the pillow in the order in which I found them: the sweeping man, the frying pan, the sun, the moon, the falling man, the masked man, the three soldiers, the frying pan, and the masked man. Three sets of three. Ely had been obsessed by threes. I feel sure that if Ely is really the one sending these, then I’ve got a “set,” the message is complete. But what is the message? I can imagine that some of the symbols—the moon, the sun, the masked man—would mean something to Ely, but soldiers? And a frying pan?

  Then I remember what Gianni had told me about each picture corresponding to a number. I take out the game I bought in the farmacia and unwrap it. Inside I find a playing board divided up into ninety boxes, each one containing a picture and a number. The pictures are a little different from the tiles I have, but they’re close enough. I take out my notebook and, turning to a blank page, write down a description of each card and then, below it, the number that corresponds to the card. When I’m done I have a chart that looks like this:

  I stare at the numbers for a long time, willing myself to see some pattern in them, trying to remember patterns that meant something to Ely. I remember he liked the Fibonacci Sequence, prime numbers, the digits of pi, and palindromic numbers, but none of those seem to fit these numbers, and if it’s a more complicated pattern I’m not going to recognize it. Nor would Ely have any reason for thinking I would recognize it. When the numbers start to blur together I realize I have to go to sleep. Maybe when I wake up, the numbers will make more sense. Ely said that sometimes if he went to sleep with a problem in his head he would dream about the numbers, then wake up with the problem solved.

  I don’t dream about the numbers, though. I dream about the figures
from the Smorfia board. First I am standing outside my house in Austin. I can feel the sun hot on my back and when I turn I see an enormous sun rising above the house roofs and treetops across the street. I turn back to my house and see that there’s a man on my porch sweeping up broken pecan shells. As I walk past him he lifts his head and looks at me with yellow eyes; it’s Charles from the Archetypes Bookstore. He’s grinning at me as if he’d just told me a joke. Of course! Opening the screen door I realize that’s what the symbols on the cards are: archetypes.

  I walk through the house, aware that with each step I take the sun is tracking my progress, moving so fast through the sky that by the time I reach the kitchen the windows there are dark. Odette Renfrew stands at the stove cooking something in a cast-iron frying pan. An overpowering smell of burned sugar and nuts fills the air. When I look inside the pan, I see it holds a pecan pie.

  “Honey,” Odette says, “this isn’t the right pan and it’s not the right day. Go back out and try again.”

  So I go out the back door just in time to see the moon slip behind the house next door. Ely is at the edge of the yard, his back to me. I start down the back porch stairs to reach him, but the three steps that are usually there stretch out below me into a long stone stairway. I hurry, afraid that I’ll miss him, but the steps are wet and slippery, coated with a film of white down. I slip, falling down into the stairwell, and as I reach for Ely he turns and I see he’s wearing a mask shaped like the leering face of a satyr.

  I turn back to my house, but it’s gone. All that’s left is rubble, as if leveled by a hurricane or a neutron bomb. Or, I realize as I pick through the debris, a volcanic eruption. A thick coating of ash lies over everything. I suddenly know that Ely and our baby are buried somewhere beneath the debris and ash. I dig, frantically scooping handfuls of dust until my eyes sting and my throat and lungs are coated with the stuff. There is broken glass in the debris as well, shards of glass covered with scraps of white paper with blue letters. Hebrew letters. I try to fit the pieces together to see what they say, even though I can’t read Hebrew, and I cut my hand on the glass. Still I keep digging until I feel arms pulling me back and something sharp prodding my back. The soldiers have come. They’re dragging me away just as I find, at the bottom of the rubble, the cast-iron frying pan, scorched and rusted and glowing red. I reach for it but the soldiers pull me away. I turn on them, ready to fight their bayonets with nails and teeth if I have to, but find myself facing the masked man. The eyes behind the mask are Ely’s. I reach to pull the mask off. My fingers graze the hard plastic surface, warm to the touch. It’s only when I hear Ely’s screams that I realize my mistake. The heat of the eruption has melted the plastic mask and fused it to Ely’s face. Peeling away the mask, I peel away his flesh as well.

  I awake, still hearing the echoes of his screams, my skin on fire and the taste of ash in my mouth. I reach for the glass of water on my bedside table and gulp down what’s left in it, then stumble to the dresser where a ceramic pitcher holds more. I pour some into my hands and splash my face, letting the water drip down my neck. My T-shirt is soaking. I wonder if I’m sick again, if I’ve had a relapse of the pneumonia. I haven’t had such frightening dreams since my last night in the Hotel Convento. Am I delirious? But when I look down at my notebook, which lies on the dresser open to the chart of symbols and numbers I’d made, my head feels perfectly clear. I know exactly what the numbers mean. They’re dates. 11/22/01, 6/17/02, 12/22/02. Anniversaries. The Thanksgiving Day when I brought Ely back to my house for pecan pie and we slept together for the first time. The day Cory was born. The last one is the day Ely found out that I was sleeping with Elgin and left me to go live with the Tetraktys.

  The sweat is drying on my skin and my breathing has slowed, but still I feel like I’m suffocating. I slip a terry-cloth robe over my T-shirt and grab my sandals. Outside, the peristylium is still dark, the air still. The only sound is the restless surge of the ocean far below the cliffs. I feel like I have to be closer to the water, to immerse myself in it. It’s the only thing that can stop me from burning up while I think about that day.

  Clearly that’s what I’m supposed to do. Why else would Ely send me those dates? He wants me to remember the history of us—from beginning to end.

  I fumble through the dark, down to the lower courtyard, passing the pool, which I dismiss as not cold enough to slake the fire in my skin. I find the stairs down to the grotto. When I come out onto the outer steps, the sun is just emerging above the Sorrentine peninsula to the east. But still, there’s barely enough light to make my way down the stone stairs to the sea. I don’t stop to think how foolish a trip it is. I could fall and break my neck. No one would look for me here for hours. I could drown in the grotto and no one would even know what had happened to me until my body washed ashore somewhere. None of this bothers me. I make my way down to the grotto and slip through the cleft in the rock, leaving my robe just outside. I hesitate when I see that it’s completely dark inside, but then a faint glimmer of light makes its way through the jagged opening to the sea—a forked beam like a lightning rod that magically ignites the water, turning it an electric blue. It’s enough for me. I dive into the fire-blue water, like a phoenix that needs the fire in order to be born again.

  The water isn’t a bit like fire, though; it’s shockingly cold. I surface—the gasp I take for air echoing off the domed ceiling like the dying cry of a drowning woman. I tread water until I can catch my breath, but it’s too cold to stay still, so I dive under again and make my way to the opening out to the sea where, hopefully, the sun has reached the rocks and I’ll be able to find someplace to warm myself. Only when I pull myself up on the rock and stretch out in the first rays of the sun do I let myself think again about the message Ely has sent me. Our three anniversaries. I have no need to think about the first two because I’ve relived them in my head often enough. It’s the last, painful one I always try to keep at bay. But now, on this rock surrounded by water, there’s nothing else to think about.

  After Ely and I came back from visiting his parents, we made a deal. He wouldn’t go live at the Tetraktys community in New Mexico, but he’d continue attending the meetings in Austin and I would come along. I would keep an open mind and give the Tetraktys a chance. I would see, Ely assured me, that it wasn’t an evil cult, but an enlightened philosophy.

  The meetings in the bungalow on Speedway consisted of some chanting and a lot of silent meditation—not so different from the yoga classes I sometimes went to with M’Lou. The study groups I attended in the members’ houses were, I thought, surprisingly scholarly. Most members read, or were at least learning, Latin and Ancient Greek. They’d all read the major sources on Pythagoras, as well as Plato, Aristotle, and a sprinkling of the Neoplatonists—often in the original. The main thing that distinguished these sessions from the seminars I was taking at UT was that here the theories and precepts we read were followed religiously. Because Pythagoras believed that the souls of men could transmigrate into the bodies of animals, the Tetraktyans were vegetarians. This wouldn’t have seemed so odd a dietary restriction except that because Pythagoras had also once told a bull not to eat beans, we weren’t supposed to eat beans, either.

  “That doesn’t make a lick of sense,” M’Lou told me over dinner at El Azteca, the East Side Mexican restaurant where we’d been eating since I was a kid. “How can you be a vegetarian and not eat beans? What do you do for protein?”

  “Cheese,” I told her, holding up my cheese quesadilla, “and eggs. But mostly they all seem to subsist on wheatgrass and carrot juice.”

  “It sounds to me like they’re starving you into a suggestible state so they can brainwash you. You make sure you keep up your strength.” She slipped me a bean burrito and half of her carne guisada, which I ate with guilty pleasure. “I don’t want you kidnapped by any cults and ending up like that gal there.” She pointed at the painting above our booth—one of the many paintings-on-velvet that, along with photographs of Pan
cho Villa and tapestry portraits of John F. Kennedy, adorned the walls of El Azteca. This one depicted a curvaceous Aztec maiden being sacrificed at the foot of a pyramid.

  “She doesn’t look like she’s been starving on any juice diet,” I said, laughing. And then, because I felt guilty for laughing, I added, “It’s not really fair to call it a cult, you know. I mean, you could say the same for Judaism or Christianity when they started—at least the Romans thought of them as cults and made fun of their dietary laws. Professor Lawrence says the thing about the Jews that really puzzled the Romans was their refusal to eat pork. The Romans loved a good suckling pig.”

  “Well, I’m with them there,” M’Lou had said, and then she’d let the subject drop. I think she was relieved to see that I didn’t seem to be taking the Tetraktyans too seriously, and that I’d finished the rest of her carne guisada.

  She was glad, too, that I was taking the ancient religions class with Elgin Lawrence because she thought it would give me some perspective on what I was hearing in the Tetraktys meetings, which is why I was taking it in the first place. Dr. Lawrence had a reputation as a keen skeptic who disabused his students of any lingering romanticism about the early Christians, the pagan Romans…or, really, just about anyone or anything. It was there that I was introduced to Phineas Aulus, the Roman writer who had traveled the Mediterranean collecting the secrets of mystery rites like so many exotic souvenirs. At first Ely was glad that I was taking the class, too. He was proud of the bits and pieces I could bring up at meetings, until I started also carrying home my professor’s attitudes.