The Night Villa

by Carol Goodman

  “I thought you’d given up coffee.” I don’t know why of all the peculiarities of our present circumstances I pick on this one to single out. Perhaps because it was one of the first things I missed when he joined the Tetraktys, how we used to drink coffee together on the front porch and watch the sun come up.

  “I gave up a lot of things I came to regret later,” he says. He’s toweling dry his hair, head ducked, so I don’t see his expression, but I hear sadness in his voice. “Sit in the sun,” he says. “I’ll get you a cup.”

  He disappears belowdeck and I sit down on a padded bench, on lemon-yellow cushions resting on polished teak. The boat must be at least forty feet long—bigger even than Lyros’s Parthenope. A billionaire’s toy; I can’t begin to imagine what Ely’s doing with it.

  Ely comes back with a cup of coffee and fresh-squeezed orange juice in a crystal glass. Then he goes belowdeck again and within minutes there’s the unmistakable odor of frying bacon. Clearly he’s no longer part of the Tetraktys, but then who is financing this little outing? What is Ely a part of?

  He comes back with a tray filled with scrambled eggs, crisp bacon, a basket of rolls, and dishes of strawberries—all on Capodimonte china and served with white linen napkins and silverware. I have a thousand questions, but the one that pops out of my mouth is, “Where’d you learn how to cook?”

  He laughs. “Yeah, I was a pretty bad cook when we lived together, wasn’t I? I couldn’t believe it when I pulled kitchen duty on the ranch—”

  “The ranch?”

  “That’s what we called the community, or rather what the didaskaloi called it. We didn’t call it anything because, of course, we weren’t supposed to talk.”

  I’m about to ask him who the didaskaloi are, but then I recognize that it’s Greek for “teachers.” Instead I ask him, “You really didn’t say anything for five years?”

  “Unless you count talking in my sleep, which I did for the first few months. A lot of new initiates do it. You can hear them in the novice dorm, calling out names mostly—” He stops, looking embarrassed, and I wonder what names he called out. “But then that stops and after a while you don’t even speak in your dreams. I wasn’t even sure my vocal chords would work after five years.”

  “Is that why you didn’t speak when you called me the morning Dale Henry went on a rampage?” I ask. If I’d had any doubts it had been Ely calling they’re banished when I see the grieved expression on his face.

  “If you had answered I would have tried, but I couldn’t have my first words in five years be to a machine. Besides, I knew the phone line was tapped. I’m ashamed to say that I was afraid of what they might have done to me if they heard me warning you.”

  “So you were trying to warn me. You knew what Dale Henry was going to do? You knew Dale Henry?”

  “I didn’t really know him. New initiates are kept isolated for their first six months—and he’d only been there for about two months before he left in May.” I think back to what Agnes had told me and realize that this meant he’d been in New Mexico since spring break—since he broke up with Agnes, in other words. “I saw him a couple of times working in the garden and I noticed he was wearing a UT T-shirt, but then a lot of initiates come out of UT. I also noticed that during chanting he was very intense. He’d stay at it for hours while most initiates could only last a couple of hours.”

  “A couple of hours? You mean some stay at it longer?”

  “Some chant for days on end without stop. It’s kind of the endurance test for newbies.” Ely grins sheepishly. “Heck, we didn’t have a lot else to do besides growing garlic and binding books. Pride manifests itself in every setting. You weren’t supposed to use chanting as a competitive sport, but plenty did. So people noticed when Dale Henry lasted eight hours on his first day. The leadership noticed. He was removed from the communal dorm and he took his meals with the didaskaloi. He was obviously being groomed for something. I was curious…okay, I was jealous. I’d spent almost five years in silence—fasting, praying, studying. After all I had given up”—he looks at me and then quickly looks away—“I thought that if the didaskaloi had a special mission they should have sent me, or at least one of the others who had been there as long as me, not a newbie. But then I started listening in on the didaskaloi—”

  “Wasn’t that dangerous?”

  “I didn’t think so at first. I still had no idea how far the leadership had strayed from the ideals of Pythagoras. One of the chores you could always do was sweeping. There was no end of sand in the halls. I started sweeping near the library where the didaskaloi were talking to Dale Henry. I realized why they wanted someone new: they wanted someone who wouldn’t be connected to the Tetraktys, and they wanted someone who hated Elgin Lawrence.”

  “Elgin Lawrence?”

  “I was as surprised as you are to hear his name come up. For me it was like the demon I thought I had slain had risen again.”

  “Ely—”

  “It’s okay.” He lays his hand lightly over mine. “You don’t have to say anything.”

  “No, I do. I never said how sorry I was…how sorry I am that I betrayed you like that—”

  Ely shakes his head and squeezes my hand. “It was my fault. I had pushed you away, retreated so far into the Tetraktys that I wasn’t really there anymore. I might as well have transmigrated into another body! I had already left you in spirit. How could I blame you for leaving me in body?”

  I shake my head. “It’s no excuse for what I did. For hurting you that way. Did you really think of Elgin Lawrence as a demon?”

  “For a while, yes. It was easier than blaming myself.” Or me, I think, amazed at how generous Ely has been to my memory. I’m startled at how relieved I am to know he hasn’t spent the last five years hating me. “I thought he’d turned you against me and turned you against any kind of faith with his skepticism. And I admit that when I first heard the didaskaloi talking about him as an enemy of the Tetraktys I felt, well, a little vindicated.”

  “An enemy of the Tetraktys? In what way?” I ask cautiously, not wanting to be the one to give away that Elgin is working with the FBI. It turns out that I don’t have to.

  “They said that he’s been assisting the FBI in their surveillance of the Tetraktys. Didn’t you know?”

  “Not until recently.”

  “Well, it didn’t come as a big surprise to me. I remembered that he had given you that FBI report on the Tetraktys, and I’m afraid I told them about that when I first came to the ranch.” Ely rakes his hand through dark curls dried by the sun. “I swear I never thought they’d do anything to hurt him. For the first time since I’d entered the community I questioned the didaskaloi. In a way, it’s what the vow of silence is all about. It’s supposed to open space in your head so that you can listen and judge what you’re hearing without planning what to say in response. It removes your ego from the equation. I listened to what the didaskaloi were saying to Dale Henry and I judged. They were using him as a tool in their machinations to get the scroll.”

  “What scroll?” I ask even though I already suspect what the answer will be.

  “You’ve figured it out, haven’t you? Pythagoras’s On the Mysteries—or as it’s also called, The Golden Verses.”

  “Even if such a scroll existed in AD 79, isn’t it likely it was a forgery, something falsely attributed to Pythagoras?”

  “Maybe, but that’s not what our magos believes.”

  “Your magos?”

  “That’s what the Tetraktyans call their leader. It means wise man—”

  “I know the Greek word, Ely. It can also mean magician…or impostor.”

  Ely nods, seemingly unoffended by my translation. I can’t help but notice, though, that he’d referred to him at first as our magos. “The magos believes that the poem really did exist and he has been tracking it down for years through all the sacred sites of Greece—Samos, where Pythagoras was born, Delphi, Eleusis. He’d finally concluded that its last known location was
the Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion in Greece, but that it was stolen from there sometime around the time of the birth of Christ. He believes that the poem predicts the birth of Christ and that, in fact, Pythagoras believed that he would be reborn in the body of Christ. Yes, I know, it sounds nuts. It probably is nuts. I’m just telling you what the magos believes. He’s convinced the didaskaloi that if they can find this poem, it will usher in a new world order. It’s been the quest of the Tetraktys for decades. And now the magos believes that the poem was stolen from the Temple of Poseidon by Phineas Aulus. He thought at first that meant the scroll had been lost when Phineas died in a shipwreck, but when he discovered that Phineas had survived…when Phineas’s journal showed up at the Villa della Notte in Herculaneum, he believed that the poem might be there, too.”

  “How did this magos know about the discovery of Phineas’s book? The only people who knew were on this project. I only learned about it after the shooting. Do the Tetraktyans have an informer on the project?”

  Ely looks at me and then, noticing that my coffee cup is empty, refills it. “You could say that. I’ll tell you more when I’ve finished the story, okay?”

  He raises his eyes from my coffee cup to my eyes, his look imploring, and I feel a charge at the contact, which startles me. I nod my compliance, not trusting myself to speak. Am I still in love with Ely? I hear the question in my head, but file it away. Stay quiet, I tell myself, listen and judge. For now.

  “The problem, though, as the Tetraktys saw it, was that Elgin Lawrence was heading the project. They didn’t want Elgin to be the one to find The Golden Verses.”

  “But Elgin’s a scholar.” I’ve broken my resolve to stay quiet not ten seconds after I made it. I’d never last five years. “No matter what you might think of him, you can’t think he’d suppress a scholarly find like that, even if he didn’t believe it was authentic.”

  “It doesn’t matter what you or I think. The magos knew Elgin was working for the FBI and he believed he would suppress The Golden Verses if he was the first one to find it. He could say that it was being kept back from publication until it could be fully translated and placed in context, until it could be verified and its source could be discovered—” I open my mouth to object, but then I remember that sometimes it takes years for scholars to publish their finds. “But the real reason would be that the material is far too incendiary. Imagine finding a sixth-century BC document that accurately predicted the birth of Christ and claimed that Christ was the reincarnation of a Greek philosopher. Imagine the controversy it would cause in Christianity, not to mention other religions. And then imagine the power it could give a group like the Tetraktys, which claims to represent Pythagoras.”

  “Well, I can assure you that Elgin Lawrence wouldn’t care about that!” When I see the look on Ely’s face, I wish I had taken a vow of silence. How could I have sprung so eagerly to Elgin’s defense in front of Ely? “I mean, you know what a religious skeptic he is. He’d like nothing better than to see believers in Christianity embarrassed.”

  “Well, there are others who might feel differently, who might try to get the scroll because they wanted to protect their Church. As for Elgin…no, I don’t believe that would be his motive, but you’re forgetting what such a document would prove: a sixth-century BC philosopher had the ability to foretell the future.”

  “Oh, I’m sure he’d dismiss it as a late-third-century AD forgery. Oh, but it couldn’t be, not if it’s buried in Herculaneum….”

  Ely nods. “Yes, you see the problem. It would have to date prior to AD 79.”

  “Well, then, a first-century forgery. There were Christian communities in southern Italy by then. St. Paul landed at Pozzuoli in AD 61,” I say, recalling John Lyros pointing out the spot just yesterday. “So there were bound to be Christian communities in Herculaneum. Or Phineas himself could have been carrying an early Christian document, something that tried to link Pythagoreanism to Christianity. I can well believe that Elgin Lawrence would try to discredit the scroll, though he certainly wouldn’t destroy it.”

  Ely shrugs. “I’m just telling you what the didaskaloi believed. They didn’t want the scroll falling into Elgin Lawrence’s hands and that’s what they explained to Dale Henry. The magos himself put in an appearance to tell Dale Henry that Elgin Lawrence’s Papyrus Project must be stopped.”

  “By shooting Elgin Lawrence?”

  “I didn’t hear the magos tell Dale Henry that in so many words, but it’s clear that’s what he meant. I heard him say that Elgin was a danger to the Tetraktys and that he must be stopped. I heard him say that if Elgin was gone, the Papyrus Project would fall apart and that Agnes Hancock wouldn’t be going to Italy this summer. That Agnes would someday realize that he had saved her from Elgin Lawrence and that she’d be grateful.”

  Despite the warm sun on my back I feel suddenly cold imagining disturbed, delusional Dale Henry, already obsessed with beautiful Agnes Hancock and half-believing he had some special destiny, listening to an enigmatic cult leader give him a target for his paranoid fantasies. It was like giving whiskey to an alcoholic. “So did this magos give Dale Henry the gun?” I ask, remembering what Elgin had said about the gun being traced to a store in New Mexico.

  “That I don’t know, but Dale would have known where to get a gun on the property and I believe that the room where the firearms were kept would have been left open for him.”

  “Then your leader might as well have murdered Odette Renfrew and Barry Biddle himself,” I say. “Didn’t he realize that Dale could kill everybody in that room?”

  “I don’t think that’s what was supposed to happen. The magos said that Dale should be careful not to hurt Agnes or Agnes’s woman professor.”

  “Agnes’s woman professor…are you sure that’s what he said?”

  “Positive. That’s when I thought about you. I knew you were teaching at UT because I’d used the computer in the office and Googled you….” He grins when he notices me staring at him. “Yeah, I know, pretty pathetic, huh? Anyway, I knew you were teaching there and it occurred to me that you might be the woman professor the magos was talking about. There are only two other female classics professors at UT right now. I didn’t like the odds. So even though the magos specifically told Dale Henry not to harm you—”

  “Why would he do that? I mean, did he say not to harm Barry Biddle? Or Odette Renfrew? Or any of the dozen students in that room?”

  Ely shakes his head. “No, he didn’t. And to tell you the truth, I wasn’t thinking about anyone else. All I knew was that if you were going to be in that room—” He stops because his voice has grown suddenly hoarse. He gulps down air and looks away. “I just knew I had to warn you. The only phone was in the office and I knew it was tapped. I had to steal a key and sneak in there before the secretary arrived, then wait until I knew you had office hours—” I start to ask how he knew that, but then remember my office hours are posted on my faculty profile. “I let the phone ring three times and hung up…at first just because I’d chickened out. I was thinking: she won’t believe me anyway, why should she listen to me after all this time? And then I called again and I hung up again. That’s when I realized I’d let it ring four times and I thought: she’ll know it’s me if I ring in patterns of 3, 4, 5. I know it sounds crazy, but I hadn’t slept all night. I suppose it didn’t mean anything to you at all.”

  “No, I did think of you. But Ely, it didn’t make me think I should stay away from the meeting I was going to. How could it?”

  “I guess I thought that you would pick up the phone when you thought it was me and that I would warn you even if it meant being overheard. But you didn’t pick up.” He looks up at me, but I find it hard to meet his gaze, nor can I think of anything to say. Why hadn’t I picked up the phone? The truth was that the idea of Ely calling me had frightened me. I look at Ely and see the look of betrayal in his eyes: the same look I’d seen when I had admitted my affair with Elgin.

  I look down. We’re ev
en again. Ely joined the Tetraktys and I slept with Elgin Lawrence. He was afraid to speak into the phone, I was afraid to pick it up.

  “Ely, you have to tell the FBI about this—” As soon as the words are out I remember what Elgin told me: there was a former Tetraktys member working with the FBI.

  “You’re the FBI informant,” I say. “Elgin told me there was one—”

  “But he didn’t tell you his name, did he?”

  “No,” I admit.

  Ely nods. “I’m not surprised. He’s not happy that I’m the one working on this. I don’t think he likes me being so close to you. He told me that I had hurt you too much, left scars on you…ghost roots, he called them.”

  I shiver at the phrase I had used in the poem I wrote for Elgin when I broke up with him. I’m sure he’d never have shared it with anyone. Any lingering doubt that Ely is telling me the truth is banished. He really must be working with Elgin and the FBI.

  “Where are you staying?” I ask.

  “With two agents in Sorrento—a convenient midway point between the dig and Lyros’s villa. They’re watching the dig so they can see what happens when the scroll is found, because if what I’m telling them is true then the magos will steal it. Then they can arrest him for that, bring him back to the States, and also try to make the case that he influenced Dale Henry. Otherwise, they just don’t have anything to charge him with. Who’s going to believe me against a man as rich and powerful as he is?”

  “A man as rich and powerful…?” I turn around and look up the hill toward the villa—the replica of the Villa della Notte on the cliff above us, its colonnaded portico clinging to the edge of the cliff like a face set into stone—and have the uneasy sensation suddenly that we are being watched. But the portico is empty.

  “Ely, who is the magos?” I ask, even though I already know the answer. What Elgin told me in Herculaneum—that the FBI was working with a former member of the Tetraktys to catch the cult member who was inside the Papyrus Project—now makes perfect sense: Who better than the head of the project?