The Night Villa (23 page)

“He may have been right,” Lyros says, “but he couldn’t have been easy to live with. How much longer after you lost your baby did he stay?”

“Six months,” I answer. “Nearly to the day. He left just before Christmas. Actually, he left on the solstice—” I try to smile, but find that my lips, coated with the salt from the fried seafood, feel stiff.

“Another numerically significant day,” John says, nodding.

“Yes,” I say, wondering how John knows that the Tetraktys assigned special significance to the solstices and equinoxes. But then, so do a lot of New Age groups. Another coincidence? I take a long gulp of the crisp white wine and stare hard at the line on the horizon where the dark blue of the sky meets the lavender sea, then at the lemon wedges on the table and the bloodred oleander blossoms edging the terrace. I’m trying to concentrate on these details rather than relive the day when Ely left our house in Hyde Park for the Tetraktys community in New Mexico. Telling this story has taken more out of me than I thought it would.

“You were probably better off that he left,” John says, a little brutally I think, but it feels good, like the bracing wind coming off the sea now that the sun has almost set. “A man on a religious mission is not good company, not even to himself.”

“And you know this because…”

He smiles wryly. The waiter’s appearance with a bowl of steaming mussels allows him to delay answering, but when he’s gone, John cracks open a shell and, spearing a dark purple mussel, carries on as if there had been no interruption. “I know from personal experience. I was on a quest once myself.”

“That trek in the Himalayas to find yourself?” I ask.

He laughs so hard he spills the broth from a mussel shell on the cuff of his white shirt. “I see I’m not the only one who’s done a bit of cyber-stalking! It’s hard to believe I was ever young enough to use a phrase like that. Finding myself!”

“Well, did you?” I pop a mussel in my mouth. I have to stop myself from sighing at the explosion of flavor, like the whole sea contained in the silky morsel.

“Find myself?” he repeats, still laughing. But when I continue to hold his gaze, he purses his lips and nods, serious. “I found, I suppose, the
limits
of myself, the borders. How far I could go on how little food or how little sleep—even how little oxygen on the top of those mountains. I think that’s why men—and women,” he adds at a lifted eyebrow from me, “pit themselves against the elements. And it
is
useful information. I won’t deny that. But after a couple of years I felt as if I knew my outlines—” He lifts his hands and holds them a foot apart, giving the space in between them a little shake so that I can almost feel the weight of the air cupped between his large sturdy hands. “As though I were a cartoon figure the artist hadn’t filled in. I was no closer to really understanding what was inside.” He lowers his hands and lets one rest on the center of his chest. “So I came back and went to work—”

“You founded Lyrik,” I fill in, “and then sold it ten years later.”

“You
have
done your homework,” he says, holding up his glass of wine to me.

“But I couldn’t find anything else about you for the next few years, the time in between selling the company and founding the Lyrik Institute. Is that when you went on your spiritual quest?”

He turns his head away, toward the sea, so I’m looking at his profile. “Yes, like your ex-boyfriend I thought the answers might lie in ancient cultures. I’d always been interested in the classics because, I suppose, I thought that if you could go back to the beginnings of civilization, to that moment when primitive man becomes rational man, you could glimpse the essence of what man is. So I founded the institute to pursue archaeological digs—in Samos, Delphi, Eleusis, Cape Sounion. And then I came here”—he sweeps his arm in a wide arc, taking in the panoramic view—“to this amazing land. There’s Lake Avernus—the entrance to the underworld according to Virgil. And beyond that, along the western coast, is Cumae, the oldest Greek colony in the western world, where the Sibyl foretold the history of Rome and, according to some revisionist church historians, the birth of Christ from her cave.” John turns around and points east across the gulf toward Pozzuoli. “And there’s ancient Puteoli where St. Paul first stepped on Italian soil in AD 61 and San Gennaro was martyred in AD 305. It’s like we’re at the epicenter of some great spiritual center here.”

He swerves his head back to me suddenly—his pupils contracted from staring at the sky to tiny purple dots in a sea of lilac—and I remember the impression I had, when I looked at his picture, that his eyes had absorbed the colors of all the seas and mountains and skies he had looked upon. In real life, with those eyes trained on me, the impression is even more startling, as if he could absorb my very essence.

“Funny,” I say. “That’s what Ely used to say about our neighborhood in Hyde Park.”

John starts to say something but pauses while the waiter serves our main course from a platter of whole grilled fish, octopus, and small Mediterranean lobsters—nearly as small as the crayfish I used to catch in the creek behind my grandparents’ ranch. When the waiter leaves John asks, “Do you think your boyfriend—”

“Ex,” I correct.

He smiles and I realize belatedly that I sound like I’m flirting. It must be the wine, I think, taking another sip of the nearly colorless liquid. It’s so light and crisp it’s like drinking water, but clearly it’s a little more potent.

“You think your
ex
-boyfriend Ely and this group, the…what did you call it?”

“The Tetraktys,” I say, wondering if John’s a little drunk himself that he’s forgetting the name of a cult I told him not half an hour ago.

“You think the Tetraktys might be interested in the Papyrus Project?”

“I’m beginning to think so,” I say. “I found out in Austin that Dale Henry attended some Tetraktys meetings, but I thought the reason he chose the project interviews as his target was that he was angry that Agnes was going away for the summer…and that he was jealous of Elgin Lawrence.”

“Did he have any reason to be jealous of Dr. Lawrence? Was he involved with the girl?” The look of distaste on his face tells me what he thinks of such student/professor liaisons.

I shrug. “I don’t know. I thought it was possible. It wouldn’t be the first time Elgin had an affair with a student.” I busy myself dismantling a lobster, hoping John doesn’t see me blush. Although I’ve already confessed to more dire mistakes, I find I don’t want to tell Lyros about my affair with Elgin, not after that disapproving look on his face. “But now I wonder if it didn’t have something to do with the project itself. Maybe it was the Tetraktys that didn’t want the project to happen.”

“Or maybe,” John suggests, “they wanted to change the personnel.”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“Well, if not for the shooting and Barry Biddle’s death, you wouldn’t be here. Perhaps this group thought that if you were here, Ely could use you to infiltrate the project.” John pauses, studying me, but I’m too stunned to say anything. It’s a dreadful idea: that Barry Biddle was killed so that I could take his place.

“But it can’t be,” I finally say. “I haven’t been contacted—” As I say it I realize that it’s not entirely true. The boat in the cove, the man who looked like Ely in the Piazzetta, the Smorfia cards…perhaps these were all overtures.

John takes my hand in his. “I’m glad. I want you to stay on this project.” He looks straight into my eyes and squeezes my hand. “And I can promise you that my wanting you on this project has nothing to do with ancient cults and transmigration of the souls and lucky numbers.” He holds my gaze for a long moment before taking his hand away. I’m waiting for him to say something about my academic expertise or classical training, something to dispel the electric charge in the air between us, but he doesn’t.

A
ll the way back to Naples I feel that charge sparking the air between us, even as we talk of other things: the dig, Simon’s condition, the fate of Phineas’s scrolls, and the interest the Tetraktys could possibly have in them. I sense that John is giving me time to decide how I’ll want to respond to his still-unvoiced proposition. We lapse into silence as we reenter the city and wind through the darkened streets toward the hospital. Perhaps, I think, the proposition was only in my imagination.

But as he pulls up in front of the hospital he says, casually, as if he only just thought of it, “You know, we’re not far from the Hotel Convento. Perhaps we should spend the night in town so that we can check on Simon and Agnes in the morning. The concierge felt so bad about you getting sick there he told me we could always use the manager’s suite.”

I smile remembering Silvio, and because I’m wondering how big a
suite
at the Hotel Convento could be. John smiles back. I realize that he’s taken my smile as encouragement. The space in the car suddenly feels small, the leather upholstery too snug and the seat belt across my chest like a hand squeezing my lungs. I have the feeling that when I try to draw in my next breath I won’t be able to, and for the life of me I can’t tell whether this is attraction or fear. Whatever it is, I need to get out of the car.

“Let’s see how they are first,” I say, opening the door.

He catches up with me on the steps to the hospital. “I’ll go check on Simon while you see how Agnes is doing,” he says, opening the door for me. “She may have woken up from her sedation and be upset that she’s in a Catholic hospital.”

“I had no idea she had this peculiar fear of nuns,” I say, relieved to be talking about something other than our arrangements for the night.

“It might be that she was in a Catholic orphanage for the first couple of years of her life.” He stops when he sees me staring at him blankly. “You didn’t know she was adopted?”

I shake my head, amazed that he’s acquired a piece of information that I’ve missed after knowing Agnes for over three years. He really is amazingly thorough. “No, I didn’t know that,” I say. “Poor Agnes. Yes, you’re right, I’ll check in on her right away. Maybe I’d better spend the night with her—” I’m just elaborating on this plan, which suddenly seems like the perfect solution, when we turn a corner and run into Elgin Lawrence.

“There you are!” Elgin exclaims. “I’ve been trying to call your cell all night!”

“What are you talking about?” I ask, annoyed at Elgin’s transparent attempt to keep tabs on me. “I didn’t bring a cell phone with me.” Too late I realize Elgin was talking to John, who’s now pulling out his cell phone and looking at it with a puzzled expression on his face.

“I think Elgin means my phone, which, I’m embarrassed to say, I apparently switched off.” He smiles ingenuously. Elgin narrows his eyes suspiciously and I can’t say I blame him. A man who’s made his fortune in communication technology can’t even remember to keep his cell phone on?

“What’s wrong?” I ask. “I thought you’d taken the
Parthenope
back to Capri.”

“I decided to take it to Naples instead to check in on Agnes and Simon and when I got here I found out that Simon had taken a turn for the worse,” he answers. “A reaction to one of the medications he was given. He went into respiratory failure, and then cardiac arrest. I’m afraid they couldn’t resuscitate him. He died an hour ago.”

“But he was expected to recover.” John’s tone is angry, as if a subordinate had failed to meet an expected deadline.

“There were complications,” Elgin responds. “You’d better talk to the administration. They wanted to talk to Simon’s employer…something about his insurance. Sophie and I will go check on Agnes. She’ll take the news about Simon better coming from her.” Without waiting for a reply, Elgin steers me around by the elbow and leads me down a long corridor. As soon as we turn a corner, though, he pulls me into an alcove, a sort of niche with a plaster saint. “Did you know Simon was diabetic?” he asks.

“No,” I say. “Why should I have? Do you mean to say
that’s
why he died? But that’s awful—”

“Yes, it’s awful
and
strange. Lyros must have known about Simon’s medical history. He did such a thorough background check on me that he knew the real story behind how I got my name.”

Elgin always tells his students and colleagues that he was named after Lord Elgin, the British earl who brought back the Parthenon frieze from Athens, known thereafter as the Elgin Marbles. But the truth, as he admitted to me after a night drinking Coronas and tequila shooters on his boat on Lake Travis, was that he was named after the town of Elgin, where he was born—nineteen miles east of Austin, famous as the sausage capital of Texas. I’d told him on that night that I thought it was better to be named for the sausage capital than an antiquities looter.

“Lyros also knew that Agnes had been in a Catholic orphanage,” I tell Elgin. “That’s why she’s so freaked out about the nuns here.”

“Really? That explains a few things.”

“She could be in danger.” I start down the hall and Elgin follows me. “If anything’s happened to her I’ll never forgive myself.” We turn into another corridor and I recognize the plaster saint with the crown of waves. Miraculously, we’ve found Agnes’s room. When I enter it, though, I’m afraid we’re too late. The bed is empty and stripped of its bedding. The room smells forbiddingly of antiseptic and ammonia.

I feel a light touch on my shoulder. Turning, I see Agnes, looking not only very much alive but the picture of health. Her cheeks are pink and her eyes glowing as if she’d just finished a morning jog.

“Thank goodness you came back for me! That shrew of a nun wouldn’t let me check myself out without someone to take me back to the villa and I’m going nuts here. I know it sounds crazy, but nuns always make me think of the Grim Reaper. I was afraid I wouldn’t last the night here!”

Elgin and I tacitly agree not to tell Agnes about Simon until we’re on the
Parthenope.
Perhaps we’re both afraid she’ll start accusing the nuns of the Hospital for the Incurables of committing murder. When we do tell her, she doesn’t blame the nuns; she blames herself.

“If he hadn’t wanted to show me those pictures he wouldn’t have gotten hurt,” she says, weeping into my shoulder. I had volunteered to stay below deck with her on the voyage back even though the smell of the engine makes me feel nauseous. I’d much prefer to be up in the fresh air where Elgin and Lyros are, but Agnes is acting so distraught I don’t want her near any railings.

“Agnes, you couldn’t have known there’d be a cave-in,” I tell her.

“But people keep dying around me. It’s like I’m jinxed. It’s not just Simon. What about Professor Biddle and Mrs. Renfrew? And even poor Dale. My own mother died giving birth to me.”

“I didn’t know that,” I say, remembering what John had told me.

“I don’t tell people that I’m adopted because usually it makes them act funny. My birth mother died having me and I wound up in one of those Catholic charity places. I was there for two years before my parents adopted me. So you see, it’s like I’m cursed.”

“Of course you’re not cursed, Agnes. You were adopted by loving parents and you grew up strong and beautiful and smart.” I stroke Agnes’s shiny blond hair as I list her assets and her good fortunes. Slowly her sobbing eases and she falls asleep on my shoulder, lulled by the movement of the boat and my assurances. Asleep, she looks even more angelic. I can’t help thinking, though, that all Agnes’s good looks have brought her has been the wrong kind of attention: Dale Henry’s obsession, Simon Bowles’s attempt to impress her with some lascivious wall paintings. Like Iusta Petronia’s, her beauty is more of a curse than a blessing.

Agnes wakes up just enough to be loaded sleepily into a taxi at the waterfront, but by the time we get back to the villa she’s fully awake and seemingly over her hysterics. We find George and Maria on the terrace, a bottle of grappa between them. Maria’s changed into white slacks and a cotton sweater and her hair is damp. Whatever family emergency called her away this afternoon doesn’t seem to have required too much of her time.

“Ah, finally!” she says as we come onto the terrace. “George refuses to let me see this next installment until we are all gathered and have had a drink in Simon’s honor. It’s really too bad, but I don’t see how waiting to read what Phineas had to say will bring Simon back from the dead.”

“It’s just the right thing to do,” Agnes says. “I think it’s very sweet of George to think of it.” George blushes as he hands Agnes a glass.

“Yes,” I say, sitting down at the table and accepting a glass of grappa. “I’m afraid I didn’t really know him very well, but I know he was a remarkable artist.” I hold up my glass in a toast.

“And he certainly knew how to enjoy the good things in life,” Elgin says, holding up his glass.

“Poor old sod,” George says by way of benediction.

“To Simon,” John says. “May he live on in his paintings.” He raises his glass to the mural at the back of the courtyard and we all look in that direction. Perhaps by design the lamp above the portrait of Dionysus has been left on, lighting up the full cheeks and plump lips of the smiling god. I remember how I had thought Simon
was
Dionysus that first morning I woke up here and I see now that he has given the face something of his own features. Perhaps Lyros has been struck by the same resemblance, because he proceeds to recite from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem about the death of the pagan gods.

“Gods of Hellas, gods of Hellas,

Can ye listen in your silence?

Can your mystic voices tell us

Where ye hide? In floating islands,

With a wind that evermore

Keeps you out of sight of shore?

Pan, Pan is dead.”

In the silence that follows the only sound is the wind buffeting the surf against the rocks below and the fountain splashing against the solemn figure of Night. It’s not hard to imagine that we are on that floating island, the last abode of the pagan gods.

John turns to George and says, “I’m sure Simon would have wanted us to go on with our work. You have another portion scanned?”

“I’ve transcribed it,” George says, opening a laptop and palpitating the touch pad to wake up the screen. “And my Latin was adequate enough to get the gist of it, but I was hoping Dr. Chase might be able to translate it aloud.”

John looks at me. “What do you think, Sophie, are you up to a little sight-reading?”

I angle George’s laptop so that I can see the screen and read the first couple of lines. I’ve gotten so used to Phineas’s style that not only can I translate the lines easily, I can practically hear his voice in my head.

“Sure,” I say, taking a swig of grappa. “Here goes.”

My trunk lay open and empty. Someone had stolen my scrolls. My first thought was to raise an alarm, alert the house, demand that Calatoria summon all her slaves and have them questioned. But then, as my rage withdrew, like a wave retreating from the shore leaves smooth sand, I found myself oddly calm. I sat on my bed to think through the situation.

Iusta had told me much about my hostess today—enough to form two conclusions. First, that Calatoria wanted one of the scrolls in my possession very badly—the one about the mysteries—

“Hold on,” Elgin asks. “The one about the mysteries? What’s the Latin?”

“De mysteriis,” I read, wondering if Elgin is thinking what I’m thinking—that
On the Mysteries
was another name for Pythagoras’s
Golden Verses.
But all Elgin says is “Go on.” So I do.

—which, Iusta explained when I asked why her mistress was so avid for this little book, she believed would increase her power as a priestess of the cult she presided over. Second, that she would not hesitate to steal it. She had already stolen a diary belonging to Iusta, which included in it a letter from Gaius Petronius. In it he had stated that he had granted Vitalis her freedom before Iusta’s birth precisely so that Iusta would be born a free woman. This letter was of course of vital importance to Iusta, and she also valued the whole diary. She had kept it for her master as a means of advancing her education.

Elgin looks over at me and smiles. He knows what such a find—a diary written by a first-century freed woman—would be to me. The successful conclusion to her court case could be the conclusion to my book on Petronia Iusta. I can’t help feeling that, even coming centuries after her death, it would be a victory for Iusta. I smile back at Elgin and continue reading.

And so if I reported the theft to Calatoria she might torture all her slaves to death and fail to extract a confession, as even a false confession would be impossible to validate by producing the stolen scrolls. How then should I proceed? If I concealed the theft and Calatoria was the thief then she would find my silence suspicious. Of course, I realized, that was exactly how I would proceed! I would act as though nothing had happened. Then if Calatoria acted suspicious of my silence, my suspicions that she was the one who stole the scrolls would be confirmed.