The Whirling Girl (24 page)

HE'D HAD NO CHANCE to follow up this hunch. After Qal'Jalam, the business of earning a living raised its head again, and the opportunity with the Plank Foundation was too good to pass up.

He'd spent months, though, poring over maps, archaeological records, topographical information. Most interestingly, reports from the fairly recent discoveries at Cayönü and Göbekli Tepe. There'd been some hoo-ha about the latter — sensational carved stones and T-shaped megaliths had been discovered, indicating perhaps the world's earliest temple — and theories that the area might have been the location of the original Garden of Eden. Still, it was a site that had drawn together the scattered upland population of huntergatherers and early farmers for ceremonies, going back some twelve or thirteen thousand years. Think of it, he said — seven thousand years earlier than Stonehenge!

THINK OF IT, INDEED!

“So that's what took you to Turkey the other week,” she said. “You finally grabbed a chance?”

He waved that away. It was all much more complicated.

A few months before his Tuscany assignment, on a stroke of luck, he had been sent out from London to Ankara on a small mission for Harry Plank. Then he'd rented a jeep and driven east into Diyarbakir Province, and on towards Lake Van. By then, after considerable correspondence with the local director of antiquities who was an old Cambridge chum, he knew exactly where he wanted to go.

“Which was?”

He put a finger to his lips. “The walls have ears.”

So somewhere out there he had, that very first afternoon, spotted a large dry grass-covered hill that was somehow different from all the other dry grass-covered hills between the dirt road he'd taken and the blue-green rise of the Anti-Taurus Mountains. He'd bumped off across barren fields which in Neolithic and Chalcolithic times would have been green and lush, he said, and the hills densely timbered.

They'd had it all, he said. The inhabitants of his unknown city — evidence of which he almost immediately discovered, though once again he put off detailing what that was — had cornered the market not just in copper from those mountains, and obsidian, and perfumed resins, but in timber. The forests had been exploited there from at least 10,000 bc, he said, and there was ample burned evidence in smaller settlements of timbers used for foundations, roof beams, ladders, furniture.

They'd had it all. “But getting and spending we lay waste our powers.”

They'd cut it down. They'd traded it away. The climate changed. Perhaps for that very reason, the worshippers at Göbekli Tepe had buried their shrines and moved away, and Luke's city too had sunk back to be buried in brush and grass and sand blown by the winds of ten thousand years.

AS HE TOLD CLARE this — and then as he got really going, broadening the topic, taking her on a whirl though ancient Mesopotamia — it was almost as if he were addressing an entire lecture hall. Clare found herself whisked past glimmerings of ancient civilizations that still throbbed beneath the ravished sands of poor benighted modern Iraq. His word, “throbbed.” Ruins pulsing with messages from thousands of years ago, where so much still remained to be discovered as excavation pushed the threshold of civilization further and further back. He gestured as he talked, and she saw the White Temple of Uruk, its high platform where the peoples of the Tigris had been able to climb closer to their gods, and the temples of Eridu, built one upon the other, where in the debris of one of those temples excavators quite recently had come upon the very roots of the language which would allow the many civilizations of the region to communicate over the next three thousand years. “The roots of cuneiform. Do you get the importance of that? My point is how the centuries recede before us as we dig, and how much remains for us to learn.

“So,” he said, turning his alarmingly blue eyes on her. “Now, far north in Anatolia, there is evidence of a major urban centre with the essential markers of true civilization: a priesthood, commerce and trade, highly skilled craftsmanship, dating even from before Hamoukar in Syria, further proving that Mesopotamia was not the cradle of civilization after all. And that is going to knock the smile off a lot of smug academic faces!”

He'd been writing back and forth to his Turkish Antiquities contact ever since, hoping that no one else would get the official okay to excavate in that area until he got the chance to firm things up. Then just after Clare arrived in Tuscany, indeed the night he drove her home after the party at Ralph Farnham's, he'd found an email waiting for him from his friend in Diyarbakir, saying that the former director of the debacle at Qal'Jalam had been snooping around the area. His Turkish friend said that if the Plank Foundation was serious about exploration in the area, Luke had better hurry out and get started on the formalities for getting a permit. So Luke hopped a plane for Ankara next day.

“And?”

Once again he put a finger to his lips, glanced half-seriously around as if the walls really might have ears, then refused to say more.

LATER, WHILE HE WASHED up, he made her sit back and take it easy. She studied his feet on the tiles. The way his toes were crumpled in, as if he'd had to wear outgrown shoes when he was a child. His sturdy legs were a little bowed. Early rickets? What was his background? There had been Cambridge, she knew; he'd told her that his focus had been on the Middle East even then, pursuing the question of urban origins. But for some reason he'd cut his ties with “sodding academe.” Then for a time the only way to get out to the Middle East had been to work at excavating “sodding sodden Roman forts” in the British winters, to earn enough to enable him to hitch out on proper expeditions in the summer. At some point there had been a spell when he'd worked as curator in a museum of Stone Age objects in Paris. But the prospect in Anatolia was something he'd been hoping for all his life.

“So what's stopping you?” she asked. “The place you've investigated sounds like something that would be a natural for the Foundation. So what happened when you popped over there? Come on!”

Little by little it came out. It wasn't the walls that might have ears, it was Sir Harold Plank. Plank had no idea that Luke had been putting forward the Foundation's interest in a dig in Turkey. Plank was completely focused on the Etruscans. It was going to be a long and delicate process to get him to broaden his interests and his resources to take on the Middle East. Luke's trip had been to try to keep things gently simmering along till Plank got the Etruscan bee out of his bonnet. But now the Antiquities Bureau in Ankara was pressing to get things firmed up.

“Harry will never go for it. Not until —”

A glass slipped from his hand and hit the tiles. He waved her to stay sitting as he went to get the broom. He kept his face turned away from her as he swept up the glass.

“Listen. I have to be honest with you about something,” he finally said.

She got up and took away the broom. “Let's not do the confession thing,” she said. “I've got something to show you, instead.”

“WHAT THE FUCK?” LUKE said, when Clare led him to the gate into the woods. “Christ! You're not getting me to go back out there. I barely made it out of there once, chased by some goddamn dog.”

“Don't worry. I'll keep you safe.”

The stream was still rampaging. She tried to point out the grooved rocks. He sniffed. Was that a sceptical sniff? She was nervous now. It had seemed obvious earlier to bring him here; he was the only knowledgeable person she could safely share this with, who had a reason, a need to investigate her theory, and a need to keep it quiet. But it was all starting to look foolish, even to her.

The terrain was rough and slick; halfway up he fell in up to his knees. When they got to the meadow they squelched their way to the far end. She pointed out the mounds, faltering as she told him her entire speculation.

He walked around, saying nothing. It started to rain. He poked the ground here and there, still sniffing.

She said, “So? But?”

He said, “So your idea is that for two-and-a-half thousand years, no one else has had the light bulb go off that maybe these bumps were worthy of digging into?”

“Well —”

“Never mind,” he said. “We'll give you an A for aiming high. Christ, I think I'm catching a cold.”

BY THE TIME THEY'D clambered back down, it was late afternoon. Clare made hot lemon and grappa. Without speaking, Luke took his drink and crawled under the duvet in the big bed. What a bust the whole thing had been. He'd made her feel foolish. Why?

We'll give you an A for aiming high
.

She realized how important to her it had been, her secret, which had kept glinting underneath all the other things that had been going on, glinting even more brightly as her ability to paint posed such frustration. The secret of my meadow. She wished she had kept it a secret. At least she'd still have it.

She lay down on the couch in front of the empty fireplace. When she woke, Luke's clothes were gone and so was Luke. The knobby walking stick was missing from the bucket by the kitchen door.

HE'D LEFT THE GATE ajar. No, he certainly hadn't been born on a farm. Where had he grown up, with that mix of upper-class and rough in his voice? She pictured a boy raised in the impoverished smugness of a vicarage somewhere, learning to toughen up fast in the local school. She squelched along the path. She saw his footprints in the mud. He'd been quick. Maybe he hadn't slept. Maybe he'd pretended he was sick. He had torn and scattered the vegetation along the stream in his rough ascent. When she spotted him he was poking at one of the mounds with that stick. She watched him poke here, poke there, then clamber from one mound to another, peering towards the spot from which the fortress could have been seen on the opposite hill if the trees weren't there.

She felt sick, and at the same time sick with excitement. So he did think there might be something worth exploring here. But he hadn't wanted to let on. Two could play that game.

“Hello!” was all she said when she went over. “You've been having second thoughts?”

“No no. Just another little poke around.” What a rat.

SHE DECIDED TO FIND out more about this person, this “simple Stone Age man” as he'd called himself at one point yesterday. When they got back to her place, she heated a pot of Marta's soup — how had she ever lived without it? — and served it with a bottle of Harold Plank's Brunello. Over the meal, she asked him to tell her more about himself.

He loved that. His apparent apprehension that she was going to accuse him dissolved. He told her about growing up as what he called “a suspect brainy type” in his rough Midlands school; he was the lad who'd read all of Homer in Greek before he got to Cambridge. Her heart softened, and she grew tense for him as he launched into a mixed, bitter and nostalgic reverie about his Cambridge days. How when he arrived he'd found himself in a college that took mainly those from tony boarding schools, the type who had their own packs of hounds; how on his first night of candlelight dining in college he'd been the only one who had not known what a dinner jacket was. Later, he transferred to another college where he'd come to cut a rather posh figure on his own terms. Posh was fine if you did it on your own terms — wearing a dinner jacket and bare feet to garden parties; or becoming known as someone who always had their beer “on silver.” But the best had been the fizz of ideas, the ferment of brilliant minds, the hours spent with the best and brightest, tossing around theories and brilliant insights. She got whiffs of beery evenings at a favourite pub; spicy blasts from an Indian place he called “the dear old Taj”; the jangle of bouzouki from someplace else; and the dense murk of late night college rooms where the talk went on and on.

He loved the chance to relive it all again, as their own night wore on, while she stalked through the forest of his recollections.

So why had he left the academic atmosphere that clearly meant so much to him? Something in his life gone wrong? Perhaps not one thing? Maybe all along he'd dug his own pitfalls. But the lost city in Anatolia was supposed to make up for all of that?

Now he snored in the big bed. Clare stared into the empty hearth.

CLARE WOKE BEFORE DAWN, on the sofa. She tiptoed past the closed bedroom door and was about to start downstairs to warm up in a bath, when she heard Luke talking on his cell phone. Even in Italian, even half-whispered, the words came through with British clarity and resonance. He was arranging to meet someone down at the coast. At Tarquinia. To pick up high-tech equipment for archaeological exploration. A job that must be done very quickly but discretely, to keep the authorities unaware.

Clare crouched, listening through the crack beneath the door.

He planned to set off within the hour. And yes,
allora, grazie grazie
, he was very glad his
good friend
understood the complexities of this situation, how it was essential to keep this matter secret in the extreme, because
the vultures were out there
.

“I have told no one,” he concluded. “No, not even Harold Plank. I will assuredly come alone.”

She heard a little under-the-breath satisfied whistling as he hung up.

It was excellent to barge in while he still sat there, naked, cross-legged on the bed; to see his eyes widen, to see him wondering how much she might have heard. To gather up all his scattered clothes and throw them out the patio door.

“What the hell?”

“Bastard!”

“Hang on!”

“Get out of here. Go and feed your goddamn cats.”

Excellent, to see him attempting dignity, even ferocity. “For fuck's sake, I don't have to listen to this.”

“Right. You don't. And if you ever try to set foot on this place again I will sick the Carabinieri on you,
and
the devil's dogs!”