Street of the Five Moons (11 page)

“My darling, you have not greeted Doctor Bliss,” said the dowager fondly.

Luigi looked up at me. I felt a slight shock. He might look dreamy and disconnected, but his eyes were furiously alive — black, blazing, intent.

“
Buona sera, Dottoressa
,” he said obediently.

I returned the greeting, and then silence fell. Luigi continued to fondle his grandmother’s hand, running a delicate thumb over her bony fingers, almost in the manner of a lover.

“You look tired, my treasure,” she said. “What have you been doing? You must conserve your strength, you are growing.”

“I am well, Grandmother.” He smiled at her. “You know that to work is for me the highest pleasure.”

She shook her head anxiously.

“You work too hard, my angel.”

He didn’t look overworked to me. He’d have been a howling success as a pop-music star, setting the little girls shrieking, if he hadn’t been so clean.

“What sort of work do you do, Luigi?” I asked. Then, as he held out those expressive, stained young hands, I said, “I’m sorry, I forgot. What sort of painting do you do?”

It was badly phrased. Most young painters imitate one style or another, but none of them like to be reminded of that; they all think they are innovators. Before I could repair my blunder, Pietro let out a sneering laugh.

“His style, do you mean? It is of the most modern school, Vicky. Totally without form or sense. Blobs of color smeared on a canvas.”

The boy’s eyes flashed.

“I am still experimenting.” He spoke directly to me, ignoring his father. “To me art is a very personal experience; it must flow directly from the unconscious onto the canvas, do you not agree,
signoria
?”

“How could she agree?” Pietro demanded. “She is a scholar, a student of art. Did Raphael allow his unconscious to overflow onto the canvas?”

“Well, now,” I said, remembering the etchings, “that might not be so far off as—”

“No,” shouted Pietro. “Form, technique, the most meticulous study of anatomy…. Vicky, do you not agree with me?”

I was about to give some light, joking answer when the tension in the room caught me. They all stared at me with fierce, hungry eyes — the boy, his father, the old woman. I realized that we weren’t talking about art at all. This was an old feud, a basic struggle between father and son. I also realized that I would be an idiot to commit myself to one side or the other. Looking around for help, I caught John Smythe’s ironical eye. Get yourself out of this one, he seemed to be saying.

“I’m not a critic,” I said modestly. “As a medieval scholar I appreciate form, naturally, but I do feel that one’s approach to art must be basically visceral. I couldn’t comment on your work without seeing it, Luigi.”

It wasn’t a bad answer; it could be interpreted according to the predilections of the hearer. Luigi’s face lit up. Goodness, but he was a handsome boy!

“I will show you,” he said, starting to rise. “Come now and we will—”

“Luigi!” The dowager tugged him back onto the stool. “You forget yourself, my child. It is almost time for dinner.”

“Tomorrow, then.” The boy stared at me.

“It will be a pleasure,” I said.

“It will be a great pain,” said Pietro rudely.

II

I am probably the only person in the whole world under thirty who knows all the words to “Lover, Come Back to Me.” It isn’t my fault, it’s the fault of my idiot memory, which retains all the meaningless facts it has ever encountered. Granny Andersen used to play the songs from the old Romberg and Victor Herbert operettas on the piano. God help me, I know them all.

On this occasion the knack proved to be useful. After dinner, when we returned to the drawing room, Pietro and I sang along with Nelson and Jeanette, and by that time I had drunk enough wine to ignore Smythe’s hilarity in the background.

After we had listened to “The New Moon,” Pietro passed into the belligerent stage and challenged Smythe to a duel. I forget what brought on the challenge; some fancied insult or other. As I might have expected, Smythe accepted, and the two of them pranced up and down the
salone
whacking at each other. There weren’t any swords handy, so they used umbrellas, and even the dowager was reduced to helpless laughter as she watched them. She went to bed then, and Pietro showed us card tricks and produced a very fat, very indignant white rabbit from a top hat. Apparently the rabbit had been asleep — in the hat or elsewhere — and was annoyed at being disturbed; it bit Pietro, and was carried off by the butler while Helena fussed over her wounded lover and bound his wounded thumb up in a long gauzy hankie. I enjoy slapstick, but by then I had had enough; I said good night and went to bed.

A long cold shower shook some of the wine fumes out of my head, and instead of retiring I went out onto the balcony.

It was the kind of night you wouldn’t believe. Full moon — a big silvery globe caught in the black spires of the cypresses, like a Christmas ornament. The bright patina of star points made me homesick for a minute; you only see stars like that out in the country, away from the city lights. In the pale moonlight the gardens looked like something out of a romantic novel, all black and silver; the fountains were sprays of diamonds, the roses ivory and jade. My knees got rubbery. It might have been the wine, but I don’t think so. I slid down to a sitting position among the potted plants, my arms resting on the low balustrade, and stared dreamily out into the night. I wanted…. Well, I’ll give you three guesses.

Then a figure came drifting out of the shadows, across the silver-gray stone of the terrace. It was tall and slim, with hair like a white-gold helmet molding its beautifully shaped head. It stopped under my balcony, flung up its arms, threw back its head, and declaimed, in the bell-like tones common to Shakespeare festivals and the BBC:

“
Sweet she was and like a fairy
.
And her shoes were number nine….”

I picked up a flower pot and let it fall. It missed him, but not by much; he had to leap aside to avoid the spattering fragments. I could hear him laughing as I ran inside.

III

Like rats and hamsters, Pietro was a nocturnal animal. Knowing he seldom arose before noon, I figured that morning was the best time to explore. So I was up at eight, bright and shining and ready for action.

What was I looking for? Well, I had no idea. Smythe had been a little too anxious to assure me I wouldn’t find anything at the villa. Ordinarily you would assume that a gang of crooks wouldn’t bring a suspicious investigator to the scene of the action, but Smythe was just weird enough to be trying the double fake. It’s an old adage, that if you are trying to hide from the law you go to a police station. Maybe the criminals were carrying on their nefarious activities under my very nose. There was one activity that would damn them for sure — the workshop of the craftsman who was manufacturing the fake jewelry.

Breakfast was set out in the small dining salon, on silver salvers and hot plates in the English fashion. I ate alone, and then started to explore.

I got lost several times. The villa was a huge place, and I couldn’t be sure I had seen it all even after I had been poking around for some time. The cellars were the most confusing part. Some of the rooms were carved out of the limestone of the hillside itself. It seemed to me that this would be a good place for a hidden workshop, so I explored the underground regions as thoroughly as I could without a plan of the place, but I didn’t find anything except a lot of spiders and cobwebs, plus a wine cellar with hundreds of bottles.

It was with considerable relief that I left the dank darkness of the cellars for the sunny warmth of the gardens. Faint music accompanied me as I wandered — the splashing of fountains, the singing of birds, the rustle of leaves in the breeze. But after I had walked for a while I began to get an itchy feeling between my shoulder blades — the feeling you get when someone is watching you.

There were plenty of places to hide — shrubs and hedges and ornamental stonework all over the place. But there was no sign of a human being. I suppose that got on my nerves. We city types aren’t used to solitude. We are like rats breeding and biting each other in overcrowded spaces. I was suffering from an insane combination of agraphobia and claustrophobia. I was out of doors, with nothing around me but trees and bushes and the sky above, and yet I felt closed in. The weathered statues seemed to eye me cynically from their broken eye sockets, and the carved fauns and satyrs laughed as if they knew some nasty secret I didn’t know.

The gardens had been laid out with a view to the comfort of the stroller. There were benches all over the place, seats of marble and wrought iron, carved and decorated with mosaic. I discovered no less than four summer houses fitted out with cushioned chairs and low tables. One was shaped like a miniature circular temple, with the prettiest little Corinthian columns all around. Eventually I found the grotesque giant head where Smythe and I had had our dialogue the day before. I had been too preoccupied on that occasion to get more than a generalized impression of horribleness; when I examined the head more closely I found it even more awful. I went around it, following a paved path of dark stone, and discovered that the head was the guardian of another garden filled with even more repulsive statues.

They were strategically placed so that I came on them suddenly, without warning, increasing the shock of their grotesque contours. One of them was an elephant — at least I guess that is what it was supposed to be, although it had horns as well as tusks, and claws on its forepaws. The trunk was wound around the torso of a man whom it was trying, quite successfully, to tear in two. The sculptor had succeeded in capturing the victim’s expression very well. He looked just the way you would expect a man to look when he is being ripped apart.

The other statues were even worse. There were few atrocities, animal or human, the sculptor had missed. I went on in a daze of fascinated disgust. The lovely flower beds and tinkly little fountains scattered around only made the sculpture worse.

I was halfway along a terrace rimmed with bas-reliefs of a particularly obscene nature when a sound behind me made me spin around. One of the statues was moving.

It was a life-sized male figure with a demon’s face, a head of curling snakes, and a fanged mouth. The gritting, grinding noise that accompanied its movement sounded like its version of a laugh. It was coming straight at me, and I don’t mind admitting I jumped back. Something jabbed me on the shoulder, something hard and cold. I whirled just in time to avoid the stony embrace of another figure, which had moved out of the azaleas that shrouded its hoofed feet. The place was alive with movement and sound, a cacophonous chorus of grating laughter. Stony arms lifted, heads turned to glare at me with empty eyes.

I tripped over my own heels and sat down hard, right in the path of a dragonlike beast that was grinding remorselessly toward me.

My scream was not a calculated appeal for help; it was an outraged rejection of what was happening. I was quite surprised when it produced results. The dragon figure let out a squawk and jerked to a stop. The other figures also stopped moving. In the silence a bird let out a long, melodious trill.

He came over the carved parapet like Nijinsky in
Le Spectre de la Rose
, in one long, smooth leap, landing lightly on his feet. He stood still, hands on his hips, looking at me severely. But his first swift movement had given him away, and the rapid rise and fall of his chest showed he wasn’t as calm as he was trying to appear. His fair hair stood up in agitated tufts.

Making the other guy speak first is an old ploy in diplomacy. The Indians knew the psychological advantages of it, and modern business executives use the same trick when they tell their secretaries to get the other person on the line before they pick up the phone. Smythe and I might have stayed there for days trying to outstare one another if I hadn’t realized that my hand was smarting. I sucked at the cut, and then glanced down at the rough metal track, almost hidden in the grass, on which I had scraped it.

“You’re not hurt,” Smythe said; and then, realizing he had lost that round, he went on angrily, “Serve you right if you were. People who poke their noses into other people’s business often get hurt.”

“You aren’t trying to tell me these things go off automatically,” I said.

He hesitated for a moment — wondering if he could get away with that claim — and then shrugged.

“No. The mechanisms are operated from the grotto behind this wall. There is a series of switches. Someone must have turned all of them on.”

“Someone?” I inspected my bleeding hand.

“I turned them off,” Smythe said indignantly. “Why should—”

“I can think of several reasons.” Since he didn’t offer to assist me, I stood up all by myself. “But if you think a silly stunt like this one is going to scare me away…”

“Are you sure it was only meant to frighten you?”

“I cannot imagine why we continually converse in questions,” I said irritably. “Like one of those abstract modern plays…. These sick stone nightmares couldn’t hurt anybody, unless they toppled over on him. They look stable enough.”

I reached out and pushed at the stone dragon. I didn’t have to reach far.

“Of course they aren’t stable,” Smythe snapped. “They are mounted on wheels. And, although they are bottom heavy and unlikely to fall over, I don’t know what would have happened if you had fainted, or hit your head in falling, with that thing bearing down on you.”

“The heroine tied to the railroad track?” I produced a fairly convincing laugh. “Nonsense. It was just a joke. Somebody has a weird sense of humor. Who? Pietro?”

“I shouldn’t think so.” His hands in his pockets, the picture of nonchalance, Smythe strolled toward the entrance to the garden of grotesques. I followed him.

“Pietro has no sense of humor,” Smythe went on. “He never operates these monstrosities. You must have noticed how rusty they are.”