Street of the Five Moons (15 page)

Was this one of Smythe’s tricks? To anchor Caesar in front of a mysterious-looking building might suggest that that building held something he didn’t want me to see. Or it might be that he wanted me to waste a lot of time investigating a red herring. Or it might be that he would want me to think it was a red herring because it really did contain something….

I decided I would investigate the building. Obviously I couldn’t do it then. So I stood up — not an easy job, since neither Caesar nor Smythe assisted me. Caesar started to howl when I walked away. After I had closed the gate, I could hear the dog house being dragged along the ground, inch by scraping inch.

“He’s bored,” I said indignantly. “He needs exercise. Why don’t you let him run? The field is fenced.”

“You can come round twice a day and exercise him,” Smythe said. “Good for both of you.”

“Go away,” I said.

“I shall. You’d better come along and have a bath. You smell like Caesar.”

“If I thought the smell would keep you away, I’d bottle it,” I said rudely.

Smythe grinned and walked off.

I might have gone back to the house to shower if Smythe hadn’t suggested it. Instead I went toward the garage. Two men were polishing the Rolls, but Bruno was no longer one of them.

I sought the rose garden next, thinking that scent might overpower the smell of Caesar — an assumption which proved to be erroneous. I wondered why Smythe had chosen to leave when he did. And where was Bruno? What did it all mean? I threw up my hands, figuratively speaking.

The roses weren’t doing me any good, so I proceeded into a part of the gardens I hadn’t seen before. It contained one of the larger fountains, a spray of shining crystal water that dampened the marble contours of a complex sculptural group of nymphs and water gods. Beyond an oleander hedge I could make out the walls of a building. Once I got a good look at the place I knew what it was. I had found Luigi’s studio.

It was a singularly unimpressive establishment for the heir to all the grandeur I had beheld — a low brick building that had once been a shed. Part of the roof had been knocked out and replaced by the skylight that is indispensable to a painter, but that was the only improvement that had been made.

The door was open. It had to be. With the Sun beating down through that glass roof, the interior of the room had the approximate temperature of a pizza oven. Luigi was stripped to the waist. His paint-stained jeans hung low on his lean hips, giving me a view of a tanned back as smoothly muscled as that of Lysippus’ athlete. I couldn’t imagine how he kept his paints from running in the heat. Then I caught a glimpse of the canvas he was working on, and I realized that it didn’t matter. No one would have known the difference.

I coughed and shuffled my feet. Luigi turned. He had a brush between his teeth and his face was stippled with red and aquamarine dots. Those, I regret to say, were the major colors of his canvas. I don’t know what else I can say about it. It conveyed nothing in particular to me except “red, aquamarine.” And particularly horrible shades of both, I might add.

Luigi was a lot nicer to look at. He was beautifully tanned, every exposed inch of him; the sheen of perspiration made his skin glow like bronze. He took the brush out of his mouth and looked at me soberly.

“You came. I thought you had forgotten your promise.”

“I didn’t know whether I should come without being invited,” I said. “It can be annoying to have one’s creative process disturbed.”

Luigi’s sulky face broke into a smile.

“I had reached an impasse,” he said, with a comical attempt at dignity. “That does occur at times, you know.”

“So I understand. I’ll leave, if you—”

“No, no.” He caught my arm in his hard young fingers. “You must stay. Tell me, what do you think of this?”

I know the routine. I stepped back a few feet, put my head on one side, and squinted. I looked through my fingers. I moved to the right and squinted, to the left and squinted. Then I advanced on the painting and squinted at close range.

“Fascinating,” I said finally. Luigi let out his breath. “Yes, it’s a very interesting conception. Suggestive technique.”

“Yes, yes,” Luigi said eagerly. “You understand.”

We discussed the painting. I pointed out several places where the tonal values weren’t quite as sound as they might have been. Luigi told me what he planned to do about that. He had a very nice time. Once he caught me off guard when he asked me point — blank what the painting suggested to me, but I talked fast and got out of that one. The only thing it suggested was sheer chaos.

After ten minutes in that heat I felt as if I must smell like a goat. Luigi didn’t seem to notice, and I couldn’t walk out on him, he was so pleased to have an audience. He showed me several other canvases. They were different colors. Mostly yellow and purple, I think.

“Have you tried other media besides oils?” I asked.

It was a silly question. I should have asked if there was anything he hadn’t tried. Pen and ink, watercolor, pastels; silk screen, engraving, woodcuts…. He kept hauling out portfolios. I was so hot the perspiration ran down my face in streams, getting into my eyes and blurring my vision, and in desperation I finally gasped.

“I can’t assimilate any more, Luigi. I must let the things I have seen sink into my subconscious and become part of me.”

Luigi agreed. He would have agreed with me if I had told him it was brillig and the slithy toves were on the wabe. I escaped into the comparative coolness of the garden, leaving Luigi busy at work on his tonal values.

It wasn’t funny, though. The frustrations of youth never are. Although I don’t claim to know much about any form of art after 1600 A.D., I didn’t think Luigi had much to offer. He would find that out sooner or later, and it would hurt like hell. In the meantime, let him enjoy himself; I certainly had no intention of telling him what I really thought.

I went into the villa by one of the innumerable side doors, planning to go straight to my room and some soap and water. As luck would have it, the first person I saw was the principessa. Things always work that way for me.

She was standing in the hall drawing off her immaculate white gloves while an obsequious butler waited to receive them and the jacket of her pale-yellow linen suit. She must have stood up in the car; there wasn’t a crease in her skirt. Her shoes were as spotless as her gloves, and every hair on her shining dark head looked as if it followed a detailed masterplan.

She inspected me, smiling her faint antique smile, and I was conscious of every spot on my unkempt person. Grass stains from the field, damp spots where Caesar had drooled on me, dirt, paint, perspiration…. I pushed the limp hair off my forehead and saw her wrinkle her patrician nose, ever so slightly.

“Hi, there,” I said.

“How nice to see you, Vicky.” She handed the butler her gloves and came toward me, arms outstretched. I stepped back.

“Don’t touch me, Bianca,” I said. “I’ve been playing with the dog.”

“Dog? Oh, that great beast of Pietro’s. What peculiar taste, my dear.”

“I must shower,” I mumbled, retreating toward the stairs.

“I’ll go up with you. I must freshen up before lunch.”

“I can’t imagine how you could look any fresher.”

“How sweet of you to say so. Seriously, Vicky, I want to have a private word with you before we join the others. The matter you spoke of the other day… I promised you I would look over my collection.”

She looked so serious that I stopped short, halfway up the stairs.

“You don’t mean you found something!”

She shook her head.

“I didn’t check every piece, of course. But I selected examples I thought would be most attractive to your hypothetical criminals. The Kurfürstenpokal cup, the Sigismund emeralds, a few others. They passed every test.”

“Well, that’s good news,” I said, after a moment. “I’m not mean enough to hope you were robbed simply to justify my theories.”

“That doesn’t mean your theories are wrong.”

She was trying to be nice, but she still didn’t believe it, and I found myself unreasonably annoyed by the hint of patronage in her manner.

“My theories aren’t wrong. I can’t prove them yet, but I will.”

“Have you discovered anything new?”

“No, not really. But I think I’m on the right track. That Englishman I told you about — the one who was in the antique shop. He’s Pietro’s secretary.”

“So I learned,” she said calmly. “You seem suspicious of him, but I can’t think why. His credentials are excellent.”

“Did you see them?” I asked bluntly.

She smiled her faintly sinister archaic smile.

“I have met the man himself. I find him attractive. Don’t you?”

“His looks have nothing to do with his morals,” I said.

“You sound like Queen Victoria,” said Bianca, her smile widening. “Do relax, child, and enjoy life. I wonder if I was ever so deadly serious, even when I was your age….”

And she sauntered off down the hall, leaving me standing in front of my door feeling more than a little foolish.

Compared to the other meals I had eaten with the Caravaggios, this one positively sparkled. The principessa was the catalyst. She controlled the conversation like an experienced hostess, drawing even Helena into it, heading off at least two quarrels between Pietro and his son, and managing simultaneously to flirt elegantly with Smythe, whose silly head was completely turned by the attention. He babbled and made jokes as if he were being paid for it.

The only thing that didn’t glow was the weather. Clouds began to gather as we lingered over our coffee, and the dowager looked anxiously at her grandson.

“Luigi, promise you will not go back to that studio of yours while it is raining.”

Luigi, who was in excellent spirits, grinned at me.

“She thinks I will be hit by lightning,” he explained, patting the old lady’s hand.

“My grandmother wouldn’t let me play the piano during a thunderstorm,” I said.

“Very sensible,” said the dowager firmly. “Electricity is a strange substance. Who can understand it? Luigi, promise. Come and read to me. You know how I love to hear you.”

“I must make a few telephone calls first,” the boy said. “Then I will come, Grandmother.”

“Telephone calls indeed,” Pietro muttered. “He talks all day. No telephoning to that friend in Switzerland, Luigi, the last bill was absolutely outrageous.”

Luigi’s smile faded, but he said nothing. I wondered what perverse quality makes people so unfailingly rude to their nearest and dearest. Many of Pietro’s remarks to the boy were quite uncalled for; he couldn’t seem to resist needling him.

After lunch I went with the principessa and Pietro to look at his collection of rare china. She was preparing a publication on a certain type in private European collections, and she was trying to decide which of Pietro’s possessions to include. China happens to be a subject I know virtually nothing about, and I have no desire to know more than I do. It was fun looking at some of the lovely dishes Pietro displayed, but I couldn’t understand half of what they were talking about. So I made my excuses and went to my room. It was raining steadily, and the soft sound made me sleepy. I lay down on my bed and soon dropped off.

I don’t believe that dreams are vehicles for messages from the supernatural world, but I do think they can serve as a means of dragging certain subconscious worries out into the open. I had a very peculiar dream that afternoon. It was all about art — Raphael’s erotic drawings, the “Pietà” of Michelangelo, the Greek statues in Pietro’s
salone
— all of them spattered and streaked with vermilion and aquamarine, like Luigi’s awful painting. When I woke up, the rain was still drizzling drearily on the balcony outside my window, and I lay blinking into the gray twilight for a while, trying to think what it was that bothered me.

It had something to do with Luigi and his studio. Those portfolios of drawings, sketches, watercolors…. The boy had experimented with many artistic techniques. Why hadn’t he tried sculpture or modeling in clay?

There were a number of reasonable explanations. Maybe he didn’t work well in three dimensions. Yet some of the sketches I had seen through a haze of heat and perspiration had a certain something….

It wasn’t a theory, it was just a nebulous, incredible suspicion. But I knew I had to check it out, right away. I grabbed my raincoat and was almost at the door when I caught sight of the clock on the dresser. It was four thirty. So I went back to the telephone.

Schmidt’s secretary, Gerda, answered the phone, and I had to gossip with her for a few minutes before she put me through. She is the worst talker I have ever met, but she’s a good kid. Yet I found it hard to chat; a mounting sense of urgency made me as twitchy as a dog with ticks. Finally Schmidt came on the line.

“I think I may be on to something,” I said. “No, I can’t tell you yet, it’s too amorphous. But I’ll call you later if my hunch works out. If you don’t hear from me tonight, forget it — but expect the usual call tomorrow.”

He was full of questions, but I cut him short. I didn’t have much time. If I did not show up in the drawing room for cocktails, someone might go looking for me. But I was wild to check out my crazy hunch, and with the rain keeping everyone indoors, I might never have a better chance.

The door of Luigi’s studio was closed, but not locked. It yielded to the pressure of my hand. Once inside, I wiped the raindrops off my face and looked for a light switch.

In the bluish glare of fluorescent bulbs the studio looked cold and depressing. It certainly was a good imitation of a starving art student’s garret. The velvet draping the model’s throne was worn and dusty, and the chairs looked as if they had been chewed by a large dog. The rain pounded on the skylight like the drums of a regiment marching into battle.

I pulled out some of the canvases that had been placed in racks along the wall. Luigi had gone through several “periods.” Like Picasso, he had enjoyed a blue period. Like his namesake Caravaggio, he had experimented with chiaroscuro. He had tried pointillism, and cubism, and imitations of Van Gogh, with an overloaded palette knife. The dreary collection proved that the boy couldn’t paint in any style known to man, but it also proved that he was dedicated. Why hadn’t he ever tried sculpting?