The Whirling Girl (34 page)

To Hell With the Devil's Dogs

BUT SHE COULDN'T GET there from here.

“
No no Signora, non è possibile!
” the station agent insisted. A midnight train ran from the coast to Siena, yes, in one hour. And from Siena she might take a train to Chiusi later in the day, and from there …

Ah, but his brother had a car. His brother would drive her, if indeed she was in such a hurry. “Do not worry, I will wake him, no, my brother will be glad!”

And yes, the station agent said, he would keep the keys of the Land Rover for young Signor DiGiustini, for when young Signor DiGiustini came for them. He was so unquestioning that for a moment Clare let herself wonder if it happened often, young women fleeing from La Celta in the middle of the night. She let herself wonder this to pacify her guilt for the terse note she'd left, after tearing up so many others. And she'd already been so cruel, hiding from the lights of his car as he drove up and down the cypress road in search of her, keeping silent even when she heard his desperate calls. Eventually, when he must have returned to the villa to search the gardens again, she had taken the chance to collect her things, grab his spare set of keys. Write the note.

Gianni, it was lovely. But we let it go too far. I told you from the start that I was involved with someone else. I will leave the Land Rover at the train station. Forgive me. Clare.

She told the station agent's brother that she had to hurry, that she was expecting a guest to arrive from America.

But if Gianni overtook them, it would be fate.

The station agent's brother took her at her word and raced through the intervening hills and valleys and little villages at an alarming speed, scattering chickens, wobbling early riders on their bikes. Clare's awful words coiled through her head: I told you from the start that I was involved with someone else. Of course she never could be, now. If you were very lucky you got one crack at what she'd had, the amazing thing she'd had, and if you weren't brave enough or bad enough or heaven knew what else enough, then that was that. If I'd been different, she thought. How odd this barrier was, that separated her from what she could be if she were different: the she who knew exactly what it was that was happening in her life, could figure it out. The sky over the Val di Chiana was thick and grey with smoke. The station agent's brother said there were wildfires in the hills. In Gianni's refuge she had not realized how drought had settled. The sun came up red behind the city said to be older than Troy. The station agent's brother skirted the base of the hill, just as Clare had the day she'd arrived, which seemed centuries ago, then up the rutted road, then pulled up on her grassy terrace. No one waited there. The house looked forbidding: hollowed of love. As she was too, for a purpose she could no longer keep straight. She threw her pack into the jeep, and crawled in after it. It was blazing midday when she woke.

Inside, the house was angrily clean, expressing Marta's disgust, she supposed, at her going off with Gianni. When she and Gianni were leaving for La Celta, Marta had pulled her aside. “The married brother of your neighbour, Signora,” she'd hissed. “In the
zona
everyone will make poison of this now.”

“How will they know?”

The level, hard-scrubbed gaze. “In our hills here, Signora Livingston, when God sees, everybody sees.”

That day, Clare had smiled at the sweeping terribleness. Was Marta her rock now? The one she could cleave to, maybe find a scrap of motherly consolation for the awful right thing that she had done at last?

It was late afternoon when she hiked up to Marta and Niccolo's to let them know she'd returned.

No one was there.

As she started back from the old house, across the wide gravelled yard, she caught a bright yellow gleam from inside one of the ramshackle sheds, a hue so bright, so unnatural, a glimpse so unlikely, that she caught her breath and crept closer.

Not a tractor. The half-gaping door suggested a longer, sleeker shape. She creaked the door wider. The place smelled feral. She heard a rustling she hoped was only rats. In the dim cobwebbed light, she met the slit-eyed complacency of a long, fast-looking car, yes surely a very expensive car, its tires removed, its body propped on olive crates. The Lamborghini.

But could it be here legitimately? She remembered Marta bristling when she'd asked if they had been storing any of her uncle's things, taking her question the wrong way:
What did Signor Kane have in any case that we would want? We have all our own things that we like!

The lawyer had told Clare clearly that all her uncle's property had been left to her.

Clues rattled through her mind. Things she hadn't picked up, or hadn't wanted to. Marta's indignation when she'd asked about tombaroli, Niccolo's constant warnings that she should not walk in the hills. The way they'd bundled her out of their house after the announcement on TV about the looted bucchero.

A rush of adrenaline, as she pried open the locked compartment on the dash to take a look at the registration. The courage, then, of someone who'd already cut her losses.

But the dogs? The devil's dogs and now the third one who is not so nice?

To hell with the devil's dogs.

Luke left his gun.

THE REVOLVER WAS SURPRISINGLY heavy. How to carry it concealed? How to shoot it, for that matter?

She pictured three dogs coming at her, fangs bared, and shooting herself in the foot. She grabbed the old coat of her uncle's that hung by the kitchen door — how appropriate, a shooting coat — and shoved the gun into one of the big cargo pockets.

When she was halfway up the meadow, it was exactly as she had pictured. Three huge brown-black mastiffs came bursting across the field with gaping jaws. She fumbled in the pocket of her jacket, got her thumb caught on one of the cartridge loops, finally got the gun out, cocked it, aimed at the centre dog and fired. The valley reverberated with a shocking sound, and when she looked, all three of the dogs were on the ground.

The dogs were shivering. It was Niccolo who growled, as he strode forward. Why would Signora Chiara do this, he demanded. His dogs were good dogs but
molto sensitivo
, why would Signora Chiara come with a gun and give them such a nervous shock? Why so frighten him and Marta, too? Marta by now also had appeared. They had come here every day, just as Signora Chiara would have wished, for there had been foreigners prowling again. They both crossed themselves to indicate the menace.
Allora!
With much peril to themselves, they'd made a point to come here — to be seen here — to defend her property.

Two of the dogs stirred, lifted their noses in the air — sprang up — ears forward, noses visibly searching the air currents now. Together, their hindquarters shimmying as they tried to wag their stumpy tails, they came straight to Clare, sniffed her jacket voluminously, licked her jacket, threw their great selves against her as they rose on their hind legs and began to lick her face. Oh God, her uncle's dogs! They recognized, if not her, at least the jacket that she wore. All the tears burst out of her that she'd held back all day, or maybe ever since she'd come to Italy. As she wept the dogs began to howl.

“Nero!” Niccolo called. “Ducé!” He tried to call them off.

“That's okay,” Clare said. She fondled the ears of the darker one, then the other with the brindled coat. “Nero, Ducé —
viene!
” she called. “Come!”

The dogs crowded close as she pushed past Niccolo, who hurried after her, protesting it was not safe to go up there, this was where the foreigners had been seen. Clare burst into a run, the dogs still at her heel.

AHEAD, BUT IN AN area she hadn't earlier explored, on the eastern flank of the cliff where she recalled sheer rock with just some overhanging branches, now she thought she saw … what? An opening in the cliff face?

Niccolo tried to pull her back, “
Signora! Pericoloso!
”

“
Sì molto molto danger!
” Marta puffed.

Clare shook them off. Yes, an opening, the darkness in behind half-obscured by a tall straight slab of stone. The section of a door?

In front of this gaping space was a fall of rock, but not huge rock. Even as she hurried she was picturing, like a film run backwards, those rocks reassembling themselves into a cliff-like puzzle, with the bushes pulled down to hide it once again. She pictured how a box-joint box master might spy the cracks in a concealing wall that had been so cleverly erected millennia ago. How with loyal helpers, the rocks could be taken down. Then later put back. Then those loyal helpers might dare to take the rocks apart again, when the shameless new mistress of the place had gone off with the married brother of her neighbour.

“Ah, poor Signora!” Marta was saying as she caught up, “We had hoped to spare you this!”

For it was with the greatest surprise, Marta said, that, while Clare had been gone, one of the dogs had chased a rabbit to the cliff edge and Niccolo had noticed some stones that looked as if they had been moved and then hurriedly replaced. That was when Niccolo had gone to get Marta, just earlier today, and they had moved the stones more, and peered in and seen —
Santa Maria!
— an empty chamber carved into the rock. Yes, empty.
Sì sì sì, totalmente vide!
They were sure. For of course they had a flashlight — this was habit, from how often the power failed in Italy. What else could Signora Chiara think? Inside was all exactly as Signora Chiara would now see it! If this had once been a tomb — she crossed herself again — it contained nothing now.

“But we have also thought,” Marta added, “Now perhaps we know how Signor Kane has been able on his not-big salary to rent an expensive apartment in the best part of Rome, and then buy the yellow car which, at our place, we have been with much honour guarding in your absence!”

Clare took Niccolo's flashlight, gripped the gun, and scrambled over the pile of rocks, with the two dogs right behind. Niccolo tried to follow. She waved the gun and said no.

She swept the beam of light around the space she'd clambered into. Dank rock on all sides: a carved-out chamber maybe twelve feet by twelve, the ceiling rising in step-carved bands that had once been painted deep blue, deep red, though chunks had broken away leaving a rough gravelly surface on the floor. Benches had been carved into the living rock of the walls on three sides. No — stone beds where bodies would have lain! The walls had crumbled over the years, too, sloughing onto these mortuary beds. On the fourth side of the chamber, bigger rock had crashed down to pile up against a wall that had some sort of niche cut into it.

On the mortuary beds debris was heaped thick in places, yet in other places the beds were almost bare, as if objects had quite recently been removed. (
Now we know how Signor Kane has been able on his not-big salary …
) So many things crowded her mind. Anger. Suspicion. Above all, disappointment. She sank down on the gravelly floor against one of the mortuary slabs. The dogs settled beside her, their hot breathy bodies welcome in the eerie chill. What had she expected when she saw the looming entrance?
You weren't supposed to think of treasure for its own sake
; she'd heard that repeated often enough.
You were supposed to think of what it could teach
.

She fondled the ears of the darker dog, whose head was heavy on her knee. “Was he in it together with them, Nero? Was your master a tomb robber, too?” A bad voice added,
And left nothing for me?
Everything she had found out about her uncle left a greater gap. Would he have felt entitled to what was in here? Maybe not just because he owned the land, but because long ago he'd convinced himself he was the victim of a beloved girl who'd turned evil before his eyes, turned rotten, and then led him down the labyrinth of his own desires. Had he never lost the victim's sense of being owed? Or, less dramatically, he'd simply excused his plundering because he needed something wondrous to make up for all he'd lost?
The way I feel now
, she thought.
Yes, needing some tangible reward for saving Gianni from himself
.

Then, in panic: but what if Gianni had followed her home? What if he was down there waiting, right this minute?

She sprang up. The beam of her flashlight made an arc, swung past the rubble wall — then darted back to where another much smaller cavity gaped through the rock, swallowing the light. She'd thought this was a niche. Now she saw that behind the fallen rock was a low stone entrance with walls some five feet thick, blocked almost to the top by the rubble.

HER HEART PUMPING WITH excitement, she managed to tug and push one of the rocks into a position to stand on. She shone her torch through the opening, flinched. The shadow of a horned figure sprang onto the far wall, along with others that might be cockerels, beasts, gods.

The gods before the gods we knew?

As her eyes adjusted, she understood she was seeing a great jumbled collection of smoky
bucchero
, urns, pitchers and vases. These were made fantastic by the bizarre appendages they sported: calf-headed spouts, wide-winged eyes, human figures springing from jug handles, faces peering over rims, the pieces made more extraordinary by friezes in relief around their curving bellies, processions of other gods or animals or birds, or creatures, both man and beast. Many pieces were still standing — others had toppled — but what a crowd. What a treasure trove was here!

Then, as Clare craned into the chamber farther, waved the torch to the side, she caught a mass of rich gleams of what was surely gold.

Gold, lying amid bones.

There were stories about bones in tombs. She'd heard a tale of someone bursting through into a just-discovered tomb and seeing a warrior in complete bronze armour. Then the figure vanished. Nothing remained but the bronze armour, the rest gone, disintegrated, just like that in the rush of new air. Perhaps that story was apocryphal. But Clare knew that finding intact skeletons was rare. In London she'd seen a display of a female skeleton, which had provided amazing details of the woman's life: her age, her diet, her health — she'd had a tendency to a runny nose, facial abscesses, an arthritic hip. Her medical problems would have made her difficult to live with, according to a modern doctor who examined her bones. She'd had children. She'd been a horsewoman in her younger years, a fact unknown about Etruscan women up to then; that like men they'd ridden horses, and astride.

Clare stepped back and down.

Had Marta and Niccolo been interrupted here just at the point of forcing their way into this second chamber? Could she blame them? Wouldn't she love to do that, too?

This was not a time to start balancing one side of the equation against the other.

“Dogs!” she said. “Move out of my way.”

Gingerly, she piled back one rock, then another, wedging, bracing, making sure that none would tumble until she had blocked off the opening. Then she pulled a sheet of notepaper from her pocket and tore tiny strips, which she secreted here and there so she would know later, just as a spy would, if the arrangement had been tampered with.

“I will believe everything that you tell me,” she said to Marta and Niccolo when she emerged. “So I will mention nothing to my lawyer for example about the car, nor to the police about what you have just this moment discovered here, in my field — if you will arrange to keep watch, night and day until
il Signor Luke
arrives from London!”

“Luke Tindhall is already at the Molino,” Marta said. “This morning I had to tell him that you went off with your Italian. I think he will not want to speak to you.”

“
Boh!
” Clare said. She asked Niccolo for his phone. He said the battery was dead.

It worked just fine.