The Whirling Girl (26 page)

AT THE NEXT INTERSECTION, a tractor turned out of a farm gate right in front of them. Luke banged his hand on the wheel. “Oh sod it! Bloody hell.”

“Come on. It can't be going all the way to Cortona.”

They would never know. Luke pulled out into the smallest gap in the oncoming traffic, squeaked past in a blare of horns.

“Anyway, don't imagine for a moment,” he said, “that Harry Plank won't set aside his fear of flying to be on hand when the moment of discovery comes. It would all reflect more brilliantly on Harry if the dig took place on property he owned.”

“And all this would reflect brilliantly on you. Re: Project The Anatolian Gig.”

Luke shrugged.

“I thought you said that if there did turn out to be any remains on my place, I wouldn't be able to sell — at least not for years and years — till a whole archaeological bureaucratic jumble got sorted out.”

“Harry's the sort of bloke who can usually find a way.”

A FEW MINUTES LATER, when they were twisting through low green hills, Luke said, “Take a look in your side mirror, will you?”

“The Audi? Why not pull over and let him pass?”

“Not a bad idea.”

The car swept past. A red Fiat was right behind, which slowed as Luke slowed, until he pulled over onto the verge and let it pass. “That should set the cat among the pigeons,” he said, with satisfaction. Round the next bend, the Fiat turned off onto a side road heading east, skirted a rise and disappeared. He tapped the map. “How does that road link up with ours? When will we see him next, do you suppose? We don't want to lose him altogether.”

“What's all this about?”

So much had been odd. His vagueness about the equipment he was after, the techniques for its use, even the meeting he'd gone off to with Vittorio Cerotti. What if they'd just gone for a beer? What if he was in the grip of grand delusion? What if she tore open those bags back there and they were full of plastic egg cartons or table legs, not archaeometric equipment?

Just as she was seriously weighing this, she saw the same red Fiat preparing to nose out of an oncoming junction ahead. After they passed, it allowed another couple of cars to go by and then rejoined the line behind them.

“Good for them,” Luke said. “Once we get to the autostrada of course the fun will begin. There should be two or three more, changing guard.”

HE HAD SET THIS up, he said, because, even without her along, he had no way of getting hold of the equipment without word seeping out. It was better to let the word get out, allow themselves to be followed. After that, he would set up a decoy in the low hills behind Lake Trasimeno, not far from Sanguinetto, a spot that was one of the few remaining pieces of land that Luisa di Varinieri's family had not sold. That was where they would unload all the equipment they themselves did not intend to use, and store it in an old shed there.

“But what about Vittorio Cerotti? He's bound to tell his wife. Is Luisa in on this too?”

“You underestimate me.”

He explained that Vittorio Cerotti was one of those contrarians who maintained that the hilltop of Cortona had not been a major Etruscan settlement, at least not until very late, almost into Roman times. According to Vittorio, early Etruscan settlement had been limited to the lower slopes, with a few princely villas controlling the rich trade routes around the base of the mountain and leading into what was now Umbria, towards the Tiber.

“Your uncle's newspaper column about the Etruscan paving seems to have confirmed this for Vittorio, and nicely bolstered his theory that the early elite settlement extended into the low hills above Trasimeno — right into his wife's family property, as luck would have it. But he's never had the funds or backing to explore this. Which is why he's selflessly agreed to aid the Plank Foundation in purchasing equipment for a preliminary snoop around, on the understanding that when anything does officially turn up, he'll get a good chunk of the credit.”

“But you don't think there's anything there at all?”

Luke gave one of those shrugs, this time with both hands off the wheel.

Once they'd turned onto the autostrada, the red car did not reappear; but Luke began to justify his suspicions by telling her tomb robber tales. How destructive these people really were, how they searched for any promising hump or hollow, even certain types of flowers, probing the earth with iron rods, breaking through into tombs with rough blows, the ancient stonework caving in, the contents looted and torn out of context. The need for secrecy was not paranoia on his part.

“Who said anything about paranoia?”

“I know what you've been thinking.”

“What I'm thinking is that you're much more interested in the archaeology of this region than you let on,” she said. “And here you told me that you're a totally Stone Age man at heart.”

He gave a noncommittal snort.

“What does a Stone Age man exactly do?” she said. “Officially, I mean.”

“Don't tempt me.” His hand returned to her knee.

AS THEY HURLED ON up the autostrada, he began telling her about the work he really loved — using, as an example, a period when he'd worked at a private museum in Paris that housed a collection of Stone Age implements owned by Baron Lowenthall. Some of the happiest moments of his life had been spent, he confessed, in the musty basement of the Lowenthall Museum. A specialty he had developed was a technique known as retrofitting. This involved fitting back together stone chips that had been discarded, chipped away, in the process of the carving of spear points by cave dwellers some fifty thousand years ago. When the gathered-up chips were fitted back together, you could tell exactly what sort of tool had been carved out of the larger block, and this told you what animals those particular cave dwellers had hunted, and therefore what they ate and wore. The geological makeup of the reassembled stone indicated how far afield that tribe had ranged and traded, and even whether the ancient tool-smith had been leftor right-handed.

Clare shook her head, half-ashamed, half-alarmed. He was the real thing. She realized she'd regarded him with an edge of suspicion, never taken him seriously, not as this sort of serious and knowledgeable person.

They careened off the autostrada at the Chiusi exit, threaded a network of secondary roads, swung up a rise, crested a hill. Suddenly the lake was there, a flat green shimmer. Luke pulled off onto the verge.

He turned off the motor. He took her chin in his large hand. She smelled leather on it from the wheel, and the hot salt of his skin. His other hand traced her cheek bones, her nose, her ears. She caught a glint of the gold snake's ruby eye.

He said, “Do you think you could love me, Clare?” Then, as he saw her involuntary shock, a quick recoil. “I said could you, not do you.”

He started the car and jammed it into gear. They crunched down to the valley.

DO YOU THINK YOU could love me?

And then that moment when he'd seen his mistake. Appalling that she was responsible for him showing himself like that, his face so naked, vulnerable, hopeful, then slammed tight. They passed through the narrow streets of a small village. He banged on the horn. An elderly woman wobbled on her bike and nearly lost her loaf of bread.

Clare glanced at his chin-up, scruffy-lion profile. What had her face looked like in the instant after? She remembered the shock on her uncle's face when she'd declared her lust for him — shock and horror at her, at himself — which had lived with her ever after. And now she, grown Clare — wounded, hardened, lying Clare — had been tossed a chance to put just a pinch of ease back into a universe of monstrous and clashing forces. The moment had opened, then shut, in a blink.

They drove around the lake. They passed the palm trees of Passignano. She closed her eyes. Was it possible that if she could just let go of whether or not she did love — just said,
Yes, Yes I could
— might this not turn out to be true? If she could do that, just make that leap, might it not jolt her from aching to hear another voice telling her about resin fungi and the life history of the unicorn.
I am so lonely, Clare
.

They drove up a rutted track that ended at a small stone shed.

They carted in bundles of stakes, electric wire, survey tape, a metal detector, and cartons of unknown contents.

By then it was dusk. He secured the shed with a padlock and pushed past her.

She said, “Luke!”

He stopped, but didn't turn.

She said, “The answer is yes.”

He didn't move. She was going to have to spell it out. If her next words felt like pity, or the jabs of an inoculation — all to the good. She imagined she could smell the feral, wounded struggle he was having before he turned back to her.

THEY DROVE UP THE hill to her uncle's place, her place, then drove slowly on along the path into the woods. In the dark they managed to heft two great duffle bags and an oblong padded case up the stream bed. They hid these as best they could.

They sat for a while on one of the mounds. Fireflies sparked, small silent fireworks. Then a rustling movement on the sidehill made Luke call out, “Who the fuck's there?” It turned out he'd brought along a revolver. He fired it into the air. The silence that settled held just that single whistle that might have been a bird.

The Contessa Calls

A HOT WIND BLEW in from Africa. Overnight the seasons changed. When Clare stood under the wisteria arbour in the morning, she saw the grass along the drive was brittle, and she felt sere and brittle, too. The phone rang as she stood wondering at the harsh quality of the wind.

It was Luisa di Varinieri on the line, saying how delightful it had been the other day to see Clare “at our old Factor's house, which now of course belongs to William Sands.”

Luisa was calling to invite Clare to a little gathering later in the week, the
Festa della Lumache
, the yearly festival of snails, to be held in a small piazza near Cortona's top gate. “This will be excellent for you to write about,” Luisa said.

Clare said a snail festival sounded intriguing. “I've always liked the concept of slow food.”

Luisa laughed. “And I will insist that William comes!” she said. “But you, my dear, will have to do your part and ensure that Luke Tindhall makes up the ground with William, now you have established — if I may say — this warm contact not just with Sir Harold Plank but with Luke Tindhall as well.”

Her tone took on the well-burnished ring of orders tossed for generations down ancestral halls.

“We will see you in the Piazza de Pescadori in three nights' time.”

WHEN CLARE DROVE DOWN to the Molino, the cats were draped on Luke's shoulders, limp with feline love. Luke was marching from room to room, muttering, “Total cock-up, total cock-up.”

Harold Plank had got wind of his trip to the Middle East, and read everything wrong. Luke had been summoned back to London. There was no time to lose. They would have to get up to her field now and find out what it had to offer, which better be something to make Plank's eyes light up or Luke was sodding toast.

They climbed straight up from the Molino along the path by the waterfall. The stream had all but dried up over those few days. Wind raked through the trees. When they located the spot where they'd hidden the equipment, Luke discovered that only the most rudimentary instructions had been included with the instrument in the black padded box, a gradiometer, which he said might be the only one they would need.

It was hard to watch Luke's struggle to put the instrument together.
Haste makes waste, little Chiara
, echoed through Clare's mind. When she was little, her uncle had given her a wooden puzzle, an inlaid box with a hidden lock. While she'd tackled the challenge of it he had held himself back, allowing her to learn almost Zen-like patience in the process of sliding this panel, that one — which then revealed further hidden ones — and remembering the sequence, so that eventually, with persistence and patience, she did indeed manage to turn the tumblers of the lock.

She could have helped Luke now. Gone was the patience that must have sustained him in the museum basement in France. He snapped at her when she made suggestions. He crammed this bit into that bit, cursing. He snapped again when she pointed out which was the diurnal sensor on the long white tube, and which sensor needed to face downwards to read the earth's magnetic field.

When he finally got the device assembled and tested, now almost two o'clock, he told her to take out metal pegs, a hammer and yellow rope, and lay out grids in the areas between the hillocks so that later, if necessary, he'd be able to bring the resistivity meter into play.

HE CLIMBED THE SLOPE of the nearest hillock. Let out a whoop. An exceptional reading! He clambered from one hill to another, as the heat of the afternoon intensified. Exceptional readings, yes. But they began to look exceptionally level. Even when he moved down and across the field, the data all came up looking much the same. At five o'clock he laid the gradiometer down. He'd already made sure he was wearing nothing metal, even checking that his jeans had no rivets. He felt through his clothing again, pulled a tiny one cent Euro coin out of a pocket seam. The coin had thrown the whole day's work out of whack.

The following morning was worse. The gradiometer ran out of battery power and they had no charger. They set up an alternate electromagnetic system according to instructions that Luke had managed to get the previous night on the phone, but found nothing that would indicate buried entrances to tombs. Clare began to understand that it would take weeks for them to explore this area properly, even if they did know what they were doing. Finally, despite all he'd said regarding the ruinous methods of the
tombaroli
, he hiked home for a crowbar and began banging it in now here, now there.

“Luke, for heaven's sake!”

He turned on her. “Isn't it about time you handed over the information that you are holding back?”

“What?”

“Don't think I'm not aware that you've got a case full of your uncle's papers. I found that plastic case you hid away behind those books downstairs, with a metal box inside.”

“What?” She felt sick, picturing his big hands getting in there — maybe fingering the ashes too?

“I was able to pry the plastic thing open far enough to see the locked box where you cleverly hid what everyone is looking for. I looked around when you were in your bath. Like a fool, I thought I'd wait till you trusted me enough to show me.”

“You are absolutely not making sense.”

“What's in there then? Let's go down and get it!”

“What's in there is private.”

“Private? I turn over my entire life to you, but you're keeping the essentials private?”

He stopped. He looked wild. She thought she could see his thoughts clawing around wildly, too.

“Fuck it. Why are we wasting each other's time?” he shouted. He turned and started off down the field. “You can forget your damn snail festival, too!” he called over his shoulder. He looked almost gleeful. “I know it's intended to get me to make up with Sands. Well fine. But you can say
buon viaggio
to Poggio Selvaggio as far as Tindhall is concerned!”