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. G.o.d 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 pa.s.sed 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 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. 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 bal.u.s.trade, 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 a.s.sure me I wouldn"t find anything at the villa. Ordinarily you would a.s.sume 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 d.a.m.n 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 s.p.a.ces. 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 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 gra.s.s, on which I had sc.r.a.ped 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 a.s.sist 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."
"Then who wired them for electricity?" I asked, walking wide around a groping, man-sized lizard. "That wasn"t done in the sixteenth century."
"No, but they moved then, by an ingenious system of weights and compressed air, pulleys and iron rods. The sixteenth-century sense of humor was rather brutal, and the Count Caravaggio of that era was definitely a man of his time. Pietro"s grandfather was the one who wired the monsters. Cute, aren"t they?"
He patted the protruding rear end of a saber-toothed tiger that had its head buried in the throat of a screaming peasant.
"Adorable," I agreed. "How did you happen to come on the scene at such an appropriate moment?"
"The count sent me to look for you. It"s almost lunchtime. One of the gardeners saw you heading in this direction."
"Oh. Well, thanks for rescuing me."
"Pure accident," Symthe said coldly. "Don"t count on its happening again."
IV.
After lunch Pietro went back to bed and I continued my inquiries. The morning had been entertaining but unproductive. What I needed to find were the service areas of the villa. I had not seen many of the staff who worked out of doors, only an occasional gardener, and I had a hunch that I might recognize a familiar face or voice among that group. I also wanted to investigate the outbuildings. If the mystery goldsmith"s workshop was somewhere on the estate, it wouldn"t be open to the public, but at least I could scout out possible places and search them later, after the workmen had gone home. I was beginning to get an odd feeling of urgency about that search. I suppose I had come to think of the unknown master as a potential victim rather than a member of the gang. I saw him as a sweet little old gray-haired man with spectacles on the end of his nose, like the shoemaker in Grimm. Maybe the gang was holding him prisoner, forcing him to turn out masterpieces....
It was a fantasy worthy of Professor Schmidt at his most maudlin. I had been working for that man too long. I was beginning to think the way he did.
First I found the garage - or perhaps I should use the plural. The building held five cars and had room for half a dozen more. The silver Rolls Royce shone in lordly splendor, looming over a low-slung red sports car. There was also a dark-green Mercedes, a station wagon, and a tan Fiat.
I did a double take on the Fiat, and then decided it must be Luigi"s. Maybe he was going through the same sort of reverse sn.o.bbism that affects well-to-do American teenagers. That"s why they dress so sloppily, in torn T-shirts and faded jeans; they are being one with the oppressed ma.s.ses. It"s rather sweet, I think. Silly, but sweet. Or maybe Luigi"s daddy was teaching him how the rest of the world lives. Parents are funny. The poor ones sweat and strain to give their kids all the advantages they lacked, and the rich ones preach the virtues of adversity and tell long, lying stories about how they had to walk ten miles to school every day.
In addition to the garage I found stables, a greenhouse, dozens of a.s.sorted sheds and cottages, and a carpenter"s shop. This last establishment kept me occupied for some time, but the tools were the usual saws and hammers and things. I found lots of buildings, but no people except for an elderly gardener asleep under a tree. I had picked the wrong time of day to check up on the employees. Like their master, they were all sleeping off their lunches. So I gave up and returned to the house, and put through my call to Schmidt. It was early, but I figured he would be waiting, all agog and full of questions, which he was.
He hadn"t received my letter yet. That wasn"t surprising, since the Italian mail service is erratic at best, so I gave him a brief rundown on the latest developments, which didn"t take long, unfortunately. I had plenty of time to dress and get ready to go down for c.o.c.ktails, antic.i.p.ating another tedious evening with Romberg and Rudolf Friml and the Great Pietro, master of illusion.
The evening started innocently enough. As I approached the door of the drawing room I was greeted by a rippling cascade of notes. Someone was playing Chopin, and playing quite well.
The ivory drawing room was Pietro"s favorite. It was a lovely room, done in white and gold, with a great crystal chandelier and gilded stucco cherubs chasing one another around the ceiling. The furniture was upholstered in ivory brocade. The grand piano was gold too, but it was a Bechstein, and the paint hadn"t affected its tone.
When I entered the room Smythe c.o.c.ked an impudent blue eye at me and switched from the ballade he had been playing to a more romantic etude. The footman on duty offered a tray. I took a gla.s.s of champagne, and went to the piano.
"Not bad," I said. "Why don"t you take up music as a profession, and stop leading a life of crime?"
"Not good enough," Smythe said briefly. His hands chased one another up and down the keyboard. "I do better with a harpsichord, but I"m not professional at that either."
"I"d like to hear you. Surely Pietro has a few harpsichords scattered around."
"The harpsichord is in the green salone salone," Smythe said.
"At least play something sensible," I insisted. He had switched to one of the more syrupy themes from a Tchaikovsky symphony.
"I play mood music," Smythe said, nodding his shining golden head toward a sofa in the corner of the room.
The light of early evening suffused the room, leaving the corners in blue shadow. I hadn"t noticed Pietro and his lady; they were sitting side by side, holding hands and whispering sweet nothings.
"What happened?" I asked in a low voice. "I thought they were about to break up."
"So did I. Someone must have given the lady good advice. I thought it was you."
"I gave her some advice, yes. But I didn"t think she"d apply it so literally. By the way, I know you checked up on me, but I didn"t realize you had done such a thorough job. That crack about my experience with ghosts-"
"I"d love to hear the details of that story sometime," said Smythe, energetically pounding out chords.
"I doubt that you ever will. How did you-"
"My dear girl, your friend Schmidt has told half Munich about his brilliant a.s.sistant."
"And you have friends in Munich?"
"I have friends in all sorts of places. And I make new friends very easily."
"I"ll bet you do."
I turned away from the piano. Pietro detached himself from Helena and sat up.
"So there you are, Vicky. I have been telling Helena about the architecture of ancient Greek temples."
"Oh, really," I said. "Fascinating subject, isn"t it, Helena?"
Helena giggled. She sounded as if she were in a very pleasant mood. She stirred lazily, and as she did so I caught a flash of light that dazzled me. Pietro had gone to the table, where a tray of hors d"oeuvres was set out, so I sat down next to Helena.
No wonder she was in a good mood. Pinned to the sweeping contours of her breast was the source of the dazzle - a brooch as big as a bread-and-b.u.t.ter plate. It was a Baroque piece, white gold and diamonds and pearls, set with plaques of antique cameos. Eighteenth century taste, like Helena"s, was inclined to be gaudy. But she was obviously very happy with her prize; her round face beamed as she contemplated the jewel over her double chin.
"Wow," I said. "It must be love."
Helena giggled again.
"It is only a loan," she whispered, in a conspiratorial tone. "So he says. But I think I will forget to give it back to him, eh?"
"Mmmm," I said.
"Come to the window, so you can see it better."
I was happy to do so, since I wanted a closer look at the brooch. Helena didn"t take it off; she probably thought I would grab it and run, as she would have been tempted to do if the situation had been reversed. But I could see it quite well. It was prominently displayed.
I could have sworn it was genuine. No, take that back; I wouldn"t have staked my reputation on any piece in Pietro"s collection, knowing what I knew. But this didn"t seem like the sort of thing my jeweler friend would copy. The laboratory boys haven"t succeeded in making a synthetic diamond that can be ma.s.s-produced cheaply. Besides, though this brooch was worth more money than I was, it wasn"t unique. Pietro had other jewels in his collection that were worth much more.
I admired the effect, while Helena preened herself and simpered. We were still standing there by the window when the door opened and the dowager entered, leaning on her grandson"s arm.
Helena must have known there would be trouble over that brooch, but she was ready to brazen it out. She stuck out her chin and her chest; the diamonds caught the sunlight in a scintillant flash, and the dowager, whose eyes were as keen as her old limbs were feeble, stopped short. She didn"t speak, but I heard her breath come out in a hiss like that of an angry snake. Her beady black eyes narrowed, reminding me of the zoological fact that birds were reptilian in origin.
Pietro hastily turned his back and began eating hors d"oeuvres. Luigi dropped the old lady"s arm. She made no attempt to stop him, although she must have antic.i.p.ated what he would do. She limped to a chair and sat down.
Then Luigi exploded.
There is no point in repeating what he said, even if I could remember all the words. He had an excellent command of vulgar invective, as do most kids his age, but the tirade was rendered pathetic by the fact that he couldn"t quite keep his voice under control. Finally it broke altogether - with sheer rage, I"m sure - and he ran out of the room. The footman held the door for him.