The Whirling Girl (14 page)

Yes, but how ironically misleading. For the “major
polis
” was of course not some undiscovered city, but Cortona itself. She imagined the dry pleasure he might have taken in feeding this clue to all those academics who had been condescending about his work, hoping to send them tramping eastward searching the hills directly above “reedy Thrasymene.”

Or had it all been intended mainly for her?

Seek and ye shall find
.

Maybe he'd imagined her to be far more cosmopolitan than she was, that she actually read the
International Herald Tribune
or
The New York Times
. Was this the way he'd finally hoped to speak to her? A breeze stirred the wisteria vine outside. Who had he been then, the man who wrote these dry pieces, which all the same had got the academics buzzing?

Lamborghini

THE PREVIOUS NIGHT IT had struck her as such a reasonable and straightforward idea; she was amazed not to have thought of it before. She would call the Rome bureau of
The New York Times
.

But it turned out that paddling a backwater of the Orinoco might have been easier than finding a phone number in Italy. In frustration, after half an hour of delays and incomprehensible recorded Italian messages, she was about to pack it in, when Ralph Farnham appeared.

This time it was a tweedy riding cap that emerged from the red car. Tight whipcord britches, knee-high boots. Even a leather switch. At the door he struck a lion-taming pose.

He was on his way to the train station to collect his literary agent, who had flown in to Florence. He'd dropped by en route because of a little problem he believed Clare could help him solve.

Well now, Clare said, she'd run up against a little problem of her own.

When she explained, he said it was a pity she hadn't called him the day before, when he'd been down in Rome. They could have bearded the offices of that august establishment together. But as luck would have it, he had the number of
The Times
right here. He pulled out a scuffed leather agenda, and wrote it down for her.

His problem, then, turned out to have to do with those famous non-existent papers of her uncle. The thing was that, with his agent on the way, it was crucial both to Clare and himself that he get a gander at those papers.

His personal suspicion, he said, was that the book Geoffrey Kane had been working on had nothing to do with archaeology. Yes, Kane had spent nearly twenty years working in Rome. And yes he'd scribbled a bit about the Etruscans. But when one considered what merely floated to the surface of Italy's beguiling ruffled waters, one had to imagine that those years in Rome might have resulted in one hell of a political story.

Farnham wanted that story. Political corruption, Mafia connections, bank scandal, hanky-panky in the Vatican. He could spin it all into a crackerjack novel, into gold.

Gold, he added, that he would be prepared to share.

Gold, furthermore, that he could use as leverage to persuade his good wife Federica to drop the foolish legal dispute about that upland corner of Kane's property.

Then Marta appeared. Without even a
bongiorno
she came bustling up from the kitchen with the vacuum cleaner and began to suck up non-existent dirt, encroaching on Ralph Farnham now here, now there, so that they were moving around the room together in a sort of polka to the rhythm of the ancient machine's helicopter roar, until he edged out the door, Clare following to thank him effusively for the number, so sorry, she said, that she couldn't help, but if anything did come up that related to the sort of work he had in mind she'd be sure to let him know.

IN THE END, WHAT Clare learned would have filled a nutshell, if one hard to crack. The man she spoke to, the current
Times
bureau chief, had run articles by “old Fufluns,” yes, but had never in fact met Geoffrey Kane face to face. The office only had five other employees, he said, and none of them were writers. Most of the work came in from freelancers. There had never been an actual Fufluns sighting as far back as anyone around the office could recall. From the tone of his voice, Clare gathered that “old Fufluns” and his dry archaeological articles were a bit of a joke.

Clare finally said, “Maybe you've seen him, and didn't know? A man in his late fifties. Who perhaps drove a yellow Lamborghini.” She was immediately conscious of how pathetic that sounded. “There must be hundreds in Rome, yes, I know. But maybe you've seen one parked, somewhere near?”

It turned out that he had indeed noticed a very fine canary yellow vehicle of that make, parked here and there in side streets around the Piazza Navona. He'd been curious, too, because of the fancy licence plate frame. It had a frieze running around the rim — he'd seen something similar in the Etruscan collection in the Villa Giulia — a frieze of peculiar-looking creatures, half animal, half human.

“But you never saw the driver?”

He thought a bit. Clare could hear phones ringing in the background. Sorry, the man said, he'd have to go. But — yes — once or twice he had noted that same car creeping though the Eternal City's eternal traffic jams, driven by a sour-looking man in a Borsalino hat.

A SOUR-LOOKING MAN IN a Borsalino hat could have been anyone. Except for that detail of the frieze, which jogged something in Clare's memory.

She brought out the two volumes of
Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria
. In the second volume, in the section about the ancient stronghold of Chiusi, on a loosened page as if he'd turned to it many times, was a drawing of a vase made of the smoky black ware known as bucchero. The vase was studded with grinning masks, and banded with a frieze of fantastic human figures with the heads of animals or birds. Clare remembered how this had fascinated her when she was young, fascinated her because the book said that they were likely taken from some myth that the Etruscans had cherished long before they'd ever heard of the myths of the Greeks. Like the great clay figures that had once towered on the roofs of their temples, the figures on the frieze were gods now lost in the mists of ancient times.

Why would he have had such a frieze on his licence plate unless he, himself, had come upon such ancient pieces?

She hurried to the sideboard, pulled out her meadow paintings and scanned each one carefully, as if she might catch some inkling of what her upland property might hold, as if some synapse in her brain might be jogged to remind her of something she had seen but ignored.

Tightrope Show

WHAT A MISTAKEN EXERCISE. Not only did the paintings hold no clue, but they fell to pieces before her eyes. They were not at all as she remembered. When she'd worked on them she'd felt so inspired. But hadn't the upcoming wedding festival glittered through her veins during all those days? Hadn't dreams involving the Italian fevered her to do this work so unorthodox, so winged and free? Now they struck her as messy, overblown, self-indulgent. “
Boh
,” she said, echoing Marta.
Who does the Signora think she is?
She felt sick with disappointment.

She spread the paintings out again, wondering why they should strike her this way now, why the courage and boldness she'd felt in the meadow should be replaced by a critic sitting on her shoulder. A critic in a Borsalino hat?

But a vehicle was turning into her lane. Nikki Stockton, the ballet woman, jumped out of a large orange van.

TODAY NIKKI STOCKTON WAS wearing earrings put together out of gilded nuts and bolts, a short flared scarlet skirt and long black tights, bare feet in the kind of high cork-soled platform sandals that could do her a lot of harm if she were to fall from them. She had a big leather satchel slung over one shoulder. Wide brass bangles shimmied as she strode forward, arms out to the side as if this simple activity were an unconscious tightrope show.

Clare scooped up her paintings. It was foolish to imagine that Nikki might catch some clue in them about what might lie underground in the meadow — though come to think of it her husband had been prowling in the area of the Etruscan paving, along with Anders. But she didn't want Nikki to see the paintings anyway; she didn't want anyone to see them.

NIKKI HAD DRIVEN OVER to invite Clare on an excursion to the dig at Poggio Selvaggio, in three days' time.

She said she'd come over personally — she dipped in a mock curtsey, as if Clare were royalty — because she'd phoned Clare some days ago, about something else, and left a message on an answering machine. Then later she realized that she must have had the wrong number. A bright grin.

Clare felt herself flush, remembering how she'd played the message over, listening for a hint of pain in the cheery voice, the memory of the scene in the woods flaring up again, Nikki's husband fucking the Danish boy.

“Oh my goodness,” she said, “I didn't even realize I had a message machine. Since I got here, I've been out and about so much!”

“No problem,” Nikki said. “I've been angling for an excuse to get together. Besides,” she patted the satchel, “I've brought your book, which I'm hoping you will sign for me.”

Then she asked how Clare's new work was going.

Clare gave a shrug and spread her hands. “I've been so busy with research that I haven't even opened up my art supplies.”

She caught Nikki's glance at those hands so deeply smudged with ground-in paint. She rubbed her fingers together, shaking her head. “Italian newsprint! It's even worse than ours at home. Look at these hands.” She gestured to where her uncle's newspaper clippings still lay scattered. “I've been poring through my uncle's columns, which I know your husband disapproves of. Serves me right!”

The phone rang. As Clare hesitated, thinking she'd ignore it, the machine kicked in and with perfect timing there was Luke Tindhall saying that he hoped she'd got the phone message he'd left a few days ago. That the newspaper clippings he'd delivered in her absence had proved to be useful.

The voice paused, maybe waiting for her to pick up. “Right,” he finished off. “Now that I'm back from Rome, if I can be of any more assistance, do give me a buzz.”

NIKKI WAS FIDDLING WITH a strap on her sandal, pretending she hadn't heard.

“What's the deal on this Tindhall character, anyway?” Clare said. “He made that date to show me around the other day, then gave a phony-sounding excuse to back off.” (This was getting worse and worse, Clare realized, given how William had backed off from that date too.) “So, should I give him a buzz?” She mimicked Luke's tone.

“Luke Tindhall!” Nikki tossed her long pigtail.

She said that for
two years in a row
she had spent weeks writing up applications to the Plank Foundation. And what came of it?
Nada. Zilch!
And now Tindhall, the Plank Foundation's representative, was actually out here, supposed to be looking for worthwhile projects to fund, and had he even responded to Nikki's repeated invitations to come up to the site? Oh, he was happy to be taken out to lunch on the project's limited funds and eat his way through the entire Tuscan menu, starting out by mispronouncing “bruschetta,” which drove William wild, but would he even deign to come over to the lab to look over their finds from previous seasons? No, he was totally evasive.

“Of course my husband doesn't exactly suffer fools gladly.”

“And he thinks Luke's a fool?”

Not exactly a fool, Nikki said. Luke was alarmingly knowledgeable, but such a show-off. On that lunch when William corrected his Italian, Luke had started going on about how he'd eaten all around the world and never once been called on his pronunciation, “… and then he started spouting bits of Arabic and Finnish and goodness knows. The type of person that William absolutely cannot stand. Of course there aren't really a lot of people that William can stand.”

A little laugh, as if this was the drollest thing.

Nikki began circling the room, arms out and tilting this way and that, as she explained how she, herself, had to be the glue that kept the whole excavation project together — a sticky business, the many things that she, as that glue, had to do. It wasn't that William couldn't be bothered, but that his mind was always several levels higher than every other mind, and someone had to tend to the everyday details like, for example, being nice to people.

“
Ecco!
” She took a bow.

Those people who
had to do everything
. Nikki's performance reminded Clare, uncomfortably, of her aunt — another who'd had to do everything, and so could never keep any employee, because no one else could do it right.

Nikki stopped pacing. She gave her braid a tug, as if to keep herself still. “About Luke Tindhall, though,” she said, “Now here is a funny thing.”

SHE SAID THAT LUISA had told her that Federica had told her that on the day following their dinner party, Ralph Farnham had been meeting someone at the airport in Rome, and he had spied Luke printing out a ticket at the automatic booking kiosk.

And then,
somehow
, as Nikki put it, Ralph had found himself peering over Luke's shoulder. The ticket was for Ankara.

“Would the Plank Foundation be spreading its wings to the Middle East, do you suppose?” Her look implied that Clare was sure to know.

Clare realized that she'd been glad to see Nikki arrive, that all the time Nikki had been striding around her room and ranting she had been imagining how they might actually become friends, do fun things together, maybe even today. Go out somewhere and have lunch, a fine antidote to the disappointment she'd felt when she looked at her work again. She'd been so alone, so self-focused, slogging through a swamp of emotions too. Coming face-to-face with that sour-looking man in the Borsalino hat when what she'd always hoped, she realized, was that he'd made something joyous out of his life.

But pal-ship was not why Nikki was here. Nikki was here to make use of Clare's supposed special relationship with the great Plankish Potentate.

How would Nikki ease into it? How many more circuits of the room would it take?

Nikki pulled out one of the chairs by the oak table and sat down primly, knees together, back very straight. She simply said, “Look, I've been hoping you could help.”

What she hoped, Nikki said, was that when Clare came up to the dig — and if indeed she did find the work of value, of course — that she could pass the word along to Sir Harold Plank directly.

“And then we could do an end run around Luke Tindhall altogether.”

Clare smiled a smile she hoped befitted her role as the protegé of a British Peer. She ran her hands through her hair. She said, “That would involve doing an end run around Lady Plank, of course.” Nikki's eyes widened, so clearly tickled to see where this would lead, that Clare couldn't resist expanding on the just-invented Lady Plank. “I gather she's one of those formidable Nordic types. Aesa her name is. Harry says it means ‘Stirs Up War.' But sure,” she added, “I'll do what I can.”