The Night Villa (12 page)

When I open my eyes again, I’m in the bed. Elgin is there and another man who, I think, must be the god come to ravage me because his hands are under my T-shirt. Then I feel something cool and metallic on my chest and realize that he’s only trying to listen to my lungs. He’s a doctor, the small still rational part of my brain tells me. He’ll want my medical history—the shooting, the damage to my lung—but does my “history” start there? Don’t I have to go farther back? Because, really, my
history
begins with the story of how my mother drowned in the San Marcos River.

“Yes, I know,” I say when Elgin looks at me doubtfully, “of all places! Home of Ralph the Diving Pig and the Aquarena Springs Mermaid show! My mother picked me up one day from school and without even stopping to tell my grandparents where we were going we drove all the way to San Marcos to Aquarena Springs. Ralph was a bit of a disappointment. In the postcards he looks like he’s soaring through the air, but in real life he kind of skitters up to the bank, herded by a workman in green overalls, and just
falls in.
But the mermaids were the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. There were three of them—a blonde, a redhead, and a brunette—their long hair streaming around them like floating clouds, and they wore seashells over their breasts and had shiny silver-green tails. I loved them so much I cried when the show was over and then my mother did the most amazing thing! She went right outside and bought us tickets to the next show so we could see it again—and when
that
show was over she turned to me, her eyes shining in the murky light of the Undersea Theater, and asked
Do you want to see it again?

“She looked as pretty as any of those mermaids at that moment, her skin sparkling as if it had been dipped in the same silver as the mermaids’ tails, her long dark hair as light and bouncy as if she were floating in water, her eyes as green as river water. If I said yes, she would be happy for us to sit there all day and watch the Mermaid Show until nightfall. It was an exhilarating idea, like eating as much candy as you wanted, but also somehow frightening, like that part in Pinocchio where the bad boys all go to Boytown. So I said no, I’d had enough, and afterward we sat on the edge of the river, dangling our feet in water so clear you could see all the way down to the bottom, where long strands of river grass waved in the current. A gentle current. How could anyone ever drown in water that gentle?”

Elgin squeezes my hand and nods his agreement. Of course, he’s been to San Marcos. He knows.

“So when they told me she drowned in the San Marcos I thought at first it was a lie, but then later…” I hesitate, because this is the part I feel worst about, but Elgin squeezes my hand again so I go on. “Later I thought about how my mother had looked that day at the Mermaid Show and I wondered if she just got lost at the bottom of the river—hypnotized by the sway of the river grass—and forgotten to come up for air. And I couldn’t help wondering, since my grandmother was always telling me how alike we were, if the same thing mightn’t happen to me.”

The only person I ever told this story to was Ely and when I did he said it was funny because when his brother, Paul, died he heard his parents say that his lungs had filled with water and so Ely had always thought that Paul had drowned, and so it was like we’d both lost the people we loved the most to drowning, and it meant we were meant to be together. That we were the same.

The two men looked at each other and nodded. The one who’d examined me took out a needle and gave me a shot in the arm. I tried to explain why I couldn’t go to sleep. That I had a hereditary risk of forgetting to breathe and drowning on dry land.

I fell asleep while trying to explain this theory, but I could feel myself falling, drifting away on the current. They must have understood because Elgin lifted me out of the bed. He lifted me up and carried me out of the room and out of the Hotel Convento. When I woke up next I saw blue sky over me and smelled the sea. Elgin was leaning over me.

“We’re taking you to the island,” he said. “We can take care of you better there.”

“As long as you promise not to let me forget to breathe or sink to the bottom of the river,” I say.

This makes him laugh. He leans down close to me and I see his eyes are the same blue as the sky. He takes my hand and squeezes it. “I promise I’ll remind you to breathe. And I won’t let you sink. I’m going to hold on to you the whole way.”

And he does. It’s a long boat trip, but he holds my hand the whole way and every time I feel like I’m falling he squeezes my hand and says, “Hold on.” So I do. When I open my eyes I see an immense tower of rock above me climbing from the sea to the sky. Swallows are looping through the bright air. Houses so white they look like they’ve been carved out of sugar cling to the steep slopes. The air is so sweet that no one could ever forget to breathe here. We’ve come, I think, to the island of the sirens.

I
wake up in a white room that smells like the sea, surrounded by the sound of falling water. I’ve been here some time. Days, I think, but it might just as well be weeks. And I’ve been sick. There had been an IV, but it’s gone now. There had been a wheezing that in my delirium I had thought was the accordion player from the train, but that I realize now was my own breathing. Now, though, the only sound is from falling water that is somewhere beyond an open doorway. There’s a glass of water on a wooden table by my bed.

When I sit up, the room moves a little, like a boat rocking on the sea. Then it steadies. I drink some water and listen. The sound of water is real. I get up and find that I can stand. I can walk if I take very small, very slow steps, but it seems like an age before I reach the doorway. I lean on the door frame and look out into the courtyard.

In the center of a circular fountain stands the bronze statue of a veiled woman. I recognize the goddess Night by her star-studded veil, the poppies in her hair, and the owl that sits upon her shoulder. She’s less foreboding than I would have thought, standing in the sunlight that turns the sprays from the fountain into streamers of jewels that glisten in the woman’s hair and in the profusion of flowers growing around the fountain. It’s so bright and colorful that it hurts my eyes and I focus on the shaded walkway that rims the courtyard. What I see there only makes my head spin more. The figures from my dream have followed me here. Beneath the colonnade across from me I see black-cloaked Hades seizing Persephone, fiery-footed Demeter turning the girl’s companions into shrieking sirens. When I turn to the long wall along the back of the courtyard I see the outlines of figures, insubstantial as ghosts. The only two figures that have bulk and color are a man with a shaved head and a plump, bearded satyr. It’s only a painting, I tell myself, but then one of the figures detaches itself from the wall and turns toward me. As he walks into the sunlight I see his eyes are the light purple of dusk. He moves quickly toward me, as if afraid I’ll escape, but I could tell him it’s not necessary. The only place I’m going is down.

When I wake up again I’m back in bed and the man with the lilac eyes is sitting in a chair reading a newspaper.

“I thought you were Hades,” I say, “but then I guess Hades wouldn’t be reading a newspaper.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he says, lowering the paper and smiling at me. “I think it would please him to see the current state of the world. I can’t claim such an impressive lineage, though. I’m John Lyros.” He puts out his hand for a formal shake.

“My new boss,” I say, putting my hand in his. “How’m I doing so far?”

He laughs. “Well, you’re going to live, which is more than we were sure of a few days ago when Dr. Lawrence found you at the hotel.”

“So it
was
Elgin,” I say. “I thought I might have dreamt him.” I wince at a painfully vivid image of myself lying on the floor of my room in the Hotel Convento in my T-shirt and panties, and Lyros’s eyes narrow with concern. He takes a bottle of pills out of his pocket and shakes one out. “What was he doing at my hotel? I mean, how did he know I was sick?”

“I told him where you were staying and he went to see if you wanted to go to Sorrento with him. The concierge said you hadn’t left your room since the afternoon before and that you hadn’t seemed well.” I wince again, remembering cursing at Silvio, and wonder what else he might have told Elgin. Lyros helps me sit up and gives me the pill. He holds the water glass to my lips and waits for me to swallow before continuing. “Dr. Lawrence insisted the maid open your door and check on you and they found you feverish and delirious. He called me and I sent for a private doctor who diagnosed pneumonia.”

“Why wasn’t I taken to a hospital in Naples?”

“My dear, have you ever been to a hospital in Naples? I knew we could take much better care of you here. I sent the
Parthenope
—the institute’s boat—and Elgin and the doctor brought you back.”

“Yes, I remember that.” Unfortunately I also vaguely recall blathering to Elgin about my mother and the Aquarena Springs Mermaid Show. “What happened to Elgin? Is he still here?”

“He had that appointment to keep in Sorrento.” Of course, I think, a new flirtation. Trust Elgin to find a new girl in every port. “But he only left when I assured him you’d be taken care of. He’s still there, although truthfully I’m not exactly sure what he’s up to. There are no archaeological sites or museums in Sorrento.”

“Knowing Elgin, it’s a girl he met on the plane over…. I’m afraid the UT arm of the Papyrus Project has been a disappointment to you, Mr. Lyros. Do I still have a job?”

He laughs and it’s the best sound I’ve heard in a while. “You’d better have. I’ve got several pages of Phineas Aulus’s book scanned and ready for you to read. I can’t wait to see what you make of it. But first, let’s get you something to eat. We’ve got to build you up. I don’t want you getting pneumonia again.”

For the next few days John Lyros personally oversees the project of “building me up.” He starts by bringing me tea in delicate china cups and ordering me light lunches of pasta in brodo and hard-boiled eggs, brought to me by a unsmiling matronly housekeeper in crisp white blouse and black skirt. On the second day I graduate to crusty rolls spread with fresh mozzarella and thinly sliced tomatoes and the housekeeper rewards me with a smile and her name—Guilia. I smile back. The tomatoes are amazing. I can’t get enough of them. Every time I eat one I can feel my poor dehydrated cells plumping up.

Good for the blood, she says to me in Italian, shaking her fist at me. Then she strikes her own chest. Does she mean that it’s good for the heart, I wonder, or is she offering herself as a example of the healing properties of tomatoes? Certainly she is the picture of good health herself, from her plump oval face to her sleekly coiled black hair. Even her coral earrings and the gold cross around her neck seem to gleam with some special power.

By the third day I’m eating the tomatoes with eggs in the morning, with mozzarella and olive oil for lunch, and heaped on pasta at night. (At night the housekeeper looks tired and doesn’t return my smile.) It’s like getting a blood transfusion, only this red liquid tastes like a mixture of Mediterranean sun and sea air, like it’s got oxygen in it. Everything looks brighter, even the housekeeper, who smiles at me again in the morning and who, I notice, has added a string of coral beads around her neck.

After three days on the Caprese tomato diet I’m strong enough to take a stroll around the courtyard. John Lyros insists I hold on to his arm in case I have another fainting spell. We do a slow circle around the fountain, the cool sprays making prisms in the bright air. Then he takes me out onto the peristylium, which faces the sea. At the balustrade he releases my arm, letting me lean on the marble ledge, and points out the landmarks of the bay: the long arm of the Sorrentine peninsula to our right, the cape of Misenum to our left. In the middle Mount Vesuvius stands placidly against a calm blue sky. The whole setting is so serene—even crowded, boisterous Naples looks tranquil from here—that it’s hard to imagine the violence of a volcanic eruption disrupting the calm. So it must have seemed to the residents of Herculaneum and Pompeii on the morning of August 24, AD 79.

“There’s Herculaneum,” he says, pointing straight ahead. “If it weren’t below sixty-five feet of tufa, we could see the Villa della Notte. That’s why I chose this spot for my restored villa, because it has such a good view of the original. I like to think of the inhabitants of the villa standing on their peristylium looking out across the bay and seeing this spot.”

“It’s eerie,” I say, looking back at the courtyard with its fountain and wall paintings. “It looks so much like what I imagine the original must have that I forgot we weren’t in Herculaneum. Is the rest of the villa designed to look like the original?”

“The lower level is laid out according to the plan of the villa we found in one of the papyri, but it’s not decorated like the original because we won’t know what those rooms looked like until they’re excavated. Besides, we need more modern amenities for the labs. Come, I’ll show you.”

He takes my arm again and we cross the courtyard to the west side and descend a flight of stairs that begin next to my bedroom. At the bottom of the stairs we enter a small enclosed courtyard, a swimming pool at its center. An orange inflatable raft bobs on the surface of the turquoise water and brightly colored lawn chairs and umbrellas are drawn up around one side of the pool.

“I decided that until we know what kind of fountain the lower courtyard had we might as well have the comfort of a pool. If you prefer to bathe in the ocean, though, there’s a staircase down to our own little grotto. Just be careful on the steps—they’re quite steep. The kitchens are through there.” Lyros points through a doorway on the south side of the courtyard. “And the labs are through here.” He leads me to a door opposite the stairs. “We usually have our breakfast around the pool because it’s close to the lab. Perhaps tomorrow you’ll want to join the others.” We walk through a corridor lined with white boards with grids marked out in black erasable ink—like a hospital surgery roster, only the “patients” on these boards are papyrus scrolls waiting to be scanned.

Lyros opens a door to a gleaming lab fitted out with stainless-steel cabinets, glass tables, and several machines that look like a cross between a camera and a microscope, each one perched on long spidery legs above a glass table. The room is a curious mixture of museum, hospital lab, and darkroom. On the walls, held between sheets of glass like laboratory specimens, hang fragments of papyrus scrolls that are the color and texture of dead skin. For a moment the medicinal atmosphere of the room, and perhaps my recent illness, makes me think they
are
pieces of skin and I shiver at the idea.

“I’m sorry,” Lyros says, “we keep this room cool to protect the scrolls and the equipment.”

“It’s probably the best air-conditioned room in the Campania.” The voice comes from behind one of the hulking machines, startling me because I’d thought we were alone in the room. The man tilts himself sideways and I see why I had missed him: he’s so skinny that he’d been totally eclipsed by the scanning machine. In fact, when he stands up I’m struck by how much, with his large wobbly head, dangling arms, and pencil-thin legs, he looks like one of the scanning machines.

“George Petherbridge,” he says in a British accent, extending his hand to me. His grip is bony and cool. “Glad to see you up and about, Dr. Chase.”

“George is on loan to us from Oxford,” Lyros explains. “He worked on the Oxyrhynchus Project.”

“The scrolls discovered in an Egyptian garbage dump? I’ve read about them. Didn’t you recover part of a lost tragedy by Sophocles?”

“That’s right,” George says, grinning. “And we had a lot worse to deal with than a little burning around the edges. The Oxyrhynchus scrolls had been damaged by water and mud. The papyri we’re dealing with here are remarkably unharmed inside their charred shells—the trick is separating the layers of writing and finding the right spectrum for the ink used on each individual papyrus. Take the Phineas Aulus scroll—”

“Is that what you’re working on there?” I point at the machine George still has one hand on.

“Yes,” he says, patting the metal scanner as though it were a pet dog. “As per your instructions, John, I’ve been concentrating on this scroll. We’ve been able to scan about half of it. Miss Hancock has been transcribing the results into a computer document.”

“Agnes Hancock? Is she here today?”

“She’s gone to make us some tea. I know she’ll be happy to see you; she’s been worried about how sick you were. Would you like a peek at the Phineas scroll while you wait?”

“Yeah, absolutely.” Truthfully, I’m more anxious to see Agnes—I guiltily remember that I’d promised Sam Tyler I’d keep an eye on her, and I’ve been in Italy for over a week without giving her one thought—but once I bend down to the machine to look through the lens and see Phineas’s beautifully inscribed letters I feel a tingle of recognition.

“Our friend Phineas used an ink high in iron-gall, which means it shows up best under an ultraviolet spectrum. Here—” Petherbridge adjusts a dial and the outlines of the letters sharpen. I make out the words
whip
and
flagellate
and
flesh
in Latin and suddenly, even though the room is cold, I feel as if I’m back in the hot tufa pit looking at the painted figure of the siren raising her whip over the bare flesh of the suppliant girl. Was Phineas describing the wall painting at the Villa della Notte? But then I notice that the verb is in the first person and I put the sentence together:
I whipped the girl until the blood rose to her skin…
I lift my head up so quickly that I make myself dizzy. Lyros grabs my elbow to steady me.

“I think you’ve been on your feet long enough,” he says, helping me to a chair. “Ah, here’s Agnes with that tea. Perhaps you can get a cup for Dr. Chase….”

“I already have.” Agnes puts down a china teacup at my side. “The intercom was on, so I knew you were here, Dr. Chase.”