Street of the Five Moons

Chapter Six

THE MEN WERE wearing dinner jackets; and if I had not felt less than kindly towards ‘Sir John Smythe,’ I would have had to admit that formal wear suited his slim build and fair hair. His cummerbund was nice and flat. Poor Pietro looked like a melon with a purple ribbon tied around it.

The dowager was sitting by the drawing-room windows, in a tall carved chair like a throne. Her presence subdued her son slightly. He had to confine his amorous proclivities to Helena, since the old countess beckoned me to her side and kept me engaged in conversation.

She was cute. She reminded me of my grandmother. Not that they looked alike; Granny Andersen was a typical Swede, big-boned and blonde even in her seventies, with eyes like blue steel chisels. But they were both matriarchs. The dowager had a passion for fashionable scandal. She wanted to know all the latest celebrity gossip. I wasn’t up to date on that subject, but I was a good listener. We both agreed, regretfully, that while recent American presidential wives might be very nice ladies, they had not contributed much to the world of glamour.

Before long, young Luigi wandered in. He looked vaguely around the room, as if he had forgotten what he came for; then he caught his grandmother’s eye and ambled over to her. She put out her thin, veined hand and drew him down to a seat on a low stool at her side. They made a pretty picture sitting there – sweet old age and attentive youth.

‘My darling, you have not greeted Doctor Bliss,’ said the dowager fondly.

Luigi looked up at me. I felt a slight shock. He might look dreamy and disconnected, but his eyes were furiously alive – black, blazing, intent.

‘Buona sera, Dottoressa,’ he said obediently.

I returned the greeting, and then silence fell. Luigi continued to fondle his grandmother’s hand, running a delicate thumb over her bony fingers, almost in the manner of a lover.

‘You look tired, my treasure,’ she said. ‘What have you been doing? You must conserve your strength, you are growing.’

‘I am well, Grandmother.’ He smiled at her. ‘You know that to work is for me the highest pleasure.’

She shook her head anxiously.

‘You work too hard, my angel.’

He didn’t look overworked to me. He’d have been a howling success as a pop-music star, setting the little girls shrieking, if he hadn’t been so clean.

‘What sort of work do you do, Luigi?’ I asked. Then, as he held out those expressive, stained young hands, I said, ‘I’m sorry, I forgot. What sort of painting do you do?’

It was badly phrased. Most young painters imitate one style or another, but none of them like to be reminded of that; they all think they are innovators. Before I could repair my blunder, Pietro let out a sneering laugh.

‘His style, do you mean? It is of the most modern school, Vicky. Totally without form or sense. Blobs of colour smeared on a canvas.’

The boy’s eyes flashed.

‘I am still experimenting.’ He spoke directly to me, ignoring his father. ‘To me art is a very personal experience; it must flow directly from the unconscious onto the canvas, do you not agree, signorina?’

‘How could she agree?’ Pietro demanded. ‘She is a scholar, a student of art. Did Raphael allow his unconscious to overflow onto the canvas?’

‘Well, now,’ I said, remembering the etchings, ‘that might not be so far off as – ’

‘No,’ shouted Pietro. ‘Form, technique, the most meticulous study of anatomy . . . Vicky, do you not agree with me?’

I was about to give some light, joking answer when the tension in the room caught me. They all stared at me with fierce, hungry eyes – the boy, his father, the old woman. I realized that we weren’t talking about art at all. This was an old feud, a basic struggle between father and son. I also realized that I would be an idiot to commit myself to one side or the other. Looking around for help, I caught John Smythe’s ironical eye. Get yourself out of this one, he seemed to be saying.

‘I’m not a critic,’ I said modestly. ‘As a medieval scholar I appreciate form, naturally, but I do feel that one’s approach to art must be basically visceral. I couldn’t comment on your work without seeing it, Luigi.’

It wasn’t a bad answer; it could be interpreted according to the predilections of the hearer. Luigi’s face lit up. Goodness, but he was a handsome boy!

‘I will show you,’ he said, starting to rise. ‘Come now and we will – ’

‘Luigi!’ The dowager tugged him back onto the stool. ‘You forget yourself, my child. It is almost time for dinner.’

‘Tomorrow, then.’ The boy stared at me.

‘It will be a pleasure,’ I said.

‘It will be a great pain,’ said Pietro rudely.

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. God help me, I know them all.

On this occasion the knack proved to be useful. After dinner, when 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 passed 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 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 balustrade, 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-grey stone of the terrace. It was tall and slim, with hair like a white-gold helmet moulding 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.

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 had an idea. Smythe had been a little too anxious to assure me I wouldn’t find anything at the villa. Ordinarily you would assume 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 damn them for sure – the workshop of the craftsman who was manufacturing the fake jewellery.

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 spaces. I was suffering from an insane combination of agoraphobia 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 towards 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, 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 grass, on which I had scraped 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 assist 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 humour. Who? Pietro?’

‘I shouldn’t think so.’ His hands in his pockets, the picture of nonchalance, Smythe strolled towards the entrance to the garden of grotesques. I followed him.

‘Pietro has no sense of humour,’ 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 humour 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,’ Smythe said coldly. ‘Don’t count on it happening again.’

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 grey-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 splendour, 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 snobbism that affects well-to-do American teenagers. That’s why they dress so sloppily, in T-shirts and jeans; they are being one with the oppressed masses. 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 assorted 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 cocktails, anticipating 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 favourite. 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 cocked an impudent blue eye at me and switched from the ballade he had been playing to a more romantic étude. The footman on duty offered a tray. I took a glass 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,’ 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 towards 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 assistant.’

‘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-butter 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 jeweller friend would copy. The laboratory boys haven’t succeeded in making a synthetic diamond that can be mass-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 anticipated 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.

If I don’t mention the footman or the butler or the maid more often, it is because I would have to mention them too often. Servants were all over the house, like fleas, jumping out at you when you didn’t expect them. Many of the more personal family encounters I was to witness took place in front of this audience; none of the Caravaggios seemed to mind them, but I couldn’t be sure whether it was because they were regarded as members of the family or as pieces of furniture.

Pietro sputtered helplessly during his son’s outburst. When the boy ran out, he would have shouted, had he not caught his mother’s eye. The dowager said nothing. She didn’t have to. It was quite clear what she thought of the whole thing, and with whom her sympathy lay. Obviously both she and Luigi assumed Pietro had given his girlfriend the brooch to keep.

The remainder of the cocktail hour passed uncomfortably. At least I was uncomfortable, and so was Pietro. Helena, never sensitive to other people’s feelings, basked in the reflected glitter of diamonds. The dowager sat like a stiff black effigy, her wrinkled white hands folded over the top of her stick. She never took her eyes off the swaggering, self-conscious figure of her son.

The only thing that made the situation bearable was Smythe’s playing. He went from Tchaikovsky to Bach to Vivaldi and finally lapsed into Rudolf Friml, which he performed with a swooping, saccharine sweetness that made the melodies sound like satires of themselves. I don’t think he was playing to be helpful, he was only amusing himself; but music does soothe the savage breast, and it pleased Pietro.

It was a long evening, though. The dowager stuck with us till long after dinner – in order to punish Pietro – and it was almost ten o’clock before the four of us returned to the drawing room for coffee. Like a naughty little boy, Pietro relaxed as soon as his mother left. He had drunk quite a bit, and was well into his aggressive mood; the fact that he had had to repress it in front of the old lady made him even more belligerent. He turned on Smythe, who was drifting towards the piano, and snarled.

‘A fine performance, I must say. So this is how you carry out your duties!’

Smythe raised an eyebrow and did not reply. Pietro looked at me.

‘He has been here less than a week, and you see how he behaves! Like a guest in the house. I take him in, employ him, because he is well recommended; he does no work, he sits by laughing when my own son insults and defames me. What do you say to that?’

‘Terrible,’ I said. The complaint was totally unreasonable, of course, but I was not inclined to defend Sir John Smythe. If Pietro had proposed stringing him up for horse stealing, I’d have lent a hand on the rope.

‘Don’t be so silly, Pietro,’ Helena said, fingering her diamonds. ‘What do you expect Sir John to do? It is your problem if your son misbehaves.’

The old saying, that it takes two to make a fight, is a lie. One person can start a fight all by himself if he is determined to, and Pietro was. Helena’s defence of Smythe only gave Pietro a convenient handle. By the time he was through, he had accused his secretary and his mistress of carrying on an affair right under his nose. I think he was looking for an excuse to take the brooch back, and Helena, never too bright, fell right into the trap.

Smythe fell into another kind of trap. When Pietro started slapping his chest and shouting about his family honour, Smythe put his coffee cup carefully down on a table and stood up.

‘Oh, all right,’ he said in a bored voice. ‘Let’s get it over with. Fetch the umbrellas.’

‘Ah, you mock me,’ screamed Pietro. ‘Umbrellas, you say? You wish to make me a laughingstock. You do not take me seriously. You will see if a Caravaggio is to be insulted.’ And he rushed out of the room.

He was back in less time than I would have supposed possible, brandishing – yes, you guessed it – only it wasn’t one sword, it was two, one in each hand. He flung one of them down on the floor in front of Smythe. Gold shone. I remembered those rapiers; they were a matched pair, part of the jewel collection, because they had gorgeous decorated hilts. They were court swords, meant to be worn with a fancy uniform; but the blades were of Toledo steel, and quite sharp.

Smythe contemplated the weapon blankly as Pietro tried to struggle out of his coat. The footman had to come and help him. Then he took up his sword and fell into what he fondly believed was an attitude of defence, flexing his knees and waving his arms.

‘Come,’ he shouted. ‘Defend your honour, if you have any!’

‘Wait a minute,’ I said uneasily, as Smythe bent to pick up his weapon. ‘Those points look pretty sharp. He could hurt himself.’

‘He could also hurt me,’ said Smythe indignantly. ‘After all, I didn’t start this nonsense.’

Pietro ran at him, roaring. He slid neatly to one side, and the point of the sword punctured the back of the chair in which he had been sitting. Pietro tugged at it, cursing luridly, and Smythe moved discreetly back a few feet. He looked at his sword and then at Pietro’s plump posterior, temptingly tilted as he tried to free his sword from the sofa.

‘Don’t do it,’ I said. ‘You’ll just make him mad.’

‘He’s mad already,’ was the reply. ‘Stark, staring mad. Why don’t you soothe him? Say something calming.’

I glanced at Helena, thinking she might try to control her outraged lover, but she was giggling happily as she watched. Two men were dueling over her; what more could a girl ask of life? I looked at the footman, and realized I wasn’t going to get any help from that quarter. Before I could think what to say, Pietro had tugged his sword free, bringing a little cloud of stuffing with it, and had turned back to his secretary. He took a wild swipe at Smythe, who brought his blade up just in time. Steel rang on steel, and I sat up a little straighter. Pietro was beside himself. That blow would have split Smythe’s skull if it had connected.

The duel with the umbrellas had been pure farce, but only because the weapons were harmless. Pietro hadn’t pulled his punches that time, and he wasn’t doing it now; I couldn’t tell whether he was so drunk he did not realize he was holding a sharp blade, or whether he didn’t care. There was a streak of violence in that little fat man after all. And he knew how to fence. Luckily Smythe seemed to have had some experience too. Pietro was no Olympic gold medalist, but Smythe’s defence was complicated by the fact that he didn’t want to injure his infuriated employer, or even allow him to injure himself. Smythe had to defend two people, and refrain from attacking. He wasn’t smiling as he retreated, with careful consideration for the rugs scattered hither and yon on the dangerously slippery polished floor. Once Pietro tripped on a fringe; if Smythe’s blade hadn’t knocked his aside, he would have stabbed himself in the calf.

I decided the affair had gone on long enough. If Pietro didn’t cut somebody, he would have a stroke; he was purple in the face and streaming with perspiration. I slid in behind him, and as his arm went forwards I grabbed his biceps with both hands, and squeezed.

That hurts. Pietro shrieked. The sword dropped clattering to the floor, digging a long gouge in the parquetry.

Smythe stepped back and lowered his point. I could see that he was about to make some rude remark, so I dropped to my knees and wound my arms around Pietro’s legs. It made a pretty picture, I must say, and it also kept Pietro from falling over.

‘I couldn’t let you kill him,’ I choked. ‘Pietro – it would be murder! Your skill is too great. It would be like fighting an unarmed man.’

Pietro’s fiery colour subsided.

‘Yes,’ he said grudgingly. ‘Yes, you are right. It would not be honourable.’

He was still angry, though. He turned on Helena, whose face mirrored her disappointment at the tame ending. She had wanted to see some blood.

‘No thanks to you that my honour is not tarnished,’ he snarled. ‘You hoped I would be killed, eh? Then you and your lover would steal away with my jewels. Give them to me!’

Clutching the brooch, Helena backed away. Pietro followed her, waving his arms, and elaborating on his theme. Smythe sat down. He had collected both swords and was holding them firmly.

‘Leave them alone,’ he said, as I started after Pietro and Helena. ‘He’ll pass out soon, and then we can all go to bed.’

Pietro did not pass out. The exercise had used up some of the alcohol he had consumed, and he was quite lively and looking for trouble. He pursued Helena in their ludicrous game of tag, and she retreated. The French doors onto the terrace were wide open, and I wondered why she didn’t go out; she could get clean away from him in the gardens. But she avoided the windows, and finally he got her backed into a corner. I didn’t see exactly what happened, only a scuffle of flailing arms and agitated movements. Then Pietro toppled over and hit the floor.

‘The winner and new champion,’ Smythe chanted. ‘A knockout in the first round.’

Helena tugged her dress back into decency.

‘He was trying to strangle me,’ she muttered. ‘I had to hit him. Do you think he is – ’

‘Out like a light,’ said Smythe, bending over his employer. ‘We had better carry him to bed. I wouldn’t go near him tonight, Helena. He will have cooled off by morning, but . . .’

‘I don’t go near him again,’ snapped Helena. ‘He is a beast, a monster. I leave him.’

She went puffing out of the room, her long skirts swinging. Her fingers were still clamped over the brooch.

Smythe and the footman carried Pietro upstairs. My room was beyond his, Helena’s was on the other side. Her door was closed when I passed it, but I thought I heard the sounds of agitated activity within. It sounded as if she were moving the furniture.

I got ready for bed, although I wasn’t tired. When I had put on a robe and slippers, I went out onto the balcony.

No capering comedian waved at me from the terrace tonight. The grounds were dark and still, with only a few pinpoints of light visible from the cottages of the employees who lived on the estate. To the left the lights of the town of Tivoli made a bright splash on the dark horizon.

It looked very quiet and peaceful down there. I thought of getting dressed and doing some exploring, but somehow the idea didn’t arouse my girlish enthusiasm. I tried to find rational reasons for my reluctance, and had no difficulty in doing so: it was early yet by Italian standards, many of the workers would still be awake, and I had no particular goal in mind, since nothing I had seen had suggested the need for further investigation. There was no sense in wandering around in the dark through unfamiliar terrain. But that wasn’t the real reason why I hesitated. I didn’t like the look of that dark garden.

I had been thinking of the Caravaggios as a comic family, something out of a TV serial, or one of those silly French farces. Now I realized that there were undercurrents of tragedy and unhappiness among them. A man may smile and smile and be a villain. He may make a damn fool of himself and be a villain too.

However, I didn’t think Pietro was the master criminal I was after. It was possible that he was a victim instead of a crook. Smythe was certainly one of the conspirators, he had admitted as much. He had only come to work for Pietro recently. I had suspected that, from the fact that the tidbits I found in the antique shop had barely been touched. Pietro was one of the names in that new file in the shop. If these men, all wealthy collectors, were the potential prey of the swindlers, then Smythe was the means by which the gang gained entry to the houses they meant to rob. He probably had impeccable credentials. They are much easier to forge than antique jewellery. Using such references, he could gain entry to the villas of his victims as a secretary, or even as a guest. He could use one victim as a reference to the next sucker in line, since the substitutions would never be suspected.

Yet one thing didn’t fit this theory. I had been kidnapped and imprisoned in the Caravaggio palace. Smythe had not been responsible for that job – or so he claimed. This implied some member of the family was involved in the plot.

The unknown I was looking for was the master criminal, the chief crook, and somehow I couldn’t believe that any of the people I had met fit that role. They weren’t smart enough. Luigi was a mixed-up, unhappy boy whose relations with his father were bad; he might explode and act in anger, but he didn’t have the experience to invent a plot as complicated as this one. The dowager was a possibility. I had known several sweet white-haired old ladies who wouldn’t balk at a spot of larceny, and although she was physically frail, there was an intelligent sparkle in her eyes.

I couldn’t see Smythe as the mastermind either. He was smart enough, but he lacked something – energy, perhaps. Yet I couldn’t eliminate him. The kidnapping might have been a trick to frighten me off. All that talk about a fate worse than death, all the implications of torture and mayhem – an act, to make me think I was in deadly danger, from which he had rescued me. A combination of gratitude and fear might have persuaded some women to give up the case. And Smythe had never intended me to identify the palazzo; only luck and my own expertise had given me that bit of information.

A soft breeze from the garden lifted my hair. It was perfumed with a nameless flower scent, infinitely seductive. It was interfering with my thinking. I went back into my room and climbed into bed with a book.

The book was one of a selection that had been thoughtfully placed on my bedside table, along with a bottle of Perrier water and a few crackers. I had no doubt that Pietro had selected the books. I chose Tom Jones because it was the most innocent of the lot. I had never read it before. It was rather interesting, but there were long dull sections between the sexy passages. I was plowing through one of these parts, not paying much attention, when I heard a sound in the corridor. It was the sound of a door softly opening and closing. Then there was a muffled thud.

I couldn’t ignore that. Pietro was out cold, so the nocturnal wanderer had to be Helena or Smythe. Luigi’s room was farther along the corridor, and the dowager’s suite was in another wing. Each room had its own bath, so there was no reason for anyone to leave his room for that purpose.

I turned out the light before I opened my door. There were dim bulbs set in silver wall sconces along the hall, with long stretches of gloom between them. As I stood there peering out through the slit in the door, a figure came out of a dark area into the light, with an eerie effect of materializing out of thin air. It was Helena.

She had not gotten far from her room, because she was towing two enormous suitcases. It wasn’t difficult to understand what she was doing. She must have realized that she and Pietro were just about through, so she was making her getaway, with the brooch. But she was so greedy she couldn’t bear to abandon any of her clothes.

I watched her for a while. She couldn’t carry both suitcases; she dragged one for a few feet and then went back for the other one. She was panting so hard I could hear her from where I stood, twenty feet away. I found the sight mildly amusing, till I saw her face.

I had never realized how strong an emotion greed can be. It was tough enough to overcome even the fear that distorted her face.

I stepped out into the hall. She would have screamed if she had had breath enough. She made a strained squawking sound and dropped to her knees – clutching the suitcases.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ I asked.

‘Dio mio! Is it you? You have frightened me! I think I am having a heart attack.’

‘No wonder, carrying those heavy bags. Why sneak out in the middle of the night?’

I knew the answer, but I was curious to hear what she would say.

‘I must leave here,’ she whispered, rolling her eyes. ‘I am afraid. There is something wrong, can’t you feel it?’

‘But why not wait till morning?’

She hesitated, trying to think of some convincing lie. The expression on her sly, stupid little face annoyed me, and I went on, deliberately cruel, ‘What about the ghost? I thought you were afraid to go out at night.’

‘You said it would not come in the house! I have called the garage, the chauffeur is waiting with the car . . .’

Her face was shining wet with perspiration. It was not a warm night. I still didn’t like her much, but her unmasked terror and her plump little hands, clutching at my skirts, made me feel guilty.

‘I was joking,’ I muttered. ‘Would you like me to help you? You can’t carry those suitcases alone.’

‘Would you? Would you help? I am so afraid, and yet it is worse to stay than to go . . . If I wait, Pietro will convince me to stay. I am never so afraid in the daylight,’ she added naïvely.

I lifted one of the suitcases, and staggered. Helena giggled feebly. I gave her a hard stare. That suitcase was too heavy. I wondered if she had some silverware in there, as well as the brooch.

I started down the hall. Helena puffed after me, half dragging, half pushing the other suitcase. We reached the top of the grand staircase, and by a combination of muscle and persistence I managed to get one suitcase down to the hall. Then I went back to help Helena.

‘Hurry, hurry,’ she muttered. ‘We are too slow.’

It had taken us a long time to traverse that long corridor. We had made a certain amount of noise, too, banging the suitcases around. But I couldn’t understand why I felt so edgy, unless the girl’s terror had infected me. The household was sound asleep. No one would bother us. She said she had called the garage, so presumably the car was waiting outside even now.

The entrance hall was a ghostly place, lighted by a single lamp suspended on a long chain. It swayed slightly on an unseen, unfelt current of air, and shadows slid across the painted ceiling so that the gods and goddesses of Mount Olympus seemed to shift naked limbs and wink as they looked down on us struggling mortals.

The swaying of the lamp should have alerted me. Air doesn’t move in an enclosed space unless something displaces it. But my back was towards the library door, and it was not until I saw Helena’s face freeze that I realized something was wrong. Her mouth was wide open, but she was too petrified to scream.

I whirled around. If I hadn’t heard her description, I probably would not have made out details at first; it stood in the dark doorway, blending with the shadows. Yet I sensed its shape – the trailing folds of the long robe, the hands hidden in full sleeves, the cowled head. Then it glided out into the hall, under the light of the lamp.

Helena got her breath back and let out a scream that sounded like an air-raid siren. It hurt my ears, but it didn’t faze the phantom, who took another step towards us. Helena’s scream faded out. She collapsed into an ungainly heap, half over the suitcases.

The light fell on the austere bone within the cowl. The fleshless skull shone, not with the pale glimmer of ivory, but with a wild glitter. It had an odd, incredible beauty; but its immobility was more terrifying than any menacing gesture might have been. Then someone started pounding on the door. The cloaked figure turned. With the shining skull face hidden, it became a thing of darkness that seemed to melt into the shadows and disappear.

Helena woke up and started screaming again. The pounding on the door continued. Doors opened upstairs. I thought of slapping Helena – and a tempting thought it was, too – but decided I had better get some help first. So I went to the door. It took me a while to get it open, but finally I admitted a man in a chauffeur’s uniform – not the same man who had driven us out to the villa originally, someone else. He shied back when he saw me, rolling his eyes.

‘Avanti, avanti,’ I said, somewhat impatiently. I am not accustomed to having men recoil when they look at me. ‘The signorina has fainted – no, I guess she hasn’t, she’s just hysterical. Help me with her.’

Her screams had subsided into loud gulping sobs. I looked up. The stair railing was fringed with staring faces, most of them female. The maids, who slept on the top floor, had been awakened by the hubbub. Then two male figures pushed bravely through the throng and came down the stairs.

Luigi had pulled on a pair of jeans. His feet and his beautiful torso were bare. Smythe was still wearing evening trousers and white shirt.

The suitcases and Helena’s huddled form told their own story. It wasn’t until Luigi’s inimical eye fell on me that I realized my own position was somewhat ambiguous.

If those suitcases were filled with loot, as I suspected they were, then I was an accessory after the fact to grand theft. It behooved me to get them back upstairs unopened, and make sure Pietro’s possessions were restored to him.

‘We met the ghost,’ I said, in a lame effort to distract attention from the bulging bags.

‘You don’t say so,’ Smythe said. ‘Did it fit the description?’

‘The description didn’t do it justice,’ I said. ‘Let’s get Helena back to bed.’

‘And what was she doing creeping out of the house in the middle of the night?’ Luigi demanded. ‘No, don’t answer. It is only too obvious. Antonio, what do you mean, helping this woman to run away?’

The chauffeur burst into an animated apologia, his hands flying. His excuse was reasonable; he had never been told he was not to obey Helena’s orders. But Luigi’s frown seemed to intimidate him. He was practically groveling when the boy cut him off with a curt, ‘Basta. Go back to your house.’

‘It must be nice to be one of the upper classes in a region where feudal loyalties still linger,’ Smythe murmured. ‘Our peasants are too damn liberated.’

He smiled affably at me, and I smiled back. His attempt to divert my attention hadn’t worked. Even if Luigi had not used the man’s name, I would have recognized his voice. He was one of my kidnappers.

That wasn’t the only thing I learned from the evening’s adventure. The servants hauled Helena and her suitcases back to her room and Luigi stamped off, radiating aristocratic hauteur. I returned to my own room, leaving Smythe standing alone in the hall.

There was no lock on my door. I shoved a chair under the knob and then bolted the doors giving onto the balcony. It would be a little stuffy for sleeping, but I preferred it that way.

I didn’t know who had played the spectral monk. It could have been anybody. Smythe, Luigi, Pietro – if he was faking his drunken stupor – or the dowager – if she was pretending to be more crippled than she really was. The elderly masterminds in mystery stories often do that – pretend to be paralyzed so they will have an alibi. Or it could have been one of the servants. I was inclined towards Smythe, partly because he had that kind of sense of humour, and partly because it had taken him a little too long to get downstairs after Helena started screaming. Luigi had had to find his pants – he probably slept in the buff – but Smythe had been fully dressed, and therefore awake. However, Smythe was a cautious soul, not the sort of man to rush headlong into danger without reinforcements.

The important thing about the ghost was that I had recognized, not its animator, but its face. Those stylized bones and sculptured cheekbones were unmistakable.

I was reminded of something my father had said once, when in my younger and more supercilious days I had complained that my college courses weren’t relevant to modern life. ‘Relevant?’ he had bellowed, with the snort he used when he was particularly exasperated. ‘How the hell do you know what is going to be relevant?’ He was right – though I would probably never tell him so. An art history course should be just about as esoteric and unrelated to the stresses of modern life as anything could be, but it had already proved useful to me in several life-and-death situations. This evening it had helped again.

The skull face was Aztec – a mask like the ones worn by priests of that macabre theology, in which skulls, skeletons, and flayed human skins played a large part. The Aztecs made skulls out of all sorts of material; sometimes they covered real bone with shell and turquoise mosaic. In a museum in London there was a small crystal skull carved by a long-dead master. The one I had seen tonight had been modelled on that one, though it was much larger, and I was willing to bet it wasn’t made of rock crystal. It was one of the little old goldsmith’s creations, and a super job. Somehow I felt sure that the workshop where that skull had been made wasn’t far away.