Neverland

NICCOLO AND MARTA HAD disappeared. But they had been honourable in a way. Perhaps they’d always been honest farmers — shrewd, yes, but honest — until Clare’s uncle came along with his knowledge, and pried the secret of the tomb from the cliff. Then maybe they’d just spied and observed, perhaps not deciding to “rescue” some of the booty to benefit themselves until after he’d left? She would never know; but the point was that they had not in fact disappeared, along with the Lamborghini, until the day the police helicopter came roaring in.

During the past week the uproar had continued, police whirling in and out, tearing up the grasses, flattening the flowers. The tomb itself crawled with scientific and forensic specialists. Every day when she’d hiked up there, Clare had been met with some stern official stone-face who spoke, she thought, neither English nor Italian but a kind of bureaucratic doublespeak about forms she would need to fill out, numbers in Florence she should call — before disappearing rabbit-like into the dark burrow, leaving her to face once again the implacable tall-hatted presence of the police.

Luke was off in Florence on Harold Plank’s behalf; Vittorio Cerotti, too. Both, it seemed, were trying to sort out the bureaucratic tangle of who would, ultimately, acquire a permit to further excavate the cliff face. Clare repeatedly asked Luke to help persuade the authorities to allow her access to the tomb, but he refused to rock the boat. It felt almost dangerous to be near him now. There was something infectious in his powerful, wounded determination to wrench a way forward out of all of this for himself.

Harold Plank was the one who’d promised to see what he could do for her. Alarming, forceful, charming man; Clare didn’t like thinking how much she already owed him. With just the lightest tap from his great battery of resources — and a commitment of funding for Federica Inghirami’s horse-breeding project— he’d managed to arrange for clear title on the property to be delivered to Clare. This of course freed the property up for him to purchase. She knew he would be prepared to administer some similar “tap” to her aunt’s lawyers in Seattle, too. She’d decided not to think of that just yet.

Plank had also, at her persuading, agreed to make a trip to Poggio Selvaggio while he still had the helicopter at his disposal. She believed he’d been up there yesterday. Until she was sure he’d done this, she didn’t want to push him to use his influence further in the matter of the tomb.

So finally, a week after the chamber tomb’s official discovery, she decided she would just damn well bully her way in on her own.

AS CLARE APPROACHED, WITH the dogs at her heel, the heavy boom of a radio had the meadow grasses cowering. Two policemen were sitting on lawn chairs near the tomb entrance, with a small table between them holding pots of yogurt, a bag of fruit, a round Tuscan loaf, two small roasted birds. They invited her to join them. They were handsome, charming, sweet — and absolutely determined that the entrance to the tomb remain barred to her. It was the regulation. It was out of their hands.

She asked if much had actually been determined inside — were the artefacts still all there?

They shrugged. This was their first shift. They didn’t know.

Then how soon would someone turn up who actually did know? She was the landlord here, after all.

Shrugs and smiles.

When she finally decided to ignore them, when she began to clamber over the rocks to damn well go in anyway, they rose together, clasping the submachine-gun-looking pistols that they wore. Their smiles disappeared.

“Are you going to shoot me? Are you going to kill me, because I’m trying to get into my own tomb?”

If they caught the irony, they didn’t show it. Before she stamped away, she took a good kick at the booming radio and sent it croaking across the field.

She stormed up the hillside, taking a steep shortcut over to the olive grove, determined to rush home and call the head of the Soprintendenza in Florence, or some higher-up in Rome, or the Pope.

Puffed out at the top, she paused and turned to look down at her lovely meadow; hers for a short time more, silent again at least.

No.

Was that singing down there now?

“I love to go a-wandering, along the mountain track; and as I go, I love to sing, my knapsack on my back …”

I must have knocked that boom box cuckoo, she thought.

“Falderie …! Falderaaaaa!”

But weren’t those familiar voices?

“Falder ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! My knapsack on my back …!”

A pair of diminutive figures carrying alpenstocks, wearing straw hats, were trudging out of the woods. What had happened to the reumatismo, the fatigue? The two of them were making their way relentlessly up the field, until they came to a stop in front of the Carabinieri. The policemen sprang to their feet, doffed their tall hats. Within seconds they were actually ushering the Barbareschi in through the entrance of the tomb.

And why am I surprised? Clare thought, as she stumbled back down. Why am I even bothering to be shaking mad, to discover that in the rock-paper-scissors hierarchy of Italian law and order, a Marquis tops a uniformed policeman and the owner of the land?

“Do not even think of waving that Kalashnikov at me, you bozo!” she snapped, as she tried to barge past the men now standing at attention outside her tomb. She struggled in their grip. Egidio popped his head out. Carolina followed. After some rapidly twinned phrases in Italian, Clare was released.

The noble couple were all smiles. “Signora Livingston, avanti! What a great pleasure to welcome you. We have been on our way to visit you, indeed, but first thought we would come to see this remarkable discovery which we have been seeing on the television.”

They drew her in, then whispered, “Please, you must understand that the vigilance of the good men outside the door will have much intensified, of course, since the contretemps yesterday at the American excavation on Poggio Selvaggio — with the disappearance of an artefact.”

“What?”

“Quite a little scandal,” they said. “Indeed, this little!” Egidio held up thumb and forefinger, a half-inch apart. “What has gone missing has been just one small bead. We saw this also on television, it is all over the news! A matter small, yet very serious, especially when we have allowed the Americans to come and excavate our sites, and then they become lax.”

“Oh!” Clare said, “But surely … There could not possibly be any …”

Her words tumbled over themselves as she tried to explain that the American, Dr. William Sands, was an academic of the highest reputation, and furthermore …

“Do not discompose yourself, Signora Livingston.” The twin expressions now were strict. “Our time is limited, and we have much bigger things to discuss!”

Bigger things? What could be bigger than such a contretemps? She remembered Luke saying that a missing bead had almost shut down some prestigious Middle Eastern excavation. But surely Harold Plank would use his great influence to help sort this out, now that he and William had established cordial relations. Surely he would.

Clare pulled away from the double hand laid on her shoulders.

What nerve, welcoming her. But at least she was in. She lit her flashlight, ducked through the low doorway into the dank inner chamber.

Everything was gone. Just the funerary beds remained, with their carved stone headrests, and no staining.

There would be much to be learned even from this emptiness, she supposed; there always was: clues in the carving of the ceiling, the beds, the rock shelf where all that dark pottery had stood. She’d have to go somewhere else to see the bucchero, the fantastic shapes, the carved friezes that had so fired her imagination. She’d have to inch her way through further tortuous bureaucratic channels.

Carolina and Egidio poked their heads in.

“Signora Livingston, please, we must talk.”

Then graciously, sweetly, horribly — crowding into the inner chamber with her, cloying the small space with a powerful miasma of violets — they began an elaborate apology. They had realized, they said, how wrong they had been, how utterly mistaken, and how — yes — stodgy, too.

“Which is unforgivable in us, is it not dear Carolina?”

“Oh yes Egidio, ‘stodgy’ will not do!”

They came bearing not just apologies, they said, but gifts that would warm the tender tendrils they feared she had subdued within her shy, mistaken breast. On and on went the floral rhetoric, which Clare could hardly follow.

They had come, she finally understood, to purchase her meadow paintings. Ever since seeing them, they had been unable to forget them. Consequently, they must have them. “Or we will be unable to rest, dear Carolina, will we not?”

“And when Egidio is unable to rest, Signora Livingston, I must confess that he quite wears me out!” A girlish giggle. “And so, I beg you to take pity on a woman not quite so young as she once was!”

Clare tried to cut in, terrified that they would start singing again.

“Stop!” Carolina demanded. “We must tell you, also, that we come as self-appointed emissaries from the broken-hearted. We have, yesterday, taken it upon ourselves to pay a visit to Bologna, to speak at length to Signora Eleanora Gasperini DiGiustini on your behalf.”

“You didn’t!”

They had.

How often, since leaving La Celta, had Clare thought of the photo in Gianni’s study. The little girl looking up wickedly at her father; the boy with the level eyes. Eleanora, with her enduring expression. A face pretty, but worn with the demands of keeping so many things together, even strays like her husband, keeping the cord from completely fraying.

Clare had not thought with kindness of that woman, because remembering the sight made her sad; yet, at the same time, she’d recognized the woman’s morose implacable strength.

“A lovely woman, and so perceptive!” Egidio and Carolina were saying. “She agreed almost immediately, when we had fully explained, that to stand as an impediment to a love such as yours with her husband would be a crime against love itself. You see …” they joined hands, “Love is to us the thing most important in this universe.”

Clare said, “But it’s not.”

Pitying smiles. “You are mistaken, dear.”

“Does Gianni know you did this?”

“We did not have to ask. We knew when we saw a broken man.”

“Do his children also understand?”

They looked at one another. The children were blown off in a shrug.

As to the arrangements with Signora DiGiustini, those could be quite straightforward, they were sure. Certainly there would be no problem. The Barbareschi had connections both in the highest legal circles and in the Vatican. However, more pressingly, in the interim, they intended that Clare should paint for them just a few more pieces of her imaginative floral fantasies, so that they could arrange a show entirely of her work, which they were now convinced had no peer.

Clare’s flashlight was burning dim. The carved-out rock walls inside the cliff were closing in. She remembered Nikki talking about the door opening into a mountain, the magic land within. The two expectant faces were smiling up at her. Such a fine line separated her now from stepping right through into neverland, with these trolllike figures offering her the poisoned jewel. The ceiling shuddered as a replacement police helicopter roared overhead. She could hardly breathe in the violet-laden air.

“No,” she said.

They looked up with disbelieving double blinks.

She said, “You must go back to Signora Eleanora Gasperini DiGiustini and tell her that you were wrong. You must say that her husband was suffering a momentary delusion, and that he needs her help. You must say that the woman he thought he was in love with has done things in the past that even he would not be able to redeem. Tell her not to be a fool. Tell her to set aside her discouraged strength for once, and help him. Tell her to go and join him in his garden. He is lonely. She can help him. Please.”

She couldn’t see the gnome-like couple now. They had dissolved in the salt of her tears. She pushed out into the flat hot sun, ran down through the meadow, the dogs lolloping ahead. She found them waiting by the jeep. When she opened the door, they jumped into the back. She kept driving until she reached the sea.