Street of the Five Moons

‘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