A moment later, the deep blackness turned to mist, chalky paint sifting off the walls into the boneyard air. The shooters, being he-man types, tried not to react but it was a real effort-their shoulders rose half a foot pretending nothing was happening.
This was good for about five seconds.
Then the ancient paintings began to dance off the stone walls and out over our heads. Painted chariots began racing up and down the shaft, the drivers lashing each other and the flailing shooters when they wouldn’t or couldn’t get out of the way.
Soldiers marched tight rows in thin air two feet above us and then broke ranks, laying bets on the chariot race, drinking from giant jugs and trying to make time with the shapely goddesses. Centaurs and unicorns dueled just below the ceiling, peacocks drank from fountains guarded by teasing nymphs and huge bushes flowered in every empty space.
None of this was even slightly realistic; these were the piecework no-dimensional paintings that came with your entry-level Roman funeral. But you could feel the air kick up when the chariots roared past and a drizzle hit your hair from the fountains. The fact that it was all totally unconvincing only made the whole thing eerier. All around us, paintings grew, changed shape, mingled, argued, fought and fornicated. Well, I’m not 100 % certain about the fornicating but it got difficult to keep track once the shooting started.
The shooting was kind of inevitable, once a couple hundred bones flew out of their burial chambers, arced into the air like somebody was chucking them and tore straight for the blueshirts. They were shooters, after all, so, when attacked in a very narrow space by pagan gods most of them had never heard of, they responded about the way you’d expect. Redbeard kept screaming at them to stop, as each discharge brought more and more of the ceiling down on us.
Crazily, in the midst of the insanity, I detached. I found myself focused on a sandy-haired shooter ducking under a chariot wheel because I saw the wheel close-up, inches from my face, just as it brushed by his.
This is the guy, I thought, the guy from the apartment and the airport, the guy I can read. Jesus, he was panicked! Not that you could blame him, attacked by Mars, Hercules, St. Peter and their really hot girlfriends all at the same time. It’s a trick, he kept repeating with mounting fervor. In his panic, he never noticed our connection-but I knew I’d remember him.
Max yelled, “Push!” We jumped forward, smacking the air shield into the wall. There was a spongy reaction and we bounced backward. He shouted ‘Again!” and this time, I heard his voice in my head saying Scream after you push. We pushed together and the wall teetered, wobbled and finally collapsed, locking Redbeard’s crew on the other side.
I was screaming the whole time but exactly nothing came out. Just as the wall came down, I heard all our voices at once-and then snuffed out just as abruptly. The screams came mixed into the sound of several other sections of wall giving way. Max emerged out of the dust with a finger to his lips and pointed in the other direction-we squeezed around a pile of rubble.
Kate still had her torch-she re-lit it and the dust in the air scrambled the light like a Seurat. You couldn’t see three inches in front of you. I could feel myself coughing but somehow didn’t make a sound doing it.
We were in some kind of huge high-ceilinged room. When we finally reached the staircase at the far end, Kate turned to Max and he held his arms out to her. She punched him hard in the shoulder.
“Ow! That’s the thanks I get.”
“For what? Almost getting us killed?”
“Hopefully for getting us killed-as far as they’re concerned. They had us cornered but we were crushed under a wall trying to escape.”
“They’ll buy that?” Tauber, ever the skeptic.
“Marat knows better-he’s probing and I’m blocking. But, for some reason, he’s not the boss-they don’t trust him. The leader, the guy with the beard, knows they’ll all be heroes-as long as they stick to their story. The other choice is to spend the next week digging through every corridor and passageway around here on the off-chance we escaped. So we’re dead. By the time they get back to headquarters, they’ll probably have decided there were fifty of us and we fell into a volcano.” He turned back to Kate. “Which gives us one more chance to surprise them when the time comes. Okay?”
“You could have told me,” she griped.
“If I’d thought of it a second earlier, I would have. Really. I’m just making this up as I go.” It was a pretty good Harrison Ford imitation, actually. She nodded grudgingly.
The mist finally began to dissipate. It turned out we were in a wine cellar and a beautiful one at that: floor-to-ceiling darkwood shelving, bottles organized by brand and years, the rows all aligned toward a grand modern staircase.
Tauber crept up and back in seconds. “Where are we?” Max asked.
“Guessing through the door slit, a fuckin’ palace.”
“Are we company?”
“After that bang? If they’re not down here already, six’ll get you ten we’ve got the run of the place.”
“Let’s have a look.”
Fourteen
The villa was a place out of time, one that had long since abandoned history and found its own solitary track. Frescoes danced on the ceilings, twenty-foot glass double doors opened onto deep iron-railed balconies, every piece of furniture in the place seemed to come off the millennium version of Antiques Roadshow. Max and Tauber fell to prowling out of habit, throwing doors open and fretting over security, but after twenty yawning-huge unoccupied drawing rooms, the whole idea got comical.
We stepped into an open central courtyard wrapped in three stories of block-shaped stucco, locust trees towering over a garden gone natural (one step short of gone to seed). White flowers crawled up the walls and the light poured through vines and bushes that probably dated to Garibaldi. After drifting through four more ornate rooms-one holding a grand piano and a bronze harp taller than any of us-we found the renovation project, a stainless-steel kitchen with the inevitable granite-topped center island (Iron Chef, season two).
“No cameras,” Tauber announced, returning from his sweep of the place. “No security wiring either. There’s an Alfa parked out back-doors unlocked.”
“Light magnetic field,” Max said-apparently this was agreement. “I feel the fridge and the air conditioners-there’s a home theatre with big speakers on the second floor. But nobody home and no signs of a hasty retreat.”
Kate returned from the office, which boasted a spectacular view of the fountain (if you have a villa, you’ve gotta have a fountain) and a birdhouse the size of a Mini-Cooper, carrying a day planner scrawled with notes.
“Sardinia,” she said. “They’re in Sardinia for the week.”
“Why hassle that nasty G8 traffic?” Tauber smirked.
“Especially when you can be in Sardinia,” Kate sighed. “Why come home? Ever?”
Tauber, all at once, was full of energy, a DT’s second wind. Surviving the catacombs seemed to have galvanized him and he insisted on leading a security tour.
“The front gate’s got a proper lock; the back’s just a padlock on a chain. So if they’re comin’, they’ll clip the chain; keep yer ears tuned that way. It’s about a minute’s run, gate to house and up the stairs. We all sleep here, the east corner. See that gazebo below? Locked gates on both sides; I just jammed ‘em. So we keep ropes or sheets on the balcony; things get tight, we drop off and have a shot at the river before they nail us.”
“What are our odds?” I asked and saw from Tauber’s scowl that this wasn’t a proper question.
“If they’re good, we won’t have time to go anywhere,” Max answered. “But Mark’s is a good plan if they’re incompetent.”
“Which is a 50/50 shot,” Tauber added. “That’s the worst of it. Otherwise, ya got neighbors at a distance, no breaks in the fence. Better’n most.”