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 . . .