“Be careful with the brakes,” Mario said resignedly, getting out of the driver’s seat and holding the door while I got in. “They pull to the right.”
“Thanks.” I let out the clutch pedal and steered the car towards the square’s only northern exit.
“That was quite an exhibition,” Carole said as we left the shabby cluster of dwellings behind. Did you have to be so tough with that poor boy?”
“If that poor boy isn’t in the Mafia,” I assured her, “it’s because they gave him a dishonourable discharge.”
We drove along a deteriorating road which took us up into the sunlit boulder-strewn hillsides I had psi-glimpsed on the previous evening. At one point—as if entering a baronial estate—the road crossed the remains of what had been a massive stone wall some centuries earlier. Faintly surprised at the idea of any medieval nobleman spending money on such unpromising land, I skried all around with a mounting sense of anticipation. There was a definite impression of richly apparelled horsemen coming and going. When a track branched off to the right towards an isolated farmhouse clinging to the mountain, I knew at once that we had reached our destination. The car rocked violently on the stony ground, but I was too excited even to wince at the sawing of my nipples on the inside of my shirt.
“Is this it?” Carole’s voice was full of doubt. “It doesn’t look to me like a place where you’d pick up an original da Vinci.”
“Me neither—but I can tell you something big was going on here a few hundred years back.” I stopped the car as it became in danger of being shaken to pieces. “Da Vinci spent a lot of his life in Milan, and it would have been quite easy for him to come up here in person any time he wanted.”
“To that hovel?” Carole said scornfully, looking at the farmhouse ahead of us.
“It doesn’t seem old enough. No, there’s a cavern of some sorts around here, and that’s probably where Julio found your painting.” My heart speeded up as, once again, I glimpsed the circular wooden machine. This time I discerned something extra—there seemed to be a whole series of canvases arranged in a curving row. “I’ve a feeling there could be a lot more paintings in it.”
Carole’s gloved hand touched my shoulder. “You mean there’s an underground storehouse?”
“I don’t think that’s the …” I stopped speaking as the figure of an elderly man emerged from the farmhouse and approached us. He was dressed in a pricy-looking chalk-striped grey suit, but the effect was spoiled by his frayed, collarless shirt and filthy tennis shoes. The double-barrelled shotgun on his arm confirmed my opinion that he had a very poor taste in separates.
I rolled down my window, projecting friendliness, and shouted, “Hi, Julio! How are you? How’s it going?”
“What you want?” he demanded. “Go away.”
“I’d like to talk to you.”
Julio raised the shotgun. “I no want to talk to you.”
“It’s just for a few minutes, Julio.”
“Listen, mister—I shoot you as soon as look at you.” He scowled in the window at me. “In your case, sooner.”
Stung by the insult, I decided on a more forceful approach. “It’s about the Mona Lisa you sold to Signor Colvin, Julio. I want to know where you got it, and you’d better tell me.”
“I tell you nothing.”
“Come on, Julio.” I got out of the car and loomed over him. “Where is the cave?”
Julio’s jaw sagged. “How you know about the cave?”
“I have ways of knowing things.” I used quite a lot of echo chamber in the voice, aware that peasants tend to be afraid of espers.
Julio looked up at me with worried eyes. “I get it,” he said in a low voice. “You are pissy.”
“P-S-I is pronounced like sigh,” I gritted. “Try to remember that, will you? Now, where’s that cave?”
“You make trouble for me?”
“There’ll be no trouble as long as you’re a good boy, and there might even be some money for you. The cave is this way, isn’t it?” Following a powerful instinct, I began striding up the hillside towards a stand of dark-green trees. Julio jogged along at my side and Carole, who for once had nothing to say, left the car and came after us.
“I find it three-four year ago, but for long time I no touch,” Julio said, panting a little as he struggled to keep abreast. “I no tell anybody because I want no fuss. Then I think, why should I not have smart city clothes? Why should Crafty Mario be the only one to have smart city clothes? But I take only one picture to sell. Just one.”
“How many paintings are in the cave?”
“Fifty. Maybe sixty.”
I gave a short laugh. “Then it was pretty dumb of you to pick one as well known as the Mona Lisa.”
Julio stopped jogging. “But, signor,” he said, spreading his hands, “they are all Mona Lisas.”
It was my turn to stop in my tracks. “What?
“They are all Mona Lisas.”
“You mean there are fifty or sixty paintings in there, and they’re all the same?”
Julio shifted his feet uneasily. “They are not all same.”
“This doesn’t make sense.” I glanced at Carole and saw she was equally baffled. “Come on—we’ve got to see this for ourselves.”
By that time we had reached and entered the cluster of trees. Julio set his shotgun down, darted ahead of us and dragged some pieces of rusty corrugated iron out of the way. Beneath them was an irregular opening and the beginning of a flight of stone steps which led downwards into blackness. Julio went down them, nimble in his tennis shoes, while Carole and I followed uncertainly. I felt her hand slip into mine and I gave it a reassuring squeeze as we reached the bottom step and began moving along what seemed to be a subterranean corridor. The daylight from the entrance rapidly faded.
I tapped Julio’s shoulder. “How are we going to see? Have you got a flashlight?”
“Flashlight no good. I buy one with money Signor Colvin give me, but the crooks no tell me I have to keep on buying batteries. This is better.” Julio struck a match and used it to light a storm lantern which had been sitting on the stone floor. As the oil flame brightened I saw that the tunnel ended at a massive wooden door. Julio fumbled at the lock and pushed the door. In spite of its weight and great age, it swung open easily, with uncanny silence, and there was spacious darkness beyond. Carole moved closer to me. I put my arm around her, but at that moment I was too preoccupied to derive any enjoyment from the embrace—the mysterious chamber, at whose entrance we stood, contained the answers to all the questions which were pounding in my head. I could almost feel those cloaked figures from half-a-millennium in the past brushing by me, I could almost hear the master himself as he went secretly about his work, I could almost see the strange machine. The greatest genius of all time had left his imprint here, and his lingering presence was so overwhelming that ordinary mortals felt humbled and unwilling to intrude.
“What you wait for?” Julio snapped, marching into the chamber with the lantern held high.
I followed him and, in the shifting light, discerned the outlines of a circular framework which resembled a wheel lying on its side. It was large—perhaps twenty paces in diameter—and at its rim was as tall as a man. Beneath the spokes of the wheel was a dimly seen system of gears with a long crankshaft running out to a position near where we stood. The whole thing reminded me of an early type of funfair merry-go-round, except that in place of the carved horses—and difficult to see properly because of the intervening frames—there was a series of paintings. All of them were attached to the inside of the rim, facing the centre. At the closest point on the machine’s circumference there was a structure like an elaborately ornamented sentry box, on the rear wall of which were two small holes at eye level.