“It sucks, lying for her,” she said. “I mean, she’s not even really a friend.”
“Sounds like a babe, though. Got her phone number?”
Kate made a face. “You aren’t even close to serious.”
“And why’s that?”
“Because you’re in love with a carving in a cloister, that’s why.”
That brought them back a little too abruptly to what they’d been trying to avoid.
Ned didn’t say anything. He sipped his drink and looked around. The long, narrow café had two small tables on the street, but those had been taken, so they were inside, close to the door. The morning traffic was busy—cars, mopeds, a lot of people walking the medieval cobblestones.
“Sorry,” Kate Wenger said after a moment. “That was a weird thing to say.”
He shrugged. “I have no clue what to make of that sculpture. Or what happened.”
She was biting at her lip again.
“Why was he…our guy…why was he looking down there? For whatever it was? Could it have been the font, something about the water?”
Ned shook his head. “Don’t think so. The skull and the carved head were the other way, along the corridor.” He had a thought. “Kate…if someone was buried there, they’d have walled him up, right? Not left a coffin lying around.”
She nodded her head. “Sure.”
“So maybe he was thinking the wall might have just been opened up. For some reason.”
Kate leaned back in her chair. “God, Ned Marriner, is this, like, a vampire story?”
“I don’t know what it is. I don’t think so.”
“But you said he made that carving in the cloister. You do know how old that thing is?”
“Look, forget what I said there. I was a bit out of it.”
“Nope.” She shook her head. “You weren’t. When he came down from the roof I thought he was going to kill you. And then he said when it was done.”
He sighed. “You’re going to ask how I knew,” he said.
“It did cross my mind.” She said it without smiling.
“Bet Marie-Chantal wouldn’t bug me about it.”
“She’d be clueless, checking her eyeliner and her cellphone for text messages. Am I bugging you?”
“No. Does she really get text messages on her eyeliner?”
Kate still didn’t smile. “Something did happen to you back there.”
“Yeah. I’m all right now. Since he left, I feel normal.” He tried to laugh. “Wanna make out?”
She ignored that, which was what it deserved. “You figure it’s over? Just something to do with…I don’t know.”
He nodded. “That’s it. Something to do with I don’t know.”
He was joking too much because the truth was that although he did feel all right now, sitting here with a girl from New York, from now, drinking a Coke that tasted exactly the way it was supposed to—he wasn’t sure whatever had happened was over.
In fact, being honest with himself, he was pretty certain it wasn’t. He wasn’t going to say that, though.
He looked at his watch. “I should check in before lunch, I guess.” He hesitated. This part was tricky, but he was a long way from home and the guys who would needle him. “You got a phone number? We can keep in touch?”
She smiled. “If you promise no more comments on my roommate.”
“Marie-Chantal? My main squeeze? That’s a deal-breaker.”
She made a face, but tore a sheet out of a spiral-bound agenda she pulled from her pack and scribbled the number where she was staying and her cellphone number. Ned took from his wallet the card on which Melanie had neatly printed (in green) the villa address, the code for the gate, the house phone, her mobile, his father’s, the Canadian consulate, and the numbers of two taxi companies. She’d put a little smiley face at the bottom.
When she’d handed the card to him last night he’d pointed out that she hadn’t given him their latitude and longitude.
He read Kate the villa number. She wrote it down.
“You have school tomorrow?”
She nodded. “Cut this morning, can’t tomorrow. I’m there till five. Meet here after? Can you find it?”
He nodded. “Easy. Just down the road from the skull in the underground corridor.”
She did laugh this time, after a second.
They paid for their drinks and said goodbye outside. He watched her walk away through the morning street, then he turned and went back the other way, along a road laid down two thousand years ago.
CHAPTER III
The morning shoot was wrapping when Ned got back. He helped Steve and Greg load the van. They left it in the cathedral square, illegally parked but with a windshield permit from the police, and walked to lunch at an open-oven pizza place ten minutes away.
The pizza was good, Ned’s father was irritable. That wasn’t unusual during a shoot, especially at the start, but Ned could tell his dad wasn’t really unhappy with how things had gone this first morning. He wouldn’t admit that, but it showed.
Edward Marriner sipped a beer and looked at Ned across the table. “Anything inside I need to know about?”
Even when Ned was young his father had asked his opinions whenever Ned was with him on a shoot. When Ned was a kid it had pleased him to be consulted this way. He felt important, included. More recently it had become irksome, as if he was being babied. In fact, “more recently” extended right up to this morning, he realized.
Something had changed. He said, “Not too much, I don’t think. Pretty dark, hard to find angles. Like you said, it’s all jumbled. You should look at the baptistry, though, on the right when you go in. There’s light there and it is really old. Way older than the rest.” He hesitated. “The cloister was open, I got a look in there, too.”
“The important cloister’s in Arles,” Melanie said, dabbing carefully at her lips with a napkin. For someone with a green streak in black hair, she was awfully tidy, Ned thought.
“Whatever. This one looked good,” he said. “You could set up a pretty shot of the garden, but if you don’t want that, you might take a look at some of the columns.” He hesitated again, then said, “There’s David and Goliath, other Bible stuff. Saints on the four corners. One sculpture’s supposed to be the Queen of Sheba. She’s really worn away, but have a look.”
His father stroked his brown moustache. Edward Marriner was notorious for that old-fashioned handlebar moustache. It was a trademark; he had it on his business card, signed his work with two upward moustache curves. People sometimes needled him about it, but he’d simply say his wife liked the look, and that was that.
Now he said, looking at his son, “I’ll check both tomorrow. We’ve got two more hours cleared so I’ll use them inside if Greg says the stitched digitals this morning are all right and we don’t have to do them again. Will I need lights?”
“Inside? For sure,” Ned said. “Maybe the generator, I have no idea how the power’s set up. Depending what you want to do in the cloister you may want the lights and bounces there, too.”
“Melanie said they do concerts inside,” Greg said. “They’ll have power.”
“The baptistry’s off to one side.”
“Bring the generator, Greg, don’t be lazy,” Edward Marriner said, but he was smiling. Bearded Greg made a face at Ned. Steve just grinned. Melanie looked pleased, probably because Ned seemed engaged, and she saw that as part of her job.
Ned wasn’t sure why he was sending the team inside. Maybe taking photos tomorrow, the sheer routine of it—shouted instructions, clutter, film bags and cables, lights and lenses and reflectors—would take away some of the strangeness of what had happened. It might bring the place back to now…from wherever it had been this morning.
It also occurred to him that he’d like a picture of that woman on the column. He couldn’t have said why, but he knew he wanted it. He even wanted to go back in to look at her again now, but he wasn’t about to do that.
His father was going to walk around town after lunch with two cameras and black-and-white film to check out some fountains and doorways that Barrett, the art director, had made notes about when he was here. Oliver Lee had apparently written something on Aix’s fountains and the hot springs the Romans had discovered. Kate Wenger had just told him about those. She just about forced you to call her a geek, that girl.