"I'm sure it is," I said.
Despite that gloomy subject matter, I spent a reasonably pleasant hour of conversation with Rosati over a second glass of wine, a tartuffo, and an espresso, all of which improved my sense of well-being no end. He made a few suggestions about sights in the area he thought I'd be interested in seeing and was obviously pretty knowledgeable about Tuscany as a whole. I learned some more about the market for Etruscan antiquities, although nothing, really, I didn't know by now. My one complaint was that he left his cell phone on and took three calls while he was sitting with me. I may be old-fashioned, but I really dislike listening to people talk on the phone while they're sitting in a restaurant, particularly if they're at my table. He made an appointment with one caller, had a mild disagreement with the second, and brushed off the third. Then he placed a brief call to someone to tell them where he was.
At some point in the conversation I mentioned where I was staying. "Lovely place," he said. "If your friends haven't arrived, perhaps we could have dinner together at the hotel this evening. I promise I won't bring my cell phone," he added. "I can tell you don't approve."
I hesitated for just a second too long.
"No pressure. I'm sure you're busy," he said. "Why don't we leave it that I'll be in the dining room at eight. If you're there, wonderful. If not, it's no problem. I have no other plans."
"I expect I'll see you then," I said. Why not, really. It was better than room service again.
I checked for messages at the hotel. There were none, so I decided I might as well do some sightseeing. Plan A would work, I told myself. I just had to be patient and wait until I saw Lake again. By late afternoon, quite by accident, I found myself by the baize. The cliffs have something quite primordial about them, sheer drops and yawning crevices, where the wind whistles and groans far below. I knew what had created them. Soft yellow sandstone on top, they are a gray clay lower down. The water that falls on Volterra seeps through the surface stone, pooling in the clay below and destabilizing the ground. From time to time, great masses of the cliffs simply collapse into the depths below. The baize are, in many ways, starkly beautiful, but I could see that they'd be a place people would feel drawn to if they were desperate, or depressed, or just tired of life. I thought of Ponte, a man I'd never known, and Godard, one with whom I'd spent only the better part of an hour, both gone, perhaps both of them by choice.
Precariously near the edge of the cliffs stood the remains of an old building. Its walls were cracked and broken, and it looked forlorn, abandoned to its fate, as the edge of the baize crept nearer. Soon it would follow the Pontes of this world, the ancient walls and necropolises of the Etruscan city, and other much more recent buildings that had crashed into the dark chasms when the earth gave way beneath them. As I looked at it, I began to feel as if that abbey and I were alike somehow, that I, too, was standing helpless, unable to move, waiting to be pulled into the abyss. I wished I'd never met Crawford Lake nor been dazzled by his money and my own ambition. Annoyed with myself for being so deeply affected by the place, I pulled myself away to head back to the hotel, which seemed to me, with its bright lights and people, to offer a sort of sanctuary.
As I entered the grounds, though, I was fast disabused of that notion. The hotel had two small parking areas, one to the side of the hotel, the other around the back. I parked on the side, beside a red Lamborghini, the same one I'd parked next to in Nice, given the yellow umbrella in the back window, and entered the hotel by a side door. As I did so, through a hole in the hedge, I was startled to catch a glimpse of carabinieri in the back lot. To my horror, they were opening the backs of cars and peering in, shining flashlights against the dim light. I pulled back a little into the shadow of the hedge and thought what to do. The police were searching trunks. When they got to mine, unless I got it out of there, they'd find a stolen Etruscan hydria. I'd have to make a dash back to my car, drive off before they got to it, and find somewhere else to hide the hydria until I could contact Lake. I turned back toward the car.
At that moment, a dark green Passat with a broken taillight and a badly scratched fender pulled up to the unloading spot near the front door, about three or four cars from mine. The driver got out and signaled for a bellhop. As he did so, he turned slightly, and by the lamp at the entranceway, I saw who he was: Pierre Leclerc, or perhaps it was, as Godard had thought, Le Conte. This seemed just a little too much of a coincidence for me. Whatever his name was, he'd been in Vichy, and while I hadn't seen him, the damage to the car also placed him in Nice at the same hotel as I was. At some point between the time I'd seen the hydria in the glass case in Godard's chateau that first afternoon and the rest stop on the highway between Nice and the Italian border, the hydria, stolen not once, but twice, presumably, had turned up in my car.
Leclerc reached into the car, popped the trunk, and signaled to the bellhop to bring his bags in, as he went up the steps to reception. The boy took out two large suitcases and used his elbow to push down the trunk lid. Perhaps because of the damage to the back, it didn't catch, and the trunk bounced open a few inches as the two men disappeared through the hotel's front door. I really didn't think about what I did next, moving almost on automatic pilot. I looked about me quickly, saw no one watching, then in quick succession strode the few steps to my car, got the carton out of the trunk, placed it in Leclerc's, and got into my car and drove away. There was a Plan B after all.
I was several miles away before I remembered that I was standing up that nice man, Cesar Rosati.
PART II. THE LION
SIX. AREZZO
THE HOTEL I CHOSE IN AREZZO WAS rather more modest than the places I'd been enjoying heretofore on this jaunt through Europe for Crawford Lake. If anything, it was a little down at the heels. Like many of the lesser establishments in Italy, it was decorated in red: red curtains, red bedspread, red tiles in the bathroom. Usually, this kind of decor offends my aesthetic sensibility. That's an occupational hazard for someone like me who deals with beautiful places and objects on a daily basis: We are a little hard to please in this regard. Here in the tiny albergo off the Corso Italia, Arezzo's main street, however, I felt much more at home than I had in Lake's lovely and expensive boutique hotels. Obviously, I'm a shopkeeper, not an aristocrat, at heart. In addition to the questionable color scheme, there was the hot water, when there was any, that clanged noisily as it made its way through what surely were prehistoric pipes, and the sounds in the next room, the rhythmic creak of the bedsprings and the grunts and groans of a rather energetic couple, came through the walls as if they were cardboard, which maybe they were. Still, the place had one overwhelmingly positive feature: No one, with the exception of Antonio, assuming he picked up his voice mail messages, knew I was there. I'd been very careful about that. I'd called the car rental agency and convinced them that the car they'd leased to me stalled all the time and insisted they give me a new one, which they did. Then I called the hotel in Volterra and told them that I would be checking out earlier than anticipated. I went back to the room and as quickly as I could, packed my bag, settled my bill, paying for an extra day so there would be no argument, and then disappeared—at least I hoped that was what I'd done—into the sunset.