"There is an explanation for this," Cesar Rosati said.
"One I'm sure we'd all like to hear," a voice behind me said. My heart leapt into my mouth. If I'd thought I could stay in the doorway and make a fast exit if necessary, I'd obviously been wrong.
"What are you doing here?" a tall woman with long, gray hair, pulled loosely back into a chignon, said. She looked rather more patrician than she had when I first saw her, dressed as she had been in a maid's outfit.
I looked over my shoulder. A tall man dressed in a white suit, white hat, and dark sunglasses stood in the doorway. His tie was not the right width to be fashionable, nor were his lapels, but I suppose if you don't get out much, there isn't much point in buying a new suit every season.
"Hello, Mr. Lake," I said. What I didn't know was whether his arrival improved my odds, which had been twelve to one before he got there, or made them worse.
"Ms. McClintoch, Anna," he said nodding politely in our direction. "And you, Mondragon." Alfred Mon-dragon nodded curtly.
"Lake!" Gino said. "Are you serious? Is this really Crawford Lake?"
"How did you find us?" Hank demanded.
"I followed Ms. McClintoch. Just about everyone here was following somebody, so I thought I'd join in," he said dryly.
"This is by invitation only," Hank said.
"I've been musing what the invitation, had I received one, would say," Lake said. "Buffet supper at six. Cocktails at four in the tomb?"
"If this place is not to your liking, then you know what you can do," Hank said.
"On the contrary, this is exactly my kind of place," he said, carefully replacing his glasses with a pair of a lighter tint. "Now, I believe Ms. McClintoch was about to get an explanation. Perhaps we could start off with some introductions. I'd prefer not to shake hands, if you don't mind. I'm Crawford Lake, and this is Ms. Lara McClintoch. And you are?"
Anna Karagiannis, the aunt of Brandy Lake's dead fiance, declined to introduce herself, but the rest of them did. Besides Anna; Dottie and Gino; Eugenia and Vittorio; there was Cesar Rosati, the man I'd stood up for dinner; Mario Romano, the fake Lake; the art dealer Mondragon; the journalist Gianni Veri; Hank Mariani, the tiny cowboy; Nicola Marzolini, my date a few evenings back; and the one person I hadn't been expecting, Massimo Lucca, the policeman from the carabinieri station in Arezzo. Hank Mariani was the last to introduce himself. He came up to me with his hand out.
"How do you do," he said. "I'm Pupluna."
"Pupluna?" Lake snorted.
"We call this group the Societa della Chimera," Mario Romano said defensively. "We meet every year around this time. We call it our annual meeting, and we have it here because, as I'm sure you know, the Etruscan kings met in this area—at a place they called Velzna—to discuss matters of state, trade, defense, those kinds of things. Anna has this wonderful home here, complete with Etruscan tomb, so she has graciously offered to be our host every year.
"We limit our membership to thirteen, after the Etruscan city states, and we all take the name of one of those cities. That's what Harold here meant when he said he was Pupluna. I'm Velc, Anna is Velzna, Dottie here is Clevsi, Cesar, Rusellae, and so on." He paused for a moment. "It sounds rather foolish when you tell a stranger, I'm afraid." He suddenly seemed at a loss for words.
"Perhaps I should carry on, then, shall I?" Nicola said. "This group has been meeting for what? Almost ten years now?" Several of them nodded. "We're rather fanatical about all things Etruscan. We have a little Internet chat group, to share information and just talk about our passion. At some point—I think maybe four or five meetings ago, wasn't it?—we decided we needed a project. We were beginning to feel we couldn't always be a social club.
"Someone, I think it was Cesar," he said, "suggested repatriating an Etruscan antiquity every year. We initiated an annual assessment for membership and built up a nest egg to help with expenses, and purchase, where necessary. I searched the records for missing artifacts and came up with a list. Alfred Mondragon here, with his inestimable knowledge and connections in the art world, has been able to track down four of them so far, a lovely small bronze of a warrior, a very nice stone sphinx, both of which now rest in Cesar Rosati's collection, a kylix by the Bearded Sphinx painter, which unfortunately we no longer have, and now, the piece de resistance, the chimera hydria, which like the others would be donated to the Rosati Gallery. It's very probably by the Micali painter, did you know that?" I nodded. "Perhaps you could take it from here, Alfred."
"The hydria resided with Robert Godard, Senior, in Vichy," Mondragon said, glancing carefully at Lake. "We found out that Godard was an Etruscophile like the rest of us, and so we offered him a position in the Societa. Godard died shortly after, which put a crimp in our plans, but we persevered and extended the same invitation to his son, also Robert. We thought we had convinced him to bring the hydria as a condition of his membership. Unfortunately, we didn't know that Robert Junior was disabled and would have real difficulty coming to Italy.
"For awhile we were still hopeful that Godard would bring it himself. He kept saying he would. But Nicola here, who went to see it and photographed it for us, thought it was pretty clear Godard was broke, ill, and wouldn't make it," Mondragon said. "At least not without help.
"And so," he said, pausing for a moment, "we had to come up with a different plan. Cesar, I think I'll turn it over to you at this point, as you were the one who came up with the idea."
Rosati cleared his throat. "A few of us got together, a committee I suppose you could call it, to figure out how to make this work. The simplest thing would have been to buy the hydria from Godard. However, we'd already told him not to sell the hydria, that it was his ticket into the Societa. The alternative seemed to be to help him get here. That's when we looked around for someone who could get money to him in a way he would find acceptable, that is to buy something from him. It couldn't be one of us, because if he came here and saw us all, he'd know something was up, and he mightn't be too inclined to donate the hydria then. And maybe he couldn't afford to. That's when we came up with the, um, plan," Rosati said.
"This plan being the one in which you used my name to trick Ms. McClintoch into assisting you with this," Lake said.
"I hope you will understand that our intentions were good," Eugenia said. "Once you've heard the story."
"Ah, intentions," Lake said. "We know all about those, don't we?"
"What I understand is that you thought ends justified means and were prepared to use someone unwitting, like me, to carry out your plans," I said.
"I take it you counted on the fact that no one would know what I looked like," Lake said. "Why did you choose Ms. McClintoch here?"
Dottie looked as if she was going to cry again. "I thought you'd be perfect for it," she said to me. "You have such an honest face, and of course you were here. I found that out easily enough. Now I feel really awful about it. I'm thinking you may never forgive me."
"I arranged for a fellow by the name of Yves Boucher to get Lara to Godard in Vichy," Vittorio Palladini said. "Actually, we'd already asked Boucher to try to buy it for us, or anything else Godard was prepared to sell, but he'd been singularly unsuccessful. Godard didn't take to him at all. We didn't think you knew much about Etruscan bronzes, Lara, so we concocted the idea of the Bellerophon, knowing—Nicola had checked the place out—that there was a large brom that might pass as a Bellerophon."
"Unfortunately," Nicola said. "You seemed to know rather more than we thought you did—I hope you'll take this as a compliment—and you ascertained correctly, and immediately, that it was a fake."