by Gigi Pandian
The map of the park showed that I’d almost reached Orcus, the Ogre of the Underworld. This was the creature from Lazzaro’s notebook that, according to Stefano’s translation, Lazzaro’s studio was near. I hurried past a dragon who had a look of curious surprise on his face—and stopped short.
I’d reached the Ogre I was after. The king of the Underworld was nothing like the friendly dragon in his wake. Hollow black eyes wide with horror, beneath wild eyebrows shaped with rage, above an open mouth that served as a doorway. The door to the Underworld. The monster had no body. Instead, a set of stone steps led from the path up to the doorway mouth.
A stunning woman with black hair and eyes spoke to me in Italian, and I responded in my broken Italian that I didn’t speak the language.
“Ah, Americana! We do not see Americans so much. You are of Italian lineage, no? I was saying if you do not like the look on L’Orco’s face right now, you return later. His expression, it changes depending on the way the sunlight falls on him.”
“Thank you for the tip. When do you like to visit?”
“The beginning of the day. This is the hour when he has the least power, as it is the longest distance from night. With my youngest bambina, it is not so easy to arrive early. Lucia! Arresto!” She left me and chased after a young child, her long hair billowing behind her.
Sleek green moss covered the Ogre’s face. The carving had been built into an existing stone on the side of a small hill. It was at least three times as tall as me, and the mouth that served as a doorway was higher than six feet. Two stone teeth hung from the top. A Latin inscription was carved onto the top of the doorway mouth. It paraphrased a quote from Dante’s Inferno: Abandon all hope ye who enter here.
Unlike most of the carvings at the park, visitors were encouraged to touch this one. With my heart thudding, I watched as a family posed with wide grins inside the mouth of the king of the Underworld. Could I be steps away from finding Lazzaro Allegri’s hidden art studio?
Once the family climbed down the steps and continued on, I took their place. I walked through the mouth into darkness, expecting to find Hell.
Instead I found a picnic table.
I glanced around the ten-foot square dining room. That’s what it was. A stone dining table and stone benches were built into the slab floor. I ran my hand along the stone walls, the table, and finally the floor. The sculpture was solid. There didn’t seem to be any way to build a secret passageway into this stone beast.
I rested against the cool stone and took in the room as a whole. I doubted this room itself had once been Lazzaro’s studio. Even in the 1500s, this ghoulish room had been open to the public. I reminded myself that Lazzaro’s cryptic message, mi trovate quando diluvia, didn’t state his studio was actually attached to the Ogre statue. It simply said we could find him there. It could be nearby.
I rushed back outside and examined my surroundings. Though Lazzaro’s sketches had been skillful, he’d taken artistic license to make the creature’s face more savage in his own interpretation. I circled the overgrown area. Narrowly, at first, before widening my radius and finding the large fountain Stefano had mentioned. The circular fountain with a winged Pegasus in the center was filled with moss, not water. And it was far from any formations that could disguise a sheltered cave.
This couldn’t be right.
There was no hidden grotto anywhere near the Ogre. Stefano Gopal’s translation was wrong too.
Chapter 19
How could Stefano have been wrong? Italian was his native tongue. But his native tongue in the 20th and 21st centuries. Not the 16th. And landscapes change over time. Had the layout been different in the 1500s? I didn’t have Stefano’s home number, so I called his office and left a message.
I bought every book on the Park of Monsters that was available in English at the gift shop, including a novel. I doubted a work of fiction would tell me anything useful in my quest, but couldn’t resist its title, Signatures in Stone, and its description that the Park of Monsters was a pathway to enlightenment. Sitting at a picnic table near laughing children, I skimmed the books. These weren’t academic tomes. These were books for tourists. Even the heftier books were conceptual studies on topics such as pagan iconography in the Renaissance, or comparing the Park of Monsters to other Renaissance gardens like the water jokes gardens in Germany that Sanjay had mentioned. None of these books contained original documents from the 1500s. Why would they? This was a tourist destination for Italians, not a research library. If I could find a local library or archives, that would be more useful. It would also be more useful if I spoke Italian.
I wasn’t going to let myself get dejected so soon. I’d only been in Italy for a few hours. Jet lag was making me cranky. I needed to go on a run to snap out of it. I got a cab back to the villa and changed into my running gear.
I had over an hour of sunlight left. Plenty of time to fit in a good run and make it back to the villa. While I stretched, I examined the map the concierge had given to me earlier. There were several trails that would work. I tucked my phone, hotel key, and map into the pocket of my vest and set off through the countryside. I left my headphones off in order to get the full experience of my new surroundings.
Without music to focus on, I thought about the warning the concierge had given me. There is nothing but death in those woods. The driver hadn’t wanted to talk about it either. Surely there wasn’t a hidden danger like a serial killer at large or a pack of rabid boars that were endangering tourists. Because of the area of the map suggested as off limits, it was more likely to be a landslide that had killed someone. The region was rocky enough for that type of danger. We’d passed several quarries on our drive to the villa.
There was only one path down the villa’s isolated little hill. The same small road we’d driven up. At the base of the hill I passed the abandoned Castello del Fantasma winery. Raucous laughter wafted out of the building with the bar. As I ran by, I spotted a young waiter I recognized from the villa talking animatedly with an older man with a weather-worn face.
Several miles later, I’d smelled the sweet scents of late spring flowers, seen the juxtaposition of medieval stone houses next to modern gas stations, and felt the warm Italian sun as I ran through pockets of sunshine between the lush green trees. Only too late did I realize that I shouldn’t have cut through a vineyard to avoid a steep hill. The path I was now on didn’t correspond to anything on my map.
I kept running until the dirt path met what I thought looked like a larger road up ahead. But it must have been a private road, because no signage was visible.
The sun hung low in the sky. As I stopped to stretch and think about what to do, I felt the chill from the sweat that coated my skin. I had my phone with me, so I could call my brother or the villa front desk and try to explain where I was.
A car approached. I tried to flag them down by waving both my hands, but the two women in the car simply waved back at me. How on earth did one signal that you needed help in Italian? As I typed that question into my phone, another vehicle approached on the road. This one was a baby blue moped. It stopped of its own accord, without me having to guess the best way to flag it down.
“Ciao, Bella,” the young man said, coming to a stop a few feet away from me. He continued speaking in rapid Italian.
“Mi dispiace, non parlo italiano.” I hoped I hadn’t completely crucified my attempt to say I didn’t speak Italian.
“Americana? I would not have guessed. I saw you at the Sacred Grove today, but did not hear you speak. You have Italian ancestry, no? You enjoyed our gardens?”
Even though he’d changed clothing, I recognized him now. He was one of the men who made sure people didn’t ruin the stones. He couldn’t have been out of his teens, but he’d been the one reprimanding the joker in the pirate hat. He ran a hand through the tousled hair that fell to his shoulders. It was a practiced gesture, one that I was s
ure made teenage girls swoon. The white shirt he’d changed into was a thick-collared dress shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest on the warm night.
“I enjoyed it very much,” I said. “You’ve just gotten off work?”
“Sì. I do not possess your beautiful legs, so I just have my moped to carry me home. You ran all this way?”
I laughed. “No. And I seem to be lost.”
“Where are you trying to be?”
I showed him the villa on the map. He took off his helmet and handed it to me. “You are a long way from home, mia Bella. I will see you safely there.”
I knew he was a member of the community with a job at the park, and I was confident I could fight off a teenaged kid if it came to that. I put on the helmet and climbed on the back of the moped.
Since the moped didn’t go much faster than I ran, while we drove to the villa I learned he’d never been farther than Rome, and that he was seventeen and working at the Park of Monsters while saving money for college. He loved practicing his English, so he talked nonstop and welcomed my corrections.
“You know the history of the gardens?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Orsini,” he said. “This is the family who built it. The man, Pirro? Pietro? I forget his name. He was crazy. This is all I know.” Hopefully he wasn’t going to be a history major when he got to college.
I asked him about the phrase mi trovate quando diluvia that Lilith and Stefano had translated differently.
“Pouring rain, sì,” he confirmed. That meant Stefano’s translation was right. It was Lazzaro himself who’d created a mystery. Was the deception deliberate or was I missing something?
My new friend Niccolò dropped me at the villa. He handed me a scrap of paper with his phone number.
“To practice my English,” he added hastily when he saw my face, then grinned. “If you have extra time in Italia and desire to thank the man who helps you when you are lost.”
I accepted his phone number and handed his helmet back to him. “Before you go, I wanted to ask you one last thing. What’s with the area of my map that’s been crossed out?”
His shoulders tensed as he looked at the map. He tried to play it off as a shrug, but his voice belied the forced nature of his carefree pose. “You go there?”
“No, but I’m curious—”
“Mi dispiace. It is later than I think.”
“It’ll only take a moment for you to tell me—”
“I am late to meet my sister. Arrivederla, mia Bella.”
I stared after Niccolò as his scooter kicked up dust on the gravel path leading out of the medieval village and back to the 21st century. Why was everyone wary of talking about that off-limits area? If it was dangerous, wouldn’t they simply tell me so?
“JJ?”
I turned to see my brother, dressed impeccably in an off-white linen suit, walking toward me. Ava was at his side, her hand draped casually over his elbow. She wore a sleeveless summer dress in vibrant yellow with a high waist and long skirts that flowed to her ankles. They were a stunning couple.
“Your brother was worried,” Ava said, “since you’re late for dinner and didn’t answer your phone.”
“I must not have heard the phone with the noise of the moped.”
“You were on a motorcycle?” Mahilan asked, dropping Ava’s arm. “Really?”
“I’m fine, Fish.”
“Do you know how many people are killed in motorcycle accidents each year?”
“I wore a helmet, and I doubt Niccolò drove faster than ten miles an hour.”
“Niccolò?” Mahilan sputtered. “Who’s Niccolò?”
“Didn’t you grow up riding on scooters?” Ava asked.
“We did,” I said. “Three or four of us on the same scooter. Fish has forgotten his roots.”
“I think they make you surrender them when you pass the bar exam,” Ava said.
“You two are hilarious,” Mahilan said. “Seriously, JJ, take a proper taxi next time.”
“Let me take a quick shower and I’ll meet you for dinner. Order me whatever the special is.”
Inside the cozy restaurant with waiters and sommeliers fussing over us, I was torn between enjoying the luxurious vacation that I never would have been able to afford if my brother wasn’t treating me and examining my surroundings critically. I was trying to do both, and thus failing miserably at each. I couldn’t completely unwind, yet I couldn’t get a handle on what had happened to Lazzaro Allegri’s lost masterpieces and who would have hurt Lilith to get that answer.
I meant to stay focused at the task at hand, but as soon as a plate of cocoa-rubbed beef was set down in front of me, I succumbed to decadence.
In the morning, I wished I hadn’t been quite so decadent with the wine pairings that went with each course. I had an appointment with Enzo and Brunella Allegri, descendants of the family Lazzaro Allegri had belonged to. With contact information Lilith had provided, I’d emailed them from San Francisco while I was setting up the trip. Though they didn’t know what they could tell me that would be helpful, they said they’d be happy to meet with me. I hoped they’d be more open to talking to me than the people I’d met so far. But it would probably be a good idea if I didn’t begin with my question about the off-limits area.
I’d meant to ask Niccolò about finding a local library or archives I could visit that day too, but he’d left so abruptly after I asked him about the forbidden area of woods. I was due at the Allegris shortly, so I couldn’t worry about that now.
Mahilan, Ava, and I had made plans to visit the Park of Monsters together in the afternoon after my appointment. The Allegris had invited me to their home, which from what I’d seen online looked more like a castle than a house.
“Mind if I tag along and do some sketches?” Ava asked over breakfast. “I read about their spectacular flower garden. I thought I’d make some drawings to send Carey.”
“You two are abandoning me to finish breakfast alone?” Mahilan said.
I impulsively decided to call Lane. Since I was in Italy, there was no danger that he could talk me out of coming. He’d be angry, yes. But he’d get over it.
It wasn’t only that I wanted to hear his voice. I also wanted to think through what was going on. Both Lilith and Stefano had been wrong about the location of Lazzaro’s hidden art studio. Lane had seen the sketchbooks too. Had he seen something I’d missed?
I hoped to catch him, but even if I reached his voicemail, that would have been all right. What I got instead wasn’t all right at all.
Lane’s phone had been disconnected.
Chapter 20
“You sure you’re okay?” Ava asked as she drove a bright orange Fiat Panda to the Allegris’. Mahilan had decided that since we were effectively in the middle of nowhere, and I couldn’t be trusted not to hop on scooters with strange men, it would be best to rent a car.
“Jet lag,” I said.
But all I could think about was why Lane’s phone was disconnected. Had he taken Lilith’s hypothesis more seriously than I’d realized and looked into it on his own, encountering the person who had hurt Lilith? Or was it his way of forcing me to make a clean break? Neither scenario was a welcome one.
“Where are you going?” I asked as Ava turned onto a road leading down into a valley.
“The GPS says to go this way. Why do you sound so anxious?”
“It’s nothing,” I said. “Never mind.”
We were descending into the area I’d been warned away from.
Enzo and Brunella Allegri were younger than I expected from the formality of their correspondence. They must have been in their late thirties.
Brunella’s voluptuous curves stood out in striking contrast to Enzo’s small skeletal frame. Based on their appearances, I expected her handshake would be warm and friendly and his cold and hard. I was mista
ken. Brunella’s handshake was clammy and perfunctory, but Enzo’s was warm and enthusiastic. He pumped my hand several times in greeting as I mentally kicked myself for jumping to conclusions.
“Come, come!” He waved Ava and me inside.
“Thanks for meeting with us,” I said.
Brunella frowned. “I did not realize there would be two of you. I did not save enough bomboloni.”
“I don’t need anything,” Ava said quickly. “Jaya is the scholar. I’m an amateur artist. You have such beautiful gardens, I was hoping to sketch them while the three of you talk.”
“Sì, sì,” Enzo said. “The roses are not blooming yet, but the poppies are magnifici.”
They spoke perfect English, but with Italian accents. Enzo’s was strongest.
“Would you make tea, my love?” Enzo asked Brunella.
“It is nearly summer,” she said. “Who needs tea?” Her bosom threatened to break out of her dress. It was a good thing she was wearing such expensive clothing or I was sure the seams would have given up.
“Cappuccinos, then. The day is young.”
“I’m fine,” I said.
Enzo sighed. “You are sure? How can we help you?” He motioned for me to sit anywhere.
A phone in the hallway rang as I sat down on an exquisite chair made in a classical style with ornate embroidery. It was the wrong choice. I’d been drawn to its decorative beauty suggestive of another century. I hadn’t realized the lumpy chair was most likely an original.
“Amore mio,” Enzo said to Brunella. “Telefono?”
She replied in rapid Italian that I didn’t follow, and Enzo went to answer the phone.
“You have a beautiful home,” I said to Brunella. It was true, even though it was chilly inside despite the warm day. Between the stately furniture and sedate oil paintings of men and women who vaguely resembled Enzo, I felt as though I were in a museum. Except for the newspaper that lay open on an antique side table next to a plate of donuts.
