Martelli downed the tiny coffee. She was thinking. She seemed briefly troubled, he thought, as if there was something she didn’t want to say. ‘I know what you mean.’
‘You do?’
‘About the choices.’
Something crossed her face then, some shadow of doubt, of unhappiness, and it struck him that Barbara Martelli’s appearance wasn’t always an advantage. It could be a burden too. This was how people judged her, on her looks, not the person beneath, who was somehow oddly remote.
‘But, Nic. The best thing is just to accept that’s how it is and get on with the job. Not …’ She looked at his coffee cup. It had been empty for a long time and they both knew it. ‘… not hide away in the corner somewhere. That’s not like you. At least, as much as I think I know you.’
He was late already. If she hadn’t walked in, he’d still be there, hesitating. And a moment would come, he knew it, when he’d turn round, go back to the farmhouse, maybe open a bottle of good wine, then undo everything he’d achieved these past few months, rebuilding his health, resurrecting what was left of his dignity and self-respect. There was a kind of glory in crashing out that way. If you could only prolong that feeling forever, it would be enough, would see you through an entire lifetime. The trouble was it didn’t last. You always woke up. The real world poked its head around the door and said, ‘Look.’ There was no escape and that was for the simplest of reasons: what he was running from lay inside.
‘Do I have to march you into that place or what?’ she asked.
‘I could call in sick.’
‘No!’ Her large, green eyes widened with anger.
They were flirting with each other. Not seriously, he realized. This was Barbara’s way of getting him moving. She’d use it on anyone she felt needed it.
‘This,’ she declared, ‘is what we do for a living. It’s our chosen vocation and there are no halfway houses. You’re either in. Or out. So which is it?’
A wild thought ran around his head then popped out of his mouth without even letting him consider the consequences. ‘Do you think we’ll ever go out on a date, Barbara? Do you think that’s possible?’
A gentle blush rose in her cheeks. Barbara Martelli got asked out a dozen times a day.
‘Ask me tomorrow,’ she said. ‘On one condition.’
He waited, still embarrassed by the sudden intimacy.
She pointed a long, manicured finger in the direction of the station. ‘You ask me in there.’
They did everything wrong in Italy. The cappuccinos had insufficient milk. The pasta didn’t taste right. The pizzas were too thin. And the booze. Lianne Dexter couldn’t work out what was wrong. Ordinarily the effects would be wearing off by now, two hours after lunch. But she felt just as drunk as when they left the osteria and it was starting to make her edgy. She and Bobby had finished the single bottle of Pellegrino mineral water from the rucksack he’d snatched from the car before it went up in flames. Now they had nothing to drink, nothing to eat and not a lot of money either. She didn’t even want to think about the walk back along the rutted lane towards the main road. How did you flag down an Italian and get him to take you to Avis for a refund on the crappy car they rented you? And what about the stuff Bobby had found? So far a coin, what looked like a very old, very big nail and something the size of a kid’s hand, semi-circular, encrusted with crud, which Bobby assured her was definitely an ancient Roman neckband or the like and would come up great once he cleaned off the crap. Which was great except they weren’t supposed to be hunting for these things. The Italians would surely know. And maybe the ‘necklace’ was just a brake lining anyway. Lianne’s father was a car mechanic. She knew about these things, a little anyway. It looked awfully like a brake lining to her.
She licked her lips. Her mouth was dreadfully dry. A cheap wine migraine was pumping at her temples. It was now approaching three in the afternoon and the light was fading. They needed to be moving. She didn’t want to be stranded all night in this odd wilderness, with its queer smell and the planes from Fiumicino screaming overhead every two minutes or less.
‘Bobby,’ she whined.
He wasn’t satisfied with the haul. Tom Jorgensen still had the marble head and it looked better than any of these things.
He tore off the headphones and barked, ‘What?’
‘Gonna get dark soon. We gotta go.’
He looked around at the grey sky and sniffed. ‘Five more minutes.’ Then he popped the headphones back on and wandered over towards the water’s edge. It was bog here. Lianne knew that instinctively. It had that odd, acid smell she associated with the cranberry farms in Maine, one of the places they’d trashed on an earlier vacation.
‘Peat,’ she said, suddenly remembering. Bobby mouthed ‘what the fuck now?’ at her with the headphones still clamped to his skull. A 747 careered over them so low she felt the earth shake. She had to put her hands over her ears just to try to keep out the bellowing of the plane’s engines.
‘Nothing,’ she whispered to herself in the plane’s wake, wishing she was somewhere else. Back home even. The cranberry farms had been nice. Interesting. Run by people who spoke the same language she did and never made her feel out of place. Rome wasn’t like that. She felt all the faces in the street were looking at her constantly, waiting for her to say the wrong thing, turn the wrong corner. It was all so foreign.
Then there was a new noise, an unexpected one. It was Bobby, whistling. He tore off the headphones and pointed to a patch of damp earth, covered in feeble grass, a few feet in front of him.
‘One more thing, sweetheart. Then we’re gone. Gimme the spade.’
She did as he asked. Bobby Dexter placed the shovel on the ground then jumped on it with both feet. The thing went straight in like a knife through hot butter. Bobby tumbled off the spade and hit the dirt once more. ‘Peat,’ she said again, watching Bobby writhe on the ground, cursing. ‘It’s soft, Bobby. You don’t need to try so hard. Look—’
She picked up the trowel they’d brought and squatted down on the ground, next to where his spade had bitten the earth. Lianne had watched an archaeology programme on the Discovery Channel once. She knew how people did these things, though why they bothered, for six, maybe eight hours a day, was quite beyond her.
‘You just do it gently,’ she said and poked the end of the trowel into the soft earth. The acid reek came up and hit her in the face. It made her think of cranberries: all that sharp red juice mixed up with vodka. ‘Look—’
She scraped the surface, trying not to breathe in the smell. And then the trowel stopped dead on something solid. Lianne Dexter gulped involuntarily and wondered whether her throat might seize up. She ran the trowel tentatively through the earth. It encountered the same solid object as far as she could push it.
Bobby lurched over the ground and took the trowel off her. He began working at the soil, a little too roughly she thought.
‘What is it?’ she asked.
An object was emerging. It was the colour of the peat, a dark, woody brown, and hard to the touch. Bobby scraped some more then the two of them took a deep breath and sat back. What lay before them, emerging gradually from the earth, appeared
