David Hewson - The Villa of Mysteries

“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 to be the carved representation of a human arm. A feminine one, probably, with the folds of a simple shift visible through the dirt, reproduced with an uncanny accuracy.

“It looks real,” Lianne said eventually.

“Hello!” Bobby bellowed sarcastically. “Earth to Planet Lianne. It’s a statue. It’s supposed to look real.”

“Statues aren’t that colour.”

“Lianne—” He was getting exasperated again. His eyes had an angry roll to them. “This thing’s been sitting in the shit for a couple of thousand years or so. What colour do you expect it to come up? Shiny white or something? You think they shrink-wrapped it before putting it there?”

She didn’t answer. He had a point.

Bobby scraped some more. A hand emerged at the end of the arm: slender fingers clenched tightly shut around the shaft of something big. The two of them stood back for a moment and stared at the object in the mud. To Lianne the figure now looked very feminine and curiously familiar. Then her head lurched into gear and she realized what the connection was. This odd, dead thing in the ground resembled a cut-down version of the Statue of Liberty, trying to raise a big, stone torch, struggling to get it upright in the mud.

“It’s not metal, Bobby,” she said with a degree of boldness that worried her a little. “How come your machine picked it up? You thought of that?”

He glowered at her. “You amaze me sometimes. I’m sitting here maybe discovering Tutankhamen’s fucking tomb or something and all you can do is pick, pick, pick. Get off my back for a moment, will ya? I’m trying to think.”

He scraped down the other side, where the other arm might be. Sure enough it was there, only a few inches beneath the surface of the peat. Maybe the recent rain had washed away some of the crap that had been covering it. Bobby ran the trowel gently across the space in between the arms. The figure’s chest emerged. She was wearing what looked like a classical gown, with a v-neck that went low enough to disclose the rising curve of her slight and very lifelike breasts. The surface of the statue, when Bobby pushed away as much dirt as possible, was quite curious. It was the colour of old leather and a little shiny. For one brief moment, as he pushed and prodded with the trowel, Lianne thought it gave a little in places, but that must have been the booze.

Bobby shuffled on his knees then pushed aside no more than four inches of soil a couple of feet below the areas he’d already exposed. He’d guessed well. There were the outlines of two ankles, some way apart, perfect, naked this time, no sign of a carved dress or anything.

“It’s life-size, Bobby,” Lianne said.

“I know!”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Jesus. If only I could see that fat fucker Jorgensen’s face right now. You bring the camera?”

She shook her head. “Forgot it.”

“Typical. Thanks a million.”

“Bobby!”

He looked at his wife. Lianne knew she was close to becoming downright argumentative just then. She didn’t care. Something bad was happening here and maybe it was time to take a stand.

“What am I going to do?” he asked. “What the fuck I like, Lianne. Whatever the fuck I like.”

“It’s too big. You can’t pack that as excess baggage. Also it’s the colour of shit. And it smells. Can’t you smell it?”

“It’s been in a bog for a million fucking years. You want it to come out smelling of roses?”

She pulled back from the thing and crossed her arms across her chest, mutinous. “I don’t want it smelling like that. And quit swearing at me all the time. It’s not nice.”

He cursed under his breath and went back up to the top end, where the head ought to be. Cautiously this time he brushed away at the soil there. She was hoping the head had gone. She was hoping all Bobby would find was the torso and a couple of legs sticking out of the bottom. And wouldn’t Tom Jorgensen see the funny side of that?

But there was a head. A beautiful one maybe once someone washed off all the crap. As Bobby Dexter scraped away, whistling again, his wife was beginning to put the pieces together, beginning to understand what they’d found. It was a life-size Roman statue, maybe a couple of thousand years old. Stained like shit from all this time in the peat, maybe, but perfect apart from that. She understood what Bobby would be thinking too. Who knew what they could do in a lab these days? Maybe get it right back to nice, white marble, like it had been when Julius Caesar or some other dead Italian first ordered it.

And there was the problem. It was just too big. The two of them couldn’t even try and get it out of the ground. Five feet or so of stone was bound to weigh a ton. Even if they got someone in to help, there was no way they could ever bring the thing back to the USA.

“Let’s just go, Bobby,” Lianne pleaded. “We can call someone and tell them about it. Maybe they’d give us a reward. Maybe we’d be in the paper. You could stick that under Tom Jorgensen’s nose and see how it felt.”

“Fucking reward,” he spat back at her. “This is Italy, Lianne. They’d steal the thing for themselves and probably lock us up for messing around down here.”

“Then what are you going to do?”

She was defying him now and they both knew it. This was some kind of turning point in their marriage, one at which either life could go in one of two directions: to freedom or to servitude.