The light picked out the shape of a metal bar set into the wall a few feet away. There were more above it. It was a rudimentary ladder, set into the side of the tunnel. It looked like hope. I had no way of telling how deep the water beneath it was but I waded toward it, praying I wouldn’t step off another ledge.
My hands slipped off the rungs when I tried to pull myself up. I tried again. This time my foot found a rung beneath the surface of the water, giving me some leverage. I looked up and could see the dimmest crescent of light above. I climbed as fast as I could. I was in a well, I realized. It narrowed as I climbed. To reach the top I had to wriggle my backpack off and carry it with one hand. I barely fit in the narrowing space. I was afraid of getting stuck and the muscles in my arms and legs screamed with effort.
At the top, planks covered the circular opening. Bracing my back against the side of the well, I pushed at them, but they didn’t move. I propped the backpack on a rung in front of me, holding it in placewith my abdomen, and used every last bit of strength I had to slam the palms of my hands into the planks. Pain shot down my arms, but I did it again, and again, until one of them shifted.
As it did, light filled the shaft of the well from below, spotlighting and almost blinding me. A man was directly beneath me, shouting in Italian. I heard my name again. I tried to climb up, through the narrow gap I’d made, but now I was stuck, wedged against my pack. I wriggled desperately until I’d freed it, but holding on to it was awkward. For a second, I was tempted to drop it, to save myself, but with what felt like the last of my strength, I managed to shove it up through the gap.
But the man was climbing up toward me, fast, and he’d almost reached me. I got my head through the gap, then my shoulders. My arms shook with the effort. I thought my strength would fail me. He was right below me now, reaching up, and he grabbed at my foot. I screamed, kicking him away, and made a final effort to pull myself out just as he tried again. The plank splintered my flank and my thigh savagely but I made it.
I looked back down into the well. He was staring up at me. I saw the whites of his eyes, the glow of his flashlight, but he was stuck. The well was too narrow at the top for him. He shouted at me again. I hefted the plank back over the top of the well, leaving him in darkness, and looked around.
There was a stack of masonry, broken stone, and marble piled against a wall. They looked like fragments of tombstones. I heaved a few pieces on top of the planks. Just in case. I didn’t know how many people were down there, if there was someone my size who might be able to follow me up.
I took stock of the state of my body. Blood stained my T-shirt, and my trousers, but I wasn’t feeling pain yet, adrenaline doing its job. I needed to get away. Even if they couldn’t climb up the well, it wouldn’t take them long to get out of the hypogeum and find me above ground. I put my backpack on. It was still dry.
I was in an old building, a small, dusty, low-ceilinged room lit dimly by daylight coming through a little window. It seemed to be part storeroom, part priest’s room. Old-fashioned, formal chairs with ornate wooden arms flanked a large table. Vestments hung from a set of brass hooks. A glass-fronted cabinet contained books and a crucifix. Rows of tarnished brass candlesticks stood in orderly rows on a shelf, beside boxes of pamphlets and a painting, turned to the wall.
The floor was grander than the rest of the space, made from huge slabs of marble, just like the pavements of Verona. One or two of them had inscriptions, too faded to read but I realized they were ancient gravestones. I figured I was in a building adjacent to the church and quickly realized what I was looking at was the floor of the more ancient church that originally stood on this site, in Isotta’s time, before it was rebuilt.
That older church’s footprint must have been a little different from the current building’s. I felt a little surge of hope, that maybe something remained of the older building, that maybe there was still a chance of finding a clue Isotta could have left here, but the hope quickly drained away. I could no longer hear shouting from the well, which meant the man was almost certainly on his way up. I had to get away.
I looked through the window but saw only an enclosed courtyard strung with an empty washing line, a hose lying uncoiled on a patch of grass, a terra-cotta pot spilling with geraniums beside an open door. I thought of trying to escape through there but the window was painted shut.
I turned to the door, afraid someone could be waiting for me behind it already. The doorway was low and narrow, the door made of thick planks of oak, with a forged latch. It creaked as I opened it and I stepped right into the nave of the present-day church.
Inside the church it was hushed and still, but men’s voices were audible from outside. I looked around for a place to hide, but there were slim pickings. The confession box, but they’d find me in a heartbeat. Maybe behind the altar, but it would hardly offer mecover. The pews were too open; I couldn’t even crouch between them. I turned to retreat back into the little room when the doors burst open and a man entered.
“Anya Brown,” he said in heavily accented English. Behind him I could see the village square, a blast of morning sunlight that made me squint, and another man, the same one who tried to follow me up the well. I was dripping wet and hurting. I was cornered. I had no option except to face him.
“Yes,” I said.
“Your father wants you.”
Sid
The taxi traveled down a long, straight road. Sid and Clio sat silently in the back.
Sid had a view of the imposing house at the end of the road, a large, three-story edifice, fortresslike, U-shaped in plan, two arms extending to enclose the front lawn: the Nogarolas’ country home.
They drove through the remains of a pair of very old gateposts, remnants of the building’s earlier lives, and pulled into a parking lot in front.
Close up, the villa looked shabby and unkempt. On the ground floor of the central section, three huge arches enclosed a terrace. You could see through to trees and parkland on the other side.
Sid knew from a YouTube video that this was the original part of the building, the part the Nogarola family had used as their summer home. The rest was added on later. There were other buildings on the grounds, too, of mixed use. Some looked like homes, others were offices or storage.
Anya should be here somewhere. He knew he’d betrayed her by bringing Clio to this place, but he was afraid for her.
Clio asked the driver to wait for them, and he cracked his door, lit a cigarette. His radio played 1990s pop tunes.
“Wait here,” Clio told Sid. He watched her approach the building and enter a section of it that had a sign out front.
He ignored Clio’s instruction to stay where he was and walked up to the terrace, looked out the other side. There was a shallow river behind the house, and the park, a hint that this place had been isolated and in unspoiled surroundings, once, but the steps behind the terrace were covered in bird shit and the doors off the terrace were locked. Anya couldn’t be back here. He scanned the front, watched Clio come out of one of the buildings, frowning. He watched her look into a few more entrances until she’d exhausted them all. He was getting a bad feeling that Anya might have lied to them both.
He got out his phone. Reception was terrible, just one bar.
“What are you doing?” Clio had spotted him and was striding toward him.
“Nothing,” he said.
