Tuscan Intrigue

By Rosalind Burgundy

Searching for the elusive criminals who left her famous father comatose after a bomb blast, cultural arts historian and quasi-archeologist, Amanda Oliver stumbles into a world of thugs, tomb robbers, obsessed archeologists and greedy collectors seeking a priceless Etruscan sarcophagus.

Putty Face's footsteps crunched on the gravel behind me. His erratic breathing, panting like a thirsty animal, paralyzed me. I opened my mouth to protest but no sound came. In a split second, the pressure of his hands on my back told his intentions. He shoved hard.

I pitched forward and the ground under my feet disappeared. My arms flailed clumsily when I grabbed out for something to stop my fall but met only air. His fierce thrust sped my descent and I tumbled uncontrollably, bouncing off bare rock outcroppings, each slam increasing my dizziness, bruising and weakening me.

Mercifully, I blacked out.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: May 27, 2005
• ISBN: 9780595790715

Rosalind Burgundy

ROSALIND BURGUNDY’s enchantment with the Etruscan’s amazing culture began when she worked as Technical Illustrator and Curator for an archeologist in the Roman Forum. After some 30 years as educator, wife, mother and world traveler, Ms. Burgundy returns to her life-long interest to create Odyssey of an Etruscan Noblewoman. Two other novels on the Etruscans, Song of the Flutist and Hidden Beauty are part of this trilogy. She divides her time between the Central Sierra in California and Palm Beach Coast in Florida.

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Tuscan Intrigue

Copyright © 2005 by Rosalind Burgundy

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

iUniverse

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This is a work of fiction based on archeological data. Characters are products of the author’s imagination. Other names, places and events are intended to give the fiction a setting in historical reality. Any resemblance to actual works of art is not to be construed as fact.

Cover Design: Rosalind Burgundy

Photograph for cover: Tomb Entrance

Rosalind Burgundy, copyright 1998

Editor: Richard Ekker, Professor Emeritus of English and Film

ISBN-13: 978-0-595-34301-0 (pbk)

ISBN-13: 978-0-595-67100-7 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-5957-9071-5 (ebk)

ISBN-10: 0-595-34301-5 (pbk)

ISBN-10: 0-595-67100-4 (cloth)

ISBN-10: 0-595-79071-2 (ebk)

CONTENTS

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

To our

Ancestor Artists and

Artisans

who enriched our world by

creating aesthetics and

objects of

Beauty

that we

treasure today

1

Dad, is that you?

The phone crackled like a gramophone recording from the 20’s, static, hissing and grating. Dad? Dad?

A man’s garbled voice said something. A thud hurt my ear. He must have dropped the phone. A moment later, an authoritative, high-pitched voice came on. Signora Oliver? Venga, Signora! Venga subito!

A click, then nothing but dial tone. Rawness hit the pit of my stomach. Dread saturated the rest of me.

You okay, Amanda? Marcia, my team partner, wheeled her chair in my direction. Was it that creepy Mr. Tate refusing the deal?

No, not him. I think my dad just called.

Your dad? You never mentioned you had one.

If it is him, he’s in trouble.

Really?

Her surprise was understandable. I rarely spoke of family.

Where does he live?

I don’t know. He’s always on the move. He might be anywhere. I haven’t heard from him in a while.

Remember we’ve got a high tech system. The last five phone numbers are saved. Want to find out who they were from?

I didn’t and couldn’t answer. My mind strayed. It had been four years since I saw my illustrious father, Montgomery Adams, he who won scholarly grants and made huge archeological discoveries. Everything he did was excessively big and intellectual, except acknowledge my contribution to his findings. Even with my art history degree and master’s in archeology, he paid minimum wage. Without a Ph.D., I was his flunky, shadowing him on his research, not having enough hours to work on mine, and never having enough money to buy more than scarves to perk up my old dresses. Sick of running around the world with him, I asked for fairness.

No spunk! he had yelled at me. No stamina for hard work.

You love no one but yourself, I yelled back as I left, knowing if I stayed, he would stifle my attempts to be my own person. Devastated by that argument, there had been no further communication.

Marcia punched numbers on the pad. Hey, that call was international. It was 390763—oops, lost it. Another incoming call knocked it out.

Italy. The country code is 39. I shook myself into the present. What were the next?

0-7, she repeated, but there were four numbers together: 0-7-6-3.

I don’t know what town or city that is. I pushed away from my desk. Cover for me, will you?

Our brochure idea is due at ten on Tuesday. You just said you didn’t know…

I’ll find it. I raced to the elevator. Luckily, the Pyramid Building lobby bookcase was filled with Asian and European telephone directories for the CEOs’ or rather, for their secretaries’ use.

Mid-afternoon, a bored receptionist read a magazine in the empty lobby. I was glad no one else was around for I must have appeared frantic, searching through the directories until I got to the Italian section. Picking out the Milan phonebook, I leafed through the white pages to locate city codes. Orvieto.

Orvieto? I had to get back to writing the brochure copy. Every time I tried to continue where I left off, I couldn’t concentrate. I could only look out at San Francisco’s white, precariously stacked buildings that glittered like crystal prisms in the afternoon sun, and then at the Bay Bridge, with its string of east bound cars and trucks, miniature from this distance. Daily I coveted this dazzling view from the twenty-third floor as I worked at my desk on inane art proposals for the city, historical projects intended to encourage folks to get culture, mostly schemes that didn’t get past the office.

Normally I was energized by the view, but its glory faded. I was wasting my time here. Marcia went to the ladies room. I didn’t have to face her.

By the time I reached the apartment, I concluded there was no choice. I had to see my father. He hadn’t said much, but pain was in his voice, the sound of physical pain. He never would have lifted his index finger to call unless something awful happened. His vanity was that large, not sharing thoughts or feelings unless he was put in the spotlight. Dad, the eminently successful archeologist who had excavated at Xuan, Teotihuacan, Thebes and Pompeii, had humbled himself.

I knew why I had been called. I was next of kin. Keith, my brother, was sailing somewhere in the Tasmanian Sea researching causes of the weather phenomena La Nina. Dad wouldn’t have contacted Keith. After his divorce from Mom, he refused to see his son.

I had to think straight—get plane tickets, remember passport and take a credit card. On hold with the cordless handset, I pulled a carry-on from the closet and dumped the contents of my drawers on the bed.

If I had gobs of money to buy a first class ticket I would, but not on my salary. The travel agent advised, Amanda, It’s peak season. Everyone goes to Italy now. Matt Romero’s a great discounter. He’ll get you there.

The fastest, wholesale way to get to Orvieto is to fly San Francisco to London, London to Bologna, and take a train. There’s a flight at seven. Want to make it? Matt asked.

Not direct or convenient but I took it gratefully. I didn’t know Matt, but he was one man I wanted to meet. The one I didn’t want to see was Wes. Wesley Francis, my live-in companion of one year and three months, was one of the few non-gay men I met in San Francisco. We understood each other and shared all things trivial and significant. Good friends and lovers but when it came to marriage, I dithered. Wes would try to stop me from going if he wasn’t at work now. He hated Dad for his treatment of me without ever having met the man.

My professional packing list was always in my suitcase. I threw in my wrinkle-free basic wardrobe, bare necessities, toothpaste, brush, cosmetics and daily contraceptive pills. Whatever else I needed was easy to find in Italy.

This might truly be an emergency. What the hell! I removed the trusty army knife from my emergency supplies that would set bells ringing at the airport and tossed in the kit. Something was missing, but I couldn’t remember what it was.

I scribbled a note:

Wes dear, don’t wait up. I’ve gone to Italy. Be home in a few days.

There wasn’t anything else to write. I had no idea where I’d go, what I’d be doing or where I’d be staying. I signed off with:

No kidding.

Love, Amanda

I put the note on his bed pillow, gathered my luggage, trench coat, and locked the door.

2

One thing is certain. Travel agents never read you the fine print. I settled into what had to be the least wanted seat, opposite the toilets, on Flight #68 from San Francisco to London.

How long does it take? I asked the attendant who brought blanket and pillow.

Ten and a half hours. It depends on the winds.

No transfers in New York, bliss to my tired bones. Anyone who’s ever flown into JFK International knows the nightmare of constant delays there. The wonder of this airline was that it honored the passengers’ need of getting somewhere promptly and avoided New York.

Scrunched up, I browsed Sky Mall.

London’s secondary airport, Gatwick, was just as shoddy as I remembered, except there was more airport security. The customs officer thumbed through my passport, and opened to my photo.

You Amanda Oliver? he asked.

Yes.

It says you have blue eyes. They look brown.

They’re really green.

He grimaced at my photo and at me. Maybe I didn’t resemble it anymore. Usually my eyes were my best feature, but they were bloodshot after this sleepless trip. Guardedly he stamped the passport and looked across the room. I followed his glance to a man with a broad black mustache.

My next flight wasn’t for two hours. I dozed on the hard seating, going from one lounge to another in search of softer chairs, intermittently walking through the fluorescent-lit shopping terminal to keep my weary mind awake.

The mustached man seemed to stare at me from hallways and corners, studying my movement. Each time I go to Italy, I feel that every man who looks somewhat Mediterranean will be checking out my breasts and rear. He wasn’t.

To confront him, I stared back. His ill-fitted suit complemented his sloppy mustache. A bleached white tuft protruded from unruly black hair and a similar raw white blemish glazed his cheek. Hand over mouth, he coughed and turned away.

He was too sinister for my liking. Maybe he thought I was someone he knew. It wouldn’t be that I stuck out as a tourist because I kept to myself, agonizing over my dad. My traveling clothes were subdued black and beige and the carry-on was standard.

Mustache was in the boarding lounge, his dark eyes darting poison at me as I handed my ticket to the agent at the gate. Perhaps it was a coincidence that he was in the same terminal at the same moment. He wasn’t in line for the Bologna flight.

The plane wasn’t an international carrier but an airbus for commuters who live in Bologna or have business with farmers in the region. On board, I declined the nauseating mixture of muesli and yogurt for breakfast. Airline food had gotten worse.

When I pre-set my watch to Italian time to get over jet lag faster, the man next to me started talking.

Signora, have you been to Italy? Where are you going?

On and on he went, asking inappropriate questions about marriage, family and friends that became uncomfortably personal. An Italian mind set.

And you? I reciprocated with the same questions.

His Roman nose was bent. He clammed up and moved to an aisle seat.

It struck me that he was the talkative version of that silent mustached creature. Fortunately, it was a short flight with sunny weather. I was glad to see the plane meet the flat, agricultural land on the periphery of Bologna.

Covered in marble from floor to walls, the small, modern airport was truly Italian. I headed for the exchange booth and took what currency they gave without counting to see if I was cheated. In the ladies room, I put on a skirt and blouse and brushed my teeth. At a vanity mirror, a youngish woman applied lipstick. Her gobs of dark curls looked like a wig. She squinted at me with a lopsided smile, more a sizing up glance.

The hot, muggy summer day reminded me of my teenage days in Italy. Dad was excavating at Pompeii, philandering with students on that dig. One day, as humid and sticky as this, Mother caught on. Enraged, she left—him and me. Then she hooked up with the New Zealand professor who lectured about the rival historic site, Herculaneum. Taking my older brother Keith with her, they all flew off to Christchurch.

Mother was set on herself. Now, as a woman, I understood why she did what she did, but still, I rarely saw her. Time, distance and lack of funds prevented me from visiting her, and she was wrapped up in her life with the professor, whom she married, and had two boys who were years younger than I. As for Keith, we weren’t close. He and Dad had one-of-a-kind careers, and competition kept them apart.

I tried not to care, staying with Dad, pleased to be on his daily field digs in Pompeii, that fascinating two thousand year old town destroyed by Vesuvius. We pulled ancient household pots and pans from the volcanic ash, chipped at masonry to uncover wall paintings, re-discovered and documented life and customs that perished with the volcano’s eruption.

We’re a team, he had said. We work well together.

He hadn’t meant it. Already my trip brought those wretched memories. If Dad didn’t really need me, this could be his way of coercing me to return and dig in the trenches. When college students gave up their idealized concept of archeology, many were known to strut off from a dig to opt for a holiday.

Out of the airport, I waved down the shuttle bus going to Bologna’s train station. For such a lovely epicurean university city, the Bologna station was the harsh call of twenty-first century realism. Sooty platforms were littered with cigarette butts and pasted bubblegum. Hoisting my luggage, I walked down a flight of stairs that led under the tracks to get to the second-class train platform that came from Venice and went south to Florence, Orvieto and Rome.

The woman from the ladies room at the airport walked to a bench not far from me. She had a lopsided gait that matched her grin I saw in the mirror. One leg was shorter than the other. It could have been the heat but she irritated me, not because she was disfigured but that she was here. Several things about this trip were disturbing—first the customs officer interrogated me over a petty detail, then that shady mustached character, the inquisitive passenger on the flight and this clinging woman.

The train pulled in and interrupted that weird feeling. I climbed aboard and walked through several crowded carriages. Sinking into a tattered, overstuffed seat in a second-class compartment, I numbly stared at the dismal industrial view as we chugged out of the station.

At the Florence terminal, I looked for the woman but didn’t see her. Sleeping fitfully, I awoke to the hilly, verdant Tuscan landscape of the Victorian classic film Where Angels Fear to Tread. What had I been dreaming? I wasn’t Helen Bonham Carter and this wasn’t a romantic upper class holiday. What was I doing here?

Orvieto! the conductor belted out.

A misnomer. The train, one of many that ran hourly up and down the spine of Italy, paused at the base of its cliffs, a post-World War II town, Orvieto Scalo.

I stepped away from the platform and watched the train disappear into a tunnel.

"Where is il centro?" I asked the stationmaster.

He pointed up at medieval buildings perched high above Scalo town. Orvieto had always been an oversight, an Umbrian view as we whizzed by in car or express train on north/south excursions.

How do I get there?

"Can’t walk the road. No sidewalks. No taxi during pran-zo. Only car or bus."

Sweating profusely, I waited for what seemed like forever in the hot sun for a bus. When the old rundown vehicle arrived, it didn’t look like it could make the few kilometers of narrow road that snaked upward to meet the funicular landing. It did. The funicular ascended the mountain to reach Orvieto proper.

Here I was, five thousand miles from home, arriving twenty-four hours after a distraught phone call propelled me into motion. Each phase of this trip was making me more remorseful that I had made the spontaneous decision to come.

My Dad was up here somewhere. What did he want from me?

3

Peak season in Orvieto was like Rome and Florence, crammed with every nationality whose currency was solid. I trudged from the funicular to Orvieto’s center with the other people from the train. Toting my carry-on, my San Francisco trench coat rolled into a ball and tied to its handle, I mulled over how to locate my father: check the best hotels in town, museums, any English-speaking university site where he might have an office, then resort to the police department if I had to, in that order. It wasn’t much of a plan, but I couldn’t think of anything else except to find a bed to sleep.

Near the town center, masses of people milled around, chatting in a cacophony of languages, fanning themselves with tourist pamphlets that littered the streets. They were admiring the spectacular square where the cathedral’s gold and cobalt blue mosaic facade glistened, its twisted pillars and gargoyles animated against the daylight. The Duomo outshined the medieval buildings whose banners proclaimed them the Palazzo del Opera del Duomo, Palazzo Faina and Palazzo Papale.

Just ahead, the logo i in a royal blue circle loudly declared Tourist Information. Going there wasn’t in my hastily made plan but there it was. I squeezed my way into an elevator-size office with about fifty other people, who, at that moment decided to get brochures of Umbrian attractions. I stood in line like a tourist when I wasn’t one. At the counter, travel-tired and cannibal-hungry I spluttered, I’m looking for an archeologist.

Archeologist, Signora? The clerk didn’t miss a beat. Orvieto is filled with archeologists. We have an ancient civilization—Etruscan, Roman, and Medieval. Archeologists come to study here constantly. Is there a particular period of history you’re interested in? We can put you in touch with a number of archeologists who—

Impatiently I said, An American. Montgomery Adams.

On hearing his name, the office personnel stopped what they were doing and stared at me, halting conversations that tourists were having with them.

"Professore Adams?" she squeaked.

You know him! Then he is in Orvieto.

He would be easy to find. I wouldn’t have the tiresome chore of hunting him down, something I had done when I was his assistant and he went off with some woman or his colleagues, without telling me. I had to make excuses to whatever official from a university he worked for, who just dropped by to check on his project. The clerk came around the counter, yanked my arm, pulled me outside and twittered in my ear, He’s there.

She pointed to the next building. My relief was short-lived. In small letters, Ospedale was written plainly over the non-descript entrance.

A car drove up. The rear door opened, and he was pushed out in front of the hospital! He didn’t move. Dead, no! He just looked dead. The car nearly rode over him when it turned around and sped down the road to Scalo. We saw it from the Tourist Office! she tattled jovially.

How do you know who it was?

Stupid question, she said. "Everyone in Orvieto knows. His wallet was on