The Night Villa (27 page)

Just what M’Lou had said.

The report recommended increased surveillance of the compound and infiltration by undercover agents to prevent another situation like Waco. I noted that despite its somewhat histrionic tone, the report contained no proof the group was purchasing firearms or that members were being harmed or abused. Still, I couldn’t dismiss it. One thing was for sure: if I showed this to Ely’s parents, they would no longer think that the Tetraktys was a math club.

I looked up and scanned the room for Elgin. He sat at a table with the pink-T-shirted girl. She twirled her long blond hair and laughed at something Elgin had just said. As if aware of my attention, Elgin turned his head and saw me looking. He rolled his eyes at the next peal of giggles from his companion, no doubt to convince me he was above such amusements. It made me wonder what he’d told people about his time with me. Had I been just another diversion that he made light of with his colleagues? When he looked back at the girl I took the last page of the report with its dire prognostications and official-looking seal and stuck it in my bag. Before Elgin could extricate himself from the giggling co-ed, I got up and left.

I walked home, quickening my pace when I saw that it was growing dark. I’d promised Ely I’d be home before dusk. It was the solstice, which the Tetraktyans celebrated instead of Christmas or Hanukkah. Ely had told me that he had something special planned. When I turned onto Avenue B a block south of our house I saw that our little bungalow’s windows were ablaze with flickering light. I had a vision of the Waco Siege, which M’Lou and I had watched on TV, with armed FBI agents in armored vehicles circled around the compound as it burned to the ground. I ran toward the lit house, scenting smoke on the air and hearing the crackle of flames, but when I got to the house I realized the smell came from our neighbor’s fireplace. The crackle was just the sound of pecan shells underfoot. My house
was
ablaze with light, but that was because there were lit candles in every window. Dozens of them. Opening the front door, I saw glass votives on every available surface. A double row on the living room floor made a pathway—like the luminarias the Mexicans put out on the East Side.

My breath still coming in short gasps from running, I followed the candled path to the back of the house, to Ely’s study where he sat cross-legged on the floor in a circle of candlelight. His closed eyes flicked open as soon as I stepped over the threshold.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Fighting back the dark,” he answered. “Don’t you remember what day it is? You were supposed to be back hours ago. Where were you?”

“I…I had a conference with a student…” I then remembered that classes were over. Who would I have had a conference with? “Here,” I said, taking the last page of the FBI report out of my bag and handing it to him. “You’d better have a look at this. It’s about the Tetraktys. It makes them sound dangerous. I don’t know if it’s true, but…” I heard the quiver in my voice, an aftereffect of thinking the house was on fire, and let it swell into a sob. Let Ely see how upset I am, I thought, let him see I’m afraid. If he loved me, he’d want to protect me from being afraid. He’d reassure me or, better yet, quit the Tetraktys altogether.

Ely read the page without speaking, without so much as blinking. He must have read it twice because I saw his eyes go back to the top of the page. When he was finished, he lowered the paper and looked up at me.

“Who gave this to you?”

This was not the question I was expecting. I thought Ely would be shocked at how the Tetraktys was portrayed here, or that he’d attack the writer, not whoever gave it to me. So I was taken by surprise. Still, I should have just told the truth: that
Professor Lawrence
gave it to me. After all, I was taking a religion class with him and Ely knew he devoted class time to modern-day cults. But standing there, in the glow of all those candles and caught in Ely’s gaze, I just couldn’t bring myself to say Elgin’s name. Maybe I thought I was in a grade B horror movie and that the flames would whisk out at the sound of my lover’s name.

So I lied. “One of my students came across it when she was researching cults for her Roman Life paper. She showed it to me when I questioned her sources. She’s the one I had the conference with.”

“Really?” Ely asked, holding the page up by his thumb and forefinger and tapping its top edge with his index finger. “Then why does it have Dr. Elgin Lawrence’s fax number here on the top?”

No avenging wind blew out the candles but my guilt must have been clear on my face.

“You’re sleeping with him.” Ely’s voice was curiously flat, as if he were reciting something.

“Not anymore,” I said.

It was as if I had kicked the air out of him. His body collapsed in the middle and he bent over at the waist, his forehead nearly touching the floor. A lock of dark hair fell so close to a lit candle that I could smell it singe.

I knelt beside him, upsetting a candle, which poured out hot wax onto my hand. I didn’t cry out. Instead, I poured out my confession. I’d felt so empty after losing Cory, I told him; he had the Tetraktys, he’d retreated from me. I knew it was wrong and I’d ended it a month ago when things started getting better between us.

He flinched when I said a month ago. He sat upright, the blood draining out of his face. “It was going on up to a month ago?” he asked.

I could only nod. He got up and left the room, kicking over candles as he went. I sat where he’d left me, listening to glass shattering throughout the house. I almost hoped then that Ely would burn down the house around us. Surely with all those candles being knocked over, that’s what would happen. But then I looked at one of the candles at my feet and saw the Hebrew letters. Yarzeit candles. I remembered Ely’s mother saying that she kept them for blackouts because they went right out if you knocked one over. When I’d asked her if that wasn’t sacrilegious she’d shrugged.
I say a little prayer with each one,
she told me.
After all, every day is the anniversary of someone’s death.

The twenty-second of December became the anniversary of our death: Ely’s and mine. He’d packed and left that night and I never heard from him again. Not until…unless these cryptic signs could be considered
hearing
from him. Will there be more? Will there ever be more than signs? I close my eyes against the glitter of the sea. The sun has fully risen now and my T-shirt has dried in the warm breeze. I say a little prayer for just one more sign and when I open my eyes I see I’ve gotten what I prayed for. Coming around the headland to the east is the same boat I saw two days ago:
The Persephone.

W
hen the boat is about twenty feet away it stops. The engine dies and the man who had been steering it, whom I’m unable to identify because of his cap and dark glasses, tosses an anchor off the bow. Without another glance in my direction, he takes off his T-shirt, jeans, cap, and glasses, leaving on navy swim trunks. For a moment I think, no, this can’t be Ely. Ely was thin and pale. This man is lithe, muscular, and, in the early-morning sun, golden. Then he dives into a patch of sea so lit by the sun that it looks as though he has leaped into fire and been consumed by it. He reappears beneath the surface, coming toward me like a flaming arrow shot through the water. He surfaces beside the rock, tossing his head to shake his thick black hair off his brow, and smiles a smile as dazzling as the glittering water.

“Hello Sophie,” he says, as if it had been five minutes instead of five years since we saw each other last.

“Ely,” I say in return, less in greeting than to convince myself that it’s true, that it’s really him. I hold out my hand to help him up onto the rock, but he scrambles up without my help and sits a foot away from me, cross-legged, grinning.

“Come here often?” he asks. It’s not much of a joke, but I’m so relieved that he’s willing to attempt any humor that I laugh. The Ely I first knew had a good sense of humor. He’d lost it when he joined the Tetraktys.

“It’s only my second time,” I say, gazing around us at the bright blue water, “but it’s already one of my favorite places on earth.”

He looks around, too, and nods approvingly. “Yeah, it’s pretty cool. All it’s missing is food. Have you had breakfast?”

I shake my head, amazed that otherworldly Ely would bring up something as mundane as food.

“Then you’ll be my guest,” he says, waving his hand toward the anchored boat. “I think the coffee should be almost done.”

We swim to the boat, Ely leading. He scrambles up the stern first and then lowers an aluminum ladder for me. When I’m on deck he gives me not just a towel, but a terry-cloth robe and slippers. I smell fresh-brewed coffee.

“I thought you’d given up coffee.” I don’t know why of all the peculiarities of our present circumstances I pick on this one to single out. Perhaps because it was one of the first things I missed when he joined the Tetraktys, how we used to drink coffee together on the front porch and watch the sun come up.

“I gave up a lot of things I came to regret later,” he says. He’s toweling dry his hair, head ducked, so I don’t see his expression, but I hear sadness in his voice. “Sit in the sun,” he says. “I’ll get you a cup.”

He disappears belowdeck and I sit down on a padded bench, on lemon-yellow cushions resting on polished teak. The boat must be at least forty feet long—bigger even than Lyros’s
Parthenope.
A billionaire’s toy; I can’t begin to imagine what Ely’s doing with it.

Ely comes back with a cup of coffee and fresh-squeezed orange juice in a crystal glass. Then he goes belowdeck again and within minutes there’s the unmistakable odor of frying bacon. Clearly he’s no longer part of the Tetraktys, but then who is financing this little outing? What
is
Ely a part of?

He comes back with a tray filled with scrambled eggs, crisp bacon, a basket of rolls, and dishes of strawberries—all on Capodimonte china and served with white linen napkins and silverware. I have a thousand questions, but the one that pops out of my mouth is, “Where’d you learn how to cook?”

He laughs. “Yeah, I was a pretty bad cook when we lived together, wasn’t I? I couldn’t believe it when I pulled kitchen duty on the ranch—”

“The ranch?”

“That’s what we called the community, or rather what the
didaskaloi
called it. We didn’t
call
it anything because, of course, we weren’t supposed to talk.”

I’m about to ask him who the
didaskaloi
are, but then I recognize that it’s Greek for “teachers.” Instead I ask him, “You really didn’t say anything for five years?”

“Unless you count talking in my sleep, which I did for the first few months. A lot of new initiates do it. You can hear them in the novice dorm, calling out names mostly—” He stops, looking embarrassed, and I wonder what names he called out. “But then that stops and after a while you don’t even speak in your dreams. I wasn’t even sure my vocal chords would work after five years.”

“Is that why you didn’t speak when you called me the morning Dale Henry went on a rampage?” I ask. If I’d had any doubts it had been Ely calling they’re banished when I see the grieved expression on his face.

“If you had answered I would have tried, but I couldn’t have my first words in five years be to a machine. Besides, I knew the phone line was tapped. I’m ashamed to say that I was afraid of what they might have done to me if they heard me warning you.”

“So you
were
trying to warn me. You knew what Dale Henry was going to do? You knew Dale Henry?”

“I didn’t really know him. New initiates are kept isolated for their first six months—and he’d only been there for about two months before he left in May.” I think back to what Agnes had told me and realize that this meant he’d been in New Mexico since spring break—since he broke up with Agnes, in other words. “I saw him a couple of times working in the garden and I noticed he was wearing a UT T-shirt, but then a lot of initiates come out of UT. I also noticed that during chanting he was very intense. He’d stay at it for hours while most initiates could only last a couple of hours.”

“A couple of
hours
? You mean some stay at it longer?”

“Some chant for days on end without stop. It’s kind of the endurance test for newbies.” Ely grins sheepishly. “Heck, we didn’t have a lot else to do besides growing garlic and binding books. Pride manifests itself in every setting. You weren’t supposed to use chanting as a competitive sport, but plenty did. So people noticed when Dale Henry lasted eight hours on his first day. The leadership noticed. He was removed from the communal dorm and he took his meals with the
didaskaloi.
He was obviously being groomed for something. I was curious…okay, I was jealous. I’d spent almost five years in silence—fasting, praying, studying. After all I had given up”—he looks at me and then quickly looks away—“I thought that if the
didaskaloi
had a special mission they should have sent me, or at least one of the others who had been there as long as me, not a newbie. But then I started listening in on the
didaskaloi
—”

“Wasn’t that dangerous?”

“I didn’t think so at first. I still had no idea how far the leadership had strayed from the ideals of Pythagoras. One of the chores you could always do was sweeping. There was no end of sand in the halls. I started sweeping near the library where the
didaskaloi
were talking to Dale Henry. I realized why they wanted someone new: they wanted someone who wouldn’t be connected to the Tetraktys, and they wanted someone who hated Elgin Lawrence.”

“Elgin Lawrence?”

“I was as surprised as you are to hear his name come up. For me it was like the demon I thought I had slain had risen again.”

“Ely—”

“It’s okay.” He lays his hand lightly over mine. “You don’t have to say anything.”

“No, I do. I never said how sorry I was…how sorry I
am
that I betrayed you like that—”

Ely shakes his head and squeezes my hand. “It was my fault. I had pushed you away, retreated so far into the Tetraktys that I wasn’t really there anymore. I might as well have transmigrated into another body! I had already left you in spirit. How could I blame you for leaving me in body?”

I shake my head. “It’s no excuse for what I did. For hurting you that way. Did you really think of Elgin Lawrence as a demon?”

“For a while, yes. It was easier than blaming myself.” Or
me,
I think, amazed at how generous Ely has been to my memory. I’m startled at how relieved I am to know he hasn’t spent the last five years hating me. “I thought he’d turned you against me and turned you against any kind of faith with his skepticism. And I admit that when I first heard the
didaskaloi
talking about him as an enemy of the Tetraktys I felt, well, a little vindicated.”

“An enemy of the Tetraktys? In what way?” I ask cautiously, not wanting to be the one to give away that Elgin is working with the FBI. It turns out that I don’t have to.

“They said that he’s been assisting the FBI in their surveillance of the Tetraktys. Didn’t you know?”

“Not until recently.”

“Well, it didn’t come as a big surprise to me. I remembered that he had given you that FBI report on the Tetraktys, and I’m afraid I told them about that when I first came to the ranch.” Ely rakes his hand through dark curls dried by the sun. “I swear I never thought they’d do anything to hurt him. For the first time since I’d entered the community I questioned the
didaskaloi.
In a way, it’s what the vow of silence is all about. It’s supposed to open space in your head so that you can listen and judge what you’re hearing without planning what to say in response. It removes your ego from the equation. I listened to what the
didaskaloi
were saying to Dale Henry and I judged. They were using him as a tool in their machinations to get the scroll.”

“What scroll?” I ask even though I already suspect what the answer will be.

“You’ve figured it out, haven’t you? Pythagoras’s
On the Mysteries
—or as it’s also called,
The Golden Verses.
”

“Even if such a scroll existed in AD 79, isn’t it likely it was a forgery, something falsely attributed to Pythagoras?”

“Maybe, but that’s not what our
magos
believes.”

“Your
magos
?”

“That’s what the Tetraktyans call their leader. It means wise man—”

“I know the Greek word, Ely. It can also mean magician…or impostor.”

Ely nods, seemingly unoffended by my translation. I can’t help but notice, though, that he’d referred to him at first as
our magos.
“The
magos
believes that the poem really did exist and he has been tracking it down for years through all the sacred sites of Greece—Samos, where Pythagoras was born, Delphi, Eleusis. He’d finally concluded that its last known location was the Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion in Greece, but that it was stolen from there sometime around the time of the birth of Christ. He believes that the poem predicts the birth of Christ and that, in fact, Pythagoras believed that he would be reborn in the body of Christ. Yes, I know, it sounds nuts. It probably
is
nuts. I’m just telling you what the
magos
believes. He’s convinced the
didaskaloi
that if they can find this poem, it will usher in a new world order. It’s been the quest of the Tetraktys for decades. And now the
magos
believes that the poem was stolen from the Temple of Poseidon by Phineas Aulus. He thought at first that meant the scroll had been lost when Phineas died in a shipwreck, but when he discovered that Phineas had survived…when Phineas’s journal showed up at the Villa della Notte in Herculaneum, he believed that the poem might be there, too.”

“How did this
magos
know about the discovery of Phineas’s book? The only people who knew were on this project. I only learned about it after the shooting. Do the Tetraktyans have an informer on the project?”

Ely looks at me and then, noticing that my coffee cup is empty, refills it. “You could say that. I’ll tell you more when I’ve finished the story, okay?”

He raises his eyes from my coffee cup to my eyes, his look imploring, and I feel a charge at the contact, which startles me. I nod my compliance, not trusting myself to speak.
Am I still in love with Ely?
I hear the question in my head, but file it away.
Stay quiet,
I tell myself,
listen and judge.
For now.

“The problem, though, as the Tetraktys saw it, was that Elgin Lawrence was heading the project. They didn’t want Elgin to be the one to find
The Golden Verses.
”

“But Elgin’s a scholar.” I’ve broken my resolve to stay quiet not ten seconds after I made it. I’d never last five years. “No matter what you might think of him, you can’t think he’d suppress a scholarly find like that, even if he didn’t believe it was authentic.”

“It doesn’t matter what you or I think. The
magos
knew Elgin was working for the FBI and he believed he would suppress
The Golden Verses
if he was the first one to find it. He could say that it was being kept back from publication until it could be fully translated and placed in context, until it could be verified and its source could be discovered—” I open my mouth to object, but then I remember that sometimes it takes years for scholars to publish their finds. “But the real reason would be that the material is far too incendiary. Imagine finding a sixth-century BC document that accurately predicted the birth of Christ and claimed that Christ was the reincarnation of a Greek philosopher. Imagine the controversy it would cause in Christianity, not to mention other religions. And then imagine the power it could give a group like the Tetraktys, which claims to represent Pythagoras.”