LITMIR.BIZ

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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 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 Tutankhamun’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.

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