The Etruscan Connection

Villa Poesia

VILLA POESIA

We spent that last evening at Villa Poesia sitting on the terrazza facing the sparkling waters of the Mediterranean a thousand feet below. White-hulled boats bobbed on the soft ripples of the oncoming tide while lights blinked on and off on the bow of small craft in the harbor, riding the surf out into the bay below us.

The lights of the villa behind us were turned low, allowing the twinkle of the heavens to show in all its glory. I held a glass of Prosecco in one hand and cradled Alana’s hand in a loose embrace with my other, resting side-by-side on cushioned recliners. The dinner at Kasai had worked its magic on us, and all was wonderful—except that my thoughts occasionally went back to Aggie.

“He died in a fall, he said,” as I replayed Aggie’s words from memory. “Could’ve been pushed. I don’t know. But Tesa is very upset.”

“Who’s Tesa?” Alana asked.

I didn’t know who Tesa was and didn’t want to press Aggie for details yet. After my conversation with Alana and our decision to go to Tarquinia to see what had happened, I placed a quick call to Aggie to reassure him that we would be there within the day, and he told me about her. Sounded like they were involved and that Tesa was part of the dig in Tarquinia.

But Alana and I wanted to spend our last evening in Praiano in the lap of the villa’s grand hospitality, with no thought of accidents that weren’t, or to archeological digs with unknown findings.

My hand jerked suddenly, and Alana turned her head to ask me what was the matter.

“Nothing,” I said, not totally truthfully.

“Wrong,” she replied. “I can tell whenever your squeeze your fingers a little that your attention has gone from me to something else.”

I had to smile at her keen sense.

“I suppose it’s about Aggie, right?” she asked.

“Yes.”

I paused to gather my thoughts and try to come up with a brief sketch of the man for her. Too many words would confuse the description, and too few would alert Alana that I was holding back.

“Aggie served in Afghanistan, around the time I did, but we didn’t meet until we were back in the States.”

“Where?”

“It’s called Tall Cedars. It’s a refuge for people in search of peace, or a change of heart…”

“Or change of identity?” she pressed.

Alana was sharp enough to know that there were only two types of people who hide their true identities: Criminals and the people who chase them. I had not clarified this with Alana yet, but I hoped she took me to be the latter. But this wasn’t the time to explain in greater detail, so I ignored her question about identity.

I checked my memory quickly before telling her more. Aggie was a drone pilot in the war—“Killing from a distance is worse than killing up close,” he had said one afternoon. “You can’t pay your respects to an enemy you never see.” That information was not classified, so I explained his role to Alana.

“And what were you? In that war, I mean?”

A gentle breeze drifted across the terrazza, a pleasant physical sensation that seemed at odds with the knot that was developing in my stomach.

“We all had special roles.” That sounded good in my head but came out sounding like a dodge.

“Uh, huh,” she replied, recognizing my verbal gymnastics for what they were. “Did you go by Captain Priest? Major? Sergeant Priest?” After a pregnant pause, she added, “Or Sergeant somebody-else?”

Alana had access to Interpol data, but my identity would not have been revealed there. Only Darren Priest, the adopted identity, not Armando Listrani. But somehow, she pegged my rank, and that made me worry that she knew something—or was supernaturally good at guessing. Still, I didn’t think she knew my name and, therefore, she probably didn’t know my assignment.

I consciously softened my grip on her hand, trying to communicate through touch that I was relaxing. Alana smiled at me, sipped from her glass of Prosecco, and returned her gaze to the heavens above us.

When the morning sun flooded the bedroom with early light, we rose, showered, and arranged our bags in the large, brightly colored living area of the villa. We grazed on the remnants of food in the refrigerator, finding breakfast breads, espresso, and fresh fruit for a perfect meal, then Alana called Julietta to arrange for a cab to the train station in Sorrento.

“It’s just as easy to get a cab direct to Roma,” she had reminded me the day before, but I said we liked train travel. And this one would get us to Rome, where we would transfer to a rental car that was waiting at the Leonardo da Vinci airport.

Julietta had been part of the romance that was the Villa Poesia. As breathtaking as the villa was, her kind attention and personal touch made it feel like home.

The altitude of the Villa Poesia rewarded visitors with once-in-a-lifetime views, but it also required many steps up the terraced slope of Praiano to reach it. Every step was worth it when we arrived at the summit, so I tried not to think of that when we scaled them each day.

On that morning, hired hands helped us carry our bags down to the waiting cab. We followed along, Alana with her roller bag and me with my rucksack, past La Moressa, the ristorante that we had enjoyed several times during our weeklong stay, and down to the little grocery store on the road below, Tutto per Tutti, which translated to “Everything for Everyone.” When we first stopped in that store for provisions at the beginning of our weeklong sojourn, I saw shelves stocked with bread, cheese, fresh produce, wine, pasta, and more, and I understood the name.

The driver picked us up outside Tutto and loaded our bags into the back of the van-size taxi. It would be an hour and a half to Naples, and the views from the narrow road that hung onto the cliffside of the Amalfi Coast left us spellbound the entire trip. Alana and I were still in the Amalfitani spirit, and neither of us could close our eyes and miss the views that stretched out below as the soaring cliffs of the coast met the rippling waters of the Mediterranean.

We arrived at the train station in Naples just twenty minutes before our scheduled departure. The train wasn’t at the track yet; it was common in Italy with its bustling schedule of trains to arrange arrivals just minutes after another train cleared the track. Ours arrived about fifteen minutes later, leaving travelers only a handful of minutes to find their car, board, and settle in. We did so, in the throng of the morning crowd, and set our sights on Rome.

The club car offered some essentials for the trip, but our breakfast had filled our bellies, so I settled for espresso and Alana for a latte. Then we sat in our assigned seats and stared out the window as the Italian countryside slipped by.

I had tried to find a rental car company near Rome’s main train station but settled for one about ten blocks away. We were traveling light, so after disembarking from the train, the short walk was no problem. In only a brief time, we were in the Hertz office and were assigned a small car for two days, enough to get us to Tarquinia and then back to Rome so that Alana and I could depart to our separate destinations on Monday.

While Alana drove, I read aloud from my phone.

“Tarquinia is more than a little village,” I narrated from the Wikipedia references during the trip, “but in Etruscan times, it was a bustling metropolis that traded in many products brought from other shores as well as from the region of central Italy itself. Called Tarchon by the Etruscans, it was an important member of the Etruscan League in the 8th to 6th centuries BCE.”

I was trying to understand the point of archeological digs in the area that Aggie was calling us to. Alana smiled back at my monologue without comment, but her impassive look revealed no great interest. Like many of her counterparts on the continent, I assumed that she was well educated in continental history, more so than most Americans, but I doubted that she knew that much about Etruscan history.

“Tarchon,” I continued, “was connected by trade to the port city of Pyrgi, another Etruscan settlement on the western coastline of the Italian peninsula. Pyrgi was on the Tyrrhenian Sea and received imports from trade centers all around the Mediterranean, even ports as distant as modern-day Egypt, Turkey, and Israel.”

“That’s not right,” she interjected.

“Yes, it is,” I insisted, pointing to the screen of my phone as if this gave my comments more credibility.

“No, I mean that’s not what Wikipedia says.”

“I’m paraphrasing,” I confessed but shrugged my shoulders as if it didn’t really matter. “Besides, how do you know?”

“I read the entire section last night,” Alana said with a grin.

“When?”

“After you dozed off on the terrazza.”

“Oh, okay,” I admitted sheepishly. “So, you know all this?”

“Most of it,” she said, “but I like hearing you read it to me. Why is it called Tarchon?”

“Don’t know. Let’s see,” I said, turning my focus back to the phone. The webpage offered too little detail on that, so I knew I’d have to dig a little deeper.

“And why the Tyrrhenian Sea?” she asked in a follow-up question. Alana seldom asked only one question at a time, a devilish technique for an inquisitor but hard to follow in a friendly conversation.

The green hills of Lazio rippled past us as we sped northward. I stared at the panorama spread out beside the roadway and gazed at an old stone castle on its hilltop perch, a romantic throwback to the warring times of Medieval Italy when city-states pitted their military might in an unrelenting series of conflict and conflagration.

“Don’t know,” I admitted. “Do you?”

“Not from Wikipedia,” Alana responded. “But I have some vague memory of a mythical character, someone called Tyrrhenus … maybe a son of some king. Might have been named after him.”

“Do you know anything about him?”

“No. But I think it’s way back.”

She was cheating, leading me to make a guess about a guy named Tyrrhenus, whom I figured she already had researched. I saw her smile and decided I wasn’t going to fall for the trap.

I didn’t have anything to add and figured that Alana’s factum would require some later research. So, I dropped it, laid my phone back down on the dashboard, and returned my gaze to the countryside speeding by.