Midnight at the Tuscany Hotel

by James Markert

  But Valerie didn’t get it. Who stays at a hotel for months? “And what about school—will I be back in time? And my lessons with Signor Vitale . . . ?”

  “We’ll take care of all that when the time comes. Besides, experiences like these will teach you so much. They’re an education in itself.”

  Valerie had known from experience that she just couldn’t win when her parents embarked on some new enthusiasm, so she’d just given in and packed. Mother had pushed her to take just about everything she owned; by the time they left, her room back home looked barely occupied. And now, as their car hurtled south down the coastline, Valerie brooded with her arms folded and jaw clenched, refusing to answer out loud when her parents looked over their shoulders to the backseat to ask her questions.

  “Did you pack your toothbrush?”

  Head nod.

  “Did you bring the bag of games?”

  Head nod.

  “Your music?”

  I don’t need it, she wanted to say, but settled for another nod, at which point they left her alone for the next hundred miles—a precursor, in hindsight, for eventually leaving her alone for the rest of her life.

  “You’ll love it here, Valerie,” her father had said. “You can play your violin all day out in the open air. Your mother and I . . . it’ll be like a retreat. Rumor is, at the Tuscany, you forget all your worries, so your creativity can thrive.”

  Her mother smiled over her shoulder. “There will be plenty of other children there. Plenty of artists and musicians like us. And actors—even engineers.”

  Valerie rolled her eyes and straightened a crease in her red dress, pretending to be unimpressed. But, truthfully, the more they talked about the place and the closer they got to the coast, where the air was salty and fresh and white birds soared, the more her bones hummed with excitement.

  Magical was the word that came to mind when she heard the descriptions—like some of the shows she’d seen on the big screen. One of her most memorable, a silent film called Sunrise, told the story of a farmer who became bored with his wife and fell under the spell of a city-girl flirt, who talked him into drowning his wife so that they could be together. The wife became suspicious, ran off to the city to hide. And the husband pursued her, only to end up slowly regaining her trust and rekindling their love for one another.

  Some might say the content was too old for Valerie. But her parents were different. They had exposed her to a lot in her young life, claiming it was all for the sake of art and culture and you could never get too much of it too early. “You might as well dive into life sooner than later, Valerie,” her mother had said, convinced that Janet Gaynor was a lock to win the Academy Award for best actress.

  Turns out Valerie’s parents were right on all accounts. Janet Gaynor had indeed won best actress back in May. And as soon as her father steered their Model T over that one-lane bridge, drumming his thumbs on the steering wheel and craning his neck to get a good look at the welcoming statue of the two nude women—and getting a playful slap on the arm from Mother—it seemed that Valerie instantly forgot all of her fears and misgivings.

  A field near the building was splashed with bursts of red flowers that matched her dress. The land—marked with skinny, cone-shaped green trees and scattered statues—rolled and tilted, curving in and out of sight. To the left and down the hill was a vineyard where green and purple grapes hung, looking like dollops of paint. And on the hillside above the hotel—it was so magnificent from the corner of her eye, she was trying not to look at it yet—was what her mother pointed out as the olive groves. Four steep terraces of olives waiting to be turned into oil or cut up and tossed into pasta.

  The hotel itself was like a castle, with crenellations along the top and turrets at all four corners. And the central piazza was full of people—artists drawing and painting, sculptors carving, musicians singing and playing instruments, actors working on lines, writers sitting on benches, eyes fixed on the blue sky as they pondered. Scientists tinkered with their latest experiments. One man sat at a wooden table carving a fancy wooden ship, a glass of red wine to one side and a plate of olive oil and bread to the other. The air smelled of fresh bread and fruit and sizzling meats, the aromas so rich her stomach growled.

  In the middle of the piazza, a giant fountain churned water that rippled clear above blue-and-yellow mosaic tiles. And the kids—her parents had not been lying. Dozens of them ran about, seemingly unattended to, which seemed normal to Valerie. Bandaging her own bumps and bruises had been custom for as long as she could remember, since her parents were so often busy or out or home but never quite in.

  Valerie stood by the fountain and surveyed the piazza. Rooms surrounded it on three sides, two floors high, with doors of every color imaginable.

  Runaway poppies spied through cracks in the stones. A man in the corner, next to the bar, sold meats. Another sold bread. Another, vegetables. The man behind the bar had skin so dark you almost couldn’t see him in the shadows, but you could hear him; his heavy bass carried easily over all the other noise. Nearby stood a man in a hat who could have been one of those gangsters she’d read about in the newspapers—the new organized types of crime brought about by Prohibition. He leaned in close to speak with another man who might have been a gangster as well, both with clipped Italian voices and pinstriped suits. They seemed nice enough, though, both of them smiling and sidling up next to two women with bobbed hair and fancy dresses as bright as the hotel doors. Valerie wondered if those men were responsible for the drinks the bartender was openly purveying.

  “Isn’t alcohol illegal, Mother?”

  Instead of answering, her mother pointed out a cluster of actors across the way, chatting and laughing. “There’s Buster Keaton, darling. And Douglas Fairbanks Jr. He was just in the movie with—oh my, there she is, Valerie—look. There’s Greta Garbo.”

  Starstruck, Valerie began to think—though she would never admit it—that the months-long stay her parents had described might not be long enough. The hotel was so beautiful and exciting, and there was even a touch of tragedy to add mystery to the place—something about a reporter who had disappeared over the cliffs. That had been a long time ago, when Valerie was just a baby, but her parents had already warned her to stay away from the cliffs.

  The hotel owner welcomed them with open arms—muscled arms specked with white dust—and introduced himself as Robert Gandy. Valerie eyed the man curiously. He gripped a hammer in one hand and a glass of red wine in the other. His skin was tanned to near leather, his wild hair a dirty blond streaked with white, his eyes blue as the California sky. He was tall, taller than any man she’d ever seen, and his persona seemed larger than life as well, larger even than the movie stars and gangsters around him.

  He introduced his wife, Magdalena, whose hair was beginning to fade at the temples but still showed evidence of the vivid, bright orange it had once been. Her demeanor immediately relaxed them, her smile a deep breath, her gait showing a grace no Tinseltown set could ever muster. She showed them to their room on the second floor, the only vacant one at the time, which was why her parents had been in such a hurry to get there.

  “Stay as long as you like,” Magdalena told them in a lilting accent, eyeing Valerie as they approached their room, whose door was painted a rich burnt sienna. “My son is around here somewhere. He’s about your age.”

  “Eight?”

  “Then he is your age. I’ll introduce you—if I can find him. That boy, if he’s not painting, likes to hide.”

  She unlocked the door, pushed it open, and the three of them gasped as they entered. The entire ceiling of the room was covered in fresco paintings, replicas of both the Creation of Adam and the Creation of Eve from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel.

  “Who painted this?” Father asked as they stood there in awe, necks craned and faces tilted upward.

  “My son, Vittorio,” Magdalena said proudly. “He just finished it. You’re the first to stay in this room since the completion.”<
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  “Your son?” asked Valerie’s father. “The one who is eight?”

  She nodded but offered no more.

  An hour later Valerie had claimed a spot on the piazza and was playing with two other violinists, both grown adults who apparently needed to follow sheet music, so she pretended to do likewise just to fit in. She played for an hour on the travertine stone, bathed in sunlight. Never had she felt so loose and free and flowing in her movements—and how beautifully the sound carried!

  Magdalena was out and about, buzzing like a bee from one artist to another, every so often pulling out a journal to jot down thoughts. Periodically Valerie spotted a child or two running across the piazza, chasing one another and laughing. Outside the hotel and in the distance, she heard the thwack of a tennis ball being struck and splashing from the two swimming pools her parents had promised she’d be able to use after she’d practiced.

  After a dinner of pasta with meatballs and mushrooms, as the sun began to cast shadows across the piazza, many of the kids—two dozen at least—congregated around the fountain. She wondered which one was Vittorio, the child painter. Magdalena came over and encouraged her to join the other kids for a game of hide-and-seek. A black boy named Turner Dixon introduced himself with a handshake and a kind smile. His father was a writer. Another boy named Charlie Deats did the same and told her to just call them Dixon and Deats—everyone did. He was the son of a scientist and an actress—“They’re around here somewhere.” He also claimed that their games of hide-and-seek at the hotel were legendary.

  “And you can hide anywhere on the grounds?” asked Valerie.

  Deats nodded. “Well, there’s a security guy at the bridge, so no one leaves the grounds.”

  “And another at the cliffs so no one goes over,” Dixon said.

  “Otherwise,” said Deats, “we’re free to go anywhere—which means he could be hiding anywhere on the property.”

  She rubbed her hands eagerly, glad to get away from her violin and feel the fresh breeze in her hair. “But who are you talking about?”

  “Vitto. He’s always it.”

  She looked around the clustered group of kids. “Which one is Vitto?”

  Dixon laughed. “He lives here. He’s already hiding. We have to find him.”

  “How long has he been hiding?”

  “Apparently since lunch,” said Deats. “He does that. And sometimes we don’t find him; he just shows back up. But just in case.” He grinned, gently tapped her arm. “We’ll say you’re it as well.”

  “Me? I don’t know my way around yet.”

  “Then you should be easy to find,” said Dixon.

  “And what better way to learn the grounds,” said Deats.

  They closed their eyes, hunkered down, and started counting, as did the rest of the children.

  “How long do I have to hide?”

  “A minute,” said Deats, his voice muffled as he crouched. “Less than that now.”

  She turned in a circle, took in the surrounding rooms, imagined she was in a grand Roman arena. The group had already counted to thirteen by the time she got moving, walking briskly at first. But with each step taken her anxiety waned, and by the time she reached the arches beneath the portico, she was sprinting, carefree, eager to find the best place to hide on the hotel grounds so that she could prove them wrong.

  In between the tall cypress trees, sunflowers dotted the hills. Statues stood like gods frozen in time. To her left, the poppy field called to her, with its thousand blobs of red moving in the breeze. But it wasn’t a good hiding spot; the grass was too short. She turned right and headed down toward the vineyards, where the branches twisted arthritically under the weight of so many grapes—plump orbs of green and purple, so purple they shone blue in the dusk. The vines were too narrow and crabby to hide behind, although she did take the time to pluck a grape from a vine on her way back up the hillside. Sweet juice exploded in her mouth as she surveyed the grounds—walkways running here and there, jutting off in angles and tangents, corners concealed by trees, the rough stone of the hotel itself, more statues. She eyed the olive groves at the top of the hill, four tall terraces linked by steps big enough for giants, but the trunks were also too narrow to hide behind, and now she heard the other kids scattering and laughing. They were on their way, and here she stood, still in view of the hotel wall.

  Voices chanted in the distance, somewhere behind the olive groves. She followed the sound, not to find where it came from but to get herself out of the trance she’d found herself in—the place was magical, just as her parents had said. And then she nearly ran into the two structures in between the olive groves and vineyards. She’d noticed them when she arrived, but only now did she really see them. Built of stone the same color as the hotel, the two buildings—more like little houses—faced each other with a narrow sidewalk running between them. Each was two levels tall, not counting the square appendages atop each one that seemed to house pigeons. Two symmetrically placed windows on each wall opened like eyes into the dim interiors. The front doors of both were open and gave the impression of never being closed.

  She stepped into the stone house farthest from the hotel. Her footsteps clacked off the wood floor. Wooden racks holding thousands of grape clusters, bundles of purple and blue and green and red, soared up toward the ceiling, where dust motes floated and the aroma of fermentation pinched at her nose. Large vats lined the wall, and some kind of a machine loomed on a counter. A few grapes lay smashed into the floorboards, but she saw no other sign of human presence. Even the workers must take time to socialize at the hotel.

  Sunlight glistened through the doorway. Valerie grabbed a cluster of purple grapes and stepped back outside, paused when she heard approaching voices, and ducked into the neighboring building, where the air smelled pungently of olives. Dark bottles and big glass jars lined up on shelves nearby, along with a collection of bins and barrels. An unfamiliar contraption occupied the center of the room; she guessed it had something to do with olives. As she rounded one of them, she bumped into a ladder, looked upward toward a loft, and decided it was the place to go.

  She clamped the stem from the grapes in her mouth and climbed the tall ladder slowly, feeling it might tilt with her if she leaned back too far. Tension broke out as sweat across her brow. Her heart raced, more so with every rung, until finally she reached the floor of the loft and clambered over the edge. It was warmer up here by the rafters, which were supported by thick, wooden beams. The loft’s floorboards were littered with pigeon droppings and hard, shriveled olives someone must have thrown up there for fun.

  “You can’t hide here.”

  Startled, Valerie looked up toward the voice. In the corner shadows hunkered a boy about her age. She flinched and accidentally knocked the ladder with her foot. Before she could grab it, it teetered and then fell in the opposite direction. They both cringed, fearing the crash would give their hiding spot away, but the ladder snagged in a thicket of netting someone had piled up and gave no more sound than a hand puffing a pillow. Dust scattered but had settled by the time Dixon and Deats—those two seemed to be connected at the hip—entered the stone house for a quick look around. The boy in the loft clamped his hand around Valerie’s mouth to keep her quiet. His fingers smelled like a mixture of olives, garlic, and paint.

  As soon as Dixon and Deats left, Valerie lightly bit the boy’s finger, and he yanked it away, shaking it.

  “What’d you do that for?”

  “I was hungry.”

  He pointed toward the cluster of grapes resting near the edge of the loft, a few of them dangling over. “If you’re hungry, then grab the grapes you stole. Lucky those two didn’t notice.”

  She retrieved the grapes and popped one in her mouth.

  He leaned over the edge, which was a good fifteen to twenty feet down. “How are we gonna get down now?”

  “We could call for help.”

  “And then we’d lose.” He watched her, his brown eyes suspicious.
“Why are you hiding, anyway?”

  “Because they said I was it.”

  He pointed to his chest. “I’m it.”

  “Well, I guess we’re both it, and now we’re both stuck. Do you want a grape?” He plucked one from the stem but didn’t say thanks. “How long have you been up here, anyway?” she asked.

  “Since lunch.”

  She scoffed, looked away, spied out the window as another kid darted past and disappeared. Atop the roof, on the opposite side of the ceiling, pigeons roosted, tiptoed, and cooed. She glanced up nervously.

  He said, “They won’t poop on you under here.” She pointed to the hardened spots on the floor, and he explained, “From the other birds. Sometimes they find their way in and can’t find their way out. Juba catches them with towels and sets them free.”

  “Who’s Juba?”

  He didn’t answer. He was too busy spying out of the circular dormer window behind him. “I think we’re in the clear.” Finally, his eyes settled on her and then stalled, as if he was fond of what he’d just found. If not for the loft’s shadows, she could have sworn he was blushing.

  “Why are you laughing?”

  “I’m not laughing.”

  “You’re grinning, then.”

  “Little odd, is all. Hiding hours before the game even starts.”

  He looked away, bashful for the first time since her arrival. “I suppose this loft is big enough for two.”

  “If not, were you thinking of tossing me to the floor?”

  He scooted closer, held out a jar of giant green olives pickled in brine. “Tell me your name, and I’ll give you one.”

  “Valerie’s my name.”

  He did as he’d promised, and she took an olive, savoring its salty fruitiness. For a few seconds the silence was awkward, and then she held her grapes out toward him.

  He took one. “Aren’t you going to ask my name?”

  “No.”

  He paused midchew. “Why not?”

  “I already know who you are. You’re the boy they call Vittorio. Your mother and father own the hotel. Magdalena and Robert Gandy. That makes you Vittorio Gandy.” She pointed to the spots of paint on his fingers and wrists. “And I’ve seen that you’re quite the painter.”