Matt wasn’t usually short of words and wasn’t a man to be scared by a Lady of Shallot routine. But he was left thwarted and wheezing as she sparked into life, took to very pointed heels, and ran after the girl like a cheetah on steroids.
A speed Matt couldn’t match. Not even fortified by allergy pills and enough expressos at the café on the corner to supercharge a Ferrari. But Matt wasn’t a guy to give up. To find an art lover—two art lovers—all he had to do was hit more art. He could do it. Like any good salesman, he was thorough; goal orientated in a flexible sort of way, and above all he had a tourist map and was ready to use it.
* * * *
By early evening, Michelangelo Pietas blended with castles by Leonardo, and Matt was positive he’d see frescos in his dreams. He’d also lit candles in enough masterpiece filled churches to speed both parents, his sister and her family through a purgatory they’d believed in, abolition or not. Matt knew all too well that it did exist—as the one left behind he had been living in it for the last two years. He tried hard to rush ahead of the melancholy burning deeper and with each candle, but the girl and the furs chasing her seemed as elusive as the smoke writhing towards heaven.
His feet were also killing him, threatening to withdraw their cooperation from the quest unless they got McDonalds takeout and the English language newspapers from the bookshop by the cathedral in compensation.
Matt made the trade.
He also picked up the main Italian newspapers and the gossip magazines he needed to keep the girls in the settlements department happy by talking about the right scandals.
It was the scandal sheets that made him spill his fries. A girl—blurred in a photograph taken from some distance away, but still familiar. The headline named her as the widow and fifth wife of the reclusive industrialist whose death had been announced a few days ago. Matt could still feel the shiver down his spine at the whispered but strangely matter of fact instruction not to ask questions about the man. He couldn’t help thinking he really should have gone skiing again this weekend, regardless of the risks of avalanches.
However, Matt didn’t ski off-piste for fun for nothing, and he knew that the secret of survival when dicing with death was knowledge, so he researched. The official version available to his laptop was clearly just that, and limited in the extreme. But it did reveal a man whose companies were worth billions, and whose five wives had all been called Francesca. Matt had her name and it was the one that whispered through the shattered frescos of his dreams.
* * * *
It called him through the epic breakfast buffet. Brown eyes were all he saw of the Sunday newspapers and her voice siren-sung him through the shadows of afternoon in Milan. He had two more major galleries to hunt in before resorting to the direct approach. It could prove suicidal. But if nothing else worked, he’d have to visit the well-guarded palazzo out of town he’d only read about.
He found her in the second gallery. Bellini’s Madonna was golden but didn’t glisten the way she did
She wore a yellow trenchcoat, belted to emphasize tantalizing curves, and set off matching, skin tight brown boots and gloves, each laced to demand he release that completely covered skin. Her hair was flattened from the Annie Hall hat lucky enough to dangle from delicate fingers, but couldn’t detract from the woman so absorbed in the Caravaggio in front of her that her free hand strained towards it. Old pain echoed in her eyes but didn’t water her cheeks, which gleamed in the soft light of the gallery. Loss shadowed her like the faded sent of old perfume, not the all too familiar reek of recent grief.
The theme tune to Jaws was often Matt’s mental soundtrack to hunting clients, and the boys he had trained with had once given him a jacket with a shark’s fin glued to the back as a birthday present, but it felt wrong here. This one, this one was different, so he walked up to her and smiled the most open and honest of his repertoire of smiles.
When she recognized him, he felt as if he were sinking into a hot tub of champagne. “An art lover, huh?”
He grinned, “I do appreciate a good work of art.”
It bought him a Mona Lisa smile. “Always good to hear.”
Not wanting to look like a fortune hunter who knew who she was, and also not being one, he introduced himself, “Matt Neri, art fan, big art fan.”
He couldn’t help the small smile of getting it right on all counts when she said, “Frances Grey.”
So what if she’d given him the English version of the Italian poetry. “Lovely name.”
“But my friends call me Fran.”
Some things were better than poetry.
Her company as they prowled the galleries certainly was. Weeks of loneliness drifted away as he talked. He had to tell her, “It is so good to find someone who speaks the same language.”
“Not a translation?”
“Tell me about it! A week after I got here, I failed Soccer 101, football, whatever. I keep sending myself mental memos to call it ‘football!’ But I just didn’t understand the importance of the two Milan teams playing each other.”
She smiled at him. “We have five, or six in London, maybe more if you count the smaller teams. It’s one of those cultural differences.”
“Big time. Some of the traders were really not happy with me. Oh, boy, the prices they’ve offered me since—not pretty.”
“I can see that would be a problem.” The understanding in her voice was sweet and told him all he needed to know about the smart girl underneath.
“Big time. But I can shout at traders. Hey, I’m real good at that, but the whole not inviting the ostracized out to lunch or dinner—for weeks, when the whole idea of me being here is to build the team for when I start up the New York office—that’s harsh.”
“So you’re left eating in the hotel on your own?” Her voice deepened. “Why do I find that hard to believe?”
He knew he was getting through, and unloading truth seemed to work as well as feeling good, so he went with more. “Because the guy left switching off the lights in the office has to spend hours all on his own touching base with his clients in the other time zone.”
“Really?”
“Reduced to grabbing a quick ice cream from the gelati shop by the castle to soothe his sore throat, too tired to head to Mickey D’s for a taste of home, and completely unable to face yet another risotto from room service.”
“Is the risotto as thick as you’re laying it on for me?”
“Thicker,” gained him a chuckle far tastier than any rice dish.
A roomful of Raphaels later they came back to the Caravaggio.
The humanity in the St. Sebastian pierced by arrows inspired him. “Mom, God rest her soul, would kill me, but the other paintings—I mean, don’t get me wrong, they’re all Great Works of Art, with the gold and the Madonna and Child’s, and the Saints—but they don’t seem like people somehow?”
The weariness in her voice was a Calvary. “Once you’ve seen one Crucifixion, you’ve seen them all?”
“Yeah.” His mother had saturated the house with the great religious art she loved. “But Caravaggio’s different, you know?”
“He always was.”
“The people are real. It’s like they come out of the canvas.”
“Out from the shadows of the past to tell their own story to anyone who’ll listen.”
“This guy—tell me.”
She lost herself in the shadowed flesh glowing against the darkness for so long he wondered if he’d pushed her too far before she spoke from a thousand miles away. “Bastiano—a child of the streets, grown into a man with the body of a Greek god, the sweetly wicked hands of the devil himself and eyes that always looked for something higher, something finer as he stood in the gutter.”
Matt couldn’t suppress the jealousy in his voice. “He sounds…great.”
Fran couldn’t lose the yearning in hers. “The kind of man that could see the real girl under the rich man’s furs and take her to a heaven she’d never dreamed of.”
But it opened up the enigma that was the industrialist’s widow. “What happened to him once he got the girl?”
“Life isn’t a fairytale, especially not then, and not for a poor man wanting the dearest treasure of a rich and powerful one. He died.”
The stark loss in her voice guilt broke something in him. “And the girl?”
Hers was already broken. “Was changed beyond her wildest imagination.”
The baker’s son who’d worked every angle to make himself something more never thought he’d express sorrow that, “The rich guy wins.”
Fran looked at the painting like it was salvation denied. “She never found Bastiano again, in this life or the next.”
Matt tried to bring her back. “That’s some painter.”
“He was.”
Matt couldn’t.
What did was the black fur glove that jaguar-swiped a thick dark knife straight at Fran’s back.
Somehow anticipating the blow, she dived and rolled, hitting the wall and setting off the alarm. Matt leaped at the girl in long black furs to knock her away from Fran who made it to her feet like a Hollywood stuntgirl only faster. She pulled him away from the knife that slashed his hand and span-kicked Fur Girl’s wrist. The weapon flew away. Fur Girl yelped and reeled aside. Her hood fell back, revealing Fran’s red-brown hair, smooth neck, and more scarily, Fran’s face.
Her voice though was very different from Fran’s. Her cry was a hoarse pain that turned into a hissed accusation in Italian that Fran had no right to come back and take what was Francesca’s, and a cold promise that she’d kill Fran first.
The two women stared at each other for what felt like eternity before the increased screech of the alarms made Fur Girl run. Fran, as white as a sheet, gazed after her, but seeing the blood dripping from Matt’s hand, swallowed hard and visibly tore herself back to concentrate on him, not her homicidal doppelganger. She grabbed her hat from the floor and told him to “Grip this.”
She snatched up the knife, put it in the pocket of her coat, grabbed his good hand and ran.
They were lucky. They were fast. Italian gallery security on a Sunday afternoon was spectacularly bad and adrenaline turned a guy with a desk job that tied him into several phones at once into a fairly passable track star. Well, with the right—or possibly very, very wrong woman—a holding his hand for grim death and a very rapid exit. Whichever way it was, they made it out.
And Fran didn’t stop. He didn’t either. He didn’t dare get caught. There was no way his career could survive a call to his boss to bail him out, and he didn’t have any friends in Milan he could call instead. His good hand remained locked in hers as she pulled him through street after street, sticking to the deep shadows of late afternoon sunshine and high buildings, until they ended up under a huge portico in one of the squares off one of the main drags.
* * * *
As he caught his breath, she took her belt and, prizing his fingers from their death grip on her hat, very gently wiped away the dried blood with her thumb. The feel of suede brushing across his palm over and over again as her eyes fixed on his was almost hypnotic in the cold. Wrapping his hand in the makeshift bandage should have hurt but lost in her eyes, it felt like a kiss.
A kiss she finished by actually brushing her lips against his knuckles with a soft, “Thank you. I’m sorry you got caught up in all this.”
It broke the spell. “What’s going on? Talk to me, Fran.”
“We might be here until nightfall.” She wrung her slightly ruined hat and looked out at the pools of sunlight that littered the area beyond the portico. “Of course, that might be a good thing.”
Every man had his limits. “Enough with the Da Vinci Code routine. I didn’t like the book. I do like answers.”
She looked at him for so long that he wondered if she’d ever say anything, or just sit there like a modern day Mona Lisa, promising much and delivering nothing. Until she did. “Some answers change everything. Are you ready for that?”
He took a deep breath. “Yes.”
“And you will keep my confidences?”
Matt was used to making binding split-second decisions over huge stakes. This was no exception. “You have my word.”
She nodded, his certainty tipping the balance in her internal debate in his favor. “OK, but we can’t stay here. We can talk on the move.” She crammed her hat back on. “Where do you want to start?”
It was a hard choice, but he always started with the fundamentals. “Who are you, really?
“My name is Fran.” She sighed, “And I’m a vampire.”
He knew he should run from the crazy lady, not stop prey-still in the courtyard, but the truth was written on her face and he wanted to know more. But he couldn’t help his knee-jerk response, “Great, so you’re gonna eat me, and not in the good way.”
Disappointment rippled through her voice. “What do I look like, a demon?”
“An angel.” She really did. “But vampires, demons, fangs, grr—they eat people, don’t they?”
He hated how he sounded. For his entire life Matt Neri had had to fight to be seen as himself—not the stereotype poor but smart kid from the “traditional” Italian part of Brooklyn, nor the dumb American in Italy. The last thing he wanted now was to sound like everyone who’d put him down for what he was, not who he was, to do to her what had been done to him his whole life.
Fran reached for his bandaged hand and caressed it gently. “Did I suck on your bleeding wound, or did I dress it?”
But Matt was scared and couldn’t just ignore that. “Dressed it, but the movies, the television—”
“Like they’re a picture of accuracy?” She stood in the shade. The picture of outraged humanity, her mouth open more than it had been exposing small incisors that were longer and sharper than human teeth.
So he went for the jugular. “Vampires drink blood. Possibly my blood.”
She tilted her head and spoke with what sounded like utmost sincerity. “Unless you wanted me to, I would never drink your blood.”
He wanted so much to believe her. He knew he sounded pathetic. But she was being honest and that was what he’d asked for—though the answers weren’t even in the ballpark of what he’d expected. “Promise?”
“My word is my bond.”
He’d heard enough people committing to a deal to know she spoke the truth. He swallowed hard as she gazed at the lamp posts like she had at the Caravaggio. Matt put two and two together and made, “You’ve been here before.”
It called her voice back if not her gaze, caught as it seemed in an inner newsreel from times past. “Many times. But I was last in Milan sixty years ago.”
He tried to imagine her in Forties stockings and succeeded only too well. Imagining bombed to hell and back Milan was harder as the buildings seemed to have been there forever. “It must be very different.”
“Parts of it haven’t changed at all.” Her voice was history in a five foot two package. “Though there’s a complete absence of Mussolini and his cronies hanging from the lampposts, which was a shame as it did take rather a lot of work to get them there.”
“You were in the resistance?” He pictured her in a beret and matching machine gun—it didn’t help the cause of running away from the vampire kicking and screaming. Neither did the distant voices of childhood. “My grandpa told me about how many people got killed fighting the Nazis at the end of the war.”
She touched the stonework of a palazzo. “Too many. But this was my land, once. I might not be the same girl who first drew breath in the shadow of the Forum, but that girl still has to do what she can when she can.”
He tried all the salesman’s ability to put himself in another’s place to understand. “What, so your human family’s children are safe?”
She sighed, “They all died.”
He recognized that grief all too well. “I’m sorry. I know how that hurts.”
“You do, don’t you?” At his nod, she dipped her head. “T
hank you, and I’m sorry.”
He tried to push aside the fresh wave of loss and concentrate on proving he wasn’t clinically insane in trusting that she wouldn’t kill him. “So you were the ‘fighting the good fight’ vampire in WW2?”
“A vampire can make a very useful partisan. We’re used to concealing ourselves in the shadows. It helps that we’re also stronger and faster than humans, and it takes a lot to kill us.”
“Stakes, holy water—”
“The classics?” She nodded. “Yeah, they all work, but machine guns—well, they hurt.” She shuddered ever so slightly. “But they couldn’t stop a girl from doing what she had to.”
“Which was helping to hang the war-mongering dictators who drove my grandparents out of Puglia?”
“Amongst more important things, but yes. And when I was a girl, what’s left of them would still be here. People are so squeamish these days.”
He couldn’t help laughing, in an only moderately hysterical sort of way.
They walked along the street keeping to the shade as he crunched the facts. “But even if you’re one of the good guys, don’t you need blood to live?”
“Yes. But I don’t need to kill to get it.” She smiled ruefully. “I don’t wear fur either.”
“You’ve got suede boots and gloves on!”
“They’re by-products! I can choose by-products.”
It was like arguing with his sister during her vegetarian phase—only with the heroic ex-partisan fang factor to push the debate into Dali levels of surreal. “And now I’m thinking—daylight! You’re walking about—ok, there was that smoke from under your hat in the gallery yesterday—but shouldn’t you be like in a coffin right now?”
She shrugged. “My skin burns in direct sunshine—hence the gloves, the hat, boots, and concealing clothes. But, honestly, do I look like a woman that sleeps in a coffin and my native earth?”
“The finest Egyptian cotton, Fran. You’re the Martha Stewart of vampires.”
Vampire's Dilemma Page 28
