by D J Mcintosh
I watched her make her way over to a grove of stunted palms and thought about Joachim. At no time had he glanced my way, almost as if he’d been expecting me to be there. I suppose Dina could have told Luisa about me earlier tonight, but even then it felt unusual for the guy not to have at least acknowledged my presence.
Visibility was good thanks to the full moon although not enough to see much in the engine. Being hunted months ago in New York with a tracking device taught me to be vigilant.
I grabbed my bag and quietly left the car, taking out my penlight. I lifted the hood and played the light over the motor. Everything looked normal. Just paranoia on my part, perhaps. I felt carefully along the underside of fenders and finding nothing, bent down and peered underneath. The penlight shone on the mud-encrusted undercarriage and picked up an object that didn’t belong under any vehicle. A series of colored wires twisted out of a small package wrapped in black plastic.
I straightened up like a shot and ran toward the palms. I didn’t catch Dina dishabille; instead I found her leaning against a tree, talking on her cell. She jumped when she saw me and abruptly clicked off her phone.
“Who were you talking to?”
“Just Luisa. She called to make sure Joachim came on time. Why are you carrying your bag?”
“There’s a bomb under the car your friend so nicely lent you.”
She let out a little cry. “No! Luisa would never do that.”
“Maybe she didn’t know. Mancini’s people probably tapped your phone. If you’ve used your cellphone to talk to her, Mancini could have gone straight to her cousin and forced him to cooperate. Or just crossed his palm with a hell of a lot of silver.” I looked right into her eyes. “I’m telling you it’s there. I just saw it. Where did you say we’re headed?”
“Rome.”
“Call her back right now. Apologize for cutting her off. Say I interrupted you. Then let her know we’ll be leaving here in about fifteen minutes for Rome as planned.”
She protested bitterly when I said we couldn’t get her things out of the car and she’d have to ditch her phone, but I managed to persuade her and we took off. They’d figure out pretty fast no one was in the car when it blew and I felt anxious Joachim might park close by, waiting to hit his remote and touch off the explosion. We probably had only seconds left.
My answer came soon enough. We’d just mounted a small hill when we heard a deep whump. As we turned in the direction of the sound, a flash seared the surrounding terrain, lighting up the roof-line of the building we’d left, followed by a belch of smoke and the irritating smell of burning plastic and oil. Tires sprayed gravel as a motor started up farther away. We hid behind some trees in case Joachim was on his way back. Thankfully the sound of the engine receded into the distance.
To be sure, ours was a shaky alliance. I had far too many questions about Dina’s trustworthiness, starting with that phone call she made. Was she really just communicating with her friend or telling her I was in the car and they could blow it up? “We’ve got to get off this road,” I said grimly. “Is there a highway anywhere near? We’ll have to hitch a ride.”
“Yes. It will take a while to get there but we can reach it.” Dina clasped her arms around her chest and shivered. “I can’t believe it. That Luisa would betray me.”
“Maybe they didn’t give her any choice.” I took off my jacket and handed it to her. It was far too big. She looked like a street waif with it draped awkwardly over her slight shoulders.
We cut across several minor roads and found a footpath winding through some kind of park. The trees gave way and we stepped onto a huge gravel plain with a pond near its center. In the distance, smoke poured from crevices in the rock. Dina anticipated my question. “The crater of the Solfatara volcano. Some believe it is the home of Vulcan, an entrance to Hades.”
After what we’d just been through a visit to hell seemed somehow perfectly fitting, and it wasn’t hard to see where the idea had come from. The air reeked of sulfur. Across the crater, smoke billowed from pits and holes. A weird yellowish light emanated from the fumaroles. Encrusted rocks and minerals surrounded these openings—brimstone, the old-fashioned name for sulfur deposits. In places the soil had burned so it was little more than cinder, all the vegetation scorched off. It was a strange sensation to put my hand on the ground and feel how hot it was, as if the very earth were dying of fever. Not being of a religious turn of mind, I’d never paid any heed to stories about sinners roasting forever in the fires of hell. And yet here, with night closed in around us and the flares of light turning the plumes of smoke an eerie yellow, I could almost be convinced.
We walked at a good clip, anxious to reach the access road to the highway. “Tread carefully here,” Dina said. “We’re only on a thin crust. It’s all boiling liquid underneath.”
Fortunately, we’d almost reached the end of the crater when Dina told me that. I burst out laughing. “Thanks for taking me on the scenic route.” She made a good choice, though, by coming here. We were totally alone and no one, I now felt sure, was mapping our progress away from Naples.
After a long trek we made it to an interchange for the A56, which led to the E45, the major highway north. As we waited to hitch a ride I said, “Your game plan was to go to Rome—then what?”
“I needed the anonymity of a large city away from Italy, one I could get lost in. Luisa bought me an air ticket to Berlin under her name. I have an old friend there the conte doesn’t know about. He’d expect me to travel to London instead because that’s where I went to school.”
“Did you discuss this with her on your cellphone?”
“I told her.”
“Well, that’s out then. So, let me suggest this. If we recover even one volume of the five you sold, at the very least, it will give us some leverage. Who has the others? Who did you sell them to?”
“The nearest is in France, a rich businessman named Alphonse Renard. Ewan told me he’s a prominent rare book collector but the only contact is through a post box at Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer.”
Twenty
November 21, 2003
En route to Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, France
We landed a ride with english tourists who vacationed every year in southern Italy and chose November to avoid the summer crowds. They were driving overnight to Florence and kindly dropped us off at a junction where we hitched another ride to the seaport town of Civitavecchia. At six in the morning we huddled in a café until we could get a ferry to Marseilles. We ended up having to wait most of the day and finally boarded a ferry that accepted walk-on passengers. The ship had launched only a few weeks earlier; it was brand spanking new and very comfortable. Our trip would last, weather permitting, about fourteen hours. In the passenger lounge we watched the Tyrrhenian Sea turn from shimmering aquamarine to copper to flat mauve in the fading light.
Once safely away from the shores of Italy, Dina relaxed a little and told me more about her family. “My mother had a lot of trouble conceiving,” she said, wrapping her hands around a flimsy paper cup full of coffee. “She prayed every day for a child. She’d almost given up hope when she learned she was pregnant. I came into the world on her fortieth birthday. She died two years later.”
“Do you remember her at all?”
“Only from photos. When I was very little I’d stand the framed picture of her I liked best on my bookshelf and talk to her. Pretend it was really her in the room. My nurse scolded me for it and said if she’d died it must have been part of God’s plan and I had to accept it. She took all my photos away. I cried for days after that but by then, her face had been imprinted on my memory.”
“We have that in common. My mother died in a mining accident before I turned three.”
Dina’s features softened for an instant. “Oh. Sorry to hear that.”
We all have a tendency to think other people’s lives are happy and full until we get to know them better. I couldn’t be sure that Dina’s sad story was true, but I fou
nd myself wanting to believe it. I suggested she consider moving to New York, a big enough city to get lost in, far removed from Mancini’s influence. Somewhere I could look out for her.
“A city might give me a place to escape to,” she said in reply, “not permanently. I suffocate in cities. I much prefer country life.”
I nodded, even though I didn’t understand the appeal.
I cast around for a way to get her mind off her troubles. “Okay, let’s talk about something else. Well, since stories are dictating our lives right now, tell me your favorites when you were a kid.”
That cheered her a little and her eyes sparkled. “Oh, that is hard! I like so many of them. I’ve always loved fairy tales. I guess my favorite is ‘The Young Slave.’ It’s one of Basile’s.” She rolled her eyes at me and smiled. “It is like ‘Snow White,’ but much darker. The Grimms’ first ‘Snow White’ was quite disturbing. The king fell incestuously in love with his own daughter, and her mother, not a stepmother, tried to kill her.”
I didn’t recall seeing ‘The Young Slave’ when I read some of Basile’s stories. “Tell it to me. I’d like to hear it.”
“Well, I may not be able to recite all of it but here’s how it starts: ‘There was once upon a time a Baron of Selvascura who had an unmarried sister.…’ I can’t remember the next lines but she swallowed a rose petal. Then it goes, ‘Not less than three days later, Lilla felt herself to be pregnant, and nearly died of grief, for she knew well she had done nothing compromising or dishonest, and could not therefore understand how it was possible for her belly to have swollen. She ran at once to some fairies who were her friends, and when they heard her story, they told her not to worry, for the cause of it all was the rose-leaf that she had swallowed.’”
Dina chuckled and I was glad to see her relax enough to laugh. I thought about the Disney “Snow White” with the sad-eyed queen who wished for a baby girl. The image of her sitting in a window with her embroidery, pricking her finger and seeing a few drops of her blood falling on the white snow, was imprinted on my brain. How much the story had changed from its early versions. “Go on,” I said.
“This is in my own words now. The maiden bore a beautiful baby girl named Lisa. She sent Lisa to the fairies, each of whom gave her a charm. The last one put a curse on her—a poisoned comb would stick in her hair and cause her to die. The fairies enclosed Lisa in seven crystal caskets and locked it inside a room in the castle.”
“What, no dwarfs?”
“No dwarfs.” She laughed again. “The Grimms added them. The girl’s mother was so grief-stricken she fell ill, but before she died she begged her brother the baron to keep Lisa a secret. His suspicious wife unlocked the door against his wishes. Jealous, and suspecting the baron kept this beautiful woman as a lover, she wrenched open the caskets and pulled the girl out, causing the comb to drop out of her hair. Lisa awoke. The wife beat her and cut off her hair. She forced her to wear rags and treated her miserably like a slave girl.”
“Amazing to compare that with today’s version.”
“I haven’t told you the ending yet. One day, the baron, who hadn’t recognized Lisa, returned home from a trip and overheard her crying about her fate. He embraced his niece and banished his wife from the castle. Lisa married happily and the moral of the story is ‘heaven rains favors on us when we least expect it.’”
“Let’s hope the heavens treat us that well,” I said.
A couple sat on our right. The woman curled her legs up on the bench and nestled beside the man. He put his arm securely around her and smoothing her hair away from her face, touched his lips to her forehead. Dina observed them, not with delight at seeing their fondness for each other, but as if they were a pair of alien creatures.
“I can’t imagine what it’s like,” she said, “actually wanting a man to kiss you like that. Do you have a girlfriend?”
“Not now.” I thought of Laurel Vanderlin.
“But you have … in the past?”
“Sure.”
I didn’t sense her question arose out of an interest in me personally. It almost seemed as if she were trying to comprehend how normal people felt.
“I’ll never be able to fall in love.”
I looked at her with surprise. Her startling admission spoke volumes of Mancini’s abuse. At some point, Mancini had ceased being her protector and become her lover. When did he cross that line and turn a kindly act into something sinister? I didn’t want to press her on that issue right now. She’d had enough of bad memories. If Dina broke free of him permanently, given time, she might see love differently. She gazed out the window at the gray sea and said nothing more. The only sound I heard escape her lips was the rush of an occasional sigh. I sensed those deep sighs signaled an extreme loneliness welling up from the bottom of her soul.
We sipped sodas and coffees and listened to the low drone of the heavy ship’s mighty engine sluicing through the water. Waves slapped the sides of the vessel, the regular swish of the salty sea like a magical soporific marking progress in time but seeming to suspend it as well. Eventually Dina succumbed to the watery lullaby and slept.
In repose her face looked like that of a sleeping child. But the image of innocence was belied by her injury. Although the swelling had gone down the bite on her lip still looked red and sore. Had she been brave, finding the courage to break away, keeping her presence of mind when she’d felt humiliated and afraid? Or had she lied to me?
On the one hand, her natural assertiveness didn’t fit easily with the picture of the victim she painted. Especially in this day and age, unless she’d been locked in a dungeon like the abused women in sensational news stories, could anyone really be held against her will for years, even by a powerful tyrant? Why not try to escape much sooner? And why choose this particular time, when she’d just met me, to flee from him? The reason she gave for wanting to recover the volumes she’d sold didn’t ring true. She had some other motive, but what it was eluded me. Even if she’d told the truth about her ill treatment by Mancini and his criminal designs, I still believed some undisclosed agenda motivated her.
More than once over the last few days I’d felt caught up in some wild fantasy. And the narrative seemed to grow ever more bizarre with each passing hour. The memory of Ewan’s ruined face and bloated body was achingly real. I had no choice now but to see the story through to its end.
With hours stretching before me until we docked, I decided to look up de Ribera. I knew he rivaled Velázquez as the most important Spanish painter of the seventeenth century. The son of a Spanish shoemaker, he rose to incredible heights. His great talent propelled his meteoric rise but two women also played a crucial role. A narrative worthy of any modern-day celebrity. He fled Spain for Rome as a result of a scandal involving a painter’s daughter and achieved almost instant recognition when he moved again from Rome to Naples. He had much better luck with patrons than Basile, because he married the daughter of an influential art dealer who championed the artist’s work.
De Ribera’s fascination with the grotesque was amply reflected in his many images of martyred saints on the cusp of death. I knew he also liked to paint individuals with disabilities and remembered pictures of a boy with a club foot and dwarfs. To my eye he had no intention to mock them but handled those subjects with a keen eye and sensitivity.
After de Ribera’s meteoric rise to fame and subsequent wealth, he fell like a shooting star when a serious illness curtailed his work in the 1640s. A decade later he died in poverty. Had his fascination with the dark side of the human spirit led to his interest in necromancy, or was it more personal? I finally drifted off with his pictures still vivid in my memory and woke only when the intercom blared our arrival at port.
Twenty-One
November 22, 2003
Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer
In Marseilles we caught a bus to Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. White stucco buildings spilled onto flat sandbars at the shoreline. This was a working man’s town. Sprin
ging up like an oddity at the town’s center was a twelfth-century Romanesque church resembling a miniature medieval fortress. The vast green marsh of the great Rhône delta, called the Camargue, swelled beyond the town.
We found the post office with no trouble. The little depot flew the fleur-de-lys, wedged in between a café and a store selling “genuine” Camargue-inspired bric-a-brac. Dina did her best to coax the postal clerk into telling her where Renard lived but didn’t get very far. He’d spoken rapidly in French so I had trouble taking it in.
“We may not be able to see the merchant at all,” Dina said after we left the post office.
“How so?”
“Renard lives in a remote area and doesn’t encourage visitors. The clerk said we can get into his estate only on horseback or by foot. He doesn’t allow motor vehicles on his property. He gave me the name of someone who might help us. Marc Hanzi knows everyone in the area. He lives near Les Alpilles.”
“The little Alps?” I asked. She nodded. “Well, there’s something to be said for small towns. We’d never have figured that out for ourselves. Hanzi doesn’t sound very French.”
“It isn’t. Bohemian, most likely, Romany. Here, they’re called the Manoush, not Gypsies. He’s a Gardian. Have you heard of them?”
“A guardian—sure, like a protector.”
She laughed. “Sort of. It’s spelled without the u. Gardians tend livestock like your western cowboys. They’re quite famous. It sounds like finding Hanzi will be difficult enough.”
Thinking he lived in a village, I asked, “Is it far away?”
“Far enough. We should get started now.”
Not knowing what lay ahead of us or how easy communication might be, I checked my email and was reassured to hear from Corinne that Evelyn was in good spirits and they were enjoying each other’s company. Evelyn owed Corinne three dollars at poker and Corinne was taking her winnings in baking.
