“Please, take this with you,” he had said. “The streets of Rome can be difficult. They are all of small stones and the traffic is …” He touched his fingers to his forehead, indicating the impossibility of finding a word to describe the horror of the traffic. “And your ankle is still too weak, I think.”
And, in fact, she had had these same thoughts and worried about what she would do for support on those excursions when Massimo’s arm was not available to her. She dreaded a reinjury, and her ankle, though much improved, was still not strong enough to walk for any length of time without a tight bandage.
“This is so kind,” she said. “It is exactly what I need.” She accepted the stick and examined the beautifully worked animal head with its protuberant brow and wide, vacant, shining eyes. It was old, a family heirloom perhaps. He might have pulled it from a rack of fellows equally wonderful, an afterthought on his way out the door. “Of course,” she added, “I’ll return it to you when I come back.”
He shrugged. “Keep it as long as you need it,” he said. Though it was certainly not gracious, Lucy found this remark sufficiently courteous, for it allowed her to return an object she considered too valuable to accept as a gift, without requiring him ever to demand that it be returned. She smiled at him and took a few steps back into the kitchen, leaning on the stick to demonstrate its usefulness. But he had lost interest already; the gesture was complete. He expressed surprise over the meagerness of her luggage.
They had reached the end of the driveway now, and the car settled onto the level road with a jolt and a shuddering at the seams, like an airplane touching down. Lucy readjusted herself, smoothing her skirt over her knees. She was thinking of how she might introduce the subject of DV when, to her surprise, Antonio did it for her.
“You have packed up your poor friend’s possessions?” he said.
“I have,” she replied. “Though I’m not sure yet where I’m sending them.”
“Surely back to his family.”
“He didn’t have much in the way of family.”
Antonio furrowed his brow, casting her a quick sidelong look of dismay.
“He was estranged from his former wives,” she explained, “and his parents died some time ago.”
“How unfortunate.”
“I’m sending some of his papers to his agent,” she added, indicating the thick envelope she had placed atop her small bag on the backseat. “Though there wasn’t much to send.”
“You did not find this unfinished book about my family?” They were rattling down the road that ran past his estate, and at the mention of “my family” he lifted his chin, indicating the stone wall behind which that entity was protected from interlopers and aliens.
“No,” Lucy assured him. “He never finished it. It wasn’t really about your family anyway. It was about DV. All his books were about himself.”
“But my house was in it. My family history.”
Lucy smiled at his evident anxiety. “You really have nothing to fear, Signor Cini. The book wasn’t finished and will never be published.”
“Please call me Antonio,” he protested.
She nodded. She would never call him Antonio. “It’s about DV alone in the farmhouse after Catherine leaves, about how much he misses her.”
She studied his profile as she said the name Catherine and detected a hardening at the jawline, a flicker of the eyes. The name is painful to him, she thought. DV wasn’t the only one pining for Catherine Bultman.
“And why, does he say in this story, did the woman leave?” He affected an amused nonchalance. Lucy considered a moment before giving her answer. She might say, Because of another man, just to see how he responded. But she settled, as was her habit, on the truth. “She leaves because she’s bored with him.”
Antonio’s eyebrows shot up, while the corners of his mouth pulled down. It was an expression Massimo used, too; it reminded Lucy of him and she felt a pleasant twinge of desire. Soon. She would be with him soon.
“It is true,” Antonio offered. “She was very bored here.”
“Did she tell you that?”
They had reached the intersection with the paved road that would take them to the autostrada. Antonio brought the car to a full stop and leaned toward the windshield, looking up and down the empty roadway as if he expected a sudden explosion of enraged traffic. “She did not have to tell me,” he said.
“Did you see much of her?”
He pulled out into the road, struggling with the gearshift and letting out the clutch so slowly that the engine nearly stalled. He was an awful driver; he drove like a teenage girl. Gradually, he worked his way up through the gears and settled into a cruising speed well below the limit. “Oh, yes,” he said offhandedly. “I saw her now and then. Her Italian is very good, you know. She speaks very well, with almost no accent; I don’t know where she learned it. Your friend spoke not at all. She did everything for him. When they went out in the car, she was always the driver. He was completely dependent on her.” He paused, submitting this last observation with the formality of a lawyer presenting a bit of deeply incriminating evidence. “I knew, of course, that could not go on very long.”
“But wasn’t she painting? She came here to paint.”
“Oh yes,” he agreed. “I saw her about with her little watercolor box.”
The diminutive “little” moved Lucy to the defense of Catherine Bultman. “She is an excellent painter,” she said.
Antonio gave her a quick, incredulous inspection. “I am no judge of such matters,” he said. “The painters I admire have all been dead for five hundred years.”
Lucy looked out the window at the beauty of the passing countryside. There was a vineyard rising on a gentle slope, and at the top a cypress-lined drive leading to a big ocher-colored farmhouse that glowed in the limpid morning light. The air was crisp, the foliage faded. Summer was over, but it would be awhile before the leaves turned. For now nature was merely exhausted from the heat of summer. Then, at an intersection, she saw a roadside altar, a brightly painted statue of Mary in a dark grotto made of small rocks, the whole thing set on a heavy pedestal with fresh flowers at the base. The road seemed familiar, and Lucy turned to look down it as they passed. There was a mown field, then a wall. Wasn’t that gate she could just make out the one to the cemetery where DV was buried? “Is that the road to Ugolino?” she asked Antonio.
“Yes,” he said. “You are observant.”
“I recognized the gate. I want to go see the stone before I leave,” she said. “Maybe I can plant something that will grow without much attention.”
He said nothing, absorbed by maneuvering past a deep rut in the road. Then he cast her a brief, chilly look.
“Where is this well?” she said abruptly.
“I beg your pardon?” he said.
“The well. The one that DV fell into. Where is it? Can I see it?”
“I don’t think you would want to see it,” he responded. “There is nothing to see anymore anyway. It has been closed.”
“They closed it up because it was so dangerous?”
“It was open only very briefly. Only a few hours, because it was being pumped. Then it was replaced and closed up.”
“What was replaced?”
He frowned. “It is unpleasant to speak of such things.”
“How could they pump out a well?” she insisted. “Aren’t they all spring-fed around here?”
Now he gave her a look of real distress. “I fear there has been some misunderstanding,” he said.
“He fell down a well, didn’t he?”
“That is the English word for pozzo, I am correct?” he said. “It is a hole in the earth?”
“For water,” she agreed. “Yes, that’s right.”
He released the wheel and pulled at the close neck of his sweater. “It is warm today,” he said.
“So what’s the misunderstanding?”
He swallowed, then, taking resolve, addressed her in the superior, emoti
onless voice of one whose interest in his topic is entirely academic. “Your friend did not fall into a well,” he said. “That would be actually difficult to do, as they are normally raised and not very wide.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“He fell into a pozzo nero. I am not sure how to say this in English.”
“A black well?” she said.
“It is for the houses, because there are no pipes such as in the city, for the waste.”
Lucy nodded as the grisly vision of DV’s last moments materialized in her consciousness. “A septic tank,” she said softly.
“What is the word?” he inquired.
“A septic tank,” she said firmly. “It’s for sewage.”
“That must be it,” he agreed. “It is not a term one learns.”
“Jesus,” she said.
“It had been cracked, the concrete, you understand.”
“The tank,” she said.
“Yes. It had to be replaced. But as often happens, once it was opened, the pumping equipment did not function properly, or perhaps it did not arrive. I don’t remember. It belonged to the farm that joins Lucio Panatella’s land. They had to give up because it was night, and they put up barricades around it, but somehow your friend managed to fall down the hill behind it, a very steep hill from a wooded area where it was not expected that anyone would be walking about late at night.”
“And he fell into the tank.”
He nodded. “Only partly. They found him early in the morning when they came to finish the work. He had struck his head on the concrete at the edge.”
“What an ignominious end,” she said.
“I am sorry to be the person to tell you.”
“But why was he in the woods at night?”
“I did not see him often,” Antonio said. They had come to the autostrada entrance. For a few moments, he was occupied in accelerating onto it. The car strained and whined, but there was little traffic and Antonio drifted into the far-right lane without difficulty. Lucy looked out at a field of sunflowers well past their bloom; the heavy dark heads hung facedown on the dry stalks, like an army of defeated soldiers. “He was drinking a good deal of alcohol,” Antonio continued. “He didn’t go out at all, as far as I know. He left lists for Signora Panatella, which I translated for her. On these lists, there was always whiskey. After some time, Lucio arranged to have it delivered to the house in boxes so his mother would not have to make the extra trip.”
“He was a heavy drinker,” Lucy said. “But he was social about it. He liked to drink with friends.”
“He had no friends here,” Antonio observed.
No, Lucy thought bitterly. You might have befriended him, but you were busy trying to steal his mistress. She looked away, out at the green and golden Tuscan hills, the brilliant, oddly assaultive blue of the sky pressing down upon them, everything poised and balanced with a postcard’s glib perfection and something of its slickness. In centuries past, this scenery had served artists as a subtle, mysterious backdrop for the doings of imaginary heroes, or as an added dimension to portraits of the wealthy and the powerful. In the old paintings, it was often gray, shrouded in mist, and presumably, sometimes it still was. In the distance she could see, at the top of a hill, the sharp outlines of a town, its ancient wall still defending it, ready to draw into itself tomorrow if enemies would only arise.
“He never let on that anything was wrong,” she said. “He didn’t tell anyone Catherine was gone. We all assumed they were having a wonderful, romantic time here.”
Antonio made no comment, though his expression was attentive. His eyes shifted from the road to his passenger, then back again. “He did not confide in you,” he said.
“Well, I suppose he wouldn’t have, even if he’d wanted to. He was my employer. We didn’t really talk about his personal life.”
Antonio nodded. “Of course,” he said.
Lucy thought, Of course what? Of course I would know nothing about such things, having never been employed one minute of my life? She remained silent while her distrust of him billowed out in all directions, like a sail in a hurricane. He knew more than he was telling; she was sure of it. He was playing some absurd game, drawing her into it with his cryptic quasi-questions and his occasional hints at how much access he had to what went on in the farmhouse. Just to rile him, she said, “Maybe he really did see this ghost,” and she knew at once she had succeeded, for he pursed up his face as if he’d bitten into something sour and replied in his most annoying and patronizing tone, “Lucia.”
“Well, he didn’t have much imagination,” she insisted. “And he was writing a ghost story, which he’d never done before, so something must have given him the idea.”
“It is a mystery to me how he learned this story of my family,” Antonio admitted. He was so evidently perplexed, Lucy believed him.
“Maybe the ghost told him,” she suggested.
“Surely you do not believe in phantasms,” he protested.
She watched him closely. He told Catherine the story of the murdered partisan, she thought, and then Catherine told DV. “I didn’t before I came here,” she said.
“Oh. You have been converted.”
“The night I got locked out, when I was sick,” she said. “I went out because I saw a man on the drive looking at the house. A man with a rifle.”
He gave a small puff of indignation. “This was no doubt Lucio Panatella hunting the boar that are so destructive of our property.”
Lucy stared at him a moment. “Oh,” she said. Massimo had dismissed the apparition of the man as the by-product of her illness, an hallucination or possibly a dream, and in truth, her memory of that night was sketchy at best. Though she had known there must be a simple explanation for what she thought she saw, she felt oddly disappointed by this one. It was so obvious. This was the country, not some cityscape where a man walking at night with a rifle was probably a murderer. He was a hunter, protecting his property and bringing home, literally in this case, the bacon. Lucy sat quietly, moodily contemplating the absurdity of her suspicions.
They had reached the outskirts of Sansepolcro, where the scenery changed abruptly from pastoral bliss to urban sprawl. Lucy noted a car dealership, a tile and building materials warehouse, and a garden-supply store flanked by plaster statues of gods, lions, saints, and enormous garlanded urns. Everything was cheap and ugly, the buildings thrown up by contractors without benefit of architects, constructed of concrete, steel, and glass. The Italians had evidently given up on the idea of architecture as art with as little struggle as the rest of the world. She looked back at Antonio, who seemed intent on driving through the ugliness without looking at it. This brief trip with him had certainly operated to dispel various mysteries, just as she had hoped it might. The ghost she had seen was Lucio Panatella out hunting, DV had fallen into a cesspool, and Catherine Bultman had not been spirited away, but had gone off in search of better adventures. She did not entirely believe this last bit. Antonio was not as disinterested as he pretended to be; she felt sure of that. He was too eager to dismiss Catherine, too impatient at any suggestion that she was an artist, a woman of substance and discrimination, as Lucy felt sure she must be, and his eagerness had an element of defensiveness in it that gave him away. She saw this because she knew about the letter.
“I found a drawing Catherine did of DV,” she said. “It was hidden in the wardrobe.”
He gave her his empty dead-fish look but said nothing.
“It was pretty shocking,” she continued. “It was DV, but he was all cut open, in agony.”
She caught the flicker of a smile at the corner of his mouth. “Doubtless he suffered on her account.”
“Did she tell you she was angry with him?”
“You are so suspicious, Lucia. What is it you are suspicious of? Do you think something happened here in our little corner of the world, something out of the ordinary?”
“Maybe,” she confessed. “Maybe I do.”
&
nbsp; “I assure you,” he said, his voice heavy with boredom, “everything that happened here was ordinary.”
They had come to the ancient wall of the town. Antonio turned along it, following its languid curve, then headed south toward the neat, serviceable train station with its double row of tracks running in and out. He pulled into a parking space and shut down the engine, which whimpered and shuddered into silence like a recalcitrant child being sent to bed. “Here we are,” he said.
Lucy glanced back at the package atop her overnight bag. “I thought we were stopping at the post office?”
“I think there is no time,” he said. “If you are not to miss your train. I have errands to do in the town, so I will mail it for you and you may reimburse me upon your return.”
She glanced at her watch; he was right. Had he planned this all along, gauged the time of the trip to make it impossible for her to refuse his offer? “That’s very kind of you,” she said.
He opened his door, smiling agreeably. In fact, he seemed unduly pleased with himself. “I will go into the station with you to assist in buying your ticket.”
Lucy got out, accepted the stick he held out to her, and hobbled along behind him into the busy, stuffy waiting room. At the counter, she stood beside him, grinning inanely while he conversed with the ticket agent, who seemed agitated by the business of issuing a one-way ticket. Lucy dug the requisite lire out of her wallet, said “Grazie” several times, and, at length, received the stiff cardboard ticket with the magical word Roma stamped in the space reserved for her destination. Her spirits lifted at the sight of it. Roma meant, among other pleasures, Massimo. Massimo’s kisses, his embraces, the reassuring warmth of his skin next to hers, the curious thrill of her name on his lips, sounding exotic and romantic, as it never had before. She forgot all about Antonio Cini, though he escorted her down the tiled hallway to the platform where the train was being announced; they had arrived with only minutes to spare. Far away down the track she could see the engine growing larger and louder. The excitement of a train arriving, coming to carry her away, carry her to her lover, made her eyes damp and she felt her cheeks flushed with blood.
Italian Fever Page 13
