Matthew Mather's Compendium

by Matthew Mather

  He just needed a little more certainty before calling his daughter, before sounding the alarm bells. All the agreements he’d signed today explicitly stated that he couldn’t tell anyone, but agreements be damned. He was sure he wasn’t the only one who was thinking the same thing.

  But first things first.

  Coffee.

  8

  Chianti, Italy

  Jess awoke to birds chirping in juniper trees outside the open windows of her room. In the huge bed, set high from the floor with a sash draped along the headboard and with tapestries flowing over the stone walls—fairy tale princesses came to mind. Would she let her hair down? Let the prince climb up and save her? The idle daydreaming screeched to a halt almost before it started. She was the last person on Earth who needed saving.

  Fairy tales were just that.

  She’d spent the balance of the previous day in bed, enjoying the doting attention of her mother. Maybe that's why she dropped off to sleep early. She had awakened earlier than usual for her—pushed awake by a vague dread she couldn’t pin down, a sleep-sensation of vertigo that forced her eyes open.

  After shaking off the bad dreams, she got up and showered, and then, after toweling off, slipped her pajamas back on and returned to the luxurious bed. She didn’t feel like leaving the comfort of her sanctuary. For a while she simply listened to the chirping birds, but she eventually opened her laptop, answered some emails and started a game of online chess.

  Jess pondered the long-lost relative Facebook-messaging her mother. Jess had nothing to do with the message, but it had given her the perfect excuse to convince Celeste to come to Italy. Her father was at a conference in Rome, and Jess wanted them all to get together, as a family.

  Her plan felt infantile, even to Jess as she planned it. Her parents had honeymooned here in Italy, but she knew there was no way they were going to get back together, and certainly not because she had rounded them up into the same room. She just wanted them to spend some time together, with her, on her terms. She wasn’t fooling herself: no romantic notions. She was too pragmatic; too much of a realist.

  So she believed.

  She had tried pinging her dad that morning, but he wasn’t available, and didn’t return her calls. Unusual, but she understood. She liked to have her own space, too, and he might be particularly busy.

  A knock at the door.

  Her mother didn’t wait for a reply. She opened the door, asking, “You spending today in bed? Again?” She delivered a cup of coffee next to her daughter and draped herself across the foot of the bed. “Giovanni already took me on a tour of the castle. We didn’t want to wake you.”

  “We?”

  Her mother frowned. “Do I detect sarcasm?”

  Jess pushed her laptop forward and picked up the cup of coffee to take a sip. “No. Thanks for letting me be.”

  Her mother glanced at the laptop screen. “Playing chess with your dad?”

  “Not today.” Jess put the coffee down and pulled her legs to the side of the bed. “Hey, could you give me a minute?”

  Celeste smiled. “I’m your mother, sweetheart.”

  “Fine.” Jess swung her legs off the side of the bed, pulling off the covers, and her right foot dropped to the floor. Her left leg ended in an angry red stump just below the knee.

  Her mother tried not to stare. “Does it hurt?”

  “See? That’s why I asked for some privacy,” Jess groaned. “And no, it doesn’t hurt.” Not true. In the fall yesterday, she’d twisted her stump painfully.

  Leaning over, she picked up her prosthetic leg from the floor next to the bed. Every day, when she pulled on this leg, had become was a ritual of remembering all the parts of her that she’d lost. Her brother. So long now, but the pain still lingered, the phantom in her mind of his face, forever frozen, forever gone.

  She closed her eyes and paused, before angling her lower leg upward to pull the socket of the prosthetic into place. It was a custom fit, with a new suction valve that kept it on securely. A smooth stainless steel rod connected the flesh-colored socket to her new foot. She’d gotten it a few months before—a multiple-axis stored-energy one in lifelike plastic. Better than her old leg, she liked to joke.

  But it wasn’t.

  Six years now, and she could hardly remember the difference. Six years ago she’d lost her leg. It was the last time that her parents had come together, that day when she’d been shipped back to the US, damaged and broken. For a short time, they resembled a real family again. She didn’t have another leg to spare. She hoped they could come together again without anyone losing a limb.

  Jess pulled on a pair of jeans and stylish gold flats, then a red short-sleeved blouse. Searching through her luggage, she found her makeup kit and walked into the bathroom, clicking the light on.

  Her mother watched her, smiling. “Makeup? You’re putting on makeup?”

  Jess rolled her eyes and grinned. “Give me a break, huh?”

  Knocking on the heavy wooden door, Jess said, “Mr. Ruspoli, ah, I mean, Baron Giovanni?” The door was open just a crack, and she heard paper shuffling. “Sorry, Nico told me to just come up.”

  The shuffling stopped. “Jessica, yes, please, come in! And please, call me Giovanni. All this Baron nonsense is embarrassing. Old-fashioned.”

  Jess swung open the door, expecting a dim medieval interior with suits of armor and swords on the walls, finding instead a bright open space. Giovanni was seated behind a computer monitor at a large L-shaped desk in the corner of the room.

  Where the wall to her left was lined by bookcases filled with a jumble of odds and ends as well as books, the wall on the right was largely covered by an enormous flat screen television. Both walls had shelves with electronic gear. The other two walls were floor-to-ceiling windows with views to the rolling vineyards and hills beyond the castle fortifications. A few pictures hung between the bookcases; one, Jess noticed, showed the Baron sailing on rough waves, sea foam spraying around him. Another showed him atop a mountain, and next to that was a large print of him in full arctic gear, smiling in the foreground of a frozen wasteland.

  “How are you feeling today?” Giovanni asked. Littered across the floor were stacks of large cardboard boxes, with clumps of backpacks scattered about. A set of scuba tanks sat in the corner. He noticed her eyes surveying the chaos. “Excuse my mess, I just moved back. Please, come, sit.” He indicated a chair next to his desk.

  Jess picked her way among the boxes. “I’m feeling great. How are you?”

  “Good, good.” He glanced back at the computer monitor. “I’m trying to understand the family business, so much to do.” His voice faded. Shaking his head, he looked back at Jess and smiled.

  The family business—the way he said it sounded ominous.

  “Giovanni…” Jess was about to apologize for her behavior, but suddenly switched tracks. Someone like this, with everything given to them, she felt a twinge of jealously, and he was probably only covering his own ass for liability. Still, it didn’t mean she couldn’t be polite. “Thank you for taking care of us,” she said finally.

  “Please, it is my pleasure.”

  “I really mean it. This is a special trip for us. And thanks for showing my mother around this morning. She can’t stop talking about you.”

  “Good things, I hope?” Giovanni smiled.

  She returned the smile. “Of course.” She pursed her lips and shifted in her seat. “If you don’t mind me asking, what were the police here for yesterday?”

  His eyes narrowed, his face remaining blank. “A local, how shall I say, nuisance? They have no business here. This is my sovereign ground. My family has defended this place for a thousand years.”

  She couldn’t tell if he was being funny or not. Was this really his sovereign ground? Like his own country? “I thought they were here because of something I did,” Jess confessed.

  “No need to explain.” Giovanni clicked off his computer.
“So, how about a personal tour of the castle? Like I did for your mother, yes?”

  Jess shifted in her chair. She needed to get back into Rome, but then it was hard to turn down a guy offering a personal tour of his own castle—and he’d been awfully nice to her mother.

  “Are you ready?” Giovanni stood and came around his desk.

  She took a deep breath and beamed her best smile. “Sure, that would be great.”

  Giovanni took Jess on a whirlwind exploration of the castle, explaining when each wall and tower had been built, what battles had been fought and won. They stopped in at the kitchens, where he explained they only had evening staff for three nights a week, usually for the guests. He mostly cooked his own food.

  On a quick march around the periphery of the outer walls, through the olive groves, she gazed across the vineyards that stretched down the sides of the mountain. Olive oil was still an important family business, he said, as well as the wine that the estate produced. From there, they went down below, into the catacombs of the wine cellars, ancient Etruscan caves carved out thousands of years ago. For three thousand years, he explained, the caves had withstood every earthquake and disaster Mother Nature threw at them.

  They ended the tour at the southwest corner, the highest point where the top of the castle walls met the peak of the mountain. They climbed up through one of the tunnels to a ledge, then up a ladder. A cable stretched across the small valley to the next property, a much smaller castello on the side of a hill opposite, so that a small cable car could be ferried across. Below, the town of Saline nestled in the foothills. The view to the west was breathtaking, the flat plains of Tuscany stretching into the distance, the Mediterranean visible as a blue line on the horizon forty miles away.

  “Is that your property as well?” Jess asked, squinting down the length of the cable that strung across the valley, looking at the smaller castello on the opposite side.

  “No,” Giovanni replied, then corrected himself. “Well, yes, it is, but much more recent. We’ve only owned it for a hundred years.” He grinned. “A new addition. We built the cable car to connect them.”

  “A new addition?” Jess held one hand over her eyes to shield the sun, taking a closer look at the structure on the other side of the gorge. “What, you bought it?”

  The grin evaporated from Giovanni’s face. “Not exactly, it was…” He looked away, exhaling, contemplating something, then looked back at Jess. “It belonged to a rival family, but they left.”

  Jess noticed a strange look in his eyes. “Like a feud?”

  “Yes, like that. Mortal enemies.”

  “Huh.” Jess shook her head, not sure what to say. She shifted her gaze down the cliff wall under the cable car shack where they’d come from: thirty feet of sheer rock, with a large grassy ledge at least twenty feet across, then a drop of a few hundred feet beyond that. “Great for rock climbing,” she observed.

  “Jessica, I do have another confession.”

  “What?” She disliked it when people used her full name. She was still staring down the rock wall, her mind constructing possible routes up it.

  “Yesterday, at the museum, I overheard you telling your mother that your boyfriend hit you, that you needed money.”

  Jess lifted her head up from looking down the cliff face.

  “As I said, the videos of you on YouTube, the famous American girl, BASE jumping, skydiving and rock climbing, the…” His voice faltered.

  “Disabled, is that the word you’re looking for? I don’t need any special treatment. Nor money. As for my boyfriend, pffftt!”

  Shaking his head, Giovanni agreed, “I apologize for my intrusion. My indiscretion. I was so surprised when I saw you here. You are magnificent, beautiful.” He winced. “Sorry, my English is a little rusty, perhaps not the right words?”

  Jess laughed, her flash of temper burning into one of embarrassment. “Your English is fine. Those are nice words.”

  Giovanni’s smile returned. “I was wondering if you might do me a favor.”

  Squinting into the sun, Jess took a long look at him. “What kind of favor?”

  “If you might give my little Hector a rock climbing lesson, perhaps?”

  “Now?”

  “I have all the equipment. We could set a top rope?”

  She looked down at the rock face. “Sure, we could do that. One thing, though.”

  “Of course.” Giovanni waited, frowning concern.

  “I go by Jess. Call me Jess, okay?”

  Giovanni stored his climbing equipment inside the doorway of a tunnel carved into the side of the rock face, on the twenty-foot-wide ledge of grass below the cable car station. While he went to fetch Hector and Nico, Jess set up two ropes from a metal gantry sticking out from the top of the cliff face, and having enough cord.

  She also rigged a rope swing from the cable car platform to let someone drop from there to the grassy ledge thirty feet below. When Giovanni returned with Nico and Hector, she’d waved to them from the platform, then swooped down, swinging back and forth a few times, earning giggles of glee from the boy.

  After untying herself from the rope swing, she did some bouldering on low rocks with Hector. Only five years old, he scampered around like a monkey, smiling a big grin at Jess as he jumped around. He was fearless, and she returned his grin.

  She attached the two ropes to Giovanni and Hector in their climbing harnesses. Jess and Nico strapped into harnesses and attached themselves to the other ends of the ropes, taking up the slack as Hector and Giovanni climbed, with Jess calling out suggestions and encouragement.

  “So what brought you to Ruspoli Castle?” Nico asked Jess. With Giovanni and Hector twenty feet overhead, Jess and Nico stood shoulder to shoulder, carefully taking in the excess rope as the two ascended.

  Jess glanced at Nico, then returned to watching Hector, taking up the slack with the braking mechanism attached to her. “Funny story. My mom got a Facebook message from a long-lost relative a few weeks ago, said he still lived here and wanted to meet us.”

  Nico jammed his brake into place and looked at Jess. “Who? Did you meet him?”

  “Not yet.” Jess frowned. What had gotten him so excited?

  Nico released the brake. “So your family is from here?”

  “My mom’s side. Years ago. We didn’t think anyone from our family still lived here.”

  “You came all the way from America for this?” Nico nodded, his wide eyes conveying seriousness.

  Jess let her head sag to one side. “It wasn’t just for that.” She pulled in two more feet of rope into the brake as Hector climbed. “I don’t know a thing about the old family. And you, do you have family here?”

  Nico concentrated on the task at hand a moment before he replied. “I have no family.”

  “You’re from Naples, though. Isn’t that what you said?”

  “I am.”

  “And Giovanni’s father hired you to work here.”

  Nico nodded. “Seven years ago he took me in. He was like a father to me. I did my best to look after him when he got sick, even when Giovanni left.” He let out a long sigh. “Ah, I forget myself. I really should not talk of the Baron’s family.”

  Where was Giovanni’s father now? In Florence, Jess guessed, but she didn’t want to pry, so she switched topics. “The police who were here yesterday morning, did Giovanni really just shoo them away?”

  Nico grinned at Jess. “This is not America. The Ruspolis, well…I would not worry, not while you are his guest.”

  The boy and Giovanni brushed together above them a moment, the two of them laughing, both thrilled.

  “Nico,” Jess said. “Leone mentioned something about a controversia, what was that about?”

  The young man shrugged and jerked the cord tight, earning a muffled complaint from his boss thirty feet overhead. “Of that, Miss Rollins, I have no idea.”

  9

  Rome, Italy

 
; Ben pulled back the curtains of his hotel room window and peeked out. Brilliant sunshine streamed in from a perfect blue sky. The traffic growled, and some people shuffled by in the street while out shopping, while others sipped coffee in the cafés.

  “Have a look in the back!” Ben shouted into his cell phone. Mrs. Brown, their seventy-eight-year-old administrative assistant, was going deaf. She refused to retire, and Ben refused to fire her. She’d been a part of his life longer than he could remember. “I know what time it is. I’m sorry.”

  Almost ten at night in Boston. He’d dragged her out of bed to search his office, to dig through the mountains of papers and boxes he’d accumulated in his thirty years at Harvard-Smithsonian. He needed data, really old data: spools of tape he’d collected dating back to the 1970s, before he started at Harvard as a student, along with magnetic tapes; floppy disks from the 80s; CDs from the 90s. Ben was a pack rat, his office the epitome of the disorganized professor, but he knew what he needed had to be there.

  Ben let go of the curtain, casting the hotel room back into darkness. “Mrs. Brown, I know this is difficult. Please keep searching. This is an emergency.” He rubbed one temple to try to ease back a throbbing headache that seemed to have followed him around for two days. The fate of the world might rest on the eyesight of Mrs. Brown, a great-grandmother twice over. “I’ll stay on the line while you look.”

  Pushing mute on his phone, he turned to Roger, who sat cross-legged on the room’s double bed. Although the Grand Hotel was fancy, the rooms were tiny. Ben had installed himself at the sliver of a working desk near the window, so the only other place to work was on the bed.

  “Did you get the new data downloads?” Ben asked.

  “Getting them now,” Roger replied. A nest of papers surrounded him, his face staring into his laptop screen. “The wireless in this hotel sucks. Even if I get it downloaded, it’ll take time to unpack and normalize.”