by Farris, John
Bertie exhaled lengthily through one nostril. "I was wondering how it works. If Eden needs you suddenly, you have to go, don't you? Doesn't matter if you're in the middle of the fish course, bing, you're out of here."
"Only when there's a dire emergency," Gwen explained with a burn of resentment at Bertie's lack of tact, carelessly reminding the dpg of her inferior, ephemeral status. "Otherwise she lets me know when I'm being… recalled."
"How?"
"Quantum physics. Earn your Ph.D.; then we can talk."
Bertie blinked at her juvenile belligerence, then smiled forgivingly.
Gwen modified her tone. "If you want to know how I get from here to there, or wherever, here's an analogy. Think of a superhighway with millions of lanes, all the traffic moving at about the speed of light. So if Eden wants me, I just slip out of the lane I'm traveling in now into a slightly faster lane, then back again; zip, I'm there."
"Speed of light," Bertie said, nodding, not entirely baffled.
"More to it than that, of course. Why the sudden interest? Did you hear from Eden?"
"No. I suppose everything's going okay in San Francisco. You didn't tell me who you saw in the lobby."
"Didn't give me a chance." The small blight of resentment faded. Gwen opened a dress box. "Lincoln Grayle."
"Linc? I thought—"
"His stunt, or whatever, illusion, didn't come off. First they had engine trouble flying to Zimbabwe and turned back. Then the hotel they were going to stay at near the Falls burned. Now he's in Rome for his TV special but having more problems; they may not let him use the Colosseum. If it doesn't work out for Linc, then we're going to Naples tomorrow, or maybe he said Florence. Do you like these shoes on me, Bertie?"
"Perfect. What else are you wearing?"
"Basic black." She held up the filmy dress she'd purchased. "The most dress for the money. I know it looks as if I spent a fortune, but everything I bought came to a little over eighteen hundred on the MasterCard."
"You did well," Bertie assured her prickly roommate. "You know, I've never seen you dressed up before. Well, I mean—"
"I know. By the way, if we're seeing the Pope, how does that go? Do I need something to cover my head in his presence?"
Bertie got off the bed and pulled on a T-shirt with Yves Saint Laurent's face on it.
"Look, I'm sorry, but Tom doesn't think you should go with us this time, either."
Gwen flung the black dress on her own bed, bypassing resentment for fiery anger.
"This is such bullshit! Where is he?"
"Tom? He's taking a—"
Tom Sherard was standing beside the marble bathtub but still dripping when Eden Waring's dpg stormed in. All of Tom visible from multiple angles in semi-misted mirrors. And clearly, although he had his share of the African huntsman's scars, no lethal claws had come near his groin. Gwen took in that much of him in a flash: the interesting hard-used body, tight weld of flesh and muscle to the long bones, gaunt rib cage, white swath across abdomen and upper thighs where sun rarely touched him. And he was hung with the stones of a giant-killer in a leathern sling.
"Would you please tell me how you're going to explain what I should be explaining to His Holiness? They were my dreams!"
"Eden's," Bertie commented behind her.
She turned sideways to confront them both as if she held a dagger in either hand. Tom shrugged awkwardly into a terry-cloth robe, one sleeve of which wouldn't slide over the waterproof soft cast on his right forearm. His face reddened to the tips of his ears.
"Of course I never dream, but so what? I know every dream Eden's had since she was a baby! And the Pope has to hear about the beast from me, otherwise he'll think you're a couple of loonies!"
"Allow me a minute, would you?" Tom said with a look that was like cocking the hammer on a pistol.
Gwen retreated promptly, still in high dudgeon. Bertie watched her go with a complex expression that was not unsympathetic, shrugged for Tom's benefit, and gently closed the bathroom door.
She found the dpg in the sitting room, on the edge of a chair, rocking from the waist up, dissipating the rest of her quixotic energies.
"Tom is having a hard time dealing with much of this" Bertie said. "He's still embarrassed, frustrated, that he missed his shot the other night. No use in my trying to convince him that you can't kill a shape-shifter with a mere rifle bullet. Oh, and he's deeply confused about who or what you are, though he'll never admit that. Third point, he's never done well with obsessive personalities; try to ease up a little. I have to keep reminding Eden of that too."
"I know."
"Tonight—let me work it out with Tom. After all, three loonies are better than two. Where would the Stooges have been without Curly or Moe?"
"What?"
"Never mind. We wouldn't be seeing the Pope at all if Tom didn't have a long-standing relationship with Katharine Bellaver. I think they had a brief affair when Tom was about my age. She does know him very well. Flights of fancy are not in Tom's emotional kit. He's solid, stable, completely reliable in situations where other men would lose their wits and their nerve. That's what Eden—loves about him."
"You love him too."
"Have, since I was a kid. Always will."
"Is he in love with both of—us?"
Bertie answered that with a soft injured smile. "I'm not sure how clear his feelings are to Tom. Is it sexual, or just devotion? Whatever, call it a dilemma, and until he sorts it all out, the guilt feelings, the generational thing—like I care how old he is—his chivalric code and the mechanism for retaining his sanity will keep him at a distance from… us."
She spoke from the sadness of her depths, voice going dry over the last words.
They heard Tom in his bedroom, slamming an armoire door with a muffled curse. The belated anger of a man briefly humiliated in his own bath.
Gwen looked at the floor, chastised, hands clasped between her knees.
Bertie broke the tension with a smile. "Why don't you keep your dinner date?"
"You're sure?" Gwen said gratefully.
"I'll fix Tom a drink," Bertie said, getting up. "He's past due for a blast. Then we'll talk. As for His Holiness… just show up. Eleven sharp at the Gemelli clinic. Now you'd better get dressed. Borrow anything you like from my jewelry case. And say hello to the master magician for me."
"Sure. Does he have any moves I should look out for?"
"When Linc holds your hand by the fingertips and slips a little something on to your wrist and looks deeply into your eyes, probably his next move is straight to bed." Bertie gave this conclusion some thought. "Although I've heard, from a former member of Linc's troupe, that he has a reputation for being stuck in neutral sexually. He can levitate any number of stage assistants, but when it comes to his own—" Bertie threw off the rumor with a shrug. "Probably one of those stories that was started by an old flame who couldn't handle being dumped by Grayle. Showbiz can be evil." She glanced at Gwen, naively curious. "None of my business, but—"
"Yes, I can. No, I haven't. It won't be tonight, either. I may not get out all that much, but I'm no pushover."
Dinner turned out not to be the intimate rendezvous Gwen had anticipated. By the time she and Grayle made the scene at Il Fiorentino on a little street close to the Pantheon, there already were six guests at the table for ten he had reserved, seated amid magnificent frescoes and imperial columns of the choice dining room.
Three Italian men in late middle age, overdressed by the likes of Versace and Prada, all with the bearing of graven images. Two had hair as thick as ram's wool, and ringlet sideburns; the third man was bald as a pumpkin with a pugilist's nose, impudent green eyes, and two-carat round diamonds in each wing of his fleshy nose. Their women—second or third wives or new mistresses—were a symphony of pampered consonance, languor in their smiles. All spoke fluent-to-passable English and responded to Lincoln Grayle as if they long had been in the capture of his gravity. They responded politely to Gwen, but without
curiosity.
Fascinating people, Gwen reminded herself. They must be, if they were friends of Grayle's. But in a way they all made her skin crawl with an unexplainable animosity.
The other two places at the table were taken a few minutes later by the English actor Gwen had not been introduced to at Caffe Greco and his companion, also an actor, a lean handsome youth with the profile of a scythe, his expression a surfeit of self-love. He wore a velvet suit the color of an eggplant with a triple-collar shirt, open at the neck.
The older actor's name was Seth Foxe. He was in Rome, he let them know, working ("for condom money, my dears") two weeks that threatened to stretch into six in a historical drama. He was drunk, but apparently one of those alcoholics who could maintain a high level of comprehension and precision of speech until suddenly passing out on their faces. The glitter of his eyes was scary to Gwen when he looked at her.
After an unrewarding day on the set in the garden of an old Benedictine convent where he was playing a Renaissance pontiff, Foxe's emotional gutters were running full of bile. One of the men at the table, a financier experienced in the film business, egged him on.
"It must be gratifying, Seth, after some of the films you've appeared in lately, to have the opportunity to work with a writer and director of genius."
"Genius? What rubbish. The Chismas mystique is based on cult snobbery, and it is rather a small cult. Paul's script, old darling, is murky psychopathology, with a larding of kinky sex and grue to pump up the lagging box office. From my mouth to God's and Paramount's ears. I refer to those pages I have thus far been permitted to read; they are doled out on a need-to-know basis by our writer and director of genius. What I need to know is, when I do my big rape scene with Lucrezia Borgia, will they provide a body double? Not for me; for the dear little dimwit essaying Lu. She's such questionable goods I hate to lay a finger on her, let alone my withered old shanks."
"The script has some good ideas, what I've read," Seth's boyfriend murmured, with the sidelong look of one who senses he has invited trouble by venturing an opinion.
Foxe tapped on his water goblet with a salad fork. "Quiet, everyone! Randy has come to the defense of his film-school cohort. Randy and Paul are quite alike, I must admit, in that their brains occasionally do spawn ideas—like larvae in shit." He leaned toward Randy, sniffing. "Is that the scent I gave you for our one-month anniversary?"
"Yes," Randy said, almost inaudibly.
Foxe beamed at the other dinner guests. "Lagerfeld. I like for him to wear it all the time, so I can more easily tell if it's Randy or my Catahoula hound I'm in bed with." That earned him his biggest laugh; Randy just looked down with feverish cheekbones and a troubled jut of his lower lip.
Somewhere within a kilometer's range of Il Fiorentino there was a muffled explosion; the chandeliers in the rooms trembled and chattered. There was sudden silence throughout the restaurant, wariness or fear in the eyes of the diners. After a few seconds conversations began again, tentatively. Rustlings in the stillness, a man's gruff voice, louder than the others, a dropped glass on tile. Waiters resumed like dancers cued from a theatrical tableau.
"Car bomb," Lincoln Grayle said to Gwen. "Or truck, from the heavy sound of it."
"Third one in six weeks," one of the Italians said with a slight shrug.
"Who are they?" Grayle asked.
"Who knows for sure? They all have their causes, and civilization has a way of angering the uncivilized."
"Rome has always been a great city," the green-eyed man said. "What is another monument? Our true test of greatness is how well we survive our maniacs."
Seth Foxe finished the scotch in his glass. "A well-lived life must endure its little spasms of angst." He caught the question in Gwen's eyes. "Angst, darling; it's a delicatessen for neurotics." Now he decided to focus all of his attention on her. "American, are you?"
"Yes."
"In England and in the rest of Europe, we've lived with our bombings for many years. I suppose you Americans are still in shock, terrorism being such a recent import to your formerly unsullied shores. A wake-up slap in the face. I'm reminded of what dear Bogie said to Peter Lorre in The Maltese Falcon. 'You'll get slapped and like it.'" His eyes glittered maliciously as he concluded his dead-on impression of Bogart. She wished he would shut up or fall on the floor, but the others apparently found him to be a rare delight.
Foxe surprised her by smiling sympathetically. "You mustn't take me too seriously," he said. "I have my warmer moments. I danced at all of my weddings. I have a daughter, about your age. Strange, all day I've been trying to remember her name."
"The world can be quite a wonderful place after all," one of the wives or mistresses said with a winsome optimism.
"Too bad the human race is still around to fuck it up," Foxe replied instantly, returning to form for his encore.
Il Fiorentino's master sommelier appeared with the Tuscan vintage that Lincoln Grayle had selected earlier.
Grayle looked at the label, nodded. The wine was uncorked. But when the sommelier attempted to pour a little of it into his glass, no wine appeared. The distinguished server looked more shocked than if another bomb had exploded, this time at his feet.
Grayle smilingly took the bottle from his hands and tilted it above the glass. Water poured out. Grayle looked perplexed. He held the bottle upright and studied the label. The sommelier, expressing his sorrow and indignation in rapid Italian, was rigid and turning red. Grayle held up an index finger, smiled soothingly, then drew Gwen's glass to his place and tried again. This time the bottle yielded the appropriate Castello Banfi Brunello di Montalcino, a deep purple splash in the glass.
"Ahhh," the master sommelier exclaimed, belatedly getting the joke when the others laughed. "Magìa, yes?"
"You'd better bring us another bottle, Pietro," Grayle advised. "This one"—he stripped the label, revealing his picture on a label underneath—"is my private stock."
The trick had been a good tension-breaker. But now they were hearing sirens. Foxe seemed to nod off after his first sip of wine. Randy took him by the elbow and helped him out of his armchair.
"Couldn't manage to eat a bite anyway," the old actor apologized. "The odor of Semtex is ruinous for the digestion, and as it happens I do have an early call."
By ten-forty dinner was completed except for coffee, brandy, and dessert, none of which Gwen wanted.
She graciously took her leave, and Lincoln Grayle accompanied her outside the restaurant to his waiting limo. Same chauffeur, same two bodyguards. One of them said to Grayle, gesturing, "Montecitorio."
"This isn't necessary," Gwen said. "I could get a taxi."
"Not by yourself, in Rome. It's no sinkhole of depravity, but unescorted women at this time of the night are fair game for thieves, which includes some legal taxi drivers. You'll get an expensive tour of the palazzos and fountains before you're finally dropped at your hotel."
The hoo-hah of sirens; she glimpsed the blue lights of three police cars speeding through the Piazza della Rotunda. Past the Pantheon but at some distance in the yellow aura of the city, above the referenced piazza, one ringed with government buildings, there was a thick brownish cloud like a brutal djinn hovering over more glories of antiquity, now in flames and rubble. The large vehicular bomb random punctuation in the long, secretive history of zealotry. A disagreeable air of destruction had reached the Rotunda. Grayle produced a silk handkerchief for her, shaking it first as if to free a forgotten dove.
"See you tomorrow," he said. "Where are you going now?"
"The Gemelli clinic." In response to the question in his eyes she improvised. "Bertie has a... a fever we're concerned about, and they're keeping her overnight."
"Gemelli clinic," Grayle said to the driver. And to Gwen, "It's only a few minutes from here, if the cops aren't barricading bridges on the Tiber. See you tomorrow."
"Are we really going to Naples?"
"You bet?" He leaned into the backseat and kissed her. Gwen had a g
low on when the limo pulled away from Il Fiorentino. Grayle watched until they were out of sight with a slight bemused smile, then returned to his remaining guests.
They were now in a private room on the top floor of the three-story building. The tall balcony doors were closed. Venetian busts brooded in niches around the walls. There was a fourteen-foot ceiling. The men—now including the owner of Il Fiorentino and the small palazzo in which the restaurant was housed, a man of impeccable fashion that failed to detract from several afflictions, among them gout and palsy—and two of the women were enjoying cigars with their cappuccino and Napoleon served in crystal glasses that were three centuries old.
Lincoln Grayle stepped out of the cabinet-sized elevator and took his seat in a throne-like fifteenth-century doge's chair, a little distant from the others. He was offered a selection of cigars from a humidor by their host, who made recommendations in a hushed voice. The cigar that the illusionist chose, a Davidoff Millennium, was clipped and lighted for him.
One modern feature of the splendidly furnished if somewhat gloomy room was ashtrays that drew off the considerable smoke. Another was a handmade, organic-form light sculpture of some opaque material, nearly eight feet in sinuous height and a couple of feet in diameter. The fluidly changing tones of the sculpture provided the only light within the room.
