by David Downie
“You did no such thing,” said Priscilla, rising and pecking Daria on the cheeks. “He is a pathological fibber.”
“You mean a liar,” Willem protested. “Flyers are liars, Pinky, how many times must I tell you? And once a flyer, always a flyer. We’re like fly fishermen. A life of the ones that got away. Speaking of fish, the red herring is excellent tonight.” He winked again at Daria.
“Willem, stop that,” Priscilla groaned. “They are red snappers, dear, not herrings, and they are exquisite, simply grilled and brushed with olive oil, then scattered with fresh herbs, marjoram, I think, and perhaps some aniseed.”
Barbara Vinci sat quietly at the table, a martyr waiting her turn for attention. Her bright, greenish-mauve eyes raked up and down her daughter’s wrinkled blue uniform, disapproval admixed with something like grudging admiration for the lithe, athletic figure beneath it. Daria bent over her mother and kissed her on both cheeks. She took her mother’s mottled hands and squeezed them. Then she apologized for being so late, and braced herself for an evening of emotional blackmail.
“It’s only nine o’clock, dear,” her mother murmured. The remark, delivered deadpan, was subtle. Dinner at nine was perfectly normal in Rome, after all, her tone insinuated. Being an hour and half late to dinner at a club in Genoa with your aged mother was not.
“Nonsense!” Willem Bremach objected gallantly. “We’ll rouse the chef and have him slay another fatted calf or perhaps a lamb, if you prefer, unless you’d like the red herrings.”
“Daria always preferred fish when she was growing up,” Barbara Vinci said slowly in her deep, vibrating mid-Atlantic voice. It was a radio voice seasoned by nine decades of good drink and half a century of passive smoke inhalation. “We thought she would become a marine biologist,” Barbara continued, fiddling with one of her many rings on her be-ringed fingers. “First it was giant squid. Then it was sharks and whales, then of course it was boys and boys and medical school, and then she turned into a secretive migratory bird like her father and flew away to DIGOS.”
“Mother,” Daria said softly, feeling disconnected, “I’m sure there are more riveting things to talk about.” She accepted the menu proffered by the liveried waiter. Daria glanced at it and said, “Bring something light, please, whatever you like, I don’t mind, and another bottle of sparkling water.”
“And more champagne!” cried Willem, too late. The waiter had scampered away.
Glancing around at the familiar, stuffy old club, Daria squeezed her mother’s extended hands again and added in a conspiratorial tone, “I’m glad to see you looking so well, Ma-Ma.”
Barbara eyed her daughter, then turned to Priscilla and Willem. “Would that we could say the same of you, dear girl.” She uttered the words ambiguously. They were a jest. Yet Daria knew her mother was secretly pleased to see her a wreck, relieved that she, Barbara Vinci, the original Barbie Doll, had been more beautiful, more alluring, sexier, and happier than her overwrought, earnest, incurably single, stripling, tired daughter ever would be. “A mature woman should not lose weight,” Barbara added sententiously. “You are fading away, Da. Either you are overworked or in love.”
“Both, perhaps?” said Priscilla in a bursting bubble of laughter. “I certainly hope so for Daria. This is the prime of her life.”
“Here, here,” said Willem, summoning the waiter with a snap of his long, bony fingers. “Do pour some champagne all around,” he commanded smoothly, turning to Barbara. “The Black Widow all right by you? You are the guest of honor, chère Barbie.”
Barbara nodded slowly and made what was meant to be a tragic face. “Veuve Cliquot black label was Roberto’s favorite champagne,” she remarked wistfully. “We shall drink to his honor.”
“Here, here,” Willem said again. “We shall and no one will stop us.” He paused to raise an eyebrow at Priscilla. “An honorable man Roberto was indeed, a hero, I might say, and his daughter is lining up to rival and perhaps outdo him.” He paused, eyeing Daria. “Developments to share?”
Daria drained her glass and refilled it with sparkling water, draining it again unquenchably, as if the chill distance separating her from her mother could be filled by liquid. “No, I cannot,” she said, looking at Willem. “Ongoing, off limits, can’t say a thing, very sorry.”
“Good for you for telling him no,” said Priscilla, clasping her hands and raising them in a gesture of victory. “We wanted to be liberated and got halfway there,” she added. “Daria’s generation has gone all the way. Had my family returned to Norway after the war and had I not met this dashing old English Dutchman I too might have lived free.”
“Oh, poor Pinky,” said Willem. “What a hideous life of enslavement you’ve lived with me.” He chuckled and added, “Here’s to liberation! Tomorrow is the seventy-something-th anniversary! We kicked the Krauts out for good—except they came back, mounted on deutschmarks, then euros.”
Barbara raised an eyebrow and sniffed. “If liberation means not having a family, working twelve hours a day, six days a week, ignoring your relatives, and trying to look like a teenager when you’re nearly fifty,” she proclaimed, “I might want to revise my definition.”
“What you mean,” teased Willem, “is Daria isn’t at your beck and call, and hasn’t produced grandchildren for you. You disapprove simply because La Davinci hasn’t added to your prodigious collection of descendants. Don’t you agree, Pinky?”
Priscilla shrugged. “I only produced two, as you put it.” She reached out and patted Daria’s hand. “The conversation goes with the décor, n’est-ce-pas? They sound like stuffed animals.”
“I think you mean embalmed animals,” Willem quipped, “or prehistoric beasts, dinosaurs, tyrannosauruses, that sort of thing, in a natural history museum. They ought to rename the club Il Museo, though Galleria isn’t bad, not as in tunnel or shopping mall or art gallery, but rather as in a rogue’s portrait gallery.” He chuckled and chortled and reached over to cover Priscilla’s hand with his own, a gesture of peace and goodwill.
“Speak for yourself,” she snapped, pulling her hand away. “That’s no way to address ladies—or gentlemen either, for that matter.”
Pivoting in her heavy mahogany chair, designed circa 1880 to accommodate the crinolines and bustle dresses of the Galleria’s rare female visitors, Daria took in the unchanging look and atmosphere of this, the city’s oldest, most exclusive club. It had opened its heavy double doors of oak and bronze to the gentle sex only in the 1990s, allowing women full membership when its prehistoric male members had begun to go extinct. Exclusive was no longer the right term. The thick damask curtains and padded carpets and polished, slippery marble floors, the heavy furniture, the wall sconces giving off dismal light, even the warped, purplish panes of glass in the Renaissance-style windows—everything evoked a yesteryear steeped in Genoese sepia. It was the ideal display case for her wizened, refrigerated mother.
The room suddenly reminded her of something else mothball-scented she had seen recently from the outside. Her mind scanned back and found it. Villa Migone. The revered name brought to mind a vision of the Questor. Why had Carlo Alberto Lomelli-Centauri III dined last night at Villa Migone, she wondered again, and why had he gone silent earlier that evening, when she’d phoned from the ruined hilltop farmhouse to say the body of Joseph Gary had been found? “Keep it under wraps,” he had ordered in a choked voice, “until after the ceremony at Villa Migone, that’s an order.”
Why squelch it, she wondered? What was he up to?
“Well, well, well,” Willem intoned, the diplomat again, trying to lighten the atmosphere. “We can safely say this,” he suggested, raising a finger and searching thirstily for the waiter, “Daria and the authorities did not find Joseph Gary underwater today but they did find a marvelous shipwreck full of wine.”
“Do you suppose it was Falernum?” asked Barbara, making an effort to be cheerful. “Nowadays the
y refer to it as Falernian wine.”
“Or that muck with plaster in it?” suggested Priscilla. “The things the ancient Romans did to doctor and ruin good wine!”
As the three chatted in hollow tones about the shipwreck and ancient Roman beverages, segueing to the weather and the boat trip they would take the following day to Lerici and San Terenzo, near the Tuscan border, they waited impatiently for a bottle of champagne and for Daria to be served her dinner. The minutes ticked slowly, the pendulum of the century-old grandfather clock in the corner of the vast, echoing room seemingly stuck in aspic. Daria’s eyelids were leaden. She wanted to be more attentive to her mother, but the accumulated fatigue reached up and began dragging her eyelids down. She was a pearl sinking into the depths of her cushioned seat. Her eyes closed. She nodded, then shook herself awake, smiling guiltily at her attention-starved parent. The words “no connectivity” kept popping up whenever she looked at her or thought of her. Squeezing her mother’s hands, by an act of will she forced herself to stay awake, making her eyes rove around the half-empty dining room, praying they would not fall upon Lomelli-Centauri. The Questor was a regular, she knew, entertaining at the Galleria Club several times a week.
They alighted instead, with relief, on a table in a far corner. There sat the bespectacled, benign, beaming Simonetta Farina, the voluble director of the Palazzo Spinola house museum. She was flanked by an equally lively, elegant woman of extremely advanced age. A wealthy donor, no doubt, Daria said to herself, staring at the twinkling diamonds on the elderly woman’s hair, or hairpiece, rather, and her gnarled fingers. Priceless sparkling antique cut stones also dangled from the woman’s enormously long earlobes and encircled her lavishly wrinkled neck.
Catching Simonetta’s eye, Daria waved, excused herself for a moment from her table partners, then padded across the carpeted room, eager to escape her mother’s oppressive presence. She offered her hand to Simonetta and the distinguished, remarkably old woman with her.
“Please, do not get up,” she insisted. “I just wanted to say hello to you, Simonetta, and how do you do, signora?” She nodded politely at the elderly woman before turning again to Simonetta. “Did you see Ambassador and Priscilla Bremach?” Daria asked. “There they are, across the room, with my mother.”
Simonetta rose and gave Daria a gentle hug. “We’ve already spoken to them,” she said, “at length, over cocktails. Your mother is charming and simply gorgeous. But they suffered mightily,” she added with a trilling laugh, “waiting for you until after eight o’clock. Willem was clearly hangry.”
“He gets metabolistic,” Daria agreed, “if that can be said in any language I supposedly speak. I am feeling somewhat hangry myself right now.” She turned back to the elderly matron. “I’m so sorry to have interrupted…”
“Not at all, how delightful to see you, Daria,” crowed the woman, clasping her claw-like hands and straightening her question-mark back. She tilted her eyes upward, held out her sparkling fingers for Daria to take them, and chirped like a cicada. “You do not remember me, do you, my child?”
Daria felt confused. Simonetta laughed pleasantly. “We are all children to Giuliana,” Simonetta explained. “Daria, you must know Giuliana, Madame la Marquise Augusti-Contini di Mandrella? Turn over a stone in Genoa and you will find a member of her distinguished family. She has been a friend of your godparents and mother since the beginning of time.”
“Oh, long before the beginning of time,” remarked the marquise gamely. “Willem Bremach almost crashed his silly little airplane into our house when he was the world’s original beardless aviator, a mere boy in uniform during the war.” She paused, laughing softly. “I also knew your father very slightly, many decades ago, a wonderful man, what happened to him was tragic, I give you my condolences albeit a quarter century late, I’m afraid, then again I have not seen you since you were a child.” From under her shock of white hair, brushed up into a funnel-like hairpiece and held in place with a tiara, she studied Daria’s rumpled police uniform. Hers were the black eyes of a crow, a venerable old bird. Daria suddenly felt naked. Though she had checked her sidearm with the manager in a safe in the cloakroom, her holster gaped open. The marquise glanced at it. “Not come to arrest anyone?” she asked in the warbling, jocular tone Willem Bremach favored. Then she laughed again.
Daria stared an extra beat before answering. She still could not place the marquise. She seemed the incarnation of a seventeenth-century portrait, a Genoese noblewoman lifted from the walls of Palazzo Spinola. Her animal magnetism and charisma were irresistible. “Why, of course we’ve met,” Daria dissimulated, gaming for time. “What a pleasure, but it has been years, decades. I am so glad to see you.”
“Still alive,” the marquise quipped. “Your mother and Willem are whippersnappers compared to me,” she added. “I have reached the age at which it is perfectly polite to boast,” she continued, her voice warming. “Shall I give you a hint? In what year was the Treaty of Versailles signed?” From under drooping, wizened eyelids, the marquise observed Daria with her raven eyes.
Daria shook her head and feigned disbelief. “Impossible,” she said, taking the marquise’s hand. “What is the secret of eternal youth?”
“I do not possess it,” she remarked. “I have eternal old age.” Her laughter was full-throated now. The marquise smiled wickedly. “Egoism,” she said, “and a desire to set the world straight or remake it in your image.” She cackled now. “Passion, love, altruism, but also a sinful lust for revenge is very invigorating. And self-indulgence. You must drink quantities of champagne and fine liqueur. Do not let the quacks tell you differently.”
“Good genes help,” Simonetta put in.
“Good genes are essential, my dear,” the marquise corrected. “I am one hundred percent Genoese.”
Daria felt as if she had been slapped repeatedly by their words. Suddenly, she began paying attention. The smiling face of Zack Armstrong came back to her saying good genes, then the mangled corpse of Joseph Gary welled up, draped across the farmhouse wall. Good genes? Daria shook her head, feeling dizzy. She was faint from starvation but determined to learn what she could from the marquise.
“Giuliana is a phenomenon of nature,” continued Simonetta Farina. “She still drives her own car!”
“Well,” said the marquise, clearly delighted, “Ambassador Bremach still flies his silly little airplanes. What of it? If I weren’t such a good Catholic, I would leave my body to science.” She cackled loudly enough that several heads turned.
“Perhaps having many children is also part of the secret equation?” Simonetta teased. “The marquise had six, was it not? Like your mother, Daria.”
The marquise assented, raised her glass of champagne, and smiled. “Yes, six, and all survived into adulthood, each had four, and the four had two each, all very boring and symmetrical, if you ask me, with even numbers, when I am a great believer in odd ones. In any case, the third generation is now ready to disgorge more of us into the world. So far, we are forty-eight by my count, scattered across the globe.”
“I only know one of your children,” Simonetta said, “Franco, a captain of industry.”
“Long retired,” said the marquise, batting away the flattery as if it were an imaginary insect. “Franco was the first, born during the bombardments, in 1942, in Genoa. We fled to a country property we owned at the time, like thousands of others. It was the house Willem Bremach nearly crashed his Spitfire into in 1945, silly boy. I called my son Franco for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, you know.” She paused and openly studied Daria. “‘Winston’ was impossible to pronounce in Italian. Besides, I thought the Fascists might kill me if I tried to register that name. Everyone in my family was a zealous follower of Mussolini. I was the only dissenter. What times, what times!”
“Yes,” Simonetta agreed, winking at Daria. “Thank goodness they are over.”
“Are they?” the marquise r
etorted. “I am not so sure. You have read Nietzsche? The eternal return? I’m told that in Australia they hunt with boomerangs.” She paused, raising an arm and perilously pretending to throw something. “You fling it out and the boomerang comes back. That is history, repeating itself. But it is your problem now, not mine. Over to you and the new generations!” She smiled again and sipped her champagne. “You must come visit,” she added spontaneously, rising in her seat while shaking Daria’s hand again with her gnarled fingers, her grip astonishingly firm. “Come to my summer house at Capo Augusti, near San Terenzo. Ambassador Bremach or Priscilla can give you my private telephone number.” She pressed Daria’s hand with insistence. “Why not come with them and your dear mother, tomorrow, now that I think of it? They’re taking the ferry to Lerici and Portovenere in the morning and then coming to me. Bring swimsuits,” she added with almost girlish enthusiasm, “I’m told the water is unseasonably warm.”
Pleased to be asked, Daria made all the right noises, then slipped away, feeling she had already stayed away from her own table far too long. Crossing the dining room again, she was relieved to see a dish of salad and a basket of bread at her place. She was also alarmed to see her mother sulking. She knew what would follow.
“We haven’t spent time together in months,” Barbara complained in a mopey voice, the Dolce Vita radio broadcaster gone. “At the first opportunity, you get up and spend half an hour with that museum director and the enchantress marquise, whom you hardly know.”
“It’s all in a day’s work,” said Willem Bremach, running interference. He winked at Daria and patted Barbara’s hand. “She must keep up her social connections, don’t you think? How else will she become the Vice Questor?”
“That is true,” said Priscilla decisively, “for once Willem is right.”
“Pinky!”
Daria blinked. The screen in her brain had gone black from exhaustion and hunger. Now, as she ate and drank, the colors were coming back and she began to feel better. She was not sure where the salad and bread had disappeared to, or the second glass of champagne Willem had set before her. Rarely had she been so famished. She had devoured the food and drunk deep, despite the recurrent hologram image of Joseph Gary’s ruined corpse and his agonizing grimace floating in the dining room, tormenting her mind on an encrypted channel invisible to the others.