by David Downie
A moment later Italo Gambero was shouting into his smartphone, asking who was calling. Daria identified herself, instructing him as quickly and soberly as she could to drive to the marquise’s villa at Capo Augusti and wait outside the gates if he arrived before her. “And Italo,” she added, hastily. “Call the Civil Defense outpost in Portofino or Rapallo or Santa Margherita and tell them to send out a helicopter or a rescue team, there are hikers on the seaside trail near San Fruttuoso, hanging from chains on the cliffs.”
“Anything else?” Gambero asked.
“Yes, pick up some of that farinata chickpea tart for me, I’m starving.” She nodded to Striker and he disconnected.
“Great electrical conductors, those chains,” he laughed. “Daria saves the day.”
“How do you know you can land at the villa?” she asked calmly, cognizant of the approaching danger. “I’ve seen photos of it. That promontory is covered with trees, and there is no helipad on the property. I checked the other day after I met the marquise at the club.”
“Trust me,” he grinned. “I’ve been there before.”
Daria nodded grimly, unable to repress a smirk, then said, “With my godfather?”
“You bet,” Striker confirmed. “Willem’s quite a guy. Too bad he hurt his knee, that kind of spoiled the fun for him.” Before Daria could ask him what he meant, she saw the island of Palmaria welling up below them, separated by a few hundred yards of sea from the rocky peninsula of Portovenere. “Didn’t Lord Byron die here?” Striker asked suddenly, glancing down. “Swimming across the Gulf of La Spezia?”
“That was Shelley, I think,” she answered, eager not to distract him.
“Oh yes, how stupid of me, it was Percy Bysshe Shelley, in 1822. How could I forget? I guess you didn’t read much poetry in medical school, but maybe you got plenty of highbrow reads at those fancy private prep schools in Rome and London? It’s a funny thing, I was a product of blue-collar America and a mere scholarship boy, but I read all of Byron and Shelley in college and graduated first in my class in English lit. Here I am, flying a helicopter and playing 007 with a girl who no longer loves me and probably doesn’t even like me anymore.”
“I’m not a girl,” Daria started to say.
“It’s a manner of speaking,” he interrupted. “Poetic license. Never mind. I’m sure it’s my fault. One of the drawbacks of the profession. It’s hard not to become an asshole.” Striker laughed his savage laugh again. “Just watch out for that Gianni character,” he added in an apparent non sequitur. “Gianni Giannini is no average traffic cop. I did a little checking and guess what, he’s got a PhD, in philosophy. Talk about a worthless, useless degree! No wonder he wound up issuing parking tickets in Rapallo. But I’ll bet he reads lots of poetry and is dying to recite some for you. He’s got a pair of kids in tow. I’ll bet you didn’t know that.”
Nonplussed, Daria nodded, then shook her head, confused, offended, angry, unsure how to reply and increasingly concerned by Striker’s erratic behavior. “I barely know the man,” she began.
“That’s how you ‘Begin the Beguine,’” he snorted, singing a snatch from the old Cole Porter tune from the 1930s. Then he changed registers and quoted Jane Austen from memory. “A man who has once been refused!” he declared like a ham actor, taking one hand off the controls to wave it. “Is there one among the sex, who would not protest against such a weakness as a second proposal to the same woman?”
Daria was momentarily speechless. “Are you really quoting Pride and Prejudice to me in a helicopter with Armageddon on the way?”
“I am,” he said.
“And you imagine you’re playing Mr. Darcy to my Elizabeth? That’s absurd.”
“You know it’s my favorite book. I’ve been rereading it for the fourth time.”
“Please concentrate on flying this helicopter, or we’ll both get killed.”
“That might not be so bad,” he said in a melancholy tone. “United again, forever, with Shelley and Byron too, why not?” Striker was strangely silent for an interminable minute. Then he sighed and spoke again, this time calmly. “I’m sorry, Daria, I don’t usually make such a fool of myself. But it is hard to be rejected twice by the same woman, especially if she’s a woman you have never stopped lusting after, God knows why. And by the way, love and lust go hand in hand in my book. I still lust you.”
Daria bit her lower lip until it hurt, then took a deep breath, her nostrils flaring. “Andrew,” she started to say, then faltered, then began again, “we’ll have to continue this very disconcerting conversation another time. I appeal to your professionalism.”
“Right you are,” he cut her off, his voice cold and hard now. “Look ahead of you. There’s the Castle of Lerici, and there’s that perfect half-moon beach at San Terenzo. We went there once, remember? And there, on that crooked point of land, is the marquise’s villa at Capo Augusti, and now we’re going to sneak in between those trees and try to land on the lawn, try being the operative concept.”
The helicopter slammed on its air brakes. It felt to Daria like an express elevator in a New York skyscraper—the old Twin Towers, she now realized she was thinking. The rushing whirlygig rose, slowed, then fell all at once in a dizzying, sick-making movement. She stared down longingly at the solid ground—but what she saw was a dangerously beautiful, rocky, wave-lashed promontory with nowhere to land. It was cloaked in dense vegetation, bristling with flame cypresses, bay laurels, and parasol pines. A long, low Renaissance villa at the end of a gated, looping driveway nested in its center. She spotted two cars in a parking lot, one an SUV of some kind, the other a white four-door passenger car she vaguely recognized as belonging to Priscilla Bremach. Italo Gambero was neither outside nor inside the gates with the DIGOS BMW.
Before Daria could turn her head and speak to Striker, with breathtaking speed, the black cloud of thundering rain and red sand had wheeled around and was upon them. Lightning struck simultaneously on three sides, and the wind lifted and tilted the helicopter, shaking it like a child’s toy. Through the horizontal, red rain she saw one of the towering pine trees below them burst into flames, then snap in half. Scorched, the trunk blackened and burning, the orange flames from the tree hissed in the rain. Hovering precariously in the gusting winds, Striker attempted to lower the copter to land on a wide expanse of lawn ringed by a greenbelt.
“Damn it,” he shouted, the explosion of words nearly blowing out Daria’s eardrums. “The top of that burning tree is on the lawn,” he growled. “I can’t touch down.” Striker expertly held the Kiowa about ten feet above the lawn and took one hand off the controls to flip a switch. Daria heard a whirring sound and saw a hatch pop open. A ladder uncoiled beneath her on her side of the helicopter. “Out you go,” Striker said, waiting for her to make a move.
She stared down in horror and realized she was shaking her head. “I can’t,” she started to say.
“Better a twisted ankle than death by crashing and burning,” he roared, his sardonic laughter scaring her more than the prospect of the ladder or falling to the lawn. “Go on, Daria, or we’ll crash for sure, I can’t hold her much longer.”
“I won’t,” she said, unzipping her fanny pack and clutching her service revolver. “I order you—”
Striker cut her off with a snarl. “You can’t order me for chrissakes, you’re on U.S. territory in this fucking helicopter, so put your pathetic peashooter away and climb down that ladder, goddammit.”
The copter jerked and swung like a swing seat on a roller-coaster. Daria felt her gorge rising but choked it back. She tore off the helmet, flung open the Plexiglas passenger door, and somehow found a way to turn sideways and get her feet on the top rung of the slippery, swinging aluminum chain-link ladder. “Be careful,” she shouted at him, her words lost in the wind and rain.
“It’s been great,” Striker shouted back, taking one of her outstretched hands and press
ing it for a split second. “Give my best to Willem.”
As if on a trapeze, Daria clutched the rungs of the whipping, swinging lifeline, clambered crazily down, and dropped to the lawn five or six feet below. Skipping away in a crouch, her ankles and knees intact, she turned and watched the helicopter tipping to one side then the other, quaking, rising, and spinning into the gale, then zipping like a giant dragonfly back out to sea, headed for the port of La Spezia. Within seconds, it had disappeared into the quivering curtain of bruised, reddish-black clouds that wrapped the cape and villa, thundering and flashing, the lightning striking the white-capped sea.
Clutching her billed cap and fanny pack, Daria crouched for a moment longer under the flailing branches of the pine trees, trying to regain composure and make sense of what Striker had said. Spoiled the fun?
“Calm, quiet, methodical,” she recited to herself out loud, running across the lawn toward the pale ocher silhouette of the villa’s terrace. It was long, narrow, and paved with slippery stones. The darkness was intense. She stumbled and almost fell while climbing the lichen-etched staircase, her shoes making a sloshing sound.
Leaning on the inside of a set of tall French windows thrown open for Daria, four familiar figures stood waiting. Two of them were propped on canes. In the darkness, they looked like weather-worn caryatids holding up the ancient sculpted marble threshold.
Twenty-Five
The cumulative age of the caryatids, Daria calculated, identifying first the marquise, then her own mother, then Willem and Pinky, must be around three hundred and fifty years. They were soaked to the skin, but smiling, beaming, at her approach.
“Magnifico!” shouted the marquise, her hands clutched together.
“Deus ex machina,” Bremach chuckled mischievously, taking Daria by the arm and pulling her behind as they retreated indoors and shook themselves like wet dogs. “Hail!” he added, bursting into mirthful laughter, “Da Vinci has descended!”
She could not help noticing that Willem looked even more dashing and sporty than usual. He was wearing a summer-weight seersucker suit and a dark blue cravat loosely knotted around his wrinkled neck. The neck was that of a venerable tortoise. The tortoise brought to mind Gilda, the tortoise-seaplane, but also Andrew Striker’s words about spoiling the ambassador’s fun.
Standing upright unaided, Willem began clapping. “I’m so glad the mercurial Mr. Striker chose not to prune the pine trees just now with his rotors. It was an impressive landing.”
“But he did not land,” corrected Priscilla, coming up from behind. “Daria jumped, she was magnificent, as the marquise said!”
“Yes, magnificent,” repeated Willem. He paused to chortle. “And to think, we merely drove down in Pinky’s ancient jalopy while you arrived like a demigod, nay, like Zephyr himself, riding the winds, with lightning, rain, and Saharan sands. Brava, Daria!”
Daria glanced at her glowering, silent mother and saluted the voluble marquise, but was so disoriented she did not know what to say. Leaning forward, she pecked Pinky on the cheeks, then her mother, then Willem.
“You are very welcome at my villa, commissario,” crowed the marquise, extending an avian hand, and drawing Daria further into the salon. As they stood under a vast crystal chandelier that was swaying in the wind, a flash of lightning struck another tree in the garden and thunder clapped violently, blinding and deafening everyone for several seconds. The lights flickered, then went out. When Daria’s eyes adjusted to the gloom, she saw the exquisite pearls around the marquise’s neck shining as bright as Andrew Striker’s teeth, reflecting the gleam of a lantern someone had lit on the other side of the room.
“Come, give me a kiss too,” admonished the marquise. “We are all so very glad you have come at last, right in time for the denouement.”
A butler and maid in formal, antediluvian black-and-white uniforms stood clutching a candlestick and lantern, waiting at attention in one corner of the long, wide frescoed salon. Imperturbable, they appeared to be almost as old as the marquise, though that seemed impossible. Surely, they would retire before reaching eighty, ninety, or one hundred? Adding their prospective ages to those of the rest of the company, she estimated the total would top five hundred.
Game as ever despite the storm and her wet clothing, the marquise commanded her servants to remain where they were, holding the only lights. Daria’s mother beckoned, but before Barbara could speak, Madame La Marquise insisted on leading the commissioner by the hand down a long, dark hallway to the bathrooms, where il commissario capitano might wash her hands and powder her nose.
“My nose is very long,” quipped the marquise.
“And mine is remarkably prominent,” said Daria.
“Then we are both like Pinocchio,” the marquise replied, “and must stop telling lies.”
The facilities were at the far end of the many-windowed hallway. A dusky gray light seeped in from outside, the storm still raging. Like the salon, the hall was frescoed floor to ceiling with mythological scenes. Daria stared at them as she and the marquise crept along, the elderly aristocrat leaning on Daria’s forearm. Had these works of art been executed, Daria wondered wryly, by one of the Republic of Genoa’s celebrated geniuses, those great masters of mannerism or the baroque unjustly, tragically unknown to anyone outside the region?
“Luca Cambiaso,” crowed the marquise, reading Daria’s mind and glancing from her to the dark walls as she shuffled forward, bent like a bishop’s crook by age and osteoporosis. “They say it is his best work. I’m sure in Rome you would not give it a second glance, but by our provincial standards it is quite good. Hercules wrestling the Centaur,” she continued, pausing to wave with her free hand at something Daria could barely make out. “Highly original. Found in every property in Liguria. Oh well. There is an extra helping of centaurs on the walls of this particular villa. If you are wondering, the answer is yes, my child, General Carlo Alberto Lomelli-Centauri and I are distant cousins, very distant cousins. This house belonged to the Centauri clan during the time of the maritime republic’s greatest admiral, Andrea Doria, in the sixteenth century.”
“I’m sure the artwork is priceless,” Daria said, clearing her throat. “But might we speak alone for a moment, confidentially and undisturbed?” she asked.
“Oh yes, my child, that is why I have led you here, away from distractions, including your charming mother. But first, wash your hands and powder your elegant nose. I shall await you down there, in the vestibule, by the front door. Your mother and the others have been instructed to stay in the salon. Your mother is most anxious not to have her rubber of bridge interrupted, but that is life, is it not? I’m afraid Willem scolded her a moment ago, when we heard the helicopter flying over the garden. He told her to stop pouting and complaining and stay quiet for as long as you were here, because you had very serious affairs of state to discuss with me. What a handsome boy Willem was back then,” she mused. “He nearly crashed his plane into our house,” she added. “Not this one. The house in Prati di Bovecchia, I mean. But surely I’ve already told you that?”
Daria bowed politely, then stepped into the bathroom and took a deep breath, more pieces falling into place. The bathroom was the size of a cupboard. It appeared to have been retrofitted a century or more ago into a niche in the hallway. Opening the twin antique silver spigots above a marble basin, she splashed water on her dusty, grimy face, arranged her tousled hair as best she could, pulled her wet windbreaker to the left then the right until it appeared less bulging and baggy, and reappeared a few minutes later in the corridor. Cocking her head to listen, she felt confident the salon was too far away for anyone there to hear what she was about to say to the marquise.
Joining her in the vestibule, she found the antique noblewoman sitting up straight on a wooden bench upholstered in red velvet. The legs were gilded, ornately carved, and made to look like the stylized limbs and paws of antelopes and lions. It and the m
arquise made a perfect match. Daria guessed the unusual piece of furniture was four or five hundred years old, like the frescoes and everything else she had seen in the villa.
A tall glass of sparkling water sat on an end table. The marquise motioned toward it. “Drink, Daria,” she said. “You must be thirsty. I know you like your water sparkling. Willem says so. Flying always dries one out. I believe it’s the air conditioning.” She smiled and peered up. Then, before Daria could speak, she added, “Say the word, my dear, I am ready to leave when you are, storm conditions permitting.” She indicated a small overnight case packed and waiting in a dark corner by the front door.
“Leave?” Daria asked. “With me?”
The marquise laughed. “I thought we were going to stop telling lies,” she commented. “I will, you shall see.” She paused and with a nod indicated the suitcase again. “We got used to being prepared, you see, during the bombardments. It’s not the kind of thing you forget easily. Willem will explain to your mother and Priscilla. You are only doing your duty. No hard feelings. I am ready.”
“May I sit down?” Daria asked, not waiting for the marquise to answer. The many moving parts of the case that had been a blur of separate motion began to slide together, a synchromesh transmission slipping smoothly into gear. She hovered next to the centenarian, careful to test the strength of the bench before putting her full weight on it. Then she settled down and glanced out of the tall windows on the other side of the vestibule. With rain streaming down the outsides, the panes rattled but held and did not leak. The gale had already begun to blow itself out.
“They certainly knew how to build back then,” the marquise remarked, raising her dry, raptor voice over the wind and rain. “This property was finished in the 1560s. So, you see, it is not that very old by the standards of Genoa but still, it has weathered many storms.”
“I hope you don’t mind if I ask,” Daria began, shifting from first to second gear. “Did one of your siblings by chance marry an Ansaldo?”