Absolute Zero: Misadventures From A Broad (Val & Pals Book 1)

by Margaret Lashley

  “Hiya, beetroot!”

  Tina’s sharp, Jersey accent yanked me out of my Italian daydream with all the subtlety of a needle scratching through a vinyl record.

  “What?”

  “Sorry to say it, gal, but your face is as red as a baboon’s ass. And that hairdo ain’t helpin’ your case.”

  Aww, crap! I blushed, not that anyone could tell. So that’s why the men were staring.

  “Thanks for the beauty tips,” I said sourly.

  Tina laughed. “Yeah. No prob. Any luggage yet?”

  I shook my head.

  “That’s a bitch.”

  Val II was the next to appear. She studied my sorry state with an evil gleam in her eye.

  “My goodness. Look at the state of you. Has your luggage not yet arrived?”

  “No.”

  As each volunteer straggled to the breakfast table, I had to answer the same question over and over again.

  “Has your luggage arrived yet?” Berta asked.

  “No.”

  I guess it was one of those idiotic questions everyone felt compelled to ask. Still, I began to wonder. Did they actually think I would have worn this outfit again if my luggage was here?

  “Hasn’t your luggage arrived yet?” Frank complained, as if it was my fault.

  The question grew more inane and annoying with every asking. I was about to get huffy, but then my empty stomach gurgled like a fart in a mud puddle. I got up and made a beeline for the buffet.

  I chose a big, fluffy croissant, a ball of fresh mozzarella, and two delicately thin slices of prosciutto ham. Local jams and fancy-looking cakes were also on offer, but I didn’t have much of a sweet tooth at breakfast time. I also wasn’t tempted by the granola and corn flakes in glass jars next to huge pitchers of milk. Corn flakes? With all these local delicacies to choose from, who in the world would pick cereal?

  We were halfway through breakfast when tall, lanky Peter finally made his appearance.

  “Hey Val, did you get your luggage yet?”

  “No.” I sighed.

  Peter sniggered. “My bags were the first ones off the plane.”

  It was official. Peter had the social skills of…an IRS accountant.

  ***

  At ten after eight, Monica Mozzarelli arrived to take the first group of volunteers to their assigned schools. We broke breakfast with plans to meet in the lobby at 1 p.m. for lunch. I headed to the front desk to check on my missing bags. As I stood in line to speak to Antonio, a firm hand squeezed me on the shoulder. I turned to find Frank staring at me. He tapped a sausage-like finger on his wristwatch.

  “We’re late,” he barked. “Let’s get going.”

  “I don’t think the lady should go, looking like that,” interrupted Ms. Mozzarelli.

  “I would have to concur,” Val II said in a snotty tone. “You really should try to do something about your appearance.”

  I stood there, totally humiliated and mad as a hornet. My frizzy, brown hair looked like an afro caught in a hailstorm. My sunburned face and legs glowed like hot coals. My shirt was blotchy with nasty-looking coffee stains. At crotch level, a wet spot soaked through my crumpled brown skirt from my damp underwear.

  I had become the incontinent bag lady from Mars.

  Even Frank had to begrudgingly agree with Ms. Mozzarelli’s assessment.

  “Okay,” he grumbled. “You’re off the hook. But just for today.”

  “Thank you, sir,” I said.

  Val II shook her Botox head at me in disgust. I turned back toward the front desk. The hotel manager, Antonio, didn’t need to ask why I was there.

  “Mi dispiache, Signora Val. No luggage for you today.”

  The slim, elegant man in the expensive, charcoal-grey suit offered me the kind of empathetic expression usually reserved for lost kittens.

  “Tomorrow, yes,” he said, unconvincingly. His eyes moved down to a guest receipt on the counter. He began to study it as if it were the secret treasure map of the lost continent of Atlantis.

  I pulled up my damp, big-girl panties and focused my attention on Antonio like a mooching dog watching the last bite of pork chop head for its owner’s mouth. I knew if I was ever going to see my luggage again, I needed an Italian champion on my side. I smiled at the handsome man like a cat charming its prey.

  “Ahem, Antonio.”

  The poor guy looked up from his paperwork and jumped when he realized I was still there. His startled face slowly transformed into the doomed expression of a man who’d just told his wife she didn’t look too fat in her new dress. I stifled a snicker. Grandma Violet taught me I could catch more flies with honey than turpentine, so I laid on the Southern charm. To be honest, I also didn’t want to give Val II the satisfaction of seeing me upset.

  “I lost my sweater this morning,” I said with a laugh. “If this keeps up, by the end of the week I’ll be naked and penniless!”

  Antonio studied me curiously. When he realized I wasn’t angry, he let his well-guarded professionalism slip. He eyed me questioningly and said, “No capire…uh…I don’t understand.”

  “Huh?”

  “I don’t understand why you still a smile.” He tilted his head and eyed me as if I had something he might want.

  “I’m on vacation, I’m in Italy, and the sun is shining,” I explained, pouring on the syrup while Val II was watching. “What more do I need to be happy?”

  Antonio sucked his teeth and looked at me skeptically.

  “The only thing that could make me happier than staying at your wonderful hotel would be to find my luggage,” I pandered. I smiled cheerfully at the suave, dark-haired man.

  Antonio drew in a great breath, held it in for a second, and blew it out noisily. His head dropped down for a moment. When he looked up again, his face had taken on the resigned look of a man ready to do battle.

  “Okay. I help you,” he said, looking as if he already regretted his words.

  ***

  After four hours of waiting around on a couch as Antonio engaged in heated phone discussions in Italian, he finally hung up the phone and motioned for me to come up to the desk.

  “I have found one of your bags. It will be delivered to the hotel tomorrow.”

  “Gratzie mille!” I cheered. I wanted to hug my handsome hero, but I didn’t think it was local protocol.

  Antonio looked at me wearily, wiped fake sweat from his brow and smiled dutifully.

  “Prego, Signora.”

  I glanced at the clock above the front desk. It was a few minutes before 1 p.m. I thanked Antonio again and took a seat in one of the square black chairs to wait for the rest of the volunteers to pick me up for lunch. It turned out to be another long wait.

  At 2:45, the volunteer group finally appeared through the lobby’s glass, double-doored entryway. I stood up. When they spotted me, the looks on their faces said it all. Berta and Tina looked mortified.

  “Were you waiting for us?” Berta asked.

  “Um…yes.”

  “Val II said you weren’t coming. Sorry,” Tina apologized.

  “It’s okay. I’ll survive.”

  I looked over at Val II. She was walking in the door with Frank. She shot me a smile as fake as her boobs. I decided to fake it as well. I threw back my head and laughed.

  “I guess I’m the foil in an Italian comedy of errors,” I giggled.

  Val II sneered, but my cheerful act was more than Antonio could bear.

  “How can you laugh?” he demanded of me. “You have nothing but the clothes on your body. No sweater. Not even any food. Yet you laugh. This is impossible. I take you to lunch. Basta!”

  Before I could open my mouth to speak, a man who’d just walked up next to me said, “I’ll take her to lunch.”

  Antonio flashed a dark glance at the man. Something akin to rivalry registered in the handsome manager’s eyes for a second, then faded. I wondered what had caused his change of heart. Was it something to do with this other man? Or could it be that Ant
onio suddenly remembered his wife, who was standing right behind him? In either case, Antonio hesitated for only a split second before speaking.

  “Of course, Friedrich. You take her to lunch.”

  I turned to face this man, Friedrich. He was not Italian. He was blond and fair skinned, and about six inches taller than me. His square face was unreadable. His thin-lipped mouth neither smiled nor frowned. His ice-cool, blue eyes would have made any poker professional proud. The man made me a little nervous, but hunger had yet again weakened my resolve.

  I looked over at Antonio for reassurance. His handsome face softened into a quick smile and a nod. On the other hand, Val II’s eyes had turned venomous.

  I turned back to the stranger and said, “Okay.”

  He took off his dark-framed glasses and said, “Come with me.”

  For the second time in two days, I followed a strange man out of my comfort zone and into his car. This time, however, the car was a shiny, silver Peugeot convertible, and the man was under seventy years old. Friedrich turned the key in the ignition and we were off.

  ***

  “Hi, I’m Val Jolly,” I said as I buckled myself in.

  The forty-something man shot me a quick glance. “Friedrich Fremden,” he offered matter-of-factly. He shifted gears and pulled out of the hotel driveway.

  “I’m sorry about the way I look,” I apologized.

  Friedrich kept his eyes on the road. “Why?”

  I opened my mouth to say something, but couldn’t come up with a word.

  “I think you look good,” he said. “I don’t know how you will be when you are all puffed up.”

  “Uh…thanks.”

  “What would you like to eat?” he asked, switching the topic like a radio dial.

  “Uh…pizza? Anything, really.”

  Friedrich nodded. His right hand worked automatically, shifting gears. He drove without hesitation. It was obvious he was familiar with the streets and the layout of the town. He even knew when it was time to dodge the local potholes. A few minutes later, we arrived at a restaurant just in time to see a kid change the sign on the front door from aperto to chiuso. Closed.

  Great. Another joke on me. I mustered a sarcastic laugh. It earned me half a smile from Friedrich.

  “Why don’t we go to Alberobello,” he suggested.

  “Sure. Why not?”

  Friedrich maneuvered his little convertible out of the parking lot, shifted gears and hit the gas. A few minutes later, the bustling little city of Brindisi fell away behind us. The land opened up to sweeping swaths of green pastures dotted with giant, brown rolls of harvested hay. It reminded me of the fields outside Greenville, but there they’d grown corn and soybeans, not hay.

  The breeze blew through my rat’s nest tangle of hair. I untied my horrid ponytail and let my wavy brown hair fly free. We drove past gentle swells of coffee-colored earth planted with ancient olive trees. Rustic farmhouses and leafy vineyards came into view and quickly faded as we sped by. The country air smelled of rain and fresh figs. The sky was a brilliant, clear blue and the early-afternoon sun beat down brutally on my already roasted face and hands.

  I fished around in my purse for some sunscreen and slathered it on my face and arms. I started to do the same for Friedrich, but when I touched his arm, he stiffened like a department store mannequin. It made me freeze, too.

  “I’m sorry! Did you not want –”

  “It’s okay,” he apologized. He fumbled for words. “It has…been…much time before someone had…touched me.”

  His honesty took me by surprise. As I gently smoothed the cream onto his forearms, I unexpectedly had to fight back tears. I knew just how he felt. I, too, missed the comfort of human contact. I wondered how long it had been for Friedrich.

  “Where are you from?” I asked.

  “Germany,” he said.

  “Oh! I’m from –”

  “I think I am safe to say it. You are American.”

  “That obvious, huh?”

  “Ja. The volunteer groups at the hotel. Mostly Americans.”

  “Oh. We’re not the first group then?”

  “That’s a trulli,” Friedrich said, ignoring my question. He pointed as we sped past a round, white house capped with a cone-shaped roof made of stacked, grey slate. “And that is Alberobello.”

  I turned to face forward. Straight ahead, at the top of a hill, lay a magical city made of round dollops of merengue, their tops dipped in grey. The pointy, grey roofs of stacked slate stones shone like rickety crowns against the robin’s-egg, blue sky. I’d had no idea such a place existed beyond the pages of a fairytale. I caught my breath and stared.

  Alberobello grew even lovelier as we drove into its center. Each small, gleaming, whitewashed house had its own hobbit-like personality. Some were adorned with strange symbols on their roofs. Others had pots of red geraniums in the windowsills. A couple of them displayed quaint, hand-painted shop signs advertising the wares of bakers and butchers. Still others nestled among the shadows of prehistoric-looking olive trees, dwarfed by their massive trunks as big-around as tables and as twisted as rope.

  Friedrich shifted his convertible into an empty spot and tucked a parking pass that looked like a lottery scratch-off onto the dashboard. Like a man on a mission, he marched us quickly past the main street lined with tacky tourist shops filled with tacky tourists buying tacky tourist souvenirs.

  My disillusionment over the commercialism quickly evaporated as I followed the determined German up a narrow side street. We snaked by clusters of trulli houses with cute, beckoning doorways guarded by lazy cats and huge clay pots bursting with flowering plants. As we wound our way uphill, my kitten-heeled sandals proved no match for the cobblestones.

  “Could you slow down, please, Friedrich?” I pleaded.

  “Turn around,” he commanded.

  I panicked for a second. Did he think I was complaining? Was he was ready to put me back in the car and take me to the hotel?

  I studied his face quickly. All I could discern was a mild, scientific interest – like a botanist inspecting an interesting species of orchid. But he wasn’t inspecting me. His eyes were on something over my head. I turned around. The view took my breath away.

  From our vantage point on the top of the hill, the entire town of Alberobello lay before us like a gigantic, white honeycomb of houses. The effect was that of hundreds of slate-topped trullis nested safely aboard a grey raft of cobblestone streets, set adrift in a sea of silver olive trees, surrounded by purple mountains and mist.

  “Bellissimo,” I whispered.

  Friedrich smiled fully for the first time.

  “You are hungry, yes?” he asked.

  “I’m famished!”

  “And that means…yes?”

  I’d forgotten! English was Friedrich’s second language. Or was it his third? Or fourth?

  “Si, that definitely means yes. I’m hungry.”

  “Pizza now?”

  “Perfecto,” I said, hoping it was a real Italian word.

  Chapter Five

  I woke, yawned, and looked at the clock. Crap. It was only 5 a.m. Still, what a difference a day can make! After the drive to Alberobello with Friedrich yesterday, he’d dropped me off at a boutique in the center of Brindisi. I’d bought a pair of white Capri pants with black floral stitching and a black top with sequin bling. It was the most sedate outfit I could find that actually fit me. When I tried it on, a man in the shop had told me I looked very Italian. I took this as a compliment, as he was a handsome man and I was doing my best to keep any and all vain fantasies alive.

  Friedrich had drawn for me a map with directions back to the hotel. He’d explained that it was simple – only one turn to make. But I’d insisted on the map anyway. It hadn’t been worth the risk.

  On my way back from the boutique to the hotel, I’d found a small shop selling toothbrushes and sundries. I’d stocked up on aloe lotion, razors, deodorant, mouthwash and toothpaste. Then I’d gone home
and scrubbed my teeth and tackled the forest of hair on my legs and armpits. Afterwards, I’d stood on my balcony in the purple twilight, wearing nothing but a towel. Scandalous! I’d watched an incredible moon come up from beneath the sea. The warm wind had caressed my neck like a lover’s breath. Or maybe it was just the sunburn….

  I stretched in the bed like a cat, then smiled at my new outfit. It was laid out, waiting for me on the chair beside the bathroom door. This morning the hotel room was full of a delicate, purple light. I got out of bed and stood on the balcony, naked, looking out at the sea. Take that, Tammy Jeter! I watched the violet morning sky fade to pink, its color whisked away on the cool, gentle breeze that fluttered the lacey white curtains hanging on either side of the terrace’s French doors.

  The sea was calmer this morning. As the sun began to crack the horizon, strange, shadowy lumps appeared in the water. As the light grew stronger, the lumps slowly took on the shapes of a dozen or so small boats, each piloted by a one-man crew. On shore, I could see a man flailing his arm up and down repeatedly. Curious, I got dressed in my new outfit (and sexy new panties and bra, yay!) and went down to investigate.

  I snuck past the sleeping night clerk, who was passed out in a pinstriped suit on the lobby couch. One of his long legs hung over the back of the sofa. One slim brown hand touched the floor. As I passed by, he grunted, then farted. I slapped my hand over my mouth to keep from bursting out laughing. I snickered and choked and nearly strangled to death as I scurried past him to the exit door.

  I managed to make it outside before I fell into a complete giggle fit. But my smile faded like a jug-eared boy’s dreams when I tried to put on my sandals. After five days in the same shoes, my kitten heels had matured into full grown tigers. They gnawed cruelly at my toes and the back of my heels. I slipped them on half way and hobbled like a drunk across the cobblestone street to the rocky beach. As soon as I hit the golden sand, I flung them off like they were full of hot coals.

  I picked my way over to my favorite boulder. I started to climb it when I heard a strange, intermittent, slapping noise coming from behind the rocks to my right. I scrambled over a huge white stone for a look. A man’s tan, sinewy arm rose up from behind a boulder, startling me. A second later, it came down hard, like a karate chop. Slap!