by Gerry Belle
The villa really was two levels as the estate agent had promised. The level she’d entered contained a spiral, wrought-iron stairway that disappeared to the level below and beyond that lay a large airy salon with French doors along one side. Flinging them open she was awed at the gorgeous view.
A stunning, stone terrace hung out over tiered gardens below. The bay glinted in the distance and Zhara could see a central plaza garden complete with a round fountain spraying water located about half-way down the hillside. Several paths meandered off from the plaza appeared to lead to a series of other villas - two villas to one side, and two to the other. Each villa was different, but Zhara had a good view of each from her hilltop perch.
Turning back to gaze into the salon, the sunlight reflected from the blue waters of the Mediterranean appeared to make the pale white-washed walls of the room glimmer with light. A huge fireplace took up one entire side wall. It was enchanting. The floors glowed with the patina of age and the molded plaster ceilings, though missing a few chunks here and there were intricately beautiful.
A hallway to the right ended in a master bedroom suite with its own bath and separate terrace overlooking the distant bay. The other hall ended in a tidy, if ancient, kitchen with a worn oak work-table, ancient gas range, small pantry and a tiny room with a cot and small half-bath. An obvious reminder that one mustn’t let the ‘help’ use the facilities with the guests. Zhara internally rolled her eyes.
Returning to the salon, she approached the spiral staircase and descended to the ground level. The stair ended in a long, cool hallway that held a door into a large bathroom behind the stairs and a glowing orb of sunlight at the other. To each side of the hallway lay spacious bedrooms, each with their own alcove-terraces dug into the hillside. Vines and clinging plants, interspersed with ferns, created green-walled, oases of tranquility off each bedroom.
The terrace at the end of the hall opened into a narrow shelf with a small set of black iron furniture at one end. This would be a nice place for Basilio and his mother to relax, chat or dine. Or they could join her upstairs on the large terrace with its assortment of plush seating, intricate wrought iron dining table and urns full of trailing bright-red geraniums.
Zhara could see a small greenhouse on one of the terraces below and wondered if there were fresh fruits and vegetables on offer. They’d find out later she supposed. For now she was tired.
Basilio had already deposited his cases in one room and his mother’s in the other. They would share the downstairs bathroom. Zhara was sure her luggage was probably already in the upstairs bedroom. He and his mother were nothing if not efficient and she knew they too, were excited to explore the villa and its grounds.
Zhara returned to her bedroom, and laid down on the bed. It was quite comfortable and it didn’t have that musty, damp smell that many of these old villas usually had accompanying them. She was so tired and was glad Beatriz had already unpacked her bags. Lulled by the absence of worry and fatigue, Zhara let the soothing Mediterranean light relax her into sleep.
Chapter Sixteen
Virus
Zhara woke sweating and gasping for breath. Stumbling into the ancient bath, she finally managed to undress and turn on the water in the tile-lined shower alcove. On shaking legs, she let the water run over her heated head and rinsed the sweat from her body. She barely managed to shampoo her hair, wrap a towel around her soaking tresses, teeter into a cotton-lawn nightgown, and stumble back towards the bed.
On the way, the towel fell from her hair and she knocked over a chair. Once she’d collapsed onto her bed, she simply couldn’t breathe and ended up sweating and struggling to roll a blanket into a long tube and align her spine atop it. This was a trick she’d learned as a child. When one of her friends had an asthma attack, his mother would lay him over a rolled blanket so that his spine was atop the narrow rolled tube of fabric. This allowed his rib-cage to fall open on either side and, in his mother’s theory, “opened his lungs”.
Zhara hadn’t known at the time if it worked, but she could attest to the fact that she could at least breathe a little bit easier now. With the last strength she could muster, she raised her arms above her head, another of her friend’s mother’s tricks, and finally, able to get a few good gasps of air, fell deeply into a sweaty, fevered slumber thinking, “I’ve got the Coronavirus. I hope the others don’t get it.”
She woke once with Beatriz hovering over her with cool, wet clothes. “Don’t come near me, Bea. I’m sick. Don’t want you to get it,” was all she managed to get out before her struggle for breath tired her to the point of unconsciousness again.
Several more times she faded in and out of awareness. The fourth time, she wasn’t hot anymore, but she struggled to even lift an arm. Basilio appeared, propped her up and stuck a straw in her mouth. “Drink,” he ordered. “You’re terribly dehydrated and need to drink.” She obeyed.
“Bea, is she ok?” Zhara mumbled out the question, her tongue thick and uncooperative.
“No, she’s ill too. I’ve got her in the same position and it does seem to work,” he indicated the rolled blanket that propped open her chest. “Marie came down with a fever the second night, but seems ok now,” he added. “I’m fine,” he replied at Zhara’s slight indication towards his tall frame. “If I’ve got it, I don’t feel it.”
She nodded, slid back down in the bed and fell asleep, so fatigued that even moving seemed too much effort. With her last consciousness, she felt Basilio lift her leaden arms and place them over her head. Immediately, she breathed easier and was lost to lala land.
It took two weeks for the household to return to any type of awareness of time. Marie and Basilio had their hands full caring for the two older women and themselves. Marie made up large pots of chicken broth and the household slowly nursed itself back to life on mugs of this, sipped slowly and frequently.
Zhara and Beatriz were wheeled mercilessly into the sun each day and deposited in lounge chairs to take the cure of the ages. Sun really did make everything better. Zhara had always known that and though she fell each day into a deep sleep after the sun had drained her of her will, she did feel slightly better each day.
Beatriz bounced back more quickly and was on her feet again in about a week. For Zhara, it took much longer. It wasn’t so much that she felt terrible, just that she was so tired she could barely walk. The virus had, for some reason, sapped her of energy.
The first week, when they’d all been ill, the household had run out of paper products. As none of them felt they had the energy to go into town, Beatriz had ordered Marie and Basilio to the attics and to find any usable old linens.
They’d hit the jackpot in an old trunk under one of the round, portal-like, leaded-glass windows under the eaves. Once Marie lifted the cracked-leather lid of the old box, she gasped with joy at having found it full of yellowed tablecloths, handkerchiefs and sheets. She summoned Basilio and together they’d lugged the items down to the terrace, cut them into usable-sized cloths, and washed them with hot water and bleach.
Thank heaven for old European bathrooms that always came equipped with a bidet. The entire household simply used the toilet, then slid onto the bidet to wash themselves afterward. Now, each bathroom held two baskets. One on each side of the bidet. The right side held cleanly washed cloths that were employed to pat-dry after washing. The left side was the receptacle for the used cloths.
Each day Marie took the baskets at the end of the day, threw the used cloths into the washer and cycled them through a hot wash with bleach. The empty receptacles were wiped down with a spray-bottle of bleach-water and another cloth. The cleanly washed cloths were then hung in the sun to dry and then neatly folded and placed in the right-side baskets to be used again. When the information would come out later that UV rays killed the virus, the entire household could attest to the fact that they'd roasted themselves and their entire linen supply in the sun, day after day, and were well ahead of that news.
Each bedroom had a sta
ck of neatly washed handkerchiefs for use on noses, sweating necks and faces, and any other place where a tissue might have normally been used. The kitchen used dishtowels where a paper towel might have been a previous norm. It took a lot of washing and hanging out to dry, but it worked and life ticked along without paper products at the Villa Colline.
Finally, they were all free of the virus, but Zhara, still weak, spent most of her days laying out on the terrace and had taken to using Inspector Jaber’s preferred method of surveillance to pass the time. Basilio had found an ancient set of binoculars in the attics and had brought them to her to use from her lounge chair on the terrace. She imagined he thought she was bird-watching, but had found the residents of the adjoining villas to be quite more interesting.
Chapter Seventeen
The Neighbors
Villa Colline held the highest position on the semi-circular ridge of the small enclave set above the bay to the south of Cannes. The five villas that surrounded the central plaza each had a winding path that led down from the houses to the plaza and then a single path wound from the far end of the plaza down to the beach far below.
Zhara knew she wouldn’t be making the trek anytime soon as her muscles seemed to be having a hard time simply walking from her bed to the bathroom or terrace a few times a day. Each day she got stronger, but it was taking a while.
The small greenhouse had turned out to be a god-send, as lime and lemon trees, herbs, leaf lettuces and other vegetables had indeed been planted before the garden staff decided to abandon the household to its fate. Now that the word was out that they’d already had the virus, Marie’s family had come to the rescue and were bringing the items they needed each day from the village. Zhara wasn’t sure about what to think of a family that would abandon one of their daughters to her fate with strangers, but wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth.
Maybe they’d needed the income.
They’d spent all of mid-February to mid-March simply trying to survive and now that Zhara was getting a little bit better each day, there was still no news of the virus receding. In order to fill the time and try to enjoy the beauty around her, Zhara had taken to observing the hillsides of her small cove as though it were her own personal kingdom - which it really was, if you looked at it in that way. She couldn’t go anywhere, so why not learn about what you had?
Most days she peered at the other residents in their villas and began to question Basilio, who ventured to the beach each day for a swim and therefore met the neighbors on the central plaza where most of them gathered each morning for coffee and a socially-distanced chat. Each group kept to a set of chairs placed near the mouth of their villa’s path. Basilio, being a generally gregarious sort of guy, enjoyed these morning conversations and had happily told her about each of the occupants of the other villas.
The two villas to the south were Villa Eau de Vie and Villa Belle Vista. Neither were particularly novel names, but their occupants certainly were. At the furthest point of the lowering ridge, Villa Eau de Vie, was a small, stark white villa with an oddly modern, box-like architecture. Zhara had never taken to that style and associated it, snottily enough, with new money and poor taste - not that that wasn’t hypocritical, because it was - as she herself was new money. Though no one could say she had poor taste.
Its occupants were a couple, not married, but with enough nagging dislike of each other to make it seem they were. Basilio had tagged them as Emile Bisset and his paramour, Anais Travers. Emile was an industrialist from Paris whose factory, a clothing manufacturing plant, was closed down early due to the pandemic. Anais was supposedly a model, but appeared to Zhara to be a bit long-in-the-tooth for that appellation.
The Villa Blanche was situated between Zhara’s own Villa Colline and Emile Bisset’s Villa Eau de Vie. It was the largest villa on the ridge and lay in sprawling grandeur all on one level. It was a bougainvillea-covered stucco palace that housed three very gruff and very eccentric sisters from Milan. Italy, being a hotspot of the virus, had been fled by the three sisters at the very beginning of the pandemic. Clearly not early enough, since Zhara and her staff had been infected early on.
The biggest oddity about the eccentric Regio sisters was that they’d ordered an enormous supply of paper products early on and tended to flaunt their possession of these sought-after items in the face of the other residents of the cove. Basilio had kindly explained to the plaza occupants how they managed at Villa Colline without any paper and had seen his patient advice taken up by most of the other villa residents. The sisters Regio had simply rolled their eyes and snickered.
On the other side of the ridge were the other two villas, Villa Folie and Villa de la Mer. Villa Folie was a lovely, mellow stone building with four bedrooms and a loyal staff of three. They cared for an elderly man named Jean-Baptiste Durand. Jean-Baptiste was an ex-dignitary of some type and held in much respect by the locals. Marie informed Zhara that Monsieur Durand was powerful and could pull many strings in the government. His staff had informed the other villagers haughtily that they had plenty of paper products and even boasted of some imported Lysol wipes in a round container that dispensed these golden eggs one at a time.
The last villa, Villa de la Mer, was occupied by a wealthy Chinese businessman who had come in mid-January to spend the winter with his wife and two sons. Zhara would later find out that Mr. Zhang had left his two daughters in Beijing and fled with his sons to Cannes in an attempt to escape the virus. Both his daughters had been infected, but lived. Zhara seriously despised the man, without having ever met him, simply on principle.
All of the neighbors were an interesting lot and Zhara spent many hours viewing them surreptitiously through her very heavy old binoculars. It was weird, but she was enjoying it. She supposed it made her a voyeur. Perhaps that was why Jaber had seemed to enjoy it too. Oh well. She usually had far more to do than watch people through binoculars. And, at that, she only did it for a few minutes at a time anyway, as the darn things were so heavy. This rationalization made her laugh at her own need to excuse her snoopy behavior. She should just admit it...she was bored and it was interesting observing human behavior.
The murders in Jordan had shown her that people did strange things when their expectations of normalcy were messed with. The pandemic was certainly a messed up normal. So far, her neighbors had seemed to be coping. Well, if you counted as normal shouting at each other frequently, like the couple in Villa Eau de Vie, or playing endless rounds of bridge like the sisters in Villa Blanche.
As far as she could tell, the aged dignitary in Villa Folie seemed to do nothing but read, take a daily stroll down to the plaza and back, and occasionally peruse the gardens terraced down the hill from the main villa. The Chinese were quite interesting. The father and sons swam each day, staying well away from Basilio and tending to go at odd times, usually when Mrs. Zhang was doing a series of very strange, Tai-Chi-like moves on the terrace. These usually commenced with arm circles in both directions, the shaking away from the body of her hands in great flapping movements, and a variety of other strange lunges and leg raises.
Zhara had taken Tai-Chi classes and never seen anything like this before. It was oddly entertaining in a sort of horrifying way and she often found herself compelled to train the glasses on poor Mrs. Zhang simply because it was difficult not to. It was like trying not to stare at a huge zit on someone’s nose. Impossible.
Also, she had learned, Chinese people could be very loud. That polite differential treatment was not the norm in the family - at least not this family. They were loud and bickered constantly. Zhara wasn’t sure if they were actually arguing, or if Chinese simply sounded that way - loud and sort of angry.
Chapter Eighteen
Death on the Ridge
At the end of the third month that Zhara, Beatriz, and Basilio had sheltered at Villa Colline, their routine world was shaken. Basilio emerged at a run from the long winding path that descended to the plaza and then on to the beach, breathless an
d shaking. His mother grabbed him, swung him into a chair and quickly pushed his head between his knees. He didn’t even struggle.
Zhara knew something was wrong immediately and as quickly as her recovering legs would allow, trotted down the wrought-iron spiral stairs and knelt in front of him. “What is it? What’s happened?” she demanded.
Basilio raised a sweat-covered face to her and whispered, “Murder!”
“What? Who?” his mother demanded.
“The sisters Regio, from Villa Blanche. They’re all dead. Sitting in their chairs on the plaza. Dead!” Basilio gasped out. “Shot through their hearts.”
“Oh my God!” Zhara exclaimed. “Call the police,” she barked at a stunned Marie, who turned, whitefaced and hurried into the villa.
Beatriz shoved a glass of cool water into Basilio’s shaking hands and then turned to Zhara. “Did you see anything from the terrace?” she asked, waving one small, dark hand towards the stone outcropping overhead.
Zhara, legs shaking, suddenly sat abruptly onto the stone pavement beneath her as her legs gave out. She sprawled inelegantly backwards, legs splayed to the sides and stared at Beatriz in horror.