“What?” I cried, and shivered in the cool night. It was, after all, almost October, and I wore only a nightgown. I was half out of my mind. The light out … and standing here in the damp grass …
“It’s about the package,” he said.
“What package?” I snapped it out like a drill sergeant.
“The one Predelli gave you. From the signora Wadley.”
“What about it?”
“Because,” he said, “my mother and father were upset. It had something to do with that, the package.”
He grasped my arm. “What was it?”
“None of your business,” I said, angrily.
“It is my business,” he said quietly. “Yes. Because I know there is something wrong. Crazy thoughts? Possibly. I am sensitive to emotions, to faces, particularly those of my own family. Listen, I saw them, my mother and father, when you said to signore Predelli about the package from the signora. You understand? But no, how could you? My father is a child. My mother his mother. Yes, she loves her sons, I am sure, but she adores Papa, she worries so about him. Not really about Benedetto, who lives a truly dangerous life. Me? In her mind I am like little Eleanora. A boy, a child. Just that, no more. But my father — ”
He held my hand, but not brutally, and I felt his breath on my cheek. “Barbara, listen,” he said. “I could see that she was very concerned about him, right after the lawyers left. They went upstairs, and were there all of the day. Now you must tell me what it means.”
“I can’t.”
“But you must.”
“I’m sorry. I can’t. It’s their life. Just let it go. It doesn’t concern you.”
“If it concerns you, then it concerns me,” he said, “that package, I want to know what it was.”
“I can’t tell you.”
“But why, but why?”
“Because I can’t.”
“I don’t understand,” he said, passionately. “You put your mouth against mine … your arms around me … and then refuse to — ”
“Will you leave me alone?”
I pounded at him. “Leave me alone!”
And then I screamed it.
“Leave me alone, let me go!”
A light sprang on, up above. Someone said, thickly, “Che cosa?”
And then another light lit the darkness.
“Now you see what you’ve done,” I said shakily. “Now they’re awake … now are you satisfied?”
His arms fell away. His voice, almost a whisper, sounded defeated. “So go,” he said, low. “Then go. I thought — ”
“I don’t know what you thought, but look what you’ve done! They’ve heard us … can’t you see it won’t do any good?”
I sprang away, raced across the sodden grass, gained my room again. My God, I thought, my God. In the middle of the night … in the middle of the night …
I turned on the lamp again, sat on the edge of my bed and, laying a finger across my lips, remembered. I’m terribly in love with him, I whimpered to myself. I’m so terribly in love with Gianni. But how could he have frightened me like that?
I jumped up and started packing. Frantically, I threw garments into my suitcase. Trembling, I stuffed cosmetics into my Elizabeth Arden valise. Ave, I thought, mumbling it to myself. Ave atque vale. My Aunt Mercedes had been luckier. She had found peace and beauty here.
I had found sadness, terror, cruelty, and a phantasmagoria of riddles. There would be no smile on my face when I left the Villa Paradiso. I was a whipped dog.
How horribly it had turned out …
Chapter Fifteen
Peter called in the morning.
“Are you packed?”
“Yes, everything’s done.”
“I’ll pick you up at around noon.”
“Please don’t. I’ll call a taxi.”
“But why? I want to — ”
“Don’t press it,” I said. “I’m going by taxi. If you don’t mind, Peter.”
“Whatever you say,” he answered, and rang off.
And I didn’t leave. I stayed there the whole day, looking at the photographs on the Boesendorfer, wandering through the empty rooms, sitting in the garden, aching, aching, for what I was leaving behind. The hours went by and still I stayed, listening to the voices next door, at aperitivi time, and then through their dinner hour, with the laughter and the camaraderie and the family close, close … clannish, alien to me. Once, I thought, this property belonged to Mercedes, the late Contessa; it had been hers, she had loved and cherished it, and now it was theirs, the Monteverdis. I hated them, briefly, and when they went into the house, because of mosquitoes, told myself good riddance, and sat there in the silence.
I was only an intruder now.
I went inside again, got out the package with the watch and the locket. I knew what I was going to do with it. I was going to bury it. Beside Paolo. I thought it was fitting. I even said, as I held it in my hands, “La commedia e finita …”
And then I went out, in the cool of the evening, to the twisted pine tree. I felt very lonely. It was the last dusky evening I would spend here. I had gone to the shed, in the courtyard, for a spade, and I walked across the grass to the dwarfed tree.
I knelt on the ground, which was a little damp and, turning over the earth with the spade, I dug a hole. The rich soil, yielding a few startled worms, sifted through my fingers. When the hole was deep enough, I pulled the watch and the locket out of my pocket. I held them for a moment. Ten years from now, perhaps a hundred, these trinkets might be found.
Blinded suddenly by tears, because it had turned out in this unexpected, sad way, I fondled the watch, crushed the tiny locket to my breast, and because of the tears did not see the figure that stood beside me. “In a permanent dark dream of a forest of firs,” I was thinking, bereft and lonely with no one to witness this final, inexorable act, I almost lost my balance when I heard the voice.
“Signorina,” someone said, and almost at once, as I blinked rapidly, I knew that voice.
“Principessa?” I asked, using the forbidden title, and looked up.
She was standing there, in half silhouette, framed by the house lights, the brilliant illumination from the valley below, and the half moon. She looked down at me, with a kind of stern curiosity and said, “What are you doing, signorina?”
I dropped the watch and locket, which I had slipped into its envelope again, into the hole.
“Something I have to do,” I said.
“I want to know.”
“It doesn’t concern you,” I said, and started to push back the earth to cover the envelope.
“I think it does.”
“May I remind you that you’re on my property,” I said, trembling.
“No,” she said. “Not your property. Mine. Ours.”
She was suddenly on her knees beside me. I tried to stop her, but she pushed me aside. And then, scrabbling in the earth, she drew out the envelope. I did my best to take it away from her, but she was a strong woman, and she wrested my hands away. She ripped open the envelope, shaking the dust from it, and pulled out the watch and the heart-shaped locket Calmly, she examined both and looked long at the watch. Her face softened for a moment and then crumpled shockingly.
“So it’s true,” she whispered, and then turned to me.
“But my dear young woman,” she said, as if she were talking to a child, to Eleanora. “Bury these if you will, but you would always know where they were. And some day, some time, you would tell someone.”
“No,” I said vehemently. “No, Principessa. Never. It would hurt someone I love.”
She laughed, a bitter sound. “You love no one here,” she said coldly. And, as with Lucia, the earthy expletive broke from her.
“Mama mia … you say love? You make me laugh, signorina. What do you know about love? You sicken me …”
Her voice was harsh now, chilling me. I felt she had become unmanageable, though I tried to reason with her. “Don’t you see,” I cried. “I wa
s hiding these things! So that no one could — ”
“But one day you will say to someone, “My aunt was murdered, and I have the proof.” Her eyes were blazing in the dusky light, and she palmed the gold watch and locket. “Crucify us, you would do that, yes I know.”
She scrambled up, glaring down at me. “Signorina, I am afraid not,” she said menacingly. “And you too want to take what is ours away from us … you too, from foreign soil, want to torment us. That woman! All of you, you Americans, like locusts, like a plague … with your dollars … we hate you, don’t you know that? All of us, we hate you!”
Her eyes were cold and terrible. I fell back. Such anger, such rage … what had I done, after all? I had fallen in love with her country, with her city, with her estate, her way of life, and with her son. And in my wild love affair with Italy, with Firenze, had tried to erase the traces of a murder … two murders. I wouldn’t have harmed the Monteverdis … never, never. My intent had been only to cover up the bloody hands of those who had been responsible for Mercedes’s death, and Elizabeth’s death.
I had been a deliberate accessory to a crime … two crimes.
And she looked at me like that!
“I was in your room,” she said quietly. “I see that your luggage is ready to go. Why don’t you go, signorina?”
“That was my intention,” I said and, backing up, was afraid. I didn’t like the look in her eyes. The face, fine, and the product of a thousand years of Florentine civilization, was suddenly evil, cruel. The strong, gray-white hair, tidily piled into a chignon at the nape, seemed Medusa-like. The woman who confronted me was a woman I was afraid of.
“I’m going now,” I said.
“You can take the car,” she assured me, her lips curving into a strange smile. “After all, they’re both dead, she and the Contessa. You might as well claim the car.”
“I thought I’d call a taxi.”
My lips were dry. I was dying to call a taxi, have a strong, experienced Italian driver help me get my bags into the back seat of his vehicle and take me away from the Villa Paradiso. Paradiso! Villa Infernale would be more to the point.
“That’s ridiculous,” she said briskly and, incredibly, smiled. “Let me help you with your luggage.”
“I don’t need help. Thank you, but — ”
“I say again, you don’t need a taxi,” she replied and walked past me, striding over the grass, to the house. She disappeared inside it.
I panicked. Oh no, I thought. I won’t let her get the best of me. Certainly not. I streaked over the grass and went round the house, scrabbling over the pebbles in the driveway. I came to the courtyard and the Principessa was coming out the front, with a bag under each arm. Over her shoulder was my cosmetic case, dangling loosely.
“Is there anything else?” she asked politely, as she dropped the bags to the ground.
“That’s all, and thank you. Now I’ll go in and call a taxi.”
It was a pleasant, warm evening, but my teeth were chattering. I spoke between them, trying to discipline myself. “Thank you, signora.”
Because her face was so strange. So determined. I was terrified at the look in her eyes. And when she picked up my bags again, opened the back seat of the Lancia and stowed them in, I wanted to scream. And I guess I did.
“I said I was going to call a taxi!”
“But you won’t,” she said grimly. “Get in.”
She came toward me threateningly. “I said get in.”
“No.”
I saw the other car, already parked on the road. I saw that and then faced her again. My voice shook; I was ashamed of it, but my God, her infuriated eyes! She stood in my path, like a bull at a corrida, with the same inflamed eyes. This is terrible, I thought, this is terrible … and I tried to sidestep her. With that, a hand came out and whacked me in the face. Like a sledgehammer. A strong, brutal hand. It brought tears to my eyes and I ducked as the hand came toward me again.
“Get in the car,” she said.
And now I knew. That there was no escape. If I didn’t get in the car she would shove me in, whamming at me with that hard, pitiless hand. I was her prisoner. This woman planned my destruction and, by whatever means, was determined that I was to die. Like the others. She would silence me, to protect her family’s interest, with whatever means possible. I would never live to tell the tale. I saw it in her hard, wicked, implicable face. That there would be no one left to reveal the terrible truth. I was to be the final victim.
I took one look at that cold and determined face and scrambled behind the wheel of the Lancia. Frantically, I started the motor. In the rear view mirror, as the car spurted forward, I saw the Principessa climbing into her own car. The dust churned up as my wheels circumnavigated the turn of the driveway, and then I was rocketing down that narrow, serpentine road, the spit of gravel pitting the metal of the car.
I should have let Peter come for me, I thought, stepping on the gas. The other car, behind me, screamed with a shriek of the tires, and I saw it in the oblong of the overhead mirror. What the hell was she doing? I asked myself, but knew. Why, she wanted to drive me off the road …
I knew what was in her mind, I knew. Please, I thought … others had died before me. My aunt, and then the little dog, and Elizabeth. It wasn’t this madwoman who had brought about those other murders … but this madwoman would protect, perhaps with her life and at the cost of mine, the person who had done them. I was expendable too … and as I rounded a turn, knew it wouldn’t even make headlines. An American girl had plunged to her death, at a break in the road, and cindered to her end.
And no one would be blamed.
It would be only a few lines at the bottom of a column. Of interest to no one. Just another tourist accident. But my life means more to me than that, my mind shrieked, as I came to one of those terrible, open places, where the valley below, thousands of feet down, was brilliantly lit, hospitable. I pressed down on the gas, standing on it, praying. The other car was so near, and that white, hideous face behind the wheel, the teeth drawing the lips back … if she sideswiped me now it would be the end. I would hurtle down, over and over, and would be shipped back to the United States in bits and pieces.
No, I thought wildly. No. I will not die like that. And realized that only a desperate measure on my part could save me. The brilliant lights of the other car blinded me, and breath rasped in my throat. I rounded another bend, the car zooming behind me like an implacable Nemesis, and I made up my mind. I stepped on the gas and — I think I was praying — drove into a plane tree at the side of the road. The tree loomed up at me and I said to myself, “God help me,” and the car crashed into the tree. My car door opened and I flew into the air, my ears singing, and lay there, listening to an Italian song, a very beautiful one.
“Come back to Sorrento …”
Pain seared my body. I knew at once that one of my arms was broken, and then I saw the flames, as I blacked out. But not for long. I realized, almost instantly, that I was at the very edge of the road, and I was looking down at the lights below, in the valley. I saw the other car plunging over the cliff, like a toy, rolling over and over, and there was no sound, simply a hulk of metal leaving the road and plummeting down, down to the valley, with its lovely lights, and the homes down there, the restaurants, the art treasures, and the immemoriality of an ancient, timeless city.
I picked myself up, painfully, and looked down over the mountainside. Red streaked into the night sky, and I screamed, knowing she was in there, in the burning wreckage. “But she’s Gianni’s mother,” I was screaming, and was still screaming when a car shrilled to a stop, and a shocked motorist climbed out from behind the wheel.
“It’s a friend of mine,” I said, sobbing. “Can’t you help, won’t you help? You must help her, you must help …”
• • •
Sirens sounded, in the night, and there was pandemonium.
I knew I could never tell my mother and father about it. It had happened t
o me, not to them, and I was a grown woman who, adult, had to take what happened to me in stride. My childhood days were over. My life, as a mature human being, had begun. A veil had been drawn, between me and my girlhood, forever. There was no going back: there was only the forward thrust of my life, now and for the rest of my days.
Chapter Sixteen
There was never any proof of anything. Two women had died, women whose days were, in any event, numbered. Women who had lived long lives, who were, at the end, ready — perhaps — to die. I was too young to be positive of anyone being ready to die. But they had lived many decades, had had, for a good many years, the best of all possible worlds, in the fragrant Eden that was the Villa Paradiso. So many others spent miserable, mean days in tenement and slum, without golden memories or beauty to fill their eyes. And died, untimely, in squalor and sadness.
Mercedes and Elizabeth had, at least — until that final, shocking moment — been engirdled by loveliness, each day secure in the golden eye of a sublime enchantment. I couldn’t feel deeply sorry for them, not for long. They had had a good life, those two women.
It was the Principessa I thought about in the dark nights, when sleep came hard. She had died, at aged sixty-one, protecting those she loved. She had tried to kill me, but I tended to forgive that, because I thought highly of love and fealty and commitment to honor. I sometimes wondered if I too would not be capable of deeming another person expendable, if that person threatened those dear to me. I wonder about it, and have no answer.
But the dead, who lie in the ground, are fortunate, at that. Better than a living death, such as the Principe. Bereft, querulous, he suffered a mental breakdown. His constant question: “Where is my wife? Won’t you please tell her I’m waiting for her?”
The rest of us look at each other, unable to answer. Gianni takes my hand and says, “Cara, don’t look like that. He doesn’t know what he’s saying, he’s in another world.”
But tawny-haired Eleanora goes to him, sits on his knee, her eyes turned inwards. They have secrets together, perhaps. They share something, possibly something horrible. I wonder if they are both guilty, or if one shares the other’s guilt. Children are never children for long. The child and the old man, quiet, sit in the sun, their hands interlaced. And a cool breeze lifts the little girl’s hair, making it a shimmering haze, like molten gold.
Classic Love: 7 Vintage Romances Page 79