by David Perry
“How many steps was that?” Lee asked.
“Sessanta-quattro.”
Lee gave him a look.
“Sorry, sixty-four. We have arrived.”
“I got that much.”
The apartment was dark—and chilly—and it took them a while to find the lights. Adriano, more familiar with European electrics, and as usual hungry to figure out anything technical, was the first to succeed.
“Ta-da!”
Like a stage set suddenly brought to life, their refuge presented itself. “I love it!”
Lee almost squealed. Ancient stone walls and sleek Euromod furnishings, all chrome and burnished wood. He felt like Goldilocks, just right. A simple but elegantly appointed living room spilled into a dining room. He could just make out the bedroom, with a wooden beamed and vaulted ceiling behind. Good, contemporary art dotted the walls with a smattering of titles in English and Italian competing for space on a large bookcase that took up one complete wall. “It’s so, so Italian.”
“Watch your head in the kitchen. I almost knocked myself out,” Adriano called from the other room. “Let’s drop our things and get to the store or we won’t have coffee in the morning. Small towns like this shut down quickly, especially in winter.”
“OK, just let me do one thing.”
Carefully unzipping his backpack, Lee took out a small wooden box, carefully wrapped in the British royal standard.
“Brian.” Adriano put his hand on Lee’s shoulder.
“Brian,” Lee said, kissing his husband’s hand. “You’re almost home, dear friend.” With that, Lee carefully put his mentor’s ashes on an empty bookcase shelf next to the sofa. For a moment, he said nothing. “OK, let’s go. Just leave the bags inside the door.” A few seconds later, they were back on the street. Dusk was rapidly crowding out the day.
“Can’t wait to meet the great Peg,” said Adriano, pulling up his jacket collar.
“Me neither,” agreed Lee, now pondering Marco’s reaction to their announced meeting later today with “Lady Peg,” the self-styled American expert on Orvieto and a semi-famous writer. Perhaps he was just picking up on local jealousy, now that Marco might be replaced as their go-to contact during Adriano and Lee’s stay here in the fortresslike hilltop town of Orvieto. Maybe that’s why Marco beat so speedy a retreat after leaving the pair with their keys and apartment instructions. No reason to take it personally, Lee reminded himself (another bit of Brian advice). Marco had just been doing his job. He wasn’t supposed to be the temporary expats’ new best friend, nor, frankly, did Lee want such newly volunteered entanglements. He wanted to be alone, with Adriano, for two months, to relax, recoup, and rejuvenate after a very hard year. Well, almost alone.
Halfway through their sojourn, Magda was to join them for a well-deserved vacation of her own. She was the one who had found Orvieto for them in the first place. To make sure Lee and Adriano were situated, Magda, with her usual ruthless efficiency, had arranged for the rental company to provide Marco and Peg as first-day greeters to ensure that the couple got settled in. That was their only function. As usual, Magda was pulling international strings from her political perch back at San Francisco City Hall.
“Perhaps Peg’s not eccentric,” Adriano offered. “Maybe she’s just American.”
Lee laughed. “That could be it. To you Europeans, we Americans are just that, eccentric.”
The couple chuckled together as they made their way slowly to the local market in search of supplies. They had briefly flirted with the idea of renting a car for their time in Orvieto, but had voted to be as “off the grid” as possible. Now that they were getting their first real look at Orvieto, their decision was reinforced. Although a few cars did make their way into town, driving about on the summit and parking there were not for the fainthearted. It was a long way down and the streets were, well, medieval. For Lee and Adriano, these two months living on the Rock were to be primarily a pedestrian experience.
Lee loved watching Adriano’s stylish creativity.
“It’s pretty PFC, you have to admit,” said Adriano, pirouetting with his iPhone camera on panorama mode to get the third such 360-degree vista of the day and using the couple’s secret acronym for “pretty effing charming,” which seemed to describe everything thus far about Orvieto.
Orvieto was indeed PFC, a picture-postcard-perfect history lesson, perched a few hundred feet up on a stark and threatening butte of volcanic rock. Lee and Adriano’s first sight of it had come while riding the train up from Rome’s Fiumicino airport earlier that morning. The Rock had looked like a great airship hovering over the Umbrian plain. Now, an afternoon haze of fog separated the town above the cliffs from the farmland below. It appeared as if Orvieto was suspended, a city in levitation, with seemingly no clear way to the top. Created by cataclysmic eruptions eons ago, Orvieto didn’t so much dominate the surrounding countryside as preside over it with a stone-hewn patience girded by over three millennia of human habitation.
“Wow—it’s got everything,” Lee marveled, reading from their guidebook. St. Patrick’s Well, a wealth of Etruscan art and antiquity, a legendary Italian Renaissance cathedral, and only four thousand people living on the summit. Not too big. Not too small. Just right. As usual, Magda had made perfect arrangements. Everything Magda did was “perfect” and she commanded the same of everyone else—especially Lee. He was looking forward to and dreading her visit, in equal measure.
“This is about as far from pretentious San Francisco techno stress as you can get,” Adriano offered, putting away his iPhone and giving Lee that “Aren’t I one lucky nerd?” look that Lee had fallen in love with ten years ago. “I could live here just fine.”
“You bet,” Lee replied with genuine enthusiasm.
Indeed, Orvieto seemed just the place they had been looking for to make a fresh start after the “year of death” that had preceded this escape from reality. A chill came over Lee, half from the late-autumn, prewinter breeze and half from the memory of their truly annus horribilis. Having carefully, if temporarily, partitioned off their retinue of PR, design and IT clients back in San Francisco, Lee and Adriano had freed themselves from the constrictions of work for two months. Frankly, for the last year, all work had taken a back seat to the needs of a dying man, Brian. It had been a challenge to run a small pop-and-pop business from hospital lobby after hospital lobby, and then, finally, from the foot of a hospice bed. Lee shivered again.
“Yes, we certainly could,” he said, shaking off a miasma of memories. “Who knows what we’ll find here.”
CHAPTER II
Refugee
Saturday, November 30, 2013, somewhere at sea
Maryam didn’t want to die this way.
All around her in the darkness, people moaned. The air reeked of sweat and urine and vomit.
Was it day? Night?
Instantly, the world turned upside down, and someone screamed—man, woman, child?—impossible to tell as an inhuman concert of tormented steel and tumbling chains, chairs, and tools slid toward her, burying hundreds of voices beneath the racket. She rolled over on her side in time to escape a huge metal container that had flung itself against the bulkhead. A rat scurried over her filthy, rag-wrapped feet too late. It was crushed. Praise Allah, we will eat, she thought. If I live through this…
Above on deck, she heard the scrambling thuds of a dozen running feet and the barked commands of a crew desperate to save their ship. Maryam did not recognize the language in which they spoke, but she understood the tone. They were in trouble.
The compartment shuddered and vibrated. In the dark, the moans became sobs and then silence. Slowly, their prison ship righted itself. An even keel—for now—until the next wave. Up on deck, the sound of nervous masculine laughter translated to the bowels below.
The baby kicked in her womb.
CHAPTER III
Of Expats and Paintings
Saturday, November 30, 2013, late afternoon, Orvieto
Peg was ve
ry American.
Lordy, Lee thought. And people think I’m a screaming Anglo.
“Always start on the right,” she said, offering first one cheek, then the other as she breezed into the Café Volsini with flourishes and waves to the staff, all of whom she clearly knew and who definitely knew her. The central casting doyenne at the cash register gave her a gray-haired look over her wire rims, simultaneously glassy and murderous. “It took me a while to learn that when I first moved here. Almost broke my nose a few times.”
Somewhere between sixty-five and Debbie Reynolds, swathed in scarves, gray leather gloves, expensive but not ostentatiously so, unless one considered gloves in and unto themselves ostentatious, Lee thought, Peg was the exemplar expat, a grade C Tea With Mussolini.
“White wine, si?” Peg asked, then answered for them to the formidable la donna now waiting at their table with pursed lips and order pad (complete with carbon paper between the sheets). “Tre vini bianchi, per favore. You’ll love it, Orvieto Classico. Quite one of the most fabulous, and cheap, white wines you’ll ever have! I tried to find it when I was back in California visiting my sister last year for the holidays, but they didn’t even have it at BevMo! I thought about buying twenty crates and going into the wine import–export business, but my goodness, everything is a struggle here to get arranged. And it’s a very small town—molto piccola città. Everyone will know you in three days. But this place is a find! Even this close to Rome, people outside of Northern Italy seem not to know about Orvieto, and what a treasure it is, an absolute treasure!”
Wow. Lee wondered if she had an air tank to fuel such machine-gunfire delivery. She had to take a breath sometime. God, he wished she would, he thought, as he inwardly rolled his eyes.
All six cheeks bussed, the trio sat down. Peg’s skirt, in some sort of voluminous silvery-gray upholstery fabric, swirled around their feet and the legs of the chairs like an incoming crinoline tide.
As Peg nattered breathlessly on about the wonders of their temporary home, Lee looked around their chosen lunch spot. Café Volsini was like something out of the past. Scratch that, it was out of the past. All the counters were marble and supported by intricately carved wooden bases entwined with figures from the hands of a mythologically inspired artist. Clear glass cases displayed martially aligned rows of tiny mouthwatering pastries and candies, handmade and stamped Volsini as if by wax imprint. There were even chocolate coffee cups—demitasse size—and matching spoons for the offing. Over the register, a procession of antique Italian money from Etruscan and Roman to Mussolini’s Nazi puppet state to the late, lamented Italian lira—marched in procession above a bewildering and delicious assortment of liquors unknown to Lee. Above a bottle of something called Aperol a thorn-crowned Jesus rolled his passionate eyes heavenward. Next to a thin, green-tinted bottle of Svinnere Nonna Velia the Virgin Mary contemplated above a flickering electric candle.
Lee watched La Donna signal with a nod and a glance for the bartender to pour the wine. Images of Talia Shire and The Godfather’s unmistakable theme music played inside his skull. He wondered if there was a gun hidden in the tiny toilette, whose entrance was marked by an antique sign he could just spy between the Virgin Mary statue and her son’s beleaguered visage next to the amaretto. The only thing out of period was a large, abstract, and almost brutalist painting, like an Italian version of Picasso’s Guernica, of seven bodies contorted in pain, and clearly bleeding from gunshot wounds to the head. A small bronze plate was attached to the simple black frame and inscribed with the words Camorena: I Nostri Sette Martiri. The artist’s name was scrawled in the right-hand corner, as if bleeding off the bottom-most victim’s palm. Volsini. Perhaps the café doyenne was an artist herself.
“As I was saying…” Peg pierced him with a glance conveying her awareness that for a second her monologue had been interrupted, or worse yet, ignored. Deep in artistic contemplation, Lee had indeed lost the conversation’s thread. He scrambled to catch up.
“Oh, sorry,” Lee said, as Adriano kicked him under the table in typical married-couple “We’re new here, be nice” fashion, and gave his husband a look. “I was just taking this all in. It’s like something out of a movie.”
“I know!” enthused Peg. “And our friend there”—Peg indicated with a whispered tilt of her head—“is Volsini—quite the oldest name in Orvieto and possessed, according to the locals, of many secrets and connections, if you know what I mean.” Peg let herself drift off with a balletic twirl of the wrist as if dying to have Adriano or Lee offer up the obvious.
“Mafia?” Adriano gasped back in a flash, and Peg absolutely twinkled in pleasure that her hint had been picked up. “Should we be worried?”
“Oh no, she looks too nice,” Lee said, nonetheless wondering himself and contemplating the picture behind the bar. Camorena: I Nostri Sette Martiri certainly looked like a mafia hit. “Plus, as my grandma used to say, ‘Worry is like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it gets you no place.’”
Adriano rolled his eyes.
Lee knew that his down-home philosophizing sometimes annoyed Adriano. Frankly, his annoyance annoyed Lee. It wasn’t the first time, and likely wouldn’t be the last. Lee let it pass. Memories of his grandmother were sacred.
“Seriously, though,” Adriano whispered. “You don’t think she’s mafia?”
“Depende,” Peg offered quietly with a subtle warning finger to her lips. “Like everything in Orvieto, depende. Don’t expect anything to be what it’s supposed to be or to operate efficiently. Ask for a plumber to come at eight a.m., he might show up by dusk the next day—depende. Be promised that your dry cleaning will be ready on Tuesday and show up on Thursday to be safe and find it still on the counter where you left it to be picked up. Depende. It drove me mad my first six months here, then…”
“What?” Adriano asked.
“I surrendered,” Peg said with a toothy smile and a big “Ha!” laugh. “Ah! Here’s our wine! Grazie, Signora Volsini! Grazie mille!”
The elderly café owner presented a tray with three enormous goblets of wine and three small dishes of delectable savories and nuts, warm and freshly prepared as evidenced by their enticing aroma and the temperature of the delicate crystal dish, engraved Volsini.
“But we didn’t order lunch,” Lee said quietly after the tray had been placed in front of them.
“This isn’t lunch,” Peg smiled. “This is what you get when you order wine, or any alcohol, in Italy, and especially at il vecchio place like this.”
As Peg spoke, Signora Volsini slipped a small silver tray with the bill next to them. Four euro fifty. About six dollars.
“That’s it, for all this?” Lee was amazed. He had heard that Italy was cheaper than San Francisco (wasn’t everything?), but this was quite something.
Peg shrugged her shoulders and smiled as Adriano and Lee lifted their glasses in a toast.
“To Orvieto!” Adriano said as their glasses clinked.
“And to new friends,” said Peg as they all three drank.
“And to Café Volsini,” Lee proffered, popping a cracker into his mouth—sinfully delicious, cheesy, puffy. He was going to like Italy. As he chewed, he looked up to see La Donna staring at him questioningly from her perch behind the cash register at the door. Cerberus with a calculator. “Mmmmm.” He smiled at her with his mouth full as if to say “Delicious!”
Signora Volsini nodded once with a curled lip whose commentary was Volsini clear—“Of course it’s delicious”—and went back to her cash drawer. The Godfather music started to play again in Lee’s head.
“There’s another bar on the other side of Piazza del Popolo, Clement’s Bar, that’s even cheaper, but they only offer chips and crackers,” Peg rattled, “and anything closer to Il Duomo is more expensive since that’s where all the tour buses stop.”
Lee had already decided. I think I’ll come here. He had a feeling La Donna of Café Volsini would know in short order that the couple from San Francis
co were temporary locals. Lee wouldn’t want her to think he was disloyal. She might prove to be the “La Madrina” of the whole town after all.
Between glasses two and three, Peg revealed her status as a retired biotech exec from Northern California turned Italian food writer, a three-time divorcée, and occasional blogger. Ten years ago, she came to Orvieto and stayed. Several of her books had become moderate best sellers, and her blog, Square Peg on a Round Rock, was now de rigueur for anyone visiting or researching Orvieto.
“I came, I saw, I bought,” she said with glee. “Real estate was dirt cheap then and has only gotten dirtier and cheaper. Heaven, I tell you, Orvieto heaven!”
An hour later, the trio walked out into the late afternoon beginnings of twilight. Somewhere a bell struck the hour, five great clangs.
“Ah yes,” said Peg with a theatrically melancholy sigh of recognition and a gloved hand to her bosom. “The Tower of the Moor. It’s quite the best alarm clock in town.”
Five o’clock. Lee would have to rush if he wanted to make the Sant’Andrea service at 5:30 p.m. He might even talk the Catholiphobic Adriano into joining him.
“Now, if you need anything, just give me a call. I live right next to Il Duomo,” Peg, said, pointing a leather-clad digit down Orvieto’s main street and simultaneously waving away a swarthy street peddler hawking homemade CDs to passersby. “Or you can just yell. I’m always walking up and down the Corso. You never know whom you might meet and what might inspire an article or research into a recipe. Ciao!”
With that, and a cheeky sextet of goodbye kisses, she was off, leaving Adriano and Lee to their first night in Italy.
While Adriano did more iPhone documentation, Lee dashed back into the bar and squeezed between Madonna and the Crown of Thorns for a bathroom pit stop. There wouldn’t be time to go to the apartment before the service at Sant’Andrea. That entailed sixty-four steps up and sixty-four steps down. He had counted. Actually sixty-four and a half. There was a weird half-step to nowhere sticking out of the wall near the top. Plus, they hadn’t even had time to begin unpacking and settling in. As he zipped up, he glanced at the old-style water tank, Coppola-like, suspended against the ceiling. He wondered if anyone had ever hidden an assassin’s gun there. He wouldn’t be surprised. For all its antique whimsy, there was an aura of something hidden—almost dread—although artfully restrained about Café Volsini, and its owner.