Book One of the Santa Lucia Series

by Michelle Damiani

  The two men joined the gathering group of townspeople rushing up the stairs.

  Edo felt a hand close over his wrist and startled. It was Chiara, standing with Magda. “Edo. You’re okay.” It was a statement.

  “Sì. You?”

  “Yes. I’ll get the other one.”

  “No, I’ve given it to him.”

  Chiara’s eyes followed Edo’s to rest on Trevor, stymied in his attempt to crest the stairs by the wall of bodies moving down the stairs.

  There was no time for questions. Chiara nodded, “Be safe.”

  “I will. You too. Stay out of here, okay, Zia?”

  Chiara nodded, her attention caught by Magda’s horrified expression as she backed away from the fire-lit steps.

  Stella broke away from Vale, mid-kiss. He leaned toward her, his hand between her shoulder blades, bringing her back against his chest. She pulled away. “Vale? Do you hear that?”

  “It’s nothing, amore. Just everyone enjoying the sagra.” His hands ran down Stella’s back, lingering on the welcoming swell of her hips.

  “Seriously, Vale.”

  “Mmm, yes, I’m very serious.” Vale nibbled the base of her neck, and allowed his hands to run up her side, to her ample bosom. “I’m taking this very, very seriously.” He cupped his hands around her and sighed.

  A shout, closer now, stalled his caress. He jerked his head up.

  They held their breath, listening.

  Stella turned to Vale, “Do you smell smoke?”

  “A little, but I always did . . . I think this room was once the kitchen of the castle.”

  “No, it’s different.”

  Vale inhaled, “Yes, I smell it.”

  More shrieks cut the air.

  Vale straightened, “I’ll go check what’s going on, you wait here.”

  “Vale!”

  “Sì?”

  Stella pulled him closer, “Please, be careful.”

  Vale looked into Stella’s eyes, filled with warmth he easily drowned in. He leaned down and lightly touched his lips to hers. She pulled his head down, pressing their mouths together, and her passion enflamed him. No woman, ever, had set his loins trembling like this one. She may be middle-aged and a mother and married to that detestable mayor, but there was a vitality to her that quickened him more than he ever dreamed possible. Though he knew he needed to leave, he almost couldn’t remember why. With his tongue he opened her mouth more deeply and drank her in, his hands pulling her up and against him. They were both moaning now, hands searching each other’s bodies. Lighting like butterflies, then pressing with increasing fervor.

  The voices in the doorway sounded like the memory of a dream. Until Dante’s voice bellowed, “Stella! Vale?”

  The townspeople bore down, fire extinguishers thrust out like armor. Giuseppe quickly located the violently burning thread of flame, shouting for assistance. The heat seared his face as he rushed forward, into the belly of the blaze. He loosed a blast of chemicals from the hose, howling as an ember branded his cheek. Patrizia joined her husband and soon many stood together, dousing the flames. Luigi, the owner of l’Ora Dorata—who was so paranoid about fires that he had more than the strictly required number of extinguishers in his trattoria—called out to the waiters he’d outfitted. They fanned around Giuseppe, spreading out among the tables and twisted wisteria vines, shouting invectives at the fire. They held their collective breath as the blaze slackened in the face of the onslaught.

  Meanwhile Edo and Trevor, along with Giovanni and Sauro, attacked the knots of fire raging within the arms of the olive trees nearest the castle. The flames, which had licked up at the promise of aged olive wood, submitted to the spray and began to falter.

  Triumphal shouts rang through the castle garden. The common fist around their internal organs released its hold. It would be okay. Finally it could be okay.

  The celebration cut off suddenly as the froth from the fire extinguishers slowed to a trickle. Despair filled the townspeople, they were out of ammunition. Where were the fire trucks?

  Without the fall of liquid, the fire surged, redoubled. A tree exploded into flame. The one beside it quickly caught, the branches crackling for a moment before fire erupted through the boughs.

  It would pain you to notice how the brilliance of the blazing trees made a mockery of the light that characterized Santa Lucia. The townspeople, of course, were spared that particular anguish. They were far too focused on the inferno before them. Every creak and moan of the trees as they shuddered with heat shot through their hearts. Their trees. Their trees were dying.

  Just then, a dozen or more townspeople clamored up the stairs, shouting. They ran clumsily, buckets of water weighing down their arm. Shoving their neighbors aside, they rushed toward the trees and threw water at the fire.

  “The falls!” they shouted. “More water!”

  A brigade quickly formed, townspeople stretching between the trees and the falls, sending water up the stairs, past the castle, and into the groves. This nightmare looked to soon be over.

  If only somebody had noticed where else the fire had caught.

  A line of fire snaked through the dry grass raked to the side of the castle’s clearing. Gaining strength, a burst of flames exploded out over the edge to rain upon the rooftops below. Most of the fire fell upon stone tile and, without fuel to burn, brightened momentarily before withering. But a few of those flames fell upon l’Ora Dorata’s wooden roof. An accumulation of dry leaves prodded the fire into greater strength, until it was robust enough to begin digging into the roof itself.

  Unbeknownst to the townspeople desperately protecting the groves in the clearing above, the fire gained a new intensity as it began to devour the antique wood of l’Ora Dorata’s roof tiles. The flames lost their jittery sparkle and instead grew into long, languid tongues of heat, burning blue into orange like a depraved sunset.

  In mere minutes, the flames extended their range, stretching out over the roof line. The roots of the fire began to crawl deeper, creeping down into the joists and beams of the building that had stood on that site since the early 1800’s.

  Bea—racing back to the castle with a fire extinguisher after shooing her chickens into the area under her house that was once a wine cellar and now functioned as a garden shed—stopped short at the sight of l’Ora Dorata’s roof alight with flames. She stood, uncharacteristically paralyzed. Bea scanned the nearby rooftops, noting that they were all stone.

  From a distance she heard the sound of a siren. She offered up a prayer of thanks that someone had called the fire department. It sounded as if the truck was only now beginning the climb up the mountain, and once it arrived, it wouldn’t be able to make its way through the street, would it? Bea lingered on the realization that she’d never thought to wonder how the vigili del fuoco would attack a fire on narrow streets.

  A snap recalled Bea to the present. She bolted up the stairs to the castle, ignoring the stings of shock to her arthritic knees. Grabbing the first person she saw, she gasped, “L’Ora Dorata! Fire!”

  The face before her took a moment to register the news, and then turned to the crowd and bellowed, “Quick! To L’Ora Dorata! She’s on fire!”

  Luigi, the owner, had feared this exact situation years ago when he bought the building and noted its uncharacteristic wooden roof. He fell to his knees. He knew he should have listened to his mother’s warning about that roof. But no, he’d been so taken by the story of the builder constructing the edifice in the style his brother’s Sienese monastery.

  Edo yanked Luigi up, “Stop! We’ll save it, but we have to move quickly! You there!” He shouted to a clutch of men surrounding the arbor that seemed to now be safe, “Run down to l’Ora Dorata and see if you can contain the fire until the vigili del fuoco arrive. Take this!” He snatched Bea’s extinguisher and flung it to the men. “And we need people he
re to contain it from above.”

  The crowd rearranged itself, snaking down the stairs to l’Ora Dorata, and whipping toward the edge of the clearing. The men on the ground in front of the trattoria aimed their water buckets uselessly at the top windows of the restaurant. The outer walls were moistened, but they were stone anyway, and weren’t in danger. Meanwhile, the fire continued down the sides of the inner walls, exploding out in bursts of flame and plaster, rushing over the spray from the one extinguisher the villagers had left.

  Edo and his crew had slightly better luck from above, as they began to arrest the fire still spreading along the rooftop.

  More townspeople arrived with buckets of water. Suddenly, they all stopped moving, their heads cocked at a distant wailing sound. They heard the siren enter the parking area at the edge of town, and then, remarkably, begin to make its way carefully through the street. But how?

  In minutes that passed like hours, the spinning blue light of the fire truck flickered against the walls of Santa Lucia. Mingled shouts of joy and sighs of relief met the sight of the vigili del fuoco, who leapt out of their vehicle, which was as tall as the trucks that serviced Girona, but thin and short enough to navigate the streets of Santa Lucia.

  The firefighters shoved the townspeople out of the way as they released ladders and attached fire hoses. A hush descended as the firefighters moved quickly to douse the fire in the building before racing up the stairs to assess the damage to the castle and threat to the groves.

  “Magda! Where are you going?”

  “I’m done with it, Chiara, done with it!”

  “With what? Magda, you’re scaring me.”

  Magda stopped abruptly and leaned against the stone wall of the alley. Breathing heavily she gazed up at the starlight, greasy now with smoke billowing from the castle. A sob threatened to choke her. She shook her hand to free herself as Chiara’s footsteps staccatoed down the alley to rest beside her.

  “Magda?”

  “I can’t do it anymore Chiara.”

  Softly, Chiara asked, “Do what?”

  “I just can’t. I can’t fight it anymore.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Magda breathed deeply before looking up, her eyes shining in the darkness.

  “Follow me.”

  She strode to her house, through the door, gesturing to Chiara to follow. Chiara waited uncertainly in the kitchen, as Magda continued to her room. She came back bearing a cardboard box, a bit larger than a shoe box.

  Magda dropped it on the table and sighed, settling herself into a chair.

  Chiara said nothing, waiting, hesitant to break the stillness that had descended around Magda.

  Finally Magda began. In a whisper, and then gaining strength. “My parents. My parents were not good people. They . . . they were Nazi sympathizers. They hated Jews, but they didn’t like much of anyone. Including me.” Magda breathed deeply through the tears that welled into her eyes. “They wanted me to be more like them. Strong. But I, I couldn’t. And they hated me for it.”

  Chiara dropped into a chair and put her hand on Magda’s arm.

  Chiara had a sudden image of Magda, as a little girl in Germany, hiding in the corner so her parents wouldn’t beat her for coming second behind a Jewish girl.

  Her vision was interrupted by Magda croaking, “It’s all my fault.”

  At first Chiara thought Magda meant it was her fault for losing to a Jewish child, but then realized that image was her own construction. “What do you mean? What’s your fault?”

  Magda shook her head and waved away Chiara’s question.

  It hit Chiara like a clap of thunder. “The fire? The fire is your fault?”

  Magda said nothing.

  “Magda, that’s ridiculous.”

  Chiara remembered that holding the sagra at the castle was Magda’s idea. That she had browbeat everyone into agreeing with her. “Listen, Magda, the inspector approved the site, nobody could have guessed—”

  “I bribed the inspector.”

  “Ah.”

  Magda nodded slowly. “Everyone was right about me.”

  “No, Magda! It was the inspector’s job to be forthright. He didn’t do his job. You just wanted the sagra to be a success.”

  As Magda stared at her hands clutched on the table, Chiara realized why it was so important for Magda to prove herself valuable.

  A tear slid down Magda’s cheek. “I ruined the sagra, and probably the castle. And all the homes. And the olive trees! And probably the whole town.” She finished lamely.

  “Let’s not get carried away. It sounds like the fire is under control, and anyway, fires have hit the castle before, and it’s still standing. Likely all that got damaged was the wisteria and the arbor. It’s lucky that Santa Lucia is almost all built from stone.”

  “What if someone got hurt?”

  “No one got hurt. It’s okay, we saw everyone leaving, remember?”

  Magda choked back a sob, and nodded obediently.

  Chiara went on, “So what’s in the box?”

  Magda blinked back her tears and tucked her hair behind her ears a few times before answering. “My box. It’s a box of reminders.”

  “Reminders?”

  “Yes. My parents’ things.”

  “You kept all of this.”

  “Yes.”

  “May I?” Chiara asked, indicating the box.

  Magda shrugged and pushed it to her. Chiara sifted through photographs of stoic Germans, commendations handwritten on thin vellum, a patch with a symbol that matched the amulet. Chiara held it up, questioningly.

  “It’s a symbol, a sign among Nazi sympathizers of kindred spirits.”

  “Magda. Why would you wear that?”

  Magda shook her head and wailed. “I don’t know! I’m not a Nazi, I swear. What my parents did made me sick. I was an adult before I stopped having stomach aches, and even now it’s not quite proper.” Magda’s hand flitted to her stomach before she shook her head again. “I hated what they did, Chiara. I don’t know why I’d wear such a thing.”

  But Chiara did, or at least she suspected.

  “How old were you when you started wearing the amulet?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I was a child. The war was essentially over, but my parents’ hatred, oh that lasted until their death.”

  “When did they die?”

  “I don’t know that either. They escaped Germany when the search for Nazis was heating up. They left me with my aunt in the country. She told me when I was in high school that they had died in a car accident. I think that’s when I started wearing the amulet, actually.”

  Chiara was silent.

  Magda mused in wonder, “Maybe that car crash never happened.”

  Chiara regarded her friend. “You let your parents define what you believe about yourself.”

  Magda hung her head. “Yes.”

  “How long are you going to let those people decide who you are?”

  “I’m not. Not anymore. I want to get rid of this box. But, without this box, who am I?”

  Chiara took Magda’s hand. “Well, let’s burn that damned box and find out.”

  Shouts of alarm were replaced with yelps of celebration, the air ringing with relief as the last of the fire was extinguished.

  One by one, the townspeople thanked the firefighters, who piled into their cartoonishly proportioned, but heroic, truck, and backed out of Santa Lucia. The villagers dropped their weaponry and flung themselves to the ground around the castle yard. In groups of two and three chatter began, as voices catalogued their burns, the clothes that would never be the same again, the damage to the castle’s groves, the impact on the coming year’s yield. As runners in a relay, they passed the baton of thanks to the Madonna that the fire hadn’t reached their trees.

  The
loss of the castle uliveto was heartbreaking, certainly, but don’t people feel their own losses most of all?

  As the villagers began brushing themselves off to return home to a well-earned sleep, speculation began churning at the cause of the conflagration.

  Giovanni mused, “Such bad luck. The wind must have blown embers up to the vines.”

  On the far side of the castle yard, a voice answered. “Are you serious? The vines aren’t dry enough to catch that way. Someone must have set this fire.”

  “What? That’s insane!”

  “C’mon, don’t be stupid. Plenty of people could have done it.”

  A chorus of “No way!” echoed as more people realized the conversation in play and the speculation spread. The voices meshed and jammed in the darkness.

  The accuser sat up, moonlight illuminating the side of his face. It was Fabio, the tuba player who worked at the hardware store. “Look what happened in Spain just a few weeks ago. You know the African population around here has been rising. You know what they are capable of.”

  “What? Impossible!” Giovanni retorted. “I know our immigrants. They come into the alimentari every day. They would never ever do this.”

  “Then who?” insisted Fabio.

  “What do you mean, who? We had a fire out here around dry wood. Whose crazy idea was that?”

  A voice next to Fabio muttered loudly, “The German.”

  Fabio snickered. “Ah, see. Maybe it was her. Maybe she started it. Mrs. Angry.”

  Giuseppe growled from his position lying down beside Patrizia, “Magda? You think she ruined the pipes in order to convince the mayor to have the sagra here just so she could burn it down? What’s wrong with you, boy?”

  Grumbles.

  Fabio went on. “How about those tourists?”