by David Fiore
“So how are you, Scott?”
He turned around. “Good.”
San Michele walked down the sloping ground to where he was standing. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah.” Scott smiled.
“I’m glad to hear that. And those problems you were talking about the other night? They’ve been resolved?”
“I was really high.”
Luca laughed. “I’m glad to hear that, too. Come on.” He linked arms with Scott and began leading him back. “What do you say? Let’s eat! I should have dinner ready soon. I wish”—he swept a broad hand over the surrounding hills—“I had some wild game to serve tonight. But ever since Lucy died I haven’t touched my shotgun.”
“That was your dog?”
“My dog, yes. What a rare bitch she was! A pointer, but also a fanatical ratter. That’s her grave there. Anyway, it’s too bad. These woods are full of songbirds.”
&
In the kitchen, a white tablecloth covered a farm table gleaming with silverware and fat-bottomed wine glasses. Dressed in his nanny’s old apron, San Michele stood before the gas stove, sleeves pushed back as he worked the burners. The meal was simple northern regional fare, and Scott found the whole dinner very comfortable. He drank, and laughed, and drunkenly attacked his risotto, radicchio, Florentine steak, arugula salad and, for dessert, his forest fruit tart.
They took their coffees into the living room. Then the doorbell rang and San Michele ushered in a group of ruddy-faced friends. They pulled off scarves and knit caps, while Luca introduced them. Then he dashed off to answer the bell again. Soon, more and more guests were arriving, by the carload, and the evening took a boisterous turn into night. Side by side, Scott and Holly mingled loudly with the new arrivals. Scott successfully carried on an entire conversation in Italian with an excitable kid who loved seventies rock.
“Ti piace The Who?” he pressed Scott, and sang a few garbled bars. “E la Blue Oyster Cult? Cosa ne pensi?”
Into the smoky room, a baby was paraded shoulder-high. There were also a lot of Chinese people—friends of Luca’s girlfriend. They were a fun bunch. After a couple hours of mixing, however, Scott grew sleepy and his voice hoarse. Comfortably drunk on Chianti and juniper-flavored grappa, he went to loaf on the sofa for a minute, settled in, and nodded off.
&
He awoke disoriented, in the depths of an incessant and foreign chatter. Even the cries of the baby sounded foreign somehow. Shouldn’t that baby be in its crib? What time is it?
On the couch with Scott was an Asian couple. He said hello, and they smiled and the man leaned toward him and asked, “Do you know where to find a man-Barbie?”
Scott gave a sleepy smile and was shaking his head apologetically, when San Michele sank into the armchair next to him.
“That’s better!” He exhaled. “You’ve got the right idea, Scott.” A tulip-shaped glass of fortified wine swirled in his hand. Then his cell phone started ringing and he slid it out to glance at the number. “This one never stops calling.” He silenced the phone and tucked it away. “Let me tell you. You never know which ones are the crazy ones until it’s too late.”
“Who are you talking about?” Scott yawned.
“That girl. What’s her name?” He tasted his brandy. “The beautiful blonde. Luca’s friend.”
“Who the hell is that?” Scott asked, genuinely perplexed.
“What the devil’s her name?” Luca looked mad at himself. Then he got it: “Arpi!”
“Luca’s girlfriend?”
“What girlfriend? As far as I know, they’re just friends. Listen, I know you don’t approve of Il Gallo, and maybe I shouldn’t be saying this to you right now, but you’d be amazed by the women he attracts. He doesn’t even know it himself. So there are some advantages to his friendship. Although I’m not sure ‘friendship’ is the right word in our case. I think, if I’m not mistaken, he cherishes an antipathy toward me, as all good artists should their patrons.”
Scott parsed that last sentence. “Huh?” he said.
“I’ve been renting out that studio to him.”
Scott was broad awake. “What?”
“Gratis,” he pronounced deliciously. “So it’s not exactly renting.”
“That’s your place?”
“Of course. I know it’s not practical of me, but what can I say? It makes me feel like a certain… Cosimo. Though,”—his face darkened—“I may not let him use it any longer, if he continues to staple his bloody paintings into my walls.”
Scott found his feet. His head reeled. “How long?” he demanded. Even to himself the question was not quite coherent.
Luca hadn’t heard him anyway. Three voluble young women had descended on him and were insisting he get up and go into the kitchen. With a bemused smile, Luca let himself be dragged out of his chair and led away.
Scott stared after them until they’d gone, and then wandered around the living room as if lost. Finally he stopped and tried looking for Holly in the crowd.
Where was she?
25
She was gliding up the entryway toward the castle’s front doors. On the way over, she swiped a ring of keys from a sideboard and dropped it into her purse. She wore ballet flats, navy tights, and a jumper dress that swung as she turned, furtively, at the staircase. She hastened up the carpeted stone steps and advanced into the varnished darkness of the upstairs hall. A runner rug muffled her footsteps. Through a spooky, velvet sitting room and into another corridor, Holly wove her way, without wavering. She was trying to gather her thoughts, but it was like herding cats.
The corridor terminated in the master bedroom. One fine, frosty, Christmassy day, she had woken up from a nap in its great bed, alone. She’d slipped out of the covers, put San Michele’s robe around her, and looked for him out in the hall. She’d glimpsed an opening in one of the doors, the second on the right, and peered inside. It was a library, a square room with shelves filled with books from floor to ceiling. She’d retreated from the door and continued to the central part of the castello. Finally, after calling down from the banister and getting no response, Holly had padded back toward the bedroom—and, lo, there was Luca, locking the library door. “Where were you?” she’d asked him.
“Just looking for a book,” he had replied, and then become uncharacteristically angry when she tried to contradict him.
The affair had started early on. San Michele had moved quick. His first overture was so swift, decisive, and expertly timed he had no need for another. As the relationship continued, Holly would often ask herself why she had accepted his advances—his advance—in the first place. Was it the tacit quid pro quo? He was, at the time, helping her get a position at the museum. But somehow that answer didn’t feel damning enough. No, something even more disgraceful had been at play. In the end, Holly concluded she had slept with Luca not for an attractive job but because when the moment arrived she had felt too embarrassed to say no. That was the hardest thing to admit. She could be manipulated into anything, without much resistance. In fact, she’d been quite accommodating.
Scott’s jealousy was often uncanny, and it was never a guarantee that he wasn’t, all the while, hacking his righteous way to the truth. So when he finally ordered her not to see the other Luca anymore, she was relieved to see how far off he’d wound up. She was also more than willing to oblige. She needed a break from Luca Gallo, anyway. Though they were friends, lately Holly had begun to tire of the artist and his serialized dramas with Arpi, who he suspected was being unfaithful. On many levels, it made Holly uncomfortable to hear him talk about what a lying slut Arpi was.
Every morning before work, while Scott slept, she and San Michele would rendezvous in his place in the Quadrilatero. Weekends they would escape to the castle and pretend they were a real couple. An intense schedule. From the amount of time he indefatigably dedicated to her, Holly reasoned that San Michele had feelings for her. But then he was indefatigable about every
thing. She tried hard to develop feelings of her own, but for some reason it wasn’t happening. Once Holly accepted this fact, she realized her cheating heart wasn’t in it anymore. Still, she might have let it go on, had Scott not then reached out to her with a plea for reconciliation so honest, and so touchingly clueless, it shamed her.
After ending the affair, Holly kept expecting repercussions. It seemed wrong to be allowed to make a clean break, to have gotten away with it. But Luca had taken the news bravely—so bravely, in fact, it had made her cry—and even she appeared unaffected by the months of running around, wearying deceit, inflamed defenses, raised stress levels, and fluctuating yet radioactive waves of guilt. In the week that followed, she began to entertain the hope that whatever damage she had caused had been isolated, and that this sordid page in her life could be turned, noiselessly, without disturbing Scott.
Then the American woman was murdered, and Holly saw that fate had waited to expose her solely to prepare a more sensational unveiling. As soon as Scott told her that the painting was missing, Holly felt the presence of something malevolent and got goose bumps of horror. Her mind flashed back to the conversation she had had with San Michele, in which she had glibly detailed all the problems in her marriage: her husband’s insecurities, lack of emotional support, jealousy, his sulking around, and his absolutely futile obsession with this oil painting by John Frederick Kensett and the miserable woman who was never going to part with it.
She remembered Luca’s reaction to the story (mildly delighted) and the casual questions he would subsequently put forth, asking how Scott was getting along in his dealings with that very awful and entertaining American woman.
Under Scott’s sudden interrogation, out on the street the night of the murder, Holly froze up. Caught in a lie, she made the split-second, default decision to stick to her story and continue lying, pathologically. Then symptoms started appearing of the flu that was to possess her for the next three days and nights. During the illness, Holly went over the mystery in her mind, arranging and rearranging her few pieces of the puzzle again and again, until finally her fevered brain wore itself out. By the time she recovered, Holly had persuaded herself that whatever the answer was, it likely had nothing to do with Luca San Michele.
And yet she kept thinking back to the strange disappearing act in the library, and Luca’s quick scowl.
Now she reached for the knob of that same library door. It was locked. Snapping open her purse, she took out the key ring and began trying random keys. It was dark, and she was being woefully unmethodical, selecting sometimes the same key twice and clumsily stabbing and scraping at the lock. The set fell out of her shaking hands and rang out on the rug. Holly snatched it up, blew the hair out of her face, and commanded herself to start over, slowly.
In order, she went through the ring. Her heart swelled with satisfaction and fear when on the sixth key she got it. It grated inside the lock, the catch gave with a stiff clink, and the library door sprang open.
The light switch illumined a brass chandelier. Holly slipped inside the room, closing the door softly behind her. It sprang back open. She pushed it shut again, but it didn’t stay. Leave it, she told herself, and turned around.
In addition to its mahogany shelves stocked with old volumes, the library had two rolling ladders, an Afghan rug, dragonfly floor lamp, end table, and an oxblood settee against the casement window. What now? Should she start twisting candlesticks?
From afar, the sound of laughter reached the library, like a dog lunging on its chain.
&
San Michele stood in the threshold of the living room. The party was a success. His guests were enjoying themselves. They had ventured out and colonized the adjoining rooms. He heard the crack of billiard balls and someone tearing through a Bach cantata on the pianoforte. People were using the absinthe fountain. The fire danced and bubbled.
He made out Scott’s silhouette outside on the patio, engulfed in the flames reflected in the French doors. He was pacing back and forth, smoking a cigarette, by himself.
Luca looked around the room again.
&
Holly tried to raise one end of the Afghan rug over her head so she could peek underneath, but the thing was deceptively heavy. She tightened her grip, jerked her arms up, then lost her grip, stumbled back, and performed a pratfall.
She sat there in thought. Her quick peek hadn’t uncovered anything. But anyway, if there was a trapdoor in the floor, she would have noticed it that day she went looking for San Michele, because the rug would have been moved to allow access to it. She wasn’t thinking straight.
Back on her feet, Holly made a desperate attempt to find a hidden switch. All in a flurry she began pulling back books. Three or four with each hand, row after row. The library ladder rumbled in its rail as she rolled it around. She rifled through the top shelves, then moved on to the next wall, working from the bottom up. A noise outside the door stopped her cold.
Already the wheels in her head were turning. She would tell Luca everything, the whole colorful story. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. He might be tickled by it. Worse came to worse, she could appease him by sleeping with him again. Thus resolved, Holly marched forward. She assumed a look of defiance, flung open the door—and gasped at the blackness before her.
Part of the hallway wall was missing. A section of its wood paneling had swung back on an invisible hinge, revealing a narrow, stone passageway. Was someone there, or had her pawing through the shelves actually hit upon a switch?
The air inside was frigid, the walls rough. She beat about the cramped passage. Then her toe caught a step and she began scraping up a tight, dizzying spiral staircase. Swallowing a lusty dose of claustrophobia, she came to the top and groped into an open space.
“Hello?” she called out.
Taking a step forward, she walked into a dangling spider. Holly spat and shrank back and swatted at it in a panic before realizing it was a light bulb chain she was battling. She pulled down on it, a dim light turned on, and a small attic room materialized around her.
She was alone. More books stuffed the wall on her left. Maybe Luca wasn’t lying when he said he’d been looking for a book.
The wide plank flooring was creaky. It was a very quaint, cluttered, aromatic little garret. The rounded doorway led directly inside. A wooden folding chair sat in a corner. A cherry desk was piled high with notebooks and legal pads (his memoirs?). There was a cushioned window-seat, an old trunk for a coffee table. A telescope tilted at a green-shuttered window in the pitched roof. A fireplace was squeezed into the far corner. Taking up the exposed brick wall in the back was a long, shallow chest of drawers with half its paint chipping off. There was indeed an oil painting in the secret room, propped on top of the bureau. A seascape, in fact—a cool yard of bottle green sea, delicate tea green surf, white sandy shore, dark vegetation, and bluish gray sky. It was cleaner, more luminescent, and in a slim hardwood frame, but otherwise it was just how she remembered it.
&
She replaced the keys on the sideboard, exactly where she had found them.
“What are you doing?”
“Oh!” She jumped. “Luca. Hi.”
He approached from a side room in the entryway. “Surprised?”
“You scared me.”
“Yes. What are you doing?”
She gave a little laugh. “This castle can be really spooky. I’m sorry, I was putting your keys back. I knocked them off by accident.”
San Michele stood before her and closed his fingers on the keys. Brooding, he turned them around in his hand, then put them securely in his pocket. “Where have you been?”
“I had to go out to the car for something.” She indicated the front doors past the vestibule.
Luca kept his eyes on her. She held his gaze. Then, with the back of his fingers, he touched her cheek.
“Don’t do that,” she said sadly.
“Your skin is quite hot. It doesn�
�t feel as if you’ve been outside.”
She didn’t blink. “I know. I’m burning up. I’ve been running around. I’m having a good time!”
A long interval ensued while Luca examined her smiling face. Then he cast a stern look up the dark staircase.
“Come on.” Holly took his arm. “Let’s go back to the living room.”
Immovably, with a pervasive air of suspicion, Luca stared up into the pitchy hall at the top of the stairs. Holly tightened her clasp on his arm. Then slowly his head turned and he looked down to regard the body pressed against him. His expression warmed.
“I’ve missed you, you know,” he told her, as they progressed without haste down the main corridor.
“Sh!” she said playfully. “I told you no.”
“I don’t understand!” He was acting exasperated, but there was laughter in his voice. “The other day at Gallo’s coming-out party you seemed so excited to see me again. This whole night was your idea. I interpreted that to mean you wanted to get back together.”
“Wrong interpretation.”
&
For the rest of the night, Holly didn’t leave Luca’s side.
Look at her, thought Scott, from his gloomy corner. The black, flashing eyes. The forced gaiety. The falsity.
He sipped the green absinthe. Holly and San Michele sat beside the fire, together on a leather ottoman. She laughed and placed a negligent hand upon his shoulder. He tapped on her knee to punctuate a point. All over again it was starting: the chronic question of which Luca; the paranoia that people were playing games with him; the jealousy that could never be scotched.