Italian Fever (16 page)

The bird had given up on the notebook and moved on to a pencil. It lifted the eraser in its beak, dropped it back to the table, then lifted it again. Each time it struck the wood, the pencil made a sharp rap, even and surprisingly loud, like the ticking of a clock. That was because, Lucy observed, the room was so quiet and still. The bird was maniacally occupied by this activity, as if it were practicing some important, necessary exercise. Bird calisthenics, she thought. She had not moved and did not move, so that her own stillness had become part of the room’s furnishings, at least as far as the bird was concerned.

This was where DV had stayed in the last months of his life, alone, day after day, working on his poor novel. Perhaps he had been visited by this busybody sparrow before the bizarre accident that ended his life. That accident was another subject she intended to touch upon during the drive with Antonio. He was adept at avoiding it, or had been so far. But this time she would press him, and because they would be closed up in a car, he wouldn’t be able to get away.

The bird had worked the pencil to the edge of the desk, where it slipped over the side and dropped to the floor. In the same moment, a queer, thin breeze ruffled the pages in the neat stacks of paper she had arranged across the desk. It was too
much for the bird, which took off in a minitornado of feathers, out through the open window and off into the dull afternoon. The pencil rolled toward her feet; the floor wasn’t level, she observed. The breeze brushed past her, cooling her cheeks and forehead. It was odd, like a current of cool water in a warm stream. It was odd, she thought again, this brief, specific chill, and then she felt a deeper cold that gripped her at the base of the spine and rushed up the length of her back, as palpable as a fingertip. The sensation in her scalp was unmistakable; the skin tightened, so that the hairs on her head, though they were not bristling like the fur on a cat’s back, were, in some vestigial, cellular way, standing on end. If she moved even a finger, she knew the illusion that she was not alone would be dispelled, but she did not move. Instead, she listened intently. The breeze had dropped off as quickly as it had come up, and her ears strained into a void in which nothing save the listener breathed. Eventually, she heard her own heartbeat, which had steadily elevated. Whoever it was, whatever it was, was just behind her; she felt a gathered energy at her back exerting a barely perceptible pressure upon her, like the intangible, ineluctable press of eye beams. She was being watched.

Slowly, with an effort of will disproportionate to the difficulty of the action, she turned in place and looked back at the empty doorway, the bare landing, and beyond that to the open doorway of DV’s bedroom. Then her eyes started from their sockets and her heart lurched in her chest like an engine thrown carelessly out of gear, for there was someone there looking back at her. Her hand flew up to contain a shout of alarm. She recognized her observer; it was her own reflection in the mirror on the open door of the wardrobe. But this discovery only intensified her terror and confusion, for she was sure, wasn’t she, didn’t she remember closing that door a few
hours ago, turning the key firmly in the latch? She was certain she had not opened it again. She rushed out across the landing and confronted her distraught, noticeably pale reflection. She examined the wardrobe, which was as she had left it, empty but for a few wire hangers. Next to it stood the suitcase she had packed that morning, which contained DV’s clothes, shoes, everything that had been in the wardrobe. The suitcase was open; the drawing pad lay across the top of the folded clothes. She had been unsure what to do with it. She was unsure what to do with everything, she concluded, closing the wardrobe door. The latch was old. It must not have caught properly and the bedroom floor, like all the floors in the house, was uneven, so the door had opened on its own. The spell had been broken by her brisk movement; she was her practical self again. The isolation of this house and the omnipresence of DV in it had played upon all that was suggestible in her. Or rather, it was DV’s omniabsence, the volume of the evidence that he had been here but was no more.

It was only that the lock was old. As she turned the key, the mechanism gave a sturdy resistance and she struggled with it briefly, turning the key hard until she felt the lock had seated. She gave the door handle a pull to make sure it was locked, then went back into the study and looked over the boxes of books she had spent the morning packing, the books no one wanted, which would be so expensive to ship back to the States, it hardly seemed worth it. Yet it would be a shame to disperse them. It was one of the many curious ironies of DV’s personality that though he wrote trash, he seldom read it. Lucy calmed herself with the problem of the books. If the estate would pay for the shipping, perhaps she could buy them cheaply herself.

But there was no telling what the estate would pay for, or
even, at this point, who the estate was. Jean McKay had approved Lucy’s plan to go to Rome for a few days, asking only for whatever papers Lucy thought might interest her, and various records the accountants were after. Everything else was to stay at the farmhouse until she returned, a situation that would make Signora Panatella weep with frustration. Lucy had put it out that she was off to Rome on business for the deceased tenant, an excuse Antonio Cini had seen through as if she’d held up a pane of window glass, but which the Panatellas would probably accept. Americans were always moving about on business, and they were notoriously wasteful and extravagant in the process.

Why did it bother her, she wondered, what these people thought of her, since in a short time she would disappear from their lives, and they from hers, entirely, as if, like DV, she had fallen into a hole in the earth? She reached across the desk and pulled in the windows. She would sleep in the smaller apartment, where she was less likely to be visited by phantoms. In the morning, after the brief ordeal of an excursion with Antonio Cini, she would make her way to Rome and to Massimo. Though he had been gone only a few hours, she longed for him with a visceral ache she had never experienced before.

Chapter 13

A
MONG THE MODERN MYTHS
that had failed to excite Antonio Cini’s devotion was the one that confers prestige upon the owner according to the size and power of his automobile. Or so Lucy concluded as she climbed into the narrow confines of the Cini car, an unimpressive pale blue steel box on wheels, with an engine that complained bitterly at the challenge of reversing on the mild incline of the farmhouse driveway. The interior was dusty, the plastic seats were covered with cheap black cloth covers printed over in a frightening array of pink dots, and the floor mats were gritty with gravel deposited by the shoes of previous passengers over what must have been a considerable period of time. Antonio did not fasten his seat belt, and Lucy, after a brief struggle with the recalcitrant strap on her side, which was so designed that it could not actually fit across anything resembling a human body, gave up and let it snap back into its preferred position against the door frame. The little
car lurched down the driveway, rattling so hard she braced herself by clutching the strap over her head and jamming her feet against the front panel of the floorboard. Antonio was entirely occupied with the wheel, the gearshift, and the clutch, so Lucy took the opportunity to observe him. For some reason, he had decided to make himself agreeable to her, and the effort subtly altered his appearance. She would not, she admitted, ever be able to say he was an attractive man. His body was too slack, his muscles lacked tone, and his skin was sallow. His mouth was a bilious purple, and he had the kind of heavy beard that always looks unshaven, though a red-rimmed nick near his chin and another close to his ear testified to a recent effort. His general aura of ill health, poor diet, and insufficient exercise was intensified by his taste in clothes, which ran to synthetic fibers and colors that clashed with his skin. Today, for example, he was wearing a light blue turtleneck shirt of a fabric that had an unnatural sheen to it and brown woolen pants with elastic insets at either side of the waistband to accommodate a vacillating girth. But his expression was more alert, less sour than she had seen before. He had arrived at her door exactly at the appointed time, bearing a gift that took her entirely by surprise, for it revealed both thoughtfulness and generosity, two qualities she had not expected to discover in his character. She glanced between the seats to where it lay across the floor, a sturdy but elegant walking stick, carved from a light golden wood, with a silver handle in the form of a leopard’s head.

“Please, take this with you,” he had said. “The streets of Rome can be difficult. They are all of small stones and the traffic is …” He touched his fingers to his forehead, indicating the impossibility of finding a word to describe the horror of the traffic. “And your ankle is still too weak, I think.”

And, in fact, she had had these same thoughts and worried
about what she would do for support on those excursions when Massimo’s arm was not available to her. She dreaded a reinjury, and her ankle, though much improved, was still not strong enough to walk for any length of time without a tight bandage.

“This is so kind,” she said. “It is exactly what I need.” She accepted the stick and examined the beautifully worked animal head with its protuberant brow and wide, vacant, shining eyes. It was old, a family heirloom perhaps. He might have pulled it from a rack of fellows equally wonderful, an afterthought on his way out the door. “Of course,” she added, “I’ll return it to you when I come back.”

He shrugged. “Keep it as long as you need it,” he said. Though it was certainly not gracious, Lucy found this remark sufficiently courteous, for it allowed her to return an object she considered too valuable to accept as a gift, without requiring him ever to demand that it be returned. She smiled at him and took a few steps back into the kitchen, leaning on the stick to demonstrate its usefulness. But he had lost interest already; the gesture was complete. He expressed surprise over the meagerness of her luggage.

They had reached the end of the driveway now, and the car settled onto the level road with a jolt and a shuddering at the seams, like an airplane touching down. Lucy readjusted herself, smoothing her skirt over her knees. She was thinking of how she might introduce the subject of DV when, to her surprise, Antonio did it for her.

“You have packed up your poor friend’s possessions?” he said.

“I have,” she replied. “Though I’m not sure yet where I’m sending them.”

“Surely back to his family.”

“He didn’t have much in the way of family.”

Antonio furrowed his brow, casting her a quick sidelong look of dismay.

“He was estranged from his former wives,” she explained, “and his parents died some time ago.”

“How unfortunate.”

“I’m sending some of his papers to his agent,” she added, indicating the thick envelope she had placed atop her small bag on the backseat. “Though there wasn’t much to send.”

“You did not find this unfinished book about my family?” They were rattling down the road that ran past his estate, and at the mention of “my family” he lifted his chin, indicating the stone wall behind which that entity was protected from interlopers and aliens.

“No,” Lucy assured him. “He never finished it. It wasn’t really about your family anyway. It was about DV. All his books were about himself.”

“But my house was in it. My family history.”

Lucy smiled at his evident anxiety. “You really have nothing to fear, Signor Cini. The book wasn’t finished and will never be published.”

“Please call me Antonio,” he protested.

She nodded. She would never call him Antonio. “It’s about DV alone in the farmhouse after Catherine leaves, about how much he misses her.”

She studied his profile as she said the name Catherine and detected a hardening at the jawline, a flicker of the eyes. The name is painful to him, she thought. DV wasn’t the only one pining for Catherine Bultman.

“And why, does he say in this story, did the woman leave?” He affected an amused nonchalance. Lucy considered a moment before giving her answer. She might say, Because of another
man, just to see how he responded. But she settled, as was her habit, on the truth. “She leaves because she’s bored with him.”

Antonio’s eyebrows shot up, while the corners of his mouth pulled down. It was an expression Massimo used, too; it reminded Lucy of him and she felt a pleasant twinge of desire. Soon. She would be with him soon.

“It is true,” Antonio offered. “She was very bored here.”

“Did she tell you that?”

They had reached the intersection with the paved road that would take them to the autostrada. Antonio brought the car to a full stop and leaned toward the windshield, looking up and down the empty roadway as if he expected a sudden explosion of enraged traffic. “She did not have to tell me,” he said.

“Did you see much of her?”

He pulled out into the road, struggling with the gearshift and letting out the clutch so slowly that the engine nearly stalled. He was an awful driver; he drove like a teenage girl. Gradually, he worked his way up through the gears and settled into a cruising speed well below the limit. “Oh, yes,” he said offhandedly. “I saw her now and then. Her Italian is very good, you know. She speaks very well, with almost no accent; I don’t know where she learned it. Your friend spoke not at all. She did everything for him. When they went out in the car, she was always the driver. He was completely dependent on her.” He paused, submitting this last observation with the formality of a lawyer presenting a bit of deeply incriminating evidence. “I knew, of course, that could not go on very long.”

“But wasn’t she painting? She came here to paint.”

“Oh yes,” he agreed. “I saw her about with her little watercolor box.”

The diminutive “little” moved Lucy to the defense of Catherine Bultman. “She is an excellent painter,” she said.

Antonio gave her a quick, incredulous inspection. “I am no judge of such matters,” he said. “The painters I admire have all been dead for five hundred years.”