Italian Fever (2 page)

As he reached this decision, he heard the sharp crack of gunfire off to his right. His first impulse, which was to throw himself facedown on the ground, gave way to anger, and he veered toward the sound, his head lowered, his shoulders hunched forward, as if he expected to tackle his opponent. He charged a few yards through the underbrush, then came to a halt, finding himself in a wide, empty clearing. He turned around slowly, listening, trying to gauge the dimensions of the space, which was difficult in the darkness. Overhead he could see a spray of stars, very bright, for there was no artificial light to dim the heavens. The smell, fetid and sickening, was stronger. He covered his nose with his hand. Whatever it was, it was nearby. Suppose, he thought, it was a dead body, another American perhaps, lured out here, as he had been, by the man with the rifle, and murdered, as he would be if he didn’t give up the chase.

Then, as he stood in the clearing, a terrible confusion came over him and he understood that he was lost. He couldn’t remember where he had come in, and the vegetation was as closed all around as a room with no door. He went to the spot where he thought he might have entered, but there was no evidence that it was the right one; there were no broken leaves or branches and he couldn’t see the ground well enough to make out anything like a footprint. The unpleasant smell made him anxious; it seemed to be rolling over him in waves. His stomach turned and his throat contracted. What was he doing out here? How had he come to this insalubrious pass? He covered his nose with his hand again and stood, head lowered, listening to the dense silence of the woods. Surely if he could only
manage to walk straight in any direction, he would eventually come to some road. This was Italy, after all. It wasn’t some uncharted wilderness. He scanned the heavens for something to navigate by, but the truth was, he knew nothing about the stars, nor was the moon anywhere to be seen. At least if he kept walking, he could eventually escape the gagging smell. He pushed at the foliage, which gave way easily enough, and took a few steps. As quickly as the way opened before him, it closed behind. He went on—there was nothing else to do—though the way grew more difficult and the rancid air invaded his nose and mouth and burned his eyes. Again he took up a slow jog, trying not to notice the disproportionate increase in his heart rate. He was going steadily downhill, he could feel it, and this seemed comforting for some reason, perhaps because it indicated some discernible direction. Then, through a break in the trees, he saw something promising, a low hill covered with scrub and at the top a whitewashed building, perhaps the outbuilding of a farm. There would be more difficulty ahead; he would have to explain somehow who he was and where he wanted to be, but if he just kept repeating “Villa Cini,” surely he could get someone to lead him that far. A wave of optimism buoyed him up and spurred him on. He picked up speed.

Then several things happened at once. He emerged into a narrow, open area where the decline was suddenly very steep. The fetid smell rose up around him like a swarm of furious insects, so that even as he lost his footing, flailing his arms to regain his balance, his stomach contracted violently, causing him to pitch forward, stumbling and vomiting, first to his knees, then, as the ground slipped away beneath him, head over heels. His brain buzzed with activity, every system becoming alert, but he was completely at the whim of gravity, dragged relentlessly down, while terror pumped out such a
flood of adrenaline that his senses were suddenly, excruciatingly acute and time came to a standstill. He saw the slick sole of his own shoe go by and thought wistfully of the running shoes in his wardrobe at the house. His fall was generating a shower of dirt and gravel, which stung his cheeks and choked him. His chin was wet. Was it blood or vomit? One arm was trapped behind him, causing the muscles in his bad shoulder to tear painfully. He would be sore for weeks. If he could only get his legs under him long enough to lie flat, he might be able to stop this endless hurtling downhill. His head and chest came up into the air. He saw something just ahead, something white, jutting out of the soil, and he heard the word
concrete
as clearly as if someone had pronounced it next to his ear. It had not, he thought, been a good idea to come to Italy. She was gone, and now this. He said her name. He heard a sharp pop, not gunfire, but something much worse, very close, and then, in the last moment, he knew he was entirely free of the earth and that the all-engulfing blackness he was entering had nothing to do with anything outside his own shattered skull.

Chapter 1

O
H, FOR GOD
’
S SAKE
,” Lucy exclaimed. “It’s a ghost story.” She dropped the page she was reading onto the smaller of the two stacks that filled every inch of the available space on her cluttered desk. This manuscript, the first half of DV’s latest novel, had arrived from Italy the day before. The package was tattered and stained, the post-mark a month old. Why had DV shipped it by sea mail? In preparation for the labor of transcribing it onto the computer, Lucy had passed the morning reading it, experiencing, as she always did when confronted by her employer’s contributions to the world of letters, a steady elevation of blood pressure and an involuntary clenching of the jaw that made her face ache. The page she took up next was as covered over with scratches, lines, and mysterious explosions of ink as an aerial photograph of a war zone. Why, she wondered, did it take such an effort for DV to write so poorly?

Under different names, in different settings, the narrators
of DV’s novels were all the same man: a self-absorbed, pretentious bore, always involved in a tragic but passionate relationship with a neurotic, artistic, beautiful woman, always caught up in some far-fetched rescue adventure, dipping occasionally into the dark underworld of thugs and hired murderers, or rising to the empyrean abodes, the glittering palaces of the wealthy and the elite. The whole absurd mess was glazed over with a sticky treacle of trite homilies and tributes by the narrator to himself for being so strong and wise and brave when everyone around him was scarcely able to get out of bed. He was usually a writer or a journalist; sometimes he traveled. When he traveled, he was always recovering from an emotional crisis and he was always alone. This time, his name was Malcolm Manx, described by himself in the early pages as “an American writer of some reputation.” Devastated by the breakup of a passionate but tragic marriage, he has secluded himself in a villa in Tuscany, where he hopes to find peace, inspiration, and a renewed interest in life.

Lucy placed her frog paperweight carefully on the pages and stalked off to the kitchen. To read on, she would need a cup of herbal tea, a glass of water, and two aspirin. The book was awful. DV’s books were always awful, but what made this one worse than the others was the introduction of a new element, which was bound to boost sales: There was a ghost in the villa. DV had gone gothic. It wasn’t enough that the unsuspecting Italians must succumb to the bold and original charms of the devastated American writer; now he was haranguing the dead as well.

The ghost was the restless spirit of a dead Resistance fighter, a partisan, ambushed by fascist forces in the yard of his own estate. This dead warrior, mirabile dictu, shared with Malcolm Manx both a staunch love of liberty and an ancestor
from the rugged Basque country. The presence of such a soul mate, a comrade, stomping through the family olive groves in search of peace and old-world wisdom had so excited the murdered partisan that he got right out of his grave, and now he was wandering around pointing at things, always in the dead of night, when everyone was asleep, everyone but Malcolm Manx, who was up and struggling with the big, hard questions of life and art.

For reasons Lucy usually tried not to think about, DV’s books sold well. A few had been made into movies, and DV was encouraged by everyone around him to write more. Reviews were rare, however, and seldom favorable, which galled him, but he had learned to take satisfaction in the size of his bank account.

Through eight years and five novels, Lucy Stark had worked for DV. He never asked her what she thought of his books and she never told him. She was, in his phrase, “the assistant,” or sometimes, more accurately, “the office.” She kept track of everything, made sure he didn’t see the worst reviews, kept his ex-wives at bay, handled his mail, supervised the flow in and out of large sums of money, and transcribed every word of his wretched prose from the tattered, indecipherable pages he sent her to the computer he had never learned to use.

In the early years, she had tried to straighten out some of his worst sentences; she had balked when a mixed metaphor strained to include a fourth incongruent element, but those days were gone. DV had complained to his editor, Stanton Cutler, who had called Lucy and explained, politely but firmly, that she must restrain her no doubt rightful enthusiasm. “Just think of it as a draft,” he suggested.

Armed with her tea, dosed with painkillers, Lucy returned
to her desk and took up the page that had driven her from the room.

A dark and brooding figure beckoned him eerily on the moonlit drive, and Malcolm felt his burning blood turn to ice in his veins.

“Jesus,” Lucy said.

The phone rang. She dropped the page, reached over the lamp, caught the teacup in the cuff of her sweater, and watched in horror as the tea spilled out across the manuscript. Bringing the receiver to her ear with one hand, she lifted the soaking page with the other and tried to funnel the hot liquid into the wastebasket. The tea poured out across the carpet.

“Lucy Stark, please?” a woman’s voice inquired.

“This is she.”

“American embassy in Rome calling. Please hold.”

And in the next moment, as she knelt beside her desk, blotting at the tea stains with a page of newsprint hastily torn from last week’s book review, a hostile, disembodied male voice came on the line and gave her the astonishing news that DV was dead.

Chapter 2

H
E FELL DOWN
a well.”

“This is terrible.” Jean McKay, DV’s agent, was the first person Lucy informed of his unexpected demise. “How could a grown man fall down a well?”

“I don’t know,” Lucy replied. “The embassy man didn’t tell me much. He seemed annoyed with DV for dying. He wouldn’t even say when it happened; he just said, ‘It wasn’t yesterday.’ And he didn’t seem to know anything about Catherine. Where is Catherine? Why didn’t she call?”

“It’s mysterious,” Jean observed.

“It
is
mysterious,” Lucy agreed.

“DV would have liked that. He always wanted to be mysterious.”

The women divided up the necessary business. Jean agreed to return the call to Italy, to call DV’s lawyer and his editor.
Lucy would contact his accountant and his ex-wives. Then they would talk again and decide what was to be done.

It took Lucy the rest of the morning to finish these calls. She switched from tea to coffee and returned to her desk, where DV’s ghost novel lay before her, still damp from the tea accident, its pages curling at the edges, mutely accusing. Was it possible? Wasn’t it thicker than it had been before she received the call from the embassy?

It doesn’t matter if it is, she thought. She would not now transfer even one word onto the computer; what would be the point? It wasn’t finished and now it never would be. DV’s ghost story would live in no other memory than her own. She tried to work up some feeling about this. It bothered her that no one she had spoken to so far had expressed anything more serious than vexation at the news of DV’s untimely death. The wives had been particularly unfeeling.

Poor DV. Jean was right; he had wanted to be mysterious, but he never was. He was as transparent as a shallow pool. There were ripples now and then on the surface, caused by how thoroughly he failed to know his own limitations, his own lack of depth. In her opinion, the move to Italy had been one of those ripples, and now it had cost him everything. What had possessed him to make such a flamboyant, impractical move?

The phone startled her from her reverie. Jean had talked with the embassy official and, through an interpreter, the landlord and even the coroner, who wanted to ship DV’s body home. “No one wants that,” Lucy said. “It would be too macabre.”

“I know,” Jean agreed. “So someone has to go over there and get him buried. I can’t. I can’t leave right now. I’ll arrange a memorial service here.”

“Did you find out anything about Catherine?”

“She’s gone.” Jean paused. Lucy could hear her sipping something, coffee, no doubt. “The landlord was vague about that. He didn’t know when she left, but he said he thought DV had been living alone there for some time.”

“Really?” Lucy tried to picture DV alone, wandering about the vast and gloomy villa he described in the manuscript, an ancient stone mansion complete with tapestries, family portraits, and a sinister family chapel in which the decadent aristocrats were routinely christened and from which they were carried out in their coffins. She couldn’t picture it.

“Do any of the wives want to go?” Jean asked.

“No. They just want to know what’s going to happen to the money.”

“Can you go?”

She had been to Italy once, when she was still in college, a monthlong backpack and train trip with two friends from school. The trio had resisted the pinches and leers of gorgeous Italian men from Naples to Trieste, it was as hot as an oven, and they were so poor, they lived on pizza slices and little sandwiches and slept in tiny, sparsely furnished rooms, with the bath down the hall. In the churches, piazzas, and museums of Venice, Florence, Rome, and Naples, Lucy sought the fabulous treasures she had studied, and each time she found one, she marveled anew at the inadequacy of reproductions to give even a hint of the power of the originals. Art in its home, she thought, at ease in its natural habitat. It was like encountering the tiger, seen previously stalking nervously behind iron bars at a zoo, sleeping peacefully in its own lair. At the end of the trip, the three friends had splurged on a big trattoria meal in Rome, then staggered full and tipsy out into the broiling streets, blinded by tears at the thought of going home.