Italian Fever (6 page)

Then it occurred to her that this was not the apartment DV had used. There were two, and this one, made up of the sitting room, bedroom, and kitchen, was probably the smaller. She dropped the towel off in the bathroom and went to the kitchen, where Massimo had left the keys. There were six on the ring, some new, others old, worn smooth and dark with years of service. Surely no one would object to her sorting through DV’s possessions; sooner or later, it was a task that must fall to her.

The kitchen door led out to a small stone terrace. She had hardly noticed it the night before. There were big pots of trailing geraniums all around and a wrought-iron table with two matching chairs stacked under the eave of the house. To one side, stone steps led down to the drive. Lucy followed these to the open space where Massimo had parked the car. From there, she could see the whole house.

It was a beautiful old building in a picturesque setting, tucked into the slope of a low hill amid scattered cypress and stands of pine trees. The stone was ocher-colored and the shutters were black; there was a trellis over the main entrance, laden with crimson bougainvillea. The delicate flowers quivered in the light breeze as if they were breathing. The apartments were cleverly designed to have separate entrances; each had its own terrace. The one she had slept in occupied the part of the house that jutted out over a rise in the land, which gave
more privacy, for there was no way to get to it save up the stone steps.

Jangling her keys as she walked, she went to the trellised door. It had two locks, one new, one old, and after a few tries, she succeeded in turning them both. She stepped into a long whitewashed room. There was one exposed beam—a tree trunk, really—that ran the length of the room. The furniture was spare: a couch with a checked cloth slipcover, two chairs exactly like those in her sitting room, a portable butler’s table. These were gathered around a big fireplace strewn with ashes and bits of burned wood. A pair of iron fire tongs and a poker lay half in the soot, half on the brick hearth. The room was divided by a wide stone staircase with an iron rail that appeared to hang in the air unsupported. Lucy stood just inside the door, thinking of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. She would look around, but not long enough to break anything. She crossed the room quickly and hurried up the stairs.

Three doors faced the upper landing. One stood open, revealing a lavish bathroom covered floor to ceiling with startling emerald green tile. Lucy tried the closed door nearest her and looked inside. Then she opened it all the way and went in, for she had found what she was looking for. Against the far wall was a wide pine bookcase crammed with books, the contents of the thirty boxes DV had shipped at enormous expense, and next to it, pushed up flush to a window, was a long trestle table on which various notebooks and papers were arranged in orderly stacks. At one end was DV’s old manual Royal typewriter. Beneath a second window, there stood a narrow iron bed and a nightstand, on which she noticed two folded pieces of paper. She examined these first. One was a page of numbers; the other was a grocery list written in DV’s spidery handwriting. Even composing a list had posed a challenge to DV,
Lucy observed. He had scratched out the word
milk
, then written
milk
in again next to it.

She went to the table and opened the leather calendar book, which she recognized at once; it was the one DV had always carried with him. He had made no entries in the six months he had been in Italy. “Busy social schedule,” Lucy said as she flipped through the empty pages. She turned to various stacks of paper. One was the original of the manuscript DV had sent her. Another appeared to be the continuation of that manuscript.
Ghosts
was scrawled across the top page. She read the first sentence.
Malcolm steered the powerful Porsche expertly through the sinuous curves of the winding Tuscan road
. There were also empty notebooks; folders crammed with credit-card receipts, insurance papers, and miscellaneous mail; unopened packs of typing paper; a drinking glass full of pens and pencils—all very orderly, which was unlike DV. She looked around the room for some other evidence, but there was nothing, so she went out to try the other room.

This was a bedroom, neatly made up, with the furniture in a line against one wall: a wardrobe, a nightstand, a double bed, all of the same yellowish wood and decorated with the same design of carved fruit. Beneath the wardrobe was a row of expensive shoes she recognized as DV’s. She opened the double doors, startling herself momentarily with her own reflection in the mirror affixed to the inside. The wardrobe was full of DV’s clothes. Sweaters, coats, and pants hung on one side; socks, T-shirts, and underwear were folded carefully on the shelves running down the other side. The sight of his folded underwear struck her as unaccountably sad. She had never, she realized, wondered what sort of underwear DV wore. Now she knew: He preferred briefs to boxers; he liked pastel colors.

She was about to close the wardrobe when her eye caught something partially covered by the suit coats hanging above it. It was a drawing pad, the inexpensive newsprint kind artists use for pencil sketching. Lucy eased it out carefully and opened the pasteboard cover.

A man’s naked figure filled the page, though the drawing was so skillful that the impression of size, of fullness, was created by a great economy of line. His hair stood out wildly on end, his eyes were black holes, and his mouth was stretched in a grimace of pain. The cause of his agonized expression was evident; his torso had been flayed from the neck to the abdomen. As if to display the full extent of his suffering, his hands gripped the flesh and held it open, exposing the bony white cage of his ribs, beneath which could be discerned the black knot of his heart. The drawing was frightening—it had been designed to shock—but what horrified Lucy most was the man’s tortured face, which was, in spite of the stylization, the sockets for eyes, and the strangely equine quality of the visibly grinding teeth, perfectly recognizable: It was DV.

Lucy carried the sketch pad to the bed, turned on the nightstand lamp, for the room was shuttered and the light was dim, and stood gazing at the drawing for several moments. So Catherine had been here. Was this nightmarish vision her parting gift to DV? Lucy flipped through the other pages, but the pad was otherwise unused. She reached out to turn off the lamp, but before she did, on an impulse, she opened the nightstand drawer.

An envelope lay inside, nothing else. She took it out and turned it over; there was no address, no stamp. As she extracted and unfolded the two pages inside, she noted several things at once: that there was no date, that the handwriting was bold—it looked masculine—that it was written in Italian,
and that it was addressed with something warmer than the ordinary greeting. “
Carissima, amatissima Caterina
.” She turned to the signature, “
Ti abbraccio, tesoro mio, Antonio
.”

Lucy had seen Catherine and DV together on only a few occasions, but she had seen enough to conclude that in Catherine DV had found a nature more passionate and a will far stronger than his own. She had been persuaded—how, Lucy couldn’t imagine—to accept his attentions for a time. He deferred to her. He wanted to change his life for her. Being with a “real” artist, he told Lucy, in a rare moment of candor, changed everything. He felt he was breathing a new, richer, more oxygenated air. He was exhilarated, breathless; he believed himself to be in love.

As Lucy looked from the letter to the drawing, a prickly sensation moved along her spine. DV’s eyeless terror seemed to leap out from the page, to clutch at her, drawing her in. “What went on here, DV?” she said.

The shiver was followed by a bolt to the heart, for there was suddenly the sound of heavy footsteps moving quickly up the stairs. Before she could move, the old woman who had plied her with
vin santo
the evening before stood in the doorway, her features set in an habitually obsequious expression that did not entirely conceal the deeper and equally habitual suspicion in her eyes. Lucy dropped the letter back into the drawer, then hastily closed the drawing pad while the old woman poured out a stream of language. “
Non ho capito
,” Lucy said, closing the drawer and moving toward her. “
Mi dispiace
.”

The signora began again at a faster clip, but this time Lucy picked out the word
pranzo
and gathered that she was to follow her to the food she had prepared. They went back down the stairs together, out into the bright sunlit drive, Signora Panatella rattling on all the way. Her car, a vehicle that looked
as unpredictable and temperamental as Lucy suspected its owner of being, was parked in the drive, the driver’s door left wide open. So she had driven up, noticed, with what must be excellent eyesight, the door Lucy had left slightly ajar, and come straight in to find out what she was up to. Now she went ahead to her car, reached across the driver’s seat, and brought out a basket, from which issued an aroma so tantalizing that Lucy’s only thought was to get closer to it. “
Signora
,” she said, taking the basket, “
grazie tante. Molto gentile
, you are so kind.” The bottom was warm; the old woman instructed her to keep one hand beneath it. Then, dismissing her repeated thanks with fluttery hand gestures and various phrases in which the word
niente
figured strongly, she climbed back into her battered automobile, started the engine, and drove off down the drive, leaving Lucy clutching her basket and blinking nervously in the bright afternoon sun. She felt chastised, yet curiously grateful, like a child who has been reprimanded and sent to her room, but with no harsh words and, at the end, an unexpected treat pressed into her guilty hand to ease the humiliation of the righteous judgment against her.

DV’
S FUNERAL WAS
a simple business, performed without benefit of clergy and attended by mourners who were, for the most part, only distantly acquainted with the deceased.

The mourners had all gathered at the piazza in Ugolino and, after the necessary introductions, had walked together out to the cemetery, where the coffin was already in place, balanced on a lattice of thin boards and a net of ropes over a deep, dark hole. Lucy was impressed by the number of locals who had turned out, dressed appropriately in black, to accompany the American writer to his grave. All three of the Panatellas
were there, as well as the entire Cini family (The aristocrats, Lucy thought; DV would have appreciated that): the grandmother, a tiny white-haired, sharp-nosed, black-eyed lady brandishing a carved walking stick; her son, whom Lucy guessed to be seventy, though a very hale and sturdy seventy, unencumbered by feebleness or fat, and with a great shock of white hair that must have been a daily trial to the third Cini family member; his son, the heir, a gentleman in his forties, nattily dressed but seedy in spite of it. He wore his graying hair slicked back, which made it look darker, but it started farther from his temples than his father’s did and he had clearly combed it with close attention to the necessity for coverage at the crown.

Paolo Braggio, DV’s editor from Milan, who had greeted Massimo with an enthusiastic hug and pumped Lucy’s hand gleefully, as if he had been waiting to meet her for many years, though she was certain he had no idea who she was or why she was there, was easily distracted from actually finding out anything about her by the arrival of Stanton Cutler, who really did seem to know him. Signor Braggio was a short, dense, fierce personage with fiery eyes and sudden manners, and as Lucy watched him embracing Cutler’s elegant waist, she thought the two looked as if they had been created to demonstrate the full range of human variety. Stanton Cutler’s languid gaze fluttered over the gathering as he divested himself of his fellow editor, settling on Lucy with a bemused shrug. What was to be done about Italians? his expression seemed to say. One had simply to endure them.

They set out, walking in pairs. Lucy fell in naturally with her fellow countryman. “This is awfully sad,” he said. “And so sudden.”

“I’m relieved you’ve come,” she replied. “I’m afraid the
arrangements are a bit slapdash. It seemed important not to let him lie around in somebody’s refrigerator here.”

“Perfectly right,” Stanton agreed. “You can take your time clearing things up once he’s buried. You’ve done an excellent job. It can’t have been easy.”

“Actually, Massimo did it,” she said. “I just signed things so he could get the money wired to pay for it.”

“And you’ll stay on a bit, at the villa?”

Lucy smiled ruefully. “It’s not a villa. It’s a farmhouse.”

“Um.” Stanton looked ahead at the party of Italians toiling up the hill ahead of them, for they had fallen behind. “Look at that amazing old woman,” he said. “She must be a hundred, and she has outstripped everyone.”

“There is a villa,” Lucy continued. “It’s hers, actually. DV wasn’t in it.”

Stanton gave her a sympathetic smile. He had been DV’s editor for nearly twenty years and understood better than anyone the essentially cavalier nature of his author’s relationship with reality. “Have you had any time to look through his papers?”

“Only a little,” she said. “There doesn’t seem to be much.”

Stanton’s blue eyes opened wide. “But you did find the last half of the manuscript?”

“No,” she said. “Was he finished with it?”

“Well, I’m assuming he was. It was due in a week or so. DV was never late with a manuscript. He always needed the money.”

“That’s true,” Lucy agreed. “But I got the first half the day before he died, and he never told me he was finished. There may be some kind of rough draft in the house. I’ll have to look.”

“Perhaps I can look with you,” Stanton suggested. “If there’s time, once we’re finished here.”

For here they were, at the gates of the cemetery, where the
unhygienic grave digger stood waving them in as if greeting guests at his dining room door. They wound their way through the less recently dead and arranged themselves around the coffin.