An extraordinary bargain. One, coincidentally, that would get her out of the farmhouse. “I couldn’t possibly impose on you like that.”
“But it is not an imposition. You can pay for the petrol, yes?”
Just then Marta emerged from the room at the back. She snapped off a few sprigs from a basil plant and carried them into the kitchen.
He took a sip of his Chianti. “I have tomorrow free. Would you like to go to Siena first? Or perhaps Monteriggioni. An exquisite little town. Dante writes of it in the Inferno.”
Her skin prickled at the name. But Dante the gigolo didn’t exist, only Lorenzo Gage, a playboy movie star who’d been her partner in shame. Now that she’d met him, she didn’t find it hard to believe that he’d driven Karli Swenson to suicide. Isabel was going to do her best to make sure she never saw him again.
“Actually, I’ve come here to work, and I need to get started tomorrow.”
“Work? This is too bad. Still, we must all do what we have to.” He smiled good-naturedly, finished his wine, then jotted a phone number on a piece of paper he pulled from his pocket. “If you need anything at all, you will call me.”
“Thank you.”
He gave her a dazzling smile, then a wave as he walked away. As least he was prepared to dislodge her with charm, or maybe she was being too suspicious. She fetched her copy of Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi but ended up reading her travel guide instead. Tomorrow would be soon enough to reinvent her career.
It had begun to grow dark by the time she went inside, and fragrant smells filled the kitchen. She entered just as Marta placed a bowl filled with a hearty-looking soup on a tray covered in snowy linen. The tray also held a glass of Isabel’s Chianti, judging by the bottle next to it, as well as a serving of sliced red tomatoes garnished with dark, wrinkled olives and a crusty slab of bread. Any hopes Isabel had that the food might be intended for her faded, however, as Marta walked out the door with it. One of these days, Isabel really should learn how to cook.
She slept well that night, and the next morning she awakened at eight instead of six as she’d intended. She jumped out of bed and hurried to the bathroom. Now she’d have to cut her prayer and meditation session short or she’d never be able to catch up with her schedule. She turned on the faucet to splash her face, but the water refused to warm up. She hurried downstairs and tested the sink. It was the same. She searched for Marta so she could tell her they had no hot water, but the garden was empty. She finally located the card Giulia Chiara had left.
“Yes, yes,” Giulia said when Isabel reached her. “Is very difficult for you to stay there while so much work must be done. At the house in town you will not have to worry about such things.”
“I’m not moving to town,” Isabel said firmly. “I spoke with… the owner yesterday. Would you please do your best to have the water fixed as soon as possible?”
“I will see what I can do,” Giulia said, with obvious reluctance.
Casalleone had an old Roman wall, a church bell that rang on the half hour, and children everywhere. They called out to one another in the playgrounds and romped next to their mothers along the narrow cobbled streets that wound in a maze. Isabel drew out Giulia’s card and checked the address against the sign. Although the street name was similar, it wasn’t the same.
A day had passed since she’d talked to the real-estate agent, and she still had no hot water. She’d called Anna Vesto, but the housekeeper had pretended not to understand English and hung up. Marta seemed oblivious to the problem. According to Isabel’s schedule, she should be writing now, but the issue with the water had distracted her. Besides, she had nothing to write. Although she usually thrived on self-discipline, she’d gotten up late again this morning, she hadn’t meditated, and the only words she’d written in two days had been notes to friends.
She approached a young woman who was walking across the village’s small piazza with a toddler in hand. “Scusi, signora.” She held out Giulia’s card. “Can you tell me where the Via San Lino is?”
The woman picked up her child and hurried away.
“Well, excuu-se me.” She frowned and headed toward a middle-aged man in a ratty sport coat with elbow patches. “Scusi, signore. I’m looking for the Via San Lino.”
He took Giulia’s card, studied it for a moment, then studied Isabel. With something that sounded like a curse, he pocketed the card and stomped away.
“Hey!”
The next person gave her a “non parlo inglese” when she asked the location of the Via San Lino, but then a beefy young man in a yellow T-shirt offered directions. Unfortunately, they were so complicated that she ended up at an abandoned warehouse on a dead-end street.
She decided to find the grocery store with the friendly clerk that she’d visited yesterday. On the way toward the piazza, she passed a shoe store and a profumeria that sold cosmetics. Lace curtains draped the windows of the houses that lined the street, and laundry hung on lines overhead. “Italian dryers,” the travel guide had called the clotheslines. Because power was so expensive, families didn’t have electric dryers.
Her nose led her into a tiny bakery, where she bought a fig tart from a rude girl with purple hair. When she came out, she gazed up at the sky. The high, fluffy clouds looked as though they should be printed on blue flannel pajamas. It was a beautiful day, and she wouldn’t let even a hundred surly Italians spoil it for her.
She was on her way up the cobbled hill toward the grocery when she spotted a newsstand with racks of postcards displaying vineyards, splashy fields of sunflowers, and charming Tuscan towns. As she stopped to choose a few, she noticed that several of the postcards depicted Michelangelo’s David, or at least a significant part of him. The statue’s marble penis stared back at her, both front and side views. She pulled one from the rack to examine it more closely. He seemed a little shortchanged in the genitalia department.
“Have you already forgotten what one looks like, my child?”
She spun around and found herself staring into a pair of ancient steel-framed eyeglasses. They belonged to a tall, black-robed priest with a bushy, dark mustache. He was an exceptionally ugly man, not because of the mustache, although that was unsightly enough, but because of a jagged red scar that drew the skin so tightly along his cheekbone it pulled down the corner of one silver-blue eye.
One very familiar silver-blue eye.
7
Isabel resisted the urge to shove the postcard back into the rack. “I was just comparing this with something similar I saw recently. The one on the statue is so much more impressive.” Oh, now, that was a lie.
The sun glimmered off the lenses of his glasses as he smiled. “There are some pornographic calendars on that back rack, in case you’re interested.”
“I’m not.” She replaced the postcard and set off up the hill.
He fell into step beside her, moving as gracefully in the long robes as if he wore them every day, but then Lorenzo Gage was accustomed to being in costume. “If you want to confess your sins, I’m all ears,” he said.
“Go find some schoolboys to molest.”
“Sharp tongue this morning, Fifi. That’ll be a hundred Hail Marys for insulting a man of God.”
“I’m reporting you, Mr. Gage. It’s against the law in Italy to impersonate a priest.” She spotted a harried young mother emerging from a shop with a set of twins in hand and called out to her.
“Signora! This man isn’t a priest! He’s Lorenzo Gage, the American movie star.”