“How poetic,” I said, discreetly brushing the sand from my hands. “Too bad Shakespeare was such a Veronaphiliac.”
He shook his head. “Do you never get tired of Shakespeare?”
I very nearly retorted, hey, you started it, but was able to stop myself. There was no need to remind him that, the first time we had met, back in his grandparents’ garden, I had been wearing diapers.
We sat like that for a moment, our eyes locked in a silent battle over the Bard and so much else, until the waiter came to take our orders. As soon as he had left, I leaned forward and put my elbows on the table. “I’m still waiting,” I reminded Alessandro, not open for negotiation, “to hear about you and Luciano Salimbeni. So why don’t we skip the Charlemagne part, and go-”
Just then, his cell phone rang, and after checking the display he excused himself and left the table, no doubt relieved to have his story postponed yet again. As I sat there watching him in the distance, however, it suddenly struck me how very unlikely it was that he was the person who had broken into my hotel room. Although I had only known him for a week, I was ready to swear that it took a lot more than your average pickle to make this man lose his calm. Even though Iraq had nearly killed him, it had definitely not broken him, quite the opposite. So, if he really had been sneaking around in my room for whatever reason, he would surely not have gone through my suitcases like a Tasmanian Devil, leaving my dirty panties dangling from the chandelier. It simply did not make sense.
When Alessandro returned to the table five minutes later, I pushed his espresso towards him with what I hoped was a forgiving smile. But he barely even looked at me as he took the cup and stirred in a pinch of sugar. Something in his behavior had changed, and I could sense that whoever had called him had told him something troubling. Something to do with me.
“Now, where were we?” I asked lightly, sipping my cappuccino through the milk foam. “Oh yes! Charlemagne was very tall-?”
“Why,” countered Alessandro, his voice too casual to be sincere, “don’t you tell me about your friend on the motorcycle?” When he saw that I was too stunned to reply, he added, more sternly, “I thought you told me you were being followed by a guy on a Ducati.”
“Oh!” I managed to laugh, “that guy! No idea. Never saw him again. Guess my legs weren’t long enough.”
Alessandro didn’t smile. “Long enough for Romeo.”
I nearly spilled my cappuccino. “Wait! Are you suggesting I am being stalked by your old childhood rival?”
He looked away. “I am not suggesting anything. Just curious.”
We sat for a moment in painful silence. He was clearly still brooding over something, and I was racking my brain to figure out what it was. Obviously, he knew about the Ducati, but not that it was my sister riding it. Perhaps he was aware that the police had impounded the bike the day before after waiting in vain at the bottom of the Mangia Tower for the owner to return. According to Janice she had taken one look at the indignant police officers and decided to stick her tail between her legs. A single guy would have been a piece of cake, and two might even have been fun, but three boy scouts in uniform had been too big a mouthful, even for my sister.
“Look,” I said, trying to salvage a bit of our former intimacy, “I hope you don’t think I’m still… dreaming about Romeo.”
Alessandro did not respond right away. When he finally did, he spoke reluctantly, well aware that he was revealing part of his hand. “Just tell me,” he said, doodling on the tablecloth with a teaspoon, “did you like the view from the Mangia Tower?”
I glared at him. “Wait a minute! Are you… following me?”
“No,” he said, not too proud of himself, “but the police have been keeping an eye on you. For your own sake. Just in case the guy who killed Bruno comes looking for you, too.”
“Did you ask them to?” I looked him straight in the eye and saw the confirmation before he even spoke it. “Why, thank you,” I went on, drily, “it’s too bad they weren’t around when that lowlife broke into my room the other night!”
Alessandro didn’t flinch. “Well, they were around last night. They said they saw a man in your room.”
I actually burst out laughing because the whole thing was so absurd. “That’s too ridiculous! A man in my room? My room?” Seeing that he was not yet convinced, I stopped laughing. “Look,” I said, earnestly, “there was no man in my room last night, and no man in the tower either.” I was just about to add, “Not that it’s any of your goddamn business if there was,” but stopped myself, realizing that I didn’t actually mean it. Instead, I laughed. “My-my! We sound like an old married couple.”
“If we were an old married couple,” said Alessandro, still not smiling, “I would not have to ask. The man in your room would be me.”
“The Salimbeni genes,” I observed, rolling my eyes, “are yet again rearing their ugly head. Let me guess, if we were married, you would chain me in the dungeon every time you left the house?”
He considered it, but not for long. “I wouldn’t have to. Once you get to know me, you will never want anyone else. And”-he finally put down the teaspoon-“you will forget everyone you knew before.”
His words-half teasing, half not-coiled around me like a school of eels around a drowned body, and I felt a thousand little teeth testing my composure.
“I believe,” I said firmly, crossing my legs, “you were going to tell me about Luciano Salimbeni?”
Alessandro’s smile faded. “Yes. You are right.” He sat for a while, frowning, playing once again with the teaspoon, then finally said, “I should have told you this a long time ago-well, I should have told you the other night, but… I didn’t want to scare you.”
Just as I opened my mouth to urge him on and say that I was not so easily scared, another customer squeezed by my chair to sit down with a deep sigh at the table right next to us.
Janice again.
She was wearing Eva Maria’s red-and-black outfit and a pair of supersized sunglasses, but despite the glamour she made no big spectacle of herself, merely picked up the menu and pretended to consider her options. I noticed Alessandro glancing at her, and for a brief moment I feared he might see some similarity between us, or perhaps even recognize his godmother’s clothes. But he did not. However, the close presence of someone else discouraged him from commencing the story he had wanted to tell me, and we sat once again in frustrated silence.
“Ein cappuccino, bitte!” said Janice to the waiter, sounding an awful lot like an American pretending to be a German, “und zwei biscotti.”
I could have killed her. There was no doubt in my mind that Alessandro had been just about to disclose something of tremendous importance, and now he went on to talk about the Palio again, while the waiter lingered like a begging dog to tease out of my shameless sister where in Germany she was from.
“Prague!” she blurted out, but quickly corrected herself. “Prague… heim… stadt.”
The waiter looked sufficiently convinced and totally smitten, and ran off to fulfill her order with the dispatch of an Arthurian knight.
“Look at the Balzana-” Alessandro was showing me the Siena coat of arms on the side of my cappuccino cup, thinking I was paying attention. “Everything is simple here. Black and white. Curses and blessings.”
I looked at the cup. “Is that what it means? Curses and blessings?”
He shrugged. “It can mean anything you want. To me, it is an attitude indicator.”
“Attitude? As in… the cup is half full?”