A stiff breeze tousled his thinning, graying hair, worn long. He donned a pair of sunglasses as he walked, traffic streaming by, everyone in a hurry, on Roman time, where the lifestyle was to rush madly. But it was a lifestyle he was accustomed to, and which he wouldn’t have traded for anything — it kept him alive, feeling young and vital, even as fifty disappeared in his rear view mirror and sixty became an ominous immediacy rather than a distant destination.
Twice divorced, he kept a small apartment near the university where he spent the week before retiring to his family’s country estate on weekends, usually with a young conquest in tow. He knew he was a stereotype, the lecherous academic who was only too willing to participate in the experimental phases of his students’ educations, but he didn’t care. Life was short, and after two failed attempts to understand the insanity of his mates, he was now a confirmed bachelor, and happier for it. His peers could snigger all they liked — he had no complaints, and only wished he’d gone down that road a decade earlier.
Carvelli turned the corner and glanced up at the front gates of the university grounds — his second home, where he’d spent most of his adult life after a brief period in the private sector, which hadn’t suited his temperament. He’d inherited a fair amount of money when his parents passed on; he was one of three siblings, all legatees to a dynastic fortune of no small proportions, so he didn’t have the innate drive to climb a corporate ladder in pursuit of filthy lucre. The only thing that had ever interested him was the research side of his work, and developing a better arthritis salve hadn’t been his cup of tea, no matter what the pay.
As head of his department, most of his time was spent in the lab, which was as it should be. His career was punctuated by frequent publication of his abstracts and periodic books, all in his areas of specialty — epidemiology and virology. His latest had been a local hit, tracing the history of malaria and the more interesting story of the companies that had fought to develop anti-malarial drugs, only to see their innovations squashed by larger competitors who didn’t want a cure cutting off their revenue from lucrative treatment patents.
That was another aspect of his work he found redeeming: He wasn’t afraid to tackle controversy, and he was somewhat of a celebrity for his maverick nature and colorful condemnations of the status quo. While it was a headache for the university administration, he was now viewed as iconic, and his cynical barbs and willingness to spout off to the press his opinions on public health policy had endeared him to the citizenry, if not always to his fellow faculty members.
The afternoon flew by as he immersed himself in his work — highly speculative research into a possible cure for liver cancer involving stem cells, pioneered in his lab and now being developed by a mirror team in France and another in Germany. If early results were borne out in more comprehensive clinical trials, it could be a breakthrough that would mean an end to the disease during his lifetime, and a crowning achievement in an already noteworthy career. Unlike many of his peers, he wasn’t consumed by taking credit for advances — he was confident he would be recognized when the time came, as he had been fourteen years earlier when he’d shared the Nobel Prize for his work on antiviral drug development. He was regularly consulted by large pharmaceutical companies because of his open, curious stance. Ironically, he earned five times his academic salary consulting for them, though it occupied only a scant few minutes of his time every month.
Hours drifted by, and when the daylight that streamed through his window was replaced by the soft glimmer of lamps, he put aside the sheaf of reports and rose from behind his desk. The halls were quiet now, classes long since over, and he looked at his watch with a silent curse. He’d lost track of time again, and it was already seven-thirty — later than he would have liked, given the date he’d agreed to with his latest paramour. It was a fifteen-minute walk to his building, but he wanted to shower and deal with a few errands before meeting her, and he’d be hurried now, a state of affairs he’d hoped to avoid.
He threw on his blazer and wrapped a lightweight white wool scarf around his neck, and stepped out into the hall. He paused to re-lock the door, and started when he heard an echo from down the long corridor, near the stairs — the rustle of clothes, perhaps, or maybe just the stiffening wind blowing through the ill-fitted windows, worn by the eons and as leaky as the Roman treasury. He looked up and peered down the dark passageway, but didn’t detect anything troubling — the area was empty, as far as he could tell.
Even with the security provided by the university patrol, it wasn’t wise to venture into dark, empty spaces at night in Rome, so he headed towards the main stairs at the other end, near the elevator, which had been out of service for a month. His footsteps reverberated off the ancient plaster walls as he descended to the main floor, where he could expect a few people to be lounging around, waiting near the security station for their rides to arrive. The sense of foreboding lifted as he rounded the banister on the second floor landing, and was forgotten by the time his feet touched the ground floor, sounds of murmured conversation drifting up to him from the front entrance foyer.
“Good night, professor,” Max, the head of night security, called to him as he pushed through the tall wooden doors, hundreds of years old and burnished, rounded, and scarred by countless generations of students bustling through them.
“Night, Max,” Carvelli replied over his shoulder, hands thrust into his jacket pockets against the spring evening chill.
He traced his way through the streets, past a seemingly endless procession of humanity intent on getting to important destinations as quickly as possible. Garlic and basil drifted in the air, the distinctive pungent perfume like an olfactory advertisement for the small restaurants along the way that were already packed with diners, early birds who had hoped to beat the dinner rush. His mouth flooded at the aroma, the promise of tonight’s date tugging at his imagination, hungry for food and then hours of athletic frolicking with a young lady a third his age. He grinned to himself as he walked, and an old woman carrying two faded cloth shopping bags eyed him distrustfully, as though he was some kind of lunatic, which he supposed some would argue he was. Eight blocks from the university he turned the corner onto his street, the apartment only a few hundred yards further. He dodged the refuse bins that his neighbors had put out for collection the following day, holding his breath as he moved past the containers — an automatic response from his childhood, now almost unconscious from years of conditioning.
At his building, he looked around before unlocking the front door, and then mounted the stairs to his third-story pied-a-terre, relieved to finally be home.
On the landing, a man in a sharp business suit descended from the floor above him — a visitor, not one of his neighbors — and Carvelli was raising his keys when the man spun and drove a syringe into the back of his neck. He felt a stab of pain and cried out, but the man’s black-gloved hand had clamped over his mouth, muffling it, even as another man came running up the stairs from the second floor.
The dark passageway blurred as a sensation like floating weightlessly swept through his limbs, and then everything dimmed before it went dark.
When Carvelli came to, he was sitting in his dining room, his arms bound behind him with some sort of soft fabric — maybe a necktie, he thought, as he fought to regain full awareness. His assailant was standing by the table, arms folded across his chest, studying him impassively, his eyes dead as a shark’s.