My ride, thought Cloud, and dived beneath the turquoise water. Maybe Kendra and Martin were too brain-dead to notice, but Cloud had figured out a pattern. One night a month Angelica got rid of them, with excuses mundane or byzantine by turns. Tonight, Cloud would peer a little more closely at that pattern, and find out just what was really going on at Huitaca.
I’ll have a fucking ride, all right. And she swam to shore.
Angelica’s preparations were, as always, simple. She waited until she saw Cloud saunter back to the gardener’s cottage. Then she turned from the window. She walked down the hall into the bedroom wing, went into the bathroom with its imported coralite marble floors and the frieze of ecstatic maenads she’d had smuggled into the country from Turkey, and stepped into the shower, a tall cubicle of green industrial glass.
Inside the light was diffuse: like showering beneath a hurricane sky. An alabaster dish held natural sponges and soaps scented with wild lavender and catmint; there was also a small canister of sea salt. Angelica poured a tiny mound into her palm, touched her tongue to the bitter crystals, and then let the water sluice it away. The smells of salt and lavender made her think of the Sea of Crete off the coast of Santorini; made her think of the Aegean, of narcissus nodding on stony hillsides and wind marbling the waves to whorls of white and midnight blue.
Afterward she changed into a plain white linen shift, sleeveless, knee-length, belted with a cord that only Angelica knew was made with real gold thread. She pulled her wet hair back into a ponytail, fastening it with a strip of leather. Then she sat at the battered Mission-style table she used as a vanity, the unstained wood so old and weathered it was soft to the touch, like suede. A small round mirror rested against a piece of lava from Akrotiri. Pots and tubes of expensive cosmetics were strewn everywhere, but Angelica ignored them. Instead, she reached for a terracotta vial stoppered with a cork, and tapped a little heap of coriander seeds into a marble pestle. She ground these, together with a piece of red sandalwood and a few slivers of dried blood orange peel, carefully rubbed the powder onto her breasts, wrists, thighs, neck.
All this while Angelica stared into the mirror before her. It was ancient, of polished metal that had corroded with time, so that her reflection was pocked with darkened spots and craters. Around its border were painted arabesques of dark green and umber, the fluid pattern broken here and there by a pair of eyes. Scungilli, her uncle had told her when he had given it to her, nearly twenty years before in Florence. Octopus.
“It was your mother’s,” he had said. There was a little break in his voice. Not of sorrow, Angelica knew that now. Remorse, perhaps, or apprehension. “Your father has forgotten I have it.”
“My mother?”
Her uncle nodded. He was older even than her father, for all that his youngest child was only seven. She had been with him and her cousins for only a short while; she had visited them often before, of course, but this was different. This was like an exile. “I found it. Afterward…”
“But I thought my mother died!”
She was amazed. Close as she was to her father, he had never spoken of her mother: it was a forbidden topic. Cousins and aunts here in Florence had told her that she died in childbirth. Angelica herself suspected something less dramatic. Her father and one of the hired girls, or a wealthy student, or… These things happened; so Angelica let it be. No one in Florence cared, and no one at home in the States knew.
But on that late-winter afternoon her uncle had only shrugged, and avoided looking at her eyes. “Perhaps she did,” he said after a long moment. Outside silver wands of rain tapped at the high windows overlooking the piazza. “We do not know.”
“Wh—what do you mean?” Angelica reached for her glass of aquavit—her young aunt claimed it stimulated the appetite—and without wincing downed it in a gulp. “Tell me.”
“You must never tell your father that I did so.” Her uncle poured himself another glass. “But it is not right, that you do not know. Especially now,” he added softly.
“It was years ago—well, you know how long it has been.” Her uncle leaned across the divan to stroke her hair. “My sweet girl—it is so difficult to remember you have already been to university! Nineteen,” he murmured, then went on.
“Your father was traveling to Rhodes, to meet with some of his friends—the university professor and some others, I do not recall. Their plan had been to rendezvous at Athens and depart from there on your father’s boat—Cefalû, the same boat he has now—but their flight from London was delayed, and there was some confusion regarding how long it would take them to get to Rome. Luciano has always been impatient: he decided to go on alone, and await them at Mandraki Harbor. That is a fine yacht harbor on Rhodes, but it is a dangerous passage in the summer. He went from Cape Sidhero on Crete to Kasos, and thence to Scarpanto—Karpathos. His plan was to continue on to Mandraki and meet his friends.
“He stayed overnight on Karpathos, and early in the morning decided to leave for Mandraki. He should have had a relatively safe passage—the Karpathos Strait is not dangerous, once you leave the shadow of the mountains—but at midday a storm came up. From nowhere, your father said. The sky was without clouds, and in the near distance he could see that the waves were unruffled; but the Cefalû was hard beset. He was forced to make landfall on an island. A godforsaken place, no larger than our villa near Poggibonsi. It was without water or any living thing, no trees or grasses; only a tiny beach surrounded by lava stones. It was fortunate for your father that the Cefalû was well provisioned, because he was marooned there for two days. He tried to radio for help, but the storm kept up, and he was unable to reach anyone. By daylight he explored the islet, but there was little enough there, and he was afraid the winds might swamp the boat. But the second night it was calm enough that he left Cefalû where she was moored and took the Zodiac to shore, to sleep there. He had so little sleep, I think that it affected his wits, but your father is angry when I say that.
“So he camped on the little spar of rock. A charred place, he told me; but when he returned with his friends a few weeks later they found gold and skeletons in the waters there—they brought divers, in hopes of finding treasure, and they did. I believe it was one of those islands burned up by a volcano long ago, but you know I do not pay much attention to your father’s work.
“That night he had only a driftwood fire, and his blankets against the wind, and a bottle of Tocai he found on Cefalû—still, not an ugly picture, eh? The storm had fled and there was a full moon, which made the sea look like blue snow—that is how your father described it. Blue snow.”
Her uncle fell silent, staring at the windows. The panes shuddered as water cascaded from a gutter overhead. After a moment he turned to her once more.
“She came to him in the night. He woke and she was there—not with him on the island, but in the water. Swimming. He wondered how she could swim, the bottom was so sharp with rocks, but she swam well. It was still dark but he could see her quite clearly from the beach, and he told me that he knew immediately she was a woman and not a dolphin or other fish—or a man.