front of her villa. She is tall and lean. Her hair is caught in the kind of knot the Italian women wear, heavy and sweeping and low on the neck. Beneath her ivory jacket her shoulders are businesslike. She looks as if she would be more at home in New York or Rome than out here on this grape farm. She lowers her black sunglasses. With a flick of her hand toward Aïda and Joseph, she asks who the two criminals might be.
Aïda raises her chin and looks squarely at the woman.
“La
vostra dottore,”
she says.
Your doctor.
The policemen roar with laughter.
The maid tells her padrona that Aïda was apprehended in the boudoir, trying on shoes. She had tried on nearly ten pairs before she was caught.
“You like my shoes?” the woman asks in English. She tilts her head, scrutinizing Aïda. “You look familiar to me.”
“She’s a model,” Joseph says.
“Ah!” the woman says. “And you? You are a model too?” Her mouth is thin and agile.
“A photographer.”
“And you were trying on shoes also in my house?”
There is a silence. Joseph looks at Aïda for some clue as to what she wants him to say or do. Aïda glances around, and I almost feel as if she is looking for me, as if she thinks I might come down and save her now. Her eyes begin to dart between the padrona and the policemen, and her mouth opens. She lets her eyes flutter closed, then collapses against a policeman in an extremely realistic faint.
“Poor girl,” the woman says. “Bring her into the house.”
The police look disapproving, but they comply. One of them grabs her under the shoulders and the other takes her feet. Like an imperial procession they all enter the house, and the housekeeper closes the door behind them.
“She must be sick,” Drew whispers. “Does she eat?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
He climbs out of our hiding place and starts down toward the house. I have to follow him. I picture being home in bed, lying on my side and looking at the blank wall, a desert of comfort, no demands or disappointment. As I navigate the large stones at the edge of the driveway, my foot catches in a crevice and I lose my balance. There’s a snap, and pain shoots through my left ankle. I come down hard onto my hip.
Drew turns around. “You okay?”
I nod, sideways, from the ground. He comes back to offer me his hand. It’s torture getting up. My body feels as if it weighs a thousand pounds. When I test the hurt ankle, the pain makes my eyes water. I let go of Drew’s hand and limp toward the door.
“Are you going to make it?” Drew asks.
“Sure,” I say, but the truth is there’s something awfully wrong. The pain tightens in a band around my lower leg. Drew rings the doorbell, and in a few moments the housekeeper opens the door. Her eyes are small and stern. She draws her gray brows together and looks at Drew. In his perfect Italian, he tells her that our friends are inside, and that we would like to ask the forgiveness of the lady of the house. She throws her hands heavenward and wonders aloud what will happen next. But she holds the door open and beckons us inside.
The entry hall is cool and dark, like a wine cavern, and there’s a smell of fennel and coffee and dogs. Supporting myself against the stone wall, I creep along behind Drew, past tall canvases portraying the vintner’s family, long-faced men and women arrayed in brocade and velvet. The style is more Dutch than Italian, with angular light and deep reds and blues. In one portrait a seventeenth-century version of our padrona holds a lute dripping with flower garlands. She looks serene and pastoral, certainly capable of mercy. I take this for a good sign. We move past these paintings toward a large sunny room facing the back garden, whose French doors I recognize as the ones Aïda slipped through not long ago. My cousin is stretched out on a yellow chaise longue with Joseph at her side. The policemen are nowhere to be seen. I imagine them drinking espresso in the
Greg Cox - (ebook by Undead)