The Savage Garden by Mark Mills Read Free Book Online Page B

the time, but as you get older those consolations no longer help you sleep. It's the only thing I've learned. We all think we know the answer, and we're all wrong. Shit, I'm not sure we even know what the question is."
        Adam drew his own consolation from the words: that Fausto was even more drunk than he was.
        Fausto drained his glass and rose to his feet. "It's been a pleasure. You be careful up there at Villa Docci."
        "Why do you say that?"
        "It's a bad place."
        "A bad place?"
        "It always has been. People have a tendency to die there."
        Adam couldn't help smiling at the melodramatic statement.
        "You think I'm joking?"
        "No . . . I'm sorry. You mean Signora Docci's son?"
        "You heard about Emilio?"
        "Not much. Only that he was killed by the Germans during the war."
        Fausto crushed his cigarette in the ashtray. "So the story goes."
        There was no time for Adam to pick him up on this last comment.
        "Out!" trumpeted Signora Fanelli, advancing toward them wielding a broom.
        Fausto turned to meet his attacker. "Letizia, you are a beautiful woman. If I were a richer man I would try to make you my wife." "Ahhhh," she cooed sweetly. "Well, you're about to become even poorer. Three bottles of wine."
        "I'll pay," said Adam.
        "He'll pay," said Fausto.
        "No he won't," said Signora Fanelli.
        Fausto delved into his pocket, pulled out some crumpled notes and dropped them on the table. "Good night, everybody," he said with the slightest of bows. "Fausto is no more."
        He left via the terrace, the life somehow draining out of the room along with him.
        Signora Fanelli set about stacking chairs on the tables. "Fausto, Fausto," she sighed wearily. "You mustn't take him too seriously, he's a bit depressed at the moment."
        "Why?"
        "The Communists did not do well at the election in May . . . only twenty-two percent, the poor things," she added with a distinct note of false sympathy.
        Twenty-two percent sounded like a not inconsiderable slice of the electorate.
        "You're not a Communist?" Adam asked.
        "Communism is for young people with empty stomachs. Look at me."
        He had been, quite closely, and he would happily have paid her the compliment she was fishing for if the Italian words hadn't eluded him.
        "Fausto isn't so young," he said.
        "Fausto was born an idealist. It's not his fault."
        He had wanted to sit there, chatting idly, observing the play of her slender hips beneath her dress as she worked the broom around the tables. But she had dispatched him upstairs with a bottle of mineral water and firm instructions to drink the lot before bed.
        This he had failed to do.
        Instead, he had flopped onto the mattress and set about constructing a gratifying little scenario in his head. His last memory before drifting into drunken slumber had been of Harry barging into the room just as Signora Fanelli was peeling off an emerald green chenille bathrobe.
     

        THE WALK TO VILLA DOCCI FAILED TO CLEAR HIS HEAD; all it did was shunt the pain from the front of his skull to the back of it, where, he knew from hard experience, it would remain lodged for the rest of the day. The heat was building fast under a cloudless sky, and his shirt was clinging to him by the time he arrived.
        He had anticipated having to force a decision on himself. In the end, it came naturally, when he was not even halfway through his brisk tramp around the memorial garden.
        There was something not quite right about the place, and this was where its appeal lay. There were no great questions clamoring for answers; they were more like restless whispers at the back of his mind.
        According to the records, Flora had died in 1548, the year after Villa Docci's completion, so why had her husband waited almost thirty