"And it's good medicine," said Justin quietly, his eyes on Guido.
Shaking her head she took herself to the kitchen, clanked saucepans, put on a kettle. Justin led Guido back to the table and sat with him.
"Are you listening to me, Guido?" he asked in Italian.
Guido closed his eyes.
"Everything stays exactly as it was," Justin said firmly. "Your school fees, the doctor, the hospital, your medicine, everything that is necessary while you recover your health. The rent, the food, your university fees when you get there. We're going to do everything she planned for you, exactly the way she planned it. We can't do less than she would wish, can we?"
Eyes down, Guido reflected on this before giving a reluctant shake of the head: no, we cannot do less, he conceded.
"Do you still play chess? Can we have a game?"
Another shake, this time a prudish one: it is not respectful of Signora Tessa's memory to play chess.
Justin took Guido's hand and held it. Then gently swung it, waiting for the glimmer of a smile. "So what do you do when you're not dying?" he asked in English. "Did you read the books we sent you? I thought you'd be an expert on Sherlock Holmes by now."
"Mr. Holmes is a great detective," Guido replied, also in English, but without a smile.
"And what about the computer the signora gave you?" Justin asked, reverting to Italian. "Tessa said you were a big star. A genius, she told me. You used to e-mail each other passionately. I got quite jealous. Don't tell me you've abandoned your computer, Guido!"
The question provoked an outburst from the kitchen. "Of course he has abandoned it! He has abandoned everything! Four million lire, it cost her! All day long he used to sit at that computer, tap, tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap. "You make yourself blind," I tell him, "you get sick from too much concentration." Now nothing. Even the computer must die."
Still holding Guido's hand, Justin peered into his averted eyes. "Is that true?" he asked.
It was.
"But that's awful, Guido. That's a real waste of talent," Justin complained, as Guido's smile began to dawn. "The human race is in serious need of good brains like yours. D'you hear me?"
"Maybe."
"So do you remember Signora Tessa's computer, the one she taught you on?"
Of course Guido did — and with an air of great superiority, not to say smugness.
"All right, so it's not as good as yours. Yours is a couple of years younger and cleverer. Yes?"
Yes. Very much yes. And the smile widening.
"Well, I'm an idiot, Guido, unlike you, and I can't even work her computer with any confidence. And my problem is, Signora Tessa left a stack of messages on it, some of them for me, and I'm frightened to death of losing them. And I think she would like you to be the person who made sure I didn't lose them. OK? Because she wanted very much to have a son like you. And so did I. So the question is, will you come down to the villa and help me to read whatever is in her laptop?"
"You got the printer?"
"I have."
"Disk drive?"
"That too."
"CD drive? Modem?"
"And the handbook. And the transformers. And the cables, and an adapter. But I'm still an idiot, and if there's a chance of making a hash of it I will."
Guido was already standing, but Justin tenderly drew him back to the table.
"Not this evening. Tonight you sleep, and tomorrow morning early, if you're willing, I'll come and fetch you in the villa jeep, but afterward you must go to school. Yes?"
"Yes."
"You are too tired, Signor Justin," Guido's mother murmured, setting coffee before him. "So much grief is bad for the heart."
* * *
He had been on the island for two nights and two days, but if somebody had proved it was a week he would not have been surprised. He had taken the channel ferry to Boulogne, bought a train ticket for cash, and somewhere along his route a second ticket to a different destination, long before the first ticket was used up. He had shown his passport, to the best of his awareness, only once and cursorily, as he crossed into Italy from Switzerland by way of some precipitous and very beautiful mountain ravine. And it was his own passport. Of that too he was certain. Obedient to Lesley's instructions, he had sent Mr. Atkinson's ahead of him via Ham rather than risk being caught with two. But as to which ravine or which train — for that, he would have had to study a map, and make a guess at the town where he had boarded.
For much of the journey Tessa had ridden alongside him, and now and then they had shared a good joke together — usually after some deflating and irrelevant comment of Tessa's, delivered sotto voce. Other times, they had reminisced, shoulder to shoulder, heads back and eyes closed like an old couple, until abruptly she left him again, and the pain of grief overtook him like a cancer he had known all the time was there, and Justin Quayle mourned his dead wife with an intensity that exceeded his worst hours in Gloria's lower ground, or the funeral in Langata, or the visit to the mortuary, or the top floor of number four.
Finding himself standing on the railway station platform in Turin, he had taken a hotel room to clean up, then from a secondhand luggage shop purchased two anonymous canvas suitcases to contain the papers and objects that he had come to regard as her reliquary. And si, Signor Justin, the black-suited young lawyer, heir to the Manzini half of the partnership, had assured him — amid protestations of sympathy that were all the more painful for their sincerity — the hatboxes had arrived safely and on schedule, together with orders from Ham to hand over numbers five and six unopened to Justin personally — and if there was anything, but anything further at all that the young man could do, of a legal or professional or any other nature, then it went without saying that loyalty to the Manzini family did not end with the tragic death of the signora, et cetera. Oh, and of course there was the money, he added disdainfully — and counted out fifty thousand U.S. dollars in cash against Justin's signature. After which Justin withdrew to the privacy of an empty conference room, where he transferred Tessa's reliquary and Mr. Atkinson's passport to their new resting-place in the canvas suitcases and, soon afterward, took a taxi to Piombino where, by fortuitous timing, he was able to board a garish high-rise hotel, calling itself a ship, bound for Portoferraio on the island of Elba.
Seated as far from the king-sized television set as he could get, the only guest in a gigantic plastic self-service dining room on the sixth deck, with the suitcases either side of him, Justin treated himself indiscriminately to a seafood salad, a salami baguette and half a bottle of really bad red wine. Docking at Portoferraio, he was afflicted by a familiar sense of weightlessness as he fought his way through the unlit bowels of the ship's lorry park while foul-mannered drivers revved their engines or simply drove straight at him, shoving him and his suitcases against the bolted iron casing of the hull to the amusement of unemployed porters looking on.
It was dusk and deep winter and bitterly cold as he scrambled shivering and furious onto the quayside, and the few pedestrians moved with unaccustomed haste. Fearful of being recognized or worse still pitied, his hat pulled low over his brow, he dragged his suitcases to the nearest waiting taxi and established to his relief that the driver's face was unfamiliar to him. On the twenty-minute journey the man inquired whether he was German and Justin replied that he was Swedish. The unpremeditated answer served him well, for the man asked no further questions.
The Manzini villa lay low against the island's northern shore. The wind was blowing straight off the sea, rattling palm trees, whipping over stone walls, slapping shutters and roof tiles and making the outbuildings creak like old rope. Alone in the faltering moonlight Justin remained standing where the cab had dropped him, at the entrance to a flagstoned courtyard with its ancient water pump and olive press, waiting for his eyes to grow accustomed to the dark. The villa loomed ahead of him. Two lines of poplar trees, planted by Tessa's grandfather, marked the walk from its front door to the sea's edge. One by one, Justin distinguished retainers' cottages, stone staircases, gateposts, and shadowy bits of Roman masonry. Not a light burned anywhere. The estate manager was in Naples, according to Ham, gadding with his fiancee. Housekeeping was entrusted to a pair of itinerant Austrian women who called themselves painters and were camped in a disused chapel on the other side of the estate. The two laborers' cottages, converted by Tessa's mother the dottoressa, a title the island preferred to contessa, and christened Romeo and Giulietta for the benefit of German tourists, were the responsibility of a letting agency in Frankfurt.