That backed her off a bit.
“We do not ‘register’ guests. I rent out the rooms to people who seem reliable and honest. On a monthly basis. I have been told this man’s name was Mr. Sweetwater. I believe he was an American Indian. What name were you looking for?”
“Pellerossa?”
She smiled thinly at that. “Pellerossa just means ‘red skin’ in Italian. Or, I suppose, Red Indian. I wish to know why are you interested in Mr. Sweetwater?”
She placed a slight ironic emphasis on the word “interested.” Signora Vasari didn’t approve of him. Either she didn’t like authority figures or she didn’t like Americans. Probably both, he decided. And seeing her dislike of him so manifestly apparent made Dalton think a little more carefully about this… escapade would be how Stallworth would put it, and not with a loving heart. This “innocent little side trip” to the Dorsoduro.
He had already used a solid State Department jacket with this stunningly delicious but intimidating woman, and if she got curious and followed up with the Consulate, the word would get back to Stallworth faster than a French soldier could throw away his rifle. The resulting cell-phone séance with Stallworth would go roughly as follows:
Jack: You used what?
Dalton: My consular ID, but —
Jack: So you could find some fucking Indian?
Dalton: Yes, but —
Jack: And this was company business how?
Dalton: The guy had this spider in his cigarette case and —
Jack: A spider?
Dalton: Right, a huge honking emerald green spider —
Jack: I asked you how this connects with Naumann!
Dalton: Well this Indian, he was eating at the same restaurant —
Jack: What restaurant?
Dalton: The restaurant where Porter used to eat. Carovita —
Jack: Hold the line for a moment, will ya? Don’t go away now.
Three minutes later there’d be a knock on the door of his hotel room, and when he opened it there’d be these two no-neck ex-Marines from the company’s Meat Hook Squad reaching for him, and then everything would go black. This was what he was risking right now and the burning question was… Why?
All of this flashed through Dalton’s rather banged-up brain in a heartbeat. She was still waiting for an answer, an answer he didn’t have.
“What do you do for a living, Miss Vasari?”
“Scusi?”
“Your work? May I ask what it is?”
Got her back on her heels now. Good.
“I… I am — dottoressa.”
Great.
Rattled her enough to bounce her back into Italian.
“Really? How nice for you. A doctor? In what field?”
“Psicologia. A Firenze.”
“Psicologia? Psychology, you mean?”
“Yes.”
A shrink. She was a shrink. Run for your life, my friend.
“Sounds fascinating. Want to know what I do?”
“What you do…?”
“Yes. What I do is I find people. Sometimes I do this with the help of the Carabinieri. Is it necessary that I go and get the Carabinieri so that you will do me the great honor and courtesy of allowing me to have an interest in Mr. Sweetwater even though you do not approve of me?”
“Do not approve…?”
Dalton held up a hand, palm out, and gave her a wry smile.
“I know. I am an instrument of the global Yankee Imperium and you despise me and all my works. When the revolution comes the proletariat will rise up and I — and all of my parasite kind — will be nailed to the doors of the basilica.”
She stepped back and folded her arms across her breasts.
“You are — tu sei pazzo!”
“You called me ‘tu.’ Does this mean we’re friends?”
She started to smile, struggled against it, and then let out a short, sharp full-throated laugh that he could feel in his lower belly.
“You are very wrong, Signor Dalton, if you think I am one with the proletariat. My mother’s family can be traced back for a thousand years. For much of that time they collected taxes for the Doge. Often this required the application of heated irons. When the revolution comes, I will be right up there beside you, also nailed to the doors of the basilica.”
“It’s a date, then?”
She gave him the cool professional appraisal of a full-grown Italian woman, an experience not to be missed. When it was over he felt like sharing some espresso and a biscotti with her in a tangle of scented sheets.
“D’accordo. And you do not have to tell me why you are interested in Mr. Sweetwater. Allora, you want to see his room?”
Yes. Then yours.
“I would love to.”
Alessandra Vasari was wearing what Dalton had assumed was a gold link belt around her waist. It turned out to be what Laura would have called a “chatelaine,” a chain with keys attached, the keys to the manor. In this case, the keys, among others, to the massive wooden door to Apartment Three. She led Dalton down the darkened hallway — Dalton would have followed her down any darkened hallway in the world at that point — her keys a-jangle and trailing her scotch-and-cigarettes scent behind her like a shimmering train of sparkling fairy dust. With deep appreciation Dalton watched the muscles across her shoulders working as she wrestled with the lock.
There was a snap and a rumbling as of tumbrels and the door rolled slowly backward, filling the darkened hallway with autumnal sunlight. In the glow from the opened room, she gave Dalton a theatrical bow and waved him through in front of her.
Dalton, who knew very well that old Italian families never advertised their wealth and that some of the best villas in Venice had entranceways that looked like the door to a toolshed, should have expected that Numero Quindici was a lot more than it had appeared to be from street level. It was as if they had stepped back into the Renaissance.
Five large wood-framed windows, each one eight feet high and two feet wide, ran along one whitewashed stone wall, the glass in them so old it had thickened along the lower part of the frames. Through the glass and over a sea of terra-cotta roof tiles the spire of the Church of All Saints rose up into the afternoon sky, a cloud of swifts swirling around it. On the end wall of the one-room flat was a massive stone fireplace with a great curved stone mantel. Above the mantel was the lion of the Medicis and over that two medieval lances forming a cross.
A rudimentary kitchen — added later, perhaps in the seventeenth century — consisted of a brick oven and a grill and a chimney above it. The floor was made of inlaid wooden marquetry, deeply worn but shining and smooth. A single bed, stripped, with the sheets and a brocaded coverlet neatly folded on the mattress, had been placed under the window wall. Two heavy green leather club chairs were positioned in front of the fireplace, in which was set a small pyre of cedar over a mound of torn paper. The room smelled of Toscano cigarillos, boot polish, and stale coffee.
Dalton took this all in with one glance while Alessandra Vasari stood behind him in the open door. None of it held him long. His attention was drawn to a tall terra-cotta cylinder, hanging by a leather thong in the center of the room. The cylinder was spinning slowly on what looked like a length of thick twisted sinew, the tube weighted enough to wrap and rewrap the sinew as it spun down and rewound, keeping the pressure on the cord, making the cylinder hum in the strong wind from the open windows. A strange murmuring buzz was coming from this cylinder, rising and falling, stopping and starting again, almost like a rhythmic chant.