“Good bye, Micah.”
Dalton stood up and she did not move away from him. He could feel the warmth of her body. Her scent was a cloud of spice and lemons all around him and he could still feel the moisture of her lips on his, her sweet taste. He reached out for her and she let him pull her into his body. He held her for a time, gently but with strength, feeling her heart beating under his ribs, the rise and fall of her breasts against his chest.
“I’m sorry,” he said, into the softness of her neck.
She pushed him away and looked up at him, shook her head.
“So long as you are false, Micah, you will always be sorry.”
“She said that, did she?” drawled Brancati, pushing a much-depleted plate of gnocchi arrabbiata away, his other hand hovering above his empty glass. He rapped twice on the little round table. Their waiter appeared, bowing, leaning in through the draperies of their little cubicle, his face beaming, red from the kitchen stoves, his hands folded in front of his spinnaker-size belly. Music from the outer rooms floated in over his shoulder. “Amarcord,” by Nino Rota.
Brancati ordered a second decanter of wine and some frizzante, along with a bottle of sambuca, before turning back to Dalton’s gloomy face in the candlelight as the waiter bustled off.
“Yes. I can’t blame her for it.”
“Basta! You are morose, Micah. You are tired. In the morning—”
“I won’t be here in the morning.”
Brancati waved that away with a glass. The wine came back, a crystal decanter, frosted, dripping on the pink linen tablecloth, and a bottle of sambuca, with two small thick glasses.
The waiter withdrew, bowing, mumbling, and Brancati refilled their glasses, so much wine that the surface of the liquid swelled a millimeter above the rims and trembled there, candlelight glimmering in a bright circle around the surface.
“Now you must drink,” said Brancati, smiling at him. “If you can bring it to your lips without spilling, you will have your heart’s desire.”
Dalton tried, failed, the wine falling like little flame-shaped drops in the candlelight. Brancati laughed, reached for his own glass, brought it to his lips without a tremor, and sipped at it. Then he set it down and leaned back in his chair, wiping his mustache with a pink linen napkin.
“You are in love with this signorina? She is your heart’s desire?”
“In love? No. I admire her. She is so—”
“Italian! Yes. If one leads a good life and dies well, God allows you to come back as an Italian, if only so that you can know the true meaning of remorse, and of virtue also. I too admire that woman, I too desire her, and I have three daughters and a wife and a mother and a mother-in-law, so I do not need to have another woman in my life, no more than a man needs more angry bees in his bathroom. Do you have three daughters and a wife and a mother-in-law, Micah?”
This cut right home, sliced right through his defenses.
“Yes. I mean, I did. One, that is. My daughter died. As a baby.”
Brancati, horrified, saw that he had put a finger into an open wound.
Dalton held up a hand, offering an unsteady smile. “It was long ago.”
“I am sorry. Forgive me.”
“It was hard, yes. My wife never recovered from it.”
“You are…”
“We do not talk.”
Brancati shook his head, sadness welling up in his face. He was a sentimental man, thought Dalton. His feelings ran close to the surface.
“This often happens. I see this as a policeman. Many families do not survive a great tragedy, the loss of a child, a loved one. The survivors blame themselves. Blame each other. This is why I hate the bad ones so much. The ripples run out from a crime, run out through time and life together. There is no recovery, no complete forgetting. The victims are always changed. Nothing is ever the same again, and in this strange new place the old ties, the old bonds of love and friendship, they wear thin, they fail. You do not blame…?”
“I blame no one but myself.”
“Yes. I see that.” He lapsed into an uneasy silence, staring at Dalton over the rim of his wineglass. He sighed, set the glass down. “You will permit me to be… scortese… impolite?”
“Please.”
“First, a question. Your rooms at the Savoia e Jolanda. The day you leave, yesterday, the maid tells us that you scrub the floors of the bathroom. The walls. The mirrors. The sink. Until they shine. This you never do before. Neither did Mr. Naumann, when he lived there. This is not something most men do at any time. Not in fine hotels, certainly. Then you take the linen towels away with you. Also you leave three hundred euros and a fifty-euro tip and a note apologizing for the bedcover, the missing towels, that they are stained from a very bad shaving cut, that you wish to repay for it. But there is no blood on the bedcover. Hearing this, our people used ultraviolet to look for blood in your rooms, but there was nothing, a few drops only.”
He hesitated, shot Dalton a wary look, slightly ashamed.
“There is also some evidence that someone was in the room with you that night. Guests in the next suite heard voices—”
“Voices? More than one?”
“They could not say. Only that it seemed to them that a conversation was going on, the back and forth, pauses. More talking.”
“Maybe I had a woman in the room.”
Brancati smiled, tolerant, amused. Unbelieving.
“There was no… no sign of that. The maids always know. Also, in the wastebasket there were several ripped covers — for bandages — and the entire box of medical supplies was empty. When you paid for the room the desk clerk saw that your left wrist had a big bandage on it, and under the black glove there was a swelling, as if your hand was injured and you had wrapped it up. Yet I look at your hand here” — reaching out and touching his left hand with a fingertip — “and there is no injury at all. So here is the question — the impolite question. Your state of mind that night, it seems a little disordered. You imagine blood, but are not wounded. You converse, with no one in the room. You see a bloody bedcover where there is no blood. You clean where there is no stain. Is this because of the fight with Milan and Gavro?”
“Partly. The rest was fatigue. Too much to drink. Far too much.”
“You drank before you met with Milan and Gavro?”
“Yes. And much more afterward.”
“You were drunk, then, when you fought them?”
“I see where this is going. I wish I could go there with you. I can’t. I had no excuse. I would have done the same on black coffee.”
“Micah — I may call you Micah? Yes? Thank you. And you will call me Tessio, like my sons do. Micah, I do not know you very well. What I do know I begin to like. You do not seem to be un uomo cattivo, a man who enjoys hurting people. Do you not feel that what happened with Milan and Gavro — that maybe you should find something else to do for a while? I mean no offense. But I admit…”
“What I did offended you?”
“Not offended, no. How to say… it troubles me. Now that I know you a little better, I would say — with respect — it is not a natural thing for any man to sing Broadway songs and quote from A Midsummer Night’s Dream while he kicks a man into a coma. If I told you this story about another man, what would you advise him to do?”
“Take a year off. Seek professional help.”
“Yes. This would be the advice of a true friend. And will you?”
Brancati’s tone was light; his question was dead serious. Dalton stared down at his glass, at the back of his left hand, resisting the urge to tell this man everything that had happened in the room, the emerald green spider, the bloody wound in his hand that was not there, above all the terrible persistence of these hallucinations.