Ring of Fire Read online

  Fernando stands there, stock-still, not knowing what to do.

  Maybe that’s why he doesn’t notice the man dressed in black who passes by him, leaving behind the lingering scent of violets.

  2

  THE DUST

  THE HOTEL’S COURTYARD IS IRON-COLORED, STILL AND SILENT. Elettra zips across it in the blink of an eye, passing by the well and the twisted trunks of the vines, which majestically rise up to the balcony. Peering out from the balustrade of the terrace are four statues with indecipherable expressions.

  Elettra reaches the foot of the stairs and sticks her tongue out at the stone mask over the arched entranceway. Then she takes the steps two at a time and reaches the room of her other aunt, Irene.

  She knocks on the door but opens it without waiting for an answer. The room is bathed in a soft light coming in from the large French doors that lead out onto the terrace. The ceiling is frescoed in green and the floor is covered with black and white checkerboard tiles.

  “Aunt Irene?” Elettra cries out. “We’ve got a problem with the rooms again!”

  Sitting in her wheelchair at the far end of the room, Aunt Irene is reading by the light of a heron-shaped lamp. She rests the book on her lap and looks at Elettra over her glasses, tilting her head slightly. She’s a very thin woman, her gray hair held back in an elegant tortoiseshell hairpin. When she was young, and before the accident that paralyzed her, she was very beautiful.

  “You don’t say!” she replies, as if she already knew about the problem. “Your father did it again, did he?”

  Elettra bounces across the room in a characteristic little trot. She kneels down on the rug in front of her aunt, making her smile with a grimace. “It sure sounds like it. But this time he did it big time.”

  “Meaning …?”

  “A triple-booked room,” explains Elettra. “He’s coming back from the airport with two French women, three Americans and two Chinese … all convinced they’ve got reservations for room four.”

  “Tell me you’re joking,” the old woman groans.

  “No! I just talked to him on the phone.”

  “It can’t be!” exclaims Irene, letting her book fall to the floor. “Is it so difficult for him to write down three reservations? If only your mother were here! She’d tell him a thing or two!”

  “Aunt Irene …”

  The woman slaps the palms of her hands against the arms of her wheelchair. “The fact is, your father’s always had his head in the clouds. If my sister and I weren’t here to look after him, this hotel would already have gone out of business!”

  “Dad doesn’t want to run the hotel,” Elettra says in his defense. “He’s writing—”

  “He’s writing!” her aunt laughs nervously. “Of course! His legendary spy novel. How many years has he been ‘finishing’ it? Five? Ten?”

  Elettra doesn’t let herself get caught up in the old debate. Instead, she checks the time. “We’ve got less than twenty minutes to come up with a solution.”

  Aunt Irene sighs. “Which would be …?”

  Elettra shrugs her shoulders. “General panic?”

  “Call Aunt Linda up here,” the old woman decides. “It’ll take the brains of three women to compensate for a man’s!”

  “Well, it’s simple!” Linda decides a few minutes later, perfectly calm. “We tell them we don’t have room and we turn them away.”

  “We can’t do that!” protests Elettra.

  “Then we find them alternative accommodation at our expense.”

  “Right. That’s the first thing we need to try,” says Irene, backing her up.

  Elettra gets straight to work, but after a few fruitless attempts she hangs up the phone glumly. “This isn’t going to be easy. Even the Astoria’s booked solid.”

  Aunt Irene thumbs through the list of hotels and bed and breakfasts resting on her lap. She reads out the next number to her niece, muttering, “Blast New Year’s Eve and all these tourists.”

  Linda paces her sister’s room with long strides. She pauses beside a collection of snow globes, picks one up and passes her finger beneath it.

  “Dust mites,” she declares, examining her fingertip. “Your room needs a good cleaning. It’s not healthy for you to live in the middle of all this dust. Especially given your condition.”

  “Linda!” snaps Irene, sensing she’s about to launch into one of her rants about hygiene. “My legs are paralyzed, not my brain! A little dust has never killed anybody.”

  Totally unconvinced, Linda turns the glass ball upside down, her lip curling with disgust. Delicate white snowflakes begin to whirl around inside the globe. “Horrible,” she proclaims, putting it back in its place after a few seconds. “This is just the kind of thing that only helps create clutter.”

  “You don’t have to like them! Besides, this is my room and I’ll keep whatever I want in it.”

  “And all these horrible old pictures?” her sister goes on relentlessly. “And those old dressers, with the unmistakable smell of mildew that old dressers have? They’ll ruin all your clothes, I tell you! You should get yourself some new dressers, like the ones in my room. And put vanilla potpourri in them. One sachet for each drawer and all your clothes will smell like—”

  “Like vanilla! Yes, I can imagine!” Aunt Irene practically howls. “Linda, would you mind trying to focus on our problem with the rooms rather than thinking about sterilizing my life?”

  Elettra hangs up the phone for the fifth time.

  “No luck. Not even at the Milton. It looks like the whole city’s full, as stuffed as a Christmas goose.”

  “Oh, that’s right!” exclaims Linda. “Speaking of food, what should we eat tonight? I could make a few slices of polenta with a little lard, or … or some amberjack. We could bake it with a few potatoes and fresh parsley. …”

  Elettra ignores her and makes a sixth attempt. But this call, as well as the following one, is no use. “Everything’s full,” she finally summarizes.

  “Well then …,” sighs Aunt Irene. “That only leaves plan B.”

  “Don’t even think about it!” Aunt Linda says, holding out her hands. “I’m not giving my room to strangers!”

  “Linda, we don’t have any other—”

  “Besides, it’s a mess, a total mess. And you know what they’d do! They’d go in there with shoes on! You know perfectly well no one goes into my room with shoes on! Oh, no! And the bathroom? It needs disinfecting. And once they’re gone? I’d never be able to use it again! There would be strange germs, viruses I don’t have antibodies for. Or you two, for that matter! There are illnesses that can survive steam at a hundred degrees Celsius! They said so on TV! Like the man who brought the bird flu virus back with him to Turkey. Did you read about that?”

  “Linda!” Irene grabs her wrist, cutting her off. “Listen carefully. In your room we can put the two ladies. The French woman and her daughter. Look at me: women. She’s a perfume designer. Clean, sweet-smelling. And she’ll only be sleeping here a couple of nights.”

  Her sister grunts, not very convinced. “And where would we put the Chinese man?”

  “In Fernando’s room.”

  “And Fernando?”

  “On the sofa in the sitting room.”

  “The sofa in the sitting room is fragile!” Aunt Linda protests. “You know perfectly well that Fernando breaks everything he touches. Besides that, he sleepwalks!”

  “Look who’s talking …,” breaks in Elettra. “You’re a sleepwalker, too.”

  “I am not,” exclaims the aunt. “Once in a while I just happen to … to talk in my sleep a little, that’s all.”

  “A little?” her niece teases.

  Irene tries to bring the argument to an end. “Let’s keep the Americans in room four. The French ladies go in your room, you come here to sleep in my room,” she summarizes, “and the Chinese man goes in Fernando’s room.”

  “Fernando can’t sleep on that sofa,” insists Linda.

  “Then he�
��ll sleep under the sofa!”

  “He can’t sleep on the floor. It’s dirty.”

  “Listen, Linda,” her sister interjects. “One of the reasons our hotel is always so full is that there’s no place cleaner or more sweet-smelling on the whole planet. Therefore … Fernando will sleep on the floor, and right now you and Elettra need to get all the rooms ready for our guests.”

  Convinced, the two turn to leave. But then Linda has a nagging doubt. “Sorry, but … even if we do it this way we’re still three beds short. One for the Chinese man’s son, one for—”

  “Then here’s what we’ll do: we’ll put all the kids in the bunk beds in Elettra’s room.”

  “Are you joking?”

  “No. They’ll have a world of fun. Elettra speaks English better than all of us put together. And her room’s perfect.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “But what?” the girl says, cutting her off with a shake of her thick black curls. “It’s a great idea. And maybe the only solution. Come on, Auntie! We can do it!”

  “Mr. Mahler?” asks the young woman at the airport.

  She’s standing in front of the international arrivals exit. Around her is the orange glow from a streetlight. She’s thin, with long eyebrows and the slender hands of a photographer. She’s wearing a pin-striped jacket, tight-fitting jeans and a pair of tall green leather boots.

  The man she’s just asked the question doesn’t stop. He passes right by her and pretends to check out the line for taxis. He’s thin, dressed in black, and has straight gray hair, high cheekbones and a nose as pointy as an ice pick. He has tiny eyes and a mouth so thin it looks like a slit. He’s wheeling behind him an anonymous black carry-on bag and is holding an unusual violin case.

  “Are you Mr. Mahler?” the young woman repeats, walking up to him.

  The first snowflakes begin to fall.

  Without shifting his gaze, the man murmurs, “Possibly.”

  “Beatrice,” she says, introducing herself. “I’ve come to pick you up.”

  “Obviously.”

  The young woman bites her lip. “Would you care to follow me?”

  “You came here by car?”

  “Obviously,” she replies, peeved.

  Only then does the man turn around. His gaze is cold and distant. “Fine,” he says. “I know the airport is far from downtown. And I’m extremely tired.”

  “Joe Vinile asked me to take you over for something to eat—”

  “Not tonight,” the man objects. “All I need are a bed and a bathtub.”

  Beatrice leads the way down the sidewalk. “Nice violin,” she remarks, opening the door to her yellow Mini.

  “It’s not a violin,” he replies, slightly intensifying his hold on the case.

  3

  THE FOUR

  IT’S SNOWING WHEN FERNANDO MELODIA’S MINIBUS REACHES THE courtyard inside the Domus Quintilia, in the old heart of the Trastevere district. His guests step out into the densely falling snow and scurry over to the shelter of the old wood-covered terrace. Their host quickly disappears into the reception lounge. And as they begin to unload the first suitcases, he returns to the minibus, nervously explains what’s happened with the reservations, describes the emergency solution that the ladies of the house have come up with and, without waiting for their response, disappears once again into the hotel.

  A heated dispute breaks out among the guests. Swirling down around them, the snow grows thicker and thicker.

  The American professor is standing stock-still beside the entrance to the hotel, a furious look on his face.

  “This is an outrage!” he thunders. “I’ve never been treated in such a manner!”

  His wife has grabbed one of his lapels and occasionally yanks on it like a leash. “George … Calm down. …”

  “Calm down?” he sputters, pointing first at the ancient courtyard of the Domus Quintilia and then at the stairs leading up to the reception lounge. “How can I calm down? We reserved a triple room and now we’re being given a double! Where will our poor Harvey sleep?”

  Hearing he’s been caught up in the middle of something, “poor Harvey” looks around, disgusted. “Let’s get out of here,” he grunts. He steps aside to avoid the giant Scottish suitcases of Mr. See-Young Wan Ho.

  The man from China is also frowning, and his shiny silk suit isn’t enough to improve his mood. “Well, what about me, then? I reserved a double, the one that’s being given to you … and now I wind up in a single room! And I have a son here, too.”

  But unlike “poor Harvey,” the Chinese boy is running and jumping around wildly in the snow, commenting on everything he can see: the wooden terrace, the four statues peering down from the balustrade, the bleak-looking stairway of the entrance with the jeering mask, the well in the middle of the courtyard, the hotel’s minibus.

  The two French guests have remained off to the side and don’t seem to have any intention of taking part in the dispute. They perfectly resemble each other, like two peas in a pod, and are dressed identically. Thin, delicate clothing in a color as indeterminate as their straight hair. When Mr. Miller asks for their opinion, Mrs. Blanchard limits herself to pointing out, “Evidently a mistake’s been made with the reservations.”

  “This is an outrage!” the American man thunders out again, not at all pleased with such acquiescence.

  “Let’s get out of here,” his son repeats grouchily.

  “Wait …,” Mr. See-Young Wan Ho says, looking over at the hotel entrance. “Something might be happening.”

  Hey, his son thinks, stopping in his tracks in the snow. Elettra has appeared.

  She has an oval-shaped face; dark, determined eyes; and a cascade of curly black hair. At her side is an equally beautiful woman with a fresh appearance, light eyes and silvery shoulder-length hair. Both of them are smiling and reassuring, like those who have the solution to any problem.

  “We’re so very sorry …,” the woman begins to say. “But everything can be worked out. You’ll see.”

  “In any case, we can talk this over where it’s warm, if you like,” says Elettra, inviting them in.

  Captivated by Linda’s eyes, the American professor radically changes expression. He frees his jacket lapel from his wife’s grip and replies with an unexpected and conciliatory, “Of course.”

  Even “poor Harvey” seems to show a glimmer of interest in what’s going on. Mr. See-Young Wan Ho accepts the invitation with a little bow. The two French ladies allow a very sheepish-looking Fernando to slip past them so he can take care of the luggage, and they follow Elettra into a beautiful dining room with a low ceiling, where there are five little freshly set tables and bright, cheery paintings hung on the walls.

  Waiting for them is an elderly woman in a wheelchair.

  “My name is Irene,” the woman begins, smiling at them calmly. “And I’m tremendously sorry about what’s happened.”

  The American professor seems ready to protest, but then, as if something has just dawned on him, he promptly decides to hear her out.

  “There are no excuses for the mistake we’ve made,” the woman continues. “But we believe our proposal is reasonable. The city’s full of people and it would be impossible to find you better accommodation. Believe me, the rooms you’ll be staying in might just be the most comfortable ones in the hotel.”

  “But mine is missing a bed for my daughter …,” the French woman adds.

  “We can solve that problem, too,” Elettra then replies. “My room has two bunk beds. If … Mistral, right?”

  The French girl nods shyly.

  “If Mistral wants, she can sleep in my room. The boys can share the other bunk bed. That way, everyone will have a place to sleep.”

  Mistral looks over at her mother, awaiting a nod of approval.

  Sheng lets out a convinced “Hao!” He tries to catch Harvey’s eye, but the American boy is staring down at the floor, embarrassed. His parents quickly discuss the situation. Mr. Wan Ho looks tranquilly at
the elderly woman in the wheelchair.

  The first person to decide is Mistral’s mother, who shrugs her shoulders and concludes, “My daughter’s used to being independent. If she’s all right with it, then it’s perfectly fine with me.”

  “Would you like to see my room, ma’am?” asks Elettra.

  “No, no. Is it very far from mine?”

  “Two flights of stairs.”

  Mistral and her mother exchange an amused smile and then accept the proposal.

  “Very well,” approves Aunt Irene, pleased.

  “Well, it is getting late,” Mr. Wan Ho breaks in, smoothing down his suit. “And we had a long flight. If my son agrees, I accept your proposal, too.”

  Aunt Irene then turns to the two Americans. “That just leaves you, Mr. and Mrs. Miller.”

  The man folds his arms across his chest with total composure. The woman leans over to brush a stray lock of hair from the forehead of her son, who promptly moves away from her. “Is it all right with you, Harvey? If not, we could—”

  “Yeah, it’s fine,” he answers. For a brief instant, he looks up from his shoes and meets Elettra’s eye. Shyly, he whirls around to get the suitcases.

  After a few more awkward pleasantries, the dining room at the Domus Quintilia empties out.

  Irene begins to wheel herself toward the elevator. A little door in the wall behind her opens up just a crack.

  “You can come out now, Lionheart,” she says, speaking to the dark crack in the door. “The coast is clear.”

  Fernando Melodia peeks into the room, makes sure all the guests have left and walks in. In his arms is a stack of clothes, towels and pajamas. “How did you know it was me?”

  “I could sense your guilty conscience in the air.”

  “I …”

  The wheels of the chair creak on the floor.

  Outside the window, the gaunt silhouette of a statue stares at the pale sky.

  “Just be careful with the sofa,” the elderly aunt cackles.

  “I’d rather sleep on the floor.”

  “I think you’d better, given how Linda might react if you don’t.”