Italian Fever Read online

  The ghost was the restless spirit of a dead Resistance fighter, a partisan, ambushed by fascist forces in the yard of his own estate. This dead warrior, mirabile dictu, shared with Malcolm Manx both a staunch love of liberty and an ancestor from the rugged Basque country. The presence of such a soul mate, a comrade, stomping through the family olive groves in search of peace and old-world wisdom had so excited the murdered partisan that he got right out of his grave, and now he was wandering around pointing at things, always in the dead of night, when everyone was asleep, everyone but Malcolm Manx, who was up and struggling with the big, hard questions of life and art.

  For reasons Lucy usually tried not to think about, DV’s books sold well. A few had been made into movies, and DV was encouraged by everyone around him to write more. Reviews were rare, however, and seldom favorable, which galled him, but he had learned to take satisfaction in the size of his bank account.

  Through eight years and five novels, Lucy Stark had worked for DV. He never asked her what she thought of his books and she never told him. She was, in his phrase, “the assistant,” or sometimes, more accurately, “the office.” She kept track of everything, made sure he didn’t see the worst reviews, kept his ex-wives at bay, handled his mail, supervised the flow in and out of large sums of money, and transcribed every word of his wretched prose from the tattered, indecipherable pages he sent her to the computer he had never learned to use.

  In the early years, she had tried to straighten out some of his worst sentences; she had balked when a mixed metaphor strained to include a fourth incongruent element, but those days were gone. DV had complained to his editor, Stanton Cutler, who had called Lucy and explained, politely but firmly, that she must restrain her no doubt rightful enthusiasm. “Just think of it as a draft,” he suggested.

  Armed with her tea, dosed with painkillers, Lucy returned to her desk and took up the page that had driven her from the room.

  A dark and brooding figure beckoned him eerily on the moonlit drive, and Malcolm felt his burning blood turn to ice in his veins.

  “Jesus,” Lucy said.

  The phone rang. She dropped the page, reached over the lamp, caught the teacup in the cuff of her sweater, and watched in horror as the tea spilled out across the manuscript. Bringing the receiver to her ear with one hand, she lifted the soaking page with the other and tried to funnel the hot liquid into the wastebasket. The tea poured out across the carpet.

  “Lucy Stark, please?” a woman’s voice inquired.

  “This is she.”

  “American embassy in Rome calling. Please hold.”

  And in the next moment, as she knelt beside her desk, blotting at the tea stains with a page of newsprint hastily torn from last week’s book review, a hostile, disembodied male voice came on the line and gave her the astonishing news that DV was dead.

  Chapter 2

  HE FELL DOWN a well.”

  “This is terrible.” Jean McKay, DV’s agent, was the first person Lucy informed of his unexpected demise. “How could a grown man fall down a well?”

  “I don’t know,” Lucy replied. “The embassy man didn’t tell me much. He seemed annoyed with DV for dying. He wouldn’t even say when it happened; he just said, ‘It wasn’t yesterday.’ And he didn’t seem to know anything about Catherine. Where is Catherine? Why didn’t she call?”

  “It’s mysterious,” Jean observed.

  “It is mysterious,” Lucy agreed.

  “DV would have liked that. He always wanted to be mysterious.”

  The women divided up the necessary business. Jean agreed to return the call to Italy, to call DV’s lawyer and his editor. Lucy would contact his accountant and his ex-wives. Then they would talk again and decide what was to be done.

  It took Lucy the rest of the morning to finish these calls. She switched from tea to coffee and returned to her desk, where DV’s ghost novel lay before her, still damp from the tea accident, its pages curling at the edges, mutely accusing. Was it possible? Wasn’t it thicker than it had been before she received the call from the embassy?

  It doesn’t matter if it is, she thought. She would not now transfer even one word onto the computer; what would be the point? It wasn’t finished and now it never would be. DV’s ghost story would live in no other memory than her own. She tried to work up some feeling about this. It bothered her that no one she had spoken to so far had expressed anything more serious than vexation at the news of DV’s untimely death. The wives had been particularly unfeeling.

  Poor DV. Jean was right; he had wanted to be mysterious, but he never was. He was as transparent as a shallow pool. There were ripples now and then on the surface, caused by how thoroughly he failed to know his own limitations, his own lack of depth. In her opinion, the move to Italy had been one of those ripples, and now it had cost him everything. What had possessed him to make such a flamboyant, impractical move?

  The phone startled her from her reverie. Jean had talked with the embassy official and, through an interpreter, the landlord and even the coroner, who wanted to ship DV’s body home. “No one wants that,” Lucy said. “It would be too macabre.”

  “I know,” Jean agreed. “So someone has to go over there and get him buried. I can’t. I can’t leave right now. I’ll arrange a memorial service here.”

  “Did you find out anything about Catherine?”

  “She’s gone.” Jean paused. Lucy could hear her sipping something, coffee, no doubt. “The landlord was vague about that. He didn’t know when she left, but he said he thought DV had been living alone there for some time.”

  “Really?” Lucy tried to picture DV alone, wandering about the vast and gloomy villa he described in the manuscript, an ancient stone mansion complete with tapestries, family portraits, and a sinister family chapel in which the decadent aristocrats were routinely christened and from which they were carried out in their coffins. She couldn’t picture it.

  “Do any of the wives want to go?” Jean asked.

  “No. They just want to know what’s going to happen to the money.”

  “Can you go?”

  She had been to Italy once, when she was still in college, a monthlong backpack and train trip with two friends from school. The trio had resisted the pinches and leers of gorgeous Italian men from Naples to Trieste, it was as hot as an oven, and they were so poor, they lived on pizza slices and little sandwiches and slept in tiny, sparsely furnished rooms, with the bath down the hall. In the churches, piazzas, and museums of Venice, Florence, Rome, and Naples, Lucy sought the fabulous treasures she had studied, and each time she found one, she marveled anew at the inadequacy of reproductions to give even a hint of the power of the originals. Art in its home, she thought, at ease in its natural habitat. It was like encountering the tiger, seen previously stalking nervously behind iron bars at a zoo, sleeping peacefully in its own lair. At the end of the trip, the three friends had splurged on a big trattoria meal in Rome, then staggered full and tipsy out into the broiling streets, blinded by tears at the thought of going home.

  “Yes,” she said. “I can go.”

  So it was agreed. She was to leave that very night. Jean promised to have an interpreter meet her in Rome and drive her up to the villa in Ugolino. She called the neighbor with whom she had a reciprocal cat-care arrangement, canceled a lunch date, and made a new message for the answering machine.

  Later, when she was packing, Lucy considered the questions she found most difficult to answer. Why had DV stayed on after Catherine left? And why had he never mentioned her departure? He had communicated with Lucy by express mail, sending lists and terse instructions; there was rarely a personal note. If he was anxious or unhappy, he hadn’t bothered, or hadn’t wanted, to let her know. But if Catherine had left him, he must have been more alone than he had ever been in his life: alone in his villa with his ghost.

  And even the ghost, she speculated, couldn’t have been much in the way of company: DV had never learned more than ten words of Italian.


  LUCY HARDLY SLEPT on the plane. It was crowded, noisy; the food was terrible, the usual. Some passengers were resigned; others never would be. She tried to concentrate on her book, The Art of Ecstasy: Teresa, Bernini, and Crashaw, but after a brief perusal of the excellent photographs of Bernini’s St. Teresa, her thoughts began to wander and she gave herself over to following them. She thought about DV and about DV’s writing. The fact that there would be no more novels meant she was out of a job, though it would take a month or two to get everything cleared away. This didn’t concern her, as she felt certain she could find another job; the years with DV had provided her with many contacts and she knew how to do a great many useful things. She was enormously, inappropriately relieved that his unfinished book would not see the light of print, for it represented a departure she found troubling.

  Everyone knew DV’s novels were thinly disguised accounts of his own life; that was what he meant by the word realism. He was fond of admitting this in interviews, as if the paucity of his imagination made the books more valuable. Of course, anyone who knew DV even slightly knew he exaggerated some things absurdly, particularly the invariable physical attractiveness of his narrators. These were always big, strong men with large appetites, big ideas. DV was not five feet five. He was not strong, was often ill, and had so thoroughly destroyed his digestive tract with bourbon that he subsisted on a bland diet of boiled meat and rice. He did have a large, rather handsome head, which was displayed to great advantage on the back covers of his novels. His dark hair and brows were thick, his nose strong and straight, his mouth shapely, and he had lively, soulful brown eyes. He had a big laugh he used when he needed attention and couldn’t get it any other way. The laugh was heard mostly in public, at readings and dinners, and especially during interviews, when he used it to cover embarrassing pauses.

  He had been married three times, never for long. In his mind, the wives were all insane and he had done his best to rescue them from themselves, but it was hopeless; in spite of his passionate attachment to each of them, in the end he had had to save himself. He had not been able to save a large part of his income, however, which went out in alimony and child-support checks every month. In Lucy’s view, the wives were interchangeable, stupid, mean-spirited women who had spotted him as an easy mark. He had two children by two wives, a boy of ten and a girl of twelve. These, presumably, would inherit his estate.

  Lucy had met Catherine Bultman on a few occasions and once they had chatted briefly about Caravaggio, Catherine’s favorite painter. No one could figure out how DV had talked her into his life or what she saw in him. What he saw in her was obvious. She was beautiful, talented, intelligent, and eminently sane. She had refused to marry him, and the move to Italy was part of a plan he had to get her to change her mind. She had studied painting in Florence and spoke Italian fluently. DV promised her a studio of her own. He would write; she would paint—it would be a perfect artist’s paradise.

  The first two chapters of the ghost novel were all about life at the villa, how the shattered American writer endeared himself to the gentle country people who worked for him, how the neighboring aristocrats delighted in inviting him for long, elegant dinners, after which he walked back alone through the groves of olives and the lane of cypress trees that sheltered the drive to his villa. On one of these walks, while brooding over the tempestuous affair he was having with a beautiful artist, he first saw the ghost.

  One thing that was odd, Lucy thought, was that Malcolm Manx’s description of the affair was particularly painful and bitter. It was the closest thing to a description of real human suffering DV had ever written. It wasn’t good, by any means; his rendering of their lovemaking was the usual clot of hyperbole, but there was a scene in which, after a violent quarrel, the beautiful artist, perfectly sane and utterly cold, closes the door on the American writer, leaving him undecided whether to go to the window and watch her drive away or remain with his forehead pressed against the door—this, Lucy had been forced to admit, was different from anything DV had written before. It was straightforward, sad, and touchingly rendered.

  Was it possible that before DV fell down the well he had actually experienced the torture of love and loss, the overturning of everything, the 3:00 a.m. confrontation with the soul in which the ordinary, self-serving lies fail to disguise the unbearable truth, that through one’s own folly the beloved has been lost and that without the beloved there is no light, there is no life?

  It seemed unlikely.

  The hours dragged by. She skipped the movie and tried to sleep, but the large man snoring next to her made it impossible. The air supply dwindled and the constant cough of the woman two rows ahead guaranteed the passengers the opportunity to contract something virulent and debilitating. The attendants fanned out carrying coffeepots and hard rolls, and the edges of the closed window shades began to glow dimly. They had flown through the night into the morning. Lucy opened her shade and looked out into the pale light of the upper atmosphere. Soon the plane would begin its descent over France, then a brief turn over the Mediterranean and down into Italy. In spite of the sad nature of her mission, she felt a keen rush of excitement.

  In the early chapters of the ghost novel, DV always referred to Italy as “she.” It was a convention Lucy despised. Italy was always revealing her treasures, turning her smiling face upon the visitor, spreading her table with the rich tapestry of her harvest, pouring out her hospitality, guarding her secrets, taunting her admirers with hints at the dark knowledge of her endless, mysterious, sinister past. She was a mother, a kind sister, a priestess, a strumpet, a generous, good-natured, but avaricious whore. DV couldn’t get enough of this sort of language. The thought made Lucy so irritable, she decided to distract herself by queuing up for the bathroom.

  Italy. La Bell’Italia. The smiling faces of her sun-loving people. It was guidebook talk. By the time Lucy got back to her seat, the plane was crossing her polluted, ineffable coast. Somewhere down there DV lay, out of this world now, but soon to be back in it; only this time, he wouldn’t be writing about the experience. His pen had been silenced by the rich, romantic soil of Italy. Now he would lie mute forever—how it would have charmed him—tucked away deep in her ancient, all-encompassing heart.

  HE WAS STANDING at the front of the eager crowd, resting the small cardboard rectangle with her name scratched lightly upon it against the rail that separated those arriving from those receiving. Unlike his neighbors, he was not scanning the passengers hopefully; in fact, he was not even looking in their direction. He was entirely absorbed by a spot he had discovered on the sleeve of his elegant jacket. He brushed at it with his thumb, frowning fiercely, his brow furrowed in concentration. Lucy approached the rail and stopped in front of him. Gradually, reluctantly, he became aware of her presence and looked up at her coldly. “That’s me,” she said, pointing to the sign.

  “Signora Stark,” he said without enthusiasm. He pronounced it “Staak.” He gestured toward the opening at the end of the rail. “Go that way,” he said. “I will meet you there.”

  Lucy turned her cart back into the crowd, pleased to have a few moments to recover from the unsettling combination of his icy manner and his extraordinary good looks. He was not a big man, but he was bulky and strong, of the bullish physical type Lucy classified as “stevedore,” and which she always found attractive. He had the wonderful tan skin and thick black hair one associates with the country she was now entering, but his eyes were a light, clear green, quite startling to look into, like finding a wolf’s eyes in a shepherd dog’s face. His expression was gloomy, humorless, and bored. She judged him to be in his early forties, several years older than she was, at any rate. Chauffering American women around was clearly not what he wanted to be doing with his time. Lucy wondered how much he knew about her mission.

  She cleared the rails and fell into step alongside him. “I am Massimo Compitelli,” he informed her, chivalrously taking over her luggage cart. “I will be driving you to Ugolino.”
r />   “Will you be staying with me there?”

  He cast her a quick appraising look. “I will stay with you until you are finished with the authorities.”

  “Good,” she said. “That’s a relief. How far is it?”

  “A drive of perhaps three hours.”

  She glanced at her watch. It would be well past lunchtime when they arrived. The coffee and roll she had eaten had left her light-headed and nauseated. She didn’t want to identify the remains of DV on an empty, rebellious stomach. “Could I get something to eat along the way, Signor Compitelli?” she said. “Just a sandwich would do.”

  They had arrived at the elevator to the parking lot. He gave her a long, steady, curious look, which she ducked by fiddling with her purse latch. Just what sort of creature is this, his survey seemed to ask, this foreigner I am to be responsible for? Lucy looked up, smiling weakly. “I’m very tired,” she said.

  He continued his scrutiny, his lips slightly pursed with thought. “Yes,” he said as the elevator door snapped open, disgorging a surprising number of people and luggage carts. “I know a place not far from here where we can stop.” She followed him into the narrow elevator. A few other travelers pushed in behind and she was pressed against the back wall between two carts. He turned to her as they began their ascent to the parking lot. “Please call me Massimo,” he said.

  Good, Lucy thought, sagging against the wall. He has made up his mind to befriend me.

  Chapter 3

  DV’S BOOKS HAD NOT DONE particularly well in Italy, although three of them had been translated and published there—the two that had been made into films and another, his last book, which was sold abroad on the strength of a movie deal that never came off. Massimo Compitelli worked for the Italian publisher, though Lucy was not able to determine in what capacity. He didn’t seem to be an editor. He did freelance work of some kind; it sounded a bit like agenting. Perhaps he was a scout. She questioned him about this over a grilled eggplant sandwich at the gleaming bar he took her to just on the outskirts of Rome, but his answers were cryptic. He was visibly appalled by her insistence on drinking a cappuccino with her food, but too polite to say anything. She tried changing the subject. “So you live in Rome?” she said.