The Lover From An Icy Sea Page 19

  “Good morning, darling. Have a nice walk?”

  “I did indeed.” And as he looked at her now, possessing all of the radiant beauty of the diamond he’d dismissed only minutes earlier, his thoughts left the lichen behind as if it were a thoroughly expendable piece of frozen tundra.

  Chapter 34

  Except for the occasional swish of the windshield wipers, they drove north in silence—though by no means an uncomfortable one. Daneka sat directly beside Kit, her head on his shoulder, one hand inside his shirt and resting comfortably against his chest. Their car was greeted now and again by pairs of amber fog lights on cars traveling in the opposite direction. Still less often, Kit had to maneuver his vehicle around a slow-moving tractor. There were no service roads in this area of the country. Everyone—big or small, slow or fast, tourist or farmer—made do with the national road.

  When they arrived at the airport, Kit dropped Daneka and their luggage off just outside the international departure lounge, then drove down and around to return the rental car. He found her twenty minutes later at the check-in counter for Alitalia, explaining to the clerk in what seemed to Kit’s ear to be fluent Italian the reason for their early departure. The clerk in this case was another woman, and Daneka’s charm didn’t seem to be working its usual magic. Finally, in exasperation, she asked to speak with the clerk’s supervisor.

  “What’s the problem, Daneka?” Kit asked.

  “Oh, she wants us to pay a penalty for early departure. I just refuse, on principle, to pay penalty fees. Either the goddamned plane’s got seats or it hasn’t. It costs them no more to fly us today than it will tomorrow.”

  When a smartly dressed, middle-aged man came into view, Daneka’s demeanor shifted abruptly from annoyed customer to woman-in-need-of-a-helping-hand. She was all pained smile and droopy eyelashes when he stepped up to the counter.

  “Buongiorno, Signora. Ci sono problemi?”

  Daneka’s subsequent spiel left Kit dazzled. Her eyes and eyelashes spoke in fluttered phrases; her hands spoke in fistfuls of anguish and disappointment; her mouth merely gave sounds and punctuation to both. Finally, she paused and, in summation, put both hands together as if in prayer.

  “Può aiutarci, caro Signore?”

  The supervisor mumbled a few words to the clerk; looked down at the tickets; looked at both Kit’s and Daneka’s passport photos; tossed Kit’s passport aside, but flipped assiduously through every page of Daneka’s, looking up from time to time at her but ignoring Kit as if he were an unseemly odor.

  “É danese di nascita, Lei?”

  “Sì, Signore. Nata in Danimarca, ma abito a New York.”

  “Peccato,” was all he said, and Kit thought to himself that it was no shame whatsoever that she lived in New York. What’s more, what presumption did this particular peacock take upon himself to suggest otherwise? Italy—another paradise? He was already having serious misgivings, and they hadn’t yet even boarded the plane.

  The supervisor made a notation of some kind on Daneka’s ticket and signed it with a flourish, then handed it to the clerk for re-processing. “Fatto, Signora.”

  “Mille grazie, Signore. É molto gentile!” Daneka gushed.

  The supervisor seemed to be quite satisfied with himself and with the end-result of the transaction, and next reached out for Daneka’s hand in what Kit suspected was going to be some secret Mediterranean hand-squeeze. Don’t you fucking dare! was what he thought—though luckily for all of them, he only thought it.

  In fact, the handshake—at least that Kit could see—remained professional and insinuated nothing more than the pleasure of doing business. Italian-style. Kit was quite prepared to think long and hard about what it was Italian men knew about Scandinavian women that he obviously did not know, when the supervisor showed distinct signs of exiting the scene.

  “E il mio?” Kit almost screeched, since both the officious supervisor and Kit’s captivating little mermaid-of-a-consort had apparently forgotten that she didn’t come without some solid carry-on baggage—namely, him.

  The man gave him a quick look, reached down to the second ticket and scribbled his initials. Did he then pick the ticket up and hand it to his clerk? He did not. He simply turned on his heel and marched off.

  Bella fucking Italia indeed! Kit thought.

  As Kit and Daneka collected their tickets from the female clerk, he gave her a nice, you’ve-got-a-friend-in-Pennsylvania smile. She ignored Daneka completely and directed her subtle smile, and a warm hand, in return.

  “Buon viaggio,” she murmured. Their handshake lingered, and the steamship of Kit’s earlier assessment of Italy and things Italian suddenly reversed course. As it did so, however, it ran up against Daneka—who was suddenly looking more like a Danish tugboat than a Danish mermaid.

  “Shall we go?” Her question, to him, sounded indeed like the warning blast of such a tugboat.

  “ArrivederLa, Signorina,” Kit offered the still smiling clerk before releasing her hand. “Yes, Daneka. Let’s.”

  Italy, Kit thought to himself as they walked towards Customs and the departure gate for their Lisbon-to-Rome flight, was going to be one barrel of laughs.

  Chapter 35

  The flight from Lisbon to Rome passed without incident—also, however, without repeat of any earlier aerial pleasures. Whether it was the lingering feeling of Lisbon’s fog or the malingering memories of their first encounter with Italian machismo, Kit couldn’t be certain. In any case, he and Daneka weren’t talking. Maybe, he thought, some real sun—or at least some sidewalk serenade to the real thing—would lighten things up.

  As their plane began its slow descent into Fiumicino, the clouds parted just in time for them to view the Vatican City under a pocket of clear sky. Other landmarks gradually found light and definition in Kit’s eyes as the cloud-cover pulled back like a lady’s skirt, and snickering sunlight put the good parts down below on full display. Shade and shadow, he knew, were essential to romance and erotica; at the moment, however, he had no use for either. His photographer’s eye simply wanted to ogle the cityscape; his middling historian’s mind wanted to associate three-dimensional blocks of stone with two-dimensional facsimiles he’d seen in the illustrations of history books; his lover’s imagination wanted to revel in the projection of the two of them, in short order, walking hand in hand through tunneled streets and dark alleys of this ‘eternal city.’ He felt that any commentary would be superfluous.

  Daneka clearly didn’t feel compelled to offer any, either; and so, they descended in silence.

  Once inside the airport and through the baggage claims area and Customs, Kit suggested he’d take care of the rental car rather than lose valuable time waiting to recover their luggage. Daneka nodded her approval and announced that she’d call the hotel in Positano to clear their early arrival. They moved their bags over to a bank of pay phones and agreed to rendezvous there again in twenty minutes.

  Exactly nineteen minutes later, they did.

  “The hotel’s booked for the night,” she announced with an abrupt gesture, clearly disappointed with a situation even she couldn’t amend. “We’ll either have to put up here in Rome or somewhere down the coast. What’s your preference?”

  “I’m sorry, Daneka,” Kit answered. But he wasn’t really; he was delighted. An entire afternoon, evening and night in Rome was a gift of serendipity he hadn’t expected—the chance, finally, to walk the streets his parents had walked and talked about, always with a peculiar gleam in their eyes.

  “Would you mind terribly staying here in Rome?” he asked.

  “No. That’s fine. I only wonder where.”

  Although he’d never studied the language formally, Kit felt that what little he’d picked up from his parents would be sufficient for him to handle booking a hotel room. “Mind if I try?” he asked.

  “Not at all,” Daneka replied. “I don’t really know Rome well enough even to make a suggestion.” Kit was happy for once that Daneka’s book knowledge—and s
o, he assumed, her carnal knowledge—did not include every city, village and hamlet on the Continent. He was especially happy that it excluded the capital of this particular Mediterranean country—a city whose historical reputation for debauchery rivaled even that of Berlin and Düsseldorf, and rendered what he knew of New York’s, in comparison, a kids’ turn of Spin the Bottle.

  He started off in the direction of where he thought he might find information, transportation and hotel reservation kiosks, then paused for a second and looked back.

  “Daneka,” he half shouted. She seemed to be preoccupied; but hearing his call, she turned around.

  “Yes, darling?” And then, perhaps for the benefit of whoever might be listening, and with a slightly flippant air, “Are you trying to pick me up? You just dropped me off!”

  “Oh, nothing in particular,” Kit said. But he felt suddenly light-hearted again, grateful for this talent of hers that could remove obstacles between them as quickly as it could erect them.

  Kit finally found the airport’s hotel reservation desk and took his place in line. During the few minutes he had to wait his turn, he leafed through his mental book of useful Italian phrases. He knew, of course, that he could count on finding at least one person at the desk who spoke English, but his recent experience in Portugal had given him a whole new perspective on the ancillary benefits of making a little extra effort. He didn’t want to make a fool of himself, but he knew he had the accent, and he figured he could make a good stab at the music. The grammar? Let the grammar take care of itself.

  When his turn finally came, he stepped up in front of a woman who, he felt, could easily have gotten catalog work, at the very least, in New York. Here in Rome, however, she was a mere clerk at a hotel reservation desk. He’d already noticed how she’d been strictly business with her previous customer. Suddenly, in his presence, she was all teeth and eyes and lashes that fell around him like a lasso. He let himself be taken in as he glanced down at her name-plate. It perched hallucinogenically atop one of a pair of breasts that, he mused, would likely have been outlawed or brown-bagged in most counties in the U.S..

  “Buongiorno, Rafaela,” he said grandly. Good Puritan that he was, he announced the name to her face rather than to her name-plate.

  “Buongiorno, Signore!” she answered gaily—and grateful that a perfect stranger had even bothered to read her name. At the same time, however, she looked more directly at the man standing in front of her—and self-consciously slipped a hand inside her blouse behind the name-plate.

  “Cerchiamo una camera per la notte. Un albergo vicino Piazza Campo de’ Fiori, se è possible.”

  “Quanti siete, Signore?” she asked as her eyes quickly scanned to the right and left of him to see who “we” might be. At the same time, Kit noticed that her smile contained not a hint of condescension to suggest that his efforts were, at least grammatically speaking, in vain.

  “Siamo due, Signora.”

  “Signorina,” she corrected him. Kit noticed from the glint in her eye that the correction was not a grammatical one. Rather, she was putting him on notice, rutting in one of those subtle ways that homo sapiens can rut. He was thankful—though only barely—that his present situation wouldn’t allow him to pursue the scent. He opted instead for diplomacy.

  “Scusi, Signorina Rafaela.”

  “Prego,” she laughed, her laugh the sound of clinking prisms hanging from a bright, new chandelier. “Quanti letti vi servono?” she asked. The gig was up. Kit knew that announcing the number of beds he and Daneka required would quickly move him and Rafaela to end-game.

  “Ce ne serve solo uno, Signorina.”

  The glint dried up like a gulch, and her eyes disappeared into the deep ravine of her computer. The screen was invisible to Kit as she muttered to herself, though audibly enough for Kit to hear: “Un albergo vicino Piazza Campo de’ Fiori…camera per due persone…un letto...” Then after only a few seconds, “Ecco, Signore. Possiamo offrirvi una camera con bagno particolare, with a queen-sized bed.” Kit wondered about the additional information of a “queen-sized bed” offered in very clipped, very unItalian consonants.

  “That will be perfect, Rafaela. And the price of this queen-sized bed for the night?”

  “Two hundred and seventy-five Euros per couple, per night, for a double room, or four hundred and fifty for a suite,” she answered. She was now all business English. “In the Via dei Cappellari” she announced as she scribbled the name and address of the hotel down on a piece of paper. “Would you like to pay for it now?”

  “Yes, please. And I think we’ll make do with the double room. The price of a suite is just a tad too sweet, thank you.” Kit took out his only credit card and handed it over. The sponge of romance was wrung dry, and out of it had come only dollars and cents. Time, then, to turn sensible about the whole matter and get back to Daneka.

  She handed him pen and receipt. He signed, handed them both back and retrieved his credit card. He decided to try one final time at a lame bit of gallantry, as chivalry had long since run off with the horses.

  “Mille grazie, Signorina. É stato un piacere.”

  “Tutto mio, Signor Addison. Buon viaggio e buon soggiorno! Arrivederci.” And then, as if the paint of him drying in front of her desk might suddenly begin to peel, she looked around and past him to the next no one in particular, “Chi viene dopo?”

  Kit returned to the baggage claim area in search of Daneka. He saw her at a distance, if barely, as she was surrounded by men looking more like frazzled roosters, and she, the lone—but hardly lonely—hen. Kit eased himself in with an occasional “Scusate” so as not to ruffle feathers. This was the only concession to airport culture he cared to make under what he decided were circumstances of strict transit—strict and now—for both of them.

  “It’s done, Daneka. We have a place in town. We can drive in or take a taxi.” At the mention of taxi, the brood of roosters re-frazzled.

  Daneka smiled appreciatively; took Kit by the elbow; led him out to a spot where they could talk. “Darling, why don’t we take a couple of night bags, leave the rest in storage, pick all of it and the car up tomorrow morning, and then drive out to Positano from here?”

  “Sounds like a plan,” he said.

  * * *

  They looked more like two college kids on a Europe-on-five-dollars-a-day tour as they sat down on the floor and began to sort and pack into two bags only the essentials for a one-night stay. At the sight of the two of them floor-bound—and however unaccustomed to flight—her riot of roosters had flown the coop.

  Two bags packed, Kit and Daneka retired the rest to an overnight storage facility, checked in at the car rental agency once again to register the postponement of their departure, then headed out to a taxi stand where they quickly found a car. Kit gave the name and street address of the hotel, and they were off even before he’d had time to close his door. A somewhat harrowing, but appropriately Roman forty-five minutes later through side streets and back alleys, they were standing in front of the hotel. Daneka paid the fare; they registered at the front desk; the porter took their bags; all three then ascended via a cramped elevator smelling of stale cigarette smoke to their floor and room.

  This was decidedly not the Grand Hotel de Champagne, but Rome had not been part of their original itinerary. It would be adequate. It had a bed and a private bathroom. It was, as Kit had noted when they climbed out of their taxi, on a side street leading right up to the Piazza Campo de’ Fiori. What’s more—as the porter made demonstrably clear to them in the act of flinging open a pair of French doors leading out to a terrace much like the one they’d enjoyed in Paris—their room looked directly out onto that same piazza. As far as Kit was concerned—and he hoped, Daneka, too—it was perfect.

  Daneka tipped the porter in a small stack of lire notes, and he exited gracefully.

  “Darling, I’m famished. How about a little stroll and then lunch?”

  “Great idea!” Kit answered, eager to get out and ha
ve a look around.

  “‘Give me two minutes in the bathroom, darling?” Daneka asked.

  “Certainly. Take your time.”

  Daneka disappeared behind the bathroom door, and Kit unpacked their luggage. He made a quick check of his armpits and decided he and his shirt could ride for a few more hours without becoming offensive. Daneka re-emerged and picked up her purse. They walked out and locked the door to their room; took the stairs rather than the elevator back down to the lobby; then walked out the front door into bright, midday sunlight.

  Chapter 36

  The Piazza Campo de’ Fiori was essentially what he’d expected to find, if somewhat more festive. Perhaps, he thought to himself, the square had a dual personality: all business by day; all romance and intrigue—maybe even mayhem—by night.

  Standing center-ring over the flower and vegetable commerce was the statue of a martyr—of Giordano Bruno, whom Kit could now only vaguely recall as someone who’d challenged the Church, who’d subsequently been condemned by the Inquisition in 1600, and who’d been promptly torched. Elsewhere on the piazza, the brother of Lucrezia Borgia had been poisoned: whether by the very same high priest of celibacy who’d impregnated her, or merely by one of the Pope’s lackeys, Kit didn’t know. Here, too, Caravaggio had served tennis balls—until, that is, love forty had led to ad out, had led to love nothing, and the player of acute artistic sensibilities had bludgeoned his opponent to death with something a little less delicate than a paintbrush.

  That was as much history as Kit knew about this particular piazza. The more contemporary—and so, to him, far more interesting—history was the one he knew from his parents. They’d been present, off and on, in the sixties and seventies to participate in anti-war protests, the first of which had been against the French for their reluctance to leave Algeria and then Indochina. The French learned, however, and eventually withdrew. The Americans rushed in to fill the vacuum, and Kit’s parents rushed back to Rome to protest not only America in Vietnam, but also Portugal in Mozambique and Angola. Four years later, Salazar died—and Portugal’s colonial empire collapsed. They went to protest, certainly, but also to celebrate the act of protesting. After all, a good march or demonstration sure beat a nine-to-five job.