Chapter 13
I stumbled backwards out of the room into the corridor, until I felt the wall behind me. The man, Signore Scala’s lover, came after me. He was entirely naked.
He whispered something in Italian to me.
Although my tongue felt thick and woolly in my mouth, I managed to murmur that I only spoke English.
He switched languages, albeit with a strong accent. “Who are you and what do you want?”
I swallowed heavily and glanced at the bedroom door. He’d closed it behind him.
He followed my gaze. “He took something to help him sleep. Even so, keep your voice down. Tell me what you want, inglese.” He didn’t look concerned as he studied me. Clearly he didn’t see me as a threat. I admired his confidence. He was the naked one, after all, yet it was I who trembled.
“I…I…” My mind went blank. I didn’t want to answer him and reveal my identity, nor tell him what I’d come for, or that there were two others with me.
Yet I couldn’t come up with a reasonable explanation.
It wasn’t often my mind failed me, but when it did, it meant fear had overtaken completely.
All I could do was repeat that one syllable like a blathering idiot.
The man smiled. It was not unpleasant. Indeed, he seemed amused by my predicament. He took a step back and, hands on hips, studied me again. “You do not look like a thief.”
“I…I’m not.” At least I’d managed more than one syllable.
“Look at my face when I am talking to you.”
I wasn’t aware my gaze had slipped until he said it. I locked onto his face.
He smiled again. This time it wasn’t at all pleasant. It was arrogant. “Do you like what you see, inglese?”
“I, er, that is to say…” I pressed my glasses at the bridge of my nose, using the moment to gather my wits.
Downstairs, Oscar and Miss Wheeler would be coming to the end of their search. I didn’t want this man seeing them. At the moment, with just me, he seemed unconcerned and disinclined to wake Signore Scala. If he knew there were three of us, he might feel threatened and start shouting.
So I said the only thing my dumbstruck mind could come up with. The truth. “I know you associate with anarchists. I saw you with two today.”
The man gasped. He lowered his arms and clasped his hands in front of him as if to warm his fingers. “Who are you?”
“My name is Gavin. What’s yours?”
“Rocco. But I mean why are you here? Are you going to tell Pietro?”
I wasn’t yet sure if Signore Scala needed to know about his lover’s anarchist connections, so I didn’t answer and instead asked a different question. “Are you and your friends involved in a recent bombing in Milan?”
He blinked at me and hurriedly shook his head. “I was in Milan three days ago and near where a bomb went off, but I did not cause it.”
“Are you involved in the murder of the boatbuilder in Pecco?”
“No!” He stepped forward and lifted his clasped hands, imploring.
“Please. Gavin, do not tell Pietro what you saw, I beg you. Those men are not my friends. They are just people I know. They mean nothing to me, and Pietro is everything. I cannot lose him. I need him. I am poor. I have nothing, only him.”
How quickly the tables turned. He was vulnerable, his confidence shattered as he realized I had power over him. I sympathized but didn’t want him to know it. He might see it as a weakness and try to manipulate me.
“Then how do you know those men?” I pressed.
“We all come to Monteoro every summer for years. I used to be a waiter in a hotel restaurant. That is how I learn English. Every summer, I stay at a pensione in the village. I met those men there. Like me, they come to Monteoro only when there is work to be found. Last summer, Pietro noticed me and took me in. I am his family now. He is mine.” He grasped my hand.
“Please, Gavin. Do not tell him that I met those men. There is nothing bad happening, nothing for him to know.” His thumb rubbed my knuckles.
“Say nothing, and I will give you what you want.”
I snatched my hand free. “I don’t want anything from you. Go back to bed, Rocco.”
He didn’t immediately react. He seemed to be weighing something up.
After a few beats, he turned and crossed the corridor to the bedroom door.
I couldn’t help but admire the way his firm, muscular buttocks moved with each step—even someone with no interest in taking a lover can appreciate the naked human form.
Before he opened the door, he cast me a final, pleading look over his shoulder, then disappeared inside.
Blood coursing through my veins, I tiptoed downstairs.
Moments earlier my mind had gone blank, but now dozens of thoughts fought for attention.
They were rather distracting, however, and I needed to focus.
We were still in danger of being caught breaking and entering.
Indeed, with Rocco awake and back in bed with Signore Scala, the danger was even more acute.
Fortunately, he didn’t raise the alarm. The threat of me exposing his connection to the anarchists was too great. Did that make him guilty of the bombing? The murder? Or just worried that his keeper would throw him out of bed and the villa.
Despite my attempts to regain some focus, I couldn’t manage it.
My attention kept wandering to the conversation in the corridor outside the bedroom.
I found Oscar and Miss Wheeler in a sitting room, going through an escritoire.
The small desk had an elegant shape with slim curved legs and brass handles on all drawers.
The lady of the villa probably wrote her correspondence there in years past.
Oscar joined me, his steps bouncy. He’d found something. “There you are, Gavin. I wondered where you got to.”
“What did you find?” I asked, nodding at the escritoire.
“Aside from wood magic, Miss Wheeler discovered a hidden compartment behind the larger drawer. In it was this.” He handed me a photograph mounted on thick paper. “Recognize them?”
The photograph looked like a family portrait taken in a studio with a plain backdrop.
A middle-aged couple sat stiff and unsmiling on chairs and two gangly youths, probably their sons, stood behind them.
The lads were aged about eighteen or nineteen.
I instantly recognized Signore Scala, but it took a moment to recall where I’d seen the other.
The clothing and hair were very different to what he wore now, but there was no mistaking the tall man with the bulbous eyes. The abbot!
“They’re brothers?”
“I can see a family resemblance between them all in this,” Oscar said. “Both sons are very tall, but otherwise, the abbot looks more like their father and Pietro looks like their mother.”
“Why didn’t the abbot tell us Signore Scala was his brother?”
“Because he loathes him?” Oscar posed it as a question rather than answer.
“The feeling is probably mutual, which explains why this lay forgotten in a drawer, hidden away and not on display.” He studied the photograph nestled on his palm.
“Brothers…” he muttered. “They’re either best of friends or each other’s worst enemy. ”
Miss Wheeler joined us. “That sounds like you’re speaking from unpleasant personal experience.”
“I don’t know how Isaac and I came from the same set of parents and grew up in the same house. And you, Miss Wheeler? Do you have siblings?”
“This is neither the time nor the place for chit chat.”
I thought Oscar might point out that she’d been the one to prod the conversation to life, but he merely suggested we should leave. He returned the photograph to the hidden drawer and we left the villa the same way we’d entered it.
On the walk back to the hotel, the two of them discussed what they’d found.
Oscar mentioned the stripped library and the accounts ledger, both pointing to Signore Scala being in financial difficulty, perhaps due to strikes at the factory.
Miss Wheeler mentioned feeling magic in most of the wooden furniture, although it was all quite faint.
“There was nothing linking him to the boatbuilder’s murder either,” she added. “There was also no correspondence of a private nature between him and the man who may have been the dandy you followed, Professor, and certainly no photographs of them together.”
“A man was there with him tonight,” Oscar told her. “Gavin and I saw two sets of men’s clothes in the library.”
Miss Wheeler didn’t seem at all shocked. “The same clothes the dandy wore earlier?”
“Quite different. What do you think, Gavin?”
I swallowed hard. “About what?”
“About the clothes? The man you followed today wore a red waistcoat, didn’t he?”
“Oh, er, yes. The clothes in the library were different.”
“He could have changed,” Miss Wheeler pointed out.
They prattled on all the way back to the hotel.
I could have told them what I’d seen. It would have answered their questions and ended the speculation.
But I didn’t. I couldn’t. It would mean admitting I’d gone upstairs expecting to see two men in bed together.
I didn’t want Oscar and Miss Wheeler jump to the wrong conclusion about my motives for doing so.
Despite my best efforts to put aside all thoughts of the encounter with Rocco from my mind, I couldn’t.
It kept me awake all night. I replayed the conversation over and over.
The way Rocco had looked at me from the bed, the way he’d been so confident that he held the upper hand until he realized I could upend his life.
He’d gone from confident to vulnerable in a heartbeat.
Part of me was ashamed to admit that I enjoyed flexing my power over him.
I’d been as shocked by the thrill it gave me as he was by the discovery that he no longer held any power over me.