Chapter 10
The woman behind the counter wore a pin-striped, pink-and-cream apron over a white blouse.
A silver cross necklace hung around her neck.
She looked like a Disney princess brought to life, her skin sun-kissed, her smile as sweet as the cinnamon that scented the air of the gelateria.
Bastian guessed she was in her midtwenties, but the older he got, the more everybody younger looked the same.
“Buongiorno,” the woman said, threading a strand of honey-colored hair behind her ear as she slotted a tray of purple ice cream into place behind the glass. Her smile dropped as she looked past Bastian to De Luca, who had come into the store with furtive eyes.
“Nicolas?” the woman said, her tone a thousand degrees cooler. Bastian remembered that was De Luca’s first name.
“Arianna,” he grunted, squeezing his cap between his hands. He looked like his clothes had shrunk a couple of sizes.
“What brings you to this part of town?” she asked, wiping down the counter, not looking at the inspector. “Surely you haven’t developed a taste for gelato?”
“Work,” he said.
Her gaze sharpened. “Is that so? Are you thinking of getting into the ice-cream business? How charming.”
Bastian glanced between them, the tension impossible to overlook.
No wonder the inspector had balked at the idea of using the gelateria as a base for their stakeout.
Bastian had assumed that he feared the spot was too conspicuous, that Zappa might see them and bring down the iron fist of the law on them both.
Now, though, he sensed a different, entirely more personal reason.
“Oh dear, Whitby, this is awkward,” he said as the cat hopped up onto the counter and eyed the colorful trays of frozen delights. “Perhaps we had better go someplace else.”
Arianna grimaced. “No, forgive me. You’re very welcome here. Please, stay.”
Bastian wasn’t convinced. Her Disney-princess eyes were clouded with annoyance and her mouth had shrunk to a point. He liked the idea of a stakeout with gelato, though. It had a certain fun romance to it. Human food didn’t quench his thirst, but it was entertaining in its own way.
“Well, if you insist,” he said. “Inspector?”
De Luca grumbled something under his breath, then turned away, taking out his phone and standing by the window.
Bad breakup, Bastian decided. It couldn’t be anything else.
Did that mean De Luca was straight? Probably for the best. Bastian really had to stop thinking about the inspector’s eyelashes.
And fingers. De Luca would only scowl with annoyance if he knew Bastian was thinking about those things.
But now that the inspector’s back was turned, Bastian couldn’t help noting the quality of his butt in those poliziotto pants. It was undeniable.
Bastian gave himself a good shake.
Your neck is on the line and you’re getting gooey-eyed over a pretty policeman. Get. A. Grip.
“Well, this looks fabulous,” he said, marveling at the gelato. He read out the labels, which were printed in both Italian and English. “Strawberry Smash, Mint Choc Chip, Banana Caramel—my favorite! Nowhere sells banana caramel anymore!”
Arianna sounded bored as she said, “A lot of people think it’s old-fashioned, but I believe a classic never dies.” She must have recited the line a hundred times.
“Truer words were never spoken,” Bastian said, making up for the enthusiasm vacuum with as much pep as he could muster. “De Luca, you must try it.”
“No, grazie.” The inspector was still by the window. Bastian wished he’d loosen up.
“And you make these all yourself?” Bastian asked Arianna, who nodded.
“Using the same recipe my grandma used all her life, and hers before. They were called Arianna, too. You could say we’re sort of traditional around here.”
She raised a hand to gesture dispassionately at a framed document beside a stack of waffle cones.
Bastian scanned the text, which detailed the history of her family and their love for gelato and ended with a promise that their ice cream was the best in Vernazza thanks to the closely guarded secret ingredient.
“Secret ingredient?” Bastian said.
“Could be anything,” Arianna replied, looking everywhere but at De Luca. “It goes with me to my grave, though.”
“Of course.”
“Are we getting gelato or not?” Whitby asked, still standing on the countertop. Arianna’s gaze slid to the cat, showing annoyance. She must not like Whitby being up there.
“Get down from there,” Bastian said. Whitby stared directly into his eyes as she sat down, placing her two front paws together like a ballerina.
“You’re not the boss of me—” she began, but then her tail, which had been sweeping the countertop behind her, connected with a green bottle.
The bottle toppled with a clink, rolled off the counter and smashed on the floor at Arianna’s feet.
Arianna leapt back with a cry, while Whitby sprang to all fours, yowling.
“Arianna, I’m so sorry!” Bastian cried, the overpowering scent of olive oil flooding his nostrils. “She’s a bit of a loose cannon. I honestly fear she has no idea she’s a cat.”
He reached for Whitby, intending to pluck her from the counter, but she hissed and swiped a claw at him, still in “frazzled cat” mode.
Arianna glared at Whitby as she mopped up the mess, saying through gritted teeth, “It’s no problem. The olive oil is easily replaceable; it’s from a local grove. We try to support each other around here.” Her gaze slipped to De Luca as she added, “Or, at least, some of us do.”
“Please, let me pay for it,” Bastian said, opting to ignore her tone. “And I’ll take three gelati—one for me, and one for each of my ungrateful comrades.”
—
Outside, they sat under a parasol at one of the two tables facing the street.
Whitby scoffed down her vanilla ice cream in two bites, then draped herself over a chair in full sun.
Bastian and De Luca chose spots facing the street, angled toward Micio Micio.
From where they sat, they should have no trouble seeing Emilio leave the cat café.
Bastian licked his gelato, savoring the taste. It was perfect. Creamy and delicious. Not too much banana, not too much caramel, and just sweet enough without making his teeth sing. He smiled as he ran his tongue over the frozen cream.
This was what he had pictured for his holiday. Whitby purring in the sun, Bastian availing himself of the local delicacies, and the fact that they were in the company of an attractive man—no matter how infuriatingly stoic—was just the icing on the Italian torta.
Bastian paused midlick and frowned. Somebody was humming the opening refrain from one of his favorite songs—“Smalltown Boy.” He blinked at De Luca in amazement when he realized the humming was coming from him.
“You know Bronski Beat?” Bastian asked.
De Luca stopped humming. He glowered, looked embarrassed.
“Bad habit,” he said.
Bastian couldn’t hide his astonishment. “I didn’t think anybody remembered Bronski Beat.”
De Luca licked his ice cream. “I have them on CD.”
“Well now, aren’t you full of surprises? And CD, too. How retro of you.”
“Physical media is the best way to listen to music.”
Bastian raised his face to the sun, suddenly wistful. “I saw them play London in the eighties. Bronski Beat, I mean. They were phenomenal.”
“In the eighties? But that—” De Luca broke off. “Oh, right.”
“He’s older than he looks,” Whitby said, lying on her back, front paws drawn up to her chin. “But younger than you might think.”
De Luca squinted at her but said nothing.
“The plus side of eternal life,” Bastian said. “I’ve seen a gaggle of important historical moments. Blondie and the Pointer Sisters at the Hammersmith Odeon, Spandau Ballet at Heaven Nightclub…Bronski were always my favorite, though, and nothing surpasses ‘Smalltown Boy.’ ”
Now De Luca looked at him. There was a glimmer in his eyes. He seemed…impressed?
“I guess we’re all smalltown boys at heart,” he said, his tone a shade less grumpy than usual.
Bastian sensed a tiny chink in his armor. He couldn’t help being intrigued.
“Did you ever want to leave?” Bastian asked.
“Where?”
“Vernazza, dear. It’s what the song is all about. Escaping.” Bastian shook out his hair. “When I was young, I couldn’t wait to escape my town. Move to the city. See the world.”
“You remember those things? From when you were…”
A smile played on Bastian’s lips at De Luca’s hesitance. “It’s not a bad word, Inspector. Yes, I remember things from when I was alive, although some of it is hazy.”
He considered the inspector, unsure if he was genuinely interested, then decided to continue regardless.
“I hated the town I grew up in. There were so many small minds, I doubt they had a single original thought between them. I stuck out like a cockatiel among crows, being one of the only obvious queer kids. If you were different in that town, you were despised on sight, ridiculed and shunned, as if you had any control over who you were. As if it were a choice to be different. As if being queer made you a monster.”
He bit out the word, his jaw clenching with a familiar twinge of anger. He saw Whitby looking at him with one eye and shook off the anger, shrugging.
“When I turned eighteen, I escaped to the city, and things were better there. I could be myself a little more. A few years later, I was invited to a rave at Stonehenge. It was quite something to behold, all those laser lights dancing over those big old hunks of rock. I danced for hours, feeling the history of the place like it was filling me up. Then I met a beautiful man in a denim jacket, and we kissed, and suddenly his kisses hurt, and the next thing I knew, I was dying. When I woke up the following night with the moon rising above the sarsen circle, I was changed.”
De Luca had gone very still. He looked at Bastian.
“You were turned at Stonehenge?”
Bastian smiled. “The Druids would have loved it, I’m sure. They were all about blood and transformation.”
De Luca’s gaze shifted to look past him. “Did it…”
“Hurt? Not really. Apart from the dying, and even that only hurt for a moment.”
“Do you wish it hadn’t happened?” De Luca asked.
Bastian straightened. “I can’t change who I am, Inspector.”
“But would you…if you could stop what happened…”
“No,” Bastian said. “Becoming a vampire was the best thing that ever happened to me. It allowed me to be myself, truly and completely, for the first time. I didn’t have to fear for my life the way I did as a queer kid living in a backwater town.
I didn’t have to look over my shoulder at night worried I’d be attacked, because I was the thing in the night. I was the thing people should fear.”
De Luca’s leg juddered up and down. He said nothing for a moment, then he murmured, “I thought about leaving Vernazza.”
“But you never did. Why?”
De Luca looked down at the badge on his chest. “My father. I wanted to make him proud.”
“He is a poliziotto, too?”
A shadow in De Luca’s gaze. “He was the commissario. He devoted his life to protecting Vernazza.”
Bastian heard it. Was. Not retired, going by De Luca’s downturned eyes, but the other thing.
“What happened to him?”
De Luca studied his gelato. “There was a fire in a bar. Fire trucks struggle to get out here, the roads are so narrow. My father saved a dozen people before the firefighters showed up. He went into the burning building seven times, bringing more people out every time. But then he went back one last time, and he didn’t come back out again.
The smoke got to him. They found him later, curled around a dead dog. He died trying to save some guy’s pet.”
“How awful. Were you—”
“I was seventeen. My mother took it hard.”
Gelato dripped onto Bastian’s hand. He’d been so absorbed by De Luca’s story, he’d forgotten all about it.
Seventeen was no age to lose a parent. De Luca must have felt a duty to his mother, and he had ended up entering the same work as his father, a local hero no less.
He recalled what De Luca had started to say outside Micio Micio about the way the locals felt about him.
They already think I’m—
What? Bastian could only guess.
“You stepped into your father’s shoes,” he said. “Not an easy thing to do.”
“I had to do something.” There was tension in De Luca’s jaw. His eyes flashed blue steel.
“I’m sure your mother appreciates having you around,” Bastian said.
“She did.”
“Did?”
“She died last year.”
Bastian’s mouth formed a surprised O. Both parents dead, and De Luca could still only be in his twenties.
His brusque manner made a little more sense, Bastian thought.
The man had been through a lot. Perhaps it was the reason he stuck to the rules so fastidiously—they offered him an illusion of control.
Bastian felt warmth in his palm and realized he had reached out to touch the inspector’s arm. De Luca blinked at him in disbelief, and Bastian quickly removed his hand, clearing his throat.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” he said.
“Grazie.” Bastian saw both gratitude and conflict in De Luca’s eyes. He forced himself not to interrogate what that meant.
“If I’ve learned anything from dying,” Bastian said, “it’s that you should have as much fun as possible while you still can.”
“I’m not sure I agree.”
Bastian laughed. “Fun is the whole point of life! What else is there to live for?”
De Luca shrugged. “I suppose it’s easier to make time for fun when you know you’re going to live forever.”
Touché.
They sat in silence for a moment, and Bastian turned over what De Luca had said. It made sense now, his feeling of duty to the town. To Luna. He was trying to do what his father had done before him, which couldn’t be easy. Perhaps he felt he didn’t measure up.
“The song isn’t just about escaping,” De Luca said, and Bastian realized he was referring to “Smalltown Boy,” the song he had been humming.
“No?” Bastian said.
“Listen to the lyrics. It’s about finding your place, away from people who might judge you; family members who don’t understand you. It’s about finding your home.”
Damn. A butt like that and knowing the meaning behind a Bronski Beat song? Double damn.
Movement came from within the gelateria. Arianna was cleaning tables. Bastian recalled the frosty exchanges she had shared with De Luca and couldn’t help broaching the topic.
“What is going on between you and the gelato girl—” he began to say, but then Whitby leapt between them, shrieking. She landed on De Luca’s lap, claws out, and De Luca yelped, jumping to his feet, knocking the cat to the ground.
“Whitby!” Bastian said. “What on earth has gotten into you?”
“The waiter!” the cat cried, her back arched. “Emilio! He’s come out of the café!”