Chapter 18 Payback
The window at the end of the staff corridor looked onto the forecourt.
I’d been at it in my nightgown since the engine caught on the second try.
Fog sat on the lake and the gravel was wet.
The red convertible rolled out through the gate, paused at the shore road, which it never did, and went left.
The taillights went dull in the white, then out. I stayed where I was.
Three steps to the door, the stairs, the gravel under bare feet, and I’d have had him before the road. I’d have taken his hand and told him: he was the one, not the man I’d married, and the whole week had gone into what Brandon had coming. Three steps. I counted them and didn’t take them.
Part of it was arithmetic: run down now and the week’s work came apart, and Brandon drove off a winner. The bigger part was about me. If I ran down those steps now, still tied to the man upstairs, I’d arrive as the girl who’d married him.
My palm was flat on the cold glass, and when I took it off it left a gray print. I went to get dressed. There was a dinner tonight, and it had to be perfect down to the last candle. That was the point of it.
On my way down I stopped at Rosa’s door. She had a coffee and the paper.
She put the paper down before I’d opened my mouth. Folded it along the crease, laid it on the little table by her cup, and set the cup on top of it. The coffee had a skin on it. She’d been up a while.
“Sit a minute,” she said. “Before you say a word, you’ll know what you’re saying.”
I stayed in the doorway. She let me.
She was dressed already. White linen, pressed before anybody else in the house was up, the thin gold at her ears, the bob ironed flat. Behind her the window was white too. The fog hadn’t given the lake back yet.
“The week he left, I took the bill down to the station, with his name on it.” She said it the way she told Pietro how many for lunch.
“Walking out on a hotel bill on purpose is a crime here, kiddo, not bad manners. That folder’s been sitting in a drawer there a year, waiting on him to set one foot in Italy.
It’s one phone call, and it’s yours to make or not. ”
The week he left. That first afternoon she’d sat me down under the lemon trees and told me his bill would be paid and he’d be the one paying it, and I’d taken it for comfort.
Sometime that week, while I was in the staff wing washing Maddie’s underwear in the bathroom sink and learning which end of the corridor the towels lived at, she’d gone down the hill to town with his name and come back up and never said.
She handed me the keys in August and every complaint in the house, and kept that one back.
A week ago, over the arrivals list, in her silk robe with the storm still on her face, she’d told me debts wait their hour, kiddo, and I’d taken it for a saying.
She wasn’t going to say any more. Her back told me that, and the cup set on the paper.
A year the other paper had sat in a drawer in town while I ran this house over the top of it.
She’d put the thing down between us as she’d once set a glass of wine at my elbow, without a word about it, and what I did with it was mine.
I asked the only thing I needed to.
“And if I say no?”
“Then it waits. It’s good at that.”
Her hands were on her knees. Still, the one ring. The same hands as on the terrace with the lemon trees, that first afternoon, when I’d sat across from them with a bill I couldn’t pay and a glass of lemonade somebody else was paying for. They hadn’t moved then either.
“Today,” I said.
She nodded. Her hand went to the phone before I’d left the doorway, to the people in town who’d waited a year for that.
The evening came in warm and gold, built for somebody else’s triumph.
Conti arrived at six. A Milanese in his late fifties, well cut and courteous, the kind who counts people as carefully as he counts money.
Brandon met him at the steps in his best suit, shining like a car on a dealer’s lot, and walked him along the gallery to the corner terrace.
I’d laid that terrace myself, right out over the water, and the evening would put gold on the lake behind it before the fish came out.
I’d checked every candle in every glass. Pietro had had the fish braising since noon. Brandon needed a perfect evening, and I’d built him one, because I wanted him as high as he could climb before the drop.
He caught me as I set the wine down on the table.
“And here she is.” He said it to Conti, with so much sugar in it my teeth hurt.
His arm came around my waist, a hand on something he’d paid for.
I went still under it. “Signor Conti, you have to hear this. This is my ex-wife. Katie. It didn’t work out, these things happen, and look where she landed.
A maid on Lake Como.” He laughed at his own line.
“And here I am, staying as her guest. Small world.”
Conti smiled the polite smile. But his eyes stopped on me for a second and weighed something. I lifted Brandon’s hand off my waist by the wrist and gave it back to him. I poured the wine, both glasses, without a drop on the cloth.
“Enjoy your dinner, gentlemen,” I said, and left them to it.
From the bar I could see the whole table, so that’s where I went. Everything was ready. All it needed was Rosa.
She came onto the terrace in dark silk and pearls, straight-backed, the mistress of a hundred-year-old house, and Conti was on his feet before Brandon had turned his head.
“Signor Conti. Finally.” She gave him her hand and he bowed over it. “Rosa Camelli. This is my house. Have they looked after you the way they should?”
“Signora. Beyond anything I could say.” He meant it.
“I’ve wanted to come for years. All of Milan talks about Camelia.
They tell me this past year it’s become the best house on the lake, and that it’s the work of some American woman who runs the whole place.
A magician, they say. I’d be grateful if you’d introduce me. ”
The table went quiet. Brandon had his glass halfway to his mouth, and it stayed there.
“Why not.” Rosa smiled, in no hurry, and turned and looked straight across the terrace at me. “There she is. Katherine. My manager, my right hand, and, if I get my way, the next lady of this house. Everything you see around you, Signor Conti, is her work.”
I walked over, not hurrying, under Conti’s gaze and Brandon’s stopped one, and gave Conti my hand.
“Piacere, Signor Conti. Benvenuto a casa nostra.”
There wasn’t a stumble in it. Last June I couldn’t have asked this town for a glass of water in its own language.
The glass in Brandon’s hand shook. The color left his face in stages as his own words came back to him. Maid. Look where she landed.
He tried a laugh and it came out cracked down the middle.
“Katie.” He set the glass down. “You’re, what. You’re here? Is this a joke? You’re the manager?”
“Manager.”
I straightened the knife and fork at his place, the way I would for any guest.
“Donna Rosa exaggerates my part in it,” I said. “But yes, Brandon. You’ve come to my house.” I moved his bread plate a quarter inch. “Sit down, Brandon. The fish is coming.”
He opened his mouth and nothing came out of it. I turned to Conti. The Milanese had seen everything and understood it, and he looked at Brandon now like a man who’s insulted the hostess in her own house. The first crack had opened on its own. I didn’t intend to stop at one.
“And where’s Mr. Keller’s companion this evening?” I asked the table, bright as a hostess should be. “Julie promised to join us. Surely she won’t want to miss a dinner like this.”
I knew where Julie was. My staff had watched it for three days: whenever Brandon went under in his business, Julie went down to the lower gate, where a dark-haired boy off a very expensive yacht was waiting for her.
I’d set nothing up. I’d only asked the question, out loud, in front of everyone, at the minute it would hit hardest.
“She’s resting,” Brandon said. “Tired.”
Chiara was passing with a tray. She stopped, face like a Sunday-school angel’s.
“That’s odd,” she said. “The young lady was seen at the lower gate just now. With the handsome gentleman off the Azimut. Again.”
Conti’s eyebrow went up. Brandon went red, and that was the end of the manners. He was on his feet, the chair tipped, his glass went over, and the wine spread red across the white cloth. He put his face close to mine. Conti, the deal, all of it was gone.
“What did you set up,” he said. “You think you’ve gotten even? You think this is over? I swear to God, Katie, when I get back to Chicago I’ll—”
“Mr. Keller?”
The voice was calm, official. Two Carabinieri in uniform stood at the edge of the terrace. The older one held a folder.
Before he turned to Brandon, the older one gave Rosa a short bow.
“Donna Rosa. Forgive us for disturbing your evening.”
There was more respect in it than the job required.
“You’re right on time, Marcello,” Rosa said.
Of course she called him by his first name.
He turned to Brandon, and the voice changed.
“Brandon Keller. A year ago you left Italy without settling your account at Villa Camelia, and you left the debt on another guest. The owner filed a criminal complaint. The case has been waiting for your return. You’ll come with us, please.”
Brandon laughed, a quick one, and looked along the tables on the main terrace, a few yards off, for someone to laugh with him.
“A hotel bill? Come on. That’s peanuts. I’ll pay it right now, tonight, card’s in my pocket, and we forget the whole thing.”
Rosa stepped in close to him. Her English went very quiet, the Italian vowels and Nick’s Midwest underneath them.
“You still haven’t understood, have you.
This was never about the bill. You came to my house.
You ate at my table. And you decided you could humiliate my girl and leave the way you left a year ago.
” She smiled with her lips only. “But this is Como, Mr. Keller. This is our world. It has a very, very long memory, and it has friends everywhere. Now the right people will look after you. And they will be very.” She let it sit. “Thorough.”
“This is some kind of mistake,” Brandon said. He turned to Conti. “Signor Conti, a misunderstanding, I’ll sort it out. Give me an hour. Please, just wait.”
But Conti was already standing. He buttoned his jacket, one button, slowly, and looked at Brandon as if he were something on his shoe. Then he turned to me and bowed, a small one.
“The evening was instructive,” he said. “A pity about the company.” He let a second pass. “I’m on Como every month. I’d be glad to stay here. It’s a pleasure to do business with people of your level, signora.”
He left, and Brandon’s deal went with him, out into the warm evening air like it had never been there.
The Carabinieri walked Brandon to the gate.
He kept turning around to shout about lawyers, and how I’d regret this, and nobody listened.
Julie never appeared. She’d find out in the morning, in an empty suite; her place in his life had ended the minute everything else of his did.
I stood in the middle of my terrace, over my lake, in my house. The main terrace went back to its plates. Chiara winked at me from behind a column. I’d had my revenge, to the last drop, with his own weapon.
There was nobody to turn to. The one person who should have been at my elbow, to hear me say we did it, had driven out at first light, certain I still belonged to the man they’d just walked to the gate.
I’d never stood anywhere emptier.
Alessandro
By dark he was somewhere near Genoa. He’d taken the whole day getting there, most of it slow, and he still couldn’t put his foot all the way down.
Something didn’t add up. He kept running that midnight back: the husband coming out of her office door, and her face.
The longer he ran it, the less the picture held.
Give me until tomorrow night. One day. Then it’s all settled, and you’ll understand.
He pulled onto a dusty shoulder above the water. The sea lay out there flat and enormous and the wrong color, nothing like his lake. He took out his phone and sat with it in his hand.
He’d run before she’d finished a sentence, as he always had, as everyone had always expected him to.
He swung the car across the empty road and floored it, north, toward the lake, toward her.
Kate
When the villa had gone to sleep I went up to my office and sat at the desk. This morning the table plan had still been lying on it. In the quiet I let myself do what I hadn’t let myself do all through this day, this month, this whole year.
I put my head down on my arms and cried, hard, and not for Brandon, for a red convertible that had dissolved into the morning fog.
And under the crying, something I didn’t recognize yet, and it wasn’t grief. Whatever came up that road at dawn, or never did, I’d meet it from my own house.
If only he came back.