Chapter 3 #9
We arrived at the luncheon slightly in ritardo, due to our focaccia detour, but this meant we could slip into the party unseen, as the cat burglars we were.
Instead of the black-clad Anglo crowd of mourning I had expected (and for which I had dressed), I found a brightly colored and chattering flock, drinking prosecco and taking food from trays passed around (cries of “Buono!”).
Of course, I knew nothing of what to expect; I had attended only the funerals of my grandparents, dreary New England affairs with just neighbors and the postman in the pews, followed by a diner lunch of coffee and Denver omelets; I did not know how loved ones would celebrate a life, especially the life of someone who shone so brilliantly, who made of friendship an art.
But I was also utterly unprepared for how to dress for this scene which I was entering, for here it was at last, the world that had terrified Giacomo into marriage and bored the Baronessa into fleeing to Capri, here it was before me: the aristocracy.
There were elderly white-haired ladies in woolen suits and pearls, holding glasses of white wine as they chatted; more bohemian types together on the sofa, their hair dyed the same deep black as their Pomeranians, wearing large costume jewelry and pleated Japanese fabrics; and others by the window with shoulder-length blond hair and long coats or capes in deep green (who I later came to know as the “sciuras” or signoras of Milan).
One woman, her bouffant gloriously blond in contrast to her deeply tanned and furrowed face, wore a long white tunic trimmed in gold, as if she were Athena herself come to visit a favored mortal.
I half expected to see Princess Pippa in the crowd, with her pajama robes and artificial flower, looking around as anxiously as her beloved monkey back in Zanzibar, but perhaps she was too eccentric a character to be seen at such a gathering.
I saw perhaps half as many men as women, all in tailored suits of windowpane check with open collars, almost identically bronzed from recent vacations, all of them clean-shaven but just two or three with full heads of silver or white hair, grown in wild locks as if to taunt their bald companions.
I tried to imagine the Baronessa among them in her younger days, but while she seemed to be from them, she was no longer of them.
A world left behind when she ran to Capri.
And we were there to steal from under their aristocratic noses.
I had always imagined Oscar as living in a great windowed room, bare except for his canvases; perhaps I got the idea from a production of La Bohème.
But his actual living quarters could not have been more different.
They were five or six rooms, all white with white furniture, but with elaborately designed ceilings, laid out in hexagons and rectangles, each painted with a monk or saint or figure surely every Italian recognized, though I could not.
Some held sheaves of wheat. Others led donkeys.
But it dazzled the eye, as did the crowd gathered in the foyer, whose center was filled by a set of freestanding bookcases arranged in a cross.
There was a table set into the bookcase, and on it were an open book that I assumed was for visitors to write their names, a small lamp of translucent glass, and a red metal urn.
My eye settled on the urn meaningfully, and I turned to my companion…
but found she had vanished. A woman in a maid’s uniform appeared with a prosecco, which I took gratefully, then offered a tray of focaccia.
Which I declined. I looked back at the urn.
I noticed this time that hanging on the bookshelf above it was a handwritten sign reading Cerchi di Dormire.
I assumed this to be the Italian version of rest in peace.
Or, perhaps, a wish for a troubled soul to rest at last.
I began a hunt for my employer, who with her scarlet suit could not easily hide herself, and found only her camel coat draped across a side chair.
An American man stood alone in the corridor, staring at the artwork.
He was enormously tall, somewhere handsomely in his seventies, and I knew he was American by the business suit he wore: crisp and dull.
Beneath it, the white shirt and yellow tie typical of the American man abroad.
I understood, because before Formica I had dressed the same way.
Then his eyes caught mine; something in them flashed.
I don’t know why, but I turned and fled into another room.
Oscar’s bedroom, it seemed. And I was alone.
Framed charcoal drawings lined the walls below a plasterwork ceiling, all in white this time, and in the middle of the room stood a small brass bed with a coverlet of abstract orange suns or flowers, I couldn’t tell.
A lamp was on beside the bed. It was the cell of a monk.
A wooden valet stand held a single tie and, below it, a pair of red velvet slippers.
They were the precise ones Oscar had promised me from Venice but never had the opportunity to deliver.
Maybe it was the influence of so many weeks at Villa Coco, but I felt an urge within myself to nab them.
I took a step closer, reached out my hand—
“Ah am so glad to see you and Lisabetta made it.”
I turned and it was the Baronessa’s old nonfriend, the prince’s paramour.
Pullman…no, Furman Childress, the man who had appeared in my first weeks, wearing a fedora like a meringue.
All in black today, like myself, but with a purple scarf around his neck.
His bald head was glazed with lamplight like a morning bun.
Or perhaps like the diamond my employer said he got out of her friend.
That single blond lock on his forehead was its flaw. “Mr. Childress!” I said in surprise.
He bowed and purred in his Southern accent, “Oscar will be greatly missed.”
I said, “I heard you knew him from Capri.”
He giggled and adjusted his glasses, looking around the room. “Oh yes. Lisabetta introduced us. Long, long ago. Ah later bought some works from him.”
“I’ve never seen his paintings.”
“His? Oscar?” He stared at me and his smooth face puckered in surprise.
“Ah think you’re mistaken, darlin’. He wasn’t an artist. He was an art dealer.
He specialized in French and Spanish Cubists.
Mostly he dealt through Lisabetta; she had all the connections.
They were quite a team. But Ah always preferred Oscar, if Ah can be candid. Our…baronessa was always a bit…nasty.”
She was many things, but I never thought of her as “nasty.” Either time had diluted that aspect of her, or else she never had any need to use it on me. Or else: I had never caught on. “You were with them both on Capri?”
“Oh yes.” He got that dreamy look that older people get, looking back on the past. I tried to picture him at twenty, seducing a jewel out of someone, and the Baronessa staring daggers at him across a sun-drenched terrace.
“You know Ah met Lisabetta, oh, maybe fifty years ago. She was a looker at forty. But you know what she was most known for?”
I braced myself. “What’s that?”
He put a hand to his scarf. “She was a thief.”
My heart jumped its rails. I thought only of the present tense; I wondered if he was talking about the toe or the ashes. But he was speaking of something else entirely.
He leaned against the doorway with his hand still on his scarf.
“That’s how she started, you know.” I thought I saw a ripple of rage cross his placid face.
“Charming lady at all the parties, always in red. You would never guess. She stole from my friend the prince. Mariano. She stole a diamond and told everybody it was me.” Then he smiled. “Isn’t that interesting?”
Strange, how I had become such a part of Villa Coco that I felt immediately defensive of my employer.
His snarling portrayal of her held no charm for me, and he seemed hardly an innocent himself.
Yet wasn’t the story of accusing him precisely the story she had told to me?
He must have been very young when all this happened, and it was possible an older adversary might have bested him with this prince, this Mariano.
It seemed unthinkable to hold grudges for fifty years, but perhaps when it comes to diamonds there is no statute of limitations.
For either party. “I haven’t heard that story” was all I said.
He fairly shimmered with pleasure at retelling it: “She turned the diamond into a boat and the boat into that house of hers in Tuscany, where you are, Ah understand, busily tallyin’ up everythin’ inside.
” He released the scarf and unbuttoned his jacket to put his hand in his trouser pocket.
He was every bit the foreigner who had tried to make himself into an Italian.
He seemed to see some kinship in me, saying, “Ah’m glad she found an American.
She turned her old career into the more proper one of an art dealer. ”
Our friend Pullman tells many stories about me, she had said. Only some of them are true.
“And do you know what else Lisabetta bought?” Furman went on. “She bought the very thing you call her. Her title. She’s no more a baronessa than Ah.” He noticed my expression. “Oh, did Ah disappoint you?”
I found myself sifting through his words, trying to sense what could be a lie and what could be the truth, weighing them against the words of my employer, that great exaggerator.
It fit too neatly: that she was a thief.
Hadn’t she and Oscar joked about being caught?
About admiring someone who stole? Weren’t we on a caper this very moment?
And what was that credo of hers, that if you like it and you want it, take it, since we won’t be back?
Was it not the very philosophy of a buccaneer?