Mozzarella Most Murderous (12 page)

Nonetheless, I was happy to be on this gorgeous coast again with the wind in my hair and the sun warming my face. How lucky we were. When we left Sorrento to cross the peninsula to the coast on the other side from the Bay of Naples, we left heavy clouds and the dark thrust of the volcano behind us and drove into the sunshine. The stacked hotels of Positano, marching down the cliffs to the sea, glittered white under blue sky as we crawled through the narrow, crowded streets, and Hank flirted shamelessly with me and I with him.

I could almost forget that I had passed the dreaded age of thirty, that I had a baby the size of an elephant waiting to be born, and that my companions were in early-to middle-middle age. But we were so happy and light-hearted. Every time Carolyn spotted a shadow on the horizon, she thought it was Capri, which she evidently had a great desire to visit. She told us about the Emperor Tiberius, who had built castles and villas for himself there, and ruled the empire from the island for the last twenty-three years of his life while he seduced beautiful young boys and had those who became boring tossed into the sea. Eliza was horrified. I noted with interest Carolyn’s knowledge of homosexual history. Perhaps it was important to my theory of the murder, although Tiberius and his reputation were well known, except perhaps to a shrubbery-besotted Englishwoman.

Hank promised Carolyn that she would see Capri, and I, laughing, insisted that I be taken along. Eliza asked only about the vegetation on Capri, and when we were all disappointingly vague on the subject, she lost interest because she had so much to look at right there at the side of the road.

 

When we pulled
into Amalfi at last, I was in need of a comfortable chair on the shady side of a piazza. Carolyn, having used up all the memory on the smart card in her digital camera, had to replace it with another card. Eliza bent vigorously to tighten the laces of her hiking boots (Hank had refused to stop along the road when she wanted to take off up a cliff to pull up some plant that had caught her eye) and insisted that we hike straight up the hill away from the cathedral. Hank agreed, so I sat in the piazza and ordered a cool drink while the others, Carolyn not looking particularly pleased at the steep hill she faced, went off to explore because Hank said it was too early for lunch and Eliza pointed out that the cathedral would not open until two.

What a pleasure to sit in the shade with a cool lemon drink and no one to hand me a camera or ask me about a plant, as if I were a botanist instead of a retired tour guide and mother of two and eight-ninths children. My feet and ankles were swollen, but the baby had fallen asleep. I bought flowers from a wizened, shawled woman making the rounds of the tables and stared lazily up at the dark and light patterns of the cathedral stones, the colonnade of rounded arches, and the many, many steps leading up to the door of the church. Perhaps I wouldn’t visit the cathedral either, although I remembered a lovely cloister and a dark crypt that had beguiled me years ago. Could Carolyn be both a murderer and a lover of cathedrals? A bisexual and a prude? It was too much for me, and I gave up wondering.

They were back in fifteen minutes—or thirty; I may have dozed off—Hank still cheerful, Eliza disappointed in the plant life but invigorated by the climb, and Carolyn eager to tell me about a cultural contrast she had witnessed and taken pictures of: a slender young man working at a laptop computer at a table in an outdoor café, while another young man, sun-browned and muscular, drove a donkey loaded with bags of rough stones to the top of the street. There he tumbled the stones into a pile, leapt onto the bare back of the donkey, and road it downhill. “The past and the present,” she exclaimed triumphantly, and showed me the pictures. Dear God, but the man on the donkey was handsome. I admired her pictures and forbore to tell her that the past and the present rubbed up against each other everywhere in Italy—nowhere more so than here where Greeks and Romans had fought for and colonized the land, where maritime kingdoms (Amalfi had been a powerful one in the Middle Ages) had flourished and waned, and where despotic foreign kings had held the people in thrall and delayed the birth of the modern world.

When Eliza looked at the photo of the donkey man, she exclaimed, “My goodness, he’s as brown as oil.”

Now that was a disgusting simile. What kind of oil was brown? “Do you cook with brown oil in England?” I asked, wondering if I’d been so unfortunate as to eat something cooked with it while on a visit to London. The idea made me a bit queasy.

“I know where that saying comes from,” said Carolyn. “Actually, it’s quite interesting. From about the fourth century the Catholic Church wouldn’t let Christians eat meat on what they called “lean” days—Lent, feasts, and whatnot. Even lard and butter were prohibited because they were animal products. So only olive and vegetable oils could be used for cooking until—I don’t remember—some time in the Middle Ages. That meant people in northern Europe, where there were no olive trees, had to import oil. The traders in Spain and Italy took advantage of the situation and sent bad oil. That’s why the English began saying ‘brown as oil,’ referring to the nasty imported stuff, which was all they could get.”

“Wouldn’t you know!” exclaimed Eliza. “I read in the
Times
that the olive oil, vinegar, and wine that are supposed to be from Italy are really fakes. Personally, I think the European Union should put a stop to that sort of thing. How can they expect us to give up the pound for the euro with all that cheating going on? I’m against the euro
and
the European Union. We English should keep to our own ways.”

I had to laugh. “Which do you dislike more?” I asked. “The fake Italian olive oil or the euro?” Whoops! The baby woke up and gave me a hearty kick. I gave him a gentle, calming pat. I myself was offended that Italy was being accused of exporting brown oil and goodness knows what else these days.

“My goodness,” said Eliza, staring at my stomach. “You’ve got a football player there. Definitely a boy.”

“She already has two soccer players,” said Carolyn, “and one is a lovely little girl named Giulia.”

With that, we went into a café that had been recommended by the flower lady and dined on
fritto misto
, French fries, wine, and
dulce
. Fish and chips, Eliza called the entree, but she was wrong. In England the batter is never so light and crisp, and there are no calamari to be found in the English version of mixed, fried fish. In fact, Eliza wouldn’t eat hers; she thought squid were “nasty.” I noted that Carolyn was happy to take a share of the spurned delicacy. I tried to talk my companions into Amalfi’s famous chocolate eggplant dessert (a medieval import from Turkey during the Amalfi empire days), but no one wanted to try it, not even Carolyn. She opted for lemon torte, and the others had mixed gelato. How boring! They didn’t even want to taste my
melanzane in salsa cioccolato
.

During lunch most of the talk revolved around Paolina Marchetti. Hank seemed very interested in her, or perhaps he was very interested in Carolyn. She certainly looked pretty that day, more vivid somehow, and where was the Charles-de-Gaulle bruise? Gone. At any rate, Hank quizzed Carolyn about every word the dead girl had said. Maybe he planned to launch his own investigation into her death. And the tale Carolyn told us was interesting. It made me wish that I had known Paolina.

The story revolved around the small, red leather book in which Paolina wrote poetry that was inspired by an American poet, Edna somebody, not a very poetic name, and I had never heard of her, although she must have been a very sexy lady.
Promiscuous
was the word Carolyn used to describe her. Paolina had found a book of the woman’s poetry in a musty bookstore while the girls of her convent school were visiting the town on a day out. When the nun teaching her English class had required a translation of a piece of English poetry, Paolina had chosen a long poem from that book, evidently something about death and rebirth. The teaching sister found the poem confusing and probably not in accordance with the Faith, as did the Reverend Mother when the translation was passed on for her opinion.

Thereafter, Paolina was praised for her skill in translating the work—the title had something to do with the Renaissance, although the bit that Carolyn quoted seemed to be about mountains, woods, and water—but our late, adventurous secretary was reprimanded for her choice of subject matter and told to read no more of the American’s poetry. Naturally all the girls then became interested, searched out books, translated them, and giggled in the dark at the poems about love and infidelity.

Carolyn ended this tale by saying that she herself had read an excellent biography of the poet and had offered to send one to Paolina. But then the young woman died, and the offer was moot. Remembering my own days in convent school, I found the story and its heroine delightful. I wished that I had known her.

Over
dulce
, Carolyn told of a wedding party she and Paolina had seen outside a church in Sorrento with burly men in black tuxedoes prowling the perimeters and keeping the tourists away. “She evidently had great contempt for the Mafia,” Carolyn remarked, “and she said that it was definitely a Mafia wedding. But really, does Sorrento seem like a Mafia-type place?”

“The Mafia are everywhere,” said Eliza. “Not just Sicily and America. Anyone at these tables might be one.” She glanced around the café suspiciously.

“Bull!” said Hank. “All that talk of the Mafia—it’s just rumors.”

“How very naïve of you, Mr. Girol,” Eliza retorted. “Your New Jersey is probably full of them.”

“You’re absolutely right, Mrs. Stackpole,” he agreed. “They own all the pizzerias. You take your life in your hands when you want to pick up a pepperoni and mushroom to go.”

Carolyn started to laugh, and Girol grinned at her. “Very dangerous, New Jersey,” he added, glancing at his watch. “If we want to see the cathedral, we’d better get over there. I’d like to beat the heavy, late afternoon traffic.”

I didn’t go. Why climb all those steps when I could count on Carolyn to bring back pictures? And she did take a lovely photo of the cloister with its surround of white columns and pointed arches, and its garden of palm trees ringed by flowers, edged walkways, and a fountain in the middle. If there hadn’t been so many steps up to the church, I’d have enjoyed sitting in that garden. Instead the baby and I dozed in the piazza, waited on by a solicitous waiter who plied me with cool, fruity drinks and gelato.

When they returned, we walked to the car, and Carolyn told me that two Carabinieri officers, a man and a woman, had arrived that morning. “They have very fancy uniforms, and I had high hopes that they’d do a better job of investigating Paolina’s death than Lieutenant Buglione is doing. Anything Signora Ricci-Tassone wants, he agrees to. But then, the Carabinieri didn’t even want to talk to me. They were more interested in having breakfast at the hotel buffet. And why are there two police forces that investigate murders?”

“They’re the military police.” I grinned. “They fight wars, crime, and any attempts to redesign their pretty uniforms or to interfere with their right to carry submachine guns. I called them myself, but since I never saw them, I thought they’d ignored the whole thing—found a terrorist to chase or a riot to quell.”

“I should have guessed that anyone in a uniform that elaborate would be worthless in a murder investigation,” said Carolyn. “They probably won’t even bother to interview me.”

 

When we arrived
back at the Grand Palazzo Sorrento, my clothes were rumpled, my hair tangled, and my face sunburned, even under all that makeup, although maybe Albertine’s applications had worn away in the wind and sun. We didn’t lose the sunshine until we crossed the peninsula, and then the wind had picked up and dark clouds, lit red by the setting sun, made an ominous picture. It would probably storm that night, I thought as we all climbed, as stiff as arthritics, from Hank’s convertible. The day had been lovely, but I could have done without the hill climbing, the steep cathedral steps, and being uncomfortably scrunched up into that back seat where there was no room for my legs. Every muscle ached as we rode the elevator up to the lobby.