Mozzarella Most Murderous (2 page)

The night sky was a stunning blue, deep and dark above her, when Paolina nudged open the glass doors at the end of the hall and padded barefoot into the pool area. A light breeze brushed her cheeks, and the stars seemed close and bright. All her irritation disappeared under the gentle blandishment of night in Sorrento. Like a sinuous creature from the sea, she eased herself into the pool and swam. Ten minutes or so was enough to complete the rehabilitation of her mood. Lifting herself from the water, she trailed droplets to a cushioned lounge chair beside a small glass table, draped the forbidden pink towel around her shoulders, and stretched out. In such delicious and beautiful solitude, Ruggiero’s absence became something to enjoy. Too bad he would be here tomorrow. Of that she was sure. He wouldn’t miss his own meeting.

She removed the small leather journal from the pocket of the robe, extracted the pen from its holder on the cover, and flipped to a clean page.

No, she didn’t like the lines. They were trite. Uninspired. Ruggiero was not a man to stir her muse. And what of last night’s lover? Danger always spurred passion, and he had had that aura about him. Since she had no lover tonight, however, the evening would end nicely if she could at least sample a tasty snack and write a few perfect lines before returning to her room to sleep.

As if her thought had been another’s command, a visitor came through the door that Paolina had left ajar, a visitor carrying a tray with two glasses of bubbling wine and two plates. Without rising or offering a greeting, she studied the newcomer and the offering from beneath her eyelashes. Not a particularly welcome person, but as the plates and goblets were set down on the table and a chair pulled up across from her, Paolina could see, in the misty lights that shone on the pool, the rich red of tomato slices, the contrasting white of the fresh buffalo mozzarella, small green basil leaves, a pool of olive oil, and a sprinkle of pepper. She would have welcomed the devil bearing
Caprese
, so she tucked the journal into the pocket of her robe and waved her hand for the visitor to be seated.

The conversation was slow and of no consequence, but the mozzarella was moist and fresh, the tomatoes ripe and sweet, the basil adding a hint of anise flavor to the salad. Perfect. Except that a drizzle of balsamic vinegar had been added. No native of Capri would have approved of that. Still, she would not complain because she was enjoying both the salad and the contrast of the sweet-yet-tart fizz of Spumante from her goblet. Only when she began to feel surprisingly drowsy, too drowsy to follow the visitor’s words, did it dawn on Paolina that she had been drugged.
Fool
, she thought, as the possibility of poison drifted through her fading consciousness. She whispered a curse in the dialect of her native Umbria, but the words never rolled completely off the numbness of her tongue.

With silent patience her visitor waited for unconsciousness to overcome the beautiful young woman. Then the pink towel was pulled from her shoulders and dropped onto the pavement poolside, the robe left draped on a third chair, and Paolina’s chair rolled toward the water, where a wrought-iron rail warned swimmers away from the waterfall. The visitor studied the barrier, then hoisted the body onto the rail and maneuvered it over, head down. Once the fingers grasping Paolina’s ankles released, she plunged in a clumsy dive over the side, her head glancing off the edge of the pool below at the shallow end before she sank into the water. A dark stain trailed her to the bottom, where she floated, unconscious, in a limp sprawl, the white of her buttocks glimmering through the water.

With a nod, the visitor rolled the chair back to its place, retrieved the notebook from the pocket of her robe, having already searched her room for it in her absence, placed the goblets and plates on the tray, and departed. Below, the unconscious Paolina breathed in water and drowned.

 

 

 

To my mind, Caprese is one of the delights of visiting Italy, and I thought of it often during the long flight to Rome. It is a simple dish to fix and can be made at home in the United States, but it will never be the same as eating it in Italy, say, at an outdoor café in a piazza with a beautiful cathedral or basilica looming up in front of you.

Then there are the ingredients: the tomatoes, which are so delicious, fresh that morning from a vine in the countryside, and the mozzarella, also fresh and made from buffalo milk. You can buy little plastic-wrapped blobs of “fresh” mozzarella in the States, but they’re made from cow’s milk and are much less rich and of a somewhat rubbery consistency. Our buffalo are the wrong kind. Imagine trying to milk an American buffalo. You’d be trampled in one of the stampedes so popular in old western films. In Italy the source of mozzarella is the water buffalo, originally from Asia, and its milk has over twice the fat content. Go to Italy! Eat the real thing!

 

On my second
morning in Sorrento I awoke feeling much better than I had on the first. And why not? I had a lovely room with a balcony that overlooked the Bay of Naples and even, on the right, the volcano. I knew that breakfast would be delicious, unlike the dinners the hotel had provided last night and the night before. I was truly amazed that such a beautiful—not to mention expensive—hotel could have provided two such mundane entrees.

A young woman I had met in the lobby and with whom I had strolled around Sorrento and dined, said she thought the management must be German, which she deduced from the many signs warning guests of things they were not allowed to do. Perhaps I’d see her at breakfast. She was alone too, her lover having canceled their assignation. She was quite disappointed, although I assumed that he was still paying for her stay here.

I, too, was alone because my husband Jason, who was supposed to meet me in Rome at the airport, had been marooned in Paris by an air-traffic controllers’ strike. I suppose I could have stayed in Rome and waited for him, but I decided that I’d rather go on to Sorrento for the sightseeing that Jason was now going to miss—and all because of the French, who are always staging unannounced strikes that inconvenience hapless visitors to their country.

My trip from Rome to Sorrento was an adventure in itself—the train from Fiumacino, the airport just outside of Rome, to the railroad station in the city, the train from Rome to Naples, and then the funny little
Circumvesuviana
with its hard plastic seats, bumpy tracks, and hordes of tourists and school children. Of course, I had to manage my own suitcase on those legs of the trip, and pulling it up and down the stairs that take a traveler from one track to another was dreadful, although on several occasions, while standing at the bottom of a long staircase, looking forlorn, kindly Italian men and boys offered help.

Naturally, I accepted, unless the offer was to lift my suitcase onto the overhead luggage rack of a train car. I reasoned that if the Good Samaritan weren’t on hand to take it down at my destination, it would probably land on my head when I tried to do it myself. On trains, I left my bag in the area between cars and sat inside as close to it as I could get, keeping a suspicious eye on my belongings as people climbed on and off at each station. No one, I’m happy to say, exited with my suitcase.

In this manner, miserably jet lagged by my long flight from El Paso to Rome, I did get safely to Sorrento, a place of beauty in the land of romance. Someone said that homosexual lovers go to Capri, the adulterers to Naples, and the divorced to Sorrento. I belonged to none of those categories, being a married, faithful, heterosexual who was in Italy to write about the food of the Campania while her husband attended a scientific conference. Not very romantic, but I was happy to be there on the Bay of Naples.

Once in Sorrento, I had the rather silly idea that I could wheel the suitcase to the hotel, but a friendly taxi driver was quick to tell me that the hotel was well up the mountain. He said no lady but one from northern Europe would think of making that hike, so I took the cab. He was right. I could never have dragged my luggage through the crowded streets of the town and then up the hill, into the driveway, and onto an elevator that took me to the lobby. On the other hand, he charged me eighteen euros for the ride.

The hotel itself was built up and down a cliff and was very beautiful. It should also have been romantic, but it wasn’t. I barely arrived in time for the first of the two boring dinners—the evening meal began and ended rather early for a Mediterranean resort. Not that it mattered. Whatever the plans of the meeting Jason would be attending were, I did not intend to eat dinner here again. Our host was a chemical company in Catania. Surely no good Sicilian would be satisfied with such food. The readers of my newspaper column certainly wouldn’t be.

I hopped out of bed, thinking of the delicious bread the hotel provided at breakfast, flavored with fennel, if I wasn’t mistaken. Jason would, barring any other flight difficulties, be here by midday, as would other members of the conference. I set the coffee machine to prepare me a first cup while I showered and dressed, thinking I’d sip it by the pool on my floor before going down to breakfast; the hotel had a series of pools, one on each floor with waterfalls in between. What luxury. After my many years of being a stay-at-home wife and mother, it was rather nice to be by myself in a foreign resort that offered so many inducements to delight. Not that I planned to swim. A seriously frightening experience in France had made me wary of swimming, even though it was unlikely that I would be caught by a ferocious incoming tide in a hotel swimming pool.

I supposed that I would be happy to see Jason. We hadn’t been getting along all that well, if the truth be told, but I had loved him for over twenty years and was no doubt wrong in suspecting that he had taken too warm an interest in a female graduate student. She wouldn’t be here, so I’d have no cause for irritation. And it was unlikely that I would come upon yet another pesky corpse whose death demanded investigation, so Jason would have no reason to complain.

My husband had progressed from worry about my safety to anger at my propensity for getting myself into dangerous situations. He had a point. Why was I suddenly giving in to a desire for adventure? Because it was exciting, I suppose. Because, until the last few years, I had led such a placid life—wife, mother, hostess. The new, forty-something Carolyn was definitely beginning to enjoy these recent escapades that had required me to overcome fear and exhibit courage. But Jason was not happy with me! He wanted back his gourmet cook and tidy house-keeper, his docile wife.

Once I was dressed for the day, I took my cup of coffee out to the pool, duly noted the signs that forbade me to take hotel towels out with me, jump or dive over the waterfall to the next level, or bring food or drink into the pool area, although apparently I could purchase it from the refreshment counter, to which I could also report emergencies. I ignored the last one because the refreshment station was unmanned, probably because I was visiting the pool before it was open for the day.

Wondering if the hotel provided a book with an index to its numerous rules, I set my coffee down on a little table, pulled a padded deck chair into place, and prepared to laze about in the fresh morning air for fifteen minutes or so. In El Paso, where I now live, one has to get up almost before the sun to enjoy fifteen minutes of cool air. Most months of the year the temperatures shoot up into ranges that I consider unsuitable for human existence. Of course, as we in El Paso say, “At least the humidity is low, so it’s always comfortable.” Comfortable if you don’t mind stepping from your air-conditioned house into a hot oven supplied with skin-cancer-inducing sunshine.

I took a sip of my coffee, turned toward the pool to sit down, and noticed that there was someone in it. Moreover, the person was resting on the bottom at the shallow end. Some lung-strengthening exercise? I used to see how long I could hold my breath when I was a child. So had a girl child in Donna Tartt’s novel
The Little Friend
. Her underwater practice had saved her life. Mine had made my mother very nervous. In fact, the lady in the pool was beginning to make me nervous, and it wasn’t just the skimpy bikini with that uncomfortable-looking thong bottom. I reflected on how lucky I was to have missed that style when I was young and foolish enough to have adopted it—not that my father would have approved.

She still hadn’t come up. She wasn’t moving either. Just resting there. My heart rate accelerated. Surely, she wasn’t . . . I kicked off my shoes, jumped in—getting my mint green slacks outfit all wet—and waded toward the woman. The water was about three and a half feet deep where she lay, and I had to duck under to pull her up.
Oh, my goodness
, I thought as I lifted her to the surface and turned her face into the air. It was Paolina, my tourist friend from yesterday, who had been jilted by her boyfriend, who shared my love for the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay, who wrote poetry herself, something I have never been moved to try.