Mozzarella Most Murderous (4 page)

“Good for you,” I said, remembering my own engagement. “Jason proposed to me at a graduation party where all the chemists were pouring or injecting vodka into watermelons and comparing the results. I didn’t know that New Jersey grew strawberries.”

“It’s the Garden State! Our produce is the best in the country. Like the Campania’s is the best in Italy. You probably thought New Jersey was all chemical dumps, oil refineries, and toxic waste, right? My wife and I live in a colonial house with a good stand of trees, a stream, and wild violets in the backyard. There’s a pre-Revolutionary War cemetery a few blocks down, full of the graves of little kids. Must have been an epidemic or something. Makes you think twice about having kids of your own.”

And so the conversation went until I was finally called in to talk to Lieutenant Buglione. He wanted to know, first, about my discovery of the body and anything I might have noticed. I mentioned the injury to her head, which he had pointed out himself, and that I thought her ankles had looked bruised, perhaps from the fall.

Then he asked about anything she might have told me during our sightseeing excursion or over dinner. The truth was, when I thought about it, that Paolina hadn’t told me much about herself beyond her name, her love for the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay, and the fact that she was to have met her lover at the hotel, only to get a call from him saying that he couldn’t make it. I didn’t know how long they were to have stayed at the Grand Palazzo Sorrento, so the lieutenant summoned the manager, Signor Villani, and learned that she was registered for a week’s stay and that she had made the reservation herself.

“But I thought he was paying for her room,” I protested. “That’s what she said.”

“Ha!” said Lieutenant Buglione after the manager revealed that the reservation had not been prepaid. “He not only no meet her, but no pay her bill. Maybe she did commit suicide.”

I told him that she hadn’t seemed worried about the bill or even depressed by the lover’s failure to appear. She had seemed irritated, but a woman didn’t throw herself off the ledge of a waterfall into a cement-lined pool in a fit of irritation, even if she expected to survive the fall.

The manager left, and the lieutenant mused over my statement. “Then he come here and kill her, then go away.” He threw up his hands dramatically—even operatically, as Hank had suggested. “Will be very hard case to solve. All night employees must be interviewed to find if strange man, not registered, arrive last night late and leave again.”

I had to stifle a giggle. “I must tell you, Lieutenant, that I explored the hotel, and it’s full of stairways that don’t lead more than a few floors down, and random exits into pool areas and cactus gardens. It’s so strangely laid out that if there is a fire, I think the safest thing for a guest to do would be jump into a pool. Unless one can use the elevators, it would be impossible to find one’s way to the lobby or ground level.”

“So you think he is lost in the hotel?” asked Lieutenant Buglione.

“No, I think he’d have had to take the elevators, so you simply need to ask the hotel staff if they saw a strange man getting on or off the elevators.”

“A very good thought, Signora.” He gave me a flashing smile, kissed my hand, and allowed me to go.

 

After my interview
I went back to the lobby but saw no one I knew. I thought of walking into town to look at the shops with an eye to finding gifts for my children, Gwen and Chris. Or I could visit the museum that featured lovely, almost fragile
intarsio
furniture. It had a gift shop on the first floor that sold amazing marquetry pieces in a more contemporary style. Expensive, unfortunately, but I did long to buy something beautiful, something I’d never find at home. Yesterday I’d been more interested in conversation with Paolina than in shopping. Now, no matter that my inclination to shop had kicked in, I felt obliged to stay in the hotel since Jason might be arriving today. At least, he’d call, so I should be here for that.

Feeling depressed, I headed for the elevator and my room. I could read a book I’d brought along,
Greene on Capri
, a memoir by Shirley Hazzard about the time she and her husband had spent with Graham Greene on the island I so much wanted to see for myself. What a strange man he had been. Greene, and evidently other Europeans, think that the clause in our Bill of Rights about the right to the “pursuit of happiness” is ridiculous, even shallow. I can’t see anything wrong with happiness. It’s certainly better than gloom. If I got to visit Capri, I was sure I’d enjoy it more than Graham Greene ever had, and Hank Girol had agreed readily to such an excursion for whatever accompanying persons might want to go.

Stepping off the elevator into the long, tiled hall that led to my room, I came close to being bowled over by two beautiful, dark-haired children, a boy of eight or nine years and a younger girl. They were evidently playing soccer in the hall. The boy apologized in Italian for careening into me, or so I gathered, while the startlingly blue-eyed girl peeked at me from under her dark curls and giggled. As I bent to pick up my purse, which had fallen in the scuffle, I noticed the soccer ball at my feet, so I retrieved that as well. The boy looked at me hopefully and asked a question.

“I don’t speak Italian,” I replied. Pointing to myself with the hand not holding their soccer ball, I said, “Americano.”

“For shame, my little ones. Apologize to the nice American lady in English. And why are you playing soccer in the hall when Mama told you not to?” A woman, evidently their mother, squatted down on her heels, although heavily pregnant, and gave each child a hug and kiss after their apologies.

“I am very sorry for knocking you, Signora,” said the boy, still looking wistfully at his soccer ball. “I am sorry,” added his sister and reached out for the ball from the safety of her mother’s arms. I bent to hand it to her.

Their mother, who was as beautiful as her children and as dark-haired, although she didn’t have her daughter’s blue eyes, tried to rise and failed. No surprise there. I doubt that I could have gotten down when I was that far along in a pregnancy, much less managed to rise again.

“We’ll have to call Papa to get her up,” said the boy to his sister. “You go.”

The little girl, obviously reluctant to obey him, responded with a stream of Italian.

“No one will wake Papa,” said their mother. “He drove all the way from Rome while we slept.”

“But, Mama,” the boy protested.

“I shall sit here until he wakes up and comes looking for us,” she decided, easing herself off her heels and onto the floor. Then she smiled up at me. “I’m Bianca Massoni, and these are my children Andrea and Giulia. You mustn’t mind us. Just circle around, and I do apologize for my babies. It’s hard for little ones to be cooped up in a hotel and ordered to keep silent so that their father can sleep. Sit down, children. We’ll play a game.”

I introduced myself and offered to help her up, imagining how uncomfortable she would become if she had to sit long on that hard tile floor. Her legs would certainly go to sleep, and then rising would become twice as impossible. I’d had that problem while carrying Chris, who had been a big baby. Signora Massoni appeared to be very near delivery, and of a very large child. However, hoisting the lady off the floor was not as easy as it might have looked. First, I tried with one hand under her elbow. That didn’t work. Then I took both of her wrists while she clutched mine. Finally with her son Andrea pushing from behind, we got her to her feet, after which all four of us fell to giggling helplessly at what a foolish picture we made while an older couple with a large, black standard poodle on a short leash circled us. They stared with eyebrows raised—well, not the dog. He just stared. In fact, he turned his head to keep staring once they had passed by.

“Oh dear,” murmured Signora Massoni when they were gone. “I hope they aren’t attending the conference. Poor Lorenzo will be so embarrassed if he hears about this.”

We discovered immediately that our husbands would be fellow conferees, which meant we four were accompanying persons. To show that I was not offended by the collision with the children and to pass the remainder of the morning, I invited them to my room and offered refreshments from the small refrigerator provided by the hotel. Jason would not be pleased, given the cost of such items, but one does feel the necessity to be hospitable. The children, delighted with the opportunity, picked bottled fruit drinks and munchies identified in Italian with garish pictures, evidently some sort of chip colored a bright orange red. To my astonishment, Bianca chose one of the tiny bottles of wine. I had to read the brands off to her because her huge stomach didn’t allow her to bend forward and she now knew better than to get too close to the floor. Could she be carrying twins, or had her pregnancy gone beyond term? And if the latter, why was she traveling around the country? Perhaps the Massonis were natives of the area. That, as it developed, was not so. They lived in Rome, where her husband taught.

To amuse the children, I provided Andrea with an Italian Carabinieri doll and Giulia with a prettily dressed Italian peasant doll, gifts that I had bought for Jason’s half niece and nephew. The dolls could be easily replaced when I ventured out to find gifts for my own children, who were harder to please, being college students. Andrea’s doll immediately arrested Giulia’s doll, as Bianca, laughing, explained to me, and a great drama ensued in Italian that kept the children happy for over an hour while we ladies chatted.

First, I complimented my new friend on her excellent English and deplored my own lack of languages.

“But why should you learn languages?” she replied diplomatically. “You live in a huge country where everyone speaks English.”

Of course, everyone doesn’t speak English at home, especially in El Paso, but I didn’t mention that. It was so pleasant to meet a European who didn’t feel disdain for the many monolingual American tourists visiting the continent.

“So much easier, is it not, to be an American? I live in a comparable area of size, but it contains many nations speaking many languages, so naturally I must speak some, especially since I was a tour guide in Rome. You must come to Rome and let me show you my city. Have you seen the Mithraic altar in St. Clement’s? The initiates stood under a grate and were baptized by the blood pouring from a sacrificial bull. Gruesome, is it not? The church is a treasure, some of whose delights you can easily pass by without a knowledgeable guide.”

I assured Bianca that I would certainly call her for the promised tour when I was next in Rome. In fact, I would have been glad to climb back on the train to Rome with her that very morning, had she not been so hampered by her pregnancy.

“Ah, it is so good to drink wine again,” she said, sipping ecstatically. “For six months my doctor insists on no wine. I swear my tongue rusted in the meantime, but in the last three months he says there is no danger.”

I hadn’t heard any such thing, but there was no use to warn her that in the United States women were expected to avoid alcohol throughout pregnancy. She was already drinking and might have been for several months. “When is the baby due?” I asked.

“You probably think I might give birth this very minute. Yes? We are not quite sure, you see. Even the doctor is puzzled. I am so big, and yet the baby has not dropped down, and I have no idea when the little one—” she patted her stomach fondly, “—was conceived.”

“You must be a devout Catholic,” I observed.

“Oh, not so devout,” she replied, laughing. “You think I don’t practice birth control. Yes? I was on the pill, and was being very good with taking it each night, but then I found Giulia popping them out of the packet and eating them one morning. What a scene. My mother-in-law and I shrieking, Giulia crying, Andrea dragging Lorenzo from the bathroom to put things to right. Poor baby. We had to have her stomach pumped at the hospital, and my mother-in-law threw the uneaten pills away after lecturing me on my careless behavior, although I keep all the medicines quite high in a cabinet in my bathroom. That was the day we discovered that Giulia is a little monkey, aren’t you,
mia bambina
?”

Giulia, whose doll had just given the Carabinieri doll of her brother a whack on the head, looked up and giggled. “
Si
, Mama.”

“So then I forget about the pills because I did not want to remember the terror of my baby having her little stomach sucked up, but, of course, being Italian—we Italians are a passionate people, you know—even my Lorenzo, who is from Lucca to the north—we made love without a thought, so—there is another baby soon.” She smiled down at the huge protrusion under her pretty maternity outfit. With that smooth, oval face and dark hair, Bianca looked like a beautiful Madonna in a Renaissance painting.

“So you must excuse me. I have been talking and talking. Tell me how you like Sorrento and who, of the meeting, you have met. Have you had adventures here on our beautiful Bay of Naples?”

“Mama, tell Giulia it is not good for a girl doll to hit a Carabinieri,” Andrea interrupted. “She must go to jail if she does so.”

“And what if the Carabinieri is a girl doll? Could she then hit it? Or if Giulia’s doll is a boy doll? What then? It is not proper,
mia bambina
,” Bianca said to her daughter, “for anyone to hit a Carabinieri. In the United States they probably hang a doll that hits a Carabinieri. Is that not so, Carolyn? Signora Blue is from Texas in America, where they hang many bad people.”

I sighed. Even in Europe, Texas has a reputation for its bloodthirsty judiciary system. “In Texas we use lethal injection,” I said, “a shot of poison.” Both children shrieked. “But only for bad adults,” which wasn’t quite true, “and not for children and dolls,” I hastened to add. “Utah may have hanging. I’m not sure. I know that a firing squad is an option in Utah.” I was trying to excuse Texas, but why? All the headlines about executions bothered me, too.