Nomad (7 page)

“A new addition?” Jess held one hand over her eyes to shield the sun, taking a closer look at the structure on the other side of the gorge. “What, you bought it?”

The grin evaporated from Giovanni’s face. “Not exactly, it was…” He looked away, exhaling, then looked back at Jess. “It was a rival family, but they left.”

Jess glanced at him, noticed a strange look in his eyes. “Like a feud?”

“Yes, like that.”

“Huh.” Jess shook her head, not sure what to say. She shifted her gaze down the cliff wall under the cable car shack where they’d come from. It was thirty feet of sheer rock, with a large grassy ledge at least twenty feet across, then a drop of a few hundred feet beyond that. “Great for rock climbing,” she observed.

“Jessica, I do have another confession.”

She was still staring down the rock wall, her mind constructing possible routes for climbing up it. “What’s that?”

“Yesterday, at the museum, I overheard you telling your mother that your boyfriend hit you, that you needed money.”

Lifting her head up from looking down the cliff face, Jess shielded her eyes again from the setting sun. “Is that why you’re being so nice to me?”

“Partly.” Giovanni nodded.

“And the other part?”

Giovanni looked uncomfortable. “The videos of you on YouTube, the famous American girl, BASE jumping, sky diving and rock climbing, the…” His voice faltered.

“What, the cripple?” Jess finished the sentence for him. Her cheeks flushed, and she struggled to keep her temper from flaring. He was being nice. He didn’t mean anything.

“Sorry, I don’t know—”

“It’s okay. Disabled, that would be the right word. But I’m not a cripple. I don’t need any special treatment.”

Shaking his head, Giovanni agreed, “No, you are no cripple. I was so surprised when I saw you here. You are magnificent, beautiful.” He winced. “Sorry, my English is a little rusty, perhaps not the right words?”

Jess laughed, her flash of temper burning into one of embarrassment. “No, those are nice words.”

Giovanni’s smile returned. “I was wondering if you might do me a favor.”

Squinting into the sun, Jess took a long look at him. “What did you have in mind?”

“If you might give my little Hector a rock climbing lesson, perhaps?”

She looked down the rock face. “What, now?”

Giovanni looked down. “Yes. I have all the equipment. We could set a top rope, no?”

She looked down at the rock face. “Sure, we could do that. One thing though.”

The Baron looked at her. “Anything.”

“If we’re going to be friends, call me Jess, okay?”

Giovanni stored his climbing equipment just inside the doorway of a tunnel carved into the side of the rock face, on the twenty-foot-wide ledge of grass below the cable car station. While he went to fetch Hector and Nico, Jess set up two ropes from a metal gantry sticking out from the top of the cliff face, and having enough cord, she also rigged a rope swing from the cable car platform to let someone drop from there to the grassy ledge thirty feet below.

She’d just finished when Giovanni returned with Nico and Hector. Only five years old, Hector scampered around the low rocks like a monkey, smiling a big grin at Jess as he jumped around. He was fearless, and earned large return grins from Jess.

She attached the two topes to Giovanni and Hector in their climbing harnesses. Jess and Nico strapped into harnesses and attached themselves to the other ends of the ropes, taking up the slack as Hector and Giovanni climbed, with Jess calling out suggestions and encouragement.

“So what brought you to Ruspoli Castle?” Nico asked Jess. With Giovanni and Hector twenty feet overhead, Jess and Nico stood shoulder to shoulder, carefully taking in the excess rope as the two ascended.

Jess glanced at Nico, then returned to watching Hector, taking up the slack with the braking mechanism attached to her. “Funny story. My mom got a Facebook message from a long-lost relative a few weeks ago, said he still lived here and wanted to meet us.”

Nico jammed his brake into place and looked at Jess. “What? Who? Did you meet him?”

“No, not yet.” Jess frowned at Nico. What had gotten him so excited? “He hasn't responded since we've arrived. Why?”

Nico stared at Jess for a long second, then looked up at Giovanni and released the brake. “Just curious. So your family is from here?”

“My mom’s side, but from years ago. We didn’t think anyone from our family still lived here. So we came to investigate.”

“You came all the way from America just for that?” Nico nodded. “Family must be very important to you.”

Jess let her head sag to one side. “Well, it wasn’t
just
for that.” She pulled in two more feet of rope into the brake as Hector climbed. “And I don’t know anything about the old family. My mom says her dad refused to talk about it.”

“You know nothing?” Nico turned to look at Jess.

“Nothing at all.” Jess wagged her head, shrugging. “And you, do you have family here?”

Nico’s jaw muscles rippled, but he smiled. “No, I have no family.”

“You’re from Naples, though. Isn’t that what you said earlier?”

“That’s right.”

“And Giovanni’s father hired you to work here.”

Nico nodded. “Seven years ago he took me in. He was like a father to me, and I did my best to look after him when he got sick, even when Giovanni left.” He let out a long sigh. “Ah, I forget myself. I really should not talk of the Baron’s family.”

Where was Giovanni’s father now? In Florence, Jess guessed, but she didn’t want to pry, so she switched topics. “The police who were here this morning, did Giovanni really just shoo them away?”

“Yes.”

“He can do that?”

Nico grinned at Jess. “This is not America. The Ruspolis, well…I wouldn’t worry, not while you are his guest.”

“And Leone mentioned something about a
controversia
, what was that about?” Jess whispered.

Glancing to his right, toward the cable car and the
castello
on the opposite side of the gorge, Nico replied, “I don’t know.” He shrugged and jerked the cord tight, earning a muffled complaint from Giovanni thirty feet overhead. “Of that, I have no idea.”

8

R
OME,
I
TALY

BEN PULLED BACK the curtains of his hotel room window and peeked out. Brilliant sunshine streamed in from a perfect blue sky. The traffic growled, and people shuffled by in the street, some shopping, some sipping coffees in the café.

A beautiful day for predicting the end of the world.

“Well, have a look in the back!” Ben shouted into his cell phone. Mrs. Brown, their seventy-eight-year-old administrative assistant, was going deaf. She refused to retire, and there was no way Ben would fire her. She’d been a part of his life longer than he could even remember now. “Yes, I know what time it is. I’m very sorry.”

Almost ten at night in Boston. He’d dragged her out of bed to search his office, to dig through the mountains of papers and boxes he’d accumulated in his thirty years at Harvard-Smithsonian. He needed data,
really
old data. Spools of tape he’d collected that dated back to the 1970s, before he’d even started at Harvard as a student, along with magnetic tapes; floppy disks from the 80s; CDs from the 90s. Ben was a pack rat, his office the epitome of the disorganized professor, but he knew what he needed was in there.

Ben let go of the curtain, casting the hotel room back into darkness. “Mrs. Brown, I know this is difficult, but please keep searching. This is an emergency.” He rubbed one temple to try to ease back a throbbing headache. The fate of the world might rest in the eyesight of Mrs. Brown, twice over a great-grandmother. “I’ll stay on the line while you look.”

Pushing
mute
on his phone, he turned to Roger, his grad student, sitting cross-legged on the room’s double bed. Although the Grand Hotel was fancy, the rooms were tiny. Ben had installed himself at the sliver of a working desk near the window, so the only other place to work was on the bed.

“Did you get the new data downloads?” Ben asked.

“Just getting them now,” Roger replied. A nest of papers surrounded him, his face staring into his laptop screen. “The wireless in this hotel sucks. Even if I get it downloaded, it’s going to take time to unpack and normalize.”

It was one thing to say you had the data, but another to decode it. Never mind trying to figure out how to read the magnetic tapes or floppy disks he had Mrs. Brown hunting for. Just trying to make sense of the compression algorithms and file formats of ten years ago was proving more difficult than Ben had imagined. He would bet the other teams were having the same problems. Making sure apples were apples wasn’t easy, especially over the Grand Hotel’s feeble wireless connection, four thousand miles from the office.

“Just make it happen. This is important.”  Ben clicked off the
mute
on his phone. “Yes, that’s right,” he yelled. “The one marked 'Red Shift 1977', that’s the one.” Mrs. Brown might be old, but she was a wizard at picking through Ben’s messes. “And you have a list of the others? Good.” He clicked
mute
on his phone again.

“Want to tell me what this is all about, Bernie?” Roger asked from the bed.

Bernie.
Ben’s old college nickname. His students liked to use it to rile him up. “I can’t tell you. I need to see if you find it for yourself,” Ben said.

It was a valid point, one Roger would understand. A problem with searching through huge amounts of data was that, eventually, you could see almost anything you wanted. If he told Roger what he was looking for, he’d probably find it. That was Ben’s main misgiving with Dr. Müller’s hypothesis. So Ben was having Roger comb through their radial velocity searches of stars to look at the subtractive factors, see if any of them were changing significantly over time. It was a big undertaking, looking in all directions at the celestial sphere to see how the solar system was moving, and not just a snapshot, but over time.

“Okay, boss, but you owe me,” Roger said, his face bathed in the glow from his laptop screen.

Ben smiled. “Next conference in Hawaii.”

Roger’s face brightened. “Deal.”

“Oh, and could you email Susan and ask her if she could check the Red Shift, Sloan, Catalina surveys for any changes in variability of stars in vicinity of Gliese 445?”

Roger frowned, his face still glued to the laptop screen. “
Changes
in variability?”

Time domain astronomy—seeing changes in objects over time—was still in its infancy. “Yes, not regular variability, but any significant changes over the past decade.”

“Sure.” Roger raised his eyebrows, clearly not confident that it would be possible. “Anything for a trip to Hawaii.”

Ben pressed his ear back to the phone, clicking
mute
back off. “Yes!” he shouted into the phone. “Overnight the boxes to the hotel, under my name. Thank you, Mrs. Brown.”

Taking a deep breath, he hung up and looked at Roger. “I’ve got to go upstairs.”