Claire Gulliver #03 - Intrigue in Italics (13 page)

Kristen was first to notice the surge of pedestrians moving with them up the narrow curved street to the hotel. “What’s going on?”

Claire had been concentrating on getting up the steep street without losing her breath. She was very tired. Visions of victims and the blown out buildings crowded her mind every time she had shut her eyes, which had robbed her of a sound sleep last night. Now she looked up and saw the people crowding the street ahead of them, going the same way they were. It was strange.

“Oh, my god,” Kristen breathed, as they rounded a curve giving them a view of the crowd amassed in front of them. Police cars and emergency vehicles were clustered in front of a building which looked suspiciously like their hotel.

The crowd was being held back by determined policemen holding out their arms. Something was obviously wrong.

“What’s going on?” Claire asked, frightened.

Kristen shook her head and motioned Claire to follow her into the edge of the crowd. She asked lots of questions as they worked their way forward until they could see it was definitely their hotel which was cordoned off. Finally, near the front, she found someone who seemed to know something, and the rapid-fire Italian went on and on until Claire wanted to scream at them. At last Kristen turned back to Claire and whispered, “That was one of the maids. She said two men forced the desk clerk to give them the room number of the two American women. They were very specific; they wanted two American women, one with red hair.”

Claire’s eyes widened in horror.

“And..., what happened?” She wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

Kristen swallowed hard. “He gave him the key. One of the men stayed with the clerk and the other went up in the elevator. When he came down they left.”

“And...?” Claire felt a scream in her throat and forced it back. “What did they look like? Ask her what they looked like.”

Kristen turned back to the woman and spoke again; Claire wished she could understand.

Just then a ripple went through the crowd. People pressed forward craning their necks to get a better glimpse of the activity near the door of the hotel. A collective gasp came from the watchers as the gurneys came out, one after the other, each draped with a sheet over what could only have been a body bag. The attendants loaded the gurneys into the back and then the ambulance moved silently down the street, the crowd opening a path for it to pass.

Kristen turned and slipped back down the street with Claire right on her heels. They didn’t stop until they collapsed in the chairs at a table in a sidewalk café just outside Il Campo. Kirsten ordered two espressos and the hovering waiter disappeared.

“There doesn’t seem to be much of a question here.” Kristen was grim. “Two Americans? One with red hair? How did they know? How could they have found out so soon I wasn’t in the building they bombed in Florence?”

“Was it him? Did she say?” Claire’s heart was pounding so rapidly she could hardly breathe.

“One was tall, good-looking, dressed in a nice brown suit, shiny with flashes of green. And the other was wearing casual clothes and a lightweight red jacket.”

Now Claire was truly afraid. “This is really serious, Kristen. Someone wants you dead.”

“Not hard to guess who, is it? I guess ‘Daddy’ still has contacts in the old country.” She looked around at the other people sitting in the café. “But how did they find me?”

The waiter brought their coffees and the bill. Kristen laid a few coins down, swallowed the espresso in one gulp and said, “I’ve got to be moving on. It won’t take long for them to find out they made another mistake and this town will be easy to search.”

Claire shivered; she knew Kristen was right.

“I think the best thing to do now is for you to go back to Florence and go about your vacation as if you had never found me. I’ll hole up somewhere until my contact people can find a safe place for me to go.”

Claire thought about that for only a moment before shaking her head. “I can’t. I can’t just let you go without knowing you’re safe.”

“Claire, don’t be silly. You need to make sure you’re safe. Besides, what can you do?” Her gentle smile took the sting out of those words.

She shook her head stubbornly. “I don’t know but I’ll do my best. You know... the two heads bit. And two pairs of eyes watching. And don’t forget if I hadn’t found you yesterday, you would have been just one more casualty in Florence.”

“Claire, they’ve identified me. They know where I am. They know I have red hair. They’re looking for me and apparently they don’t care who gets in the way.”

Claire stared at Kristen a moment. “That’s it! Kristen, they think you have red hair! They don’t know. We have an advantage right now.” Claire brightened at the thought.

She carefully studied her friend. Kristen’s spiked brown hair was growing on her. Actually with Kristen’s fine bone structure the style somehow made her look more feminine rather than butch. She certainly didn’t resemble the red-haired woman Claire had followed yesterday. For that matter, she looked entirely different than the blonde, freckled face student who had worked in San Francisco. She wasn’t even sure she would have recognized Kristen in Florence if she saw her like this.

“Where should we go?”

Kristen shrugged. “Don’t know. Let’s get on a bus and see where we end up.”

Claire nodded, glad Kristen had accepted that she was going with her. “Let’s go.”

The creaky bus lurched along the hilly roads, stopping frequently to accommodate passengers. Claire was fascinated by the people getting on and off — family groups with assorted members, people going to and coming from shopping burdened with assorted bundles and bags, school kids with heavy backpacks, even on Saturday, and business people with newspapers and briefcases. This was obviously a well traveled route for the natives.

The bus’s destination was Pisa, and when they arrived, they wandered around long enough to see the famous Leaning Tower, which really did lean at an impossible angle. Not far from the Tower they got on another bus. They took this bus only as far as the train station where Kristen approached a window for tickets.

“Where are we going?”

Kristen indicated a train resting on one of the tracks. “Genoa. There’s our train. We’re in third class.” She pointed at the car in front of them. “Choose a seat.”

The railroad car looked similar to the BART trains she had ridden in San Francisco. She sat down on the molded plastic seat and held her backpack on her lap. When the train started moving the gentle sway of the car rocked Claire to sleep in spite of her anxiety, or perhaps because of it.

“Claire, Claire, wake up. We’re getting off here.”

Claire, groggy with interrupted sleep, struggled out of her seat and lurched after Kristen, surprised to find they had arrived at Genoa so soon. But when she really opened her eyes on the station platform she saw the signs reading La Spezia and was really confused.

She grabbed Kristen’s arm. “I thought we were going to Genoa.”

Kristen kept moving purposely forward, saying over her shoulder, “I changed my mind. I was looking at your tour book and realized we could get to the Cinque Terre from here. Why not? It’s off the beaten track. It should be jammed with day-trippers coming to walk the cliff trails, and it’s so tiny we’ll see anyone who doesn’t belong. It sounds like a good place to hole up until I make contact again. What do you think?”

Claire’s brain was starting to function again, and she could see the sense in Kristen’s logic. And of course she had heard of the Cinque Terre. It was a quite well known off-the-beaten-track destination. She followed Kristen past several tracks to a little old fashion type train setting there as if it was waiting for them.

This train clacked and clicked along a track that wound through tunnels and then hung over fabulous seascapes. They rattled through several villages, but when they emerged out of one tunnel to stop on a small platform before entering the next tunnel, Kristen got up and nodded to Claire to follow her. They stood on the platform until after the train disappeared into the far tunnel, then looked around them. The train platform dissected the little village. The road went under the platform. Up the hill colorful buildings were stacked tightly until they reached a highway at the top of the village. At least that’s what Claire’s guidebook said. The road going down twined through the village with structures on top of structures, crowded closely, most with laundry hanging out of windows flapping in the sun, until it ended abruptly in the piazza at the water’s edge. There they could see fishing boats, bottoms up, resting for their next venture into the sea, umbrellas and tables clustered around some restaurants and some local boys noisily playing soccer amongst it all. Their shouts and cries carried up the hill and were easily heard on the platform now that the train had gone.

Vernazza was a postcard perfect village, really just a cluster of colorful buildings perched on the cliffs over the sea. It looked more like a movie set than a real place but the villagers were moving about in pursuit of their business and the tourists were evident.

“The book recommends a couple of the pensions up the hill, if you want to try there first?”

Claire nodded. Kristen had been pouring over the book so she was the expert here. They made their way down the stairs and then under the platform. From here they could see the road curling steeply up to the left while on the right a series of steps led high up the hill, threading behind homes and climbing further yet.

“My god, how do you suppose they carry their groceries up there?” Claire commented.

“That’s probably why they shop everyday. Then they only have a few things. Or maybe there is another way up there, some road or alley coming down from the highway across the crest of the hills.”

“Wouldn’t it be heaven to live in a place like this? Do you suppose they forget to notice how beautiful it is?” Claire exclaimed.

Kristen shook her head, concentrating on a handwritten sign in Italian posted on the side of a building. She looked up to her right at the little zigzagging path snaking up the hill. “This sign is advertising a room and bath in a private home up there.” She pointed up. “What do say we check it out instead of one of the pensions?”

Claire nodded, then followed Kristen up the steep path, turning in behind some of the buildings until they arrived at a building set high on the hill, the tiny front yard enclosed from the path by a short hedge which protected the recessed doorway.

The landlady, a middle-aged woman wrapped in an all encompassing apron was friendly, apparently pleased at the thought of rent money. She stood back gesturing them to come in.

“Claire, come on. Let’s look at the room.”

Claire crowded in the foyer behind Kristen. The large kitchen stretched across the right hand side of the house and a wizened old lady, clad completely in black sat at the table, hands clenched around the cup before her. Her eyes were bright and shrewd as she examined Claire and Kristen. Nothing would escape her scrutiny, Claire thought. But they must have passed her inspection as they moved to the stairway, because she returned Claire’s smile with a nod.

The room was tucked in the top of the building, up four flights of stairs. The landlady bustled cheerfully to the window, showing no signs of heavy breathing from climbing the stairs, and opened it wide to let in the sun and the breeze. The white stucco room was large and airy. The huge bed covered with a down comforter looked like a comfy nest. Claire had to restrain herself, she wanted to fling herself on that bed and forget everything that had happened in the last two days.

The bathroom was tiny, hardly bigger than a closet, but clean. The toilet shared the shower space and, unlike the hotel in Florence, had a shower curtain to protect the rest of the bathroom from the spray.

Claire nodded her agreement to the question in Kristen’s eyes and went to the window to look out over the village while Kristen paid for the room and handed over their passports.

“I’m going to wash out my dirty laundry, then close my eyes a minute before going out again. Okay?”

Kristen nodded. She had already sunk down on the bed, claiming the side by the door as her own.

“I need to make contact as soon as possible...” and she was asleep.

Claire quietly did her wash, hung it out the window as everyone else in the village seemed to do and then lay down herself. The quiet and fresh air worked their magic and she, too, fell into a sound sleep.

Every meal at the Villa had been wonderful but tonight was special. First the appetizers, Group B had provided a selection of roasted cozze (mussels) in garlic and cream, bruschetta, toasted rounds of bread heaped with fresh mozzarella and topped with chopped tomatoes and basil in olive oil flavored with garlic and the final selection was zucchini flowers stuffed with sausage.

“Taste the wine,” Ruth urged Millie. “I picked this one.”

Millie rolled it around on her tongue. It was a Pinot Grigio. The flavor blended with the appetizers. As a matter of fact everything was so tasty she had to restrain herself so she’d have room for the main course. And of course, she knew what was coming for dessert. Thank god, Chef Martin had announced they would forgo the pasta course tonight to ensure everyone could adequately enjoy the contributions from each of the groups.

“Save room for the main course,” Steven admonished from across the table.

“So, Steven, what’s on the menu?” Randy leaned around Zoe who was sitting between him and Steven.

“You’ll see. But it’s good. Trust me on that. Right, Zoe?”

Zoe nodded, looking pleased, but didn’t elaborate.

“Coniglio Arrosto Morto, rabbit cooked in wine and stock,” Antonio, sitting on the other side of Randy, announced with a flourish. “And...” he nodded to Sam down the table further.

Sam slowly rose to his feet and said in a surprisingly loud voice, “Bracioline Affocate, Drowned Veal Escalopes, and...” he gestured to Helga at the other end of the long table.