Love Is Strange (A Paranormal Romance) (10 page)

Farfalla scampered up the stairs for a stronger signal.

“So,” demanded Babi, “how did it work out for you?”

“It worked,” said Farfalla. “He hired me and he paid me in cash.”

“Good. Don’t say I never did you a favor, then.”

“Babi, I feel bad about this. I said that I would help you with the big conference errands, and here I am stuck in Anacapri with this American guy.”

“LOXY says that your American guy is a big conference errand.”

Farfalla thought this over. It was quite a thing to say. It didn’t have to be spelled out in detail. Smart Neapolitans, like Babi, never spelled anything out. “I hear you.”

“Don’t kiss him,” said Babi, and she hung up.

Don’t kiss him
. If only Babi had said something else. Don’t flirt with him, don’t let him buy you drinks, and don’t go to his hotel room. Don’t be the rich boy’s girl-toy.

Farfalla did not do such things. Life was too short. But,
don’t kiss him
? Not even one kiss? Even Audrey Hepburn in her cold, virginal 1950’s movie was allowed one kiss. Or two kisses, or count them, three passionate kisses. With the tall, handsome Gregory Peck.

Don’t kiss him?
Every woman in Italy was allowed to kiss someone! A line of women a kilometer long had kissed the Prime Minister.
Don’t kiss him?
This was not good advice. This was sneaky and fatal and ominous. This was a curse.

Farfalla was good at dodging curses. That was the great advantage of foreseeing the future. To make sure that awful things did not happen. Farfalla was good at making dreadful things not-happen. Not-happening awful things were her personal specialty.

So, she would not do it. Not kiss him. It was like she had already not done it. Not kissed him, not. Never. Never to kiss him. Not throwing her arms around his neck. Not rising up on her toes. No line of sweet tension thrilling down her back, nothing down the trembling length of both her legs... Lips gently not meeting his lips…

Farfalla looked in wonder at the blank black tablet she held in her hand. Thank you, iPhone! You insanely great machine, you flat black brick of opium!
Don’t kiss him
, the gabby little machine had just said to her. An iPhone had doomed her forever.
Don’t kiss him
, because she was dying to kiss him now. She would die like a dog if she left Capri without kissing Gavin Tremaine. Oddio, what a terrible mess.

Kissing Gavin Tremaine was a calamity. Would he even do that? Would he kiss her? Oh yes, he most certainly would kiss her. Because she would make him do it. There were eighteen thousand ways for her to get him to kiss her.

Oh please, God, Saints, nice Brazilian voodoo demons, please don’t make me kiss that man,
Farfalla thought to herself. There was no force in her meek little prayer. It sounded like a coy invitation.

Farfalla grew stern with herself. She really, truly, did not have to kiss him. Even if he was her One, she did not have to kiss him. She was not doomed. A kiss was an act of will, and the future was not set in stone. Farfalla had always known that. The future was not made of stone because the future was a
story
. People who could foretell the future were people who
told
the future. They didn’t carve the future from a piece of stone. There were no stone futures, the future was a story! A story that people told to people.

Even Cassandra, that famous, fatal priestess, herself had a story. Cassandra’s story was the famous, dreadful legend of Cassandra:
I am Cassandra of Troy, and I can tell you the future. You won’t believe the future, but the future won’t stop. I am your slave, and I hate you. And you will die, and I’ll die too — but I’ll watch you die first. Because I am the prophetess Cassandra.

Farfalla could walk out of this dreadful museum, back into the sunlight. She could do that. That was her choice, her act of will. It was time to make her free decision. Choose the future, right now.

She could leave this scary old, new doomed place. She was almost half-free, from having run up these stairs to talk to Babi. She could run out the door of this awful place. Flee the museum of the painful past, run, run through the winding streets of Capri, to the little train, to the next zooming hydrofoil. There were so many ferries in the Capri harbor. Rushing by like clockwork. Rushing by like the passing hours of a woman’s life.

Off this island in thirty minutes. Gone, vanished from Capri. A ticket in Napoli, a train to Milano, a bus to Ivrea. And she would breathe in peace.

Leave all of this. Leave this space and time. Do it, Farfalla. Disappear. Eight hours of travel up the boot of Italy. A journey of eight hours starts with one single step. One, single, strong-willed step. You can walk away from this destiny, Farfalla. You don’t have to do any of this.

Farfalla stepped up, away toward her freedom, and out of all this, forever... and then, she spun on her high heel and walked back down into the dungeon, into her dark fate.

How strange life was.

In the dead dentist’s dark and dreadful dungeon, everyone reveled in the gloom. Popper Bead Girl was shining in Farfalla’s absence. Without Farfalla around, Popper Bead was perky and charming. This was Popper’s big chance to be the center of attention, to make her fuss over her dead junk that nobody else ever noticed.

Popper Bead, Gavin and Professor Milo had managed to locate something of interest— a suitcase.

The travel case was made of thick, cracked brown leather, with iron locks, brass hasps and reinforced corners, dotted with heavy bronze studs. It was a dignified, princessly traveling case from the age of steamships. Rich people drowning and freezing in the wreck of the Titanic might have clung to a suitcase like this.

“This suitcase has no key,” Gavin told her.

“Is it
her
suitcase?” said Farfalla. She reached her hand toward the lost suitcase of the Princess Amelie Rives Troubetzkoy. Then she stopped. She didn’t have to touch the suitcase. It was radiating occult certainty.

“There’s no way for us to know for sure, not without opening it,” judged Gavin. “But this is an old Italian suitcase. It’s the proper age, and it has American luggage labels. From New York, from Boston... and look, this one is from the Jefferson Hotel, in Richmond, Virginia.”

“She took the key with her,” said Professor Milo. “She left this case with her good friend, the dentist, because she meant to return here, some day. Amelie Rives was a sly little minx.”

Gavin was on one knee, examining the situation. He glanced up, bright-eyed. “Did you just say ‘minx’? I never heard anyone speak that word before.”

“The Princess Troubetzkoy wrote historical romances. She used the word ‘minx’ all the time.”

“The lock on her case is rusted solid,” Gavin announced. “Her key would be useless now, even if we had it in our hands.”

Nobody seemed to know what to say about that.

“Well, a hundred years ago, this would be a definite setback,” said Gavin. “But this is the twenty-first century! We could X-ray this suitcase. We could put in a CAT-SCAN.”

No one said anything about that, either.

“Maybe a nuclear magnetic resonator...” Gavin awkwardly hefted one of the handles, carved from elephant ivory. “I can hear something moving around in there! Come and listen to this, Farfalla.”

“Why?” Farfalla hedged. She kept a careful distance from the fatal container.

Gavin shook the suitcase violently. The ancient ivory handles squeaked like dying mice.

Popper Bead swiftly got upset about this. Gavin stopped his antics and set the case down, gently. Then he glanced at his watch in the gloom.

“Well,” Gavin said, “we got so close to success here... That case weighs a ton!”

“It could be her books in there,” said Professor Milo. “Just her books and her private papers.”

“Maybe,” said Gavin, “but that would be great news for you, wouldn’t it?”

Professor Milo’s placid face wrinkled in quick dismay. “I’m afraid you don’t understand! My university has tons of paper from Amelie Rives Troubetzkoy. Amelie wrote
dozens
of books.
Thousands
of letters. Nobody reads that rubbish now! Nobody will
ever
read that! Where is the Cosmic Cupid?”

Gavin glanced toward Farfalla. Her eyes met his in the gloom. There was a sudden, surging burst of silent, intimate, flawless man-to-woman communion between them. Without a word, they had agreement, a game plan, and immediate action.

“There’s no need for panic,” Gavin announced.

“We can find your Cosmic Cupid for you,” soothed Farfalla. “It will just take patience and the proper paperwork.”

Gavin raised his hand. “We need to get this American suitcase exported back to the United States. I know ways to do that between working museums. They’re like an Inter-Library Loan.”

“But I don’t want the Cosmic Cupid stuck inside some museum!” said Professor Milo.

“Doesn’t Cupid belong in a museum?” said Farfalla.

“No! No, because
I
want the Cupid. I want the Cupid for myself,
privately
.”

“Look, professor,” said Gavin, “let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Maybe you can figure out some way to own your Cupid privately, but the first step is to figure out if there’s any statue here at all. And I think I know how to prove that. Back home in Seattle, we have some top-notch high-tech facilities that perform ‘non-invasive imaging.’ And I can help you there, because I know all those guys.”

“Can’t you just do that now?” said Professor Milo. “Use your computer, or something.”

“What, how, with my two hands? I’m a Futurist, I don’t have X-ray vision! The Italians are reasonable people when it comes to their heritage issues. We just need to make a good case. So, we all send an email about it, we start a wiki, and we do a Skype conference call.”

“I don’t have any computer,” Professor Milo pointed out.

“Well, that’ll sure slow things down by a factor of ten... But, well, we can put together a Cosmic Cupid coalition. We can find every scholar on the Internet who is interested in Amelie Rives Troubetzkoy. Then, we fill out all the Italian forms, we cross the t’s and dot the i’s. The Italians will come across for us. That’s how museum research gets done.”

“But I’m the only one in the world who is interested!” said Professor Milo. “I am the world’s greatest authority on Amelie Rives Troubetzkoy.”

“She was famous,” Farfalla offered gently. “She still matters to somebody on the Internet.”

“She does not matter!” wailed Professor Milo. “I published five different scholarly papers on her, and they never got one citation! Amelie Rives Troubetzkoy was never important! She was just famous, beautiful, rich and very romantic. That’s all! Even when she was alive, all the critics knew that Amelie was a lousy writer. She was popular, but she was awful! That’s why time forgot her long ago!”

“Maybe people will rediscover her literary merits some day,” Gavin said.

“She never had any merits! Her writing is totally, hopelessly, awfully bad! Amelie was beautiful, blonde and gorgeous... In Capri, she was young, and happy for a while, a little honeymoon of joy... Isn’t that enough? Isn’t it
enough?
I want to cry!”

Popper Bead spoke up.
“What is wrong with her? I told you not to come down here! This is a terrible place!”

Farfalla still hated Popper Bead, but she had to give her credit. Popper had done her best to warn them against coming down here. Nobody had paid a bit of attention to Popper’s warnings.

Gavin glanced at his wristwatch. “Look, I hate to say this, but I need to leave this place right away. There’s a major panel this morning, sponsored by LOXY. Fabio Mascherati of LOXY is chairing that panel. Fabio’s a personal friend. He would take it badly if I didn’t show up.”

“All those Futurists are sure to start late,” Farfalla told him.

“I’m already late. You ladies can sort this out. I have no choice here, I really have to go.”

Gavin Tremaine vaulted up the stairs, jumping them two at a time. He vanished from the dungeon, as if he had never existed.

Farfalla looked at the other women. Well, here they were. Three women in the dungeon of pain, where no woman ever wanted to be.

Three women? No, four women. Because a woman had owned that suitcase.

8
I speak Portuguese

9
“I’m sorry, but Dr. Malaparte is not here. She is in Anacapri, and will not be here until tomorrow.”

Chapter Seven: Tomorrow’s Trends in Web Couture

Gavin had assumed that preaching in a chapel would be easy. But the acoustics in the medieval chapel were dreadful. It had something to do with the host of display screens.

Gavin sat in the front row, but still couldn’t follow the rapid Italian of the panelists. He slipped translation headphones over his ears. Most of the other Futurists were also wearing headphones. Everyone alone together, in his or her own private world.

Fabio Mascherati was this panel’s moderator. Fabio had personally picked the guests for LOXY’s major panel on future fashion trends. Fabio’s favorite fashion “thought leaders” did not look very fashionable. They wore neat, black European intellectual’s clothes, and looked like cut-out cartoons.

There was a philosopher on Fabio’s panel, because every Italian cultural panel had to have a philosopher. There was a television host who made Italian fashion documentaries. There was a sober female politician from Brussels. Her European committee handed out grants to “centers of regional excellence.” Centers like Milan, for instance, the home of LOXY.

There was also one Paris fashionista, sitting on stage like a hostage. In European high fashion, Milan and Paris had it in for each other. They were like Apple and Microsoft.

Europeans could be scary people. They said such nice, sweet, guarded, phony things about one another in public. Intellectual European panels like this one were about Europeans assuring themselves, over and over, that they wouldn’t massacre each other anymore.