if expecting to get thrown out any minute. They looked Italian but didn’t speak it, so Tom’s services were not required when Nguyen took them off to a conference room he’d booked for their briefing. Apparently one of them understood English and would pass on Nguyen’s instructions to the others in their own language, which might as well have been Arabic for all that Tom could make any sense of it. Which left him free to call Mirella back.
The fact that she’d got in touch at all astonished him. He’d assumed that the striking young woman that he’d twice made a clumsy attempt to hit on had no interest in him whatsoever. She certainly hadn’t provided him with the slightest encouragement on the occasions when they’d met, purely by chance, and he had more or less forgotten her, except he hadn’t. And now here she was saying she could see him for a couple of hours that evening if he was free.
Strictly speaking, of course, he wasn’t. Martin Nguyen had given him firm instructions to be on call and ready to leave at five minutes’ notice, as a result of which he had already turned down Nicola Mantega’s invitation to a working dinner that evening to discuss what Tom knew about the apparent discovery of Alaric’s tomb. On the other hand, he’d gathered from Nguyen that the next stage of the operation wasn’t going to happen until well after dark, and hadn’t even been told what it was or whether his presence was required. So as long as he could get back to the hotel quickly if Nguyen summoned him, there was no reason to sit twiddling his thumbs in his room when he could be romancing — what a beautiful name! — Mirella.
They’d agreed to meet at seven-thirty, but Tom got there twenty minutes early to check the place out. A bank of thick thunderclouds squatted on the city like one of those unimaginably huge alien spaceships in that movie. A sense of oppression was thick on the ground. The venue turned out to be a garish pizzeria alongside an intersection just a few minutes’ walk from the hotel. It looked borderline okay, and the alternatives were even more uninspiring, as indeed was the whole area. There were the vestiges of a straggling roadside town now bypassed by the autostrada, but it mostly consisted of dormitory apartment blocks whose commuting owners ate at home, and bars and fast food outlets for students from the 1970s university slab stretching away like the Great Wall of China across the line of hills to the west.
When Tom arrived, there were a dozen students there, hanging out rather than actually eating, their voices struggling to be heard above a barrage of rap music sweetened by Italian vowels. The decor was upscale public lavatory, only with bleached-out halogen lighting, mirrors just about everywhere except the floor, and clunky plastic tables and chairs in primary colours like a play-set for giant toddlers. That was okay. Tom had already figured out that there were few things to touch Italian taste at its best and none to equal it at its worst.
He ordered a beer and found himself wondering what Mirella was going to wear. The two outfits he had seen her in so far had been so different that they didn’t provide much of a clue. In fact, thinking back, Tom realised that almost everything had been different on each occasion: the style of her hair, the make-up she wore, even her body language. It was almost as if the person he had seen on those two occasions had not in fact been the same but a pair of identical twins, structurally similar but each with a completely different personality. He smiled to himself at the absurd thought. Anyway, identical twins might just about be possible, but triplets would be pushing it, so pretty soon he’d get a take on who she really was — or rather, who she wanted him to think she was. Tom found this final insight rather disturbing. I’d never have had an idea like that back home, he thought. This place is complexing me. He wasn’t sure whether he was entirely comfortable with that.
The answer to his question about her appearance proved to be yet another enigma, so different from either of her previous personae that Tom didn’t even recognise her until she sat down at his table. Beneath a bulky blue padded coat she was wearing a prim suit in a clashing shade of muddy brown. No make-up, no jewellery, her hair drawn fiercely back and bunched in a tight bun. All in all, she looked like a small-town dental hygienist dolled up for a tough job interview in the big city. Guess I’m not going to get laid tonight, thought Tom, although under the circumstances there wouldn’t have been any chance of that anyway.
‘You seem surprised to see me,’ Mirella said.
Tom didn’t have a ready answer, so he just smiled.
‘Now then,’ she went on, ‘you told me your name on the phone but I didn’t understand it.’
‘It’s Tom. Thomas. Tommaso.’
‘Tommaso.’
He loved the way she lingered on the double consonant, caressing it with her lips as though reluctant to let it go.
‘ Un bel nome.’
A surly servitor appeared at their table. Mirella ordered some kind of pizza. Tom said he would have the same.
‘So you’re staying out here?’
Tom nodded.
‘Just around the corner. The Rende International Residence.’
‘Oh, you must be rich! I’ve only been there once, when one of my friends got married. They held the wedding reception there. Isn’t it very expensive?’
‘Well, I’m not paying. I’ve been hired by a friend of my father’s who’s working for an American film company. They’re planning to make a movie here, only he doesn’t speak Italian so he needs me to translate for him. Not my normal line of work, but you know what they say — another day, another dolore. I mean dollaro.’
‘Films! Oddio, che bello! I’ve always wanted to work in films.’
‘Well, you’ve certainly got the looks for it!’
What a lame, pathetic, dumbfuck line, he thought, but she seemed pleased by the compliment.
‘It isn’t as glamorous as it sounds,’ Tom went on quickly, with what he hoped was just the right touch of sophisticated world-weariness. ‘But what about you? Do you work?’
Mirella responded with a light, airy explosion of breath and upward dab of her startling eyes that perfectly expressed disgust, contempt and fatalistic resignation.
‘An office job with the provincial authorities. It’s very secure, very boring and I know precisely how much I’ll be earning when I reach retirement age.’
The food came.
‘So what do you do?’ Mirella asked after scarfing down two slabs of pizza with admirable greed and concentration.
‘I’m a chef. Trained, qualified and with good references. I’ve worked at some celebrity restaurants in the United States and now I’m thinking of moving here and opening up my own place. This is where my roots are, after all.’
‘So you said. What’s your family name?’
Tom paused over a long swallow of beer. If he told her the truth, she would immediately make the connection to his murdered father, who had inflicted enough damage in years gone by. Tom did not intend to let him strangle this relationship at birth from beyond the grave.
‘I’m not entirely sure,’ he said. ‘My father’s family was certainly Calabrian, but they changed their name when they moved to America and I haven’t had time to follow up that angle. These film people work you pretty hard! I’ll need to do some research in the archives. Perhaps you could help with that, Mirella. Anyway, we can talk about that some other time. In the end, I’m more interested in my future than my past.’
‘The essential is to keep them in balance.’
And so it went on. They continued to make pleasant small talk, but the conversation refused to get hot. The place itself didn’t help — it had by now been invaded by a gang of languid adolescents wearing baggy jeans with the crotch down by their knees — but Tom also sensed an inner reticence in Mirella, a desire to avoid moving towards intimacy. That was typically Calabrian, of course, and for that matter he himself had been parsimonious with the truth, but it perhaps explained why he found himself being rather more frank than he had intended when she asked her next question, as if to show her the way, to demonstrate that he was prepared to risk trusting her.
‘But I’ve also heard that this movie you’re talking about is not going to happen. Didn’t you see that interview on television with Luciano Aldobrandini? He claimed the whole thing was a fraud!’
Tom sighed theatrically.
‘He may be right. Listen, Mirella. This is in the strictest confidence, but there’s another project involved.’
By now she had finished eating, in her graceful, dedicated, methodical way, and was all attention.
‘What’s that?’
‘They think they’ve found Alaric’s tomb.’
