A Glancing Light

had very nearly been blown up; I had been told that things would be better if I were dead, or failing that, if I could at least have the good grace to act as if I were. Now I was being given the carabinieri version of a get-out-of- town-by-sunset-and-don't-come-back speech.

'Are you telling me not to come back here?' I said hotly.

 'I merely ask the question. You will admit my work has not been made simpler by your presence.'

It was hard to argue with that. 'There aren't any direct flights from Sicily to Seattle,' I told him. 'I'm coming back Sunday night at ten o'clock and I'm getting the first plane Monday morning—six-thirty, I think. I've already booked a room for Sunday night at the Europa. They're holding the rest of my luggage.' I didn't feel I had to tell him about Anne and Amsterdam.

'You arrive at ten at night and you leave at six-thirty the next morning?'

'Yes,' I said. 'You have to admit, even I couldn't screw things up too much in that amount of time.' You wouldn't guess it, but I was feeling pretty surly.

He nodded and rose. 'That will be acceptable. If you make your statement to Captain Lepido now, you can still be on the noon plane.'

'Fine.' God forbid that my continued existence in Bologna should complicate his life any more than necessary.

As we were going out the door he put a hand on my arm. 'A word of advice?'

I paused.

'When you get your luggage from the Europa. . . ?'

 'Yes?'

'Look inside.'

Chapter 15

Ugo Scoccimarro's frank, happy face was enough to expunge most of the morbid thoughts with which I'd been occupying myself on the flight from Bologna, and any gloomy remnants were blotted out by his exuberant Mediterranean bear hug of a greeting. This was not Clara Gozzi's discreet northern version, but the full Sicilian treatment: bone-cracking embrace, thunderous back-pummeling, noisy kiss on each cheek. And no slack mouthing at the empty air for Ugo, either. When he kissed you, he kissed you. The sensation was something like getting your cheek caught in a vacuum cleaner.

I hugged him in return. Seeing Ugo always made me feel that the world wasn't such a complicated place after all, that there was still room for simple pleasures, simple motives— maybe even simple explanations to complicated-seeming things, although I was starting to doubt it.

With a cupped hand he gently patted the side of my face where some bruising was still visible. 'You're all right now?' he asked in his broad Italian. 'It doesn't hurt?'

'Not at all.' I'd called a few days ago to fill him in on what had happened.

'And Max? He's better?'

'A little. It'll take time, though.'

'Ah, Cristoforo, if only I didn't ask the two of you to come get a drink with me, to walk with me to the station. If only—'

'Forget it, Ugo; it's not your fault. They were after Max. If they didn't get him then, they would've gotten him some other time.'

On the other hand, some other time I might not have been with him to absorb a great deal of gratuitous punishment. But this I dismissed as an unworthy thought. I clapped Ugo on the back. 'I'm glad to see you,' I said honestly.

'And I you. Look, here's Maria.'

'Chris, hello!' Ugo's wife called in English, and I received an embrace as openhearted if not quite as suffocating as Ugo's. 'You poor man!'

An animated, wiry woman a year or two older than Ugo, Mary Massey had been an accountant employed by the Americans at the Sigonella Air Force base when she'd met him at a St. Agatha's Day party in Catania. A few months later they were married, Mary for the first time, the widowed Ugo for the second.

It was a relationship of opposites: Mary's father was an American master sergeant from Pennsylvania, her mother an Italian bookkeeper from Messina, up the coast from Catania. Mary had spent eleven years in Philadelphia. Well read, well traveled, she had two college degrees (one American, one Italian), an inquisitive, intelligent mind, and a sometimes biting sense of humor. Ugo, as blunt as a watermelon, had left school in the fourth grade; had never been north of Naples or had the least desire to do so until Mary began dragging him off on yearly vacations; and still possessed, as far as I could tell, a world view better suited to the simple olive-grower he once was than to the business titan and international art collector he'd become.

The marriage shouldn't have lasted a year, but somehow they had clicked. Ugo, with plenty of native intelligence and his own rough charm, tolerated and actually seemed to enjoy Mary's barbed wit, and Mary was equally broad-minded about Ugo's Neanderthal opinions. When they didn't agree, which was all the time, they laughed and went on to the next subject. It had worked for them for six years, and from the look of them as we walked to the parking area—Ugo's hefty arm tenderly encircling Mary's fragile shoulders, Mary leaning into him— they were still going strong.

The airport was on the Plain of Catania, some distance south of the city. For the first few miles Ugo drove through a string of small villages and decaying stone farmhouses overlooking rocky land that would have seemed untillable if not for the evidence of scraggly rows of grapevines or stunted olive trees. The dark, small people with their creased faces; the hard land; the unadorned, whitewashed buildings made it seem like another world from Bologna. If not for the occasional caffe and tabaccheria signs in the villages, I would have thought we were in the Greek islands.

It was a sunny day, the first after two days of rain, and there were knots of women sitting outside to gossip and enjoy the warmth. Fashions hadn't changed much down here. Most of them wore the same black dresses and black shawls that I'd seen in photographs from their grandmothers' generation. And all but a few of them had their chairs turned away from the street so that they faced the blank white walls of the buildings a few feet behind them. It seemed odd to me, and I commented on it.

Ugo laughed. 'You don't find that in Catania or Palermo. These villages—they're centuries behind. The women keep their eyes away from the streets, the cars, so that they don't catch the eye of a man even accidentally. Quaint, don't you think?'

'Oppressive, don't you think?' Mary said in English, then translated for Ugo's benefit.

He shrugged. 'The old ways. There's a lot to be said for them. At least the women didn't talk back.' With another rumbling laugh he reached across and squeezed Mary's knee.

The open country gradually gave way to the sprawling southern reaches of Catania. Ugo went screeching through the twisting, narrow streets at the death-defying speed with which everyone down here seemed to drive, even in the city. It seemed a dreary place, with long rows of dark, low tenements and a lot of garbage in the streets. Many of the buildings were made of a repellent muddy-purple stone. These, I knew from my Michelin, were built from the lava with which Mt. Etna sporadically engulfed the city. Several times on the drive I had seen the conical volcano looming to the north, an elongated pancake of steam trailing from its peak.

Twice I watched in surprise as small, three-wheeled automobiles were pushed over the sidewalk and through what appeared to be the double front doors of ground-floor apartments. Another time I saw one of the cars through a window, standing in the middle of what was unmistakably the kitchen. A few feet away an aproned woman was chopping vegetables at the sink.

When I remarked on this, Ugo shrugged again, but didn't smile this time. 'Eh, it's an old city. The apartment