with a sharp clatter onto the ancient, stone-flagged floor.
‘Irina, nyet!’ Vladimir roars over my head.
The laundry worker lets out a wail and rips dirty towels out of my hands as fast as I can pick them up.
‘That’s a two hundred thousand dollar, one-of-a-kind bag,’ Gia says to Jurgen mildly as she bends down and gathers up Irina’s things. ‘But of course you’d know that.’
Workers begin darting over from everywhere to help the woman and me repack the laundry bag. Though I pretend not to notice, I feel their hands brush mine deliberately, feel their eyes raking my face. Everyone wants you, everyone loves you. It’s making me feel kind of queasy, all the attention.
Gia helps me to my feet and the people around me fall back reluctantly. ‘Don’t even get me started on your But I must have eeet little phone that you haven’t even learnt how to use properly yet, which is now probably broken thanks to Tyrannodon here …’ She hooks Irina’s bag back onto my shoulder, nodding at the crowd.
‘You’re attention-seeking again in some bizarre way I can’t fathom,’ she says. ‘I’ve never seen you lift a finger to help anyone if there wasn’t something in it for you. But now that you’ve picked up the germs of hundreds of past hotel guests, can we go?’
Vladimir claps his hands dismissively and the crowd scatters. He extends a spotless handkerchief in my direction and I wipe my hands with it. He takes it from me with his thumb and index finger and drops it disdainfully on the floor beside him. We continue through the room, to a doorway on the other side that leads to an internal staircase, away from that sea of expectant, devouring eyes. As we move up the stairwell, it’s suddenly eerily quiet and our footsteps echo on the uneven stone stairs, worn down from centuries of use. We walk up in single file, past two landings, not a single, living soul around, until we reach a pair of heavy steel doors. Vladimir pushes down hard on the panic bar running along the inside of the door on the right, meeting with unexpected resistance. He turns and exchanges a look with Jurgen over our heads. Together, both men put their shoulders to the door and force it open, hissing with the effort.
We stagger out onto Via Victor Hugo, into the teeth of a building gale. Even as I watch, black clouds hurtle across the sky, covering the sun. A long shadow seems to blanket the wide thoroughfare we are standing on, sweeping down its face, across the exteriors of all the graceful buildings crowded on either side, like a river of darkness. In the distance, through the man-made stone canyon, I catch a glimpse of the Piazza del Duomo — the Duomo Square — the Christmas tree and the softly gleaming cathedral rising at its far end like a mirage.
We’re quite some distance from the recessed circular drive of the hotel’s official entrance. According to plan, there are three glossy black luxury sedans with dark tinted windows illegally parked against the kerb, engines idling, each sporting a silver hood ornament in the shape of a delicate winged lady in flight. The cars are longer and wider than normal, with two rear doors instead of one, and they seem to be riding a little low to the ground, as if they might be armoured.
I wonder again how one lone skinny female could merit all this protection, be the centre of so much attention. I don’t know how Irina can stand living like this. It’s beginning to give me the creeps, the way everyone stares and whispers and desires.
Standing beside the first car is a heavy-set older guy in a tailored navy overcoat, who can only be Angelo. A younger coat-wearing giant, with a head of short, tight dark curls, who must be Carlo, is holding open one of the back doors to the third car. The eyes of both men light up when they see me, but then they dart anxious looks at the leaden ominous sky.
‘Is about time!’ Angelo calls out, looking back at me longingly.
‘Subito!’ Carlo snaps, though he, too, cannot look away from me for long.
The fierce gusting wind tears at the ends of my hair so that it ripples out behind me like a bright banner. All the fancy awnings and shutters along the street snap and creak, as the wind buffets them. The sky is an unnatural colour — steel grey with a hint of yellow in it — and the arctic conditions are enough to stop Gia in her tracks so that I almost collide with her back. With an oath, she knots her fancy scarves tightly around the lower half of her face before zipping her leather jacket right up under her neck. Vladimir and Jurgen scowl as they hunch their heavy shoulders against the bitter conditions and pull on matching pairs of black leather gloves, scanning opposite ends of the street continuously.
Vladimir moves forward and opens the back passenger side door to the second car, gesturing urgently for me to get inside as the wind throws grit in all our faces and threatens to snatch the stylish cloche hat right off my head and over the rooftops. Still, I hesitate, unwilling to be dragged back inside, back into Irina’s claustrophobic, over-protected, hothouse little life. I close my eyes and tilt my head back as if I could drink in the approaching tempest, transcend it.
‘What are you doing? Get moving!’ Gia yells through her veil of scarves as she stumbles in the direction of the third car. ‘See you at Giovanni’s. Just be prepared.’
‘Wait!’ I scream, raising my black-gloved hand in her direction.
Gia stops, looking back at me quizzically, and I shriek ‘Ryan!’ into the teeth of the wind. It’s not a question.
Gia hesitates as Carlo plucks at her arm. She throws his hand off and pivots on one heel, back in my direction. Carlo snarls in guttural Italian, but remains where he is, watching me, because that’s what he’s supposed to do, and what he can’t help doing.
Gia leans in towards me as I yell, ‘Bring him to me. As soon as you can.’
In reply, she shouts: ‘Mercy is alive and badly needs your help — have I got it?’
I nod vigorously and she gives me a thumbs-up, then shoves me in the direction of the second limo before stumbling back towards the third car and climbing into the back seat. Jurgen gets in beside her and Carlo swings into the seat facing theirs. The two rear doors slam shut in unison and I can no longer see them all behind the car’s blank, dark windows, though I can still feel their eyes on me.
Angelo’s waiting impatiently for Vladimir to get into the first limo, but the older man continues to watch me narrowly. There’s impatience in his voice when he suddenly bellows, ‘Bystro, Irina! Bystro!’ Hurry, he’s saying. Hurry. But there’s still that reluctance in me to re-enter Irina’s heavily regimented existence.
And something’s telling me to look around. It’s like an itch, like a small and nagging cut dragging at my attention. Something; but nothing I can really place.
The entire length of Via Victor Hugo is weirdly deserted. The old buildings lining both sides of the street have taken on a cold and sinister cast. They seem to loom inwards in the failing light, as if we have stepped into a painting by Dali, or Magritte.
I see that while I was talking to Gia, a cumulonimbus cloud of terrifying proportions has filled the sky immediately above us. Its ragged, billowing shape seems as wide as it is tall, and it’s outlined in a strange and brilliant corona, as if it has swallowed the sun. There’s distant lightning flickering at its heart that maybe only I can see. The strange mass seems to frame the graceful triangular Palladian roofline of the three-storey grey stone building across the road in a brilliant, numinous light. The extraordinary cloud formation is so beautiful that I can hardly look away. It seems almost familiar, like a portal to another world.
‘Irina!’ Vladimir shouts, but his voice seems remote and inconsequential, as if heard in a dream.
I can almost smell the approaching storm. There’s heavy rain on the way, a massive front that will hit the old city like a bomb, and I know with certainty that it will last for hours and obscure everything in its path. That cloud, it’s just the beginning of something terrible. A storm for the ages. They’ll talk about it for years to come.
I rip my eyes away from the sky and take a small grudging step towards Vladimir. But then I see something. A gleaming blur moving in an illogical fashion. Like a mobile patch of sunlight. Light where there shouldn’t be any light. I turn my head towards it, though when I try to follow it with my eyes, I don’t see it any more. Perhaps the surface gleam of slickly shining paving stones, or the electric light spilling out of the interiors of cafes and storefronts, is playing tricks on my senses.
Or maybe, remarks my inner demon, it does not wish to be seen. Not this time.
I frown.
Appare! I think. Show yourself.
And that’s when I feel it, faint but insistent. Like an energy at once hot and cold, hair-raising, like a hum, like vinegar in my bones. I know that feeling, have felt it before. Know its source. And it’s coming closer.
I scan my surroundings intently, see nothing. Though I can still feel it, almost hear the grating zing, zing of its movements. It’s far weaker, far fainter, than when I first encountered it on a city street in Australia a lifetime
