Dying For Siena (8 page)

“Siena?” Nick’s voice was sharp. “So that’s why—”
That’s why she wasn’t answering.
He’d called a thousand times, had buzzed her doorbell until his own head had buzzed. “What’s she doing in Siena?”

“A conference. I just told you that, Nick.” Lou gave him a withering glare.

It’s unfortunate,
Nick thought,
that Lou’s tongue is just as sharp as her eyes.

“Start paying some attention here. This is your life.”

“So…” Nick tried to keep his voice casual. “When is she coming back?” Maybe he could pick her up at the airport, pick up where they left off…

“Do you know,” Lou frowned, “I didn’t ask. I was too busy telling her how pretty Siena was and how much she was going to enjoy it. I told her all our Rossi cousins lived in Siena. I gave Dante a quick call and told him to look her up.”

“Dante!” Nick half rose out of his chair, then put a hand to his head. He’d hurt himself with his own voice. “Why would you want to call
Dante
? Why not Mike?” Mike was on the other side of forty, overweight and happily married with two kids.

“Because.” Lou glared at him. “Dante has more time to show her the sights. But you’re evading, Nick. I want to know exactly what happened between you and Faith. And I especially want to know why Faith looked so unhappy when I mentioned your name.”

But Nick wasn’t listening. “If Dante puts the move on her, I swear I’ll kill him.” Nick’s head swiveled at the sound of the phone and he groaned. “Get that, will you, Lou? I don’t want to talk to anyone.”

“Okay.” Lou rose gracefully. “But don’t think you’re off the hook. Hello? Hello?” She hung up. “Wrong number. But come to think of it, I left you a message on your answering service. Have you been listening to your messages?”

“Ah…no.”

“You shouldn’t be let out loose.” Lou looked around. “Where’s the machine?”

“In the gulag. I didn’t want to be disturbed.”

Lou made an exasperated noise and disappeared. Nick was cautiously contemplating the idea of food for the first time in two days when Lou called out. “Nick, I think you’d better come here and listen to this.”

“If it’s Dee Dee, I don’t want to know.” Nick limped to the gulag. “She’s annoying enough in person.”

“No,” Lou said slowly. “It wasn’t Dee Dee. It was Dante.” Her voice was odd.

“What?” he asked Lou. “What did he say? Is Faith all right? Has he been putting some moves on her?”

Instead of answering, Lou pressed the replay button and Dante’s voice came on. “Nick, I have some good news and some bad news…”

“Ah, Faith Murphy. Just the person I was looking for,” Leonardo Gori, the head of the Siena University Math Department, said.

Faith had just entered into the cloister after lunch. Lunch had been subdued, what with a murder and all. Luckily, it had been delicious, so nobody had been overly bothered by the lack of conversation.

She looked up at Professor Gori. She was in awe of him. He had a solid reputation as one of the most original thinkers in the field of econometrics. He was also the driving force behind the Siena Quantitative Methods Seminar, arguably one of the most important math seminars in the world. It also didn’t hurt that he was incredibly good-looking, in a tweedy sort of way.

She was here as an interloper. What did he want with her?

Be cool, be suave,
she told herself. “Ah—”

“Terrible business, this.” He rocked back slightly on his chic loafers. “We’re so sorry at the loss of Professor Kane.”

“Ah—”

“Indeed,” he said. “A great loss to mathematics. However, I’m afraid this will mean some reorganization of the conference as well. I was wondering whether I could have a word or two with you in private.” Professor Gori smiled gently at her. “If you have the time, of course.”

“Of course,” Faith murmured.
Not have time for Leonardo Gori?
Unless, of course, he was going to tell her she wasn’t welcome anymore, now she wasn’t riding on Roland Kane’s coattails.

He led them into a large room directly opposite the entrance. It was elaborately frescoed and was furnished with museum-quality antiques. Two very attractive secretaries were doing what looked like nothing at all. But they were doing it very elegantly.

Faith followed Professor Gori into an inner study, as heartbreakingly beautiful as the outer study, only less elaborate. A long antique refectory table, a throne-like straight-backed chair with iron studs bracketing the leather padding, another chair and a sideboard made up the decor.

“Please sit down,” Professor Gori said, and Faith realized it was the second time he’d said it while she’d gone into a fugue over his furniture.

“Sorry,” she murmured, sitting down gingerly on an antique chair that probably cost more than she would ever earn in her lifetime. It was sturdier than it looked, though, and she relaxed slightly.

He sat down behind another one of those amazing antique desks, where generations of monks had prayed or eaten or done whatever it was monks did.

“Well,” he said, and stopped.

Faith tried to look serious and smart and relaxed, while bracing herself. Professor Gori was probably going to give her one of Roland Kane’s patented stay-out-of-trouble-don’t-bother-your-betters-stay-quiet-and-pretend-you’re-not-there lectures.

“I’m delighted at this opportunity to talk to you, Doctor Murphy.” He put his clasped hands on the table and smiled.

Faith started. Her doctorate was brand-new and she still wasn’t used to the title. Not that anyone at Deerfield would call her doctor anyway. She just didn’t look the part.

“Just Faith, please, professor,” she said. Professor Gori was a big name internationally. The idea of him calling her doctor was ludicrous.

“Then you must call me Leonardo, Faith,” he replied and smiled.

Faith blinked, completely floored. Calling Professor Gori “Leonardo” was like…was like calling the Pope “Johnnie”. Not in this lifetime.
“Oh, I couldn’t—”

“Of course you must.” He smiled again and Faith started paying attention.

He’d just been Professor Gori before. An important man in his field and head of one of the most prestigious university departments on earth. She had hardly considered him a human being—he was just another one of those remote and faceless male authority figures her life seemed to be so full of.

But now she looked more closely. Like everything else in this country, seemingly, he was good-looking. Not lavishly good-looking like the Rossis, true, but handsome in a rather austere manner.

Though the day was already heating up, he was in a tan polished cotton suit with a cream cotton shirt, and blue and yellow silk tie. He looked as if his sweat glands had been surgically removed.

But aside from his looks, there was a gentleness to his face, a kindness in his eyes, and she felt herself relaxing. Instinctively, she knew she didn’t have to weigh every word and brace herself against nasty comments. He was as far from Roland Kane as was possible and still be of the same gender and species.

“I’m delighted you’ve finally decided to accept our invitation, Faith. We were very disappointed you couldn’t come last year. I was very much looking forward to discussing the ideas on hysteresis you published in
Mathematica
. Your report on system dynamics is just fascinating. And I found your thesis on tipping behavior thoroughly compelling.

“As a matter of fact, that’s what I wanted to discuss with you. Would you be willing to moderate our panel on tipping behavior? It’s a topic of great interest nowadays and I feel you’d be best positioned to cover all angles. We’d want to cover economics and public health policy, and I know you’ve done some work on that.”

He stopped and smiled at her, his head tilted inquisitively.

Faith blinked and barely stopped herself from looking around to see who he was addressing. Normally quick, it took her a moment to process what he’d said because it sounded so outlandish.

Would she be willing to moderate a panel of world-famous experts on one of the hottest topics around? Talk about cutting-edge research with some of the finest minds on earth?

Well…yes, as a matter of fact.
She’d also be willing to accept a winning lottery ticket, marry Mel Gibson and accept the Nobel Peace Prize.

“Faith?” Professor Gori—Leonardo—was looking at her quizzically. “Would you have a problem with that? Because if you do, if you’d rather moderate another panel, pseudo-quantitation, say, that’s fine, too. I just thought that maybe you’d—”

Faith was jolted out of her surprise-induced stupor. “No!” She lowered her voice. “Ah, no. No, that’s not it at all. I’d be…delighted to moderate the tipping panel. But…” She shook her head to see if she could loosen a few neurons.

She thought she’d heard him say…

“What was that about not accepting your invitation last year? I’m afraid I don’t understand,” she said.

This time last year she’d been finishing up her paper for
Mathematica
, working madly on her
PhD, and doing the usual graduate student scut work—teaching no-brainer summer remedial classes for jocks—and getting ready to move to Deerfield.

Her contract had started on July first. She was absolutely positively certain that no invitation to Siena, Italy, had been forthcoming.

Leonardo frowned. “Well, as I said, we were really sorry you couldn’t accept our invitation last year.”

“Professor Gori…Leonardo. I didn’t receive an invitation last year. Actually, I didn’t receive an invitation this year either. I’m only here because Tim Gresham fell ill at the last minute. And Professor Kane made it quite clear he wasn’t particularly happy I was along.”

“I…see.” He sat back and steepled his fingers, looking
très
European Intellectual. “Well, my dear, we most certainly did issue you an invitation to participate in the Quantitative Methods Seminar last year and this year. We sent the invitation care of Professor Kane, since we’d heard you would technically be under contract with St. Vincent’s by the time the conference started.

“Professor Kane said that you were too busy with the move to Deerfield last year. And he said he couldn’t spare you this year. We were very disappointed and made this known to Professor Kane. Forcefully. And I, personally, was delighted when I saw last night that you were able to come.”

Faith was silent. She could feel her heart swell with resentment and anger that she hadn’t been the one to slip a knife into Kane’s black heart. Being invited to participate in the Quantitative Methods Seminar was considered a signal honor in her field. He knew that. Kane had kept her from it last year and had done his very best to make sure she couldn’t come this year.

When she spoke, her voice was thick with repressed anger. “I was told about the trip here less than four hours before departure.”

“I see,” Leonardo said again. He gave a little sigh, an Italian masterpiece of subtle expressiveness.
Yes, Professor Kane was a shit
, that sigh said,
but he was also a colleague and important in our field and I can’t come right out and say what I think of him.
“I’m afraid that Roland Kane, for all his brilliance as a mathematician, was a very difficult character.”

“Yes,” Faith said shortly, her jaw muscles bunching.

Another elegant, little sigh and a gentle straightening out of the razor-sharp crease of his trousers.

“Well,” he said, looking down at his perfectly buffed and filed fingernails. “Sadly, Professor Kane’s…temperament is no longer a problem. And I can assure you we are delighted to have you. Tell me, Faith,” he leaned forward. “Did you read Dunhatton’s paper on system dynamics?”

“Sure.” Faith leaned forward, too. “I think it will have a number of interesting applications. For example, it would be fun to come up with a sort of management flight simulator—a little self-contained world, where we could use a company’s input to define the parameters. The executive staff could try out decisions and see what the short-term and long-term fallout would be.”

“Excellent.” He beamed. “This year is going to be exceptionally interesting. We have Yamaki from Nogura and Jean-Pierre Daumier from The Pasteur Institute. You’ll enjoy what he’s done on the epidemiology of AIDS. It’s going to be an interesting week.” He picked up a dog-eared copy of the program. “Let’s see, tomorrow we’re going to have registration from eight to nine, though the desk will be open all morning. We’ll have an early lunch here and then we’re starting again at two.

“I’d like the work to be over by 5:00 because most of the participants will want to get down to Siena to see the trial heat of the
Palio
.” He smiled at her blank look. “That’s our local horse race. It’s—” he pursed his lips, “—it’s a deeply felt event in Siena. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.

“And coming back to our business, I suggest you co-chair Critical Points in Hysteresis with Murauer in room four, from 3:00 to 4:15, and moderate the Tipping Behavior Panel from 4:30 to 5:30. We’ll see about the other days as we go along. Is that all right with you?”

Thoughts of Roland Kane’s perfidy fled from her head and, for a second, Faith forgot how much she hated him.

It was happening. It was finally happening. Eighteen long, miserable years in Sophie and eight long, hard, empty years putting herself through school and graduate school, and then this last year at St. Vincent’s under Kane, which had been unpleasant, to put it mildly.

Who the hell cared? It was over. She was in this gorgeous country on a beautiful summer day and this wonderful Italian man had just handed her the keys to the kingdom.