Mozzarella Most Murderous (9 page)

Why? I wondered uneasily. What had they been doing for two days if not talking chemistry? Instead of replying to questions about chemistry, Jason remarked that it was lucky Sibyl had known a hotel where they could stay. Hank chuckled and said he hoped they had managed to get two rooms and that if he hadn’t trusted his wife implicitly, he might have been jealous. Having recently worried about my husband taking off for Austin with a female graduate student and realizing that his greeting to me had been little more than a nod and a comment that he’d finally made it to Sorrento, I found that I did
not
trust my husband implicitly, a trust I had taken for granted for years. I was jealous.

“Have you been enjoying yourself?” Jason asked across the table.

“Certainly,” I said rather stiffly. “You’ve missed an excellent dinner.”

“The airline fed us on the flight to make up for the inconvenience of being held up two days in Paris,” he replied. “What happened to your face?” He sounded rather suspicious, as if I’d been injured while doing something he disapproved of.

“I was attacked by a dog,” I replied coolly.

“Your wife has had a bad time of it, Signor,” said Bianca gaily from her place by our host. “Not only did the Guillots’ poodle knock heads with her, but before that she found the corpse of our host’s secretary dead in the pool outside her room. I think Carolyn will need much comforting, Signor Blue.”

“Jason,” he corrected her, to which she replied with her own name. “I doubt that my wife is in need of comforting. She’s become quite accustomed to corpses, haven’t you, Carolyn?”

I could see the shock on the faces around the table, particularly Bianca’s. She was undoubtedly amazed by my ill luck in finding more than one dead body, but Jason needn’t have said that. Now everyone was looking at me strangely, except our hostess, who picked up on Bianca’s name and said, “What a quaint, old-fashioned name, Signora Massoni,” to which Bianca said, “Yes, isn’t it? My mother named me after the good daughter in Shakespeare’s
The Taming of the Shrew
. She played the part in the days when she was an actress.”

“Thank God she didn’t play Kate,” said Lorenzo. “I’d have hated to spend my life with a shrew.”

“An actress?” mused Constanza Ricci-Tassone, raising her eyebrows as if she’d never heard of an actress who was also someone’s mother. “How interesting. And were you an actress as well, Signora Massoni? Before your marriage?”

“No,” said Bianca, doing a perfect imitation of Constanza’s condescending smile. “I was a tour guide. Lorenzo’s mother visited Rome from Lucca and took my tour. A year later when Lorenzo moved to Rome, she gave him my name and telephone number. You might say ours was an arranged marriage.”

“And how does one become a tour guide?” asked Constanza. “I would be most interested to know.”

I had to swallow a sigh. Given the developing rancor between Bianca and our hostess, the chances of Bianca getting any useful information from the Riccis about Paolina seemed small.

“I can’t speak for other tour guides, but I became one by majoring at university in history and foreign languages.”

“She has an amazing facility for languages,” said Lorenzo proudly. “And it seems to be genetic. Our children can do pretty well in three languages besides Italian. They certainly didn’t get that from me. I hated German and French and only forced myself to master English because it’s the lingua franca of science.”

Constanza smiled thinly; her husband asked Bianca if he could offer her a job; and the Guillots, who had begun to look irritated when I mentioned their dog, looked even angrier when Lorenzo said he’d hated studying French. I wondered what they thought about English being the “lingua franca.” I assumed franca referred to French, which had once been the language of diplomacy, if not science.

Also, given how unpleasant our hostess was being to Bianca, possibly because her husband was showing an interest in the expectant mother, I had to wonder whether Constanza was the person who had killed Paolina because Signor Ricci had been interested in his secretary. Now I had two suspects: the husband and the wife. Possibly three if I counted the toxicologist from Catania. Perhaps he had wept over Paolina’s death out of guilt.

“As interesting as your history is Signora Massoni,” said our hostess, “I must interrupt the telling to explain the
dulce
which is being served.
Mosto di Ficodindia
. It is a dish that you are not likely to find in your respective countries because it is made from the prickly pear cactus that grows at the foot of our volcano.”

For a moment I forgot about Paolina and my unease about my husband, distracted by the interesting dessert placed in front of me. “If growing near a volcano isn’t absolutely necessary,” I said to my hostess, “I have prickly pear cactus in my yard.” I tasted the mold, which was topped by candied orange peel and roasted almonds. “Wonderful!” I exclaimed. Constanza and I smiled at one another. At least she didn’t dislike me. Perhaps I should have sat with the Riccis, even if I didn’t speak Italian. “This should be very popular in El Paso since we have the cactus, and it is commonly eaten in one form or another by the Hispanic population.”

The dinner wound down with espresso and Limoncello, the most popular liqueur of the Campania. Then we diners rose and drifted toward the lobby and our rooms. Jason said to Sibyl that he’d see her the next day and suggested that they continue their discussion at lunch. Hank then laughed and said to me that I needn’t feel left out because we were going to explore the beauties of the Amalfi Coast tomorrow while our spouses talked about dull science.

I said, “Umph,” because the Guillots’ dog had left his isolation beside the wall and then pulled away from his mistress to take another shot at me. “Stop that,” I snapped. Thank goodness, he desisted after licking my hand. My ankles and the hose around them still felt damp from his under-the-table attack.

Meanwhile, Hank was inviting the other ladies to join us in the morning, saying his rental car might be a convertible, but he thought it would hold five or six. Bianca accepted immediately, as did Mrs. Stackpole, with a flutter of excitement over the new plants she expected to see. Albertine Guillot announced that she had already seen the Amalfi Coast and planned to rest on her balcony with a good book. Signora Ricci-Tassone assured us that she herself would take us to the Roman ruins in Pompeii on the following day, but that tomorrow she had to see to conference arrangements since her husband’s secretary had so foolishly killed herself, and at such an inconvenient time.

She was certainly intent on convincing us that Paolina’s death was a suicide, while I was surer than ever that it was murder.

That opinion caused harsh words between Jason and me when we got to our room. “For God’s sake, Carolyn,” he said. “Can’t you leave it alone? The police will sort it out.”

“You haven’t met them,” I retorted, but he wasn’t paying attention. He had already turned away and punched his pillow several times in preparation for sleep.

It wasn’t so long ago that, after a separation, Jason and I would have fallen into bed to make love rather than to sleep. The thought made me very sad and kept me awake.

 

If America is the home of fast food, Italy is the home of slow food, a country where ninety-seven percent of the food consumed is not delivered from behind a counter less than five minutes after being ordered. Italians like home cooking, which is interesting because until the nineteenth century, women were not considered fit to prepare fine food. Misanthropic writers said women were dirty, lazy, drunken practitioners of witchcraft. Households where women did the cooking were poor households. In the kitchens of the rich, only the lowliest tasks were considered suitable for females.

But now every Italian male loves not only his mama, but his mama’s cooking, which features regional and traditional recipes made with the fresh products for which the various regions are famous or food products produced in small factories, for instance the dried pastas and canned San Marzano tomatoes of the Campania.

So what would an Italian choose instead of a fast-food hamburger? How about this very Italian hamburger patty? You could even put it on a round of toast grilled and drizzled with garlic olive oil.

 

A second coat
of makeup didn’t help any more than the first. The colorful bruise on my cheek, courtesy of Charles de Gaulle, canine abuser of American ladies, was only slightly less obvious. I wondered if the periwinkle blue blouse and slacks I had chosen to wear were bringing out the blue of the injury the way a blue dress is said to bring out the color of one’s eyes. I could change my clothes certainly, but there was nothing to be done about my eye. From the green lacquered armoire, I selected an off-white jacket and held it up to my shoulders in front of the mirror inside the door. No help at all. Either the bruise had darkened or the jacket’s color made it seem so. At least my cheekbone had stopped aching.

Just as I was about to try a black jacket, someone knocked on my door. Assuming it to be the maid, I opened the door without inquiring, only to be faced by Albertine Guillot, looking wonderfully chic at such an early hour in the morning in her perfectly cut black dress and gold earrings. Her dog, thank goodness, was nowhere in sight.

“Just as I feared,” she said, accent dripping with French hauteur. “Your face looks very battered. However, I have come prepared to help you with that problem,” and she brushed right by me without even asking my permission to enter the room. How did she plan to help? Put a bag over my head?

She studied the room, and then proceeded to drag a tall stool from the bar toward the window, drawing open both the green and beige striped drapes and the white sheers behind them. “Sit here, Madame Blue,” she ordered. “I can see that you applied makeup in front of the mirror in your bath. I myself find that natural light is much more effective, but then you Americans are so naïve in matters of appearance.”

Since I had continued to stand still, amazed by her effrontery, she took my arm and escorted me to the wicker-backed stool. However, once she had me perched there, she was not happy with her access to my face. “You are too tall,” she complained. “And why do you not wear eye makeup? A blonde such as yourself will lose the effect of the eyes without the proper color on eyebrows, lids, and lashes.” She opened a capacious handbag and laid out various pots, brushes, and the like on a table by the window.

“Really, Mrs. Guillot—” I protested.

She waved me to silence and began to remove, with brisk and painful strokes of some stinging liquid on cotton, the two coats of foundation I had applied. “Your skin is quite good,” she remarked, “for a woman of your age and coloring.”

“How very kind of you to say so,” I muttered.

“It has been my observation that you fair-skinned Germanic types tend to develop fine lines a bit early.”

“Earlier than you dark-skinned Mediterranean types?” I asked.

“Exactly.” She studied the bruised side of my face and then selected a small pot of thick white stuff, which she patted, again painfully, onto my injuries.

Clown makeup? I’d have to remove it as soon as I managed to get her out of my room.

“Poor Charles de Gaulle,” she murmured. “We were served a spicy pasta on the plane from Milan, and he ate it up before I could stop him. I attribute his naughty behavior yesterday afternoon and evening to a serious case of indigestion.”

The pasty white stuff dried almost immediately. I could feel it draw against my skin.

“I do hope you understand,” she continued.

I didn’t, of course. If he was sick, why hadn’t she left him in the room or taken him to a vet?

“I had ordered him something I thought might prove agreeable to him, but the Italians are so inefficient. The stewardess gave us all the same meal and then patted my poor dog on the head with some adoring comment when he plunged his nose into the dish and all but inhaled the whole serving, garlic bread and all.” She was now smoothing foundation over the white paste and the rest of my face. “I assure you that the stewardess was not so adoring when he had an accident on the seat. In fact, she was quite insulting, although the incident was entirely the fault of her incompetence.” Mrs. Guillot selected a pot of rouge, contemplated the color, and nodded.