Tahoe Blue Fire (An Owen McKenna Mystery Thriller Book 13) (17 page)

TWENTY-FOUR

We’d come in separate vehicles, so I said goodbye to both of them and joined Spot in the Jeep. My vehicle had been parked in the shade as twilight descended, so I let it warm up as I dialed Olga Decker’s number. She’d just been available to text Street, so it might be my best chance to get her on a phone call.

She answered fast. “Street Casey texted me your name, so I white-listed Owen McKenna in my contacts folder. Otherwise, your call would have gone directly to the phone call composting heap, there to rot in company with telemarketing pitches.”

Whatever I expected a Classics scholar to say, it wasn’t that.

I gave Olga a brief explanation of my current job investigating a murder that may have a connection to the Medicis of Italian Renaissance days.

“Quite the extravagant proposition,” she said. “Entertaining, at least, if not realistic.”

“Could you spare a few minutes sometime in the next few days?”

“Well, I’m on writing sequester. Can’t you talk right now? I can spare a couple of minutes.”

“Yes, of course. Here’s my situation. I need to solve a puzzle, and I very much hope you can help. Two women and a man were murdered. As one of the victims was shot and lay dying, she wrote two words on a note. ‘Medicis BFF.’ That woman and one of the other victims were enthusiastic about the Italian Renaissance. Before they were killed, I believe they were excited about something connected to the Renaissance. I’m trying to figure out what Medicis BFF refers to.”

I could hear Olga Decker breathing. “Some of my students use BFF as an acronym for best friend forever.”

“Right.”

“Which has nothing to do with usage in the era of the Medicis. So if this is really about the Medicis, the woman who wrote the note was probably referring to something other than best friend forever.”

“And whatever that thing is,” I said, “it’s possible it was motive for the murders.”

“I can’t help you,” she said. “I could teach a four-credit course on the Medici family, but this is meaningless to me.”

“Can you point me toward someone who might be of help?”

“I can point you to lots of people, but I have no belief that you would find anyone who knows more than I.”

“I’d like to ask anyone I can find,” I said.

“Okay, here’s a remote possibility. Two years ago, I had an exchange student named Antonella Porto from Florence, the epicenter of the Medici family dynasty and the most important town of the Italian Renaissance. This student often referred to a legendary professor she had at the University of Florence, a man who, like some of Berkeley’s finest scholars and me, believes it is good to reach down and teach intro classes to freshmen and sophomores. It’s remedial work, believe me, but it is eye-opening to see where young college students are in their nascent brain development.”

“Does this professor specialize in the Renaissance?”

“More than that. Antonella said that, in Italy, he is considered the foremost Medici scholar in the world. Of course, whether that is true or not, I don’t know. As with most careers, the reputations of professors are made more on the basis of their charisma than on their knowledge.”

“Did your exchange student mention his name?”

“Oh, you wouldn’t believe. It was as if she belonged to a cult, and this man was the leader they worshiped. She mentioned him constantly. I’ve never heard such fawning adoration. His name is Drago. Professore Giovanni Drago. The name stuck with me because of its Italian meaning of Dragon. Believe me when I say that I was glad to have Antonella go back to Italy just so that I would never have to hear her say his name again.”

“Any idea how I would contact this Professor Drago?”

“You mean phone number and email? No. Antonella Porto made him sound like royalty. You’re not going to get royalty on the phone, are you. Now maybe if you speak Italian, you could make some international phone calls. But to hear Ms. Porto tell it, you would probably have to visit. And when you get off the plane, just ask for Professor Drago. Surely, everyone in all of Italy knows this celebrity.”

“You don’t like this guy very much, do you?”

“I’ve seen professors with that kind of popularity in this country. They are all self-aggrandizing jerks who care more about the attentions of the cute students, male or female, than they do about the quality of their writing, their lectures, or their research.”

“If there isn’t an easy way to contact Drago, what about contacting Antonella Porto?”

“Well, I certainly don’t carry her number around in my head. I suppose you could go to the university and ask the other students coming and going. Or you could Google her. That probably works as well for Italian girls as for American girls. They’re all addicted to their Facebook presentations. But I’ve gone overtime. I have to go.”

“Thanks for your help,” I said as she hung up.

TWENTY-FIVE

The next morning, I got busy on the phone and on the computer, trying every way I could think of to contact Professor Drago in Italy. But I could find no number or email. Neither could I find anyone who would confess to knowing him and be willing to take him a message. Nor could I find contact info for his student Antonella Porto.

Frustrated, I headed over to Street’s bug lab. Her VW beetle was parked in front. She answered my knock, opening the door with one hand and holding a jar of white rice in the other. Spot pushed in past her, exploring the thousand scents of bugs, which, I knew from experience, are not like the scents of flowers.

“Lunch?” I said, looking at her jar of rice. “Oh, I guess not. The rice is moving.”

“Maggots,” she said, “endlessly offering themselves for science. And by the way, maggots have much more protein than rice. Many people around the world eat them. It’s considered a delicacy in some cultures.”

“Not my culture.” I stepped past her, giving wide berth to her jar.

“Don’t be scared,” she said. “It’s not like they’re going to bite you.”

“So you say. You were wrong once before.”

“Really? When was I wrong?”

“When you said I’d like Brussels sprouts better than cheeseburgers.”

“That was clearly a joke,” she said. “Hyperbole in pursuit of levity, which I hoped would lead to a playful, open-minded desire to try new foods.”

“Yes,” I said. “I did try Brussels sprouts. And I might even like them if they were grilled and covered with melted cheese and lots of barbecue sauce.”

“Which is made of high fructose corn syrup. The whole point of Brussels sprouts is that they’re healthy.”

“As are maggots, so says you. Doesn’t mean I’ll eat them.”

“Stuck in your ways,” Street said.

“That’s good, because I’m stuck on you, too.”

Street set down her jar and hugged me. “Thanks.”

Spot saw us and immediately came over and thrust his nose between us, wedging us apart.

“Spot, can’t you see I’m trying to hug my sweetheart?”

He wagged.

Street let go of me and bent a bit so she could hug Spot.

“He wants in on the love,” she said.

“He wants you to hug him instead of me. And it’s working.”

“Yeah, he’s effective at this amore business. Everybody loves him.”

Spot was still wagging.

“Speaking of amore,” I said, “wanna take a trip with me to the amore capital of the world?”

Street let go of Spot and straightened up. “Are you going to Italia?”

“Your charming friend Olga said that the foremost Medici expert in the world is Professore Giovanni Drago, and he lives and works in Florence. I believe Scarlett Milo would want me to spend her funds investigating the Medicis up close. I also think she’d recognize that I would need an assistant on my travels.”

“Will I be assisting with amore as well?”

“Part of your duties, sì.”

“When would we leave?” Street asked.

I looked around at the shelves of jars of bugs in Street’s laboratory. “As soon as you can tear yourself away from your beloved companions.”

“How long would we be gone?”

“Don’t know. Just a few days. Adam is in the safehouse. I worry about leaving him for very long. But his stepsister Felicite says he has seizures roughly every two weeks, so he’s probably okay for a bit.”

“Have you appointed yourself protector of an athlete who - what did you say - is the size of a piano and can sprint like a race car?”

“Kinda,” I said. “He needs it when someone is trying to burn him and shoot at him.”

“I thought the shooter was aiming for his sister or you.”

“Yeah, but I also consider Adam a shooting target by association.”

“Well,” Street said, thinking. “It would take me some time to tie up loose ends, catch up on email, and get this place ready before I could travel overseas.” She looked around at her lab.

“So when do you think you could leave?”

“Probably not until tomorrow.”

“That long?” I said. She was amazing. “Okay, I’ll put off leaving until then.”

TWENTY-SIX

After Street’s agreement to join me, I once again looked up Antonella Porto, Olga Decker’s exchange student.

I found no contact information, but there were several Facebook pages and other websites with information on multiple Antonellas. One seemed especially promising as it mentioned her fascination with the Medicis of Florence. The same page also referred to her job at a Florentine restaurant called Trattoria da Tacito. I was able to find a phone number for the restaurant. But when I dialed, I got no answer. I’d have to pursue it when we got to Florence.

I called my bank and had them overnight in some Euros, and I reserved a pair of roundtrip tickets online. Diamond’s schedule for the next week was too heavy down in Carson Valley for him to babysit His Largeness up at my cabin, but he agreed to take Spot in at his abode.

The next morning, Street and Spot and I made the trip up and over Kingsbury Grade and down to Minden in Carson Valley. When Diamond opened his front door, Spot raced around Diamond’s yard to show his excitement, no doubt enjoying the feeling of grass instead of high altitude ice and snow between his toes. Spot didn’t even notice when we said goodbye and drove off, his standard reaction when faced with the prospect of hanging out with Diamond, the man who’d introduced him to danishes.

To get to Europe, Street and I first had to fly the opposite direction from Reno to Los Angeles on a small jet, rickety with age. The plane shook as if it were shivering from the cold at 35,000 feet, and the metallic banging from within its walls was so loud that the only possible source of noise was a hundred loose bolts bouncing around the plane’s ribs. At LAX, we waited for three hours, then walked onto a newer 747 stretch that was bigger than many ships. The plane spent an inordinate amount of time getting its lumbering bulk up to speed before it gradually lifted off and climbed up over the Pacific. The pilot put the beast into a big banking turn and held it until we were cruising northeast, the shortest route to Europe from L.A., going nearly over the North Pole. We flew into nighttime as we crossed the northern Rockies, cruised starlit skies across Hudson Bay and on to Greenland, then saw dawn as we came back southeast toward Ireland and Great Britain. After eleven hours and nine time zones in the air, we dropped down into Frankfurt and changed back onto another rattle-shake oldster for the third leg of our trip to Florence.

Soon after we crossed the glaciers that scoured the north slopes of the Swiss, French, and Italian Alps, we dropped down over the long, twisting waters of Lake Como and then out across the verdant fields of Northern Italy. There were sixteen shades of green in the patchwork of vineyards and forest and hay fields and vegetable farms. Stone farmhouses and barns dotted the landscape. As we descended closer to the ground, we saw sheep and pigs and horses. On the top of every tall hill were castles and churches in fortress towns. Rarely did we see any building that didn’t look hundreds of years old. Eventually, the rural land began to disappear under a profusion of structures. In the distance we could see the dome of the big famous church that was the center of Florence, the most significant of Northern Italy’s medieval city state towns.

Our first indication that Florence has one of the world’s shortest runways came when the captain publicly announced his concern about local rain showers and muttered that if the runway was wet he needed to know in advance so he could detour to Bologna. Apparently, the landing strip had dried enough, and he put the plane down in a quick-stop maneuver that was so hard and abrupt that it was like landing on an aircraft carrier and being caught by the cable that jerks you to a stop just before you pitch off the deck into the high seas. Our pilot knew his stuff, and our plane stopped rolling with an easy 15 or 20 feet to spare before the end of the runway.

Florence has no taxiway, so the plane about-faced and rolled halfway back down the runway before it turned off and parked on a lot not much bigger than the tarmac at a modern American gas station. We walked down the gangway stairs into spring Tuscan sunshine that was noticeably softer than Tahoe’s high-altitude scorch torch. Although Florence is farther north than Tahoe, it sits at much lower elevation, so there was no snow. Unlike the dry air of the Sierra, the Tuscan air was humid, and on the moist breeze were luscious floral scents over the verdant smells of the vineyards in the surrounding countryside.

The bus driver must have been a dodge’em-car champion. He threaded the big coach through medieval streets that had been generously built so that two people could walk abreast. I stared as he raced past ancient stone walls and signs and bicycles with margins of two inches. When the bus stopped at the Florence train station, 21 hours after we left Tahoe, we were happy to get off and begin transporting ourselves in that oldest, slowest, and most healthful way, the movement of walking a relief after the sarcophagus-sized space of mass transit seats.

We’d walked for only ten minutes when we came to the church that is shown in every depiction of Florence and was featured in an article in the airline magazine. It was huge and decorated with hundreds of impressive sculptures that nestled in little nooks on the outer walls. I’d learned from the article that the church, like much of Florence, was built during the Renaissance, which made it about 600 years old, the approximation of date necessary because those slow-poke Renaissance construction workers took over one hundred years to haul and carve and hand cut and stack all that stone. The church was bathed in golden light giving it a pink glow against the cerulean blue of the sky as the afternoon moved toward dusk.

“The duomo is something,” Street said.

“Duomo?”

“The Italian word for church.”

“Oh, right. I saw that in the magazine,” I said.

“Look at the crowds. And this is the off season.” Street gestured toward the masses holding up their phones to take pictures.

“Yeah. Old sells,” I said. “I thought our Spanish missions in California were old at two hundred forty years, but I guess that age wouldn’t impress these tourists.”

“I’m pretty sure most people think gigantic stone temples are more impressive than little wood and mud-brick missions.”

“Ah,” I said.

We turned down a side street. There was a nice doorway in a plain stone building, and on the wall was a little sign that said Residenza.

“You think this is a hotel?” Street asked.

“We could ask inside.”

I pulled open a huge wooden door with a brass doorknob in its center, and we walked into a small marble entry. A dark, narrow passage went back, and a well-lit stairway with an ornate cast iron railing rose up to the side.

“Your choice,” I said.

“Up,” Street said.

We took the stairs. A second floor hallway led past several doors to a small room with a desk.

“Buon giorno,” a woman said.

“Parla inglese, per favore?” Street said.

“Sì,” the woman said and then spoke rapid-fire Italian.

Street said a few Italian words mixed with English words. I heard “hotel” and “rooms” and the other woman spoke more fast Italian and they nodded and gestured and eventually Street turned to me and said, “Do you want this on your credit card?”

“It’s an expense that Scarlett Milo is covering postmortem, so yes,” I said as I pulled out my card, and the two women made the transaction. When they were done, the woman gave Street an actual metal key that inserts into a lock, and Street said “Grazie mille” twice.

Street turned to me. “We’re on the second floor.” She walked back down the hallway and headed up the next flight of stairs.

“You said we were on the second floor. We already came up one flight.”

“Right. This is Italia. The second floor is the third floor.”

“Then where is the third floor?”

“On the fourth floor,” she said.

We hiked up the stairs. “How did you know how to say all those Italian words?” I asked.

“When you were watching the movie on the plane, I was reading the phrase book.”

“Always the perfect student,” I said.

Our room was large and spare and beautiful, and had a polished oak floor, a fifteen-foot ceiling, crown moulding, heavy velvet drapes, and a partial view of the duomo out the tall narrow windows. “Ain’t like no Holiday Inn,” I said.

“Ain’t indeed,” Street said. “How lovely.”

We showered and headed out to wander the city and find dinner and libation in the form of pizza and Chianti.

The next morning, I got out the sheet on which I’d printed a Google map of the address for Trattoria da Tacito.

“Tell me again about this restaurant?” Street said.

“It was on a Facebook page that mentioned Antonella Porto, the exchange student I learned about from Olga Decker in Berkeley. Apparently, Trattoria da Tacito is where Antonella works.”

Street nodded and went into the bathroom.

I noticed that I’d printed the map at a large scale, so there were no street names anywhere near the little Google teardrop marker. The only thing to go on was the irregular pattern of streets and blocks that were all different shapes and sizes. I spread out the big store-bought map of Florence to compare with the Google map.

After a minute, Street came out of the bathroom, saw me staring at the map, and said, “Need help?”

I looked up. She was slipping a turquoise hairclip into her hair. It matched the turquoise of the lacy camisole that snugged around her torso and hung from string-sized shoulder straps. It also matched the turquoise underpants that were a design exercise in how to construct clothing using the least amount of fabric.

“If you don’t put on more clothes,” I said, “you’re the one who will need help restraining me. But if you do put on more clothes, then no one will know how color-coordinated your underthings are.”

“You will know.”

“That’s the problem,” I said. “How am I gonna focus on detecting?”

Street pulled on a thin, loose, drapey black sweater and tight black, elastic pants. She slipped her bare feet into pointy black shoes not much more substantial than ballet slippers. Last, she put on a silver necklace from which hung a tiny turquoise pendant.

“Better?” she said.

“Yes and no. Come help me with this map, but stand a little behind me so I can concentrate.”

She came near. She emanated the tiniest aroma of freesias.

I pointed to the maps. “No street names came through on the small map I printed. So I thought I could find the street shapes on the big map and tell where to go. But it’s like a jigsaw puzzle.”

“Those shapes are right here.” Street pointed.

“How did you find that so quick?”

“I have a Ph.D. in Entomology.”

“Learning about bugs teaches you map reading?”

“Yes, actually,” she said. “The patterns of Italian streets are like the tunnels and galleries that bark beetles carve under tree bark. Confusing, senseless, and utterly captivating. Anyway, half the streets on the big map don’t have names, either.”

“More frustration than captivation,” I said.

“You need to get in touch with your inner Italian romantic,” Street said. “Come on. We’ll find the restaurant by exploring.” She hung her passport pouch around her neck, slipped it under her sweater, picked up her little turquoise clutch, and moved to the door.