“Glaucus!” Olivia cried.
And then David heard another noise—a muffled groan—from the bedroom. He pushed the door wider with one finger and saw a man with a gag in his mouth, half-on and half-off the bed. His hands dangled above his head, tied with a phone cord to the bedstead. Dried blood was caked all over his face and neck.
As David rushed to his aid, Olivia appeared in the bedroom doorway, and said in horror, “Giorgio?”
By the time the ambulance had come and gone, and the police had finished interviewing Olivia, it was too late to make any of the flights David had hoped for. As far as the carabinieri were concerned, it had simply been a break-in, and the old boyfriend had come back to collect his stuff at just the wrong time. Olivia said she was missing some cheap jewelry, but that was about it. “I’m just glad he didn’t take any of my books,” she told the cops. “They’re the only valuable things in here.”
For much of the time, David had sat outside on the stoop, thinking and keeping his own counsel. It didn’t seem to have occurred, even to Olivia, that this could be anything more than a burglary gone awry. But to David, who had been nearly run over at the skating rink, it seemed like some very odd things had been happening since he’d gotten mixed up with Mrs. Van Owen. And was this one of them? Or was the strain on his nerves just getting to him? He checked his watch again, recalculating how quickly he could be on his way to Paris.
And when the last police car pulled away, Olivia settled down beside him and said, “Giorgio and I broke up a few months ago. He’d been on a sabbatical in Greece.”
“Then you’re okay?” David said, draping an arm consolingly around her shoulders.
She sighed, and fumblingly lighted a cigarette.
“You don’t need to stay here to look after Giorgio?”
“Him?” She blew out a cloud of smoke in disgust. “Let his new girlfriend do that.”
David felt like an immense weight had been removed from his heart. He was ashamed to admit it, even to himself, but ever since Giorgio had turned up in the apartment, he had been wondering where things stood between Giorgio and Olivia. What if she was still in love with him? “So,” he said, “does this mean you would still consider going to Paris? There’s a TVG, leaving in ninety minutes. We could still make it.”
But Olivia didn’t answer at first; in fact, it was several seconds before he realized that she was shaking, then quietly sobbing. He hugged her tighter, as the shock of what had just happened at her place sank in. The police were gone, her apartment had been ransacked, her old boyfriend was on the way to the hospital. David, who was so good when it came to talking about an edition of Dante, was again at a loss for words. The lighted cigarette hung, neglected, from her fingertips, before it finally tumbled onto the broken steps. But when she lifted her dark eyes, wet with tears, to his own, he knew—for once in his life he knew—that words weren’t what was called for. He pulled her closer and touched his lips to hers. There was no response, and her lips were cool. Her eyes remained open and inquisitive.
“I need you,” he said.
“Because I speak French better than you?” she said, with a troubled, uncertain smile. Her shoulders were still quivering.
“Je vous aide,” he said flawlessly, “parce que je t’adore.”
And now, when he kissed her again, her shoulders were still, and her lips were warm. And they clung to each other, sitting in the middle of the broken steps, saying nothing. For David, burying his face in her dark hair, feeling her arms wrapped around him, it was the sweetest respite he had known for a very long time, and he wished that they could have stayed that way all night.
Chapter 18
Cellini watched from the shadows as the catafalque was carried across the piazza. Four members of the Accademia, of which he had been a founder, bore it on their shoulders, followed by a throng of black-clad mourners. The doors of the ancient Basilica della Santissima Annunziata, in which the tomb was waiting, were held open by a quartet of friars.
He touched the silver garland around his temple to make sure that he was still well concealed by its powers.