Ring of Fire (2 page)

Elettra hasn’t come down here to play. She’s on a mission to catch the mouse.

That’s not playing.

Tick-tack goes the mouse.

And then …

Then the basement ceiling suddenly starts quaking, rattled by a series of booms that make the bottles shake in their wooden racks.

It can’t be!
thinks Elettra, looking up.
No, not now!

But the quaking doesn’t stop. The dust starts to stir restlessly. The pounding on the floor grows stronger, turning into a series of furious footsteps accompanied by a voice that grows louder. In the end, it sounds like a siren.

“EEELEEEEEETTRAAAAAA!” the siren howls, throwing open the door to the basement.

A flood of light drenches the stairs, the stacked-up furniture, the bottles of wine, the wardrobes and the statues. Elettra’s eyes dart straight out in front of her. The little gray mouse is standing there, on its hind legs, barely a centimeter inside the shoe box.

“You’re not getting away from me!” she says, tugging the string.

The box falls, but not on the mouse.

“No!” she cries.

At the top of the stairs, Aunt Linda’s hand gropes around for the light switches and flicks them all on. A dozen bulbs blink on, their blinding light driving away all traces of darkness. They’re hanging from the ceiling inside round lampshades made out of old bottles.

“Elettra! Were you in the dark?”

“Darn it!” she shouts, jumping to her feet. “He got away again!”

“Who got away?” her aunt asks, baffled.

Elettra glares at her threateningly, the umbrella shaft in her hand. “What do you want now?”

At the top of the stairs, her aunt looks around at the basement as if she were seeing it for the first time. “Oh, what a mess!” she grumbles. “One of these days your father and I will just have to come tidy it all up. It’s just not possible, I tell you, to have a basement in this condition!”

It’s as though she has completely forgotten the reason she came down in the first place.

Looking at her, Elettra feels anger blazing up inside. Her aunt gracefully runs her hand over her thick gray hair, without understanding the damage she’s done. The shoe box is lying on the floor, useless, and the vast stone basement is hiding a mouse who’s still in perfectly good health. The whole maze of hallways and rooms packed with things now looks dingy in the harsh light of the bulbs.

“What do you want, Aunt Linda?” Elettra shouts a second time. And then, as the woman makes no sign of replying, she adds,
“Aunt Linda!”

Her aunt stares at her with her big, clear eyes. “Elettra, dear,” she says, perfectly calm. “Your father called from the airport. He says there’s a problem with the rooms. A serious problem.”

“What’s wrong?”

“He didn’t want to tell me.”

“So where is he now?”

Aunt Linda smiles. “At the airport, naturally.”

* * *

Fernando Melodia snaps his cell phone shut. The recorded voice of an operator has just informed him that he’s out of credit.

“Oh, no,” he groans beneath his perfectly trimmed mustache. “Now what do I do?”

Beside him are the Millers, an American couple with an angry-looking boy. They’re standing tranquilly beside the sign for terminal A, watching over a pile of giant suitcases.

They’re shorter than their son, a lean, tall beanpole with messy hair who’s looking around as if he were expecting to be taken away and hanged. Maybe he’s embarrassed about how his parents are dressed: an otter-gray checked jacket and polka-dot bow tie for him, a khaki-colored suit for her.

There they are, the Millers. They’ve arrived. They’re pleased.

They’ve reserved the hotel’s last available room to spend New Year’s in Rome. The professor’s also here to attend an important convention on the climate. His wife is clearly the type who loves shopping sprees. Their son, on the other hand, seems to have been dragged here against his will.

Fernando sighs.

So that he can be recognized as the owner of the hotel, tucked under his arm is a sign on which he’s written:

That was Elettra’s idea. An excellent idea, although for a few long moments, Fernando had regretted bringing it. He’d simply held
it up and the Millers had walked right over to him, smiling. The two adults, at least.

Handshake.

“It was so kind of you to come get us,” Mr. Miller had thanked him, leaving behind his pile of luggage carts for a moment.

Fernando returned a sheepish smile and from that point on, that smile hasn’t left his face for a moment.

A smile in which he’d gladly bury himself.

The reason for his embarrassment is that he’s at Fiumicino Airport to pick up two people. Not three. Two French ladies by the name of Blanchard and not three Americans by the name of Miller. He’s expecting a mother and daughter flying in from Paris Charles de Gaulle, flight 808, arriving at terminal B. The young perfume designer Cecile Blanchard and her daughter, Mistral. He planned to greet them, have them get into the hotel’s minibus, and give them the keys to room number four, the one painted lavender, complete with bathroom, shower and a delightful terrace overlooking the side lane.

The last free room in the hotel.

The hotel doesn’t have another free room for the three Americans. Looking at them, they’re happy and calm, which shows they’re convinced of the opposite. And that Fernando’s made some kind of mistake with the reservations.

A tough situation, with very few ways out of it.

He clutches his creditless cell phone in his pants pocket and hopes Elettra will call him.

“Is there a problem?” the American professor asks him. He adjusts his bow tie, something he does incessantly.

“No, no problem at all,” Fernando says reassuringly as he tries to come up with a quick solution and forces himself not to think about the fact that it’s the holiday season and Rome’s swarming with tourists. “We just need to wait for two other guests to arrive.” He points up at the arrivals board listing the flight from Paris. “They’ll be here any minute now.”

Delving into the confused jumble of people and luggage carts, Fernando tries to calm down.
This can be solved
, he thinks. It isn’t the first time he’s gotten a reservation wrong since his wife passed away. But this is the first time the entire hotel has been full. And he’s got the feeling that the rest of the city’s booked solid, too.

Then he thinks about the Internet. Ever since he started allowing people to make online reservations, things have become incredibly complicated. Before, all you had to do was answer the phone. Now you need to start up the computer, download the e-mail, record the reservation, copy the name down into the register and make a note of a sixteen-digit credit card number.

It’s turned into a job for bookkeepers.

A wave of people push their way out of the international arrivals exit, which means that the flight from Paris has landed. Fernando raises the sign over his head with a certain sense of doom.

Maybe the two Parisians missed their flight. Maybe they changed their minds. Or maybe there’s a free room he’s forgotten about. But that’s highly unlikely in a hotel that only has four guest rooms.

He glances over at the American boy, who looks like the only person in the world gloomier than he is.

The phone continues to stubbornly refuse to ring. How long is it going to take Elettra to call back?

“Are you from the Domus Quintilia?” a man’s voice asks him just then.

Fernando looks down and sees two small Chinese people: a man wearing a shiny silk suit and a cheerful boy with blue eyes and a pageboy haircut.

“I beg your pardon?” Fernando replies mechanically. And as he does, he feels the characteristic shiver of the unexpected crawl up his spine.

The man wearing the silk suit waves a paper printout at the height of his belly button.

“I am Mr. See-Young Wan Ho,” he says, introducing himself, “and this is my son, Sheng Young Wan Ho. You were very kind to come pick us up.”

“I’m … I’m sorry?” Fernando stammers. And while he’s stammering, out of the corner of his eye he spots a French woman walking up to him, accompanied by a girl who clearly appears to be her daughter.

Mr. See-Young Wan Whatever waves his piece of paper for the second time at belly-button height. His son, Sheng, smiles happily. “We booked room number four at your hotel. It was very kind of you to come pick us up.”

Fernando Melodia’s sheepish smile completely freezes on his face.

Meanwhile, the French woman, the perfume designer, the only party he’d been expecting that evening, is telling her daughter, “Look, Mistral. That’s the man from our hotel.”

Fernando stands there, stock-still, not knowing what to do.

Maybe that’s why he doesn’t notice the man dressed in black who passes by him, leaving behind the lingering scent of violets.

T
HE HOTEL’S COURTYARD IS IRON-COLORED, STILL AND SILENT
. Elettra zips across it in the blink of an eye, passing by the well and the twisted trunks of the vines, which majestically rise up to the balcony. Peering out from the balustrade of the terrace are four statues with indecipherable expressions.

Elettra reaches the foot of the stairs and sticks her tongue out at the stone mask over the arched entranceway. Then she takes the steps two at a time and reaches the room of her other aunt, Irene.

She knocks on the door but opens it without waiting for an answer. The room is bathed in a soft light coming in from the large French doors that lead out onto the terrace. The ceiling is frescoed in green and the floor is covered with black and white checkerboard tiles.

“Aunt Irene?” Elettra cries out. “We’ve got a problem with the rooms again!”

Sitting in her wheelchair at the far end of the room, Aunt Irene is reading by the light of a heron-shaped lamp. She rests the book on her lap and looks at Elettra over her glasses, tilting her head slightly. She’s a very thin woman, her gray hair held back in
an elegant tortoiseshell hairpin. When she was young, and before the accident that paralyzed her, she was very beautiful.

“You don’t say!” she replies, as if she already knew about the problem. “Your father did it again, did he?”

Elettra bounces across the room in a characteristic little trot. She kneels down on the rug in front of her aunt, making her smile with a grimace. “It sure sounds like it. But this time he did it big time.”

“Meaning …?”

“A triple-booked room,” explains Elettra. “He’s coming back from the airport with two French women, three Americans and two Chinese … all convinced they’ve got reservations for room four.”

“Tell me you’re joking,” the old woman groans.

“No! I just talked to him on the phone.”

“It can’t be!” exclaims Irene, letting her book fall to the floor. “Is it so difficult for him to write down three reservations? If only your mother were here! She’d tell him a thing or two!”

“Aunt Irene …”

The woman slaps the palms of her hands against the arms of her wheelchair. “The fact is, your father’s always had his head in the clouds. If my sister and I weren’t here to look after him, this hotel would already have gone out of business!”

“Dad doesn’t want to run the hotel,” Elettra says in his defense. “He’s writing—”

“He’s writing!” her aunt laughs nervously. “Of course! His legendary spy novel. How many years has he been ‘finishing’ it? Five? Ten?”

Elettra doesn’t let herself get caught up in the old debate.
Instead, she checks the time. “We’ve got less than twenty minutes to come up with a solution.”

Aunt Irene sighs. “Which would be …?”

Elettra shrugs her shoulders. “General panic?”

“Call Aunt Linda up here,” the old woman decides. “It’ll take the brains of three women to compensate for a man’s!”

“Well, it’s simple!” Linda decides a few minutes later, perfectly calm. “We tell them we don’t have room and we turn them away.”

“We can’t do that!” protests Elettra.

“Then we find them alternative accommodation at our expense.”

“Right. That’s the first thing we need to try,” says Irene, backing her up.

Elettra gets straight to work, but after a few fruitless attempts she hangs up the phone glumly. “This isn’t going to be easy. Even the Astoria’s booked solid.”

Aunt Irene thumbs through the list of hotels and bed and breakfasts resting on her lap. She reads out the next number to her niece, muttering, “Blast New Year’s Eve and all these tourists.”

Linda paces her sister’s room with long strides. She pauses beside a collection of snow globes, picks one up and passes her finger beneath it.

“Dust mites,” she declares, examining her fingertip. “Your room needs a good cleaning. It’s not healthy for you to live in the middle of all this dust. Especially given your condition.”

“Linda!” snaps Irene, sensing she’s about to launch into one of
her rants about hygiene. “My legs are paralyzed, not my brain! A little dust has never killed anybody.”

Totally unconvinced, Linda turns the glass ball upside down, her lip curling with disgust. Delicate white snowflakes begin to whirl around inside the globe. “Horrible,” she proclaims, putting it back in its place after a few seconds. “This is just the kind of thing that only helps create clutter.”