Chapter 2
“Just stating the facts as I see them.”
“Dani, we’re getting off track with this discussion. Do you want to spend a month or two in Italy or not?”
“You know I do. I’ve always wanted to visit the place my family came from.”
“That’s right. All four of your grandparents came from the same village, didn’t they?”
“I think it was more like a wide place in the road, but yes they did.”
“My friend Joel has been stationed in Rome for two or three years. He and his wife can be our tour guides while we’re there.”
“That’s your roomie from prep school, right?”
“Yep. We were thrown together by the luck of the draw, and were best friends by the end of the first term.”
“What did you mean by ‘stationed’?”
“He’s the cultural attaché at the embassy in Rome, and you know what that means, right?”
“CIA Station Chief.”
“Yeah.”
“Are you planning on seeing your father while we’re there?”
“You bet.”
“That’ll be a bit strange, won’t it? I mean, meeting your father in the flesh for only the second time in your life.”
“That’s true. He sent me a first-class ticket to Aragoni as a graduation present when I finished prep school, and I spent a couple of weeks with him. He really wanted me to spend the entire summer, but I’d already enrolled in a full load of summer courses and was too stubborn to change my plans. All I really remember from that trip is an old castle in the mountains, and a bunch of people who wanted nothing more than to please the son of their master. I think I must have met a zillion relatives, but I don’t remember a single name or face.”
“Remind me why he hasn’t come to see you.”
“He refuses to fly overseas, except in the direst of emergencies. The last time he was in this country was when he rescued my mother from that abusive bastard her father had forced her to marry after he learned that she was pregnant, and that was a few months before I came along.”
“Too bad she wouldn’t divorce the guy.”
“True, but she was too staunchly Roman Catholic for that. A permanent separation was as far as she would go.”
“Yeah, the church has a lot to answer for.”
“Well, to be honest, it wasn’t just the church. As I understand it, she was already well on her way to being more than a little batty at the time.”
“That’s not a nice thing to say about your mother,” he said.
“Why? It’s the absolute truth. As someone once said, she spends most of her time in the arms of Jesus and/or Morpheus. To put it in simpler terms, she dealt with a bad situation by creating and withdrawing into her own reality, and she’s spent the rest of her life drifting in and out of it because she feels safe there.”
“That’s so sad,” Dani said.
“True, but I’ve had thirty years to get used to the situation. I’ll give my father credit where it’s due, though. He supported us—from afar—all those years, and he paid for my very expensive education without a whimper. I’ll contact him when we have a tentative itinerary worked out.”
“By the way, can we spend Monday together, just the two of us? I’ve already cleared my schedule for the entire day.”
“Sure,” I said, “what’s up?”
“For one thing, you go back to work Tuesday; for another thing, I have to defend my thesis on Tuesday; and finally, the minute that momentous event is over, I have a huge project to begin.”
“What huge project?”
“You’ve familiar with my DNA database?” he said.
“How could I not be? For the last three years you’ve been testing every blood sample taken in the hospital for DNA and doing God only knows what with the results—and don’t tell me what, because I probably wouldn’t understand it.”
“Yeah, and I’ve got a huge database built up.”
“So?”
“So, someone was cleaning out the oldest and deepest compartment of a cooler in the morgue last week, and they found a stash of more than a thousand vials of blood.”
“Really? Blood from where?”
“That’s the best part. Someone had a pilot project going back in the fifties—nobody seems to know why—and they collected and saved a small vial of blood from everyone that came through the Emergency Room for a period of six months or more. Dr. Cauthen was going to have the vials destroyed, but I talked her into letting me test them first.”
“That’s going to keep you busy for a few days.”
“I plan on doing at least a hundred tests a day for the next week or ten days. In any case, I have to finish the work by the time the term ends, because my access to the lab at MIT and all that very expensive equipment ends with it.”
“And I’ll be mostly working nights during that period. We’ll just be ships passing in the night. Are the people at MIT okay with you running all those tests?”
“As long as they collect my grant money, I can run as many tests as I like,” Dani said. “And the trip gives me something to look forward to. Not to mention the fact that I’ll have you all to myself for most of the summer. That’s worth waiting for.”
WE SLEPT LATER than usual Monday and spent the rest of the morning in bed—until we were finally driven into the kitchen by hunger. After a very late lunch, we showered, dressed, and went for a long, leisurely walk that lasted all afternoon—we decided to take the Freedom Trail from beginning to end and back again, winding up in the public garden. From the public garden, we walked over to Newbury Street and stopped by a favorite café to have a light supper at an outdoor table. By the time we returned to the apartment, it was dark. As was our custom, we went into our little den slash office—formerly a second bedroom—to check our respective e-mail accounts. I skimmed through a number of messages until I found one that caught my attention.