“Preston suggested I call,” Izzy said. “You know, he has good days still, and he can be quite sharp. Well, today he reminded me something about your mother.”
Nikki’s heart rate, which had begun to slow, quickened.
She’d told Izzy Durant’s theory about her mother—his suggestion that Beatrice had led a secret life. In the months since, she and her aunt had worn out the topic.
Izzy continued. “Preston remembered the nameVioletta. He remembers Beatrice mentioned it.”
Nikki gripped the phone tightly.Violetta, Durant had said.That was her code name.
If he was right and Beatrice had led a secret life, then it meant her mother was a puzzle she could solve.
“Did Preston remember when this was?” Nikki asked.
“He thinks he saw the name on letters.”
“Do you have the letters?”
“I’m afraid not.”
Hope, briefly kindled, was quelled. Preston’s memory wasn’t a reliable source.
Izzy was apologetic. “I’m sorry it isn’t much to go on.”
—
Nearby, a woman in an oversize coat was tending to a votive shrine affixed to the plaster and concrete on the side of a building.
Like the hundreds of similar aediculae—street memorials—in the city, this shrine was made of a glass-fronted cabinet, set against white tiles, an arching piece of corrugated metal to protect it from the rain. The cabinet housed gold-framed prints of Jesus and the Madonna, and a painted wooden icon of San Gennaro, two bare light bulbs, candles, and a cluster of red plastic tulips.
Nikki recognized the bleached blonde curls and bright scarves, the fortune teller’s cart with its baubles and ribbons.
“Signora Dorotea!”
Startled, the fortune teller stared wide-eyed, then made a show of reasserting control. She returned to her task, adjusting the items in the glass cabinet, locking it with a key that she kept on a wristband among the clinking bracelets.
“Ah, seeker. I knew you would find me,” she said. “You wish for my guidance.”
“I wasn’t looking for you,” said Nikki. “Just a coincidence.”
“There are no coincidences,” said Dorotea. “Your life is part of a greater dance. Look for the pattern. What wisdom do you seek?”
“I don’t have money to pay for your wisdom today,” Nikki said.
A flash of annoyance crossed Dorotea’s face. She turned her back, arranging the items in her cart.
“Betrayal is the seed at the root of your rage,” she intoned. “The pain of betrayal lives on in the heart of the child.”
Nikki strode rapidly away.
—
She was approaching the end of her street when she spotted Enzo: a familiar figure seated at the same table at the same café where he used to wait for her after her shift. The well-groomed hair and beard, muscular build, and polished style was a sort of looping backwards, skipping to an earlier track. Her breath stopped.
She seemed suddenly to be constructed of many parts, not all in agreement about how to feel. Anger surged—a hot, unpredictable hostility that had built its home inside her. But alongside this was a peculiar longing. She’d been with Enzo, his passion, his companionship, affection, for three years. She’d loved him. At the end of a long night shift, her heart would thrill to see him here, waiting for her. They would talk, and he’d come up to her flat and make love to her in the early morning light. She remembered his arms around her, the smell of his sweat and cologne, listening to him breathe as she fell asleep. She hated herself for this weakness: sentimentality that urged her to hold him again, and pretend that the end of their relationship hadn’t been so completely catastrophic.
She considered jogging past without a word. But that would be toomuch like hiding, and he obviously needed reminding to never come back.
“What the fuck are you doing?” she demanded, her back to the sunlight so that he squinted.
