“Why’d your friend call you?” I thought to ask. “If his dad’s got the whole thing sorted out?”
“He’s worried about his father managing a vacation rental on his own. He thinks renting to us will be easier, which is true.” Marcello had a hunch that, if Paul and I offered to sign a two-year lease and asked for very little in the way of upgrades or repairs, Giovanni’s son might be able to convince him to take a bird in the hand.
“Does it need repairs?” I asked as he took a hard right onto a narrow road that led up into the hills.
“I haven’t been inside the place in years,” Marcello admitted. “So we’ll see.”
56.
AS THE CAR CLIMBED,Marcello pointed out my window at a dirt road that ran between two gated pillars and disappeared. “That’s the entrance to the Villa Webber.”
On one of the pillars was a hand-painted sign that readVIETATO L’ACCESSO, and I looked to Marcello for a translation. “No trespassing,” he said.
“Ah.”
“You can’t see it from the road, but there’s this beautiful old abandoned house up there.”
Even the property was impressive. It had to have been a hundred acres, at least, and was surrounded by a crumbling stone wall that wound its way along the roadside. In the spots where the wall had failed, it hardly mattered. Dense outcroppings of prickly pear cacti served as a natural barrier.
“Webber doesn’t sound like a very Italian name for a villa,” I observed.
Marcello grinned. “It was built by a Brit.”
“Named Webber?”
“James Phillips Webber.” Marcello slowed to let a car, coming from the other direction, pass us on the narrow road. “Great-grandson of Frederick Philipse II, a Dutch slave trader who at one time owned half of New York.”
“How did Webber end up here?”
“He was in Australia, I think, and on his way home to London sometime in the 1830s, he shipwrecked off the coast of La Maddalena.”
“Let me guess. He liked it so much he decided to stay?”
“That’s how the story goes,” he said with a smile, “although who knows how much of it is true. Even Webber’s heirs have been dead for half a century.”
I watched as the crumbling stone wall slipped from view.
“At one time the house had a very impressive library. People came from all over to see it.”
“The books aren’t there anymore?” I asked.
Marcello shook his head. “No one knows what happened to them.”
The whole thing made me sad. I guess I was thinking about Lenny and the stuff that had mattered to him when he’d been growing up, and even right before he’d shipped off to Vietnam. His baseball card collection, his comics, his transistor radio. Right now all those things lived in his bedroom, which my parents hadn’t touched. But one day, when my mom and dad were gone, it would fall to me to decide what to do with all of it. Would the things Lenny loved mean anything to my children? Their children? Their children’s children?
“I haven’t told you the best part,” said Marcello.
I glanced over at him.
“In the summer of 1943, after the Allies took Sicily, Mussolini was deposed and put under house arrest.”
Marcello seemed to be waiting for me to acknowledge that I understood this piece of recent history, so I said, “Okay, yeah.”
“He was brought here.”
“To La Maddalena?”
He laughed, waving in the direction of the villa. “To the Villa Webber.”
