Ariana Kiriasis sat on a large, damask-upholstered divan in the upstairs sala of her home in a quiet street in the Aventino, the southernmost of Rome’s seven hills. She was looking out to the view over her balcony, the double doors of which were thrown open to the pleasant morning air and to the sound of crows in the stone pines on the grounds of the nearby churches of Santi Bonifacio e Alessio and Santa Sabina. This single view was the reason she had bought the old house, as well as the reason it was grossly overpriced, considering its wretched plumbing and deteriorating stucco walls, which she had had to pay handsomely to have repaired.
Having an artistic and romantic eye, she had never regretted her decision. To the northwest, the view encompassed a long stretch of the Tiber and all of the district of Trastevere. On a day like today, with a slight haze in the summer air, the filtered light illuminated the dome of Saint Peter’s with exquisite effect, as though it were a colossal pearl hurled from heaven onto the muddy banks of the Tiber.
This was the view Ariana stared at now, but it was not the view she was seeing. So intensely was her mind engaged that she actually saw nothing at all. On the sofa beside her, and scattered over the floor around her small slippered feet, were the pages of the morning’s International Herald Tribune, which her maid brought to her every morning with her espresso and pastry.
Ariana had been through every page of it. She had been through every column… several times. She did not find, she could not find, the item that she had depended upon seeing every first week of the month for the past four years. It was usually in the form of an advertisement, and usually the smallest one the newspaper would sell. The word “art” or “drawing” always appeared in the advertisement, which might address anything having to do with art, the sale of art supplies, an art auction, an estate sale, an exhibition. Sometimes they were fanciful. Corsier was like that. He could be droll. Within the brief advertisement were two things meant for Ariana to read: first, there was the name “Claude Corsier” in a coded form and in one of five languages; and second, there was a coded date on which the next month’s advertisement would appear.
Her own advertisement, meeting similar criteria and intended for Corsier’s eyes, had appeared two days earlier in the same newspaper.
She had already gotten up and gone to the writing desk in her bedroom to check Corsier’s previous month’s advertisement and to confirm today’s date. She had already spent a lot of time staring at the crumpled newspaper, leaning forward on the sofa, her elbows on her thighs, the fingers of both hands embedded deep into her wiry hair as her mind raced over the possibilities for the advertisement’s conspicuous absence. None of the possibilities made any sense except the worst one. She felt distinctly as she imagined a woman might feel who one morning found that dreaded lump in her breast after a lifetime of knowing that her family medical history and her own habits had predisposed her to that inevitable discovery. It had finally happened. Still, it was a shock.
Suddenly she dropped her gaze from the white dome of Saint Peter’s to the newspaper on the worn and faded Persian carpet. The sudden change from bright to dark blinded her momentarily. She waited. Her sight returned from the edges inward. As the newspaper reappeared it struck her as really quite odd that she and Claude Corsier had never discussed exactly what they would do in this situation. They had created a system for mutual notification, but beyond that… Well, there was nothing beyond that, and she was dumbfounded by the shroud of isolation that had dropped over her in the last twenty minutes. Before coffee she had a place in life. Friends. Lovers. Companions. After a few bites of her torta di mele and a demitasse of espresso, she was suddenly an alien in that same world.
Actually, that wasn’t quite right, either. She was no longer in the same world that she had lived in before the torte and espresso. She had been dragged backward in time into a former life. When she thought about it now, it seemed so far removed from her present life that it was as though it had all happened to another person. Yet, strangely, certain events, certain moments, faces, bits of conversation, the sound of a voice, a betrayal, the touch of a lover, a death, a fragrance, all of it was as immediate to her as the events of last night.
And that was what petrified her.
Ariana picked up the telephone.