Ring of Fire Read Free

notice the man dressed in black who passes by him, leaving behind the lingering scent of violets.

2
THE DUST

    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 inan 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,”