“Hmm. I’m sorry?”
“Any questions about what I’ve just told you?”
“No.” She followed the fat cop down a hallway.
“This might not be the best time,” he said, and glanced back at her over his shoulder as they walked. “But I noticed that you’re not wearing a wedding ring. I wondered if maybe sometime you might want to have dinner . . . the legal system can be really confusing and it can help to have someone who—”
（The hotel concierge brings a phone to the beach. Dee Moray removes her sun hat and puts the phone to her ear. It’s Dick! Hello, love, he says, I trust you’re as beautiful as ever—） The cop turned and handed her a card with his phone number on it. “I understand this is a tough time, but in case you feel like going out sometime.”
She stared at the card.
（Dee Moray sighs: I saw The Exorcist, Dick. Oh Jesus, he says, that shite? You know how to hurt a fellow. No, she tells him gently, it’s not exactly the Bard. Dick laughs. Listen, darling, I’ve got this play I thought we might do together—） The cop reached for the door. Debra took a deep, ragged breath and followed him inside.
Pat was sitting on a folding chair in an empty room, head in his hands, fingers lost in those currents of wavy brown hair. He pushed his hair aside and looked up at her; those eyes. No one understood how much they were in this together, Pat and her. We’re lost in this thing, Dee thought. There was a small abrasion on his forehead, almost like a carpet burn. Otherwise, he looked fine. Irresistible—his father’s son.
He leaned back and crossed his arms. “Hey,” he said, mouth rising up in that sly what-are-you-doing-here smile. “So how was your date?”
14
The Witches of Porto Vergogna
April 1962
Porto Vergogna, Italy
Pasquale slept through the next morning. When he finally woke, the sun had already crested the cliffs behind the town. He climbed the stairs to the third floor and the dark room where Dee Moray had stayed. Had she really just been here? Had he really been in Rome just yesterday, driving with the maniac Richard Burton? It felt as if time had shifted, warped. He looked around the small stone-walled room. It was all hers now. Other guests would stay here, but this would always be Dee Moray’s room. Pasquale threw open the shutters and light poured in. He took a deep breath, but smelled only sea air. Then he picked up Alvis Bender’s unfinished book from the nightstand and thumbed through the pages. Any day now, Alvis would show up to resume writing in that room. But the room would never belong to him again.
Pasquale returned to his room on the second floor and got dressed. On his desk he saw the photograph of Dee Moray and the other laughing woman. He picked it up. The photo didn’t begin to capture Dee’s sheer presence, not the way he remembered it: her graceful height and the long rise of her neck and deep pools of those eyes, and the quality of movement that seemed so different from other people, lithe and energetic, no wasted action. He held the photo close to his face. He liked the way Dee was laughing in the picture, her hand on the other woman’s arm, both of them just beginning to double over. The photographer had caught them at a real moment, breaking up in laughter over something no one else would ever know. Pasquale carried the photo downstairs and slid it into the corner of a framed painting of olives in the tiny hallway between the hotel and the trattoria. He imagined showing his American guests the photo and then feigning nonchalance: sure, he would say, film stars occasionally stayed at the Adequate View. They liked the quiet. And the cliff tennis.
He stared into the photo and thought about Richard Burton again. The man had so many women. Was he even interested in Dee? He would take her to Switzerland for the abortion, and then what? He would never marry her.
And suddenly he had a vision of himself going to Portovenere, knocking on her hotel room door. Dee, marry me. I will raise your child as my own. It was ridiculous—thinking that she would marry someone she’d just met, that she would ever marry him. And then he thought of Amedea and was filled with shame. Who was he to think badly of Richard Burton? This is what happens when you live in dreams, he thought: you dream this and you dream that and you sleep right through your life.
He needed coffee. Pasquale went into the small dining room, which was full of late-morning light, the shutters thrown open. It was unusual for this time of day; his Aunt Valeria waited for the late afternoon to open the shutters. She was sitting at one of the tables, drinking a glass of wine. That was odd for eleven in the morning, too. She looked up. Her eyes were red. “Pasquale,” she said, her voice cracking. “Last night . . . your mother—” She looked at the floor.