Chapter 3
"Good-bye, darling, have a good time in Arizona!" cried Mrs. Santini as Romina started up the ramp to the boarding platform, struggling with tickets, purse and hand baggage. "Don't forget to send me a postcard now and then to let me know how you're getting on."
"Bye, Mom, take care of yourself!" the girl shouted in response, thrusting her boarding pass at the airline official and climbing the stairs to the waiting aircraft. There was no question that Mrs. Santini would receive postcards from Arizona, describing the beauty of the desert and the Grand Canyon, not to mention the fun she was having in the company of her old school chum from Phoenix who had graciously offered to put her up for the summer. In fact, the postcards had already been written, stamped and forwarded in a large envelope to Charlotte Baker, a former classmate who lived in Phoenix, with instructions that they be mailed to her mother once a week. Charlotte, who was fond of intrigues and amorous adventures, was the perfect person to act as a conspirator in such an undertaking as this and Romina had allowed her former classmate to believe that she was, in fact, going off on an illicit vacation with a man.
The Boston-New York shuttle was too brief to allow her any time for her own thoughts, particularly since she was seated next to a young mother with two children, both of whom had a distinct tendency toward air sickness. Romina landed in New York slightly nauseated herself from all the mopping up she had been forced to do.
Other than Jonathan Oliver Winters, Romina did not know a soul in New York, so there was no point in calling anyone or going into the City itself. Instead, she found her way immediately to the Alitalia counter and booked her passage through to Rome and then Palermo. She was fortunate because there was a flight with vacancies leaving within an hour, and before she had time to contemplate the wisdom of her actions any further, she was sitting on a sleek Alitalia 707 and fastening her seat belt for the take-off.
When the No Smoking sign flickered and went off, Romina gratefully lit a cigarette and settled back in her seat. Now that the die was cast, she began to entertain serious doubts about the whole project. Perhaps there was some very good reason why her mother had hidden from her the secrets surrounding her own birth and the disappearance of her father. Perhaps it would be better, after all, if she remained in ignorance. Furthermore, how much chance did she have of succeeding? Damn little, she was forced to admit. Supposing Il Volpe did know something or even supposing that he was her real father, could he be found? The Italian police were having their difficulties locating him and how could she hope to succeed where they had failed? Of course, she did have one advantage the Italian police did not, since she posed no physical threat to Il Volpe and he could have no possible reason for hiding from her.
The trans-Atlantic flight passed without incident. Romina, exhausted by the emotional turmoil in which she had lived for the past few weeks, took the opportunity to sleep most of the way across. She was seated next to an elderly Sicilian priest and the two of them chatted sporadically, giving her a chance to practice her Italian. She had been studying the language for years and already spoke it fluently. Her own relatives were Northern Italians, but several of the tradesmen in her neighborhood were Sicilians and she had taken the trouble to learn the dialect of that region. She knew she would have no difficulty communicating when she arrived and even the priest complimented her on her linguistic ability.
At Rome she changed planes for the shuttle to Palermo, but once again her schedule was tight, giving her no time to mop around at the airport and think about changing her mind. Flying South, she examined Italy from the air, enjoying the alternation of irregularly shaped green and brown patches of land, seeing the country become more desolate and wild as they flew away from the prosperous North. Then the plane arched out over the sea and there was nothing to look at for the last hour of her journey until the shores of Sicily suddenly appeared. In another moment, they were on the ground at the Palermo airport and she felt the heat as soon as the aircraft taxied to a halt. Thanks to the time change in flying over the Atlantic, it was still mid-day and Romina considered staying over in Palermo for a few days to spend some more time practicing her Italian and getting used to the idea of being in Italy.
More excuses, she told herself severely. You're not here for sightseeing and you have a job to do, so get on with it. At the Palermo air station, she asked for and received instructions on transportation to Strappani and arranged for a hotel room to be waiting for her when she arrived in the little town, since the journey overland was long and hard, and she would hardly arrive in condition to wander the streets looking for a place to stay.
The bus was old enough to have been used in General Garibaldi's last campaign and the driver drove it with savage ruthlessness, sparing neither tires, nor brakes nor passengers. Romina had hoped to catch a few hours sleep on the way, but she found herself being thrown violently bad: and forth as the ancient vehicle careened terrifyingly along mountain roads, making sleep entirely out of the question. The countryside through which they were passing was savage and brutal, with very little vegetation and fewer and fewer signs of cultivation or even civilization as they approached the western tip of the island. Here and there on the hillside, she could see shepherd's huts, or small poor-looking farms and they occasionally passed peasants leading thin, tortured donkeys along the side of the road, heavily burdened with bales of sticks. From time to time, the bus was forced to slow to a crawl in order to pass through a herd of sheep being driven down the road. Everywhere she looked there were signs of poverty and harshness. Even the land itself seemed to be uncompromising and cruel, as if it resented being inhabited by mere mortal man.
Strappani was only a few miles from the sea, and as they approached the water, a gentle breeze from the Mediterranean brought some relief from the staggering heat. Romina tried to strike up a conversation with some of her fellow passengers, but found them sullen and suspicious and unwilling to exchange more than a few muttered comments about the temperature. The men gaped at her boldly, not even averting their eyes when she indignantly met their gaze and tried to stare them down. She had thoughtlessly worn a miniskirt and it seemed as if every eye on the bus was focused on her uncovered legs and she felt naked and exposed-in violent contrast to the solemn, black-robed women who were covered from head to toe, despite the heat.
After what seemed an eternity of being shaken around, the bus pulled into Strappani. There was a taxi waiting for her at the bus terminal, having been sent by her hotel, and word had apparently spread that a foreigner was coming because there was a small crowd of men waiting by the taxi with no other apparent purpose than seeing her step down off the bus.
Romina was too exhausted to do any sightseeing that evening and slumped in the back of what proved to be Strappani's only taxi as the driver took her to what was the town's only hotel. It was dark when she appeared at the registration desk and handed over her passport to a wizened old man behind the counter who plied her with endless questions about her reasons for coming to Strappani. She discovered as she signed the register that she was the only guest currently staying at the pensione and guessed that foreigners did not often visit this remote village. When she stated that she was merely a tourist and had heard that Strappani was a pleasant town to visit, the hotel keeper gazed at her with an expression of frank disbelief.
Her room was cramped and furnished in dreadful taste, but the bed looked reasonable and Romina sprawled on top of it gratefully the moment the hotel keeper had accepted his tip of one hundred lire and backed out the door. As her eyes adjusted to the dark, she discovered that there was an old man in an adjoining building who was gazing placidly out his window into hers, not even making an attempt at pretending he was not studying her with great interest. Closing the windows made the room suffocatingly hot and she considered complaining to the man at the desk but decided that this would only keep her out of bed longer and probably fail to achieve any real results. She compromised by undressing in the bathroom, showering and climbing under the sheet with her bathrobe on, slipping it off with difficulty under the cover. Her neighbor in the next building observed her contortions without a visible change in expression and Romina was tempted to call him one of the choice names in Italian she had learned from her uncles as a child.
She was still running through her limited vocabulary of Italian curse words when she fell asleep.