Chapter One

❧

The bus had been late out of Pienza and Dante walked the last kilometre. He tore the cuff of his trousers on a thorn in the lay-by where the asphalt ended. The cuff hung folded under, not stitched, and dragged at his ankle as he climbed.

He shifted the folder under his arm. The plastic spine had warmed against his ribs.

Three forty-five, Tomás Reyes had said on the phone. Una buona idea, arrivare un po' prima. Bring the letter even though we have the letter. Bring the knife if you have one. Wear shoes you can walk in.

He had worn the wrong shoes. The leather rubbed his right heel raw.

Down in the piazza he had passed the fountain. Spring-fed, mosaic, the three-triangle mark on the rim. His feet had known the village before his head. Twelve years was a long time and not very long. The bakery sign still said Forno Gianna. Signora Caterina's store still had its bead curtain in the doorway. He kept his head low under his cap and walked past her window without looking in.

His grandmother had been buried in this piazza's church. He had not been there for it.

Best not to walk in carrying that.

The cypress lane climbed and the villa rose above it. Stone the colour of crust. Shutters the green of new oil. The south wall showed where new stone had been knit into old, the joins still pale, and three rough-cut blocks waited on the grass below. Above the slope somebody was working. The chink of a trowel on rock, steady, not in a hurry. The sound rose under his own breath.

He stopped at the gate. It was open. He had two minutes by his watch and seventeen by Tomás Reyes's. He did not know which clock he was meant to be on.

The grease mark on the folder caught the afternoon light. He had noticed it on the bus. He had thought about wiping it with his sleeve and then he had thought no, what would be the point. He went through.

A man met him at the courtyard arch.

The man was thin and unhurried in a clean white shirt. He had a cloth over his shoulder. His shoes were old but polished. He looked at Dante and did not look away first.

"Signor Romano."

The Italian was Spanish-edged. Reyes.

"Sì."

"You are seventeen minutes late."

Dante straightened. "Sono, il bus."

"It is not a problem."

Tomás did not offer a hand. He turned and walked, and Dante followed because there was nothing else to do. The cuff dragged at his ankle and then he forgot it.

They crossed the courtyard. A cat sat on the warm flagstone by the kitchen door. It did not move as they passed. The kitchen door stood open. Dante saw, in one sliding glance, a long pine table, a wood-fired stove with the iron door cracked open, copper hung from a beam, a wooden pass scarred at the corner like every working pass he had known. Someone had been chopping rosemary. The whole room smelled of it and of woodsmoke and of something with anchovies, very slow, very far back.

He wanted his hands in there immediately. He kept walking.

Tomás opened a door at the far end of the corridor. "He will not be long."

A small antechamber. Two chairs. A window onto the loggia. The chairs did not match. Dante took the harder one because that was what one did. He set the folder on his knee and put his hands flat over it.

Tomás did not leave at once. He stood in the doorway with the cloth still over his shoulder and looked at Dante. Just looked. Not unkindly. As if checking a name against a memory and not finding the file.

"Have we met, signore?"

Tomás considered it a moment longer than the question deserved.

"No," he said. "Probably not."

He went out.

Dante listened to him walk back along the corridor. He listened to the trowel up on the slope. He listened to a woman's voice somewhere outside, clear and brisk, not Italian, telling someone to leave the basket by the door. He counted the floor tiles.

Twelve.

A door opened.

"Signor Romano. Julian Valenti."

He stood. The man in the doorway was tall, fair-haired, in a grey shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows. His forearms had mortar dust on them. He had not washed.

"Signor Valenti."

"Julian. Come through."

The study was small and the books had been moved around recently. Julian took the chair behind the desk. Dante took the one across.

"You're seventeen minutes late."

"Yes."

"Tomás told you 3:45."

"Yes."

"I had it down as four."

Julian slid open the desk drawer and set a stopwatch on the wood between them. It was silver and old. Dante noticed it because his nonna had owned a stopwatch, a cheap red plastic one she used for boiling eggs. This one sat closed the way a shell sits.

Dante set the folder beside it. "Then I am on time, signore."

Julian looked at him a moment. Then he laughed once, briefly, and the laugh stopped. Dante did not laugh.

"Tell me about the pici."

Dante had not expected to begin there. He had prepared answers about brigade structure and the cost of San Marzano in October and the difference between farro grown above six hundred metres and farro from the plain.

"It is a four-ingredient pasta," he said.

"Four."

"Flour. Water. Salt. The hands."

"The hands."

"Sì, signore. If you measure the pici you have lost the pici."

Julian raised an eyebrow. He turned the folder around without opening it.

"You wrote here that you trained at Osteria del Lupo."

"Sì."

"Under Mancini."

"Sì."

"That place lost its star."

A pause was wrong. Dante kept his face still.

"It did."

"Why?"

"There were many reasons."

"Tell me one."

He kept his hands flat on the arms of the chair. The small white scar at his left eyebrow tightened where he had broken the skin against a pan handle at twenty. He did not touch it.

"We had stopped cooking for the room," he said. "We had started cooking for the page."

Julian nodded once.

"And the pici, specifically."

"The pici, specifically, was mine." He waited.

Julian opened the folder. He turned a page. He turned another page. He stopped at the one with the sauce recipe written down the margin. The grease mark was on that page too.

"You wrote a recipe in your own application."

"I, yes."

"In the margin."

"I was off the heat for thirty seconds and I —" Dante stopped. There was no clean way out of that sentence. He let it sit.

Julian closed the folder.

"You have one job at this villa, Signor Romano. You cook for the house and for the guests when there are guests, and on Wednesdays and Saturdays for the kitchen table when there are not. Signora Ferraro keeps the kitchen. You are the cook in it. You will not move the salt without asking her. You will not change the knives without asking her. You will not put your hand on the wood-fired stove your first week without watching her use it. After the first week, you may. Is this clear."

"Sì, signore."

"Tomás keeps the day-book. You write what you have served. You write what you have used. You write who was sick at the table. If you cannot write, you can tell him and he will write."

"I can write."

"Good." Julian looked at him a beat longer. "We have a guest in the painted-ceiling room until Wednesday. She eats lightly and prefers pulses. Tonight she has asked for soup. Can you make a ribollita."

"Yes, signore."

"With what is in the kitchen."

"With what is in the kitchen."

"Three months. We see how it goes. If at the end of three months we are both still here, we make it permanent."

"Sì."

"Pay is on the kitchen pass at the end of every Friday. The room is the small east room. Tomás will show you. Welcome to Villa Valenti."

He stood. Dante stood. They did not shake hands.

In the passage outside, Tomás was waiting. He had taken the cloth off his shoulder.

"Venga. The kitchen properly."

The right heel was bleeding into the shoe now. Dante did not care.

The kitchen had a woman in it.

She was at the stove with her back to him, sleeves to the elbows, a tea towel over her shoulder. She did not turn when they came in. She finished what she was doing, brought a pot down off the heat onto a thick wooden trivet, and then she turned.

She was not what he had expected and he could not have said what he had expected. She was maybe fifty. Her face was a face that had been outside for years. Her eyes went over him once and stopped on his hands.

"Signora," Tomás said. "The new cook."

"I know who he is, Tomás." She wiped her palms on the tea towel. "Romano. Show me your knives."

He had the small notched-handle paring knife in the bottom of his bag, wrapped in a square of clean cotton his nonna had cut and hemmed. He had not put it in his apron pocket because he was not in his apron. He bent and unwrapped it on the pass.

Alessandra Ferraro picked it up by the handle.

She held it the way one holds a bird with a hurt wing: carefully, and with the absolute confidence that it would not bite. She turned the blade so the small notch at the heel of the wood caught the light.

"This was Rosa's."

He had not said his nonna's name.

"Sì."

She looked at him then, and her face did not soften, but it did not stay closed either. She set the knife back on the cloth, folded the cloth around it, and pushed it across the pass to him.

"Welcome to my kitchen, Signor Romano. Don't move the salt."

He laughed before he meant to and stopped. She did not laugh. She turned back to the stove.

Tomás was at the pass already. He had the day-book open in front of him. A wide cloth-bound book with a pencil tied to it by a length of brown string. He was writing in pencil. Dante read it upside down because that was a habit you could not shake.

D. Romano. Cook. From today.

Tomás turned the page back. The page beneath had today's date at the top. Dante's eye caught on a line two-thirds down because it had been written in ink, not pencil, and the writing was rounder than Tomás's.

Lombardi. Table for one. Wednesday 23 October. Marked.

It meant nothing.

It meant something.

Tomás closed the day-book.

"Come. The room."

The small east room had whitewashed walls, a narrow iron bed with a folded grey blanket, a chair, a small writing table, a window that opened on the kitchen garden. The third board on the back stair creaked under Tomás's weight on the way up and under Dante's on the way back down a minute later, after he had set his bag on the chair.

He did not unpack. He went to the kitchen.

Alessandra had the cellar door open and was bringing up a string of dried beans. She set them on the pass without looking at him.

"Cannellini are at the back of the pantry. Cavolo nero by the door. Bread from yesterday in the wooden bin. Stale enough."

"Sì, signora."

He took off his jacket and hung it on the hook nearest the door. He rolled his sleeves. The leather of the right shoe had stopped bleeding into the sock. He went to the pantry.

He worked.

He cubed the day-old bread the way his nonna had cubed it, by feel and not by size, and he set water on the cooler part of the wood stove and he layered the beans into a heavy pot with two cloves of garlic crushed under the flat of the knife and a sprig of rosemary from the bunch on the pass. He put a square of pancetta in at the bottom because there was pancetta in the larder and because his nonna had always put pancetta in at the bottom. He moved around Alessandra without speaking. She moved around him. Tomás came in once with a list and went out again.

He was reaching for the salt when he stopped. His hand was nearly on the cellar without his having asked.

He drew his hand back. He looked across the pass at Alessandra. She was at the chopping board doing nothing in particular and not looking at him.

"Signora. May I."

"Yes." Without turning. "Twice. Now and at the end."

He took the salt.

The name surfaced as he was crushing a clove of garlic under the flat of the knife. The garlic split. The smell rose. The name came up under it like something in a pot finding the surface.

Lombardi.

C. Lombardi.

He stood still with the knife flat on the garlic and the smell of it on his fingers and the soup beginning to murmur on the stove.

Twenty-three October was a Wednesday.

The Wednesday was six days away.

He looked at the day-book on the pass. The book was closed. The brown string of the pencil hung off the edge.

"Signor Romano."

Alessandra. Not turning.

"You will burn the soffritto."

He put down the knife. He took the pan off the heat.

Outside, the trowel up on the slope had stopped.

Chapter Two

❧

The car set her down at the lower bend and she paid the driver in cash and watched him reverse the hired car back out of the lane until the bumper cleared the wall. Only then did she pick up her case.

The case was small. She had packed it in a quarter of an hour in Milan the night before — two blouses, the dark blazer, the closed shoes she always wore to work, the brown Moleskine, three pencils, a sealed envelope from Elsa, a toothbrush. She did not pack lip colour on working days. She was thirty-two and had been doing this for six years and she had her routine.

Lucia Moretti met her in the doorway of the trattoria with flour up to her wrists.

"Signorina Lombardi."

"Signora."

"You are early."

"By eleven minutes."

Lucia wiped her wrists on her apron and looked at her without smiling. She was a thick woman with grey at the temples and a face that had decided everything it was going to decide before Chiara had walked in.

"Up the stair to the right. The green door. The hot water takes a minute."

"Thank you."

"The villa knows you are coming at seven."

She paused on the step. "Seven."

"You wrote seven in your reservation."

"I wrote evening."

"Tomás has it as seven. The first sitting is seven, the second is eight-thirty. Wednesday is not a two-sitting night."

She kept her face still. "Fine."

"Fine," Lucia agreed, and turned back to her dough.

The board on the stair was loose on the right side. The green door opened onto a room that was almost as the email had promised. White walls. One bed. A wardrobe with a drawer that did not close all the way. A jug. A saucer. She set the case on the chair and the Moleskine on the small table and did not unpack.

She crossed to the window. The piazza ran the long way of the village below. There was the fountain with the three-triangle mark on the rim. There was the church. There was an old man putting up an awning over a card table. There was a small girl crossing without looking at the awning or the man or the medallion on the door of the church. The girl carried a paper-wrapped loaf with both arms. The smell of bread came up through the window even at this distance, and her stomach did not register it as appetite but as inventory.

She washed her hands at the basin in the corner. The cold tap ran for a long time before it warmed. She washed her left hand last, as she always did, and dried it last, and did not look at the heel of the palm.

She put on the dark blazer. She put on the closed shoes. She lifted the Moleskine into her coat pocket and took up two of the three pencils. She left the case on the chair.

The cypress lane began at the side of the church. She had read about the lane in a Touring Club guide from the sixties: a kilometre and a quarter, climbing eighty metres, lined with stone pines until the bend and cypresses from the bend up. The guide had got the slope wrong by half. She did not mind. Her shoes held.

The call from Elsa had come on Monday. Three Tuscan agriturismi, high-season pricing, find the failure. Find me the column they'll quote next year. Chiara had not needed to open the envelope. The lane was doing nothing to help her find failure. The lane was doing what it had been doing for five centuries, which was look like the kind of thing people drove an hour from Florence to photograph.

The bend turned out to be more of a long elbow than a corner. The trunks began on the right side and then the left. The sun was behind them. The light came in flat and red and the shadows of the trunks lay across the lane like fingers laid on a table.

She walked at her usual pace. She had been told once by a man who had loved her briefly that she walked like a woman who had business. He had not meant it as a compliment. She had not slowed down.

The villa appeared in pieces. A roof corner over a wall. The top of a tower. The whole face of the south wing, with shutters the colour of new oil. There was new stone knit into the lower wall where someone had been working that day. Two pale courses, very clean. She noted the work and walked past it.

A man was waiting at the gate. He was thin and unhurried in a clean white shirt, with a folded cloth over one arm.

"Signorina Lombardi."

"Signore."

"Tomás Reyes. Benvenuta a Villa Valenti."

"Grazie."

He did not move at once. He stood holding one hand near her case as if he were going to take it and did not take it. He looked at her one beat longer than was necessary, and she let him look because she was used to it.

"You will eat at seven."

"I had written eight."

"Sì. The kitchen prefers it."

"Of course."

He turned and she followed him through the courtyard. There was a cat on the warm flagstone by the kitchen door. The cat did not move. She did not move around the cat. The cat moved at the last possible second.

The kitchen door stood open. As she passed she let her eye travel without turning her head. A long pine table. Copper hung from the beam. A wooden pass scarred at the corner. A cutting board beside the stove carried a long diagonal knife mark in the grain, cut at a left angle. She had seen that angle before and did not stop at it. A wide cloth-bound book lay closed on the pass with a pencil tied to it by a length of brown string. A brass key sat on the pass beside the book, and beside the key a small folded note in a hand she did not know. From a doorway beyond, she could see down a corridor to where a door stood open on a painted ceiling. She caught a single section of the painting: vines, a bird, the corner of a sky. Then she was past it.

Someone was at the stove. She did not turn her head.

"You will be in the loggia."

"Thank you."

The loggia ran the length of the south side and looked across the slope. A single table had been set at the centre with one place. There were two glasses and a small bowl of olives and a stub of beeswax candle in a brass holder. A folded linen napkin lay to the left of the plate, hand-hemmed, the cotton soft from many washings. She noted that the mender had used a thread half a shade darker than the cloth.

She took her seat. She did not unfold the napkin yet.

Tomás brought water without asking and a half-bottle of white wine she had not ordered.

"The villa pours this in October."

"Then I will drink it in October."

He did not pour. He left the bottle on the table with the cork still in it.

A woman crossed the loggia from the other end and stopped at her table. She was perhaps thirty, English, in a linen shirt rolled to the elbows.

"Vivi Caldwell. I run things."

"Lombardi."

"I know."

She looked at the woman. The woman looked back. Vivi's eyes were grey-green and tired around the corners and entirely awake.

"Should I be worried?"

"That is a strange question."

"It is. You write for Corriere."

"I do."

"You closed a place in Rome two years ago."

"I have closed several places."

"Yes. Well. I hope you find tonight worth your trouble."

It was said without warmth and without hostility. Chiara nodded once. Vivi nodded back and went away across the flagstones.

The antipasto came on a long wooden board. A wedge of pecorino six months old. Three slices of finocchiona. Four green olives. Two figs cut open. A piece of warm bread from a loaf she could see had been folded against itself in the cold-ferment style. She tried the bread first because she always tried the bread first. The crust gave the right way and the inside had the open lace of long fermentation. She tore a second piece and ate it with the oil from the small jug. The oil was bright and grassy and very young. New oil, then. The frantoio was running already.

She wrote in the Moleskine.

Bread. 24-hour cold ferment. Crust correct. Pecorino six months, not the eight they want you to think. Oil this season's, three weeks at most.

She kept the pencil in her left hand and the bread in her right. She held the pencil with her fingers and not the palm and she kept the heel of the palm turned in to the table where no one could see.

The pici came after a quiet quarter of an hour. Vivi did not return.

The plate was set in front of her without ceremony. A small mound of fat hand-rolled strands in a pale sauce. Cacio e pepe. The cheese had been worked into a cream the colour of old ivory. The pepper had been cracked, not ground. The strands had been rolled by hand on a wood surface; she could see the grain of the work bench in the shape of them, slightly uneven, slightly oval in section, not the perfect round of an extruder.

She knew this kind of pasta. She had eaten it in Rome two years ago at the table of a man in a brown apron whose face she had not seen because he had not come out of the kitchen. She had eaten three forkfuls there. She had put down her fork. She had written the line that had closed the place.

She picked up her fork.

The first taste went past her teeth and stopped on the back of her tongue. The flour was good. The pepper was alive and not stale. The cheese had been emulsified at the right temperature. The pasta was tender at the heart and held in the bite. There was salt in the water at the right amount. There was no butter, which was correct. There was no oil, which was correct. There was no Parmigiano cut into the pecorino, which was correct. Whoever had cooked this had cooked it twice in a row to get it right. He had cooked it for the room and not for the page.

She knew the cooking in her own hands without consulting her head.

She set her fork down.

She picked it up.

She ate three more forkfuls. She set the fork down a second time. She drank a quarter of a glass of water. She wrote in the Moleskine.

Pici cacio e pepe. Hand-rolled, correctly uneven. Cheese emulsified to the correct opacity. Pepper cracked. The acidity of the pasta water is judged. Temperature at the plate slightly too cool, a fault of the pass and not the cook. The dish is competent. It mistakes restraint for confidence.

She underlined the last sentence. She drew a line through the underline. She left the sentence on the page.

The secondo was a slow-braised beef shin with chestnut polenta. It was very good. She ate half and wrote a half-line.

The dolce was a poached pear with a spoonful of unsweetened ricotta. It was very good. She ate the pear and not the ricotta and wrote a quarter-line.

She closed the Moleskine and slid it back into her coat pocket.

Tomás brought her the small bill on a silver dish without being asked. She paid in cash. She left a tip that was correct and not generous. She stood. She put on her coat.

By the door of the kitchen Tomás had opened the day-book on the pass. He was writing in pencil. She read it upside down. An old habit she had not bothered to lose. Lombardi. 23 ott. Cena. Tavolo per uno. Pulita. He did not turn the page. He did not look up.

She walked back across the courtyard to the gate. The kitchen door stood open as she passed and she did not turn her head.

She could see, without turning, the back of a man at the stove. He was perhaps thirty, broad across the shoulders, in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled to the forearm. He was wiping the lip of a small pot with the corner of a cloth. The motion was the motion of a man who had been doing the same motion since he was eight. She did not see his face.

He did not turn.

She did not turn.

The trowel up on the slope had been quiet for hours. The dusk on the cypress lane was the colour of a peach that had been cut open and left on a plate.

She walked down. She passed the bend, the elbow, the long stone wall, the church. The village had set out its early dinners. A radio played in a kitchen. A different cat crossed her path and did not look at her.

The trattoria's lower door was open. The dough on the long marble had been turned into bread and was somewhere in the back. Lucia sat at a corner table with a glass of red wine and a notebook of her own.

"Signora."

"Signorina."

Lucia tipped her head toward the empty chair across the table. Chiara hesitated and then sat.

"You ate."

"I ate."

"And."

"It was a competent meal."

Lucia drank from her glass. She did not look at her. She turned a page in her own notebook and turned it back.

"There is a cook there now."

"I noticed."

"You did not see his face."

"He did not turn around."

Lucia set her glass down and looked at her with the eyes of a woman who had been deciding for several minutes whether to say what she was about to say.

"He is from here."

"Many cooks are from somewhere."

"He is from here," Lucia repeated. "His grandmother was Rosa Romano. She is buried in the church at the bottom of the lane you have walked down twice today. He did not come for her funeral. He came back last Thursday."

"You did not know."

"I did not know."

"You will not write his name."

"I have not written it."

Lucia turned a page in her own notebook. She picked up a fork that had been on the table and turned it once in her hand and put it back down.

"His grandmother taught him the pici."

It was very quiet at the small table in the corner of the trattoria. Outside on the piazza a man's voice called another man's name and got an answer. A dog barked once. Then the village was quiet again.

Chiara reached into her coat pocket and put her hand on the Moleskine.

She did not take it out.