Jeffery Deaver - The Burial Hour

It was a chaotic avenue, narrow, throbbing with tourists and pedestrians and bicycles and scooters and punchy cars. Here were vendors and shops offering souvenirs, religious icons, furniture, commedia dell’arte figurines, cured meats, buffalo mozzarella, limoncello bottles in the shape of the country, and the local dessert, sfogliatelle, crispy pastry that Stefan adored — not for the taste but for the sound of the crackly crust between teeth.

The morning was hot already and he took off his cap and wiped his shaved head with a paper towel he carried with him.

A Black Scream began but desperately he turned his attention back to the street sounds around him. The putter of scooters, shouts, a horn, the sound of something heavy being dragged along stones, a cheerful child’s tune chugging from a boom box next to a street performer — a middle-aged man folded into a box that resembled a cradle. Only his head, covered with an infant’s bonnet and positioned above a doll’s body, was visible. The eerie sight and his bizarre singing captivated passersby.

The wind, snapping laundry overhead.

Mommy silent, Mommy silent.

He was then aware of another sound, growing louder.

Tap... tap... tap.

The rhythm caught him immediately. The resonant tone. He closed his eyes. He didn’t turn toward the sound, which was behind him. He savored it.

‘ Scusati ,’ the woman’s voice said. ‘No, uhm, I mean: Scusami .’

He opened his eyes and turned. She was perhaps nineteen or twenty. Slim, braided hair framing a long, pretty face. She was in jeans and wore two tank tops, white under dark blue, and a pale-green bra, he could see from the third set of straps. A camera hung from one shoulder, a backpack from the other. On her feet were, of all things, cowboy boots with wooden heels. They were what had made the distinctive tap as she approached.

She hesitated, blinked. Then: ‘ Dov’è un taxi? ’

Stefan said, ‘You’re American.’

‘Oh, you are too.’ She laughed.

It was obvious to him that she’d known this.

Obvious too that she was flirting. She’d liked what she’d seen and, college girl on her own, had moved in. The sort who had no problem making the first — or second or third — move. And if the boy, or maybe, for a lark, the girl, said no, she’d offer a good-natured smile, no worries, and move on, buoyed by the unbreakable union of youth and beauty.

He was round, he was sweaty. But handsome enough. And not a player. Safe, cuddly.

‘I don’t know where you’d get a taxi, sorry.’ He wiped his face again.

She said, ‘Hot, isn’t it? Weird for September.’

Yes, though the humid southwestern Italian air was not the source of his perspiration, of course.

A group of schoolchildren, in uniform, streamed past, guided by a protective Mother Hen of a teacher. Stefan and the girl stepped aside. They then shifted again the other way as a Piaggio motor scooter bore down on them. A grizzled deliveryman in a dusty fisherman’s cap drove them yet another direction as he staggered under the weight of a carton-filled pushcart, glaring and muttering, as if the sidewalk were his own personal avenue.

‘Crazy here! Don’t you just love it?’ Her freckled face was infinitely amused, and her voice was light but not high. If the sound had been flower petals, they would have been those from pink roses, plucked but still moist. He could feel the tones falling on his skin like those petals.

None of the crackly rasp of vocal fry that the music-hater refugee, Fatima, had.

As she spoke, the Black Screams grew quieter.

‘Don’t know anyplace back home like it, that I can think of,’ he said, because that was what somebody from back home would say. He thought New York City was like this actually but, given his recent adventures there, he didn’t volunteer that observation.

She rambled, charmingly, about being in the south of France most recently, had he ever been? No? Too bad. Oh, Cap d’Antibes. Oh, Nice!

The screams abated some more as he listened. He looked too: such a beautiful young woman.

Such a lovely voice.

And those tapping boots! Like a rosewood drum.

Stefan had had lovers, of course. But in the old days. Before what the doctors would call — though never to his face — the Break, at around age twenty-two. It was then that he had simply given up fighting to be normal and stepped, comforted, into the world of sounds. Around the time Mommy went all quiet in the cellar, quiet and cold, in the quiet and hot cellar, the washing machine spinning the last load of towels ever washed in the house.

Around the time Father decided he wasn’t going to be aproned to a troubled son anymore.

Before then, though, before the Break, sure, there’d been the occasional pretty girl, those who didn’t mind the strange.

He rather enjoyed them — the occasional nights — though the sensation grew less interesting than the sounds of joining. Flesh made subtle noises, hair might, tongues did, moisture did.

Nails did.

Throats and lungs and hearts, of course.

Then, though, the strange got stranger and the girls started to look away more and more. They started to mind. Which was fine with him because he was losing interest himself. Sherry or Linda would whisper about taking her bra off and he’d be wondering about the sound of Thomas Jefferson’s voice, or what the groans of the Titanic had been like as she went down.

Now the young woman in the cowboy boots said, ‘So, I’m here for a few days is all. My girlfriend, the one I was traveling with? She broke up with her boyfriend before she left, but then he called and they got back together so she just went home, pout, pout. And abandoned me! How about that? But here I am in Italy! I mean, like, I’m going back to Cleveland early? Don’t think so. So here I am. Talking and talking and talking. Sorry. People say I do that. Talk too much.’

Yes, she did.

But Stefan was smiling. He could affect a good smile. ‘No, it’s all good.’

She wasn’t put off by his silence. She asked, ‘What’re you doing here? You in school?’

‘No, I’m working.’

‘Oh, what do you do?’

Presently slipping nooses around people’s necks.

‘Sound engineer.’

‘No way! Concerts, you mean?’

With the Black Screams now at bay he was able to act normal, as he knew he had to. He ran through his arsenal of blandly normal tones and words and launched a few. ‘I wish. Testing for noise pollution.’

‘Hm. Interesting. Noise pollution. Like traffic?’

He didn’t know. He’d just made the career up. ‘Yep, exactly.’

‘I’m Lilly.’

‘Jonathan,’ he said. Because he’d always liked the name.

Triplet. Jon-a-than.

A name in waltz time.

‘You must get lots of data, or whatever it is you do, here in Naples.’

‘It’s noisy. Yes.’

A pause. ‘So, no idea where to get a cab?’

He looked around because that was what a blandly normal person would do. He shrugged. ‘Where do you need to go?’

‘Oh, a touristy thing. A guy at the hostel I’m staying at recommended this place. He said it’s awesome.’

Stefan was considering.

Not a good idea... He should be following up on his plan regarding Artemis (it was quite a good one). But, then, she wasn’t here, and Lilly was.

‘Well, I’ve got a car.’

‘No way! You drive? Here?’

‘Yeah, it’s crazy. The trick is you just forget there’re traffic laws, and you do okay. And don’t be polite and let people go ahead of you. You just go. Everybody does.’

Blandly normal. Stefan was in good form.

Lilly said, ‘So you want to come with? I mean, if you’re not doing anything.’