Eric Lustbader: Last Snow

FORGE BOOKS BY ERIC VAN LUSTBADER

First Daughter

Mistress of the Pearl

The Ring of Five Dragons

The Testament

The Veil of a Thousand Tears

LAST

SNOW

Eric Van Lustbader

A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

NEW YORK

PROLOGUE

Capri | April 1

EVERYTHING COMES to an end. Love, hate, betrayal. The greed of wealth, the lust for power, the comfort in religion. In the final moment, everyone falls, even the kings of empires and the princes of darkness. In the silence of the tomb, we all get what we deserve.

Reassured that for him that particular moment is a long way off, he boards the cramped and crowded bus at Piazza Vittoria for the vertiginous ride down the mountainside into Capri village. The driver’s square metal fare box is closed and locked and he will not take money for the ride. This is the Caprese version of a strike against management for higher pay. No marches, no shaking fists, no amplified rhetoric. Calm and considered, slow as the pace of the island itself, the protest has been going on for three years.

The two-lane road down which the bus wheezingly careens is steeply pitched, harrowingly twisting. Traffic whizzes by in the opposite lane so close the trucks appear ready to kiss the bus. The road is decorated on one side by sprays of brilliant bougainvillea, on the other by views of the Gulf of Naples, glittering in the sun. Occasionally, in the mysterious niches of the rock face, miniature painted plaster statues of the Virgin Mary can be seen, bedecked with wilted flowers. He has seen the open-air factory near the beautiful cemetery in Anacapri where the statues are made, white bisque with blank eyes turned out of rubber molds, ruffles of rough edges that must be removed with a knife. Many of the passengers, mostly the older women, touch forehead, chest, and shoulders in the sign of the cross as they pass these hallowed places where pedestrians were struck down.

All the orange plastic seats are occupied. Bags shifting between bare knees. Long hair floating on a hot breath of wind. Brief arias of Italian conversations, the loud, brutal bite of German. Handprints on the glass, greasy chromium poles, the stirring of silent bodies in the grip of the forces of gravity. He stands, staring out through the window at the cloudless sky, the cobalt water, the yachts and pleasure boats. He sees a packed hydrofoil cutting a scimitar swath through the bay from Naples and he wonders whether this is the one.

Watching the hydrofoil, it occurs to him that the port of Mer-gellina was the last real thing he can remember. When he himself stood on the eleven o’clock hydrofoil as it bounded across the bay, when frenzied Naples faded into the heat haze, when the steeply rising slopes of Capri had appeared as if from the deepest portion of his memory, he had entered a land of lost time. He felt as if he was seeing the rocky shore as Augustus Caesar had known it more than two thousand years ago. And just then he had caught a glimpse, high up atop the rocks, of the remains of the Villa Jovis and quite without conscious volition had projected himself either backward or forward in time into that palace of stone and grass and magnificent ruined baths.

A young man in a red-and-blue checkered swimsuit, taking full advantage of the unnaturally warm spring, dives off the bow of a sleek teak and fiberglass sailboat into the dark water. A brief creamy splash, then his blond head appears as he wipes water off his long Roman nose. He waves enthusiastically to a woman in large sunglasses and a wide-brimmed straw hat who has appeared on deck. Her feet are spread wide, one hand presses her hat to the top of her head to keep it from whirling away. Her swimsuit is comprised of three tiny yellow triangles.

Ten forty in the morning and already the back of his neck feels sticky. A line of sweat snakes down the indentation of his spine. His face itches. The bus lurches around a hairpin turn and a body is thrown against him. He smells a light citrus scent and turns, aware of the heat emitted from bare skin. A Caprese girl of eighteen or nineteen in a short, unnervingly tight turquoise skirt and a lime green sleeveless Lycra top that looks to him like underwear. The perfect curve of a tanned arm, and underneath the smooth hollow that leads inexorably down to the lift of the young breasts. So vulnerable and at the same time so remote, as if she is part of another lifetime, another universe. Which, of course, she is. This does not stop him from staring at the intimate dewlike sheen that licks the shadowed dell from which floats toward him the unmistakable aroma of freshly peeled lemons. Her face is partially hidden by the thick curtain of her long dark hair, but he can catch a glimpse of coffee eyes, a generous Sophia Loren mouth. And her ass. My God, the Caprese have magnificent buttocks! Even the mothers. All that climbing up and down steep inclines. All day, all night. Better than a StairMaster. The modern-day Romans are wrong to disdain the Caprese as peasants. But when you have your nose in the air it’s difficult to appreciate the treasures that lie close to the earth.

A sudden longing pierces him, drawing him to her as if she is a lodestone, the very center of True North to which he has long ago become attuned. With the tension of a biologist encountering a potentially new species, he studies the tiny silken hairs on her taut forearm, and at the back of her neck as she lifts a slim hand to swing the waterfall of her hair out of the way, the long pale sea-creature cilia at the arching of her nape.

This Caprese girl, fresh as a spremuta . He wishes he was holding her hand, brushing against her rocking hips, listening to the music of her lithe legs as they walk side by side through the peaceful earthen aisles of the mountaintop cemetery. They would stop and silently watch the women on their knees, plunging their hands into buckets of soapy water, scrubbing down the carved marble of their family grave sites, arranging freshly cut flowers in green glass vases married to the cool surface of the tombstones by black iron rings. How he would love that and how utterly bored she would be. To judge by the blank look on her face, a bracing macchiato and a spin into Tod’s is more her speed.

He is close to her, his thoughts caressing her as intimately as would a lover’s hand. And yet she is utterly oblivious. Lips moist and half open, she cracks her chewing gum. He laughs silently, at her, at himself. How foolish fantasies are, and at the same time how compelling. He cannot imagine anything more powerful.

He inhales her deeply, recognizing an alchemical change: His reaction to her has released a powerful sensation inside himself. It is both exhilarating and frightening, an eely thing dredged up from the darkness of his youth when he wandered the debris-strewn streets of Manhattan at three in the morning with the Outsider’s contempt for the humdrum world. How he cherished being other—a lone wolf watching the sheep all moving in the same direction. And how he feared the loneliness it brought with it. Possibly, he tells himself, he was searching for her, just this one, this perfect creature, but immediately he knows this as a conceit. There is no one that does everything for you, and so you keep searching beyond love, beyond companionship, because part of the human condition is not being satisfied, for if you were there would be nothing left save death. Dissatisfaction, he tells himself, is the engine that drives life.