I was soaking in the bathtub as the winter light filtered through the bare-limbed trees. Only a wall of glass separated me from the woods and the bridge that led to Marco’s treetop study. Ordinarily I adore lying in the white, spoon-shaped tub, gazing at the forest and the sky. But today I was disturbed.
It was so quiet I could hear the tiny bubbles foaming around my knees. I had lit a candle—La Candela Profumato al Melograno di Santa Maria Novella—and the air smelled like powder, incense and honey. It was a saintly fragrance that reminded me of the ancient church where we were married. The Oficina Pharmaceutica of Santa Maria Novella is nearly 800 years old, and Italian families have been lighting the thick, pomegranete-scented candles for centuries in hopes of good fortune, something I could use right now.
I was alone. Maffeo, my husband’s mirror image, the mysterious twin he had never bothered to mention in four years of marriage, the brother who was sitting in the chair opposite me when I opened my eyes this morning, was sleeping. At least, he had been breathing deeply and slowly, with a slight guttural snore, when I listened at the door of the guest room at the far end of the house. Even so, I had locked myself into the bathroom before stripping off my bloodied cashmere sweater and jeans.
I closed my eyes and sank deeper into the steamy water. With my fingertips I touched the back of my head. There was a lump where I had been bashed and my red hair was sticky with dried blood. But the headache was gone—thanks to a double dose of painkiller—and I could begin to think about what had happened.
Images surfaced, then disappeared. I let them come and go. The apoplectic dwarf, Lala handing me a spicy Tequila Maria, Al Underwood’s catlike eyes, the Porsche rising from the floodlit river, Max’s wet white face, Marco's books and maps tumbled across the floor of the tree house, the odd scent of jasmine, darkness…
My mind hit the rewind button. Marco’s books had been tossed around like trash and the maps ripped out of their frames. All of them, as if the intruder had gone on a rampage. Had he--or she--found what he was looking for? Or did he wreck the study in because “it” was not there? If I knew what "It" was, I might be able to figure out who had hit me over the head.
I splashed warm water on my face and tried to picture the bookshelves as they had been. On the top shelf were Marco’s journals, wrapped in brown paper, ordered chronologically, 29 of them covering the last 20 years: expeditions in South America, Central Asia, the Himalayas, plant research, the family project he was always working on. Everything that had filtered through his mind had been recorded meticulously in heavy black ink.
Then there were his research texts: scores of books, explorers’ memoirs, monographs, a well thumbed copy of the Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Plants, first editions of Shultes’ works. Like the journals they had been tossed helter skelter. Naturally Marco knew exactly where each book belonged, but how would I know if something had been taken?
I picked up the soap and absentmindedly turned it over in my hands. And there was the glass bookcase with the antique books, the ones about his namesake, the first Marco Polo, the Venetian trader, traveler, explorer, the author of The Description of the World, a book of marvels supposedly written while he was imprisoned in Genoa in 1298.
The original manuscript had vanished. Various copies, maybe 150 of them, are scattered around the world, in rare book rooms of museums, in locked bank vaults, in obscure private collections. No two are alike: the priests and scholars who copied the original embroidered the traveler's tale, adding a little here, subtracting a little there, until it was almost impossible to separate the fact from the fiction.
At least that’s what Marco said. Was he obsessed with his ancestor? Maybe. Packages would arrive every now and then from rare book dealers. He would disappear, then call me a few days later from Mongolia or Kandy or Cochin. At home he pored over those books, taking meticulous notes, coming to bed when dawn was breaking. They were old, some from the 18th and 19th centuries, beautifully bound in leather, with gold stamped titles, but they weren’t very valuable, he’d insisted, only to him and to his “research.” (Though I did see a bill for $9,500 tucked into one of them…)
The water was suddenly cold. I stood up and stepped out of the tub, wrapping myself in a white Turkish towel. I knew what I had to do: I had to go back across the bridge to the tree house, I had to sort through the mess, I had to figure out what was missing. Then I had to talk to Lala. I had to…. What I really had to do was sleep. The thought of all that activity was making me tired.
I stepped into the green silk pajamas I had worn the night before. I buttoned them up, and as I turned to the door, my arm brushed the pocket. There was something inside. My fingers touched a small, rolled up piece of paper. It was the paper that I had found on the floor after I’d broken the pepper jar. I must have slipped it into my pocket and forgotten it.
I unrolled the paper and read…