The Night and the Music - Lawrence Block [58]
“Something flowing-collar, from the looks of him. I give up. What did he do?”
I’d been looking his way, and our glances caught. I saw recognition come into his eyes, and his eyebrows went up again in that manner that was unmistakably his. He pushed his chair back, got to his feet.
“Here he comes,” I said. “You can ask him yourself.”
“Mr. Scudder,” he said. “I want to say Martin, but I know that’s not right. Help me out.”
“Matthew, Mr. Pollard. And this is my wife, Elaine.”
“How fortunate for you,” he told me, and took the hand she extended. “I looked over here and thought, What a beautiful woman! Then I looked again and thought, I know that fellow. But then it took me a minute to place you. The name came first, or the surname, at any rate. His name’s Scudder, but how do I know him? And then of course the rest of it came to me, all but your first name. I knew it wasn’t Martin, but I couldn’t sweep that name out of my mind and let Matthew come in.” He sighed. “It’s a curious muscle, the memory. Or aren’t you old enough yet to have found it so?”
“My memory’s still pretty good.”
“Oh, mine’s good,” he said. “It’s just capricious. Willful, I sometimes think.”
At my invitation, he pulled up a chair from a nearby table and sat down. “But only for a moment,” he said, and asked what brought us to Italy, and how long we’d be in Florence. He lived here, he told us. He’d lived here for quite a few years now. He knew our hotel, on the east bank of the Arno, and pronounced it charming and a good value. He mentioned a café just down the street from the hotel that we really ought to try.
“Although you certainly don’t need to follow my recommendations,” he said, “or Michelin’s, either. You can’t get a bad meal in Florence. Well, that’s not entirely true. If you insist on going to high-priced restaurants, you’ll encounter the occasional disappointment. But if you simply blunder into whatever humble trattoria is closest, you’ll dine well every time.”
“I think we’ve been dining a little too well,” Elaine said.
“It’s a danger,” he acknowledged, “although the Florentines manage to stay quite slim themselves. I started to bulk up a bit when I first came here. How could one help it? Everything tasted so good. But I took off the pounds I gained and I’ve kept them off. Though I sometimes wonder why I bother. For God’s sake, I’m seventy-six years old.”
“You don’t look it,” she told him.
“I wouldn’t care to look it. But why is that, do you suppose? No one else on God’s earth gives a damn what I look like. Why should it matter to me?”
She said it was self-respect, and he mused on the difficulty of telling where self-respect left off and vanity began. Then he said he was staying too long at the fair, wasn’t he, and got to his feet. “But you must visit me,” he said. “My villa is not terribly grand, but it’s quite nice and I’m proud enough of it to want to show it off. Please tell me you’ll come for lunch tomorrow.”
“Well …”
“It’s settled, then,” he said, and gave me his card. “Any cabdriver will know how to find it. Set the price in advance, though. Some of them will cheat you, although most are surprisingly honest. Shall we say one o’clock?” He leaned forward, placed his palms on the table. “I’ve thought of you often over the years, Matthew. Especially here, sipping caffé nero a few yards from Michelangelo’s David. It’s not the original, you know. That’s in a museum, though even the museums are less than safe these days. You know the Uffizzi was bombed a few years ago?”
“I read about that.”
“The Mafia. Back home they just kill each other. Here they blow up masterpieces. Still, it’s a wonderfully civilized country, by and large. And I suppose I had to wind up here, near the David.” He’d lost me, and I guess he knew it, because he frowned, annoyed at himself. “I just ramble,” he said. “I suppose the one thing I’m short of here is people to talk to. And I always thought I could talk to you, Matthew. Circumstances prevented my so doing, of course, but over the years I regretted the lost opportunity.” He straightened up. “Tomorrow, one