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CHAPTER 1
Others might contemplate such an act and dissuade themselves, but Paolo prayed at synchronicity's altar, which is why that Thursday his one-inch display ad appeared in the homes section of 'The Baltimore Sun'.
"ALICE MILLER -- If you value her work and would like to create a magical room for the little person in your care, call Paolo Maio, (301) 271-8691."
The right patron would appear. If not, it was the wrong time and he would breathe life into his next idea. That he'd not been born to the realms of the Sforzas and Viscontis was hardly worth reflection, so intent was he on his inquiries into the nature of others. In time his face bore his question -- Who are you? -- and it amazed his friend and patron, Matthew Pieto, how many people troubled to tell him. But that was not his gift. His gift was that, having told Paolo who they were, they felt like they'd acquired a ciphered account in a Swiss bank.
Dr Natalya Yasdarov had read Alice Miller's books, was in fact the Swiss psychiatrist's conscious disciple, although it would have been news to Alice Miller, and when she saw Paolo's ad she laughed with pleasure. "Oh my, I wonder who he is!" Ordinarily Natalya wouldn't have been reading the 'Homes' section, but she was renovating the old nickel-brick house on North Charles Street she had inherited from her aunt so that her eleven-month-old nephew -- no, her son -- would have a respectable home.
She thought she'd been dreaming about the fey ad -- "a magical room for the little person in your care" -- as she sat in the kitchen sipping her second cup of coffee and watching Sacha dip his waterproof book in his cereal preparatory to munching on it.
She felt her hand reaching for the phone.
"Mr. Maio, my name is Natalya Yasdarov, I saw your ad in the paper ..."
"That's a wonderful name. Are you Russian?"
"Sort of, yes."
"I'm sort of Italian."
"Actually I'm sort of confused -- about your ad, I mean, but I found it intriguing. I've read Alice Miller, but what does she have to do with interior design?"
"I'll send you my vita. Then, if you like, we can meet."
"Yes, but what do you want to do?"
"Something truly wonderful. I'll just charge you for the materials. I really want to do it. Maybe it sounds a little crazy, but let me come tell you."
"It sounds a lot crazy, but crazy is my specialty."
* * *
They liked the humour in each other's voices and made a date to meet that evening. All day she found her lips starting to form his name, Paolo Maio, a name she liked very much. What would he be like? Serio: Vittorio Gassmann; comico: Giancarlo Giannini.
As he got out of his white pickup truck she saw a tall, precariously strung-together man in his late thirties perhaps, his very blond hair flopping in the night wind. He had on white coveralls festooned with pockets and tool loops and a white dress shirt clobbered with paints of many colours. Standing at the door in a pale blue tunic drawn by a white scarf, she found herself smiling in amusement.
"Natalya Yasdarov?"
"Paolo Maio, I presume."
His cerulean eyes haunted his white eyelashes. His gaze seemed not merely direct, rather the cones and rods seemed to work at taking her in.
"I saw you in a painting in the Uffizi, I'm glad to see you looking happier."
"I looked unhappy?" She was enjoying herself.
"Bummed out. Father trouble probably. I mean, you looked virginal."
"What does virginal look like, Mr. Maio? Uh" -- she held her hand up -- "don't answer, I don't think I want to have this conversation with a stranger."
Paolo smiled as if he understood perfectly and wasn't in the least rebuffed.
"This room," she started again, "what have you in mind? No, wait a minute, who are you, I mean what do you do? I know of course people are not what they do, but we have to start somewhere besides the Uffizi, don't we?"
"If you think about Alice Miller you know a lot about what's wrong with the world. It seems to me it would be very reassuring to a child to make a brand new world of it, instead of just painting a room and putting goofy kiddy toys in it. It would be telling the child, 'You count, you're safe, the way you see things counts'."
Natalya had led him into the kitchen. She wished he hadn't stopped, she'd felt herself lolling comfortably on his words. "Please don't stop."
"I want to make a room filled with secret compartments, light shows hidden behind moveable panels, machinery moving in walls, like naked clockworks, villages recessed between the studs of the wall, a bed that rises to the ceiling and is surrounded in a beautiful tent when it's lowered. A lot would depend on whether the child is a girl or a boy."
"A boy, eleven months old."
"I'm an artist and a sculptor. My studio is down on South Broadway. I get these ideas."
"I see. Well, I get them too, but I never see my work finished. I'm a psychiatrist."
"A healer."
"No, not really. I think I show people how to heal themselves. They have to do the work."
"The hard part."
"Oh yes. Tell me how you got this idea?"
"It sort of ratcheted into place in my head one day when I was in Hutzler's buying a shirt to wear to an opening in New York. There was this couple with two kids, a girl and a boy. The father had spatially divorced them, you know, like he just happened to be standing there. The mother was pushing the girl in a stroller, and the stroller kept folding up because it hadn't been lock-set, and the boy kept tugging at her, he wanted to go somewhere. Then right out of the blue she backhands the kid. Pearl Harbor, wham! He starts yowling and she says, 'I'll give you something to bawl about when we get home!' In other words, his home is not safe for him, it's the place where he's gonna get it. He can't trust his parents. I lost it. I walked up to the mother and said, 'How would you like it if somebody hurt and humiliated you in public like that?' She didn't know what to say. But the father says to me, 'Is this any of your business?' 'It's your business,' I say. He's madder at me than at what happened, so we eyeball each other until Mama hauls him off. I was pretty ashamed of myself."
"Why? You were right!"
"The world's unsafe for children, if Alice Miller had said that everyone would have agreed, but she said their parents are unsafe, the kids can't trust their custodians, so how're they ever gonna trust anyone?"
What a lovely man. How strange to meet him under the circumstances of her life, Sacha's life. She wondered what to say. "Uh, when you met me at the Uffizi, did I look foreign perhaps?"
He seemed puzzled.
"I'm a Jew." Why on earth did she feel compelled to say that?
"Ah, like the mother of God," he said with a relieved smile. "Why did you ask that?"
This was the moment to decide how their relationship might work, its demeanour. "I was at a loss for words to say."
"Oh. That happens to me all the time."
"And what do you do?"
"Paint. What do you do?"
"Say silly things, I guess."
"I must have missed that. Your saying something silly, I mean."
She laughed. Then she tried to check herself, and they both laughed.
"Well, Paolo, I would like you to make my little Sacha a magic room. Yes, I think I would like it very much."
"Is this real coffee?"
"Yes. Would you like some decaf?"
"Too late. Could we talk some more?"
Good. He too apprehended the spirit of the commerce between them.
"Tell me about Sacha."
She crooked her forefinger pulling him up the stairs to the second floor where Sacha slept next to her room. Sacha's sandy hair had fallen over his one visible eye and when she brushed it back with her fingertips he opened this eye and she leaned over and kissed it shut.
When she glanced at Paolo he seemed beatified as if his eye too had been kissed.
* * *
Down in the big kitchen at the back of the house Natalya poured more coffee. "It's strange how we became a matrilinear family. We were standing by the window in Frankovsk -- it's a Ukrainian city just north of the Carpathians -- Irina and me, hand in hand, watching this spidery little German vehicle going from lamppost to lamppost putting up signs. You know, Do this! Do that! Report to, et cetera. It was still the honeymoon, I figured out later, the Nazis on their best behavior because not all the Ukrainians were unhappy to see them. So it was the last chance for Jews to get out. My father had a brother teaching at the Frunze in Moscow, a mathematician, and he was planning to smuggle us all back behind Red Army lines by the underground railway. So of course Irina and I wanted to know all about this railway, how many cars, how big was the locomotive, what mountains it went under, and so on. Our mother, Elena, is trying to laugh and put the best face on everything, but that's hardly the only thing she's doing. She's also arranging for me and Irina to go to Istanbul through Rumania to friends of her family who'll arrange for us to sail to America to her sister Yekaterina here in Baltimore. That's how we got here. Naturally she never tells my father until we're gone. We never saw them again. His head was spring-loaded, so I don't see how he could've survived those operatic thugs.
"She is my role model, she saw what had to be done and she did it, for us. You can live your whole life saying, I'm very forward-looking, I never look back, the past is past, everybody has ups and downs. But when the day comes the whole world turns to Steuben glass and you're slipsliding off, then you've only one hope -- namely somebody shows you how to be a detective.
"Why a detective? Because there's been a grand theft of innocence, a whodunnit -- in our case, it was Irina's innocence and mine, and it was Papa who done it. Night after night, stinking of vodka and lies. Mama made us concubines. How could she not know? So when I say she is my role model, it's a very considered thing to say, because somehow the arrival of that army of undertakers inspired her -- is that the right word, I wonder? -- to a single act of heroism. This is what I had to reconstruct to be a psychiatrist, the chief of detectives, and it's why Sacha's here. Come to think of it, it's why you're here. But why is Alice Miller important to you, Paolo?"
Paolo was a mile or two back in her narrative, trying to rappel off that Steuben glass. He had to shake himself to catch up.
"I had wonderful parents. They'd been restaurateurs in Milan. Their place in Manhattan was really a salon where they fed artists and writers and actors, spiritually as much as anything. But I also knew a man in New York, handsome as you'll ever meet, who'd been betrayed, whipped till he turned feral. After I met him I began to see desperate kids everywhere I looked, kids who weren't in safe hands while the whole world is telling them how lucky they are. God, we shit our kids!" He stood, unable to support such thoughts sitting.
Turned feral. Whipped till he turned feral. The precocity of this phrasing made a 'danse macabre' in her mind. She stood absentmindedly on tiptoe to touch his shoulder with her fingertips. Then, dismayed, she pressed on with her story more to overlook her gesture than anything.
"Yekaterina was a lovely duck. That's what we called her, Ducky, because we were so sad when we got here, and she used to make us laugh by imitating animals. We'd squeal till we wet our pants when she did a mama duck waddling and quacking. It got to be sort of a code: whenever something was wrong, Ducky would make a hilarious face.
"Ducky had inherited quite a lot of money from her husband; he made bedsprings. She loved art and would go to openings with us in tow. She was fruity and we loved her immensely. She'd say, 'May I introduce the Princess Irina and the Archduchess Natalya' and we'd play right along and curtsy. Ducky gave us wonderful educations. She was quite a bit older than Elena, ten or twelve years I think, but she took an active role in our lives -- school, homework, friends, everything. She even took us to baseball games at Orioles Stadium and blatted huge Bronx cheers at the umpires. Oh, we loved her madly! We never spoke about Mama because we were insatiable readers and we sort of knew what had happened to her. At first we cried at night and when we did Ducky would take us into her bed and sing to us and coo, 'Shush, shush, my little Frankovsk ducklings.'
"Ducky was a super-patriot, so we assimilated with a vengeance. Sometimes when she couldn't explain something she'd say, 'Well, it's the American way, my darlings.' I don't know if it's rare in a woman but she used to weep during 'God Bless America' and 'The Star-Spangled Banner'.
"We both went to Hopkins. Irina is a botanist. She was always outgoing, her friends called her a 'firecracker'. I was kind of introspective and dreamy. But it was funny, the jocks hit on me and the eggheads hit on her. Weird, huh?"
"Unh, unh, the jocks figured you were one of those rare brains who wouldn't dump on them, right?"
"Yeah! It was a neat ticket for me -- that way I didn't get painted into a corner, you know, stereotyped. Baltimore is probably one of the few cities in the world capable of producing Jewish jocks. But I went out with a lot of Christian boys, you know, from Saint Paul's and later on from Hopkins. Ducky's religion was iconoclasm, really, so we grew up agnostic, but Jung sort of baptised me in a way. I don't know about Irina, except she told me out in Arkansas that she saw God in a dewdrop, and that's certainly more religion than I've ever had."
CHAPTER 2
"Ducky died of leukemia the year before I graduated from medical school. We felt grateful she'd lived that long. We stayed together here on Charles Street for about a year before Irina decided to make a pilgrimage to Jim Morrison's tomb in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. 'Why don't you come, Natalya, you could visit Proust and Oscar Wilde,' she said. I enjoyed that we respected the differences between us. At least I thought we did. I couldn't go -- I was doing my residency at Spring Grove. I got a few cards from around Europe, then nothing for five months. The next thing I heard she was living in a commune in Fort Smith, Arkansas, where they were growing herbs in concert with the devas and trying to market them. I can't imagine what the devas told them about all the marijuana they were growing. I stayed on here alone and worked at Hopkins. I think in Irina's mind I sort of became Ducky. Otherwise she wouldn't have felt safe leaving.
"She called me one night to tell me she was having a baby. I guess she expected me to take the bait and ask her when she'd gotten married. 'Are you happy?' I asked her. 'It's just like you to ask something like that, Natalya!' she says.
"'Well, yes, I suppose it is. So, are you happy?' I don't get an answer right away, which is not surprising because our conversations are always punctuated by long pauses.
"Then she says, 'He's a yahoo.'
"'Who is?'
"'The baby's father.'
"'I see.'
"'You don't see, Natalya, you never see. He's a yahoo, you know -- Yahoo, Mountain Dew!'
"Well, aside from my not knowing Mountain Dew is a soft drink and never having heard the rebel yell, my idea of a 'yahoo' was sort of literary, so it diverged pretty sharply from Irina's. I figured a yahoo -- I guess I would have pronounced it yay-hoo -- was a brutish person. But Irina seemed to mean a yokel, and in any case it didn't seem very flattering. But what really worried me was why she wanted to babble on about the baby's father when she hadn't bothered to mention him before.
"She said, 'If it's a girl I'm going to name her Guinevere, and if it's a boy I'll name him Lancelot or maybe Abercrombie.' She was trying hard to be funny, but I was getting more and more worried by the minute. The old family scene. She could never get Ducky's goat so she always went after mine. It ended up she named the boy Sacha, and that worried me too -- as if she'd tried to step back on something firm by giving him an old world name, not for him but for herself.
"Sacha must have been nine months old when I got a call from Sue Ellen Hendershott in the Fort Smith human resources agency. Sacha had a broken hip and was in a full body cast."
"'A full body cast!'
"'Yes ma'am,' Sue Ellen Hendershott says, 'he fell down some stairs and hurt himself.'
"'I'm a doctor, Miss Hendershott, maybe you better get to the point.'
"'Ma'am, the point is one of the doctors -- the one your sister took the little fella to? -- says the injuries are not consistent with your sister's account. She took the little boy to two emergency rooms before the one that treated him and when they started asking questions she just up and walked out with the boy. Seems like the third hospital -- there was this nice doctor from Pakistan, y'know? -- treated the little boy first and asked questions later. Well -- the doctor from Pakistan? -- he didn't like your sister's story, ma'am, so he reported it to the police and they reported it to us. He said the child's body was covered with bruises. You there, ma'am?'
"'I'm here, Miss Hendershott.'
"'Well, we'd kinda like to know about your sister and her husband? We don't know who he is, and the living conditions where the child lives are pretty bad, ma'am. The neighbours are right upset, and there is some evidence of drug abuse. So we were wonderin' what you think we oughta do.'
"Sue Ellen Hendershott sounded like a very decent, educated country girl. I liked the hypnotic interrogative way she talked and it sort of drew me to her, to Sacha and Irina.
"'I'm coming down there right away. Could you give me an appointment?'
"'That would be right nice, ma'am. We kin' set a spell and talk it out.'
"So I flew to Fort Smith and met Sue Ellen -- she looked like a long-stemmed bluebell -- and I liked her so much by the time I left I was saying dun't and wun't in her honour.'
Paolo smiled broadly, enjoying the wry disposition of Natalya's mind -- redolent, really, of his own.
"I was packing when Irina called and said she was in trouble and could I come. 'I'm coming,' I said."
* * *
"Little Tut in his mummy case is what he looked like, and from the moment he saw me he kept following me with his eyes. If I left the room and returned his eyes would be right on me as if I hadn't gone. I knew from the start I wasn't there to see Irina or Sue Ellen, I was there to see Sacha.
"Irina was freaked out. She seemed to be running the place, whatever it was, a big two-floor green and white slambang of boards with a slew of falling-down corrugated metal sheds all around. Everything had gone to seed -- truck that looked like it'd been dropped off a building, water pump groaned ominously, vegetable garden looked like the devas went south. I couldn't figure out how they could make enough money to feed themselves, and then it dawned on me they were dealing. Most of them were musicians, but it wasn't blue grass they were devoted to.
"Buddy, Sacha's father -- at least Irina thought he was the father -- fled on his Harley two days after Sacha was born. A nurse asked him if they'd decided on a name and he said, 'Ask his ole lady', and blew. Small loss. Irina doesn't even have a picture of him. She described him as sort of Confederate-looking and blond, so I figured he was one of those gut-punched string beans with a droopy moustache and hangdog slouch leering at pregnant teenagers down in Paterson Park.
"There was an old black lady who'd lived on the place when they bought it -- I've always wondered where they got that money -- and they let her stay in one of the shacks. She was worried about Sacha, I could tell. She would look at me and shake her head all the time, which was valuable information to me. I asked her about Buddy and she said, 'He be a good boy, daddy a preacher, mama a drugstore farm'cist lady, till he 'low those drum-bangin' so-called frens 'a his o' ta Fawt Smith be tellin' him what to do allatime.'
"That authentic?" Paolo asked.
"The accent? Oh no, I don't think so, but I do hear a lot of accents in my line of work and I like to amuse myself. Like, for example, have you ever noticed folks from Bawl'mer say 'Danny Ocean, hunn' instead of 'down-to-the-ocean, honey'?"
"There's a certain way they use their sinuses to talk," Paolo said, "like when they say 'new' it comes out something like nee-uu. It's quite a feat because they don't wrinkle their noses to do it."
"Do I do that?"
"Say 'new'."
"I will not! I'll never say 'new' again."
Paolo leaned back in her director's chair, put his hands behind his head, and closed his eyes to signal they'd digressed from her story.
"We didn't talk much the whole two weeks I was there. We took long walks in the meadow, it's very pretty country. I never mentioned Sacha's injuries. We took him into town a few weeks after I got there to have his cast removed and I guess he made a decision for his mother then and there. When the doctor cut away his cast he held his little arms out to me. After that it seemed I was carrying him around on my back all the time and he would play with my hair and push it down over my eyes. Then one day we were walking high up in a meadow, just Irina and me, and she turned around to me and hugged me. I held her face in my hands like Ducky used to do when we were upset and I pressed my forehead up to hers and looked into her eyes.
"'I'm sick, Natalya,' she said, 'be his mother, be Sacha's mother, be his Ducky, I'll sign the papers.' We sat down in the grass with the sun playing hide and seek in the clouds and braided wildflowers for a while and then we started to cry, and a week later I took him home with me.'
CHAPTER 3
Paolo patted himself. Natalya wondered if he smoked, but he was looking for a small sketchpad. Finding none, he got up and said, "I'll start tomorrow if that's okay with you." Tomorrow was Saturday and it became his habit to come Saturdays and work all day. Other days he'd call the night before. At first she left him keys to the double-door entry under a petunia marker stuck in a Virginia juniper planter. But within a few weeks he was coming by three or four evenings unannounced.
One of his obsessions led Paolo to Dominick Maggiore. It upset him to use tools and materials whose properties he didn't understand, and this same obsession drew Dom to Paolo. If Paolo was going to use a detail brush, for example, he wanted to know not only that it ought to be mink-bristled -- but why mink bristles were best. He was loath to cede any secret to craft lore.
He figured he needed braces to reinforce the studs in Sacha's room which he intended to bore through -- and in some cases interrupt. So he started calling metallurgists and getting secretarial brush-offs until Dom picked up his phone, as he always did, at the National Institute for Metallurgical Research.
"Steel," Dom said.
"Yes, but there's steel and there's steel -- I know it sounds crazy, Dr Maggiore, but I have to have just the right thing because this is a magical room and ..."
Dom looked at the phone and then put it back to his ear. This is the best conversation I've had in years, he thought. "You're right, Mr Maio. In fact, in view of what you say, steel might not even be the right answer. I better see the room."
Passion for content joined them.
* * *
"Listen, Ducky," Paolo told her that evening, "I'm stuck about how to brace the studs. So tomorrow a metallurgist is coming to advise us."
"A metallurgist?"
"I think he's a fellow zany."
"Do you always do this?"
Paolo waited for exposition. He knew it wasn't in Natalya's nature to even wonder what this fellow zany might cost and he hadn't bothered to tell her Dr Maggiore had volunteered.
"Yes."
"And does it always work out?"
"One way or another, Natalya."
"This sounds like dialogue I have with patients."
Paolo looked stung, so Natalya murmured musically and said, "Oh you!"
"Paolo, I think our fellow zany is here," she called up the stairs next day. Paolo articulated himself down the stairs in the manner of the futurist Severini's paintings, his coveralls bristling with tools.
"Domenico, I'm Paolo, and this is Natalya. Sacha is preoccupied."
The newcomer might be grasping her shoulders, so firmly his gravity held. His amber eyes embraced Paolo with palpable goodwill. When he turned them to Natalya she found in them something she could define later only as solace. In this pivotal instant she learned that Paolo, far from being indiscriminately friendly as she feared, allowed himself all the time he needed to consider a new persona. He was not to be had cheaply. His approval meant something.
Dominick Maggiore, she saw, was one of those men whose eyes linger without disquieting -- gracing rather than importuning. His carved mouth was good-humoured, not humourous like hers. A Roman proconsul, she decided, judicious, fair, but not readily accessible. Paolo on the other hand was a Lombard prince, not destined like an older brother to inherit, but happily given purview of the arts.
Such wispy reveries Natalya entertained as they climbed up to Sacha's room -- that is, his former room, for he was now removed down the hall to Ducky's bedroom, overlooking the hidden garden at the back.
To her dismay, she saw that Paolo had already gutted the room so that its laths and studs stood out.
"I'm going to transform the ceiling into a domical vault," he was saying. "I wish I could raise it, but a second floor ceiling is a bit much to raise if you intend to use the room above. I'd like to cut a skylight in the ceiling upstairs, then echo it with another down here, but that stands in the way of another plan I have for this ceiling. I don't know quite how yet, but I did this in New York once for a friend, so I know I can figure it out. The idea is it will present the night sky -- so Sacha can sleep under the heavens as the Medicis loved to do." He let that sink in.
And was rewarded: "If you have the heavens on your mind the world needn't be such a hellish place," Dom confided to the room itself.
"I have to steal about two feet from the walls, so it's a good thing it's a big room. I want to fill the walls with secret caches, you see -- an aquarium, a terrarium -- and inside these walls," he gestured to his right, "I'd like to install HO gauge trains, with countryside and villages."
"Lombardy?" Natalya asked. But she was fixed on Dom's having failed to ask how any of this would be done: not a querulous, self-important man, this fellow zany.
"I'll put secret compartments in the floor too, but I'm not sure what kind of handles to use."
"Recessed ring-pulls perhaps," Dom said. He read Paolo's expression finely: the artist was delighted but he didn't get it, so Dom made a flat loop with his left forefinger and thumb and pried it up with his right forefinger. Paolo laughed.
"Everything has to be wired. Fortunately the house is already 220 volts. The sashes I'll take out and put in a wall-to-wall bow window with a seat. I haven't discussed this with Natalya, but I'm kind of worried the bow window will alter the facade in some moogy way."
"Moogy?" Natalya said, "as in Moog synthesiser?"
"Yeah, muzzy," the rapt Paolo said.
She was about to chuckle when she saw Dom nodding as if he knew just what Paolo meant. "Lombard strips," he said, aiming a sly smile at Paolo, "they just might give the bow window a rather considered elegance."
"Post-modern nostalgic," Paolo said, catching on.
Natalya was so pleased her toes tingled. She had no idea what Lombard strips were but admired the giftedness of Dom's response: to salute Paolo's heritage while making a helpful suggestion.
By the time he'd described a Lombard strip -- faux pilasters joined at the top by little arches -- she and Paolo were fanatic partisans. The three of them were as exhilarated by what they were discovering about each other as they were about the room. "What do you think about the vault, Domenico?" He had expected Dom to pass on the merit of the idea.
"Well, enlarging the window could help with the vault." He could not yet bring himself to say, Paolo, but he enjoyed being called Domenico. "We could hoist the entire night sky up from the street through the hole before you install the new window. The strips of course can come any time."
He had Paolo's full attention. Paolo had intended to do it all in place with plaster, as he had in Matt Pieto's apartment in New York.
"The boatyards are hurting for business. If we can get the measurements down to where we know we need the holes for the major stars to be illuminated, we can have a yard fabricate two fiberglass semi-domes. Then we rig block and tackle on the roof and we hoist them and set them down on a fairly shallow cantilever."
"Magnifico!"
"Then you can paint the night sky, or if you prefer, you can paint it before we raise it."
"Phosphorescent paint, I'll use phosphorescent paint."
"I can pre-wire the halves of the dome so all we have to do is wire them into the house circuitry. Actually, I don't think the vault necessarily precludes the double skylight. The hemispheres can be made retractable. The eye opens and shuts."
"Yeah, but we've got a door on one side and a window on the other," Paolo fretted.
"Sure, but all you've got is walls right and left, right? We'll have to poke around, see what's what."
* * *
"You'll help, Domenico?"
"Yeah, I'd like to."
Natalya was wondering whether to express her childish glee when she realised she already had, clasping her hands as when Ducky unwrapped some new and wondrous gift. Pleasure opened Paolo's face.
"I'll have to study the stars," he said. "You know, figure out which ones to fire at this latitude."
"Latitude and season," Dom said. "Polaris, Deneb, Arcturus for sure. Fact is, you could pick a night. Sacha's birth night maybe."
"You know the stars?"
"I navigate. I have a boat." He walked along the north wall of the room touching the lath. "Maybe we could recess a diorama of the ancient Nile, you know, through a peephole. Depends on how much top room we need to retract the vault. I'm sort of an amateur Egyptologist."
"I am too!" Natalya announced so loudly it startled her.
"Listen -- about the braces, Domenico, what do you think?"
"I think we really need steel fascia with oculuses and rectangles for viewing. See, if you think about it, the studs have to go to make room to retract the vault, but you still want to recess various and sundry delights in the wall."
"Steel walls?"
"Galvanised, yeah. There are options. Gotta think about it. Weight's a factor. I can fabricate what we need. I have a little workshop in an alley on The Hill."
"What do you make?"
"Tangs and swages mostly. When I get ambitious I do turnbuckles and blocks."
Paolo loved the arcane nomenclature.
"Tangs fix a boat's rigging to its hull somehow, to coaming or bulkheads. They get a lot of stress and I got tired of paying the yard for bum metal from Taiwan. Swages have eyes in them and you use them and turnbuckles to adjust the tension of the rigging. Lots of stress and fatigue."
"What's rigging?" Paolo asked.
"Oh. Rigging is what holds the mast up and the mast is what you set the sails on." Dom put some wired silver glasses on to examine the studs, then pocketed them and looked at Paolo.
"What's your boat's name?" Paolo asked. Dom turned to Natalya with the answer. "Nefertiti."
"The exquisite consort of the heretic pharaoh Akhenaton," she said.
"Some call her the most beautiful woman in all history," Paolo said.
"Yes, because of an artist like you," Dom said. |
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