Mozzarella Most Murderous (17 page)

Jason got back to the room so late that I didn’t have time to do more than wash my face and change my clothes before dinner. He chatted about some interesting toxic idea he and Sibyl had come up with at the bar while I was worrying about my unwashed state after an afternoon of wind, dust, and sun. My husband didn’t say anything to indicate that I needed a bath, but then, he wouldn’t. There was no predinner gathering for drinks and appetizers, maybe because Constanza was watching her glucose levels. Alcohol isn’t good for diabetics, is it? We were to go straight in to dinner, but Bianca pulled me aside to relay her conversation with Gracia.

“She thinks Paolina slept with a man who came to visit Ruggiero that day. He stopped to talk to her on his way out of the office.”

“Who was he?” I asked, glancing at my husband, who was now chatting with Sibyl on the way in to dinner.

“Well, this is the weird part, and I have to say, I think maybe Gracia is a provincial type who hates foreigners.”

“What did she say?” I asked impatiently.

“She said it was a foreigner, maybe an American, maybe someone from this meeting. That I should ask my friend Signora Blue if she knew where her
professore
was that night. I wouldn’t pay any attention, Carolyn,” Bianca added.

I noticed that she was watching me rather curiously as she reassured me, and Gracia’s remarks did send a shiver up my spine, which had been doing entirely too much shivering today. Still, it was nonsense. Jason had been in Paris with Sibyl, for all the consolation that gave me. I shrugged. “It couldn’t have been an American from the conference. Jason was in Paris, and Hank was in Rome. I wonder if she has something against me. But why would she? I don’t even know the woman.”

“Ignore it,” Bianca advised again, and we went into the dining room together, where I saw that some people were seated, but not Hank and Ruggiero, who were in intense conversation. Hank? Why was he talking to Ruggiero? I managed to sit beside Hank and asked him.

“I’m trying to drum up business,” he replied as he took the bottle from the waiter and poured wine for both of us. “Why do they give us only half a glass?” he muttered. “It’s not like they won’t be back every five minutes with refills.”

“Business with Ricci Chemicals and Pharmaceuticals?”

“Sure. They have toxic waste. We’re trying to expand into the European market. It’s not like we’re just in New Jersey. We do business all over the U.S. Might as well expand. I’d love to get into Eastern Europe and Russia. They have toxic waste coming out their ears. And China—that would be a gold mine if it weren’t such a pain to do business there.”

He turned to talk to his wife, and I considered what he’d said. It made sense. More sense than Gracia accusing Jason. We ate our way through another wonderful dinner. How was Constanza getting this fantastic food out of a hotel that served such awful dinners to the other guests? Maybe the breakfast chef was doing her dinners? No, wait. She’d hired a local chef. I knew that. Obviously my nap had been too short.

Among other things, we had lovely pork cutlets with Marsala and juniper—I do love the sweet, rich taste of Marsala with meat—and an excellent polenta. A form of polenta goes back to Roman times. People in Pompeii had probably eaten it. But an interesting thing I’d read about polenta concerned the eighteenth century. This was after maize from America had become popular in the area and was a staple food of the poor. Because the method for treating the maize killed the vitamins, there were terrible epidemics of pellagra among the people in the countryside and the poverty-stricken urban dwellers in Naples and other cities. I didn’t even know what pellagra was, but I presumed I was in no danger because I’d eaten polenta on one evening.

At dinner the chemists were quite animated—mostly about chemistry—but those of us from the Pompeii tour were half asleep. Wouldn’t you know? Ruggiero announced dancing after dinner and led us into a small ballroom with a musical foursome on a little stage. I wanted to groan. As soon as I got up from the table, I discovered that all my leg and back muscles were aflame. Of course I understood the progression: first climbing around rocks, then oxygen euphoria, then horrible pain. There were chairs in the ballroom, and I longed to commandeer one, but I had questions to ask.

First, I cornered Ruggiero and said I understood Constanza had been in Sorrento the night before the conference to help Paolina with the organization, adding that we had had such a lovely time together today that I now wished I could have had dinner with her that night. Her husband said he didn’t think she’d been in Sorrento; she’d never offered to help Paolina before, but he and his wife hadn’t come to Sorrento together the next day. Maybe she’d been off shopping. His wife was an ardent shopper.

No alibi for Constanza. Then I limped over to her and said that the conference was so well organized that her husband must have come ahead to see to things himself. She stared at me with raised eyebrows. “The president of the company does not come ahead to organize the conference, my dear Carolyn,” she replied at last. “However, being a professor’s wife, you might not know that. I suppose if your husband were organizing a conference, he might well have to come ahead to see to the details. He probably doesn’t have people to do it for him.”

Well, we were back to the old snobbish Constanza, and I still didn’t know where her husband had been the night of Paolina’s murder, or in fact, where either Ricci had been. And that, I felt, was all the detecting I could handle in my present condition, so I sat down. Eliza plopped herself right down beside me. She was wearing a crepe dress that matched her hair—taupe. “I was so curious about that dish you ordered at noon. Isn’t the name rather—er—salacious?”

Goodness she looked interested, as if she expected me to tell her a dirty pasta story. “Well,
puttanesca
does refer to women in the sex trade.”

“Hmm.” She nodded knowingly. “How very obscene. A perfect lunch choice after a visit to Pompeii. The guide did say it was the site of the famous Roman orgies.”

I’d always wondered exactly what sound a titter made; Eliza was tittering, and I couldn’t resist teasing her a bit. “Oh, Romans were quite straight-laced compared to earlier inhabitants of the Campania—the Oscans and the Samnites. Romans considered their drama so disgusting that the word obscene grew from the name of the tribe—Oscan.”

“Really? Whatever could their plays have been about? Sex, I suppose, which explains why
pasta puttanesca
is so spicy.”

“Actually, it’s the red pepper flakes,” I replied.

“Pepper was used for a long time to disguise the flavor of spoiled food.” Eliza nodded knowledgeably. “My mother always said that.”

“Oh, I’m not sure of that. It became popular around the first century AD and was used in everything—even wine. And desserts. I suppose the wine wasn’t all that good in Roman times, but I doubt that the desserts were spoiled. And people in the Middle Ages believed that spices helped to dissolve food in the stomach. They sprinkled spices on everything as a digestive.”

“Really?” Eliza stared at me, puzzled, and then suggested that I might like to try reading books on botany, which were so very interesting.

After mentioning a few fascinating botanical facts to prove her point, she popped off her chair and left to spread her love of plant life elsewhere. I relaxed and watched the action. Ruggiero was dancing and flirting with Sibyl, of all people. She was taller than he. I studied Constanza surreptitiously to see if she cared, but she didn’t seem to notice. Maybe she was as tired as I was. Then I watched Jason to see if he was jealous. He wasn’t even looking at Sibyl; he was talking to Adrien Guillot, a conversation that had the look of chemistry. I could usually tell.

Constanza, when I looked again, was glaring at Valentino and Violetta, who were laughing together. Was she jealous on her daughter’s behalf? Did her daughter know that Constanza had Valentino picked out as a prospective son-in-law? Then, as Ruggiero danced by, I heard him bragging to Sibyl about how fit he was. That meant, if true, that he would have had the strength to throw his unfaithful mistress over the waterfall, he or his wife, who had picked up Bianca.

About then Hank sat down beside me. Too bad. I wanted to watch, not talk.

“Ricci’s a good dancer,” Hank observed.

“So is Sibyl,” I responded politely, although actually she was more enthusiastic than graceful, in my opinion, but maybe I was just jealous since my husband seemed to like her so much. At least he wasn’t dancing with her. Had they danced in Paris?

“She’s a jewel,” he agreed. “I can see why Ricci’s putting the moves on her, but he doesn’t have a chance. Neither does your husband, in case you’re worried about that.”

Well, that was tactless, I thought, embarrassed that Hank had noticed my uneasiness about Jason and Sibyl. “That’s very reassuring,” I said dryly, and started looking for someone else to talk to.

“The fact is that Sibyl knows she’s not likely to find a lover better than me.” He grinned at me and added without the least appearance of modesty, “Not to blow my own horn, but I do know my way around a woman’s body.”

The man was drunk, I realized, though it didn’t excuse the poor taste of his remarks.

“So how about Capri tomorrow, Carolyn? Are you up for it? Us accompanying persons have to stick together.”

Fortunately Jason arrived and suggested that we call it a night. I was only too happy to agree, even if he did grumble all the way to the room about the deficiencies of the meeting and all the undercurrents between the participants. I was surprised that he’d noticed, but he mentioned Constanza’s reaction to the flirtation between Lorenzo’s mother-in-law and Valentino Santoro. “What’s that about?” he muttered. “Violetta must be twice his age. And he’s supposed to be mourning his lost but unrequited love, what’s-her-name.”

“Paolina,” I replied, and headed straight for the bathroom. I was going to soak in a hot tub until my muscles stopped aching, and then I might even sleep through breakfast—or not. That fennel bread was so good. And there was the possibility that they’d have the shell pastry with the orange-vanilla filling again. I wouldn’t want to miss that, even if I couldn’t pronounce it.

 

 

 

 

You probably think Marco Polo brought pasta to Italy from China. I thought that from childhood, but evidently it isn’t so. The Romans had a flour and water dough called lagana, which was flattened out, cut into strips, and then cooked with sauce in an oven. The Etruscans, too, had pasta from the fourth century BC. Some scholars of the subject think pasta came from Persia and was spread by the Arabs to China, the Middle East, and Europe. The Arabs were using pasta dried in the sun (which could be carried around in the desert without spoiling) by the ninth century, and dried pasta was being made in Sicily in the twelfth century in such quantities that it could be shipped to other cities. By the Middle Ages in Italy pasta was being made in different shapes, but instead of being baked, as it had been by the Romans, or cooked in boiling water al dente as we do now, it was cooked for several hours and flavored with cheese and spices, a recipe that held pride of place in Italy until the 1700s, when tomato sauce was introduced. However, that didn’t become popular until the early 1800s.

For many centuries pasta was considered an expensive dish because it cost so much more than bread. When an Italian peasant family, used to eating bread, soup, and vegetables with an occasional bit of meat, ate pasta, it was considered a feast. Then in the 1600s various production innovations lowered the cost, and the problems of feeding large city populations brought it onto the table of the urban poor. Neapolitans were being called macaroni eaters by the 1700s, and pasta could be seen flapping on drying racks in the city, where it was also manufactured and exported.

And how did pasta become so popular in America and everywhere else? It immigrated with Italian immigrants, particularly immigrants from Southern Italy, where war, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, plague, famine, and endemic poverty encouraged hundreds of thousands to leave the region for greener shores, taking their love of pasta with them.