The wind whipped a short lock of hair over his forehead. He’d had it cut that afternoon. He’d also shaved and-since he intended to avoid lighted public spaces tonight-removed his brown contact lenses. Now, however, he felt exposed. Sometimes he wanted to step out of his own skin.

The Frenchwoman last night had spooked him. He didn’t like misjudging people. Although he’d gotten the anonymous sex he’d wanted, something had been drastically wrong. He managed to find trouble even when he wasn’t looking for it.

A pair of street toughs ambled toward him from the other side of the bridge, looking him over as they came closer to decide how big a fight he’d put up if they tried to take his wallet. Their swagger reminded him of his own youth, although his crimes had been limited more to self-destruction. He’d been a punk with a silver spoon up his ass, a kid who’d figured out early on that misbehavior was a good way to get attention. The more things changed, the more they stayed the same. Nobody got more attention than the bad guy.

He reached for his cigarettes, even though he’d quit six months ago. The crumpled pack he pulled from his pocket held exactly one, all he let himself carry these days. It was his emergency stash.

He lit it, flicked the match over the side of the bridge, and watched the boys come closer. They disappointed him by exchanging uneasy glances and passing on.

He drew the smoke deep into his lungs and told himself to forget about last night. But he couldn’t quite manage it. The woman’s light brown eyes had shone with intelligence, and all that buttoned-up sophistication had excited him, which was probably why he’d neglected to pick up on the fact that she was a wacko. At the end he’d gotten this gut-churning feeling that he was somehow attacking her. He might rape women on the silver screen, but in real life that was one outrage even he couldn’t imagine.

He left the bridge behind and wandered along an empty street, taking his foul mood with him, even though he should be on top of the world. Everything he’d worked toward was about to happen. The Howard Jenks film would give him the credibility that had eluded him. Although he had more than enough money to live the rest of his life without working, he loved the whole business of making films, and this was the role he’d been waiting for, a villain who would be every bit as memorable to audiences as Hannibal Lecter. Still, he had those six weeks to get through before Night Kill started filming, and the city felt claustrophobic around him.

Karli… The woman last night… The sense that nothing he’d achieved meant anything… God, he was sick of being depressed. He tucked the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, shoved his hands into his pockets, hunched his shoulders, and kept walking. James-fucking-Dean on the Boulevard of Broken Dreams.

The hell with it. Tomorrow he was leaving Florence and heading for the place that had drawn him here.

5

Isabel turned over in bed. Her travel clock said nine-thirty, so it should be morning, but the room was dark and gloomy. Disoriented, she gazed toward the windows and saw that the shutters were closed.

She rolled to her back and studied the combination of flat red roof tiles and rough wooden beams above her head. Outside she heard something that might have been the distant rumble of a tractor. That was all. No reassuring clank of garbage trucks or musical shouts of taxi drivers cursing each other in Third World languages. She was in Italy, sleeping in a room that looked as if its last occupant had been a martyred saint.

She tilted her head far enough back to see the crucifix hanging on the stucco wall behind her. The tears she hated started leaking out. Tears of loss for the life she’d lived, the man she’d thought she loved. Why hadn’t she been smart enough, worked hard enough, been lucky enough to hold on to what she’d had? Even worse, why had she defiled herself with an Italian gigolo who looked like a psychopathic movie star? She tried to fight the tears with a morning prayer, but Mother God had turned a deaf ear to her delinquent daughter.

The temptation to pull the covers over her head and never get up was so strong that it frightened her into dropping her legs over the side of the bed. Cold tile met the soles of her feet. She made her way across the dreary room into a narrow hallway with a utilitarian bathroom at one end. Although small, it had been modernized, so maybe this place wasn’t quite the ruin she’d imagined it to be.

She bathed, wrapped herself in a towel, and returned to her martyred saint’s cell, where she slipped into a pair of gray slacks and matching sleeveless top. Then she walked over to the window, unlocked the shutters, and pushed them back.

A shower of lemony light drenched her. It streamed through the window as if it had been poured from a bucket, the rays so intense she had to close her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, she saw the rolling hills of Tuscany lying before her.

“Oh, my…” She rested her arms on the stone ledge and took in the mosaic of buff, honey, and pewter-colored fields, broken here and there by rows of cypress, like pointed fingers against the sky. There were no fences. The boundaries between the harvested wheat fields, the groves of trees, and the vineyards were formed by a road here, a valley there, a simple curve of land somewhere else.

She was gazing out over Bethlehem. This was the Holy Land of the Renaissance artists. They’d painted the landscape they knew as the background for their Madonnas, angels, mangers, and shepherds. The Holy Land… right outside her window.

She took in the distant view, then studied the land closer to the house. A terraced vineyard extended off to the left, while a grove of gnarled olive trees grew beyond the garden. She wanted to see more, and she turned away from the window, then stopped as she saw how the light had changed the character of the room. Now the whitewashed walls and dark wooden beams were beautiful in their sparseness, and the simple furniture spoke more eloquently of the past than a volume of history books. This wasn’t a ruin at all.

She moved into the hallway and down the stone steps to the ground floor. The living room, which she’d barely glanced at the night before, had the rough walls and vaulted brick ceiling of an old European stable, something it had probably once been, since she seemed to recall reading that the tenants of Tuscan farmhouses had lived above their animals. The space had been beautifully converted into a small, comfortable living area without losing its rustic authenticity.

Stone arches wide enough for farm animals to pass through now served as windows and doors. The rustic sepia wash on the walls was the real version of the faux treatment New York’s finest interior painters charged thousands to reproduce in uptown co-ops. The old terra-cotta floor had been waxed, polished, and smoothed by a century or more of wear. Simple dark-wooden tables and a chest sat along the wall. A chair with a muted floral print rested across from a couch covered in earth-toned fabric.

The shutters that had been closed last night when she’d arrived were now thrown open. Curious to see who had done it, she passed through a stone arch into a large, sunny kitchen.

The room held a long, rectangular farm table nicked and scarred by a few centuries of use. Red, blue, and yellow ceramic tiles formed a narrow backsplash over a rustic stone sink. Below, a blue-and-white-checked skirt hid the plumbing. Open shelves displayed an assortment of colorful pottery, baskets, and copper utensils. There was an old-fashioned propane stove and a set of wooden cupboards. The rough French doors that opened to the garden had been painted bottle green. This was everything she’d imagined an Italian country kitchen to be.

The door opened, and a woman in her sixties walked in. She had a dumpling figure, doughy cheeks, dyed black hair, and small dark eyes. Isabel quickly demonstrated her crackerjack mastery of the Italian language.

“Buon giorno.”

Although the Tuscan people were known for their friendliness, the woman didn’t look friendly. A gardening glove hung from the pocket of the faded black dress she wore with heavy nylon stockings and black plastic mules. Without a word, she removed a ball of string from the cupboard and went back outside.

Isabel followed her into the garden, then stopped to absorb the view of the farmhouse from the back. It was perfect. Absolutely perfect. Rest. Solitude. Contemplation. Action. There could be no better place for it.

The old stones of the house glowed a creamy beige in the sharp morning light. Vines clung to the mortar and curled near the tall green shutters at the windows. Ivy climbed a drain spout. A small dovecote perched on the roof, and silver lichen softened the rounded terra-cotta tiles.

The main part of the structure was built in a simple, unadorned rectangle, the typical style of the fattoria, or Italian farmhouse, that she’d read about. A one-story room bumped haphazardly off the end, probably a later addition.

Even the dour presence of the woman digging with her trowel didn’t detract from the shady enchantment of the garden, and the knots inside Isabel began to loosen. A low wall built of the same golden stones as the house marked the far perimeter, with the olive grove sloping away beyond it, and the vista Isabel had seen from her bedroom window behind that. A wooden table with an old marble top sat in the shade of a magnolia tree, a perfect place for a lazy meal or for simply contemplating the view. But that wasn’t the only refuge the garden offered. Nearer the house, a wisteria-covered pergola sheltered a pair of benches where Isabel could envision herself curled up with pen and paper.