Hot Ice

6

Jason didn’t hear Maria step onto the loggia, the adoring Pangloss padding at her heels. She watched Jason concentrating on the canvas on the easel before turning down the sound system, reducing the joyous can-can of Offenbach’s Orpheus in Hades to little more than a tinkle.

He turned, his puzzlement turning into pleasure. “Well, hello there! I thought you were still sleeping, fighting jet lag.”

“Sleep? With the whole chorus line of Moulin Rouge prancing through the house?”

He gave her an admiring look. Maria Bergenghetti. Dark skin, sun-streaked hair so black it had blue highlights like a crow’s wing. When she smiled, as she was doing now, she displayed a Chaucerian Wife of Bath gap between her front teeth that, if not saying she’d had it in her time, said she could have the world if she so desired. The shift she wore almost concealed a figure that women half her age would envy.

“Perhaps you’d rather hear Tchaikovsky.”

She put her hands to her ears. “Those damn cannons are worse than the dancers, and the church bells give me a headache.”

Maria preferred Kenny Rogers to Rachmaninoff, Hank Williams to Wagner. Although born Italian, she had gone to college and grad school in the United States, absorbing odd pieces of American pop culture as well as Americanized English with a Western twang. Her interest and passion, though, were volcanoes. She had returned to work for the government of her native land. After all, few volcanoes were privately owned.

Truthfully, Jason enjoyed American country music too; he simply couldn’t paint and listen at the same time. The tragedies of deserted lovers, broken trucks, runaway trains, and the other subjects the singers lamented were distracting.

And Pangloss insisted on accompanying each with the most doleful of howls.

Jason changed the subject. “So, what time is your body on now? What time is it in Hawaii?”

She shook her head. “Two days ago, a week from now. Who knows? I’m tired of being tired. Think I’ll go into town, see what’s new.”

“Nothing since the Normans left about four hundred years ago.”

“OK, so I’ll see the same old stuff. But I haven’t seen it in a month. Want to come along?”

He gave the invitation some thought. “Why not? Maybe I can find a Herald Tribune, see how Washington’s doing.”

“First in war, first in peace, and last in the National League East.”

He smiled at the hoary joke. The Washington baseball team had arrived from Montreal long after Jason had left the town house in Georgetown that he had shared with Laurin; but, like so many expats, following a sports team was a trace of a homeland he both missed and to which he had no intent of returning. The English-language paper also featured Calvin and Hobbes, a favorite comic strip long since absent from American papers.

“Suzuki or Suzuki?”

Motorcycle or car.

Upon arrival on the island, Jason had purchased a well-worn Suzuki Samurai, a small jeeplike vehicle with an underpowered engine but a clutch and four-wheel drive that were equal to the surrounding hills. Its two rear seats were almost large enough for two adults and served as carrying space for his canvasses, groceries and, when Maria was with him, Pangloss. The quality of the car had induced him to buy a used 250 cc motorcycle by the same manufacturer, a machine for which Maria did not share his enthusiasm.

“Does it matter?”

“Try wearing a skirt on the back of a bike and ask that question.”

“A zillion Italian women don’t ask it; they just do it.”

“The cause of large families.”

Robespierre appeared from nowhere and began to rub against Maria’s leg. Pangloss eyed the cat with canine caution.

“If we take the car, we can include Pangloss,” Maria said helpfully.

Jason was already wiping his brushes clean. “The car it is, then.”

The road to the causeway consisted of more potholes than pavement, each of which produced a grunt of discomfort from Pangloss in the rear. Before Maria could begin her normal complaints about the speed at which Jason insisted on driving, he initiated a conversation.

“You were so tired when you got in last night, I didn’t have a chance to ask: How was the trip?”

She related the airlines’ latest atrocities, now routine in the course of air travel. “Other than that, nothing you’d find interesting. And you?”

He gave her a nervous glance before returning to concentrate on what passed for the road. “Me?”

“I’m not talking to the dog. Gianna told me you were gone a couple of days.”

Jason cursed himself for not swearing the housekeeper to silence. “Oh, I got tired of just hanging out, decided to go over to the mainland.”

He knew there was no chance this was going to satisfy her but it did give him a second or two to think.

He could feel the heat of her blue eyes burning into him. “Jason, you remember Casanova.”

The name by which she referred to her ex-husband, a man who seemed to be as capable a liar as he claimed to be a lover. The name came up on those rare occasions Jason had reason not to tell the whole truth.

“Never met the man.”

“Jason …”

He sighed heavily. “OK, so I had a friend in Africa who needed some help …”

“This wouldn’t be same friend who nearly got us killed in the Hades thing, would it?”

Jason sighed again, the sound of a man who had just realized his alibi was sinking faster than the Titanic. “OK, so, yeah, it was.” He saw the storm clouds gathering. “Why not? I mean, you were gone, off watching some volcano on the other side of the world….”

“You promised.”

Where was his logical mind now?

“I promised I’d have nothing to do with those people as long as we were together. I don’t call your being gone a month or more at a time ‘together.’ What if I asked you to stop climbing around erupting volcanoes? That’s dangerous, too, y’know.”

She let go of the hand grip she had been holding on to as the car jolted down the road and entwined her fingers in her lap, something she did when she was giving something deep thought. “Then, I suppose, I would have a choice: quit or stay with you. I would not agree to do one thing and sneak around doing the other.”

She noted the set of his jaw. “Jason, I love you. Is it too much to ask that I don’t have to worry about you getting killed? Or, for that matter, my getting shot at? I never want to be forced to actually kill someone to save your life again. I mean, you yourself say you have more money than you’ll ever spend. Can’t you live long enough to try?”

“Not if it means letting those animals who are responsible for Laurin go free,” Jason said through clinched teeth, not taking his eyes off the road. “Not if it takes the rest of my life. Can’t you understand that?”

Maria turned in her seat to face him, putting a hand over his on the steering wheel. “I understand you loved her very much, still do, and I accept that. But when you’re full of hatred, how much can you love me?”

Neither metaphysics nor rhetoric was a subject in which Delta Force trained its members. Neither had he taken either course in college. Jason regretted the omission.

He placed a hand on her leg well above the knee as he turned onto the narrow causeway that led to the main part of the island. “I tried to show you how much I love you last night….”

She removed his hand impatiently. “I was just too tired. Besides, sex and love aren’t the same. My ex demonstrated that enough. I—”

She followed his eyes. A large cement truck had turned onto the far end of the causeway. A construction company had brought several over on a special ferry from the mainland to do some work in the town. But there were no roads on this side of the causeway that would accommodate a vehicle of that size.

And there was no building going on.

“What …?” Maria began.

Instantly alert, Jason shushed her with a hand gesture, looking over his shoulder. He stopped and quickly shifted into reverse and began speedily backing up, to the consternation of two motor scooters, a cyclist, and a pocket-sized Fiat 500. Two pedestrians, older women, crossed themselves as they scurried to the other side of the road.

Maria turned from staring out of the open rear flap of the Samurai’s canvas top and looked at the truck approaching with increasing speed. “Is he drunk, crazy, or both?”

Jason glanced to the front too, and then backward. The end of the causeway he had just left seemed impossibly far away. “I don’t intend to stick around to find out.”

The truck, smoke snorting from its vertical exhaust like the breath of a dragon, was rapidly filling the Samurai’s windshield. The road was barely wide enough for two small cars to pass. There was no room around the oncoming behemoth. The causeway here had been originally built centuries ago across a narrow stretch of swampland that connected the two islands. Although eventually paved, there had been no reason to widen it or to add shoulders. Leaving the road meant running into a tidal bog of unknown depth, one that, under weight, could easily crumble into the sea that had been nibbling at the edges of the road since rock, pebbles, and sand had been used to steel it from the tides.

“Jason, that truck is going to hit us,” Maria said in a surprisingly calm tone.

She was right. Unless Jason could win the race to the end of the causeway behind him, there was no place to go. And it didn’t look like the contest was going in his favor.