Crazy, that...

By Elle Saverini

“I’m shacked up with a Greek I hardly know...” reads the email sent by Adrienne Hoffman from an industrial internet café in Corfu after arriving from Rome with little more than the clothes on her back. “I can’t call out on my cell phone.”
A man with a beautiful scar¬one that rings his hip and deeply embeds his thigh like a giant reverse question mark—has given her the key to his apartment. Everything on this trip is questionable, from the sepulchered saints and violent medieval artwork to the wooden, Orthodox icons stacked by his highly trafficked bed.
While the crazy Corfu birds cry and shriek into the night above the market umbrellas of Ristorante San Giacomo, guns and cocaine pass from her missing backpack to the over-educated night clerk in one of Corfu’s best hotels. A straight edged, blue-eyed Italian cop extends himself beyond standard police work when an old Greco-Italian feud resurfaces, and the ties of “family” in its many forms are tested until broken.
Crazy, that... thrusts the reader into voluptuous island settings, a sensuous mix of ruthless fact and vacation fantasy, narrated by four distinct international voices brought together by crime, faith, and passion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elle Saverini
• Release date: Jul 31, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465990457

Elle Saverini

A native of Fairfield, Connecticut, Saverini was a thirty year resident of the San Francisco Bay Area where she was known as a teacher and Victorian home renovator, among her various careers. Since 2005 she’s lived in a hilltop town overlooking Lake Trasimeno in Italy, where she’s taught English, written novels, and penned travel articles for Examiner.com. A mother of three and ardent animal lover, she’s been tagged on Greek islands with Tartufo, her famous one-eyed Japanese Chin, and in the United States with Nerina, her death-defying, black, Italian rescue cat.Her current novel is a sexy romp through Corfu, a travel adventure with Camorra bad guys, and a character study times four. "Crazy, that... Crime. Faith. Passion." is Saverini's third and shortest novel at 88,670 words, and her first commercial endeavor. A video, "Interview with the Author" is underway, and the sequel to "Crazy" is due to be released in August 2012.

Book preview

Crazy, that…

by

Elisabetta M. Saverini

* * * * *

Published by Elisabeth Saverini at Smashwords

Copyright 2011 Elisabetta M. Saverini

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

* * * * *

This is a fictionalized story. Any resemblance to people living or dead is due solely to the mythic, psychic abilities of the author, which may render the reader dumbstruck after reading both this volume and the sequel which follows.

* * * * *

Dedicated to my daughters: Kathryn, Lauren & Kristin Milewski,

who will always be the most important characters in my story.

Table of Contents

Prologue: Corfu (Kerkyra), August 1994

Chapter One: Corfu, August 2009

Chapter Two: Bari, Italy, August 2009

Chapter Three: The Key

Chapter Four: Itineraries

Chapter Five: Not a Small Woman

Chapter Six: Swimmers

Chapter Seven: A Day at the Beach

Chapter Eight: My Happy Birthday

Chapter Nine: Other Islands

Chapter Ten: A Fantasy

Chapter Eleven: Blood

Chapter Twelve: Choosing Sides

Chapter Thirteen: The sense of it

Chapter Fourteen: Finding Spiros

Chapter Fifteen: Criminals and Clowns

Chapter Sixteen: Making Sense

Chapter Seventeen: Lovers

Chapter Eighteen: The Truth

Chapter Nineteen: So Close, You Can Touch

Chapter Twenty: Pieces to Remember

Chapter Twenty-one: Funeral for a Foreigner

Chapter Twenty-two: A Tale in Three Languages

Chapter Twenty-three: Fratelli / Brothers

Chapter Twenty-four: Insomnia

Chapter Twenty-five: Last Rights

Chapter Twenty-six: Logical Conclusions

Prologue:

Corfu (Kerkyra)

August 1994

The silver Ducati is brand new, and so is the girl sitting behind him. Both are Italian, both bring him pleasure and come with risks — the girl more than the motorcycle, which he skillfully maneuvers uphill and around the sharp, gravel strewn curves on the highway to Corfu’s north shore. A cold current surrounds the northern beaches even in summer, but they’re not going there for a midnight swim.

Vaggelis Tsatsoulis has a deserved reputation: though they may not exactly love him, they never forget him — each girl and the occasional older woman. Intense and exquisitely physical, he’s been solving the mystery of sex since he was thirteen, an intuitive act that often leaves him deliriously confused, wondering:

Make sex, make love — what is difference?

Sometimes it is better not to know.

The girl pressing herself into him as he bends the Ducati from left to right has finally slipped the noose of bodyguards stationed around her; three weeks of staring at him from behind black Armani sunglasses, across stretches of crowded white beach and around other bronze bodies, waiting for signals — passing close enough to exchange a few words, notes passed to her through friends, other Italian girls who’ve helped her to be slippery, to win. One night she finds a side door at a nightclub, a hole in the invisible net placed between her and her Greek ragazzo, and in an alley in the blue-black night among sour smelling boxes and a dumpster leaking dark stains, they have only minutes to plot their rendezvous: one chance, one night. The girl has become like the air he breathes but she has no idea of her power over him… how could she? At eighteen, he behaves the way his Greek grandfather and uncle have taught him. He preserves his dignity by not-saying.

He thinks her name too simple: Rita. It has a humble and submissive sound to it, and mocks her. Maybe her parents wanted a child with a docile nature when they named her, a girl who would obey. She did win their trust: good grades, no trouble at all, why not let her go on vacation with the other girls over the Ferragosto holiday? The catch is the wall of male cousins and brothers surrounding her. Vaggelis hates them all, hates their low minds — worse than watch dogs, these alpha males, yet they think he is the animal in this scenario. None of them know the depth of his love for her, of how Rita inspires images of dark and golden Orthodox Marys in his mind; she, alone, weds what is carnal with what is holy. For the first time in his life, he sees himself kneeling before an ornate silver altar, imagines he can smell incense. In her blue eyes, his unborn children dwell.

Vaggelis accelerates into the next curve and her arms tighten around him. They don’t feel like the arms of a virgin, a virgin at sixteen but with a muscular streak of rebellion. Living in fear of her cousins’ retaliation has either fueled their mutual passion or become irrelevant; she only risks a beating, but the Castellese boys are known for their knives. If Vincenzo and Gianni discover their liaison, deep and purposeful cuts will mark Vaggelis’ body before they leave him for dead.

Crazy, that idea, because he’s never been one of their kind. His father, a restaurateur, left him with real estate holdings in the lucrative historic district of Old Town Kerkyra, enabling him to profit from the resurgence of tourism. Germans, Italians, British — even Americans — all are arriving en masse to Corfu. He should be at work this very moment making sure the kitchen doesn’t panic under the ten o’clock rush, but his responsibilities call dumbly, his life up to this point a dress rehearsal for adolescence. What matters now is using that sliver of a moon to shed just enough light as they descend from the Ducati and feel their way towards the cliff overlooking the beach. The air smells like warm sand and dried weeds; the wind has subsided. Neither speaks the other’s language so they say what needs to be said in minimal English. No amount of discussion will change the fact that tomorrow they’ll begin living separate lives across a narrow but impassable Ionian Sea.

Rita’s parents, in Bari, have already toasted her engagement to the oldest Giuliano boy, Michele. Aside from her intimidating beauty and yet untested strength, Rita brings a thorntree of family connections to the match. Michele, of course, is much older.

To the eighteen year old Greek, the whole world has arrived at a sinister age, one without regard for what used to be sacred. Ironic in the face of his flagrant reputation is the fact that Vaggelis carries a sense of God and a compulsion to find his soulmate inside of him, and no amount of wise counsel will counter his bitter disappointment in knowing that the life he envisions with Rita — a pure and honorable one — is absolutely futile.

So he spreads out the blanket, unbuttons his shirt and lies down. The girl who has never lain with any man before, who has never been left alone long enough to even formulate an idea of her own, inhales his aroma and releases her own dewy scent as she pulls her chic, multicolored blouse over her head. Then she goes to him with lean young arms and kisses which melt his dark expression. Like a wingless angel she folds-in next to him, and at that very moment he knows in the root of his being, in what he calls his soul, that whatever hell may lie ahead of him won’t matter after tonight.

* * * * *

Motorcycle maintenance is easy if you study the parts and repair manual. Say your brakes feel mushy: that means you’ve got air in the brake fluid lines that needs to be let out via a handy little screw. Its technical name is the bleed screw, and Vincenzo and Gianni Castellese think this is hilarious, considering the circumstances.

If you wanted to render the brakes completely unusable, you’d bleed-out all the brake fluid. But if you wanted the brakes to function at, say, a stoplight at moderate speed, but fail at high speeds, you’d have to file down a few turns of the screw so it would hold until stressed at maximum, perhaps fifty or more miles per hour. When the brakes gave out at high speed the rider would most likely be killed from the crash, with or without a helmet. And if not killed, crippled for life.

This mechanical sleight-of-hand would be achieved as soon as Rita was back in Bari, planning her nuptials. The Greek leaves his Ducati in the open carport at his mother’s house, and the security fence is easy to breach. Working together, they need less than five minutes to complete the adjustment, Gianni compressing the handbrakes while his brother expertly installs the filed-down screw. There’s justice to this method — destroy the Greek using the same motorcycle on which he stole their cousin away, taking his blood for Rita’s virginity — and leaving him either dead, or a cripple incapable of ever having a woman again. His future would be finished. The Greek would never have a son.

The Traveler: Adrienne

Chapter One:

Corfu, August 2009

It’s a beautiful scar. It begins halfway across his back above his left buttock and arcs down in an almost perfect semi-circle around his hip, ending like the stem of a reverse question mark embedded deep in his thigh. Seven pieces, he said. Bone in seven pieces, him in bed six months. Motorcycle. Eighteen. Better eighteen than forty I tell him, because that’s when there’s enough life force in a man to heal on rabbit blood transfusions, if need be. Somehow he understands this and laughs.

Could’ve died, he said. Instead an almost complete recovery, but then he favored that side for so many years that the right side now aches from all the standing and walking on the white stone terraces of his restaurant, the tile floors of the kitchen. His restaurant — San Giacomo — occupies the prime site in the Old Town historic district. Floodlights illuminate the only Roman Catholic church on this Greek Orthodox island, a majestic town hall guards the top tier of the multi-leveled piazza; church below, shops, a café, one other restaurant competes for the tourist appetite for fine food, wine, strong coffee, and atmosphere. They come for the atmosphere but the pavement isn’t softened by the setting. Work grinds endlessly from June until September — climaxing in August — and August is when my backpack failed to follow me from Aeroporto Roma to Bari in spite of an itinerary with built-in buffer days to control exactly this type of Italian airline insanity.

I’m at Fiumicino Airport in sweltering Roma, where all the Alitalia agents look like either actors or models. The black haired beauty behind the counter nods towards Ugly, my orange and black Aussie backpack, and says

Check-in or carry-on?

Carry-on. Bari is only an hour away but I know only too well what can go wrong; the pack’s not leaving my sight. I’ve booked a one night stay in the up-and-coming city of Bari before continuing on by train to the port city of Brindisi, just in case… in case of what? I couldn’t say. The unexpected delay. All I know is that I’m done with a lifetime of rushing, I’m traveling slow. Tomorrow night at nine o’clock I’ll be eating dinner aboard the ferry named Ikarus Palace, on my way to Corfu, a prepaid internet ticket in hand.

The Alitalia agent slides my boarding pass across the counter and points me towards security: Adrienne Hoffman, Seat 23D.

Buon viaggio.

I’m humming along with Green Day on my ipod when six exquisitely sharp tent spikes show up on the x-ray screen inside Ugly.

Signora?

The security girl looks bored, asks me to extract the menacing scrap metal without which my tent will curl up around me in the wind at Corfu Camping. The Italians behind me crane their necks to see what’s holding up the line.

Signora?

It’s the minutia of life which make or break us: I should’ve thrown the spikes in the trash and taken the backpack on board with me. Instead, I make my first bad decision and relinquish the bag to check-in, running back to the Alitalia counter just moments before she closes. I watch Ugly turn the corner to airline oblivion on a flaccid black conveyor belt and something inside me hears it sing Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye …

Two hours later I linger with the other hopefuls, staring at another grimy conveyor belt — an empty one. We take turns filling out missing bag reports and then I board a city bus for downtown Bari, check into my linoleum lobby hotel and explore both the old and new quarters of the city.

I distract myself by visiting Santo Nicola in his crypt, never knowing that Santa Clause had been stolen from Turkey in 1089 when the Barese heard the Venetians were plotting to get him; relic stealing was a big business during the Middle Ages, and Italians are skilled thieves. Down in his crypt, devout eastern Europeans led by their young bearded priest are crossing themselves backwards and dipping to their knees in an aerobic ritual which leaves me breathless when I try to follow. I wander through an electrically lit lower chapel and see a glass casket containing a woman in a long Victorian dress, her boney hands folded over her chest. It’s hard to tell if she was ever beautiful with her suitcase brown, leathery skin and shrunken lips retracted above and below yellow teeth, but she is a saint and I’ve witnessed a miracle: she did not decompose. I walk the waterfront, enter a Farmacia and buy cosmetics to replace those that are in the lost backpack — each item is elegantly packaged and then wrapped in tissue paper by the farmacist like a perfect, tiny gift.

When the sun starts to sink below the horizon, I enter a restaurant with a canvas roof and clear plastic siding; before I sit down I’m ushered to an adjacent lot filled with wooden crates and am told to point to the fishes I wish to eat. The man guarding the day’s catch plucks my choices with his bare hand and the first one carries my selections back to the kitchen to be grilled. I gorge on an array of seafood, seared eggplant and red peppers, slabs of pale brown bread; I drink chilled, gold-tinged, local white wine.

Back at the reception of my hotel, I ask the man,

Did my backpack arrive?

His face falls.I’m sorry, but it’s not just your bag, he adds by way of consolation.

The Russian couple is missing their luggage, too. It’s been on the television all week — a disaster, he tells me as he passes me my key.

Upstairs, I press buttons on the remote control and the night scene at Aeroporto Fiumicino flashes on the screen. A woman reporter is interviewing a perspiring man wearing a suit, tie and foggy glasses — the director of Roman airport operations. He tries to give reassuring answers to her questions while in the background, a confetti collage of thousands of derailed bags sit on trolleys, illuminated by floodlights, going nowhere, and I wonder to myself,

Where in that mess is mine?

Although I depart the next morning wearing my last article of clean clothing, I feel strangely optimistic as I exit a coffee bar escorted by a retired Barese. He kisses my hand before putting me on the right local train for Alberobello, the town with hundreds of conical hobbit houses which have existed since the thirteenth century. No one really knows what they’re about with Druid symbols in broad white strokes painted on their roofs, but they provide a curious stopping place between Bari and Brindisi — the port where I must ultimately board the evening ferry. The ticket to cross the Adriatic was expensive, non-refundable. If I’m going to go to Corfu, I either depart tonight or don’t go at all.

Of course I elect to go: bad decision number two. I consume a dinner of Greek specialties in the ship’s dining room, smoke a cigarette on the deck, then shower and sleep alone in a cabin intended for four women.

The sun comes up and we reach Igouminitsa — where most of the people disembark — then on to Corfu, where I make my way into the heart of Kerkyra.

You’ll never find a hotel. Not in this time, in August. Not in Old Town. Maybe if you go out, outside a little…

The girl at the desk of the hotel with the comforting Italian name can give me a room tomorrow, but not tonight. She calls around, finds something in the port. Thank you, I tell her, but I won’t stay in a giant concrete rectangle on the main strip. I didn’t come all the way from Perugia to Roma, Roma to Bari, Bari to Brindisi to Igouminitsa and finally to Corfu in order to sleep on the port side of town in an ugly concrete slab with two-meter tall letters on top advertising the name of the hotel. Eighty-five euros, no thanks.

I came to camp: ten euros a night.

You have tent? the Greek man at the site had asked when I’d called from Italy a few days before.

I have tent, I replied. A practically virgin tent, because God and Alitalia have conspired to keep me in hotels I can’t afford.

In the heart of Old Town just off the esplanade, Hotel Arkadion does have one spacious single with a double bed, air-conditioning, antique furniture and a frigobar all for me. I ignore the latter, shower in the pristine bathroom, reluctantly turn on the air-conditioner before lying down to call Alitalia one more time with the last minutes of Italian cell phone time before I’m cut-off for good.

Yes, I’m in Corfu. No, I’m not going back to Bari. I’m in a hotel, and this wasn’t my plan — I came to camp. Hotels are twice as much in high season.

Two days, she says.

Va bene, I sigh. I can suffer two days in the Hotel Arkadion.

I eat Greek salad, walk the waterfront, pay two euros to enter a Greek Orthodox Church which has ninety works of art in it; one features the Virgin Mary triumphant above a decapitated, blue, three-headed monster with floppy human female breasts splayed-out under her feet. This strikes me as pagan myth with the fantastic blue dead creature, the virgin goddess and four male saints flanking her: floppy human female breasts with areolas and nipples, three amphibian heads. I ask two different docents: a young man who tries to dig up an answer and a girl who just smiles, shrugs, apologizes. They either know nothing or they aren’t saying.

I walk outside the church and at the top of perhaps forty stairs, am taken off-guard by the view of the sea. The Greek sun is setting but still burns strong and I think about those four nightspots on the esplanade, just off the alley where I found the Arkadion, got them from the waiter where I ate the first of the endless Greek salads I’ll live on for the next two weeks — feta, tomato, cucumber, red onion and olives are my mainstay because I feel thick and puffy in this heat — this luxurious, blessed heat I traveled so far to feel. Can it ever be too hot?

I look at the names on a scrap of paper and think: later, later tonight.

It starts to get dark and my energy fades as I trudge towards the Arkadion. Short night on board the ferry. I’d had breakfast at dawn with the only other passenger awake, a retired American traveling with his wife and daughter. He tells me about sailing the world on their fifty-foot vessel, how after ten years they’re ready to dock and sell the Windwalker north of Naples, maybe Ostia, Roma’s port. For now I can find them at berth L-68 in Gouvia, Corfu’s yacht harbor. We agree to rendezvous on Saint Spiros’ Day, four days from now.

When I reach Corfu Town Hall Square, just before I turn left down the alley to the Arkadion, I see a wooden podium just like the one in churches, and it’s positioned outside a restaurant on the stone terrace; I’m sure it wasn’t there before. A light is clipped onto it highlighting a menu with colorful illustrations of the specialties, bright and inviting, and I think, yes, maybe I could be hungry again.

Creamy, garlicky tsatsiki — that’s all I want. That, bread and a half bottle of good Greek wine. And while these thoughts are taking shape, he springs up to the podium with far too much energy for someone with a giant stapled and sutured question mark of a scar ringing his hip. Of course I have no knowledge of his deformity at this hour but it will come because there are two types of people: those who tell nothing and those who tell everything, and Vaggelis is in the latter category. Almost.

He captures customers in his softly pressed white cotton shirt, white pants. The couples look at the menu, the women look at him — and ultimately it’s the women who decide where they will dine. With black eyes and hair, three days’ worth of perfectly trimmed dark beard which elongates his already thin face — a rogue beard which wants to be unruly, like Vaggelis — he escorts them to their tables moving like the rest of the staff at a jackrabbit pace, darting back to the kitchen then again to the podium, leading the people to the table of their choice.

The important thing is to flatter and please the people, and at this moment I am one of the people. Does he look at everyone this way? Probably. Straight-on with his eyes then averting them, then fully penetrating your private thoughts before returning to his role as the cordial, proper maitre d’tavola. Later he asks me:

You see how I don’t go to your table except to bring you Parmesan?

No, I think. I was too enthralled with the red wine and the tsatsiki and the crazy, crazy Corfu birds which cry and shriek like harpies late into the night, long after normal birds know they should have their heads tucked under their wings… crazy Greek birds that sound like the mechanical toys that street vendors hawk.When I question the slender blonde waitress about the birds, she misunderstands me and agrees that they are toys. For a rare moment she rests near me, looks up into the black night sky and says,

Every night, too much noise. Too loud, too loud, every night…

Are you alone? Is what I know he’s going to ask so I beat him to it; I tell him right away at the podium,

It’s just me.

And I think he moves a little faster. Maybe too fast. The girls in white shirts and black pants move in sprints, passing each other in relay races which continue well past midnight. I witness near collisions. The half bottle of Greek red wine opens up; the lost backpack blends into a daydream as I sip and grow an appetite.

Pastitsada. Pasta and meat, a house specialty. The girls run, my mind runs back to Crete, ten years, nine years, again two years ago. Too many years, and too many ragazzi — young Italian men. Never mind, I tell myself; I’m in Corfu tonight.

There’s enough penne rigate and meat for three people. Too much. The Greek ragazzo in white rushes to bring grated Parmesan to my table, and when he leans towards my plate, spoon hovering in midair, I’m distracted by a glimpse of his smooth chest.

You’re not interested, I tell myself. But I meet his eyes when I ask,

Is it Reggiano?

And he says, It’s Parmesan.

Si, I say. But is it Reggiano? Not all Parmesan is created equal.

And he says it is, but I doubt it. I release the top button on the tight black jeans I found on sale in the Italian town where I was stranded between trains, between Alberobello with the Hobbit houses and Brindisi for the ferry. Max Mara jeans, end-of-summer collection. I was lucky to have found them and the silky black crisscross top which practically grazes the dark circles around my own unholy nipples. They’re not too dark though, for I haven’t been able to sun bathe nude yet — nor will I on this conservative, Greek Orthodox island.

The pastitsada is too rich. I pay, I leave the floodlights and the noisy diners and walk — who knows where? No Roman road planning here, only mazes which confound and lead me in circles, finally back to the piazza and now I know my way to my hotel. And as I turn the corner down the alley towards the Arkadion, he touches my arm and says

You left things on the table. Phone and sunglasses.

And I say something like, Thank you, and worry that perhaps he opened my flip-phone and saw pictures of Fabio wearing only a very low-slung blue towel, admiring himself: Narcissus.

Where you are going tonight?

I’m prepared for this question because I have the list: Destil, Amaze, Base, and Magnet… I recite the ones I can remember and he says

"Those are no good! You must go out, farther out from the center.

Really? Maybe I scoff. I have faith in this list.

"Yes. Out."

With whom?

"With me."

You?

He has courage. Italians are strong but Greeks are stronger.

Maybe. When?

Twelve-thirty. I leave the restaurant at twelve-thirty.

I am at the Arkadion. Tired, but game.

Another ragazzo passes us and he greets him in Greek. His friend works the nightshift at my hotel — a good thing, maybe.

I know this routine: I’ve freshened-up a thousand times in my life. Somewhere between smooth legs and white teeth the hotel phone rings. Forty-five minutes early.

I found your number.

I’ll bet you did. I bet you find a lot of numbers I think, but don’t say.

"You said