Free The Conversion by Joseph Olshan

somebody else. But you also have to know that Ed was one big drama queen.”
    Marina now laughs and slaps her thighs. “I think you’d make a good detective, actually.”
    I remind her that in my thorough questioning by the Parisian authorities , I’d been forced to examine and re-examine what happened in great detail.
    “Of course you did.”
    I am just now realizing that Marina’s invitation for me to stay at the villa, all her zealous efforts to troubleshoot my obligations to the French courts, make a bit more sense. If she hadn’t wondered whether the intruders might have been looking for her room, would her generosity have been less forthcoming? In one way, I am relieved; now her gestures don’t seem so lofty and altruistic. Surely, her belief that the men were out to assassinate her husband instead of Ed is what she wanted to discuss.
    “So you really think Stefano is in danger?” I ask.
    “I’m actually waiting for news from my friend, more conclusive news. I could tell you that for the last twenty years, many such threats have been thrown around by one disgruntled group of people or another and have come to nothing. But, as you well know, the terrorists of today are adamant and organized. They have certainly killed many people who have gone in opposition to them.”
    I take all this in for a moment, and then tell Marina another idea that has been revolving around my brain: that now, after all has been said and done, Ed probably would have approved of his own death. It was a better way to go than suffering some long, withering illness.
    “Who’s to say that would have happened?” Marina asks.
    And I now explain that Ed had also been infected with HIV and had lived with the virus for years.
    Marina nods and says, “Oh, I see. Poor man,” she mutters.
    We arrive at a series of five front steps that ascend to delicate French doors with mullioned glass panes, doors leading directly into the downstairs
salone
. The villa doesn’t have a formal entrance per se but rather a ponderous, beautifully carved wooden door at the side that is controlled by an electric lock. This small entrance in the front is hardly grand. Marina sits down on the worn stone steps and tilts her face to the sun. I am looking across the valley halfway up a mountain where, surrounded by towering, mature cypresses, sits another residence of substantial proportions . Pointing to it, Marina says, “That, by the way, is the convent where Puccini’s sister lived. The one on which he based
Suor Angelica
. You could take a hike there.” I tell her that I might just do that.
    Several moments pass and, somewhere in the distance, the dogs begin to bay in earnest. Marina finally gets up and walks toward the French doors. Then something stops her and she turns around. “And you?” she says. “Do
you
have that virus, too?” Blunt as usual.

Five
    Another nightmare. I’m on the balcony at the Parisian hotel, or maybe it’s on scaffolding looking in on the crime scene, before losing balance and free-falling. The final impact of the pavement is a rude shock, and my breathing is blocked by blood gurgling up into my throat. I awaken once again with my head at the foot of the bed, my face in the pair of socks that I left there, smelling the sweat of my own feet.
    It’s three o’clock in the morning, and lying here I remember having similar nightmares when, at the age of fourteen, I read for the first time Giorgio Bassani’s bildungsroman,
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
. It’s one thing to read a novel about a wealthy Jewish family who are deported to the concentration camps during World War II; it’s another thing entirely to read about a family that is actually your own. The author’s first cousin, my mother, was born into much more modest circumstances, and yet her father, my grandfather, was prescient enough to get his branch of the family out of Ferrara before the Nazis invaded. My mother came to America at the age of five and