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There was nothing worth stealing in this room. I checked my backpack and felt the bulge of my wallet. I didn’t bring a computer and I had my cell phone with me.
“Shit,” I whispered as the possibility hit me. “Shit. Shit.” I scrambled to my overturned suitcase and reached into the interior pocket. My passport was gone.
How could I have been so stupid to leave behind the one thing I needed to get home?
“You’re a world-class idiot, Sara. Goddamn it,” I yelled out loud, and laid back down on the floor, wishing the thief had taken my credit card instead, the one I’d probably have to default on when I got back. I reached for my phone to Google replacement passport Sicily, but the Wi-Fi wasn’t working and the cell service was still terrible. I had to find Giusy and ask for help.
I picked up the box from the closet, clutching it to my chest as I hurried down the stairs.
Giusy was arguing with someone on the phone, too fast for me to understand her. The only words I could make out were the curses. Suddenly she slammed her hand onto the marble of the check-in counter with the intensity of a judge banging a gavel, and then silence.
She fixed her eyes on me once I made it in front of her.
“I’m sorry I was an asshole on the mountain,” I said, echoing her earlier comment about me.
“Don’t apologize. It was a lot. My entire life, people have told me I am a lot to handle. Would you like a coffee? Why are you carrying that box?”
“My room,” I started. The sentence caught in my throat. “Did you see a man run out of here when I came in?”
Confusion clouded Giusy’s face as she shook her head.
“I assume it was a man. Or a boy. He banged into me in the hallway and when I got to my room it was a mess. He broke things. But that seems like maybe it was a distraction because the only thing he took was my passport.”
“Your passport is missing?”
“Did you see him?”
“I did not see anyone.” She repeated her question. “They took your passport?”
I nodded. “What do I do? I need to call the consulate, right? Do I have to report it to the local authorities? Has anything like this happened to your other guests?”
“Come with me. Let’s sit. Let me think.” Giusy opened the heavy door behind the desk.
This must be where Giusy lived. It was an entire house on the other side of the wall from the hotel. I almost bruised my shin on a canister of canes next to the door. Canes in all colors, shapes, and sizes, though I had still witnessed no actual limp in either of Giusy’s legs. She had scurried up the mountain like a champion.
The decor couldn’t have been more different from what was in the hotel. The walls were painted bright blue and electric orange. They clashed terribly with the red Turkish rugs covering the floor. Giusy pulled out a bottle.
“A splash of wine?”
Screw it, I’d been robbed and presented with an ancient police report detailing the grisly murder of a long-dead relative. I held up two fingers in a little pinching gesture to indicate I wanted only a bit.
She poured us two juice glasses full. Suddenly I felt so incredibly grateful for her, for someone to take care of me, and I nearly forgot the tension between us this morning.
“Should we call the police?” I asked. “I don’t have any phone service. I haven’t been able to call anyone or check my messages. I have no idea what is going on back home, what is happening with my daughter. We don’t go this long without talking.”
She nodded. “I will try to reach my friend who works with the police. Let’s go sit on my roof. You will get phone service up there if you want to check in with your family.”
We walked through her kitchen. I noticed a cut of meat thawing on the countertop, spring lamb rump from the shape of it, the kind you hardly need to season if you roast it straight over an open fire. The different cuts of meat once called out to me, as strange as that sounded. I could carve them with my eyes closed and sometimes I did. But I hadn’t picked up a knife since we shut down.
Giusy led me up a narrow staircase. On the top floor we walked to the end of the hallway and climbed a short ladder to a trapdoor in the roof. Giusy flung it open, and I followed her through the hole of blinding light.
I squinted into the sun and saw a few lounge chairs, a rickety side table, and an overflowing ashtray. Lines of laundry flapped in the wind.
“Welcome to my office.” Giusy spread her arms wide.
“Now this is the million-dollar view,” I said. You could see the entire town from here, up to the castle at the top of the peak and down to the sea on the horizon.
“I know.” Giusy lit a cigarette with one hand and pulled dried sheets off the line with the other. “It is nice to look at, but I would rather get money for it and leave it behind. Right now we are on the roof of my house. That roof next door is the hotel. I want to sell both of them and be done with it all.”
