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Lupercallia

BOBBY AND LIANNE DEXTER WERE GOOD PEOPLE. THEY owned a brand-new timber mansion on an acre plot cut into a vast green swath of pines thirty miles outside Seattle. They put in long hours for Microsoft down the road, Bobby in marketing, Lianne in finance. They hiked every weekend and, once a year, made it to the summit of Mount Rainier. They worked out too, though Bobby still couldn’t keep what he called the “family tummy-pudge” from coming through over the belt of his jeans. And that at just thirty-three.

The Dexters were quiet, comfortably wealthy middle-class Americans. Except for two weeks a year, in spring, when they went abroad on vacation. They’d reasoned this through. It was all a question of balance. Work hard for fifty weeks of the year. Party hard for the remaining two. Preferably somewhere the locals didn’t know you, where different rules applied. Or maybe didn’t apply at all. Which was why, on a chill February day, they were ten miles outside Rome, dead drunk on red wine and grappa, seated in a hired Renault Clio which Bobby was driving much too fast over the potholes of an unmarked lane that ran from a back road behind Fiumicino airport down towards the flat, grey line of the meandering Tiber.

Lianne glanced at her husband, making sure he didn’t see the anxiety in her face. Bobby was still fuming. He’d had the metal detector out all morning, hunting around the outskirts of Ostia Antica, the excavated remains of imperial Rome’s onetime coastal harbour.

Bobby and Lianne had retired hurt to a nearby roadside osteria where, to add insult to injury, the waiter, an unshaven lout in a grubby sweatshirt, had lectured both on how wrong it was to pronounce the word “pasta” as “pahstah,” the American way.

Bobby had listened, his white, loose cheeks reddening with fury, then snapped, “Just gimme a fucking steak then. ” And added a litre of rosso della casa to the order just for good measure. Lianne said nothing. She knew when it was smart to acquiesce to Bobby’s mood. If things got too bad drinkwise they could always dump the car at the airport and take a cab back into town. Not that Italians minded about drunk driving. They did it all the time, it seemed to her. Or at least she assumed they did. Italy was like that. Lax. She and Bobby were just behaving like the locals.

“I cannot believe these people,” Bobby complained as he rolled the Clio over a pile of dried mud that had caked neatly into a solid ridge after the recent winter rain. “I mean like… don’t they have enough of this fucking stuff as it is?”