This is a spy novel set in Italy for the most part. There are some interesting developments along the way.

Chapter 1

I could see into my my grandfather’s library through the sheer curtains as I walked up to his narrow white townhouse. I still had the extra keys on my ring that he gave me the first time that he had gone into the hospital. He was back now, after a few days of rest and being looked over.

I knocked on the big, black, front door with the little windows that ran across the top and waited for my grandfather Ernie, to open it.

We were the last two members of our family still living, by some quirk of fate. He had raised me from the age of twelve. Because of that, we had become closer than most grandfather-grandson duos. He had worked at the university and I was finishing up my degree there, so I often stopped by on my way home. I would often borrow a book or two from his vast collection that he had created over the last fifty years that he had taught history and political science there. Sometimes I used the need of a book as an excuse to stop by and see him.

I stood waiting at the door wondering if he was alright, when I heard his familiar footsteps on the ancient hardwood floor approaching me from the other side of the thick door. He was a special man. He was very fit and alert, with the agility of a man half his age, but even he, couldn’t stop the inevitable march of time.

He opened the door with a warm smile and his customary, “Hello big Bobby,” and waved me in. Then he turned and started to walk back through the house to his little den. He had a book in his hand as always. This time, as I read the title, I could see that it was on the Russian Revolution. His index finger had marked the page where he had stopped reading when I knocked on the door. He was wearing his usual Bermuda shorts and white, short-sleeved shirt. He was barefoot as always.

He read constantly. The only time he turned the “idiot box,” as he called it, was when the evening news came on “with those talking heads,” as he called them. He hadn’t lost all faith in their objectivity, but he was nearly at that point now, since he had seen how the media had changed over his lifetime. It wasn’t for the better as far as he could tell.

I walked down the narrow hallway, behind him, and away from the street to the rear of the house. We walked into that little room on the left that was across from the kitchen, where I had spent so much time.

I could hear a man’s voice reading the news from the room, before I could see him down there by the fireplace. “Today marks the end of the second year of the intervention of the United States of America in Iraq.” My grandfather Ernest, Ernie to his friends, looked at me as he sat down into his leather chair, and let out a sigh. “This is going to be a major disaster Bobby. They don’t know what they’re getting themselves into over there,” he said with an impatient glare at the television. “That place is a puzzlw with half of the pieces missing, and the other half spoken in a language and existing in a culture that they just don”t understand.

He moved his head toward the couch in an invitation for me to sit, and as I did, it reminded me of all the times I’d been there over my lifetime, and how large his townhouse had once looked.

The den was about twelve feet square with a high ceiling that made it look bigger than it was. When I was just a young boy it looked enormous. I was twenty-three now, and the room had somehow become smaller over the passing years, like a favorite jacket on a man passing through middle age and gaining a few pounds.

the room was painted white with the obligatory coffee table in the center, and two side tables in two of the four corners of the room. The two end tables had the mandatory lamps on them, with white shades. the high ceiling had a large light hanging from three, short chains, with a coating of dust on them. The room was bright from the lights and from the French doors that led out into the narrow, deep, well kept, back yard that was once my whole world.

The walls around us were covered in black and white photos of my “Ernie” in different cities all over the world. He loved to travel, and when my grandmother died at sixty, from cancer, Ernie started to travel more than ever. “it keeps me from missing her so much guess,” he would tell me when I asked hei if he was ever going to slow down. There were pictures of the Brandenburg Gate, The Arch de Triumph, and even pictures of all those beautiful buddhist temples in Thailand and the Far East.

As I got older, it occurred to me, just how much money he must have spent on all those vacations of his. I began to wonder how he could afford them on his salary. He couldn’t have made that kind of money working at Georgetown. He always assured me that he was in great financial shape when I asked, and he never gave me a reason to think otherwise.

“Don’t worry about your crazy old grandfather bobby, I’m fine. I just can’t sit still,” he would say.

Over the years I had started borrowing his books as a way of checking up on him, and keeping in contact with my only living relative. I passed by his home every time I went to, or left the campus, so why it would be silly not to stop by and visit once or twice a week at least.

We had lived together for for ten years after all. MY parents had been killed in an auto accident, and he and my grandmother were the only family that I had left. It was easy for the courts to give him and my grandmother custody. When my grandmother died, we just had other left to watch over us. I left when I turned twenty-two and wanted to try being out on my own. It was reassuring for me to know that he was nearby, just in case.

It wasn’t easy for either of us, but it was for the best. I had a lot of growing up to do and I needed my space, or so I thought at the time. He was a good man, and let me leave without a fuss and making me feel guilty about leaving him. He knew our bond would never be broken. I hadn’t even thought about it. That shows where you where my head was, at the time. He made it easy for us to remain close.

He said he looked forward to our visits, and he always had a kettle on the stove in the afternoon in anticipation of my stopping by. I had never given much thought to the idea that he might have had other friends or visitors than myself, but apparently, he did.

More than a few times, I had seen butts in the ashtray with bright red lipstick on them, and smelled a perfume that seemed somehow familiar to me. He would quickly toss the butts without comment when I arrived. He never smoked, and the French doors would alwsy be open when I saw those butts on the the table at the end of the couch closest to them.

there was an alley that ran down the rear of his home, and all the way along the other narrow back yards, and down to the larger street at each end of it. The rear fence had a gate that opened on to that alley.

Several times, I had come to visit and could still see the smoke hanging in the air with no ione else in the house. At least he told me that he was alone when I asked. I never ventured upstairs to the bedrooms unless he asked me to climb those steep, narrow, steps for a book he had forgotten up on his nightstand or for some other reason. I had no reason to snoop, and I didn’t want to break our trust. I had thought many times that there could have been someone upstairs that who didn’t want to be seen, but then I thought, “who,” and “why would they hide up there anyway?”

There were other odd things that I discovered in my grandfather’s home while he was in the hospital the first time, and I had been put in charge of his mail and his greenery. I had time then to pay more attention to all photographs on his den wall for one thing, while I was there alone. I had been looking at them most of my life, but never paying attention to them.

More latter today. Come to R.C. Hand on Facebook for my podcast appearances and interviews.