text: Prologue An Italian Villa Italy Her tiramisu now a decadent constellation of espresso-soaked crumbs across a vast nine-inch expanse of luxuriant eggshell Milanese Corel, the tip of her newly Botoxed tongue delicately savored the exclusive nespresso the Giardino Degli Ulivi shipped in daily from the Cluni di Vito Valley. She could be forgiven her cosmic meanderings - the renowned Dr. Tyson had addressed the conference this morning, and the former boxer and honorary doctorate in pugilistic romance had closed his keynote with a random prose recitation of When You Wish Upon a Star . Donatello, the muscular young waiter who’d earlier decanted her moscato with a deft twist and a tug, removed her dessert plate, accidentally touching her hand from the opposite side of the table. It lingered for a moment - the ristorante had earned five Michelin and four Goodyear stars for its exquisitely tacky raspberry drizzle. She yanked free first - she’d already enjoyed the favors of the bronzed and reticent boi di pool Leonardo, the masseuse con lieto fine Raphael, and village travel agent Michaelangelo, who’d sold her her Vespa rental policy. Tan aged muted insured tourists were normally her taste, but it was the off-season. “And how does the signora like the tiramisu Toscana di buoza con java a la madonna ciccione ?” Donatello purred. “I (***) it -- it called to mind my favorite pasteria cucina di casuale off the Newark Airport Turnpike,” she murmured, savoring the memory of perpetual zuppa and breadsticks and the quaintly homicidal calls of the Jersey villagers. “Ah,” Donatello smiled radiantly, squeezing her thigh in the continental manner as he replenished her water and swept the crumbs from the Napolese red-checked table cloth. “As my people say, when you’re here, you are like famiglia.” She looked down blushingly to retrieve her Discover Double Platinum card, but when she looked back up, he was gone, as was the local custom whenever one was ready to pay and vamoose . Though there were only three empty tables on the terrace and two inside and Donatello’s five brothers working the front of the house, she settled in with her ’22 Moscato for the customary 35 minute wait and gazed off at the Tower of Pisa and the Coliseum and Vatican City and Tuscany and the canals of Venice to the east. The woman appeared as if out of nowhere, like a wraith from the pearly gates of Hell. Bundled in cloak and shawl and an ankle length skit and blocky goat-leather shoes, the blocky, compact woman swooped in nose-to-nose with the four-time National Book-ish Prize winner. Her eyes, set in a flat froggish face, were goggly and dead. “You (***) your tiramisu?” she sneered. “You (***) your continental breakfast, your morning McCafe di Latte , your how you say conference bag of swag. You (***) the crazy tattooed man with the voce di una bambina and the Jiminy Cricket.” “Mike Tyson is a global treasure,” the author whispered. “ Basta fondu ,” the crone shrieked. “Your kind, you talk of (***), you write of (***), you fill the Hallmark and the Lifetime and the Prima di Amazona with (***), but you know nothing of it. You take all meaning out of it, you sell it like lire candy at a 100-Lire General or a Euro Tree. It is an obscenity from your torta hole. “No longer! By the gods of Daniella Steel, I curse your tribe, your famiglia, your entire genre and your publishing casas! Only death and misery will come to you who henceforth blaspheme this most sacred of words. Salagadoola mechicka boola bibbidi-bobbidi-boo!” “Hey, you!” a strong, ruggedly masculine voice roared. “How dare you terrorize this bella signora , the generosa tipper, this Rewards Club Triple Titanium member! Scram, you!” She couldn’t understand half of Donatello’s threat, but she felt a throbbing pulse of gratitude as the hag glared back and disappeared eventually after fumbling with the terrazza gate latch. Her eyes locked with Donatello’s, and their bodies quickly became as one on the checkered tablecloth until the first screams echoed from the Motel Sei/Boyardee Arena-Convention Center below... Chapter 1 Alexis Integra Chatt muted her office/parlor TV as the Best of CNN scanned across the Boyardee Center ballroom, littered with the corpses of 323 of the world’s premiere romance writers sprawled amid blood and mimosa. “I came to you as a sort of last resort,” “Bridgit Towne” admitted. She’d been a hometown gal-pal from A.I.’s cupcake scone days, but they’d drifted apart after Alexis severed all cozy ties and set up shop in Atlanta as a steamy-adjacent paranormal investigator and notary. After the tragedy in Italy, Brigit had gone off the grid and abandoned her famous nom de plume . “InterpolCon was going on at the Extended Stay Italia next door, some old Belgian detective was investigating a murder on an overcrowded gondola, and this meddling mystery writer from Maine was visiting her great-aunt-cousin in Tuscany,” Bridgit resumed. “But none of them had a clue. Why I came to you.” Alexis noticed the writer worrying a beaded WWJCD bracelet. She’d never been particularly religious before, aside from a controversial wooing scene between her heroine Shonda and a brawny, no-nonsense Anglican vicar in The Christmas Wood . “You think this woman was some kind of supernatural manifestation?” Brigit grinned sheepishly as she spotted A.I. spotting. “I know it sounds crazy except maybe to you, but I always ask myself, ‘What would Jackie Collins do?’ I think she’d want to consider the possibilities. The old woman had eerie, soulless eyes, and the restaurant patio gate had a fairly simple latch mechanism, but she couldn’t seem to work it. As if she’d never before encountered a human patio gate .” It seemed like flawless logic, but A.I. needed to dig in on the specific non-human entity with which she might be dealing. “Look, you want a glass of wine? I’m out of white, but Dvlknish found an old Amontillado behind one of the walls.” “I’d lo--, I mean, I would appreciate and enjoy some, but I gave up the booze after Italy. I’m a sloppy drunk, and I can’t afford to get loose-tongued - at least in the verbal sense. This thing has been a nightmare. We’re all running scared. I had to buy a Roget’s Thesaurus, and half my readers say they’re having trouble getting soft because of confusing synonyms and nuanced emotions. Try getting the juices flowing when Kristen looks deeply into Cody’s cobalt eyes and declares her ‘intense interpersonal regard.’ “Without beach reading, tourists are venturing too close to the sharks. Tastefully Aroused Mothers for Editorial Decency have boycotted the major romance publishers. The TAMED wackos said we’re now promoting ‘sex without buffers,’ and as a result, there’s an epidemic of embarrassing moments at afterschool waiting zones and on public transit.” “And just what do you want from me?” “Find that old witch and make her lift the curse,” Brigit demanded. Chapter 13 “So she what, smelled like an animal, had BO?” More and more woke were-creatures were going the Thinner / Drag Me To Hell route rather than simply dining and dashing.. I considered the possibility of full-moon shape-shifters until Donatello roared with earthy, robust, Old World laughter. “No, no, my lovely signora! When I was a foolish young man, I sought to become a fragrance millionaire, until I realized food service and customer seduction were my noble calling. And that the only, er, how you say, tail one finds in the perfume trade are financially strapped mid-life actresses. There is only so much Natalie Portman one can withstand, capisce? But I have retained one very specific talent -- the ability to identify any fragrance, from Stetson to Obsession 5: The Arousing. This old village woman fairly, how do you say, reeked of Pfish.” “Fish??” “No, no,” Donatello chuckled hononymically. “Pfish, by Zuckerberg. ‘Hack into her IP.’ It’s very popular with one of our Premiere Molybdenum Reward Abusers; as I said, musky. And there was a faint note of sulfur -- she reminded me of my precious Zia Maria in the village of Catania. Well, she was not precisely my ‘aunt’ -- more like my nonna Sbarra’s nurse. Well, nursing student, well, pre-nursing--“ “Whoa-kay!” Alexis sang, ringing off. Chapter 25 It was unusual to see the Italy area code on her phone twice in a single day. Dvlknish was an ursine lump next to her, rumbling in post-coital contentment somewhere between a badger with a deviated septum and a woodchipper snagged on a driftwood badger with a delicately carved deviated septum. The Syburslovenian hacker/plagiarist was a manly sleeper and an earnestly motivated lo--, er, partner. Now I’m doing it, A.I. thought. Then she remembered the phone call, and slipped into the hallway to connect. “Bon giorno, Signora Chatt?” the policeman inquired. “I am so sorry to interrupt your, ah, shift at the lumberyard? You talked to a Donatello Gnocchi today. I regret to inform you Signore Gnocchi was murdered this evening. With his dying breath -- well, his next-to-final breath -- he asked our responding officer to tell you he knew how it was done, whatever it was. “Sadly, with his actually dying breath, he died before he could finish his final message. He seemed to indicate his, how do you say, grandmama, committed these horrific murders at the Boyardee. From what his manager told us, Sbarra Gnocchi died in Catania in 1921, when Etna erupted during her weekly trip to the Mercato Della Spazzatura Sfusa a Buon Mercato, or as you call it, Costco. Crushed after knocking over a palette of panini makers - you cannot make sudden geological noises around the old, you know?” “But he was positive his grandmother was responsible for the deaths?” “He looked straight up at my officer - he had very striking azure eyes, as deep nearly as the Corsican coast, by the way - and moaned ‘Nana’ before perishing. We will miss our young Donatello - no man was more skilled or generous with the parmesan grinder. Or with certain other implements of his trade, if you catch my--” “Whoaaakay.” ** Dvlknish grunted as Alexis squirmed anxiously beside him on the couch she’d snagged at Lovecraft and Derleth’s downtown . He’d always looked forward to NCIS Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday, especially after struggling all day with a new genre. Romance was the Syburslovenian immigrant’s meat - along with wild marmot, javelina, and ring bologna - and the growing wave of authorial panic had spread to the international bootleg underground. Her Knish had little knowledge of American law or justice, and he’d written himself into a corner following the Chapter 1 mandatory street execution of The Audi Attorney ’s jaywalking client. Syburslovenians were soft on toxic microchip dumps and bioweapons storage, but they respected the yellow lines and the thin blue line that protected them. As Alexis’ cheek and Dvlknish gnawed distinterestedly at his third heron leg, she became concerned over his peckish appetite. She patted his thigh, felt the hollow clonk of titanium, and patted the other one. They locked eye and eyes, and he grunted with a contrite grin, slurping heron skin into his maw. As the Eskimos have literally dozens of words for snow, so the Syburslovenians have more than 100 guttural expressions for that deepest of human emotions. More confusing, all meant roughly the same thing. A broasted marmot, a coral sunset, an adorbs feline video, A.I.’s fingers on the pelt of his shoulder, L.L. Cool J charging into a hijacked luau on behalf of an obscure law enforcement agency that, oddly, every cop and civilian alike seemed to recognize - all were articulated within the same spectrum of affection. A.I. knew from her recent brief experience as an investigator of the arcane and uncanny that there was no value in playing chicken with the unknown. She grunted her desire throatily, and suddenly, Dvlknish abandoned all hope of discovering who the poi smuggling ringleader was. During the commercial break, pulling a jagged Cool Ranch from her sweaty hindside, Alexis filled Dvlknish in on Donatello’s murder and the mystery surrounding the untraceable mass hemorrhage of the world’s most distinguished romance writers. Her soulmate stirred and grunted contemplatively. “I know,” Alexis said. “It bothered me a little, too. He’d called his grandmother Nonna during our earlier conversation, and yet he used the non-Italian term ‘Nana’ with the policia . And there was the matter of the old woman’s and, presumably, the killer’s perfume...” Dvlknish struggled from the couch and ambled for the bedroom. He returned a moment later flapping an Eastern European men’s fashion magazine, Coat and Coverings . Dvlknish located a center spread ad featuring a flamboyantly dead-eyed Mark Zuckerberg brandishing a slim flask of amber liquid, as a gaunt but blocky Syburslovenian supermodel fawned at his flank. Dvlknish scratched vigorously at the ad and pushed it into Alexis’ face. Her eyes widened. “Pfish,” she murmured. “I detect floral notes, an essence of lightly singed motherboard, but there isn’t anything remotely musky, as Donatello suggested.” Alexis paused. “But maybe Donatello was simply being more direct. And the vague side note that reminded him of his family in Sicily. Donatello’s nonna lived in the shadow of Italy’s tallest volcano.” A.I. bounced up and scrambled to her office laptop. Dvlknish attempted to reconnect with NCIS: Montpelier as she rapped away at the keyboard. Soon, Alexis reemerged bearing a sheaf of paper. “I got it! I jumped onto House Hunters’ list of dormant volcano-adjacent megahomes in the $1-$10 billion range. Donatello didn’t realize how on-the-head he actually had been. And there’s the final piece of the puzzle.” Dvlknish followed her index finger to the TV screen, where thanks to Amazon’s cutting-edge Fortuitous Network Crime Show Timing technology, a sturdy, bald man with an elaborate roommate-prank facial tattoo and the voice of some forgotten Warner Brothers cartoon character was hosting the Nobel Prize Awards live on Nickelodeon. As a rivulet of green slime doused a group of Stanford astrophysicists, he grunted excitedly. Chapter 47 Like most volcano lairs, mandatory safety exits were discreetly located at the base of the cone -you didn’t fuck with Micronesian building codes. The supervillain’s base was not terribly difficult to locate, thanks to the corporate logo carved into the side of the hardened lava slope. It was a Sunday, and she knew her prey was not about to pay overtime for a special forces-trained security detachment. The few dozen tech-slaves docked into their coding stations or playing foosball on their three-minute meal breaks were easy to dispatch or bribe with energy drinks and Takis. “I heard Mike Tyson was scheduled to officiate the Nobies, and I stopped to wonder why he hadn’t died with the rest of the romance writers,” I said to the man in the huge chamber next to the executive Starbucks, who peered at a bank of monitors now displaying dead and hyperactive Gen-plusser nerds. “Ms. Chatt,” Elon said, an Angora cat in his lap. He placed the steaming platter of feline au poivre on his mammoth desk, and his goggly dead eyes narrowed. “Do you realize how many Indonesian fifth graders I’m going to have to hire to make up for this loss in productivity?” “That’s why you did it, am I right?” Alexis forged on. “You dosed those poor simpleminded saps’ mimosas, but Tyson was keynote. Mike would never have drunk before a PowerPoint.” “My understanding was the authorities have been unable to trace the substance used,” the first man to ding the Moon with a recreational shuttle murmured. “Because it wasn’t a ‘substance.’ That sweet, hot cheese-grinder you murdered? His dying message suggested his grandmother had committed the conference slaughter, but I realized he was identifying the method of murder. Not Nana, nor Nonna, but nanobytes . You or your employees at Tesla’s Tuscan mimosery injected millions of destructive microrobots into the writers’ brunch booze. They deconstructed organ and membrane walls until the victims hemorrhaged to death, then exited through their capped and bleached orifices, blending into the eventually cleaned-up blood. “I knew we were dealing with some implausible tech-thriller weapon when I realized Donatello meant the old lady on the terrazzo smelled ‘Musk-y.’ SEC and CNBC filings show you bought and replicated Zuckerberg years ago - he’s so obviously AIed. As the staff at the Motel Sei will attest, Pfish is their sole Premiere Molybdenum Reward Abuser’s favorite fragrance.” “Very good, Ms. Chatt,” the Space X sky jockey and fire car maker purred. “Love -- exciting and new, right? Not for me. Employee families and external relationships, coitus in the server banks and cloning labs, three-minute lunches that turn into five-minute lunches as team members linger over their ramen and gruel and the latest Kristin Hannah or Celeste Ng or Susan Wiggs. Employees calling in sick to catch Hallmark’s third-quarter Christmas and first-quarter Valentine’s marathons? Love hurts - the bottom line. I cleared barely 18 figures this fiscal month, and the Dark Old Ones - er, I mean the board and stockholders - are extremely unhappy. Fortunately, you have no proof of your ridiculous allegations, so I won’t even bother to kill you.” Then Elon blinked as the item in my right hand glittered in the lair’s blue light. “You would have gotten away with it,” Alexis smiled tightly, “except the execution of a perfect mass murder and your role as the old village witch sapped your blood sugar and you grabbed a quick snack at the Giardino Degli Ulivi. Namely, their signature after-dinner Andes Mint. An Andes Mint degrades in roughly 3.14 minutes, or 10 seconds inside an expensive suit or pants pocket, and this wrapper from the scene of the curse is coveed with your chocolatey prints.” Before Elon could leap for his phone and his attorney’s programmed number, three dozen Mossad-trained, taurine-fueled TMZ correspondent and gossip wranglers rappelled into the volcano. “You forgot,” Alexis ginned. “When you’re at Giardino Degli Ulivi, even illicitly, you’re like family.”