I, Spy? (Sophie Green Mysteries, No. 1) (Sophie Green Mystery)

shrugged. “Nine it is. I’ll see you then.”
    I skipped upstairs, feeling much better already, and changed into my navy suit. I had my phone and credit card in my pocket, hoping I’d be able to jimmy open the door if I needed to.
    I didn’t need to. Wright answered the door, wearing a hotel robe and smoking a cigar. Oh, please.
    “Room service?” I said. I hefted the towels I’d brought from my room. “I’ve come to make your room ready for bed.”
    He stood back to let me in. “English?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “What are you doing here in Rome, then?”
    Hoping you’ll go away.
    “Studying, sir. Ancient Roman politics.”
    This stumped him, as I’d desperately hoped it would. “Right,” he said, taking my towels. “I’ll be in the bath.”
    Was it my imagination, or did he wink at me?
    Bleurgh.
    I clattered around for a while, until I was sure he was done listening to me, then I got out my phone and tried to remember how to take a picture with it. I messed around in Wright’s briefcase, taking pictures of a lot of things—the camera was slow but the pictures were hella-good—but I didn’t see anything I thought was very interesting.
    However, I did see a magnificently placed wedding ring on top of a serviette with three girls’ numbers scrawled on it.
    “Room service?” Wright called from the bathroom, and I froze with my finger on the shutter to snap the ring. “Room service? Come and scrub my back.”
    I bolted.
    Back in my own room, I found I had about ten minutes to get ready for dinner. I dropped the suit on the floor, wriggled into my marvellous dress (maybe slightly too small but at that price, who gave a damn) and shoes, sprayed on Impulse body spray in the absence of perfume, and ran my fingers through my hair.
    There. Ready.
    Sort of.
    Harvey was waiting, looking handsome and indefinably American, and he smiled at me as I approached.
    “You look brand new,” he said. “You ready to go?”

Chapter Ten
     
    We took a taxi across the river and wandered around looking for a trattoria in the Trastavere district. I had no idea a modern city could be so beautiful. Every road ended in a little piazza with the sort of topiary in huge terracotta pots that my mother would pay a fortune for from the garden centre. Soft, happy light and chatter and music flowed across the streets from every building. The people were beautiful, olive-skinned and charming.
    One of the things I found so frustrating earlier in the day when I was running out of time to go shopping—I mean, complete my mission, ahem—was the way you can’t follow a road to the end, then turn left or right onto the next road, as it appears on the maps. Oh no. Every road ends, as I said, in a charming little geranium-filled piazza with a dozen pretty little alleys leading off all over the place. Whichever one you take is guaranteed to take you completely the wrong way, and by the time you find a street with a street sign and locate it on your (by now very crumpled) map, you’re halfway across the city in the wrong direction.
    I minded very much when I was alone, but now I figured I was getting the hang of it. Of course, it helped that I wasn’t getting quite so hassled by a lot of Romans who appeared to have never seen a blonde before. Now I was getting the same attention, but walking arm in arm with a handsome man seemed to subdue it somewhat.
    “You’re a hit,” Harvey said as a wolf-whistle echoed down the street after us.
    “It’s the hair,” I said. “They have a thing about blondes.”
    “You ever been to Asia?”
    I shook my head, no.
    “Man, they go nuts over a white skin there. If you’re a redhead they practically worship you. Blondes too.”
    “My mother went to Sweden once with her friend who’s Indian,” I said. “They couldn’t get over her. People kept touching her hair. My mother’s blonde like me and she was kinda pissed off people kept ignoring her.”
    “People notice her a lot?”
    I thought about it. My mother had never been like other people’s mothers. She didn’t look old. She didn’t have scary-hair-in-the-air like my friends’ mothers all had from when we were at primary school. She borrowed my clothes. She was attractive and made the most of herself in a growing-old-gracefully sort of way. She moved with the times, which I guess was the secret to avoiding old age.
    “Yeah, people notice her a lot,” I said.
    “Must run in the family.”
    He was very sweet and charming, and he