Moscow Rules

important, you are not to tell a soul he’s there. As far as you’re concerned, this man is a nonperson. He does not exist.”
     
     
    “And where shall I put this nonperson?” asked Margherita.
     
     
    “In the master suite, overlooking the swimming pool. And remove everything from the drawing room, including the paintings and the tapestries. He plans to use it as his work space.”
     
     
    “Everything?”
     
     
    “ Every thing.”
     
     
    “Will Anna be cooking for him?”
     
     
    “I’ve offered her services, but, as yet, have received no answer.”
     
     
    “Will he be having any guests?”
     
     
    “It is not outside the realm of possibility.”
     
     
    “What time should we expect him?”
     
     
    “He refuses to say. He’s rather vague, our Signore Vianelli.”
     
     
    As it turned out, he arrived in the dead of night—sometime after three, according to Margherita, who was in her room above the chapel at the time and woke with the sound of his car. She glimpsed him briefly as he stole across the courtyard in the moonlight, a dark-haired man, thin as a rail, with a duffel bag in one hand and a Maglite torch in the other. He used the torch to read the note she had left at the entrance of the villa, then slipped inside with the air of a thief stealing into his own home. A moment later, a light came on in the master bedroom, and she could see him prowling restlessly about, as though looking for a lost object. He appeared briefly in the window, and, for several tense seconds, they gazed at each other across the courtyard. Then he gave her a single soldierly nod and drew the shutters closed with an emphatic thump.
     
     
    They greeted each other properly the next morning at breakfast. After an exchange of polite but cool pleasantries, he said he had come to the Villa dei Fiori for the purposes of work. Once that work began, he explained, noise and interruptions were to be kept to a minimum, though he neglected to say precisely what sort of work he would be doing or how they would know whether it had commenced. He then forbade Margherita to enter his rooms under any circumstances and informed a devastated Anna he would be seeing to his own meals. When recounting the details of the meeting for the rest of the staff, Margherita described his demeanor as “standoffish.” Anna, who took an instant loathing to him, was far less charitable in her depiction. “Unbearably rude,” she said. “The sooner he’s gone, the better.”
     
     
    His life quickly acquired a strict routine. After a spartan breakfast of espresso and dry toast, he would set out on a long forced march around the estate. At first, he snapped at the dogs when they followed him, but eventually he seemed resigned to their company. He walked through the olive groves and the sunflowers and even ventured into the woods. When Carlos pleaded with him to carry a shotgun because of the wild boar, he calmly assured Carlos that he could look after himself.
     
     
    After his walk, he would spend a few moments tending to his quartersand laundry, then prepare a light lunch—usually a bit of bread and local cheese, pasta with canned tomato sauce if he was feeling particularly adventurous. Then, after a vigorous swim in the pool, he would settle in the garden with a bottle of Orvieto and a stack of books about Italian painters. His car, a battered Volkswagen Passat, gathered a thick layer of dust, for not once did he set foot outside the estate. Anna went to market for him, resentfully filling her basket with the air of a virtuoso forced to play a child’s simple tune. Once, she tried to slip a few local delights past his defenses, but the next morning, when she arrived for work, the food was waiting for her on the kitchen counter, along with a note explaining that she had left these things in his refrigerator by mistake. The handwriting was exquisite.
     
     
    As the days ground gloriously past, the nonperson called Alessio Vianelli, and the nature of his mysterious work on behalf of the Holy Father, became something of an obsession for the staff of the Villa dei Fiori. Margherita, a temperamental soul herself, thought him a missionary recently returned from some hostile region of the world. Anna suspected a fallen priest who had been cast into Umbrian exile, but then Anna was inclined to see the worst in him. Isabella, the ethereal half Swede who oversaw the horse operation, believed him to be a recluse theologian at work on an