The City of Falling Angels Read Online Free PDF

quick fix for the party. It would simply have to go on as planned. For one fleeting moment, they all wondered whether it might be possible to say nothing about the fire, assuming that only a few people would have heard about it before coming to the ball. But that, they decided, might only make matters worse.
     
     
    Bea Guthrie returned her attention to her unfinished centerpiece as a smiling, ruddy-faced man with dark, curly hair came walking into the Rainbow Room and waved to her. He was Eligio Paties, a Venetian restaurateur who had also been flown to New York by Save Venice to cook dinner for six hundred people tonight. He was just now pacing off the distance from the stoves on the sixty-fourth floor to the tables here on the sixty-fifth. As he walked, he kept looking at his watch. His main concern was the white truffle and porcini mushroom risotto.
     
     
    “The final two minutes of cooking happen after you take the risotto off the fire,” he was saying to the headwaiter walking beside him. “When it comes off the stove, it is absorbing water very quickly, and in exactly two minutes it will be done. It must be served on the plate immediately, or it will turn to mush! We have two minutes to get it from the stoves downstairs to the plates up here. Two minutes. No more!” When Signor Paties reached the far side of the room, he looked at his watch and then looked back at Bea Guthrie, beaming. “One minute and forty-five seconds! Va bene! Good!”
     
     
    Later in the afternoon, when the decorations were finished, Bea Guthrie went home to change, depressed, dreading the next several hours. But then the guest of honor, Signora Dini, called with an idea. “I think I know what we can do,” she said, “if it meets with your approval. I will come to the ball tonight. After the guests have arrived and the announcement is made about the fire, I will say, speaking for all Italians, that we are very grateful that this afternoon the board of directors of Save Venice agreed that all the money raised tonight will be dedicated to rebuilding the Fenice.”
     
     
    That would put a positive spin on the evening. The Save Venice board could be canvassed quickly, and they would surely agree. Suddenly feeling much better, Mrs. Guthrie went upstairs and laid out her harlequin costume in preparation for the ball.
     
     
     
 
SIGNORA SEGUSO NEARLY WEPT FOR JOY when her son, Gino, and her grandson, Antonio, returned home. The moment the electricity had gone off, the flickering light from the fire had invaded the house, its reflection dancing and leaping over the walls and furniture, making it seem as if the house itself had caught fire. The Segusos’ telephone had been ringing constantly, friends wanting to know if they were all right. Some had even come to the door with fire extinguishers. Gino and Antonio were downstairs talking with the firemen, who were urging the Segusos to evacuate, as others in the neighborhood had already done. The officers spoke in lowered voices and with considerably more deference than usual, because they were aware that the old man at the window upstairs was the great Archimede Seguso.
     
     
    And Archimede Seguso would not leave the house.
     
     
    Nor would any of the Segusos consider leaving while he was still in it. So Gino and Antonio busied themselves moving furniture away from the windows, taking down curtains, rolling up rugs, and moving flower boxes indoors. Antonio went upstairs to the terrace, ripped the awning off its rod, and sprayed water on the roof tiles, which had become so hot that steam rose up from them. Signora Seguso and her daughter-in-law meanwhile put things into suitcases in order to be ready to flee the moment Archimede changed his mind. Gino, noticing his wife’s suitcase in the hall, lifted the lid to see what valuables she had put in it. It was filled with family photographs still in their frames.
     
     
    “We can replace everything else,” she said, “but not the