The sky was just turning purple when he stopped in front of the place:
Genoa Café set in a two-story frame building perpetrated, with bays and
turrets, right after the 1906 fire. It was flanked by a Chinese grocery
store, full of leathery fragrances, and a Portuguese Baptist mission. A
sign on the door said closed. Well, the old people would be in no mood
for discussing the various types of pizza tonight.
Yellow light spilled from the upper windows. Kintyre found the door to
the upstairs apartment and rang the bell.
A street lamp blinked to life, a car went by, a grimy urchin watched
him impassively from a doorway across the road. He felt much alone.
He heard feet coming down the stairs, a woman's light quick tread.
Expecting Maria Lombardi, he took off his hat and bowed in Continental
style when the door opened. He stopped halfway through the gesture and
remained staring.
_Morna_, he thought, and he stood on the schooner's deck as it heeled
to the wind, and she was grasping the mainmast shrouds with one
hand, crouched on the rail and shading her eyes across an ocean that
glittered. Her yellow hair blew back into his face, it smelled of
summer.
"Yes?"
Kintyre shook himself, like a dog come out of a deep hurried river.
"I'm sorry," he stammered. "I'm sorry. You startled me, looked like
someone I used to--" He pulled the chilly twilight air into his lungs,
until he could almost feel them stretch. One by one, his muscles
relaxed.
"Miss Lombardi, isn't it?" he tried again. "I haven't seen you for a
couple of years, and you wore your hair differently then. I'm Robert
Kintyre."
"Oh, yes. I remember you well," she said. Her mouth turned a little
upward, its tautness gentling. "Bruce's professor. He spoke of you so
often. It's very kind of you to come."
She stood aside to let him precede her. His hand brushed hers
accidentally in the narrow entrance. Halfway up the stairs, he realized
he was holding the fist clenched.
_What is this farce?_ he asked himself angrily. Nothing more than
straight blonde hair, worn in bangs across the forehead and falling
to the shoulders. Now in the full electric light he could see
that it wasn't even the same hue, a good deal darker than Morna's
weather-bleached mane. And Corinna Lombardi was a mature woman--young,
he recalled Bruce's going over to the City last month for her
twenty-second birthday party--but grown. Morna would always be thirteen.
Corinna had been nineteen when he saw her last, still living here and
working in the café. That was at a little farewell dinner the Lombardis
had given him, before he departed for his latest year in Italy. They
had wanted him to look up Angelo's brother Luigi, the one who had made
a success in the old country as a secret service man. Kintyre had
visited Luigi a few times, finding him a pleasant sort with scholarly
inclinations, most interested in his brilliant nephew Bruce, with whom
he corresponded.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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