"And you understand the need for absolute secrecy?" "It is a privilege to have been chosen, padrone." Accomplish what I ask of you-demand from you-and you can retire a wealthy man, your future secure." You have the numbers and the codes for my unlisted telephones and fax machines. Whatever you need will be supplied by my ships and cargo aircraft Everything must be precisely duplicated from the original plans as recorded in Bastia two hundred years ago, updated, of course, with modern conveniences. "That is not necessary, sir, I shall carry it out." My representatives will check constantly to make sure it's carried out." But, padrone, you're talking about a hundred or so acres." He yelled to be heard over the pounding rain hitting the stone, "it must be roped off, sealed off, so that no one enters it or disturbs it in any way! Is that clear?"
The "padrone," a man in his early forties, dashed into the small sanctuary, immediately pressing the unfolded map against the spidery foliage he took out a red felt marker from his raincoat pocket and circled a wide area. Still, it was a refuge from the sudden downpour. It was overgrown with vines crawling up the sides, strangling the entrance-forbidding. It was the entrance to a long-ago garden arbor of sorts, odd insofar as the arch itself was barely four feet wide while its thickness was nearly "Over here, padrone," cried the guide from Bonifacio, pointing at an archway in the stone wall. The rain began, a drizzle that quickly became a steady shower. Looking over at the area that momentarily consumed his attention. He kept turning his gaze away from the map, He gave it to the man from Amsterdam, who rapidly unfolded it, placed it against a stone wall, and anxiously studied it. Reached into his pocket and withdrew a many-folded sheaf of heavy paper. Let me have the survey map for the north property, if you please." The Corsican "Everything can wait until I'm finished!. "Senetosa can wait," replied the slender man in a raincoat, his speech betraying a Netherlands origin. "The roads back to the Senetosa airfield are difficult enough without the storm," he added in accented English, the language mutually agreed upon.
"I would suggest that we hurry, padrone," said the heavyset Corsican in a hooded parka. Overgrown, barely visible paths around the great house to be slogged through, not walked over. Soon the air and the earth would be drenched, mud everywhere, the It was midafternoon, the skies dark, heavy rain imminent as a late-winter storm made its way up the coast from Bonifacio. Structures destroyed, gutted by fire decades ago.
The exterior stonework, built to stand for centuries, was by and large intact, the insides of the various In the rugged Corsican hills above the waters of Porto Vecchio on the Tyrrhenian Sea, there stood the skeletal remains of a once-majestic estate.
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