Via Persa | Closed
For @caravaggios-demon
The young man hastened down the narrow lane in a poor attempt at appearing easygoing and unnoticeable. His hair looked rumpled and there was a darkness underneath his eyes that told of sleepless nights on trains. He held his backpack to himself with his hand on the single strap over his shoulder. The wind took a turn, and he cursed the wind that had blown away his hat in Milan and the rain that had broken his umbrella in Marseilles but most of all, his wet socks, which had begun to irritate the thin skin around his ankles.
“1...3...what—how is this 13?” Daniel balked at the lane, glancing between the numbers around him and the wet scrap of paper in his hand. The sun had set Daniel didn’t know how long ago, and the desperate cold feeling was beginning to curl around his stomach. He leapt up to wipe at the 13, only to discover it was a small slug next to a 7, half-covered by ivy.
“Gimme a break,” he muttered at the slug, which did not respond.
There was no doorbell, but he still felt like a jerk for banging on the door. It was old and there was glass and it rattled. Someone had painted small roses inside the glass. It wasn’t very good, Daniel thought, but someone had loved it enough to do it four times in every corner.
He banged gentler. He was hours late, but the housekeeper couldn’t have gone to bed. The guy he met at that bar in...somewhere...had said to stay here for the night before meeting up again in Istanbul. His parents’ housekeeper was used to it, he said, because all his friends stopped there, sometimes 5 at a time.
The house looked quiet, though the lights were on. He blinked against the rain and sighed. He was too miserable to be terrified. Was it the traveler’s checks he’d purchased? Was he tracking the numbers on those? How does he do it?