Sicily again

When it rains, as it often does in Yorkshire, England, my back aches and I remember Sicily and the treachery of a woman. I have the twin scars, physical and mental, of the stab in the back and simultaneous shot to the heart, that nearly ended me on the slopes of an ironically erupting Etna so many years ago. We were supposed to be working together but work had strayed over that invisible line into leisure, then pleasure, as I allowed myself to let go of all sense and training, completely, for the first, and almost certainly last, time.

Men are often accused of objectifying women, dividing them into mere body-parts to the exclusion of their higher virtues.  If they knew what I know about really dividing people into their body parts they may not be so quick to judge. In any case Melissa Generossi was infinitely more than any sum of her exquisite parts that you might imagine. Italians, especially in the hot, irritably poor South, often sound like they are arguing. As a Northerner from the shores of the lakes, she had an accent that, when talking her own language was as an angel, laughing, but when speaking English….. she was like a hair-trigger to the testosterzone. I was always pleased to see her and I actually did have a pistol in my pocket (It was a Sig Sauer 9mm automatic but that would have spoiled the alliteration) She worked for some national anti-mafia squad and I was assigned to the case as there were connections with the smart, young, London boys who had filled the gap after the likes of the Krays had imploded and their ‘colleagues’ in the Met had been routed-out. I actually knew some of them from University which in those days was the only kind of facial-recognition available (University, eh? And I’ll bet you thought that we were all estate-boys done good, like the SAS, didn’t you?).

She laughed a lot, showing her perfect teeth and then touched your arm and all the other things that I should have recognised that she’d learnt in her the Flirting module of her Body-language course,  (She would have got a ’Distinction’). Instead and quite foolishly I’d allowed myself to think that I really was that attractive…

This not Melissa, but a young Sophia Loren. Melissa is better-looking…

For these and other reasons I was heading off to Luton airport with mixed feelings.