Google Maps had said it would take 55 minutes to reach Mille Fiori HQ, but they crossed beneath the road-spanning sign that welcomed them to San Marino so quickly Duncan half expected last night’s hotel would still be visible in the rear-view mirror. The Most Serene Republic and its kookiest inhabitants had felt much further off — in time and space and relevance — though it now seemed likely Duncan had already spied San Marino and captured its castle-topped mountain in one or more of the panoramas he’d taken from the ruins and crags around Pietrarubbia the day before.
He and Mack had hardly spoken all morning, drained from the night before and careful not to disturb their fitful calm. He could have handled it better last night. Should’ve cottoned on sooner. But he couldn’t kick the thought that she must have confided in Gianluca that night in Copertino, and maybe other hosts: Bruno, Silvano and Joanna, the Giuseppe-denier on the desk in Assisi. So he kept to himself, though at some stage they’d need to talk about filming in Mille Fiori. What Mack could and couldn’t say. How they’d capture sound. What to do if they were separated. They should have covered this well in advance, but now here they were, another country.
Aside from the welcome sign, there was little else in the way of fanfare. The first few villages beyond the border were sleepy affairs — the houses perhaps a little newer or better maintained than their Italian neighbours but otherwise unremarkable. As the main road approached the base of Mount Titano upon which San Marino’s historic centre nestled, the number of lanes doubled and the locals really put the foot down, which, in turn, made Duncan hunch his shoulders and tighten his grip on the wheel. It was the suddenness of the change, each and every time, from one kind of driving to the next. The fact one minute you could be stuck inside an Ancient Roman one-way system and the next be on an oak-shaded road, little wider than a footpath, with a tractor coming your way. And the speed at which you were expected to adapt. To always be at the redline of safety or else get taken up the bumper by an impatient local who would rather die in a head-on collision than putter along behind you.
Gas stations, bridal salons and car dealerships flashed either side of the de facto motorway as they left the base of the mountain. A fashion boutique. A McDonalds. They hadn’t been part of anything so disposably modern since leaving the A14 and the Adriatic, the Autogrill, Harry Styles and the vaping, gaping teens three days ago.
Five minutes later they were back down to two lanes, bus stops and apartment blocks. The green patches between the buildings grew longer, gave way to pasture and unknowable crops. It was like driving through the model town his grandfather began after his retirement, and which grew a little each year until it had a bit of everything: one farm, one zoo, one school, one shopping mall, one skyscraper, one tram, one airport and one mini Cape Canaveral, all squeezed on to what was once the dining-room table.
Although Duncan had seen shots of Mille Fiori on its website, he still imagined some sort of compound. An entire abandoned village resuscitated by newcomers eager to buttress themselves from, as the narrator of those videos put it, ‘the predominant twenty-first century rational, materialist world view’. But there was no gate or privet hedge, no century-old stone buildings. With 300 metres left until their destination, according to Duncan’s phone, the Micra crested a hill and entered another small settlement with the standard row of colour-coded dumpsters for the villagers’ recyclables and the board plastered with notices about concerts and energy conservation. The buildings with their smooth walls of reinforced concrete — either large homes or small apartment blocks, it was hard to say — were placed at generous intervals, products of modern sprawl rather than the crush of antiquity. And then they were through the other side and flanked again by farmland, the Republic’s eastern border somewhere ahead of them. Drive too far, he thought, and they might topple off his grandfather’s table.
Duncan looked back at his phone, which insisted they’d driven past their destination.
Mack shrugged.
He pulled over, re-entered the address of Mille Fiori HQ and was told it lay 150 metres back in the direction they’d come.
After backtracking, they found the public front of Mille Fiori was located on the ground floor of a four-storey building that also housed a pizzeria, an accountancy firm and some apartments. The cult’s office resembled a tourist information centre — the smiling woman in canary yellow behind a blue counter, the racks of brochures and the liberal sprinkling of the tulip/target logo — except no self-respecting information centre in this part of the world would be open seven days, as this place announced it was.
‘We going in, babe?’ Mack asked.
‘Hold on,’ he said, zipping up his gear bag. ‘We need to talk about sound.’ He had an external microphone connected to the top of the XC which was good enough for the vibe-capturing work he’d been doing in churches and piazzas but would struggle with dialogue once people got more than six feet from the camera. He’d also brought along his own portable digital audio recorder, a relic from Curio Bay days. He held it out for Mack. ‘Keep that on you. Don’t mess with the settings. Just hit “record” and “stop” when I say. Actually—’ He took it back, pressed record, returned it to her. ‘Just leave it running. Hold it in your hand, not in your pocket. But don’t hold it out like a microphone or anything, you’ll put people off. I’ll also record audio on my phone, if need be. What? We’re not going to be able to light anything properly. People will understand. But crappy audio? No way. Battle lost.’
‘People? I thought this was just for Motta.’
‘It could be. But let’s not limit ourselves.’ He stepped back, fired up the XC and pointed it at Mack. ‘Tell me what’s happening.’
‘What’s happening is you seem panicked.’
‘Say, “We’re here in San Marino and are about to go into the Mille Fiori headquarters for the first time.”’
‘You say it.’
‘You’re in frame.’
‘How’s my hair look?’
Duncan lowered the camera, noticed the woman behind the counter watching them through the glass. She waggled the fingers of one hand in greeting. It was all looser than he would have liked, this plan. He may have been happy to let Mack improvise back in high school, so long as he was behind the camera and controlled the edit. But together, live, in a cult made up of people who were at best stultifyingly earnest, and at worst psychologically unstable? No: worst-case scenario was their night ending with the two of them tied to a giant firework, James Alby-Whatshisname coming up to them in a big wooden witchdoctor’s mask, a burning taper in his hand, the taper being brought down to the tip of a comically long fuse that, once consumed, would send them ‘levitating’ up to unsurvivable heights, the latest dual sacrifice to a bloodthirsty sky god.
‘I’m going in,’ Mack said.
Duncan was still rolling. Had he caught the counter woman’s finger-waggle? Perhaps it would play like a mockumentary: the joke on him, his pretensions and ignorance. Motta would never begin something so loose. Uffy or no Uffy. But here he was, fumbling for content. For the possibility of saying something with other people’s words, their faces, the way they hold a pen or swat a fly.
‘Now, you’d be Mack,’ the woman was saying. ‘And Mr Blake, I take it?’ She was in her early twenties. Short hair, dark roots showing through the blonde, a little like Charlize Theron a few years/a dozen movies ago, which is to say Duncan thought of seducing her, or at least began to fixate, reflexively, on the fruits of a successful seduction. He felt the muscles in his face tauten, his spine lengthen, but kept the camera held out in front of him.
‘Is it all right if I film from the get-go?’ he asked.
‘Why not? We’ve been expecting you,’ she said, eyes wide, bright and down the barrel of the camera. She wore no name badge, just a small pin on her blouse. That logo again. ‘We always welcome interested souls. And a famous filmmaker? Well,’ she said.
‘I wouldn’t say “famous”,’ he said, trying to decide if she was from the States or Canada; how someone so normal, so exceptional, could wind up here.
‘We had a showing of your last film up at The Nursery the other night. It was a big hit.’
‘The Nursery? Like, for little kids?’ He thought about what would happen if Zeb watched Curio Bay. How much further into his shell he had left to withdraw. How the sight of tourists being shot through the antihero’s scope, the sea turning red, would shunt him the rest of the way.
‘No, that’s what we call our— I guess you would call it a community centre? Our hub? But we are into the floral theme, you may have noticed. Like, my flower name is Trumpet Honeysuckle,’ she said, an ironic, rah-rah quality to her voice to let them know she was aware how ridiculous it sounded, ‘but you can call me Honey.’
‘Not Trump?’ Mack asked, and Honey gave two short shakes of the head. ‘Does everyone take a flower name?’ Mack was holding the audio recorder against her hip, so casual he couldn’t tell if she’d forgotten about it or was trying to conceal it. She’d chosen, at least, to rest it on the same side as she’d knotted her white t-shirt so there was little chance her clothing would rustle or obscure the dual mics.
‘I mean, it’s pretty new for us,’ Honey said. ‘Like, it only caught on last year. It’s all in the spirit of svago, you know, playfulness? When we started calling ourselves The Thousand Flowers, it was only a matter of time before some bright spark started calling herself Tiger Lily. Except, there is no Tiger Lily. Heck, I can’t remember who was first. It’s like a meme, you know?’
‘Oh, we know memes,’ Mack said. ‘Must be harder for the guys, though? Flower names?’
‘Not really. It’s probably easier, in a way. All the good flower names are either so old lady or so Walt Disney. Rose, Hyacinth, Iris, Daisy, Violet, Buttercup. Gawd, I can’t stop myself. Whereas for guys it’s easier to have some fun. Like, I’m sure you’ll meet Cush, our fitness flower, which is actually short for Cushion Spurge.’
Duncan caught a laugh early, let it writhe inside his abdomen.
‘And, like, there are so many good ones,’ Honey continued. ‘Boneset, he’s just the sweetest guy, always in his lab coat. Goatsbeard, who, you guessed it, has a gnarly beard. And Black-eyed Susan, which is some kind of sunflower, I think, but it’s also the name of just the butchest guy, which is why it’s funny.’
Mack, smiling, turned to Duncan, expecting him to talk. Man, did they need some structure!
‘What about James,’ he asked, careful not to blow out the microphone, ‘your founder?’
‘He endorses it. Like, he’s totally down with The Three Esses. Any way to lighten the tone. But he was the toughest to pin a flower name on. He couldn’t find anything he liked, which was just the biggest invitation for it to become this group bonding activity, you know? Like, everyone was on Wikipedia, searching for names. Jack-in-the-pulpit, Clary Sage, I remember those were suggestions. It went on for days until he just put his hands up and announced that his new name would be — get this — Gas Plant. Like, oh my gosh. He can be such a dad sometimes. Mostly, we just call him GP.’
Duncan gave a weak smile and panned to Mack, who appeared lost in contemplation and might at any second announce she would henceforth be known as Pear Blossom.
‘But what am I doing?’ Honey said, picking up some pieces of paper and moving out from behind the counter. ‘You probably have way more interesting things on your mind than silly old nicknames. We have some paperwork here for you, not too much boring legal stuff. We use a standard location release if you’re happy with that. I imagine you have your own personal release forms you want to use, but if we use the ones our lawyer is happy with, it would be easier maybe? This here’s your draft itinerary. Ms MacKinnon,’ she said in a lower voice, ‘we were going to email it through, but we figured it might seem presumptuous — we really are an open book — so what we’ll do instead is bring you through to the meeting room we’ve got back here, which doesn’t have a flowery name yet, by the way — if you have a good idea, we’d be glad to hear it — and I’ll get Tansy and Red — that’s short for Red Valerian, he just loves Game of Thrones — who will be your buddies for your stay. You can sort it out with those two. What you wanna do. What you wanna see. That page is just to show you one possibility. Okay? Okay, follow me.’
‘I was emailing with Gypsy?’ Mack asked her as they walked.
‘Yes, you were. Gypsophila. She’s in the studio this morning. She does the voiceovers for our videos, which I’m sure you’ve seen. We’ve pencilled her in for tomorrow afternoon. Once you’ve had a chance to get your bearings, experience what we’re about without feeling like we’re putting on a show. But she is keen to meet you both and discuss your project when the time is right.’
‘Will we get a chance to talk to —’ Duncan paused, cycling through names— ‘GP?’
‘Oh, sure. This isn’t like North Korea or whatever. I mean, we do have nuclear warheads, but.’ She made a psssh sound and punched Mack’s upper arm. ‘GP’s around, he’s accessible. He’s got some business to attend to this morning, but he’s excited to see you both. We don’t get many Kiwis coming through. It’s not an interest thing. We’re getting some good cut-through with our Facebook videos at the moment, but it’s really hard to convert looks and likes into foot traffic all the way up here, when you lot are all the way down there.’
‘You seem pretty up with the analytics?’ Mack said.
‘Not just a pretty face,’ Honey said sweetly, though the image that flashed in Duncan’s head was of her putting Mack into a headlock. ‘Some people here just have one job, but most of us can float, no pun intended. We get to know a little about a lot. See how the sausage is made, as GP likes to say.’
She led them down the hall.
‘Are you one of the younger ones?’ Duncan asked.
Honey stopped outside the meeting room, looked up toward the flickering hallway light. ‘I might be. I mean, there are some kids here, families. But among those who work? I guess. It’s never really come up. It’s not like age is a good proxy for the kind of wisdom we’re pursuing, you know. Maybe if you were a thousand years old, that’d be something. But basically everyone alive today was raised within the same narrow frame of reference, with certain inalienable truths, which, I’m sure you’re aware, are not so inalienable.’
‘Like levitation?’
‘Exactly.’ She gestured for Duncan and Mack to enter the room, which contained an oval table and four chairs that looked like they’d been salvaged from the trash of the accountants upstairs. Nothing on the walls. No external windows. Perhaps it was Honey’s invitation to name the room, but Duncan was reminded of the ice-cream container his mother used to store dahlia bulbs over winter.
‘Will we see someone actually levitate?’ Duncan asked.
Honey delivered a bad-news smile. ‘It just so happens our three fioritura, the ones who can levitate at will, are right now on stendere missions. Outreach. But, like a flower bursting into blossom, it can happen all of a sudden. Wouldn’t that be something, to see someone lift off for the first time? And on that note—’ Honey spun and disappeared down the hall.
Duncan stopped recording. Took his tripod from his bag and began setting it up in the corner of the room.
Mack picked up the stack of papers and straightened them against the tabletop.
Duncan walked behind her and pulled the door to, revealing a poster tacked on its reverse. An image of a bewigged Isaac Newton, above which it said, in white lettering, DID YOU KNOW? And beneath: Before Isaac Newton invented gravity in 1869, people could fly.
‘This is so cool,’ Mack said.
‘You can put the Zoom on the table.’
‘The what?’
‘The thing you’re holding. The audio recorder.’
‘Did you hear how flippant she was about floating? She can fricken fly, that girl.’
‘Her? No way.’
‘Oh, so what other reason would you have to be totally gaga over her?’
‘What? Her? Me? I was filming.’ He went back around to the camera. The lighting was terrible. The angles all wrong. He’d have to sit on someone’s lap if all four of them were to be in frame. He got his phone out of his pocket.
‘You looking up Trumpet Honeysuckle on Pornhub?’
‘Stop it. I thought you liked her.’
‘I said this —’ she gestured around the room, and presumably what lay beyond it — ‘was cool. Lil Miss Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Bee? I’m reserving judgement.’
‘We should talk about last night.’
‘Babe, we really don’t have to.’
‘Maybe not now. But whenever you want, I’m here.’
She was still for a moment, her cheeks reddening, as if she might cry, but then she rolled her eyes from left to right as if following the path of a rainbow across the sky. ‘So they’ve watched Curio Bay? That’s cool.’
‘Netflix, huh? Tanner, my agent —’ he rapped the knuckles of one hand on the tabletop — ‘ex-agent, still hasn’t come back to me about that. Like, he must’ve licensed it to them, in some territories at least, last year.’
‘Cha-ching. Pizza’s on you.’
‘Where are we sleeping? Do they have guestrooms? Do we pay?’
‘Settle, Gretel. Separate rooms is all I know. They said they’d look after us. We only gave them three days’ notice, remember.’
He scanned the release forms Honey had left. They looked fine. Better than fine. Granted him perpetual rights. Gave him final edit. Asked only that he include their logo and an acknowledgement in any finished work.
If they had something to hide, they would do it in plain sight.
He moved on to the itinerary. ‘Nice to be consulted for once,’ he said.
The door eased open and a clean-shaven head poked in. ‘Did someone call for a consultation?’ He wore a black t-shirt for the band Týr which showed a red-eyed woman holding a skull as if it was a crystal ball. Duncan thought of Mack’s TOÄD the Wet Sprocket tee, but also his premonition of witchdoctors and skyrockets.
‘Let me guess,’ Mack said, ‘Red Valerian?’
‘Hiya.’ He rubbed his scalp and sat down. ‘You can call me Red.’
‘Norwegian?’
‘Danish, actually.’
‘You okay that I’m filming?’ Duncan mouthed, but Red didn’t seem to respond.
‘Like Nikolaj Coster-Waldau,’ Mack said, which was not a question. She, too, was into Game of Thrones.
‘And Pilou Asbæk.’
‘Stop it!’ Mack shouted. Duncan tried not to look like he had no idea who that was. ‘You guys are killing it.’
‘I come from Zealand, actually. Maybe you call it Old Zealand?’
‘Get out!’
‘I’m serious. I mean, nearly half of Denmark live on that island, so I’m not that special.’ He turned to Duncan. ‘I liked your film, by the way.’ He smiled, lips and teeth parted. A smile so fake it could have been ripped straight from the video for Soundgarden’s ‘Black hole sun’.
‘Thanks. Do you mind being filmed?’
‘Go for it.’ Red leaned back in his chair and shouted, ‘Tansy!’ through the open door.
Ten seconds later a dark-haired woman appeared, short of breath. Her jeans looked a couple years too tight and yet, as she composed herself, she hitched them up, like a gunfighter or perhaps a clown, as if they were two sizes too large.
‘Buongiorno,’ she said.
One goggle-eyed greeting and he could tell: if she wasn’t a former school teacher, she must’ve raised a dozen kids, which meant everyone she met from here on out was a kid in her eyes too.
‘I was wondering when we’d see our first Italian,’ Mack said.
‘No. Sono Sammarinese,’ she said, slow, like a pharmacist handing over a heady prescription. ‘I was born one kilometre that way.’
‘Duncan and Mack,’ Red said, pointing at them in turn.
‘Yes, I know. The producer and his assistant. Mack MacKinnon. What kind of a name is Mack?’ she asked.
‘It’s short for Felicity,’ Duncan said.
Mack glared at him, then turned to Tansy. ‘A local? How long have you been with Mille Fiori?’
‘I’m rolling now, okay?’ Duncan interjected, pointing to the camera in the corner of the room.
‘Tre anni,’ Tansy said, holding up three fingers, then swivelled the hand, ‘più o meno. Com’è il tuo Italiano? Capisci tutto?’ She looked at Mack, then Duncan.
‘Un po’,’ Duncan said, demonstrating the extent of his Italian with the minuscule gap between his thumb and forefinger.
‘Va bene,’ she said, then turned to Red. ‘E com’è il tuo Italiano?’
‘Ancora molto male,’ he replied, looking down at the table.
‘We will talk in English then,’ Tansy said, miming wiping dirt off her hands, ‘for Red’s benefit. Va bene?’
‘Thank you,’ Mack said, sweet enough that this time the image was of Mack putting this woman — half her height and nearly twice her age — into a headlock.