My plane touched down in Geneva at dawn. I’d slept through most of the flight after helping myself to several mini bottles of red wine. I woke to the flight attendant’s announcing our imminent arrival and lunged for my giant bottle of water. My tongue was sticking to the roof of my mouth and my pulse was pounding a Congo line behind my eyes. Drinking on an overseas flight was one of the worst ideas I’d had in a long time.
With only my backpack, I ripped through customs, arranged for a rental car and headed toward my hotel in the center of town. I loved downtown Geneva with its stately old buildings, café tables on the sidewalks, and wrought iron balconies overlooking the street.
Checking in was an exercise in practicing my rusty French. I probably came across like a preschooler, but I got what I needed from the desk clerk.
The small room had a tiny, white desk with an upholstered chair, a white-framed bed with flowered bedspread, a dresser, a coffeemaker, and a bowl of fruit. No TV, which was fine by me.
I showered, ate an apple, some grapes, and drank about a pot of coffee before I headed out. I dressed as demurely as I could, in simple black pants, a white blouse and black blazer. I pulled my hair back in a low ponytail, grabbed some dark sunglasses and kept the makeup to a minimum. My rental car was ostentatious enough.
I missed driving my Ferrari, so I’d rented a Tesla Signature Roadster. I realized this was drawing attention to myself, but by the time word got back to my godfather — and that’s assuming he did have spies here in Geneva — I’d be long gone.
My plan was to show up at the widow’s house at eight–supper time–and surprise her. I hoped she’d open her doors wide. She’d put her address on the envelope for a reason, right?
Until then, I would take the Tesla for a spin. I’d been mellow on the drive from the rental agency to the hotel—I’d been more interested in the spectacular views of Lake Geneva including the famous Jet d’eau — a fountain in the middle of the lake that spouted water more than four hundred feet in to the air.
But now I itched to see what was under the hood. I was going to take the Tesla for a test drive through the nearby French Alps.
I grew up going to the races at Laguna Seca raceway. When I turned sixteen my parents bought me an orange twin turbo Dodge Viper and enrolled me in the Skip Barber Racing Course at the racetrack.
As soon as I learned to race, I decided I also wanted to learn how to work on cars. I got a job that summer in the pit crew at Laguna Seca, helping the mechanics change tires and refuel the cars. I think for a while my parents suspected I was the kind of girl who didn’t like boys, but that ended the night they found the thirty-year-old French racecar driver in my bed. They were supposed to be flying out to Europe that day but the flight was grounded due to fog. Thank God my mom was there to stop my father from killing the poor guy on the spot. He escaped with his clothes in his hands. I never heard from him again.
After that, my mother gave me the birth control talk privately while my dad publicly announced that he would harm any man or boy that touched his teenage daughter. My father must have suspected Dante was gay before I ever had a clue because that was one guy my father always let me spend time around.
Today, I didn’t attract as much attention as I thought driving the Tesla through town. There was some international finance meeting and it looked like billionaires from across the world had convened in Geneva solely to putt around in their luxury sports cars. I spotted five Ferraris, including one Ferrari 458 Italia Spider, three Lamborghini Gallardo LP 560-4 Bicolores, and even a McLaren MP4-12C. The dozens of Porsches, Jaguars and Mercedes seemed provincial next to the higher-end luxury race cars.
Needless to say, nobody batted an eye at my Tesla.
As soon as I left the city limits, my spirits lifted. Driving fast had always been my therapy. Before long I was hugging the mountain curves along the Alps that served as the natural boundary between three countries — Switzerland, France, and Italy. I steeled myself for my visit that night. I needed to get proof that my godfather was a killer and then I’d have to take care of it myself. I was the only one left to avenge my family’s name.
The thought made my stomach hurt, but I knew I had to do it for my father. He would’ve expected no less of me. There was a reason he wanted me to study karate, learn to fix cars, and shoot guns when I was only fifteen. He knew that someday these skills would come in handy. He had prepared me well.
I brushed aside these thoughts and pressed my foot to the gas pedal. As my speedometer’s numbers increased, my thoughts flew out the window into the wind and I concentrated on the rush that speed gave me.
I hopped onto the Route des Grandes Alpes, also known as the N902, which climbed higher and higher, past Bourg St. Maurice, until the air was so cold I had to crank the car’s heater.
One of my books on Budo had talked about how for many American’s driving the freeway had become an act of meditation. In Japan, the book said, people reached a meditative state through the tea ceremony. But when Americans tried to imitate this, they were unable to achieve that subconscious state. The theory was that for the Japanese, the tea ceremony was so ingrained in their culture and life that when they performed the ceremony, their minds and bodies naturally went into auto pilot – they did it entirely without thinking and as a result, their thoughts wandered and they were able to achieve that meditative state.
In America, the book said, the activity that had become so rote and automatic was driving. So much so that many people did it on auto pilot and achieved a state of meditation. At the time I read it, this theory made perfect sense. More than once, I had headed on a familiar freeway and completely missed my exit without realizing it because I had been daydreaming, or meditating, or whatever subconscious state you could call it.
That’s one reason I embraced driving as my own unique therapy.
On this day, in a million-dollar car, on one of the most scenic roads in the world, I really didn’t take much of it in. Instead, I turned inward, going over everything I knew about my parents’ deaths hoping that some little tidbit that had escaped me would surface. I sifted back through a lifetime of memories about my godfather, trying to understand why he would turn on my family like this. Nothing made sense. I realized I could think about it for the rest of my life without understanding.
It wasn’t until I reached the stretch of N902 called the Col de I’Iseran that I realized I should probably find a spot to turn around and head back. I didn’t want to be late to the widow’s house. Even though she wasn’t expecting me.