Word: portos
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Before he was charged with second-degree murder in the 1986 death of Kathleen Holland, 17, Joseph Porto calmly confessed on videotape that he had strangled his girlfriend till "my hands got tired," then used his high school graduation tassel to finish the job. Porto, now 19, gave a similar account to a prosecution psychiatrist, explaining that he had exploded in jealous anger when Holland told him she wanted to date other boys...
...west coast of Africa, has decided it no longer requires his services to oversee the refueling and supplying of passing ships. Grey does not place particular value on his job, the running of "a sort of gas station cum grocer's shop." But he will miss Bom Porto, the seedy, seductive capital of his adopted country, and his mistress Vera, a black woman of commanding girth and friendliness. Leaving her bed on one of the final mornings before his exile home, "George felt posthumous...
George's other responsibility is his late parents' retirement home in a tiny coastal village in Cornwall. He settles there because he has nowhere else to go, but he looks seaward and makes odious comparisons: "In Bom Porto, the Atlantic was milky green, thick as soup. At this time of year it swarmed with plankton, and in certain lights you seemed to see the sea wriggle with life. It was easy to imagine the first things crawling out of it and starting in on their colonial adventure. This northern sea was different, more coldly sophisticated. If you thought about...
...late 20th century loves "hot" romantics and geniuses with a curse on them. Caravaggio's short life and shorter temper fit this bill. He died of a fever in 1610 at 39 in Porto Ercole, then a malarial Spanish enclave on the coast north of Rome. The last four years of his life were one long paranoiac flight from police and assassins; on the run, working under pressure, he left magnificently realized, death-haunted altarpieces in Mediterranean seaports from Naples to Valletta to Palermo. He killed one man with a dagger in the groin during a ball game in Rome...
...decides, "Pure Gold and all that, but inconceivably maddening." Worse, the new husband begins to take the true measure of his wife, who not only treats her servants as if feudalism still reigned and slavery had never been abolished but who hectors her semi-invalid son unmercifully: "Drink your porto and try and get a little color in your face for a change." She will make him a worthy Benoir, fit to assume his rightful inheritance of family leadership and at least (pounds)30 million, or kill him in the process. She rages: "You! You will drive me into...