The Lost Daughter

by Lucretia Grindle

  The day she was dreading was June 4. She watched it inch closer and closer on the calendar, as if it would mean something, this mere fact that her father had been dead for a year. Barbara had telephoned on her birthday. The university in Ohio didn’t finish until the end of the first week in June, or else, Barbara said, she would have come home. Instead she suggested that Angela should come to America in August, for a holiday. Barbara would send her a ticket. She was going to buy a car and they could drive to Yellowstone Park, or maybe even all the way to California. Angela said that sounded nice, but she knew from the sound of Barbara’s voice, from how fast she was talking and the high insistent pitch of her words, that it would never happen. That her father would send her on a trip, or her mother would rent a house somewhere, far away and very expensive, where there was no room for Angela.

  During the last week of May, it suddenly became very hot. The grass in the center of Piazza Ariostea turned bright green and the low hedges sprouted faster than they could be clipped. Nasturtiums and pansies tangled out of the windowboxes she passed on her way to the pizza parlor. The tubs of little plants, African violets and miniature cyclamen, the florist next door set out on the pavement had to be watered almost every hour, and finally brought in under the canopy.

  The second of June was a holiday, but Angela went to the pizzeria anyway. The owner was considering enlarging the place, putting a bigger restaurant room out in the back, and had asked her to look at the numbers. Besides, she did not want to stay home. For the last three nights she had lain awake on the sofa, watching the shadows from the street move across the sitting room ceiling, certain she could hear her father snoring down the hall.

  The pizza parlor had nothing as fancy as air conditioning, so after letting herself in she turned on the fan and got a chair and propped the street door open, hoping there might be a breeze, or at least a slight shifting of the hot muggy blanket that had draped itself over the city. The office was behind the bar. She jammed its door open, too. Just before noon, she heard someone come in.

  “We’re closed,” she called, wondering if she should hang the sign over the back of a chair where it could be seen from the street. There was no reply. Probably it was the owner, come back for something he’d forgotten last night. When no one appeared in the office doorway, she finally got to her feet and went out into the main room.

  He was standing with his back to her among the wiped tables with their upturned chairs, his hands in his pockets, sleeves rolled up. His arms were brown, as if summer had imprinted itself forever on his skin. Sunlight from the open doorway caught his hair.

  “Ciao, Carina,” he said, turning around. “Da quando non ci si vede.”

  Part III

  Florence, 2010

  Sunday, February 7

  ENZO SAENZ WAS GIVING up and going home. The last two days had been an almost total waste of time. He had watched hours of security tape from the cameras at the airport, and the bus stop, and the train station and seen—precisely nothing. At least nothing that even vaguely resembled Anna Carson, in or out of disguise.

  It was true that there had been several moments of excitement, two at the bus station and one at the airport, when individuals of medium height wearing jackets and carrying red backpacks had come into view. But all of them had turned out to be duds. That had been the high point of the weekend. For all intents and purposes, Anna Carson, like her stepdaughter, had vanished.

  The databases were showing precisely nothing, either. There was no further information on the black BMW. The crime-scene techs had lifted fingerprints from all over Kristin’s apartment that matched Anna Carson’s, whose did, in fact, match Angela Vari’s. But so what? She’d been there with her husband the day after she arrived, and left her ID bracelet in plain sight, for Christ’s sake.

  Despite the high-level hand-holding—James MacCready and even the consul were also doing their part—Dr. Carson was just barely being persuaded not to go public. Not to rush to the nearest television studio or newspaper office. The thought made the back of Enzo’s neck cold. National honor, not to mention departmental rank-pulling and a tidal wave of machismo, would result in bringing in the flying squad. TV-style SWAT teams would look tame in comparison. He could close his eyes and see bulletproof vests and helicopters and machine guns. If that happened then no one, not Enzo, nor James MacCready, nor Pallioti nor His Dickheadness, the consul, nor God Himself could put any money on which way it would come out for Kristin, or Anna, Carson. The idea was enough to keep Kenneth Carson quiet. For now.

  Enzo took a breath and wondered if he’d been wrong. Yet again he saw Anna Carson’s eyes widen as she stared at the tiny screen on the phone, and saw her glare as she denied what she had seen. There was no question that she’d been angry. But some niggling part of him now wondered if the anger had come, not from belligerence—a vestigial Brigate Rosse instinct telling her that all and any policemen should go fuck themselves—but from fear. If he had reached out, been less aggressive—if, for instance, he had bothered to find out who she was before he had ambushed her—perhaps he might have been able to talk her out of running. Or at least make an educated guess as to where, and why, she had.

  He sighed, wondering, too, why he couldn’t accept that he knew the answer to that one. Leopards didn’t change their spots. As far as he could see, Angela Vari had been Brigate Rosse. And a turncoat with it. When it got too hot, she’d gotten scared, gone running to the police, and offered them the one thing she had—Antonio. In short, she’d shopped her lover to save her own neck. Charming. He just wished he could figure out what the hell she was up to now. And why she’d bothered to take the kid’s teddy bear.

  Enzo slammed the drawer of his desk shut. It was past five on Sunday evening, and the building was unusually quiet. Pallioti had gone to his sister’s. For the briefest moment, Enzo allowed himself to dwell on Seraphina. On her smile, and her voice, and her beautiful house. And beautiful son. And charming husband. Whom she loved. Then he pushed her out of his mind. Or, more realistically, put her back in the shadowed corner where he kept his cache of safe, unattainable longings.

  Tommaso, her little boy, had just turned four, and although no one would ever have dared say so, it was common knowledge that Pallioti was entirely besotted by his nephew. Just the week before Guillermo had caught him perching the child on his desk and showing him how to call the mayor on the emergency line. “Pronto, pronto,” the child had lisped. Not that the mayor would have noticed. The telephone seemed to confuse him at the best of times. Still it was a known fact that if Pallioti was in a particularly foul temper on a Monday morning it was probably because he had not had his weekend Tommaso fix. Enzo wondered if he felt the same way about his cat, and thought, though he might not want to admit it, that he probably did. She had been neglected for the last several days, and was in a reasonably foul temper herself.

  He stood up and looked at the USB drive that had been dropped on his desk an hour earlier. It held the logs he had requested from across the country—every identity card that had been reported stolen since Thursday by anyone, male or female, who might conceivably bear any physical resemblance to Anna Carson. There had been daily updates, but so far, like everything else, they’d led nowhere. He picked it up and shoved it into his jacket pocket.

  Thirty minutes later when he opened the door to his apartment, the cat switched her tail and gave him the evil eye.

  “There’s no point in looking like that,” he said. “I’m sorry. I brought you a treat.”

  She glanced in the other direction, as if he might conceivably be talking to some other cat, then hopped down off the sofa and sauntered into the kitchen. Feeling like a supplicant, Enzo picked up her bowl and opened the bag without even taking his jacket off. He told himself he’d only stopped at the supermarket because he fancied something that wasn’t out of a can, it had nothing to do with the cat.

  “Ciao to you, too,” he muttered as he put the bowl on the floor. Then he took off his sho
es, shrugged out of his jacket, and went to stand under a hot shower.

  Dinner was a fat, speckled river trout. A glass of wine. Buttery yellow potatoes barely bigger than his thumb that were already coming up from the south. When he’d finished, donating the bones to the cat bowl, Enzo poured himself a second glass, and felt more human. He hit the button that raised the shade and stood for a moment, swishing the deep, almost purple wine in the globe of the glass and staring out at the city.

  The sleet of the last few days had finally been driven away by a sharp, biting wind that tore down from the mountains, rattling the empty branches of the trees and chasing the last dead leaves from the gutters. It had rippled the water of the Arno until the customary brown was spittled with whitecaps, then whipped into the piazzas, snatching at newspapers and bus schedules and discarded paper cups before leaving behind a night sky spangled with stars.

  Enzo felt the cat brush his legs, as close as she ever got to thanks, then heard her patter away and make a soft whump as she jumped back onto the sofa. He thought of his grandparents, and wondered if the old man had his telescope out—if he was taking advantage of this clear night to climb up onto the roof terrace in his overcoat and trace Orion’s belt. Pick out the bear, and the twins, and the bull. He wondered about his mother, if she was in her studio, lost in her strange world of colors. Or if she had gone out to walk her property as she sometimes did on winter nights, moving through the pale twisted trunks of the olive trees.

  He should stop, he thought suddenly. He knew too many policemen who had spent too long walking the boundary of what was decent, what was bearable to humankind. Pallioti was the exception. He had somehow safeguarded his soul, every romantic last drop of it, but he was rare. Many more reached forty, then fifty, with something dead behind their eyes. It wasn’t too late to have a family—a wife, children, something more than fantasies and a cat to come home to. Medical school was probably out of the question by now, but he wasn’t stupid, and there were plenty of other jobs he could do. He rolled the glass in his hand, raised it, and let the wine slide across his tongue. Then he turned and looked at the USB drive that sat on the counter. Five minutes later he’d booted up the computer and was scrolling through the entries.

  Enzo’s first instinct had been to ignore the South, then he thought he’d better not ignore anywhere. Still he bet on Rome. That had been Angela Vari’s last stomping ground, the place in Italy that would be freshest in her mind, even if it was thirty years ago. If she still had contacts, they were likely to be there.

  After forty minutes of sifting through reports of stolen purses, pickpocketed wallets, and mysteriously vanished passports and identity cards that by their numbers suggested they should litter the streets of the capital, he felt his certainty ebb. A few cases were remotely likely, but nothing stood out. He moved on to Milan. There he noted two names, both of them young men. It was possible, but difficult, and on the whole he didn’t see why she’d take the hardest option. He made a note of the names to follow up in the morning nonetheless. Then found himself yawning, and was contemplating finishing the bottle and taking up the task over breakfast, when he saw that it had been an unusually quiet weekend in Reggio. Parma, Modena, and Bologna between them had only a handful of missing cards. He glanced at his watch. It wasn’t exactly late. He might as well finish the province before he called it a night. Five minutes later Enzo Saenz sat up suddenly. Then he leaned forward and squinted at the computer screen.

  * * *

  “The description fits, and it’s Bologna. Close to Ferrara.”

  Pallioti felt himself smile, out of nostalgia as much as anything else. He recognized the edge in Enzo’s voice for what it was—the desperation that passed for hope in policemen. The need to believe you’d found something, anything, that might crack a case gone dead. Which, let’s face it, this one had. He’d spent the afternoon at his sister’s playing with his nephew, watching his pager for notice from the team at the Excelsior that someone had made contact, knowing somehow that it wouldn’t come, and thinking of nothing else.

  “So you think she’s going to Ferrara?”

  “I didn’t, but I do now. Don’t you?”

  Pallioti nodded. He supposed he did. Whether it is good for us or not, we go back to what we know. A thin snow had begun to fall. He had parked his car, tipped the garage attendant, lingered to discuss the likelihood of Italy retaining her World Cup title, and was walking home. Light slanted through closed shutters, picking up shreds of snow and ice, making them fluorescent against the dark.

  “In any case.” Enzo sounded testy now, not unlike his nephew when he stayed up too late. “I’ve spoken to Bologna. They’re going to try to get this woman, the one whose wallet was lifted, to come in tomorrow morning. So I’ll be leaving early. I just wanted to let you know.”

  Pallioti murmured something about being in touch, then the phone went dead and the only sound in the street was his footsteps. His fingers tapped the smooth metal case. He did it without being aware of it, the way some people pulled their ears or fiddled with their tie. Morse code, more than one person had told him it sounded like. His private little SOS. Or, in this case, Angela Vari’s name. He turned the corner, heard a bell begin to toll from across the river, a faint hollow sound, and stopped and fished in another pocket for his keys.

  The past had been with him all day. Now it had followed him, like a waif tugging at his sleeve. Almost twenty years ago, during the blood-letting commonly known as the Second Mafia War, he had been seconded to Palermo to work on a kidnapping. That time the victim had been a twelve-year-old boy, snatched on his way home from a riding stable to teach his father, who had decided to make a deal with prosecutors, a lesson. The family, certain they could deal with the problem themselves, refused to cooperate. As a result the police were one step behind for the almost eleven months that the child was moved, and held, and moved again like an increasingly pathetic chess piece. In the end the animals who had taken him got bored and strangled him, dissolved his body in lime, and sowed the bones in some godforsaken field.

  Enzo’s voice made the waif bolder. Pallioti had been to Ferrara only once, quite a long time ago. Flat as a pancake and very windy, it was reputed to be beautiful, but he had found it rather sinister—a time warp enclosed by walls, the great brooding castle with its moats and dungeons looming over the center of town, looking down on abandoned cannons and a statue of the screaming Savonarola. The waif trotted after him across the empty lobby of his building. It hung about as he waited for the elevator. Pallioti didn’t like flat places. All the shadows were wrong.

  * * *

  “Alessandro. How good of you to call.”

  The voice was exactly as Pallioti remembered it—thin, smooth, and cold. Like surgical thread that had been stored in a freezer, which made it all the more incongruous that its owner was so large. All fat men were expected to sound like Santa Claus.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t have the time earlier. I wanted to thank you. For your help.”

  “Not at all. I take it you got what you needed.”

  “Yes.” Pallioti thought of the dog-eared files he had handed Enzo Saenz two days ago. “Thank you,” he added. “I’m sure your help—expedited things.”

  There was a sound on the end of the phone that was something between a chuckle and a humph—a general acknowledgment of the man’s importance. Pallioti smiled. It wasn’t something his friend had ever been exactly shy about, even in the old days, when they had first known each other. When the man on the end of the phone had taken Pallioti under his wing, offered him his patronage, much as Pallioti now gave his to Enzo. Not that he would ever be as important, so, sadly, Enzo would probably never find him as useful.

  Pallioti swirled the grappa he had poured. He’d thought twice about making this call at all. Asking for a little help in getting a sensitive file sent quickly was one thing. What he was about to ask for now, on the other hand—dirt, intuition, the squishy viscera at the heart of history—was somet
hing else altogether. It was also why he had decided to use his own landline, and to call the man at home. Cell phones were inherently insecure, and everyone knew the ministry lines were bugged. He wondered if the sleek phone thing that sat on his sleek black desk in his overdesigned office was tapped, too. Probably. Probably there was some poor drone sitting hunched in a basement somewhere listening to endless loops of the mayor shouting “Pronto!” Pallioti pushed the thought aside and wondered how best to get what he wanted. Flattery usually worked.

  “I’d been meaning to say—” Pallioti examined the neatly clipped edges of his nails as he spoke. “I want to congratulate you, truly, on the latest initiative. With the Americans,” he added. “Deeply impressive. I was going to write. But, well.” He coughed self-deprecatingly, suggesting he knew that the quality of his letter paper, never mind the words written on it, could never really come up to snuff. “In any case,” he oiled on, “it’s very good of you. And on a Sunday night, to take the time to talk. I appreciate it. Deeply. I wouldn’t impose unless it was important. I know I can count on your—discretion.”

  What a load of garbage. Hogwash of the first water. Since being elevated to his present great height, the fat man was known to spend most of his time farting around on golf courses. And as for the new Transatlantic Intelligence Sharing Initiative, anyone with half a brain knew it was gobbledygook. Sharing intelligence, or for that matter anything else, with Uncle Sam—if it wasn’t an oxymoron in the first place—only went one way. Not yours. And if by any chance anything remotely impressive had been done, with the Americans or anyone else, it had been done, not by the man himself, but by his minions. Who would then have been banished, sent scurrying away with their tails between their legs and their lips buttoned so their master could step up and take the credit.

  The only bit of what he’d said so far that was true was the last bit. Or rather last two bits. He suspected what he was asking for really was important. Crucial, in fact. And the fat man was discreet. At a price. He’ll make me pay for this, Pallioti thought. He’ll make me pay. Extravagantly, and at the time and place of his choosing. And if I’m lucky, just through the nose.