Leo wished that this moment could last, but he had to get to the matter at hand. He asked: “Would you … would you happen to remember Nigel’s cell phone number?”
“What?” her eyes snapped open.
“Please, Orsina, we need to get in touch with him. Try to remember.” She tried, and did remember it. Leo got up and walked directly to the “staring lady,” a few seats down the aisle.
“Forgive me for being so upfront,” he said, looking her in the eye, “but may we borrow your cell phone for a moment? It’s a local phone call, and my battery’s run out.” The woman looked surprised, but consented.
Leo briefly explained to Orsina that she must ring her husband, and tell him to meet her at 1:13 a.m. exactly at Milan’s central railway station. It was a wild guess: for all he knew, Nigel could be anywhere else in Italy, or in Provence, or in London.
Nigel answered, and could not believe he was hearing his wife’s voice. Overwhelmed by emotion, he could only listen. But she asked where he was. In Milan. That seemed to please her very much, so he elaborated. As soon as he had been released, he had gone there to hire some of Italy’s best private detectives. He had spent the whole day interviewing them. She cut him short, and told him where and when to meet her.
****
Milan’s central station was shrouded in fog. Leo carried Orsina down to the platform, eased her back into the wheelchair, and looked around. Nigel was there. As soon as he spotted Orsina, he hurried toward her. But Leo intercepted him, and Nigel nearly screamed for help, thinking he was being attacked by a bum.
“It’s Leo Kavenaugh, you fool! Don’t you remember me? For God’s sake, don’t make a scene! Act as if this were a routine pick-up of a relative of yours.”
Nigel was baffled but complied, and bent to kiss his wife on the cheek. “Listen to Leo,” she whispered in his ear, “he saved me.”
Leo resumed. “Now, listen carefully. Orsina’s been kept under heavy sedation, I presume since she was kidnapped. Before you go to the police, take her to a private clinic for a checkup. I hope she’s O.K., but you must make sure she is.
“If she’s fine, then you let the police know. You realize that they’ll question her for hours on end; you mustn’t put her through that at present. Now, about her protection. Hire bodyguards, surround Orsina with them. Never let her out of your sight. There must be no contact whatsoever with her uncle. None at all—is that clear? Not with him or with any of his staff. The man is incredibly dangerous and he’s totally out of control.”
Perhaps Leo was out of control, Nigel thought, but his wife was there, safe; nothing else mattered at the moment. He asked, incredulous: “Is he the one who had Orsina kidnapped?”
“You’ll find out.” He looked at Orsina, who had not let go of his hand since they had gotten off the train. “She’ll explain it to you herself,” Leo added. “Follow my instructions, and she’ll be fine. Then get out of Italy with her, but never lower your guard. Adopt the same security precautions. And don’t tell a soul that you’ve seen me. Orsina was on that train alone. Is that clear?” Then, turning to Orsina, in Italian: “I must go now. If I stayed with you, the police would make a mess of things. They couldn’t prove a thing against your uncle, so they’d go after me. I don’t care if I rot in prison forever, if that helped you. But it wouldn’t. Your uncle would be free, and soon enough he’d be after you again. He’s working at a grand scheme, and you’re just a pawn in it, like Angela was before you. I have to leave now.”
“Ti credo,” she said—I believe you—her eyes full of tears.
“Leo,” interposed Nigel, “how can I ever repay you?”
The mere word “repay” made Leo’s blood boil. Before he replied, Orsina spoke for him, quietly but with intensity: “You can help him get out of Italy safely.”
Nigel had kept up with the news. He knew that Leo was wanted by the police as the suspected kidnapper of his wife.
“Don’t worry about me, Orsina.”
“Nonsense,” she said, with a flicker of her normal energy. “Nigel: find a way to get him out of Italy, will you?”
“Yes, yes, I’m thinking.”
The passengers from the train had all left, and the three of them were alone on the platform. The usual platoon of carabinieri, plus some loiterers and prostitutes were eyeing them from not too far off. It was time to move away from the station. Nigel said: “Here’s what you’ll do.” He took out a pen and a pad, and scribbled something. “Ten days, no, make it two weeks: exactly two weeks from today, at 1 p.m. sharp, dial this number, with country code and all, as it’s written. It’s the custodian’s mobile phone, the custodian of our place in Provence. Our house phone there may be tapped, but I doubt his mobile phone is. There’ll be instructions on how to get out of Italy safely. Consider it done.”
Orsina looked at Leo. “Promise me that you will call, Leo,” she said. He looked at her intently, and promised.
Leo escorted Orsina and Nigel downstairs to the taxis. “May I see your cell phone, Nigel?” Leo asked. He weighed it in his hands for a moment, then flung it against the station wall, stomped on it, carefully collected all the fragments, and handed them to Nigel. “No cell phone for a few days; throw the pieces out later; don’t get a new one.” Nigel said nothing. “Now,” Leo continued, “go inside, find a pay phone, wake up your lawyer, and ask him to recommend a private clinic in Milan, and to meet you there in half an hour. Make sure he doesn’t tell anyone.”
As Nigel strode off, Orsina grabbed Leo’s hand once more: “I wish you could stay.”
“I’d only be in the way, and make things more complicated. Also, there is something I must do, alone.”
“I know. Take good care of yourself, Leo. I’ll be waiting for you.” He leaned down, and kissed her.
Upon his return, Nigel reported that he’d spoken to Avvocato Alemanni, who had been extremely helpful, despite being awakened at this ungodly hour. His recommendation was to go to the Casa di Cura Privata Capitanio: first-rate medical attention and good privacy, too. Alemanni would meet them there.
“Good,” said Leo. “I’m sure your cell phone was tapped and that Orsina’s call was recorded. You don’t want the Inspector breathing down your neck first thing in the morning, do you? Your wife’s in no state for that yet. Now you’re no longer traceable.” Leo let his words sink in and then added: “Cheer up, the worst is over.”
Nigel stretched his hand to shake Leo’s, but was handed instead bottles of pills, needles, ampoules. “That’s how Orsina was kept sedated, I assume. But do not show them to anyone, least of all the clinic’s doctors: they’d ask too many questions, maybe alert the police. You’d better go. Taxi!”
After easing Orsina into the car, while Nigel was putting the folded wheelchair in the trunk, Leo gave her one last embrace. She hugged him back, and whispered: “Promise that you’ll call, Leo, two weeks from now. Promise me that.” Leo, choked up, nodded, and smiled for the first time in weeks. Then, with the forbidden book still in his backpack, he vanished into the foggy vastness of Piazza Duca d’Aosta.
****
Emanuele spent an uneasy night in the luxurious Gritti Palace Hotel. By eight o’clock he was crossing the Grand Canal by the Accademia Bridge, and soon after, he was ringing the doorbell of his own home. Bhaskar opened the door, and his face told the Baron all that he needed to know. When the women from the cleaning service let him in, he had gone straight up to the fourth floor and down the spiral stair to the secret apartments. He had found Soma tied to a radiator in a state of collapse, and Orsina gone. Bhaskar had managed to carry his wife down to the couple’s own quarters, where she was now resting in bed. “I think we should call a doctor,” he added.
“No, we shouldn’t, you idiot,” said Emanuele. “I’ll pay one of the maids to stay and look after your monkey-wife. We don’t want anyone nosing around. Meet me here in fifteen minutes, and bring cleaning things—lots of towels and plastic bags—but not the maids.”
Emanuele went
upstairs to change his clothes and collect his keys. When he came down again, he and Bhaskar entered the disused kitchen for the second time and passed through the storage rooms. They saw how the unknown intruder had blocked the door in the false barrel and, removing the obstacles, entered it and turned the corner to the door of the shrine. Unlocking the door and switching on the light, Emanuele surveyed the wreckage while Bhaskar hurried to clean it up. The glass vials upset and broken, the foul smell of their syrupy contents; this much the rats might have done. But who had left the door open? And the disappearance of the book could not be blamed on the pantegane. No, there was conspiracy here. Emanuele checked the Yale locks on both doors: they worked perfectly. He brusquely dismissed Bhaskar and sat down in the red-upholstered chair.
The Baron’s ancestors seemed to utter reproach from their portraits. Cesare della Riviera was painted at full-length, robed in black with the white cross of the Sovereign Order of Malta on his shoulder, one hand on the pommel of his sword, the other, gloved, resting on a book. A tree was barely discernible in the background. Cesare’s look was ambiguous, the eyes hooded and serious, the lips on the brink of a smile. It was the fluids of his own body, preserved through alchemical coction for four centuries, that had been mopped up from the altar he had set up and consecrated. It was that book written in his own hand that had never left the shrine.
How could such a sacrilege befall the dynasty? Would the fortunes of the Riviera survive this? the Baron wondered. He had no doubt that the magic behind Cesare’s shrine was real, and that the geometrically placed relics had radiated an occult influence for the protection of the family, like the Lares, the ancient Roman household gods, yet more potent. During long hours of meditation in this chamber, Emanuele had often felt a stern but benevolent presence. Now it was just as palpably absent. He tried to recall some carelessness that might have led to its dissolution, but his own conduct, unlike his nieces’, seemed to him to have been impeccable.
After his melancholy reflections, the Baron climbed the long spiral stair back to his own apartments, feeling every one of his sixty-four years. He crawled out of the fireplace under the sardonic stare of Pulcinella. Emanuele had always tolerated the commedia dell’arte figures out of a conviction that Arlecchino was an allegory of Sulphur, Colombina of Mercury, Pulcinella of Salt, and so on through the other alchemical subjects. Now they seemed vapid and leering, the stupid comedians that they were. Were they laughing at his expense? Why, after all his elaborate scheming, Orsina had vanished into thin air now that he needed her most!
His clean clothes were already dirty, and Emanuele felt soiled. He took a warm shower and changed into pajamas and dressing gown, then rang for Bhaskar. “Sit down,” he said in English, “and tell me exactly what has happened—if you want your children back in that sewer of your country to remain alive.”
Bhaskar, already terrified, started to sob.
“Shut up, you useless Shudra,” screeched the Baron. “Tell me, is it possible that my niece got up of her own accord, tied up your wife, and left? Haven’t you been keeping her under sedation?”
“Oh we have, Signor Barone, we have,” replied Bhaskar, his eyes shot with tears. Soma has regularly made the injections; she was a nurse-trainee in Delhi, as you know. Day and night she has spent with the patient, and never left the secret rooms. I have fetched and carried everything, in and out.”
“Could you get any sense out of her yourself?”
“She says that a man came into the room, a tall man with a beard, threatened her with a hammer, tied her up and gagged her. That’s all she can tell me.”
“Enough already. Now,” changing tone, “I made a promise that if you and your wife carried out my commands without question and without fail, I would pay to bring your children to Italy. You have now failed, and my promise is void. But my power is not. Do you know how much it costs to have vermin like your little monkeys killed in India? Less than a meal at a restaurant here.”
Bhaskar could only stutter in response. The interrogation went on for another half hour, but after he had kicked the servant away in fury, questions still thronged the Baron’s mind.
Who could have known that Orsina was in the palace? How could someone have known how to enter it and find the concealed rooms? Emanuele went through the list of possible suspects. Nigel? Could he have carried out such a daring plan? He might have a mind for business, but that was that: in the Baron’s view, he was little more than a lucky gambler. Ghedina? That was an unwelcome thought: that the Inspector in charge of finding Orsina should somehow have actually found her. But he would have surrounded the palace with policemen and searched it from top to bottom, and even then most probably missed her. No, someone knew about the underground chambers and the secret stair, and was cunning enough to block the trapdoor in the cellar, once he and Bhaskar were through it. Had Orsina herself ever discovered them? Had Angela? Emanuele knew for a fact that the girls’ parents, the dullest of people, had never entered the “palace within the palace.” It was Orsina’s grandfather, Publio della Riviera, who after initiating the 29-year old Emanuele into the family mysteries, had given him the rooms on the top floor as his own apartment, and from that day to this, none but illiterate cleaning maids had set foot there. Well, that was not quite correct. Early in their marriage, his ex-wife had been there on and off, but the Commedia figures, she said, gave her bad dreams, nor could she put up with the stink of Emanuele’s little “laboratory.”
Of all these people, Angela was the most likely to have discovered the secret layout for herself. But the idea of any of her feckless friends executing this abduction was unthinkable. Who, then, who had been so knowing and so daring?
TWENTY-FIVE
The Baron had a light lunch and, over coffee, opened the last few days’ newspapers. Disgusted by the media’s gossip and slanders about his family, he had deliberately not been reading them for some days, but now he found that he’d better catch up. La Repubblica had an editorial on Nigel, or rather a tirade against him. The sordid circumstances of adultery in his own villa sickened the Baron. He would fire Samanta. Embittered, he switched papers, and his eyes fell on an article in the local Gazzettino. Leo Kavenaugh was now being sought by the police “to help them with their enquiries” into the Della Riviera affair. Not only that, but the man had vanished, leaving a Venetian hotel room “daubed with human blood from floor to ceiling.”
Here was one suspect that Emanuele had not thought of: that good-looking American with his earnest professorial ways. The Baron remembered inviting him to attend his lecture on transcendence, and seeing him yawn before slipping out with Orsina. And, furthermore, that Orsina had asked him to the villa to help her study The Magical World of the Heroes, though he himself had put a stop to that. Could the American have been having a secret affair with her? It did not seem to fit his character either to be passionate or to carry out a commando-like raid. But the facts were unpleasantly there: Orsina had been abducted, the Baron humiliated and, worst of all, the shrine vandalized and robbed of its most precious relic. Then there was the blood. Surely the pseudo-Jesuit wasn’t doing that sort of magic?
If Kavenaugh had stolen both book and Orsina, where were they now, and what were they going to do? Elope? Return her to Nigel? Either way, Emanuele’s plans to use her as a magical companion were now wrecked, unless she decided to divorce MacPherson and return to live in her Italian homes. Even then, it would be impossible to subdue her, as he had done so easily with Angela, who had been under his spell since she was a child. And then, Orsina might decide to adventure on vaticination herself, and see into the past. The accusation of having murdered her sister would follow. Of course, no court of law could accept a vision conjured up by magic. But still, what a disagreeable prospect! Might Orsina hire a mercenary or two to dispose of him? He doubted it, but women, he knew from occasional experiences, do have irrational traits.
Emanuele turned to the Corriere della Sera and read another version of the Della Riviera saga
. When he saw the article on the confessions of the young men, his confused and depressed mood turned to outrage. Was it for this that he had labored? What was becoming of his crusade, the Reconquest of Europe from the Islamic hordes, in which he had cast himself as a Charles Martel or Godfrey of Bouillon reborn? So long as there was breath in his body, he had no intention of stopping halfway.
Finally, the Baron reached that morning’s edition of the Corriere, and read an article with unhoped-for and growing delight. It dealt with the sacrilege at the Cathedral of Chartres. For once, the desecrators had not turned themselves in. The French police had conducted a brilliant investigation and arrested seven young men. They were not ultra-right fanatics; they were, in fact, Moroccans, financed by a Saudi Arabian fundamentalist group with alleged ties to the country’s royalty. They had first admitted their action, with pride, then stated in various interviews that “the infidels in the West are the Muslims’ inveterate enemies”; that Muslims are to “arrest them, besiege them and lie in ambush everywhere” for them; that they are to “fight them until Islam reigns supreme”; and, to end with a bang, that they are to “cut off their heads, and mutilate their members,” for “If a Muslim does not go to war, Allah will kill him.” The French media had pointed out that the young fanatics had quoted passages from the Koran. The article ended by reporting that massive anti-Islamic rallies were being planned in Paris, Lyon and even Marseilles.
France had done this, wondered the Baron? This was a major coup, and a strong message to the rest of Europe and the world. He felt an unaccustomed surge of euphoria, but suppressed it. It was not too late. He must act immediately.
The first call the Baron made was to Giorgio. “My new cycle of lectures at the Villa Riviera will proceed as planned, starting on Friday afternoon. It is of the utmost importance that the work not be interrupted. But remind the young men that there is to be absolutely no camping on my property, and no strolling around the villa grounds either.”
The Forbidden Book: A Novel Page 26