The Missing Italian Girl

by Barbara Corrado Pope

  “Then they were and are the targets—Pyotr, Angela, and now Maura.” Clarie said this with a mixture of shame and hope. She did not want to believe that she was among those being stalked. She had only been warned.

  “And, if he’s not caught, other anarchists and the women who dare to admire them might also be in danger.” Bernard looked up sharply. “He may think you admire them. You mustn’t take any more chances.”

  Clarie sat down again. “Then you must go to the police and have them question this man.”

  “Why doesn’t Madame Séverine go?”

  “You must know why I can’t go,” Séverine said, striking a rather coquettish pose.

  Bernard had managed not to sound sarcastic. That was his way, even though Clarie was fully aware of the grievances behind his question: he didn’t like Séverine, he didn’t like Clarie’s relationship with her, and he had already been embarrassed by a run-in with the police. But Clarie was not about to let Séverine’s pride in her reputation for disreputability nor Bernard’s barely repressed irritation interfere with what needed to be done. “I’m sure they’ll take what you say seriously,” she insisted to her husband.

  “Of course I’ll go,” he said. Their eyes locked. Clarie had the feeling that if they had been alone, he would have apologized for insinuating, even for an instant, that he did not intend to do everything in his power to keep her safe.

  “And,” Séverine said, interposing herself, “I hope you will keep me informed about any arrests or new developments. I want to be sure I’m the one who reports the story first.”

  The silence following her remarks was palpable. Bernard turned ever so slightly to block her from his view. Clarie didn’t want to look at her either.

  “It’s my living,” Séverine said. This time without a touch of archness or frivolity.

  “Of course.” Clarie got up, a peacemaker, moving closer to both of them. Séverine had never hidden the fact that Clarie’s plea for help fed into her ambitions. And there still was work to do. “What about Maura?” she asked.

  “My concern is for you and Jean-Luc,” Bernard said dryly, distancing himself from any concern about the Laurenzanos.

  “My friend, who has been following them, says she is performing around Montmartre at night and in the Parc Monceau in the daytime,” a subdued Séverine responded. “I’d better go.”

  Clarie walked her to the door and watched while she put on her gloves. Séverine clasped Clarie’s hands in hers. “Tomorrow night, I promise, I’ll find an escort and go look for Maura on Montmartre.” She kissed Clarie on each cheek. “Stay safe, my dear,” she said.

  “You too,” Clarie answered.

  “I hope this is not good-bye.”

  Clarie shook her head. “I don’t think so.” She embraced Séverine. “Be careful,” she whispered.

  Séverine squeezed Clarie’s hands one more time before turning and leaving.

  Taking a deep breath, Clarie went into the parlor to talk to Bernard. She soon found out that he, too, had a secret. He had not told her that Jobert warned him about the scarred man. He hadn’t wanted to alarm her or to believe she was in danger. This admission made it easier for Clarie to tell him everything she had done in the past few days. He did not ask, and she did not promise, to give up the hunt for Maura. Perhaps he assumed she would. What he did not understand was that for her, giving up on Maura would be like surrendering a piece of herself.

  20

  “BRAVO!” MONSIEUR ANDRÉ CALLED, AS if he were some high-class gentleman instead of the head of a rascally ragpicking family. “Bravo!” echoed his wife. Others clapped and banged on pots and pans.

  Maura held her hand to her waist and bowed, joining in the mockery of those who thought they were better than the motley crowd that surrounded her. She and Nico, the street musicians known as Piero and Nicoló, had taken to performing for the ragpickers each night as they waited for the ten o’clock hour when they were allowed into the streets of Paris to hunt and gather. In the last few days, the commencement of the ragpickers’ work had become the end of Nico’s and Maura’s.

  To her amazement, her plan had worked, and she and Nico had made more money than they needed to survive, especially as they gained the courage to perform in wealthier neighborhoods. It helped that she had grown up with many of the songs that Nico knew. It also helped that he was so willing to sing of Pyotr and Angela.

  “Sing your song, we like it!” Jacques, one of the strays, yelled.

  “Nicoló, strike up the chord.” Maura stretched out her hand toward her companion.

  Pieter, a boy from Tzarist Russia

  Loved mankind with all his heart….

  More amazing to her than her success was the fact that she had learned to like some of the ragpickers, although she’d never dream of wanting to live among them, or rather among the stinking mounds that undulated out of their doorways. Her first friendly exchanges began with the women who had worried about Nico being alone and told her they were happy he had a companion. For them, sleeping five or six or seven in the one room they called home was not only hardship, it was companionship, protection, warmth in the winter. Maybe that’s why the families so willingly took in the strays, the lice-ridden, emaciated runaways that eventually found themselves in “the zone,” the ragpickers’ quarters. To share while having so little. To be so honest in plying their trade, when everyone treated them with contempt. She almost began to believe the words she had written.

  Why can’t we all be free

  To work with joy and dignity

  To earn our bread and all we need

  To live, to love, to play, to breathe?

  Someone heard the ten o’clock bells, and the ragpickers began to move, waving good-bye to the women who had to stay with the smallest children, and to Maura and Nico, who started off toward the vineyard. Nico had told her he chose to live alone because he loved the well, the quiet, and, until she came, spending his waking hours at peace, wandering or playing music and thinking of his Jeanne. He said he knew that she would leave some day, and he would be fine. She doubted this. He was so old. But she was worried about her mother, who was also alone. Sometimes she had fantasies that they could all live together.

  More than anything, she was too young to give up her ambitions. Playing in the Parc Monceau had reignited her dream. She’d never be like the women in silks who strolled through the park with their top-hatted gentlemen. But she wanted to make something of herself. Not to beg all her life. Yet she could not leave the zone until they found Angela’s and Pyotr’s killer. Then, and only then, would she be safe.

  21

  “YOU WON’T GO BACK TO the Square d’Anvers?”

  “No,” she promised.

  “And you’ll always go out with Rose.”

  “Yes.”

  Martin took an ebony curl that had fallen out of one of Clarie’s pins and wound it behind her ear. “I want nothing to happen to you.”

  “Don’t worry. On your way, Maître Martin.” She picked up his bowler and plopped it at a jaunty angle on his head. Martin knew that she was trying to lighten the mood. But her chest was heaving ever so slightly, so he held her in his arms again, feeling her heart, trying to make her feel safe. “Don’t worry,” he assured her, “I’ll track down Inspector Jobert if it takes all morning. He’s clever and competent. He’ll drag in the man before noon, I promise. Or at the latest by the time the bastard is back from lunch. And in the meantime—”

  “We won’t go out.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise.” This earned her a light kiss on the lips. When he stood back, he caught a fiery glint in her eyes he hadn’t seen for years. In it he glimpsed the girl he had fallen in love with, the impetuous Clarie Falchetti. Not the responsible, hard-working mother and teacher he had so come to cherish. Nor the subdued Clarie she became after she lost Henri-Joseph. When it was all over, he’d try to understand what had happened to her in the last month. And, in turn, he’d make her understand tha
t he was capable of loving all the Claries. As long as she was honest with him and kept herself safe from harm.

  Martin raced down the stairs and through the courtyard. He wound his way through the busy streets and struggled through the crowd in front of the Gare du Nord to get to the train station’s post office, where he looked up the address of the precinct that served the Goutte-d’Or and sent a pneu to the Bourse, telling them he would not be in until the afternoon. Then he headed north on the street that ran between the giant train station and the equally elephantine Hôpital Lariboisière and continued on whatever route pushed him north toward the rue Doudeauville. This was unfamiliar territory to Martin. He breathed in the fetid odor of open sewers and felt the suspicion the inhabitants exhibited for well-dressed outsiders. He was chagrined, once again, at the notion of Clarie walking the same streets, alone or, at night, in the company of Séverine. It was a relief to reach Doudeauville, a lively commercial street. Address in mind, as he strode along, it only took him a few minutes to spot the iron gates in front of the police station. He rushed through the courtyard into the station. Rushed, only to wait. Impatiently. For more than an hour.

  Martin could not resist rising from the bench every fifteen minutes to insist to the mustachioed receptionist that he had to see the inspector. What he got in return, from the indifferent uniformed man, was a shrug. Being a defense attorney did not help in this environment. Another bitter reminder of the power Martin had once had as a judge.

  “Where is he?” Martin asked for the third time, more of a shout than a question.

  “Out. As I told you. He said he would be in soon.” The mouth hardly moved under the hair covering the burly man’s upper lip.

  Martin paced. In the best of all worlds, Jobert would have had “his man” follow Arnoux and know what he was up to, even have arrested the bastard. In the worst, Jobert was out on some other case, investigating a petty theft or assault, or just making someone else’s life miserable with his feeble, sarcastic jokes. As Martin waited, his doubts grew. He should have gone to the precinct in the ninth arrondissement, closer to his home, or he should have gone straight to headquarters in the Palais de Justice and found an inspector he had worked with during his time there. Why was he trusting that Jobert was doing anything useful? Waiting was insane. Clarie could be in danger. Martin swiped his bowler from the bench and was about to leave when the secretary said “Maître Martin, I think I heard someone come in the back door.” The man got up and lumbered down the hallway that opened beside the counter that hid his desk. His return was equally, agonizingly slow. “I told Jobert you were here. He’ll be out in a minute.”

  Martin took off his hat and settled on the bench again. He placed his hands on his thighs, closed his eyes and waited, trying not to count off the seconds. Trying to keep his mind clear, ready for his meeting with the irritating inspector.

  “Maître Martin.” Jobert’s jocular, all-too-knowing voice.

  Martin got up. “Inspector Jobert, I have an urgent matter to discuss, in private.”

  Jobert scrutinized him for a moment. “Well, Maître, your timing is good. I happen to have someone in my office you will want to meet.”

  Michel Arnoux? Did Jobert have the bastard in custody? Martin moved forward. “Let’s go, then.”

  Jobert nodded and ambled down a narrow gray hall to his office. Martin followed impatiently, hoping every step of the way that he was about to confront Clarie’s tormentor. But when they arrived at the doorway to Jobert’s tiny, tidy office, the man who stood to meet them was neither tall nor thin nor scarred. He was stocky, with a stubble beard and a nose that looked like it had been broken more than once. Although he wore a shabby worker’s smock and cap, Martin realized at once that this rough-looking character was a police agent.

  “Maître Martin, Agent Torcelli,” Jobert introduced them as he maneuvered behind his desk. “Please, sit,” he said, pointing to the two wooden chairs that took up most of the remaining space. “Torcelli, tell Maître Martin what you have found out.” Jobert picked up the cigar that had been left smoldering in an ashtray.

  Martin took his watch from his vest. Ten thirty. He calculated that there was time for him to learn what the police knew before they went to the Gas Administration building to arrest Arnoux. All his training and experience as a judge had predisposed him to listen first and give his version of events later.

  “Well, sir,” the agent said as he scraped his chair closer to Martin, “the night your wife, Madame Martin, came to the café was the first time I noticed this guy, the one with the scars on his face. It was only my third time there. It’s true,” he admitted as he ran his fingers around the rim of his cap, “I decided to follow your wife that night, especially since she and that woman, Séverine, said they were looking for the Laurenzano girl. But as soon as I figured out who she was—your wife, that is—I hurried back to the café, hoping to have a little tête-a-tête with the guy who had been talking about planting bombs.”

  “Go on,” Martin muttered, jiggling his knee. At least the fool seemed contrite that he had stalked a respectable woman instead of an idiot publicly advocating violence.

  Torcelli swallowed hard. “Unfortunately, when I got back, he wasn’t there. The bartender snickered that he had had to go home to meet a curfew, that he was like a pussycat having to slink back to the Gas Company housing every night right on schedule. Turns out, quite a few of them laughed behind the guy’s back. He’d come in, trying to be the big man, saying he was a stoker who had been in an explosion. From the way he talked, from the way he dressed, no one believed him, except the Russian, who trusted everyone. This Balenov took the man under his wing, so to speak, and tried to make a disciple of him. I almost decided then and there that the man with the scars wasn’t worth investigating. That is, until I talked to my inspector.”

  Torcelli glanced at Jobert, who was leaning back in his chair, chewing on the last stub of his cigar and nodding approval.

  “The inspector thought this guy could just be very wily, fooling everyone, and that I should press him to see if he was in a dangerous cell. Remember, at that point, we thought Angela Laurenzano was killed by an anarchist to keep her from talking.”

  At that point. “What do you believe now?” Martin was about to burst. This was taking too long.

  Jobert held up his hand to calm Martin. He pointed to Torcelli to continue.

  “Wednesday night he came back to the bar. He seemed grateful for anyone who would talk to him. So I stood him a few drinks and asked if he really believed that Balenov had been lying the whole time about being against violence. He assured me, he knew the Russian was violent.”

  “How?” Martin straightened up. “Did you ask how he knew?”

  “Sure, I asked. He said because the Russian and his ‘little friends’ had killed Barbereau.”

  “Those ‘little friends’ would be Angela and Maura Laurenzano,” Jobert interrupted, shooting Martin a meaningful look. “Do you think your wife knows anything about that?”

  Martin ignored Jobert. He wanted Torcelli to get to the point. “Do you think he was part of their cell, of any cell?” he asked the undercover man.

  Torcelli shook his head. “I don’t think so. He didn’t really talk like an anarchist. More like a crazy man, a loner. When I asked point-blank if he knew anyone who could build a bomb, he said that he was plenty smart enough to build one himself. He’d learned enough from reading one of ‘their’ pamphlets. I noted that: not ‘our’ pamphlets, ‘their’ pamphlets.”

  “That’s when I got involved.” Jobert leaned forward. “I wasn’t about to let Torcelli lose his cover by going to the Gas Company making inquiries, so I went myself. With that face, it was easy to find out who he was.”

  “And who is he?” Martin knew. He wanted to hear it from them. He did not want to believe that Séverine had found out as much, if not more, than the police.

  “Michel Arnoux, injured in the bombing at the Hotel Terminus three years ago. Presu
mably because of that, no friend of anarchists. A clerk in the accounting department, who, according to his boss, has gone a little bit off the rails lately. Missing days, coming in late other days—”

  “So he can go stroll through the neighborhood and threaten my wife. I want the man arrested.” Martin could no longer contain himself.

  The inspector looked up, startled. “When did he approach her?”

  “Two days ago. You should be out there right now, hauling him in.”

  “What did he say exactly?” Jobert no longer wore that irritating, insouciant look. This was serious, immediate. And Martin was sick at himself for not having made his demands as soon as he saw Jobert. “He talked about the Charity Bazaar fire, he warned her she wasn’t behaving like a proper woman.”

  Jobert and Torcelli exchanged glances.

  “You should make sure she keeps away from him, sir,” the brutish-looking Torcelli said, with surprising gentleness. “He’s funny about women. Last night when I got a few more drinks in him, he kept going on and on about how unfair life was, how the worst men attract all the pretty girls; and how good men, like him, are betrayed by bad women. He sounded as if he hated women. So I took a leap. I asked him if Angela Laurenzano deserved what she got. He turned all red, took a big swallow of whiskey, and clammed up. Said he had to get home. Very suspicious.”

  “So why haven’t you dragged him in?” Martin got to his feet. Did this madman think his Clarie was a bad woman, a betrayer?

  “Maître Martin,” Jobert sighed, smashing the stub into the ashtray, “I tried this morning. He wasn’t at work. Nor was he in his room at the Cité. I came back here to consult with Torcelli. And lo and behold, you were waiting for me. That’s when I told Torcelli we were in luck.”