Vico butted in just as Mr. Contreras, drawing a deep breath, prepared to unleash a major aria in defense of his beloved animals. “Mi scusa, Signora, mi scusa. It is all my doing. I am here from Italy to meet my cousin for the first time. I am so excited I am not thinking, I am making noise, I am disturbing the rest your beautiful eyes require…”
I stomped up the stairs without waiting for the rest of the flow. Vico caught up with me as I was closing the door. “This building attracts hardworking ladies who need to sleep. Your poor neighbor. She is at a hospital where they work her night and day. What is it about America, that ladies must work so hard? I gave her some of your flowers; I knew you wouldn’t mind, and they made her so happy, she will give you no more complaints about the ferocious beasts.”
He had switched to Italian, much easier to understand on his lips than English. Flinging himself on the couch he launched happily into a discussion of his day with the “partitura.” He had found, through our mutual acquaintance Mr. Ranier, someone who could interpret the music for him. I was right: it was from the Baroque, and not only that, most likely by Pergolesi.
“So not at all possibly by our great-grandmother. Why would your mother have a handwritten score by a composer she could find in any music store?”
I was too tired for finesse. “Vico, where were you at five this afternoon?”
He flung up his hands. “Why are you like a policeman all of a sudden, eh, cugina?”
“It’s a question the police may ask you. I’d like to know, myself.”
A wary look came into his eyes-not anger, which would have been natural, or even bewilderment-although he used the language of a puzzled man: I couldn’t be jealous of him, although it was a compliment when we had only just met, so what on earth was I talking about? And why the police? But if I really wanted to know, he was downstairs, with my neighbor.
“And for that matter, Vic, where were you at five o’clock?”
“On the Kennedy Expressway. Heading toward north Harlem Avenue.”
He paused a second too long before opening his hands wide again. “I don’t know your city, cousin, so that tells me nothing.”
“Bene. Thank you for going to so much trouble over the score. Now you must let me rest.”
I put a hand out for it, but he ignored me and rushed over to the mound of papers we’d left in the hall last night with a cry that I was to rest, he was to work now.
He took the Pergolesi from its envelope. “The music is signed at the end, with the initials ‘CF.’ Who would that be?”
“Probably whoever copied it for her. I don’t know.”
He laid it on the bottom of the trunk and placed a stack of operas on top of it. My lips tight with anger I lifted the libretti out in order to get at the Pergolesi. Vico rushed to assist me but only succeeded in dropping everything, so that music and old papers both fluttered to the floor. I was too tired to feel anything except a tightening of the screws in my forehead. Without speaking I took the score from him and retreated to the couch.
Was this the same concerto Vico had taken with him the night before? I’d been naive to let him walk off with a document without some kind of proper safeguard. I held it up to the light, but saw nothing remarkable in the six pages, no signs that a secret code had been erased, or brought to light, nothing beyond a few carefully corrected notes in measure 168. I turned to the end where the initials “CF” were written in the same careful black ink as the notes.
Vico must have found Fortieri’s letter to my mother stuffed inside Don Giovanni and tracked him down. No, he’d been here at five. So the lawyer, Ranier, was involved. Vico had spent the day with him: together they’d traced Mr. Fortieri. Vico came here for an alibi while the lawyer searched the shop. I remembered Ranier’s eyes, granite chips in his soft face. He could stab an old man without a second’s compunction.
Vico, a satisfied smile on his face, came to the couch for Gabriella’s evening gown. “This goes on top, right, this beautiful concert dress. And now, cugina, all is tidy. I will leave you to your dreams. May they be happy ones.”
He scooped up his portmanteau and danced into the night, blowing me a kiss as he went.
VIII
I fell heavily into sleep, and then into dreams about my mother. At first I was watching her with Mr. Fortieri as they laughed over their coffee in the little room behind the shop where McGonnigal and I had spoken. Impatient with my mother for her absorption in someone else’s company I started smearing strawberry gelato over the oboe Mr. Fortieri was repairing. Bobby Mallory and John McGonnigal appeared, wearing their uniforms, and carried me away. I was screaming with rage or fear as Bobby told me my naughtiness was killing my mother.
And then suddenly I was with her in the hospital as she was dying, her dark eyes huge behind a network of tubes and bottles. She was whispering my name through her parched lips, mine and Francesca Salvini’s. “Maestra Salvini… nella cassa… Vittora, mia carissima, dale…” she croaked. My father, holding her hands, demanded of me what she was saying.
I woke as I always did at this point in the dream, my hair matted with sweat. “Maestra Salvini is in the box,” I had told Tony helplessly at the time. “She wants me to give her something.”
I always thought my mother was struggling with the idea that her voice teacher might be dead, that that was why her letters were returned unopened. Francesca Salvini on the Voice had filled my ears from my earliest childhood. As Gabriella staged her aborted comeback, she longed to hear some affirmation from her teacher. She wrote her at her old address in Pitigliano, and in care of the Siena Opera, as well as through her cousin Frederica-not knowing that Frederica herself had died two years earlier.
“Cassa”-“box”-isn’t the usual Italian word for coffin, but it could be used as a crude figure just as it is in English. It had always jarred on me to hear it from my mother-her speech was precise, refined, and she tolerated no obscenities. And as part of her last words-she lapsed into a coma later that afternoon from which she never awoke-it always made me shudder to think that was on her mind, Salvini in a box, buried, as Gabriella was about to be.
But my mother’s urgency was for the pulse of life. As though she had given me explicit instructions in my sleep I rose from the bed, walked to the hall without stopping to dress, and pulled open the trunk once more. I took out everything and sifted through it over and over, but nowhere could I see the olivewood box that had held Gabriella’s glasses on the voyage to America. I hunted all through the living room, and then, in desperation, went through every surface in the apartment.
I remembered the smug smile Vico had given me on his way out the door last night. He’d stuffed the box into his portmanteau and disappeared with it.
IX
Vico hadn’t left Chicago, or at least he hadn’t settled his hotel bill. I got into his room at the Garibaldi by calling room service from the hall phone and ordering champagne. When the service trolley appeared from the bar I followed the waiter into the elevator, saw which room he knocked on as I sauntered past him down the hall, then let myself in with my picklocks when he’d taken off again in frustration. I knew my cousin wasn’t in, or at least wasn’t answering his phone-I’d already called from across the street.
I didn’t try to be subtle in my search. I tossed everything from the drawers onto the floor, pulled the mattress from the bed, and pried the furniture away from the wall. Fury was making me wanton: by the time I’d made sure the box wasn’t in the room the place looked like the remains of a shipwreck.
If Vico didn’t have the box he must have handed it off to Ranier. The import-export lawyer, who specialized in remarkable objets, doubtless knew the value of an old musical score and how to dispose of it.
The bedside clock was buried somewhere under the linens. I looked at my watch-it was past four now. I let myself out of the room, trying to decide whether Ranier would store the box at his office or his home. There wasn’t any way of telling, but it would be easier to break into hi
s office, especially at this time of day.
I took a cab to the west Loop rather than trying to drive and park in the rush-hour maelstrom. The November daylight was almost gone. Last night’s mist had turned into a biting sleet. People fled for their home-bound transportation, heads bent into the wind. I paid off the cab and ran out of the ice into the Caleb Building ’s coffee shop to use the phone. When Ranier answered I gave myself a high nasal voice and asked for Cindy.
“She’s left for the day. Who is this?”
“Amanda Parton. I’m in her book group and I wanted to know if she remembered-”
“You’ll have to call her at home. I don’t want this kind of personal drivel discussed in my office.” He hung up.
Good, good. No personal drivel on company time. Only theft. I mixed with the swarm of people in the Caleb’s lobby and rode up to the thirty-seventh floor. A metal door without any letters or numbers on it might lead to a supply closet. Working quickly, while the hall was briefly empty, I unpicked the lock. Behind lay a mass of wires, the phone and signal lines for the floor, and a space just wide enough for me to stand in. I pulled the door almost shut and stared through the crack.
A laughing group of men floated past on their way to a Blackhawks game. A solitary woman, hunched over a briefcase, scowled at me. I thought for a nervous moment that she was going to test the door, but she was apparently lost in unpleasant thoughts all her own. Finally, around six, Ranier emerged, talking in Italian with Vico. My cousin looked as debonair as ever, with a marigold tucked in his lapel. Where he’d found one in mid-November I don’t know but it looked quite jaunty against his brown worsted. The fragment of conversation I caught seemed to be about a favorite restaurant in Florence, not about my mother and music.
I waited another ten minutes, to make sure they weren’t standing at the elevator, or returning for a forgotten umbrella, then slipped out of the closet and down to Ranier’s import-export law office. Someone leaving an adjacent firm looked at me curiously as I slid the catch back. I flashed a smile, said I hated working nights. He grunted in commiseration and went on to the elevator.
Cindy’s chair was tucked against her desk, a white cardigan draped primly about the arms. I didn’t bother with her area but went to work on the inner door. Here Ranier had been more careful. It took me ten minutes to undo it. I was angry and impatient and my fingers kept slipping on the hafts.
Lights in these modern buildings are set on master timers for quadrants of a story, so that they all turn on or off at the same time. Outside full night had arrived; the high harsh lamps reflected my wavering outline in the black windows. I might have another hour of fluorescence flooding my search before the building masters decided most of the denizens had gone home for the day.
When I reached the inner office my anger mounted to murderous levels: my mother’s olivewood box lay in pieces in the garbage. I pulled it out. They had pried it apart, and torn out the velvet lining. One shred of pale green lay on the floor. I scrabbled through the garbage for the rest of the velvet and saw a crumpled page in my mother’s writing.
Gasping for air I stuck my hand in to get it. The whole wastebasket rose to greet me. I clutched at the edge of the desk but it seemed to whirl past me and the roar of a giant wind deafened me.
I managed to get my head between my knees and hold it there until the dizziness subsided. Weak from my emotional storm, I moved slowly to Ranier’s couch to read Gabriella’s words. The page was dated the 30th of October 1967, her last birthday, and the writing wasn’t in her usual bold, upright script. Pain medication had made all her movements shaky at that point.
The letter began “Carissima,” without any other address, but it was clearly meant for me. My cheeks burned with embarrassment that her farewell note would be to her daughter, not her husband. “At least not to a lover, either,” I muttered, thinking with more embarrassment of Mr. Fortieri, and my explicit dream.
My dearest,
I have tried to put this where you may someday find it. As you travel through life you will discard that which has no meaning for you, but I believe-hope-this box and my glasses will always stay with you on your journey. You must return this valuable score to Francesca Salvini if she is still alive. If she is dead, you must do with it as the circumstances of the time dictate to you. You must under no circumstances sell it for your own gain. If it has the value that Maestra Salvini attached to it it should perhaps be in a museum.
It hung always in a frame next to the piano in Maestra Salvini’s music room, on the ground floor of her house. I went to her in the middle of the night, just before I left Italy, to bid her farewell. She feared she, too, might be arrested-she had been an uncompromising opponent of the Fascists. She gave it to me to safeguard in America, lest it fall into lesser hands, and I cannot agree to sell it only to buy medicine. So I am hiding this from your papa, who would violate my trust to feed more money to the doctors. And there is no need. Already, after all, these drugs they give me make me ill and destroy my voice. Should I use her treasure to add six months to my life, with only the addition of much more pain? You, my beloved child, will understand that that is not living, that mere survival of the organism.
Oh, my darling one, my greatest pain is that I must leave you alone in a world full of dangers and temptations. Always strive for justice, never accept the second-rate in yourself, my darling, even though you must accept it from the world around you. I grieve that I shall not live to see you grown, in your own life, but remember: Il mio amore per te è l’amor che muove il sole e l’altre stelle.
My love for you is the love that moves the sun and all the other stars. She used to croon that to me as a child. It was only in college I learned that Dante said it first.
I could see her cloudy with pain, obsessed with her commitment to save Salvini’s music, scoring open the velvet of the box and sealing it in the belief I would find it. Only the pain and the drugs could have led her to something so improbable. For I would never have searched unless Vico had come looking for it. No matter how many times I recalled the pain of those last words, “nella cassa.” I wouldn’t have made the connection to this box. This lining. This letter.
I smoothed the letter and put it in a flat side compartment of my case. With the sense that my mother was with me in the room some of my anger calmed. I was able to begin the search for Francesca Salvini’s treasure with a degree of rationality.
Fortunately Ranier relied for security on the building’s limited access: I’d been afraid he might have a safe. Instead he housed his papers in the antique credenza. Inside the original decorative lock he’d installed a small modern one, but it didn’t take long to undo it. My anger at the destruction of Gabriella’s box made me pleased when the picklocks ran a deep scratch across the marquetry front of the cabinet.
I found the score in a file labeled “Sestieri-Verazi.” The paper was old, parchment that had frayed and discolored at the edges, and the writing on it-clearly done by hand-had faded in places to a pale brown. Scored for oboe, two horns, a violin, and a viola, the piece was eight pages long. The notes were drawn with exquisite care. On the second, third, and sixth pages someone had scribbled another set of bar lines above the horn part and written in notes in a fast careless hand, much different from the painstaking care of the rest of the score. In two places he’d scrawled “da capo” in such haste that the letters were barely distinguishable. The same impatient writer had scrawled some notes in the margin, and at the end. I couldn’t read the script, although I thought it might be German. Nowhere could I find a signature on the document to tell me who the author was.
I placed the manuscript on the top of the credenza and continued to inspect the file. A letter from a Signor Arnoldo Piave in Florence introduced Vico to Ranier as someone on the trail of a valuable musical document in Chicago. Signor Ranier’s help in locating the parties involved would be greatly appreciated. Ranier had written in turn to a man in Germany “well-known to be interested in 18th-century music
al manuscripts,” to let him know Ranier might soon have something “unusual” to show him.
I had read that far when I heard a key in the outer door. The cleaning crew I could face down, but if Ranier had returned… I swept the score from the credenza and tucked it in the first place that met my eye-behind the Modigliani that hung above it. A second later Ranier and Vico stormed into the room. Ranier was holding a pistol, which he trained on me.
“I knew it!” Vico cried in Italian. “As soon as I saw the state of my hotel room I knew you had come to steal the score.”
“Steal the score? My dear Vico!” I was pleased to hear a tone of light contempt in my voice.
Vico started toward me but backed off at a sharp word from Ranier. The lawyer told me to put my hands on top of my head and sit on the couch. The impersonal chill in his eyes was more frightening than anger. I obeyed.
“Now what?” Vico demanded of Ranier.
“Now we had better take her out to-well, the place name won’t mean anything to you. A forest west of town. One of the sheriff’s deputies will take care of her.”
There are sheriff’s deputies who will do murder for hire in unincorporated parts of Cook County. My body would be found by dogs or children under a heap of rotted leaves in the spring.
“So you have Mob connections,” I said in English. “Do you pay them, or they you?”
“I don’t think it matters.” Ranier was still indifferent. “Let’s get going… Oh, Verazi,” he added in Italian, “before we leave, just check for the score, will you?”
“What is this precious score?” I asked.
“It’s not important for you to know.”
“You steal it from my apartment, but I don’t need to know about it? I think the state will take a different view.”
Before Ranier finished another cold response Vico cried out that the manuscript was missing.
Windy City Blues Page 5