“What is your work?”
“I’m a miner.”
“Excuse me?”
“I dig holes in rocks.”
“Really.”
“Really.”
He knew they’d run “Gary Phillips” through Washington. That, undoubtedly, would ring some queer bells. But he had time on his side. If they didn’t hold him, if he didn’t give them another moronic reason, he could still finish this.
“Why did you bring a gun to Italy?”
“I…my wife was shot and killed. In a burglary. Since then I’ve carried a gun. You can’t understand what it’s like watching your wife die.” A grotesque distortion, but Michael knew, as the supervisor stared into his eyes, that the man saw the real, convulsing pain beneath it. And the lie, all his lies, became real. And the Truth Shall Make You Free.
The assistant returned and nodded to the supervisor. There was a María Maggi in Musocco buried in 1956. Michael could feel the wind go out of the supervisor’s sails.
“You have a permit for that pistol?”
“In America.” And Michael knew they weren’t going to hold him.
“We will have to confiscate the gun as a customs violation.”
Michael kept his look neutral.
“We have the name of your hotel and will contact you tomorrow or Tuesday. You’re free to go.”
Michael rose. “Mr. Phillips…” Michael turned to the supervisor. “Be sure to see Siena. It’s beautiful this time of year.”
“Thank you.”
Michael opened the door. As he walked by the passport kid, he heard him hiss under his breath, “Do yourself a favor, Phillips. Stay out of trouble. You’re not built for it.”
He took the train in from the airport. His eyes stung with their constant, nervous movement, even with the lids closed, which was pointless anyway; he was way beyond sleep. The car clacked through the confusion of a city built by conquerors: Austrian blocks of yellow-washed plaster, Parisian facades of granite and playful lattice, Norman paranoia, Swiss money, and sewers that gurgled of Africa.
The train coughed into the Stazione Centrale, Il Duce’s soaring salute to a modern Pax Romana. Michael passed through the terminal of heavy columns and vast marble walls and remembered his first time here, in college, just a year after a war he barely missed, waiting between trains. The great fascist symbols leering from those marble slabs had been hastily covered that summer by acceptable republican flags or simply mangled with haphazard swaths of cement. There were still Allied soldiers everywhere then, eyes cocked no longer on the Italians but the Soviets, mustering over the northern mountains. There’d been poverty and eternal style.
There’d been Gina.
His hotel was a block south of the station. There was a message from Hector, a number in Madrid, and he returned it on a pay phone at the post office.
“Michael.” The voice as enthusiastic as always. “Everything went okay?”
“I’m here.”
“Excellent. My nephew will meet you at the agreed place at four. He’ll have the documents you asked for.”
There was a pause on Hector’s end. “Michael, Alejandro Morales has disappeared from Argentina on a forged passport. We don’t know his destination. It could be anywhere. It could be Milan.”
“Thanks for the warning.”
“I am here for you at all times, Michael. Good luck.”
Michael dropped his bags in his room, lay down on a wafer mattress, locked his arms behind his neck, and looked out the dusty window. He’d clear his brain in a minute, meet Hector’s nephew coming down from Bonn in a few hours, and together they’d complete the arrangements at the cemetery for the exhumation of María Maggi.
Beyond the glass was the train station. It hadn’t changed much in a quarter century. Fewer bullet holes. The city had seemed bigger then. The whole world had.
Twenty-three years ago he’d finished his summer exchange year at the University of Bordeaux and was drifting magically between the girl left behind in France and the one he’d marry in Chicago.
The train that summer had taken him through the Vichy collaborationist south and a Monaco that was a passing blur of tanned bodies, swimming pools, and the nagging feeling that maybe there had been a war somewhere.
But there had been war, and crossing into Italy, its footprints were on a hundred Lombardy towns. Piles of rubble swept up but not yet removed, cratered fields, and everywhere the sour iron tang of a million obliterated battle machines.
Michael had been on his way to Florence, like all Americans, to taste white-man history older than the Alamo. He’d been restless on the ride and wandered the train, hung his elbows out the side windows, and watched the power lines race up and down, up and down.
She’d spoken first. “Sometimes, people’s arms get caught on the mail hooks. They get ripped off so fast the person doesn’t even notice at first, yes? If they live, it’s important to remember to notify the railway police, so that if they find the arm they can return the wedding ring.”
“I’m not married.”
“Then you have less to be concerned about.”
He pulled his arms in from the window.
She was standing in profile beside him and promptly hung her own elbows out the glass. “I’m not married either.”
She was a few inches shorter than he, with the dark blonde of a northerner. Her dress was blue polka dots on white, fitted at the waist and flared to the ankle. It suited her, though not outrageously so. He told her his name in Italian, she glanced him up and down, arms still hanging out the window. “A Yankee wop with a Russian name.”
“Raised in Argentina.”
“My.”
He continued speaking to her in his mother’s Italian, and she kept answering in English. “Where are you from?”
She’d only met his eyes once, in her brief appraisal, and had since concentrated on the bushy rush of hillsides and glimpses of coast. “Not far from here. In the mountains. But I live in Marseilles now.”
“What’s in Marseilles?”
“My boyfriend.”
She turned then, and the eye that had been hidden in profile was bruised purple and black. “Tell me about your family,” she asked.
“They’re dead.”
She taught English in France and was on her way home for a visit: mom, dad, a small pharmacy, none of which she seemed to like much. He didn’t ask about the black eye. The war had grazed them—an uncle she’d never met killed in Calabria, a little brother’s eye lost to a stray B-24 lightening its load over the Alpes-Maritime. Michael felt compelled, stupidly, to apologize for it.
She shrugged. “Life gets you one way or another. At least they never saw it coming.”
“And you do?”
“Don’t you? You strike me as the kind of guy who sees it coming with both feet.”
She took a cigarette out of his pocket, stuck it into her mouth, and walked back down the car.
He found her later in a compartment full of attentive teenage soccer players, slid the door open, and sat down opposite. She didn’t seem surprised in the least to see him.
“You’re wrong,” he said. “Life can’t come and get you. It can’t, because life is a dumb, blind, thoughtless blunder.”
“You believe that?”
“I have to.”
She took a long drag on her cigarette and regarded him.
“What’s your name?”
“Gina.”
There wasn’t much left of the train ride, so they talked of simple things: living among the French, the sensation created by the arrival of black American GIs. Then the train was in Milan and there was the pulling down of cases, the flushing onto the platform. They walked silently together past hissing engines, dodged rain puddles from a thousand war-holes in the curved superstructure.
The crowd diluted in the vastness of the station, and they stopped near the ticket windows for local trains.
“Where are you going now?” she asked.
“Florence.�
��
“Of course.”
“Is it nice?”
“It’s old.”
“What’s better?” he asked.
“Acereto.”
“What’s that?”
She pulled another cigarette from his shirt pocket. “My town.”
They took the stopping train north, into the hill country. Watched the Renaissance jumble of Milan loosen as towns drew themselves into tight, sober hamlets, felt Caesar’s grip weaken with the chill of the barbarian north. As the coal-fired train heaved its way up steeper inclines, the villages compressed tighter and tighter, till the trapped energy squeezed itself out in a profusion of church spires lurching up defiantly against the icy peaks above. Norman cathedrals heaped on Carolingian chapels and themselves topped, like layered Neapolitan, with gussied, Hapsburg clock towers.
Her town was no bigger than others, its church no less layered. They walked from the station, he with his father’s suitcase, older than both of them together. He hauled it up steep cobbled lanes, past a small piazza, in its tidiness somehow more German than Italian. It was Sunday, and Sunday people lounged everywhere, having coffee, playing chess. They all stared but Gina made eye contact with none of them.
“Do you know these people?”
“Of course.”
They continued down a narrow alley. A young man yelled down from his window, “Gina!”
She stuck her arm in the air but kept moving. Out of the alley, to the far edge of town and a prosperous, two-story home. “This is it.”
Gina opened the gate, walked past a battered pet dish. “You have a dog?”
“Had. Killed in the war. Same bomb that got my little brother’s eye. Landed right in the pond out behind the house. There’s still mud from the explosion up under the eaves. Probably some dried Poitzel too. Poitzel was the dog. I don’t know why we still have the dish.” She keyed the door and pushed it open. “You’d have to ask my parents.”
They walked in, and the house was silent.
“Where are your parents?”
“Oh, they’re gone. All week.”
They packed a cold dinner, carried it up the wildflower hill behind the house. Sunset flared insects purple and green. The town below glowed coppery and in doing so at last, to Michael, seemed Italian.
They drank hot Chianti, ate hard bread and sliced tomatoes. Gina pulled up fistfuls of fragile mountain flowers. “This used to be a graveyard, long ago. If you look around here, in the grass, you can find bits of marble with Latin on them. Sometimes pieces of iron and teeth. Roman teeth.”
“You always picnic in graveyards?”
“All Europe’s a graveyard.”
She stood with her wine, looking across mountain pastures. “Someday you and I will lie in a place like this, with children picking at the pieces of our tombs.”
“I suppose so.”
“You don’t think about it?”
“Why draw it any faster into your life?”
Gina flopped down beside him. “I’m drunk.” She emptied her glass into the earth. “Chianti. Chianti for the dead. Do you miss it, Mr. Centurion?” She broke a piece of bread and let the crumbled fragments fall. “How about some bread?” She lay back on the crumbs, crossed her hands across her chest, and closed her eyes. “It must have been like this, don’t you think? Maybe a sword to keep him company…”
He was silent, and she looked at him from a cocked eye. “You disapprove.”
“It’s morbid.”
“Not talking about death won’t make it go away. Better to have the courage to look it in the face.”
Michael felt his face flush. “Courage? Christ, you were in the middle of a war and the only thing you lost was a dog.”
He regretted it immediately and lowered his voice. “You’ve got so much. Family, a nice house, a hometown where people know you, things I can’t even imagine…Why on earth obsess about death?”
“Because I know life will take all from me, Michael—I just know—and I won’t let it have the satisfaction.”
“That’s no kind of life, Gina.”
“What is?”
It stumbled in his throat. “I don’t know. I’m trying, but honestly, I don’t have the slightest idea.”
And Michael, who had never really understood the intentions of women, was surprised when she kissed him.
Just glancing. He held her hand lightly, like a prized lab specimen. And kissed her black eye. She replaced it with her mouth. It tasted of cheese and cigarettes, then didn’t, and they were down, fragrant herbs against his cheek. He breathed her in, floated on dark-blonde hair enclosing him.
There were fireflies when he came up for air. Soft, lethargic sparks. He started to get up, his head lightened, and he sat down again. Tiny chunks of Roman tomb stuck to arms and backs. As he rubbed them off himself and her, it came out of him quietly: “Tombs. Nothing but tombs my whole life…”
In her parents’ house they built a fire, and the clothes, grass stained with buttons that fastened on opposite sides in America, came off awkwardly. Neither of them had bathed since the train, and there was a tang to their skin. He lifted Gina, curled her close to him, and she was lighter than he expected. Broad, dark nipples on teardrop breasts like small pillows against his chest.
She explored his body, her eyes closed, and found the boyhood scar on his thigh. “Where did you get this?” she breathed.
He didn’t answer, instead brushed his hand across the inside of her thigh. It was moist, warm, and one labia was longer than the other.
“Nobody’s perfect,” she said.
He kissed it.
In the morning they had brioche and coffee in a sudden and confusing silence. It was as if a heavy motorbike, cruising at high speed, had inexplicably begun to tip, and no matter your effort, the momentum was cast.
Words that had seemed so simple the night before now choked midair, embarrassed. He didn’t touch her, found it hard to imagine he ever had, and after a few hours of tortured pauses, bewildered, he said he’d better be getting on. She slapped her thighs, said okay, and before he knew it, she was seeing him to the platform, the walk a thousand times longer than the afternoon before. He sputtered some hopeless half sentences about how long she’d be in town, how long he’d be in Europe. He felt tainted and humiliated. She gave him a phone number both of them knew he’d never call.
In the train he took his seat numbly, and shot a glance at Gina out the window, but she’d already given the station, and Michael, her back. The engine lurched, her retreating image slid sideways, and at the last instant, when she was sure he was no longer watching, when he had in fact nearly averted his eyes, she turned to him a face stained with tears, and Michael understood.
Gina fought the chaos of life by giving up to it all that she cared about before it could be taken. Michael had touched her and so was given up.
There was a small note left in a battered novel he didn’t find till his return to Chicago. Only a few lines in Italian: I don’t consider myself a happy person, but I was happy with you.
September 2, 1971
23.
It was knocking that woke him. Insistent. Drawing him up from black lakes. “Signore?” More knocking. “Signore? Is everything okay?” Michael looked at the window. Afternoon slanted through it.
“What?” It surprised him how strangled it sounded. “Of course.”
“We were concerned.”
“I’m okay. Jesus.”
“Will you be staying Monday night?”
“Monday? I don’t know. I’ll tell you later.”
“We need to know now, Signore. Checkout is one p.m. Excuse me.”
Michael groaned and struggled off the bed. A cacophony of cathedral bells had begun somewhere and felt like it was going on in the next room.
Michael opened the door. “What’s the problem?” He rubbed his face. The nap had left him feeling like shit.
The hotel employee’s repertoire was limited to a shrug. “Checkout is one
o’clock.”
“Why are you bugging me with this now?” The bells were starting a world of a headache. “What the hell is that?”
“The church, Signore. They are ringing for Saint Maxima day.”
A glimmer of catechism flared in Michael’s brainpan. “Isn’t that Monday?”
“Of course.”
“But it’s only Sunday morning. I arrived on Sunday…”
The employee looked at him peculiarly. Michael was growing weary of everyone he met since getting off the plane treating him like a mental patient. “What day is today?”
“Saint Maxima day. Monday.”
“That’s impossible.”
The employee shrugged.
“You mean I slept a day and a half?”
“We were concerned. You never came down for meals.”
Hector’s nephew. Michael spun around to collect his wits. Get moving. A day and a fucking half.
“Signore. The room.”
“Yes, yes. I’ll keep it.”
The employee nodded and left.
He hit the streets in the clothes he’d slept in, snaked through afternoon traffic to a small café on the Piazza Cincinnato, where he was supposed to meet Hector’s nephew. Yesterday.
The cappuccino was lukewarm and Michael ignored it, watched instead the sidewalk clutter, bet on the nephew hanging around an extra day. He’d been there an hour, staring at the same dead coffee, when a young man in a black polyester suit and red open-necked shirt appeared before him. “Michael Suslov?”
“How’d you guess?”
“Only an American would drink a cappuccino at two in the afternoon.”
The young man sat in the chair opposite, snapped for a waiter, pushed gold-rimmed teardrop aviators back up the bridge of his nose. “They don’t have calendars where you come from?”
“I was held up.”
“Really? I hadn’t noticed during the three fucking hours I sat here yesterday. Slipped right past me.” He hunched his shoulders, adjusted his lapels. The guy seemed to be in constant motion. “We can speak Spanish if you want. Or English.”
“Italian’s fine. It might be the one thing about you that doesn’t attract attention.”
Blood Makes Noise Page 18