One Summer Day in Rome

by Mark Lamprell

  Alec took his wife’s hand, and they walked toward the man. “Buongiorno at last,” he said, while Meg bristled that he was doing the talking. “We’ve been e-mailing about the blue tile. I’m Alec, this is my—”

  The man raised his hand and put something very sharp against Alec’s throat. He realized with a jolt that it was a knife.

  “Money,” demanded the man in heavily accented English.

  Before she could even process what was going on, the cross-eyed man grabbed Meg from behind. She started to scream but stifled it quickly, as she too felt the blade of a knife against her throat.

  “Bag,” said the cross-eyed man into her ear. This close, he stank of sweet cologne. He pulled the bag from her shoulder. Her whole world was in that bag, but there was only one thing that really mattered.

  Alec took the wallet from his back pocket. In the zippered section, there was about five hundred US dollars and in the open section just over a thousand euros, the bulk of it intended as a deposit for the tile maker.

  “Please, in the bag,” said Meg to the cross-eyed man, “there’s a tile, a blue tile wrapped in—” In one motion, the man slapped his hand across Meg’s mouth and began to propel her backward. Shock rocketed through her. She had never been handled like this, except maybe in play as a child. A memory triggered of a moment on her parents’ outback property. There was a party to send her off to boarding school in Toowoomba. One of the jackaroo’s sons pushed her backward toward a bale of hay. He, too, had his hand clamped over her mouth. But underneath it she was laughing.

  Adrenaline shot through Alec the moment he saw what was happening to his wife. Despite the blade against his throat, he began to twist in protest toward the cross-eyed man, shouting, “Hey!” He heard Meg stumble and fall in the darkness and felt a blow to the side of his head. He fell, too, landing on the hard concrete. They heard the door bolt behind them and found themselves in pitch-blackness, listening to the sound of footsteps hurrying across the outer room. The roller door beyond rattled shut.

  Alec’s ear was ringing. He felt Stephanie’s bandage on his forehead. It was in place. He wondered if the stitches had burst. They did not appear to be bleeding, but it was hard to tell.

  “Are you okay?” he said.

  Meg sat up, trying to get her bearings, too stunned to speak. She extended her hand in Alec’s direction, but he was out of reach.

  FOURTEEN

  The Spanish Steps

  FORTUNE FAVORS THE BOLD.

  —Virgil, The Aeneid

  Having decided to escape the heat of the city, August and Alice wandered the shady avenues of the Pincio gardens planted with a huge variety of palms and evergreens. August felt his stomach churn but knew he was not ill. It was the kind of churning you felt when, having been awarded the art prize at school, your name was also called out for the physics prize. It was the kind of churning you felt when you could not believe your luck.

  Alice looked up at one of the mighty umbrella pines. They were all over Rome, these trees, and she could not help but admire their strong sculptural forms. She imagined teams of winged topiarists shaping their great canopies into compact clouds of green. Patting the rough bark, she asked August what they were called.

  “Beverly,” he answered authoritatively. “They’re all called Beverly.”

  Alice laughed.

  “I have no idea,” he added, looking up at the tree. “It’s a pine of some sort.” By the time he looked back, Alice was walking toward one of the 228 busts of famous Italians that also lined the paths of Pincio.

  Alice did not know it, but she was walking toward the Jesuit astrophysicist Angelo Secchi, whose likeness had been placed, not by accident, precisely over the Rome meridian. Angelo had been the director of the astronomy observatory, and fortunately for him, the intellectual mood of Rome had shifted in the 250 years since they had barbecued his fellow scientist Giordano Bruno in the Campo de’ Fiori. Indeed, Angelo was so revered for his work in solar physics and stellar spectroscopy that he had been placed here among the other stars of Italian science, art, philosophy, and politics.

  “Do you know him?” said August.

  Alice almost answered, “Not personally,” but decided it was too close to his Beverly quip. She shook her head instead. He observed her studying the bust, captured by something in particular; he couldn’t tell what.

  “What are you looking at?” he said.

  “The colors,” she said.

  He laughed, thinking she was joking. It was a white stone bust. There were no colors. Until she pointed them out to him. Driftwood, bone, milk, cream, blue-white, warm white, lime white, chalk white. A hitherto undiscovered universe opened before him.

  “So is this some idiot savant thing?” he said, trying to get a rise out of her.

  Alice had never confessed the full extent of her strange obsession with color. It seemed too mad not to keep private. But since they had agreed to part, never to see each other again, she decided there was nothing to lose by telling him everything. She told him about her childhood spent secretly color-coding closets. She told him about working in the boutique and how they depended upon her exacting eye; how she loved her job and mourned its passing. She told him that she saw the world in color first and form second.

  “So when you look at my face, say, you see the green of my eyes first?” he said.

  “They’re not green,” she said, and she proceeded to catalog the seventeen tones she had observed in his iris thus far.

  He stood there smiling at her.

  “What?” she said. “Don’t tell me you don’t do something strange. I can tell there’s a weirdo in there somewhere.”

  “I skip,” he said.

  It was true. August’s father produced recyclable packaging for the free-range organic egg market, but before that he had been, for a brief time, a professional boxer. Part of his fitness regime had been skipping rope, an exercise he carried into later life and encouraged his young son to practice as well.

  August practiced rope-skipping well into high school and would have been tortured for it were he not so adept with a left hook. One day, after an altercation with a chum, he tried skipping rope to quell his fury but failed to find catharsis. So he dropped the rope and took off across the football field, a small hop with his left foot followed by a bound with his right, a small hop on his right foot followed by a great bound with his left, off he went, alternating left and right, hops and bounds, skipping across the muddy grass. It was a strange, mad, wildly liberating thing to do. And he loved it.

  August told Alice how he loved it, how he still skipped regularly although no longer with a rope, and how it helped him think, especially when he was stuck on something like a design assignment.

  Now it was Alice’s turn to smile. “The scary thing about this,” she said, “is I think you may be telling the truth.”

  “Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it,” he said, taking her hand.

  She wrested it back. “I am not going skipping with you.”

  “Oh, come on. What have you got to lose?”

  “My dignity.”

  “Besides that?”

  “I am not going skipping with you,” she said firmly.

  He smiled a disappointed smile.

  “Although I may steal the idea,” she said.

  “What for?”

  “My sculpting,” she said. “I am a sculptor.” This instantly sounded like a pretentious claim to make, and she felt compelled to explain. “I’m at art school, majoring in sculpture.” Even that sounded ridiculous. She felt like an impostor.

  “What kind of sculptures do you do?”

  “B-grade ones, mostly.”

  “So you’re just another narcissistic American who thinks they’re brilliant at everything,” he said.

  She smiled and told him about Professor Stoklinsky, his unfounded belief in her, her mediocre work, Daniel’s help, and the professor’s command to do something voosh. They fell into a broader conversation abo
ut what they were studying and why they were studying it. She tried to pin him down on why he had chosen to study architecture.

  “I went to one of those posh schools,” he said, “where your choices were medicine, dentistry, or law. If you were wildly arty, you did architecture.”

  “And you were wildly arty?”

  “Can’t you tell?”

  “Do you like it?”

  “Better than medicine, dentistry, or law.”

  “What would you do,” she asked, “if you could do anything?”

  “Live under the sea with a beautiful fish lady who breathes through her eyelids and has three vaginas.”

  Alice laughed. Alec shrugged; he never knew what to do with that question. “The truth is,” he added, “you can never just do what you want, can you?”

  “But say you could?”

  “I’d go live in Paris and be a painter,” he said, saying something for the sake of saying it and kicking himself for being uninventive.

  They walked along in silence for a while. Alice looked at the time on her phone. He didn’t ask how much longer they had before she had to catch her train because he didn’t want to know.

  “Let’s do something voosh,” he said.

  She liked that he had remembered voosh. “What kind of voosh?”

  He had no idea what kind of voosh. But he knew that, once again, he had hooked her. And now he needed to come up with something big, something bold, something memorable.

  * * *

  The Spanish Steps tumble downhill from the monumental church of Trinità dei Monti into the busy Piazza di Spagna below where Bernini’s pretty boat-shaped Fontana della Barcaccia splashes happily amid the traffic. A network of oddly angled travertine staircases connects 135 steps via a series of grand landings affording panoramic views of the bustling commercial district that spreads in all directions beyond the piazza. At most times of the day or night they are packed with groups of tourists and locals, and on this particular day, the glorious weather had attracted them in droves.

  Alice sat on the back of August’s rumbling motorino mentally listing all the things that could potentially happen to her as a consequence of what she had just agreed to do: death, permanent injury, arrest, deportation; these were just the highlights. New Alice told her to get a grip; if she was genuine about making real changes, now was the time to woman-up and take a walk on the wildly dangerous side. And besides, she knew perfectly well that Old Alice would be too embarrassed to pull out now.

  August was so stupidly in love that his brain had turned to gobbledygook. He was certain they were indestructible, and no questions of mortality even entered his head. In another age he would have expressed the enormity of his emotion by challenging someone to a duel or sailing across the Mediterranean in search of lost treasure, but this was all he could come up with at short notice.

  He had spent many a summer on his cousin’s farm riding cross country, and what they were about to attempt was not much more difficult than that. He revved the tiny engine and lifted the front wheel of the motorino onto the sidewalk. There was a moment of rapid acceleration. Pedestrians parted. The bike charged down the white stone staircase.

  Alice would have been appalled to learn that she was screaming her head off but fortunately was too preoccupied to notice. As the wheels bounced down the steps, her whole body shuddered so violently that she thought her bones would disconnect, rendering her a jumbled skeleton inside a fleshy sack of skin. She could no longer feel her arms but nevertheless instructed her brain to instruct her limbs to hold on tight. Faces whizzed by. Some alarmed, some smiling, one shouting furiously.

  With a thump the bike hit the first landing, and for a merciful few seconds the shuddering stopped as they made their way diagonally across it, speeding from the left-hand side of the steps to the right. Alice relaxed for a moment and almost lost her hold when they hit the second flight of steps. As the motorino descended, she gripped tighter. At least, she was pretty sure she did. She gathered she must be holding on because she was not falling off. She closed her eyes, feeling time simultaneously speed up and slow down. This couldn’t be happening to her; it had to be happening to someone else. She felt herself rise out of her body, observing events from afar.

  As the motorino plowed down the stairs, not one conscious thought entered August’s head. He did not feel a single bump. He was necessarily completely present in each unfolding moment, his brain absolutely occupied with calculating countless equations and formulating appropriate responses to physical challenges presenting themselves in a relentless second-by-second sequence.

  On the second landing, August saw a man in a dark blue uniform with white gloves running toward them, blowing a whistle and waving jazz hands at him. He swerved the bike around the man and continued to descend. Scanning the piazza below for an escape route, he noted two blue flashing lights making their way up the Via dei Condotti. Looking back at the steps, he saw a lady with a trolley of gelati directly in front of him. The woman had just seen him, too, but her face was still blank; she had not yet had the time to register, let alone express, the horror of the potential catastrophe before them. August swung the handlebars quickly to the left.

  The sudden turn caused the rear wheel of the motorino to slide across the travertine, thrusting Alice sideways. Her eyes sprang open to see the white pavement looming toward her. She felt herself leaving the seat, certain the worst was about to happen. She tried to grip August’s torso, but forces were dragging her farther and farther away from him. Color drained from her vision so that she saw the world in fuzzy black and white. Time slowed, and events unstitched themselves from reality. Somewhere in her brain, Alice registered that she was fainting and had, in fact, forgotten to breathe. She commanded her lungs to open and take in air, but they had solidified with fear, rigid as two iron pots.

  Then suddenly below her the wheels took purchase, and the motorino stopped sliding. There was a bump, and Alice’s lungs inflated. Color returned to her vision. She gripped August’s T-shirt and with a surge of determination dragged herself upright, against downward momentum. Time resumed its usual speed. Alice shut her eyes again, as if shutting down one sense might help her better manage the others.

  Clutching the handlebars, August found equilibrium. With the motorino upright and his heart pounding, he steered around the woman and her gelati and made a final descent to the piazza where he drove in an arc around a group of schoolboys. August did not even notice that they were clapping and cheering.

  Once the terrible juddering of the descent had ceased, Alice opened her eyes again to see and hear two police sirens wailing toward them. Looking left she saw a third siren approaching from the Via di Propaganda. This cannot be happening, she thought.

  August turned the motorino right and sped toward the Via del Babuino but made a snap decision to turn left down the Via delle Carrozze. They fell into the shade of the buildings, and August registered a drop in temperature. With a sickening lurch, he thought that he had lost Alice somewhere. Removing his left hand from the handlebars, he quickly checked around his waist to discover that she was still holding on.

  Still fractured from reality, Alice registered little but the kaleidoscopic blur of pedestrians. She saw a line of market umbrellas with people dining at café tables beneath them, a child in blue-and-white stripes, an amber-brown sign that said Greco on an apricot terra-cotta wall.

  August noted a change in the pitch and intensity of the sirens: there were more; they were closer. To his right, he clocked a small archway, the width of a doorway with a metal gate, solid to waist height with vertical bars above. It was ajar. He applied the brakes and turned, nudging the gate with the front wheel. It swung open, and he drove the motorino into a small alcove. In front of them three marble steps led to a raised porch. On the porch, an exposed brick partition with an off-center doorway revealed what appeared to be some kind of washbasin. The space made little sense, but not much was making sense right now.

  Suddenly
a blue light flashed around the white rendered walls, growing quickly in intensity. A siren wailed, louder and louder. Pulsating blue filled the alcove. The siren screamed in their ears. Then it raced away. Another blue light came wailing and another and another. Through it all they remained as statues. Eventually, the dim wailing of the last blue light softened into the echo of a distant musical note.

  Finally, August unfroze and turned to Alice, forcing her to unlock her arms from his waist. A smile cracked his face. “I reckon that was voosh,” he said.

  Alice looked at him, blank. Too much data had been entered into her system, and she was experiencing a momentary shutdown.

  August leaned in to her. “You okay?” he said.

  She could feel his hot breath on her face. He was so close that she thought he might kiss her. Suddenly, she rebooted, wildly, thrillingly, intoxicated. If he was going to kiss her, she was going to kiss him back.

  An alarm went off with a piercing, insistent beep. They both jumped. Alice pulled a phone from her pocket. August took it and looked at the screen. It was time to catch her train. He smiled sadly at her and handed back the phone.

  The moment when they might have kissed had vanished.

  FIFTEEN

  The Art of the Cappuccini

  OFTEN A MAN ENDURES FOR SEVERAL YEARS, SUBMITS AND SUFFERS THE CRUELEST PUNISHMENTS, AND THEN SUDDENLY BREAKS OUT OVER SOME MINUTE TRIFLE, ALMOST NOTHING AT ALL.

  —Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead

  Dr. Stephanie Cope sat at a table outside a small restaurant in the Via del Pellegrino, waiting for her bucatini all’Amatriciana. She was sipping a cappuccino, which scandalized her waiter, Pietro, because, as he explained every time she ordered it, the only occasion anyone in Italy took milk in coffee was at breakfast. But Stephanie had lived too long in war zones not to know the importance of getting what she wanted when she wanted it. She wanted to have a coffee, with milk, before lunch, and so that was what she was having. For tomorrow we may die. She had no doubt they were shaking their heads in despair around the espresso machine, but so be it.