The Dante Game

by Jane Langton

  “The old ones, they come back. You know. They couldn’t kick the fucking habit after all. But the new ones, where the hell are they?”.

  Yes, that checked with the television report. The young were still swearing off, crowding the trains and highways to Rome as thickly as ever, making their crusading journeys to the Vatican. Bindo had seen them on the screen, a swarm of young bodies teeming in Saint Peter’s Square like beetles in a jar. Well, give them time. If the earlier ones were backsliding, perhaps the new ones could be expected to do the same. It was enough.

  Matteo Luzzi was now firmly installed at the farm.

  The place had been rented by Leonardo Bindo once before, when it had been necessary to store a bulky shipment of marijuana, back in his pre-heroin days. It was an ordinary Tuscan farm in the hills north of the city, where the Torrente Mugnone was only a rushing little stream. Vineyards and olive groves dotted the hillside, and the farmer and his wife cared for a small household collection of livestock. Dependable and close-mouthed, they cared nothing for the use to which their buildings were put, as long as the rent was paid.

  Soon Father Roberto, too, moved his meagre belongings to the farm. Roberto was fleeing from the landlady of his apartment near the Central Market. To his embarrassment she had fallen in love with him. She was always hanging around his doorway in the hall, she found excuses to knock on his door at night, and once he had come home to find her inside his room waiting for him. What if she were to look in his drawers and find his secret Vatican correspondence, the letters he had been unable to throw away?

  But now it was all right. Roberto was delighted to be out of the city. “I grew up on a farm in Switzerland,” he confided to Matteo, “a dairy farm, with goats and cows.”

  “Switzerland?” Matteo was interested as always in any fragment of information about Roberto. “Then you’re Swiss?”

  “Si, si, but my home was only just north of Lake Garda, where everyone speaks Italian.” Roberto laughed. “But with an accent, I’m afraid.”

  And so their joint bachelor life began. As housemates they were not a congenial pair—Roberto’s obsessions were too different from Matteo’s.

  In fact it soon became apparent to Roberto that Matteo’s claim to be a priest in layman’s dress was highly dubious, and he wondered why the cardinals in the Vatican had chosen him as a go-between.

  It was true that Matteo’s appearance was beguiling. He looked like an altar boy, a wholesome adolescent in a white surplice carrying the cross in a solemn procession. And only through Matteo could Roberto conduct his correspondence with the Vatican. The boy had rented a box in the local post office. Every day he took away Roberto’s letters, and nearly every day he returned with answers—splendid answers, inspiring answers, words and phrases that spoke profoundly to Roberto’s every concern. They calmed his fears and allayed his doubts. The deaths of the two servants, the murder of the young American boy, did they trouble good Father Roberto? Ah, he must be assured that there was a higher compassion than a concern for the loss of these simple lives. Think of the multitudes across the world now in bondage to the Holy See!

  “Remember, Father, Dante’s righteous rage when Pope Boniface VIII sat in the chair of Peter—Which now stands vacant before God’s Son’s face! Remember, and take courage. Remember, and know that you have our earnest prayers, our deepest friendship, our eternal devotion.”

  Therefore what did it matter that Matteo Luzzi was as unsavory a young man as Roberto had ever known! Matteo must be endured. He brought the letters that were Roberto’s life blood.

  But of course Matteo’s greatest importance was as an instructor in the use of firearms. Since Roberto was still commuting to his job in the city, they could practice only on weekends.

  “Bravo,” cried Matteo, as Roberto’s cluster of hits grew smaller and nearer to the center of the paper target. “You’re like a buckaroo in the Wild West.”

  Matteo reported Roberto’s progress to Signor Bindo on the telephone. “I think he’ll be a marksman after all. And, listen, he’s worked out a plan of escape. It’s very good. I was astonished.”

  “Escape? You mean afterward?” Bindo did not say that he had no great interest in saving Roberto Mori for a long life lasting into extreme old age.

  “Si, and it’s brilliant. But he needs a hostage, he says, someone to use as a shield.”

  “A shield?”

  “Someone at whom no one will fire. A woman.”

  “Ah, capisco. But where do we find such a woman? Can’t he just pluck her out of the crowd?”

  “No, no, it must be arranged ahead of time. She must be there from the start.” Then Matteo was struck by an idea. “Wait, I know of someone. Yes, she would be perfect. No one would fire at this woman. No one, I promise you.”

  Bindo put down the phone with a mingled sense of misgiving and satisfaction. The whole thing had been simpler in the beginning. There had been less to worry about. But now he was in charge of a real organization. He had a genuine center of operations and a growing staff, like a certain colleague of his in Turin and another in Naples. Here in Florence he, Leonardo Bindo, had become a mover and shaker, manipulating large events that might someday change the world.

  CHAPTER 33

  O you that follow in light cockle-shells …

  Turn back and seek the safety of the shore.…

  Paradiso II, 1,4.

  In spite of its troubles the American School of Florentine Studies had not yet foundered completely. Christmas came and went, and all the remaining students returned, including—to Zee’s intense relief—Julia Smith. But the trustees back in Boston were restless. One student was dead, and half of the others were gone. What a terrible beginning for the American School of Florentine Studies!

  The situation was even worse than the trustees knew. Leaving for the Christmas break, Professor Himmelfahrt announced that he wouldn’t be coming back.

  “Honestly, Lucretia,” he said as he climbed into the cab, “why go on? What’s the point? Stop throwing good money after bad.”

  So Italian history disappeared from the schedule, having ended abruptly with the sack of Rome in 1527. Nobody missed it. The other classes went on as before, with only five students in attendance—Kevin and Dorothy and Joan and Tom and Julia.

  Kevin Banks was the only frequent absentee. Sometimes he showed up in the classroom and sometimes he didn’t. He had stopped taking notes. He wouldn’t last long.

  As for Homer Kelly’s course in modern Italian literature, the instructor himself was barely keeping up. Homer had meant to do a lot of reading over the holiday, but instead he spent the entire two weeks in Venice with his wife Mary. Now Homer stayed up every night in his chilly room at the pensione, humped up on his narrow cot, reading Pascoli and Gozzano by the dim light of his tiny lamp.

  At the school things were normal through the first half of January, and everyone began to hope that the uproar had died down. But then trouble erupted again.

  It was a theft this time. Michelangelo’s compass disappeared from the Museum of the History of Science. Left in its place in the glass case was a slip of paper with a quotation from Dante.

  “Don’t tell me,” groaned Zee, when Homer called to inform him. “I know what it said. It’s one of the clues from the Dante Game. He that with turning compass drew the world’s confines.”

  “Right. Therefore this vandalism is obviously our fault. Just another example of the diabolical playfulness of the homicidal fiends here at the American School of Florentine Studies.”

  The connection was farfetched, but Inspector Rossi took the matter seriously enough to send another search party to the villa to look for the missing compass. Once again every-one’s belongings were tumbled and ransacked, but nothing turned up, and Rossi departed with his companions and didn’t come back.

  To Zee it was apparent that Hell still boiled and rumbled beneath their feet, and might burst up at any moment in fierce fizzing geysers through cracks in the floor.


  In class, however, they were officially in Paradise, moving upward from one exalted bliss to the next, rising to the Heaven of the Moon. From the back of the room Homer looked on with compassion as Zee’s face became with each ascent more haunted, more cadaverous.

  Poor Zee—Homer saw him in a Dantesque light, a man whose intellect was like a wild thing in its den, whose arrow shot heavenward but fell to earth, attracted by a false fair lust. He was a lost soul whirled by desire in a harrowing wind, hither and thither, and up and down.

  The tearing and sundering of Zee’s nature were almost visible as he stood before them, talking so quietly he was almost whispering. He seemed to grow ever more incorporeal.

  It was an odd kind of tortured courtship. But courtship it was, Homer knew that, however one-sided. The object of Zee’s sublimated affection had little to say in class. She wrote in her notebook and looked up only to copy Zee’s drawings of the first cantos of the Paradiso—Dante and Beatrice on the moon, the story of the virtuous Piccarda Donati, kidnapped from a nunnery.

  It couldn’t last, thought Homer. One couldn’t teeter on a precipice and hold one’s breath forever.

  As for Julia, she too was suspended, caught between her cruelty to poor doomed Ned on the one hand and her ardor on the other—her unspoken feeling for Zee was a fantasy slowed down, postponed, delayed.

  It would be up to her to reach out, she knew that. Zee waited and waited and said nothing. Julia imagined him clasped in a hair shirt like that of a martyred saint. She had seen the one belonging to Savonarola in a glass case in the monastery of San Marco. How it must have chafed and rasped him! Now she wanted to remove Zee’s, to tear it off. She longed to soften toward him, to say Here I am.

  But she couldn’t. Not yet. She was too confused, too distraught. Her native caution had returned.

  CHAPTER 34

  Down must we go, to that dark world and blind.…

  Inferno IV, 13.

  It rained in January for ten days. At last it tapered off and stopped. On the first dear Saturday morning Lucretia and Zee piled everybody in the van for a field trip to the Benedictine monastery of Monte Oliveto. Actually it wasn’t everybody—only Dorothy, Joan, Tom and Homer. Julia begged off, determined to finish her Dante paper, and at the last minute Kevin Banks was nowhere to be found, although Lucretia looked for him everywhere.

  The title of Julia’s paper was “The Still Center of the Revolving Wheels,” its subject was time and eternity. Time was water moving in a round vase, it was the perimeter of the circle of eternity, with God at the center, equidistant from all points on the circumference at once.

  Julia put her tired head on her arms, and thought about Ned Saltmarsh. If time was a circle, where was Ned? Somewhere on the edge, occupying one small segment of the perimeter. If one could travel backward along that spidery geometric curve, one would come to a time when he had been alive.

  Oh, Ned, Ned, she mustn’t think about him now. Desperately Julia opened her notebook to the page on which she had copied Zee’s drawing of the capture of Piccarda Donati.

  But she was too restless, too troubled to work. Pushing back her chair, she stood up and put on her coat and walked out-of-doors into the cool bright air. Crossing the driveway, she descended the stone steps past the decaying outbuildings and the broken greenhouse where the bodies of Isabella and Franco had been found. Beyond lay a sloping field of wet grass and yellow mud. It was an olive grove, the fruit ripe on the limbs like green cherries. At the other end of the orchard half a dozen people were busy in the trees stripping the olives from the branches, letting them fall on cloths spread over the ground.

  When she came back to the house her shoes were covered with mud. Julia stood in the driveway scraping at them with a stick, as Kevin Banks came out the door.

  “Oh, hey, Julia, hey, listen, so long, I’m leaving.” Kevin hunched his shoulders and shifted his pack. “Jesus, this thing weighs a ton.”

  “Oh, Kevin, you mean you’re really going for good?”

  “Oh, right. Like I just got a call from this friend of mine, she’s in Venice. You been to Venice? Me neither. Hey, it’s fantastic, she says, so why don’t you come on up? They’ve got this extra space because, I dunno, some guy, he left. So I’m on my way.” Kevin squirmed to readjust the straps of his pack. “Besides, what’s the point of staying here? This place is up shit creek. If my parents knew what was happening they’d have kittens. Like our great professor turns out to be a murderer? Listen, watch out. He’s really gone on you. You heard what they said about him, right?. He’s really bad news, right?”

  And with this piece of fatherly advice, Kevin Banks left the Villa L’Ombrellino and the city of Florence and took the train for Verona, Venice and Trieste, shoving his way into the crowded aisle, unable to find a place to sit down. All the compartments were full. Kevin had to sit on his backpack in the corridor for four hours, all the way to Venice,

  It was the last any of them saw of him.

  Julia went back to her room, feeling sober. Once again she sat down at her desk and tried to collect her thoughts.

  She was alone in the house. There was no one to notice the two cars surging up the driveway, no one to bar the door against the three men who leaped out and came running up the steps.

  One of them was the school’s missing secretary, Matteo Luzzi, When the phone call came, Matteo had been cleaning his Bernadelli automatic pistol. Swiftly he had reassembled it and thrust in a clip. Now he led the way. “She’s supposed to be in her room,” he said, running down the staircase to the ground floor in the west wing. Together they threw open Julia’s door and pulled her roughly out of her chair.

  Julia was tall and strong. Furiously she tugged herself free and tried to dodge past them. When one of them grabbed her by both arms, she struck his face a tremendous blow. He let go, crying, “Porca madonna,” and nursed his cheek.

  But there was no arguing with Matteo’s gun. “Stia ferma un momento, Signorina,” he said angrily. “Stay still, please. Now, quickly, pack your clothes.”

  “Oh, damn,” said Julia. “Oh, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn.”

  CHAPTER 35

  LAY DOWN ALL HOPE, YOU THAT GO IN BY ME.

  Inferno III, 9.

  Locked in the back of the little three-wheeled van, Julia tried to keep track of the turns and twists of the road. There were no windows, but she could tell when the three small wheels turned left or right. The back of the truck was jammed with a mess of electrical equipment, cables, wires, batteries, battery clamps, wire-cutting tools, ail jumbled together. Caught in the seething snarls of wire were grubby pieces of clothing, greasy paper bags and panini-wrappers, the sports pages of newspapers. At first Julia was tumbled mercilessly up and down on the metal floor, but then she managed to rearrange some of the heavy cable to cushion the shock.

  They were passing through the city of Florence, she was sure of that, circumnavigating the old center, heading gen erally east, or perhaps north. Before long the city noises faded. They were in hilly country. The truck tilted up and down, moving in long rising and falling curves. At last there was a sharp turn to the left, and the smoothness of the paved surface gave way to a bumpy road. The truck slowed down, and they began climbing more and more steeply, making violent turns at switchbacks, then rising straight up a precipitous incline. Again there was a sharp turn, and the truck paused. A gate creaked. The truck moved again, slowed down and stopped.

  There were shouts of greeting, wild whoops. The engine was turned off and the little vehicle jounced as someone got out of the cab. Julia heard another car pull up and stop. Doors banged. Now someone was scrabbling at the lock of the door that imprisoned her, and Julia turned to face the opening, ready to lash out as she had done when Matteo and the two others dragged her out of the villa.

  Light flooded in. Faces were crowded around the back of the truck, staring in at her, grinning. Julia was on them like a tiger.

  But there were four of them now, four burly men. They laughed
as they subdued her, and one of them thrust his hand inside her blouse.

  “No, no, Raffaello,” said Matteo. “Vietato,” and he shook his finger at him waggishly. Julia was gripped from the rear, but she managed to lunge at Raffaello and kick his shin with all her strength, so that he yelped and hopped in pain. She cursed him, and wrenched herself furiously from side to side, but her heart was beating violently. Good Christ, what was going to happen to her now? She could think of only one use to which she could be put.

  They pushed her in front of them indoors. Julia had an impression of yellow stucco farm buildings. In a last glimpse of the little truck she saw the words painted on the back, ELETTMCISTA MOBILE

  “Upstairs, Signorina,” said Matteo. Reluctantly she climbed the narrow stone stairway, fearful of what might be waiting at the top.

  It was a sparsely furnished chamber, a bedroom with a narrow cot and a large barred window. The four men crowded in after her. Julia retreated to the far corner and turned to face them.

  But they stayed respectfully beside the door, grinning and staring. The man called Raffaello dumped her canvas suitcase on the floor.

  Swiftly she studied the room. The brick walls had once been coated with plaster, but now only scabby patches remained. There was a sink in one corner, and under it a chamber pot decorated with roses. A wardrobe with a missing leg leaned in another corner. There was a chair with a wicker seat. Under the window an old-fashioned cast-iron radiator hissed.

  The barred window was large and high. Julia went to it and looked out, turning her back on her captors.

  She saw a valley and a hill. There were olive trees like the ones at Bellosguardo, running down into the valley and up the other side, shedding small shadows. Directly below the window a flock of parti-colored chickens and ducks moved jerkily around a farmyard. At one side in another wing of the building she caught a glimpse of a large animal in a pen. The place was clearly a working farm. Perhaps this room had been used for the storage of grain or the plucking of geese. Perhaps generations of farmhands had occupied it, had washed at the sink and fallen exhausted on the bed.