by Jane Langton
“Of course. Isn’t she with you?”
“Hell, no. Why should she be with me?”
“She’s not with you? She didn’t leave school with you?”
“God, no. Well, I mean, like I said good-bye to her. I mean she wasn’t packing up or anything. Maybe she decided I was doing the right thing, and took off herself. I don’t know what the hell she did. So listen, could you send the camera right away? Here’s my address, okay?”
When she hung up, Joan passed along the news that Kevin and Julia had apparently wearied of the school simultaneously, but had not, after all, gone away together. Afterward she was sorry, when she saw how much the news delighted Zee.
“You mean, she wasn’t with him? I knew it, I knew it!”
“I think it’s all the more disappointing,” said Joan severely, “her leaving by herself without a word.”
At once Zee called Homer Kelly, and woke him from a cozy nap in his room at the pensione. Homer had spent an exhausting morning with Zee in the Saab, bouncing up and down on country roads, hitting his head on the ceiling of the car, telling himself it was a wild-goose chase.
Homer was fascinated to learn that Julia had not gone off with Kevin Banks. It dawned on him that Zee was behaving like Dante in the Paradiso. No longer was he led by pure reason (in the guise of his kindly and learned friend Homer Kelly). Now he was on the trail of the heavenly Beatrice (in the shape of the beautiful Julia) and the sheer nuttiness of revelation was guiding his footsteps. Well, revelation was supposed to illuminate a higher truth than reason, so maybe the man was right after all.
“You know, Zee,” he said, sitting up in bed, “you’re wearing me down. All your original assumptions were ridiculous, but your corollaries are impeccable. I mean you’ve put together a patchwork that’s pure piffle, but I’m beginning to believe in it. What’s next?”
“Would you call Inspector Rossi? He might take Julia’s disappearance more seriously if he knew she didn’t just go off with Kevin Banks. Then he might be more cooperative. He’s been un poco absentminded lately. I don’t know what’s got into him.”
CHAPTER 46
Nay, by another path thou needs must go
If thou wilt ever leave this waste.…
Inferno I, 91, 92.
Time was growing short. Julia didn’t know the date of Easter, but by mid-March she knew it must be soon. Her conviction was even stronger that something appalling was about to happen. There was increasing tension among the younger men at the farmhouse. They were louder than usual, quarrelling and erupting in nervous laughter. Sometimes the arrogance of Matteo Luzzi resulted in furious confrontations. Matteo regarded himself as the social superior of Carlo and Pancrazio, but, lacking the sober authority of Signor Roberto, he failed to command their allegiance. Carlo refused to wash his car. Pancrazio would not even light his cigarettes or surrender to him the best portion of Tina’s pollo arrosto.
There were passionate exchanges of obscenities. Julia listened with ironic attention, and salted them away as curiosities.
Raffaello was gone, along with his three-wheeled truck. But Signor Roberto now seldom left the farm. He made no demands on Julia, but she tried to avoid him just the same. She told herself that his outrageous good looks made no difference to her, but she was wary of her own vulnerability. She found a way to make her pigtails stand even more fiercely on end. She wore layers of oversized shirts under her burly padded vest and covered it with a drab apron of Tina’s.
Her offer to help with the outdoor work had been taken up with a vengeance. One day Tina opened the door of the pigpen, handed Julia a bucket and scoop, and jerked her head at the pig, saying roughly, “Faccia pulizia!”
Clean it up. Perhaps it was a punishment for trying to run away. Julia made no complaint until Tina locked her in the brick shed that was Graziella’s pen. Then she looked out in protest at Pancrazio, and said, “Hey!” and thumped On the door.
Sympathetically he peered through the window and spoke rapidly in Italian. Julia shook her head.
Pancrazio acted it out. “Porcellino scappa,” he cried, making lickety-split motions with his arms. Then he grasped at the air and fell down comically with an imaginary pig in his arms.
Julia laughed. Apparently she wasn’t the only one who had tried to run away. So had Graziella. Tina had locked the door because the pig could burst through the latch.
The job was vile. Julia swept, scraped, scooped, and spread clean hay.
One day the cleaning of the pigpen led to a discovery. From the rear window she could see a part of the farm that was otherwise invisible, a walled courtyard below the level of the other buildings. There were voices below the window, and the noise of a steady thudding.
Standing up to scatter fresh straw, she glanced out the window and saw Roberto in the lower courtyard firing at a target. Matteo was looking on.
The gun was a small weapon with a fat barrel. Roberto fired again. There was no loud report, only a thud and rattle as the invisible projectile struck the metal target. Thud-whang. Thud-whang. Thud-whang. It dawned on Julia that the thick barrel must contain a silencer, a sound-suppressor like the muffler on a car.
She watched as Roberto fired and fired and fired, then replaced the clip and fired again, while Matteo murmured “Bene,” and “Bravo.”
She should have been distressed, frightened, she knew that. She should have remembered the deaths of Franco and Isabella, the murder of Ned. Instead there was only the crude satisfaction of gazing down at Roberto without being seen. The man had a kind of captivating, unselfcoriscious grace, even in the performance of a violent act. For once she could drink her fill.
Little by little, Julia and Roberto had begun to speak to one another. Roberto’s English was flawless, his vocabulary fitted out with esoteric words and phrases. He was grave and scholarly. He spoke of Dante, and the translation of The Divine Comedy by Longfellow that had been imposed on him in an English school in Switzerland. He described the archeological investigation of the ancient church beneath the Cathedral of Florence. Diffidently he introduced the subject of the political influence of the Holy See.
His appearance was distracting. Julia couldn’t get used to it. The first overpowering impact always repeated itself. Zee, she told herself, remember Zee.
Remember Zee. One day she snatched at the chance to write him a letter.
She had no paper, no pen, no stamp, no way of getting a letter into the mail.
But Roberto, she knew, wrote letters.
Today he was sitting at his desk in the corner of the big room in the farmhouse, writing one after another. Julia watched as he folded each letter, thrust it into an envelope, wrote an address, swabbed a stamp with glue from a jar and pounded it down with his fist.
He had finished three, and now he was beginning another. Once he glanced up and caught Julia’s eye. She flushed and looked away. He must not think she wanted to look at him. It was only the pile of letters she was interested in, but he mustn’t know that either.
Julia bent her pigtailed head and looked at her muddy shoes, aware that she was lying to herself. It was Roberto, not the letters, she wanted to look at. She was intensely aware of him as he rose and moved toward her. She glanced up, and their eyes met, and she knew that hers betrayed her. He went past her, his trouser leg lightly brushing her knee, and knelt to open the doors of the stove.
His letters lay on the desk, unattended. Standing up. slowly, Julia glanced at Carlo and Pancrazio. They were playing briscola, idly tossing the cards on the table, their attention fixed on the game. She moved closer to the desk, picked up a stamp and an envelope and thrust them into her pocket, while Roberto emptied the bucket of charcoal on the dying fire.
When he rose and went back to the desk she was sitting once again in her chair, her head bowed over one of Carlo’s magazines.
The task was still only half done. Julia waited until the cardplayers wearied of their game. When they sank down in front of the television, trying to coax
out of it some kind of picture, she got up and moved past the card table, closing her fingers on the pencil stub and the slip of paper on which they had been keeping score.
Upstairs after supper she got to work at once, pulling the chair up to the window, using the sill for a table. Gripping the tiny pencil, writing very small, she filled every square inch of the scrap of paper with a doll-sized letter. “A farm north of the city, I think. The driveway is a left turn.” She spoke of Roberto and Matteo, of Raffaello and his truck, of Pancrazio and Carlo, of Tina and Egidio. Something was going to happen on Easter Sunday, something awful, something criminal, something for which these men were making enormous plans.
There was no room to say anything tender. Wildly she scrawled LOVE across the entire small sheet, and slipped her letter into the envelope. Then very carefully she wrote the address—
Professor Giovanni Zibo
Villa L’Ombrellino
Piazza di Bellosguardp
Firenze.
Lastly she licked the flap and rubbed it tightly closed and put on the stamp. Then she admired the finished product. It was a genuine letter. It would go through the mails like any other letter, and arrive at its destination.
If only an official in the local post office could get his hands on it, and bang down on it the gadget imprinting the name of the town, the seal of form upon the wax of matter. The whatness of the place, its essence, the name that made it different from all other places in the world, from all other olive-covered hillsides in Italy, would be solidly imprinted. Like God, the postmaster would whang down the seal, and the town would stand revealed, unique and individual for all to see.
Next morning she ran down the stairs after Pancrazio with her envelope under her shirt, and glanced eagerly at Roberto’s desk. His pile of letters was still there. Swiftly she inserted her own at the bottom. Before turning away she glanced at the address of the topmost letter. It was only a box number in Florence.
She had done all she could. Now everything would depend on whether the letters were mailed in a bundle—shoved all at once into a letter box—or dropped one by one into the slot. Her only hope was a careless mass mailing, not an inspection of each letter, not a terrible individual holding of each one in Matted’s hand before he allowed it to fall into the lovely darkness inside the box.
This morning Matteo was not at the farm. Would the trip to the post office be delayed until he came back? Julia watched as Signor Roberto entered the room, smiled at her, pulled on his long narrow coat and then—good!—swept up the stack of letters, spoke sharply to Pancrazio, and went out. She could hear his car starting up outside, grinding over the pebbled drive, moving but of earshot.
Her letter to Zee was on its way—or else it wasn’t.
In reckoning its chances, imagining only two possible fates, Julia had failed to think of a third. When Roberto pushed the letters into the mailbox outside the post office in the nearby town of Caldine, he dropped the entire bundle at once, but as he thrust it into the narrow slot, the last letter left his hand a fraction of a second later than the rest. He saw, just too late, that it had been written by someone else. In that instant he read the name Professor Giovanni Zibo, and he knew at once what had happened.
Roberto turned and stared at the big glass window of the post office. Through it he could see the clerk behind the counter looking back at him.
The post office clerk in Caldine was a voluble old man with a wild fringe of grey hair encircling his bald head. He took great interest in his work. Officiating behind the counter day after day, week after week, year after year, he had his finger on the pulse of the world. His little office was a nerve center for all Italy. Letters for destinations in all five continents had gone through his hands.
Thus it wasn’t surprising that he took a personal in terest in the stream of correspondence passing under his nose every day. So great was his curiosity that he regretted the laws governing the privacy of the mails. The stuff of high drama was hidden under those innocent white envelopes—important business matters, high concerns of state, scandalous revelations, family intrigues and secret love affairs—who could tell what impassioned endearments burned beneath the plain envelopes with their simple addresses?
The clerk knew for a fact that the local baker was carrying on a clandestine love affair by letter with a woman in Prato, although he was a married man with six children. And Signora Freschi, who kept a dress shop, wrote to her son at a box number in Rome, but the clerk happened to know that it was the address of a maximum security prison.
This morning the clerk was in for a treat. When he caught sight of the tall good-looking signore with the beard and the handsome head of grey hair, the man was standing outside the post office with his hand on the mailbox, looking irresolute. The clerk watched avidly as the gentleman dropped his hand and walked in the door.
But Signora Mossi was first in line, mailing a package.
“Ah, Signora,” said the clerk, “it’s for your daughter, who married the artist in Pisa. Has he sold any paintings yet? I thought she was going to marry the programmatore di computers, a man with a future. Artists, who knows what will become of them?”
“I told her a thousand times,” said Signora Mossi, “she was making a mistake. Her own brother is a programmatore in Milano. He’s doing very well. He has a beautiful apartment, with a television all over the wall.” She made a sweeping gesture to show the immense size of her son’s television set.
Behind her the tall man made a slight impatient gesture. The clerk winked at him, said good-bye to Signora Mossi and slapped the counter in welcome. “Buon giorno, Signore! Dica pure? What can I do for you?”
At once Signor Roberto took advantage of the clerk’s all-embracing interest in the human race. “Forgive me, I’m all apology,” he said effusively, “but I’ve posted a letter by mistake. I shouldn’t have done it. I wrote in a hurry, and now I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said the things I wrote in the heat of anger. My letter is in the mailbox outside. Would you be so good as to open the box and give it back to me? I’m so ashamed! The letter would destroy the happiness of my—ah—my sister and my brother-in-law.”
“Ah, family quarrels,” said the postal clerk, “how well I know them. I too have written angry letters, only to tear them up with the return of reason.” Beaming in his forgiveness of the human failings of his customers, he led the way outside.
The key turned in the lock, and the front of the mailbox fell open. It was nearly empty. Only the letters Roberto had mailed himself lay on the bottom. Eagerly he reached for them. “Yes, yes, those are mine.”
But the clerk snatched them first, and began running through them inquisitively. “Please, Signore, as soon as they’re in the box they’re the property of the Italian Civil Service, no longer yours. Which of these letters is it? I see they’re all addressed to the same box number, not to a person.” Slowly, infuriatingly, he shuffled through them, examining them one by one. “Ah, it must be this last one, addressed in pencil. But perhaps it’s not yours. It’s in another hand.”
“But that’s it! Give it to me. The others were written by someone else. I was merely mailing them as a service.”
The clerk stared at the controversial letter. “You have a fine hand, Signore. Swift but clear, almost a lesson in calligraphy. Have you had lessons in artistic penmanship? I myself—”
“Please,” said Roberto impatiently, “may I have it? It’s of the utmost importance that it not go through the mail.”
The clerk read the address, savoring the situation, wringing from it the last drop of satisfaction. He was already concocting the phrases with which he would describe the episode to his wife, the story of the distinguished-looking stranger who regretted mailing an angry letter. “Signor Giovanni Zibo,” he read aloud from the envelope, “Villa L’Ombrellino, Piazza di Bellosguardo, Firenze. Ah, Bellos-guardo! I’ve been there many times, visiting my friend Filippo Lascola. He owns a camera shop on Via Foscolo.” Teasingly the clerk held the
letter to his breast while he extolled the beauties of Bellosguardo.
At last he handed it over with a little bow. “Hereafter, my friend, we will not write in haste, vero?”
When Signor Roberto returned from mailing his letters, Julia looked at him furtively, fearing chastisement. If he had discovered her letter among his own, she would surely be locked up in her room, or punished in some other way.
But he did nothing. His eyes encountered hers, and glided away.
Her spirits soared. Her trick had worked. He had mailed her letter with the rest, and it was now in the impersonal hands of the Italian postal service. Before long she would be rescued. Her heart thumped, and she imagined an invasion of police, a rush of armed men, and Zee looking for her, calling her name.
CHAPTER 47
What? broken thus, the laws of the Abyss?
Purgatorio I, 46.
It was Lady Day, March twenty-fifth, the celebration of the Annunciation, the day when the unspotted Virgin had conceived her child.
Leonardo Bindo attended the special services in Santis-sima Annunziata, where the miraculous picture of the Virgin was entwined with a garland of lilies.
When he returned to his office there was a fat manila envelope on his desk. O Dio mio! Bindo was sick of the whole thing. Opening the envelope, he took out a handful of letters from Roberto Mori. The scum from Milwaukee had collected them from the post office box as usual, and sent them on to the bank.
Now Bindo wished he had not been so artful. In the beginning he had relished the amusing deception. He had invented a whole set of five imaginary prelates at the Vatican, every one of them eager to correspond with valiant Father Roberto Mori. Bindo’s collection of stationery had been acquired from a friend in the Vatican Printing Office, and it was various and wonderful. There were splendid letterheads for the Congregations for Divine Worship, the Causes of Saints, and the Evangelization of Peoples. There was a set for the Sacred Apostolic Penitentiary Tribunal.