The Dante Game

by Jane Langton

  The poor unhappy file clerk was caught just as he was climbing into a borrowed car to go on holiday with his girlfriend to a swanky hotel near Livorno. He had spent the morning shining his shoes and pressing his beige suit and arguing with his mother and squeezing money out of his brothers, and now in anguish he had to abandon his stunning girlfriend in her flouncy dress and take the bus back into town.

  At last the phone in the booth at Querciola rang loudly, and the angry director of the registry barked the desired name and address into Homer’s ear and hung up savagely with a fierce click.

  Homer winced. “It’s important, I tell you,” he said to the buzzing phone, and then he went looking for Zee.

  The address for Raffaello Biagi was just down the road in Caldine. “We must have passed it again and again,” said Homer, as they climbed into the Saab.

  But Raffaello was not at home, and his landlady exploded when Zee asked for him.

  “That thief! He left in the night last week with the television set and the clock radio. He owes me two months’ rent. I called the carabinieri, but they did nothing, nothing, and then the next night Raffaello came back and took my mother’s picture which was in a silver frame, and my husband’s toupee, although Raffaello has plenty of hair himself. What was it, a joke? I had to change the lock on the front door. Fifty thousand lire it cost me! But I’ll never get my mother’s picture back.” The landlady stared at them in wrath as though they were Raffaello’s accomplices.

  “A thief as well as a kidnapper,” said Zee grimly, as they drove back to Querciola.

  Homer said nothing. He was beginning to get a picture of what had happened. The kid was a common criminal, some kind of low-down rat. He had caught a glimpse of the lovely Julia, had tracked her to the villa and snatched her away, probably at gunpoint. Then he had raped and murdered her and dumped her body somewhere. Perhaps right now she was stuffed in the back of the little truck, a rotting corpse. There had been a bad smell back there behind the meat market, but perhaps it was only the odor of decaying meat in the trash cans.

  Back in the parking lot they took another look at the little truck. There it was, still locked, still empty, still silent. Homer took a surreptitious sniff, smelled nothing, then wandered over to the trash bins, inhaled, and was bowled over. He smiled. So much for that repulsive theory.

  It was suppertime. Homer was ravenous again. They took turns eating in the restaurant, then spent the night in the car.

  It was a ghastly experience. They tried to take turns keeping watch and sleeping. But there was no way Homer could sleep. He folded himself this way and that in the back seat, groaning. Zee was not as cramped as Homer, but he was afraid to close his eyes in case Raffaello should return and drive off while they were both unconscious.

  Hours passed. Homer tried kneeling, head down, then wrestled himself onto his back with his feet out the window. Zee hooked his legs over the steering wheel. They were both wide awake at midnight, fully conscious at one o’clock, more or less alert at two o’clock, drowsy at three o’clock, and sound asleep, paralyzed with exhaustion, at four o’clock in the morning.

  CHAPTER 51

  … Through a deep pool a fish slips and is gone.

  Purgatorio XXVI, 135.

  The keepers of the oxen, man and wife, were up early on Easter morning to prepare the four huge beasts from the Val di Chiana for the procession to the cathedral.

  First the animals were scrubbed until their white hides were spotless, then their hooves and horns were painted gold.

  The flowers for the wreaths had arrived the night before from a florist in the neighborhood. Now the wife took the sprays of irises and roses, tulips and daisies, and wove them into floral crowns, saying to herself, The Holy Father will see them. They must be more wonderful than ever before.

  “O, ehi!” cried the husband, urging the oxen up the ramp into the back of a heavy truck. Then he and his wife climbed into the cab and drove through Porta al Prato to the house where the cart was kept.

  A few early risers had gathered to see it pulled out of the high wooden doors. Soon more people came along to watch the harnessing of the oxen by the handlers and the crowning of the great horned heads with flowers and the flinging of purple robes over the broad backs and the tying of red ribbons to the four tails.

  “Ecco!” cried the wife proudly, pulling the ribbons into jaunty bows and stepping back while everyone clapped and cheered.

  In the archbishop’s palace, in the anteroom beside His Excellency’s bedchamber, a young priest laid out the ceremonial robes—the white cassock and new chasuble. He did not put out the biretta, since the archbishop would of course remain uncovered in the presence of the Holy Father.

  Below the archbishop’s bedroom a dormitory had been rigged up for the halberdiers of the Swiss Guard. Some of them were already getting out of bed and pulling on their elaborate striped uniforms and sticking their tousled heads out the window to look at the sky.

  It was a pearly morning. Patches of blue showed through clouds that were tinted with sunrise colors. One of the guardsmen clipped on the earphones of his little radio to hear the weather report. Rain was threatened, denied, threatened again.

  Six miles north of the city, Homer Kelly woke up in the grey light before dawn and moaned pitifully after his hideous night in the back of Zee’s car. His knees were rammed against the back of the front seat and his head was crushed down into his left shoulder.

  Unfolding himself, he gave one dazed glance out the window, then yelped in consternation.

  Zee woke up instantly, sat up and cursed.

  They had missed him. Within the last hour Raffaello Biagi had come for his truck and driven it away.

  Zee was beside himself. Starting the car in a fury of self-recrimination, he threw it into gear, jerked forward, stalled, started again and lunged across the paved parking lot and around the meat market to the highway.

  They were just in time to see Raffaello’s little truck come charging up the dirt road across the street and pause while a stream of cars went by on Via Faentina. Blocked on the other side by another stream of traffic, cursing, Zee and Homer got a good look at Raffaello Biagi, a broad-shouldered young goon in a heavy jacket.

  “Christ,” said Homer, as Raffaello’s little truck careened onto the highway and plunged away in the direction of Florence, “look at that.”

  The hinged door at the back of the truck was open, flapping sloppily up and down, and things were falling out—a sofa pillow, a folding chair. An entire deck of cards fluttered into the air, trailing hearts, diamonds, spades and clubs along the asphalt.

  At last the entire highway was empty of traffic. Zee growled in triumph, and whirled the Saab in a wild circle to follow Raffaello. But Homer caught his arm. “Wait, wait. Stop. It’s all coming clear.” Idiotically he quoted Dante, “Then in a flash my understanding clove. Zee, Zee, forget Raffaello. Let’s find out where that driveway goes. What’s going on up there on that hillside? We’ve got to find out. This is the place, I tell you. She’s here. She must be here.”

  Zee gave him a startled glance. Throwing the car into reverse, he backed up insanely without looking, then clashed the gears and turned into the driveway and plunged down the steep incline.

  The roadway was littered with a scattering of forks. They collided with a toaster. A lampshade sailed away. And then Zee jammed on the brake and Homer tumbled forward over the back of the front seat and banged his head against the dashboard. Without apology Zee leaped out of the car and ran forward to pluck something from the stony road. It was stuck there upright, its point thrust into the rutted clay as if to inscribe a circle in the dust.

  Zee handed it to Homer, the compass that had been stolen from the museum, the one that might have belonged to Michelangelo. Then without a word he started the car again and began racing it up a rugged road of switchbacks and hairpin turns.

  Rolling left and right in the backseat, Homer hung on as the car shuddered and climbed. The rough road
was a mile long, growing steeper with every turn, twisting more and more sharply. Sometimes the wheels of the Saab failed to grab, and the car slipped back. Then Zee had to shift gears, accelerate and turn furiously at the same time.

  Beyond the switchbacks the road went straight up the hill to a group of low buildings, golden in the slanting morning sunlight. To Zee it looked like a typical Tuscan farmhouse surrounded by walls and barns and connecting one-story structures. As they turned into the gate and stopped, they could hear a terrible screaming.

  Zee leaped out of the car. “Good God, what’s that?”

  The noise was very loud, an awful squealing, accompanied by shouting and barking and the terrified squawking of barnyard fowl. “It’s an animal,” said Homer, uncoiling himself from the back seat, standing up stiffly. “Zee, it’s only some kind of livestock.”

  Boldly they walked toward the noise. Suddenly the squealing ended. There was only the wild squawking and the breathless shouts. Pushing open a gate, they came upon a scene of carnage.

  They were within a farmyard enclosure. Chickens and ducks huddled at one side, screeching in a frenzy, fluttering up into the air, flapping their wings. At the other side in the doorway of an open brick barn hung a large pig, its hind feet tied together and slung over a hook. Blood poured from its slashed throat into a bucket. A man with a bloody knife pulled the overflowing bucket out of the way, and a woman shoved an empty pail into its place. Blood spattered on the ground, then poured noisily into the pail.

  The man glanced up at them and said roughly, “Che desiderano?”

  What did they want? Zee stepped forward. He spoke in Italian, but Homer understood it, because it was the simple truth. “We’re looking for someone, a young American woman, a beautiful girl with yellow hair.”

  The man looked down at his bucket, into which the blood was pouring more slowly, and said heavily that he didn’t know. The woman, too, claimed to have seen no such person. Turning away, she ran across the yard, seized a chicken and wrung its neck, then snatched up another.

  To Homer the slaughter seemed an odd occupation for sunrise on Easter Sunday, but the woman was on a killing spree and couldn’t stop. The other chickens skittered away from her, screaming. Ducks quacked wildly and waddled in frantic circles.

  “Come on,” he murmured. Leaving the noisy blood-spattered enclosure, they walked back to the car. They had left it in front of the largest of the farm buildings. The door of the house swung open and shut, and open and shut. “Look,” said Homer, “some more of Raffaello’s work.”

  Once again there were signs of a bungled robbery. A blanket trailed down the stone steps, entangled with a man’s overcoat. A broken mirror lay on its back, reflecting the sky.

  They walked into the house, and Homer shouted for Julia.

  There was no answer. The place felt hollow, with a kind of final emptiness, as if no one would ever occupy it in days to come, as though after they were gone it would never again know the sound of a human voice. It seemed to have no connection with the farmyard, the squealing pig, the farmer and his wife. It existed like an abandoned house in a plague-infested town.

  The big ground-floor room was deserted. There was only the furniture—a rumpled sofa, a table, a collection of mismatched chairs, a desk and an iron stove.

  They ran up the stairs, calling Julia’s name, and found several untidy bedrooms littered with men’s clothing, a bathroom and two locked doors. Zee rattled the handles, and called out, but again there was no answer.

  “Let’s bash them in,” said Homer.

  They did. It didn’t take long. The doors were old.

  When they burst into the first room, there was no trace of Julia. Instead they found an arsenal of weapons.

  “What are they for?” groaned Homer. “What the hell for?”

  The second was orderly and empty of personal possessions, except for shirts hanging in the wardrobe, a few books beside the bed, and a sheet of paper lying on the table.

  They looked at the paper. It was a letter. It began, Eccellenze, and was signed simply, R.

  “It’s a poem,” said Zee, “addressed to some cardinals, I think. That’s how it begins, Excellencies. It’s a kind of farewell. It’s quite good, as a matter of fact. Why would anybody write a farewell poem to the princes of the church?” Zee turned a line into English. “May the common good prevail in the act of my hand.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” said Homer.

  Baffled, they went downstairs to look in other wings of the farmhouse. They found a staircase leading to three rooms on the second floor of a brick storage shed. One was heaped with potatoes, another was empty except for a tumble of wine bottles. A third was a bedroom with a window looking down on the farmyard and across the valley.

  Homer went to the window and looked out. The pig still hung in the doorway of the barn, with blood dripping slowly from its slashed throat. The farmer and his wife were gone.

  Zee was exultant. “Julia’s room,” he said. “Look.” In a fever of excitement he reached into the wardrobe and showed Homer the puffy orange vest. “This was hers. And so was this, and this.”

  Homer snatched something from behind the radiator, and handed it to Zee. It was a yellowed piece of newspaper, a picture of Professor Giovanni Zibo.

  Zee barely looked at it. “Hurry,” he said. “We’ve got to hurry. Where are they? They’ve all gone somewhere. That Raffaello, he knew they weren’t coming back.”

  They clumped down the stairs and found their way back to the car. Then Homer remembered his conversation with Inspector Rossi on the phone. His conscience smote him as he bent double to squeeze himself into the Saab. “Zee,” he said, “I didn’t tell you, the inspector told me yesterday that somebody named Roberto was going to be killed during the Explosion of the Cart. There was an “R” at the bottom of the poem. Do you suppose it meant Roberto? What the hell is the Explosion of the Cart?”

  Zee looked at him and gasped. Wordlessly he started the car and jammed his foot on the accelerator. The Saab leaped forward and plunged down the hill. Homer reared back against the pull of gravity, lurching left and right, while Zee explained with curses that the Explosion of the Cart was an annual event during the Easter celebration at the Duomo. Today, he said, just happened to be Easter Sunday, the pope was coming, and Gesù, what were all those guns intended for?

  “Oh, God,” said Homer. “How much time have we got?”

  On Via Faentina they had to slow down. The street was crowded with pedestrians. The inhabitants of the Querciola housing development were walking down the hill to Caldine to attend the first mass of Easter morning.

  Homer recognized the girl who had waited on him in the meat market. There she was, arrayed like a lily of the field, walking with a young man in a pale blue suit like a delphinium, heading for the sunrise service. Some of the housewives who had been buying meat for their Easter dinners were on the road too, accompanied by husbands and. children, all decked in their Easter finery.

  Dexterously Zee piloted the car around them, nimbly he negotiated his way along the main street of the town of Caldine past the church. Homer could imagine the priest at midnight, taking off the black coverings from the altars, pulling down the mourning veils from the figures of the saints, lighting the votive lamps. And now as the Saab rushed by on the narrow street, the bells that had been tied since Good Friday to hush their joyous wrangling were loosed once more and allowed to ring out.

  It would not be so in Florence, Homer told himself, as they passed the last of the stragglers on the other side of town and picked up speed. In Florence the pope was coming, and the Campanile bells would not ring until the end of the service in the Duomo. Only when the whole celebration was over would they peal to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

  And then Homer cursed his own stupidity. In two Ianguages he profaned the sacred joy of Easter morning. Easter morning! Good God, Easter morning, and the pope was coming! The pope was il Papa, not il papà. The accent
was reserved for the father of a family, the ordinary father of an ordinary family, not for His Holiness the pope. Isabella and Franco had been talking about the pope, not about Isabella’s father. Lying there in the shattered greenhouse making love, Isabella had not said that her unfaithfulness to Alberto would kill her father, il papà. She had been talking about the killing of the pope, il Papa.

  Homer explained it to Zee, between obscenities. “Oh, Jesus, Zee, what a difference an accent makes. All this time I knew it, I mean it was filed away in my head, only I was too stupid to know it. How can one nation ever understand another when the other guys talk so funny? It’s the everlasting curse of Babel. Listen, remember Isabella’s habit of listening at keyholes? Well, this time she heard what she shouldn’t have heard, and then she passed it on to Franco. But unfortunately someone else was listening this time, the mastermind with the grey hair, the man who looks like a film star. So he had to kill the two of them, or perhaps Matteo killed them for him, because they had found out what he was up to. It was a plot to assassinate the pope.”

  Zee had to shout above the clashing of the bells in the next little town. “But why Julia? Mother of God, why did they take Julia?”

  “I don’t know why the hell, Zee,” said Homer, but in the teeming confusion of his own mind as they raced along Via Faentina, across the bridge at Badia Fiesolana, past Pian del Mugnone, through Calderaio, slowing down behind tour buses, coughing in the diesel fumes, rushing on into the choked traffic of the city, he couldn’t help wondering whether the beautiful Julia had really been the victim of a kidnapping after all. Perhaps she had been part of the conspiracy from the beginning.

  CHAPTER 52

  … I saw entire

  The threshing-floor, whereon fierce deeds are done.…

  Paradiso XXII, 150–151.

  The archbishop was beginning to tire, although he had only begun to work his way through the schedule for the day—