The Book of Hidden Things

by Francesco Dimitri

  ‘Hey,’ Mauro said. ‘Do you want a moment?’

  ‘No, please. Stay.’

  Mauro filled a glass with tap water, while I stood transfixed, and Art cried, standing at the marble table. Mauro said, ‘Here.’

  Art sipped his water. ‘What you guys are doing for me is… beyond words.’

  ‘Stop it,’ I said.

  ‘I hate crying. It’s pointless.’

  ‘Your mum died. Crying is just normal.’

  Art looked at me, puzzled. ‘But I’m not crying for Mum’s death.’

  ‘You aren’t…?’

  ‘I’m crying for her life.’ He took an orecchietta between thumb and index finger. ‘She died while making pasta, for Christ’s sake! That was the last thing she did, rolling out dough in the form of an ear, the last actions her brain thought of, her muscles carried out. Rolling out dough in the form of an ear. How’s that for a meaningful life? And what was her biggest dream? Having an asshole muttering empty words over her body!’

  ‘She was happy with her life,’ Mauro said, quietly.

  ‘Her life was small. So small! This house, this town, this fucking world, everything’s so incredibly small. Mum let that asshole tell her how she should behave, how she should dress to get to Heaven, as if he knew jack shit about the Hidden Things. Mum spent her life doing as she was told and accepting being… small. So clever, so smart, and small as fuck.’ He paused. ‘Like mother, like son. I’ve been small for too long. It’s time to…’ He stopped.

  ‘To?’ Mauro prompted.

  ‘Rise.’

  After the funeral, Art didn’t return to Prague. He stayed in Casalfranco and never moved out again. I should have known that he was cooking something up.

  He always was.

  9

  ‘Rocco is a moron,’ says Mauro.

  We’re sitting in the porch of a roadside bar on the Litoranea, snacking on pistachios and black olives, and drinking Campari. The bar is built, for reasons I can’t begin to fathom, in a style reminiscent of an alpine lodge. We face the beach, on the other side of a narrow two-lane road. A shrine to the Virgin Mary, comprised of a statue with vacant glass eyes and offerings of flowers and candles, lies half-hidden in the broom on the border where sand and tarmac meet. ‘I agree.’

  Fabio’s pale, and, behind his sunglasses, he looks like he doesn’t want to talk, or listen, or live. He has told Mauro about his dad’s Alzheimer’s.

  ‘Do we have a way to verify the healing story?’ Mauro asks.

  I cast a glance at the barista, who sits inside watching TV. He’s tall and wiry, and he has skin like leather. It’s not that he’ll keep what he hears to himself; he won’t hear anything in the first place. ‘It’s tricky. Rocco didn’t name names. But I’ve got an acquaintance who works in surgery in Casalfranco and he’s asking around. I told him it’s for a paper I’m writing.’

  ‘Your working hypothesis being…?’

  ‘Unexpected healings do happen. Art might have got lucky somehow.’

  ‘Art had dealings with the Corona,’ Mauro says. ‘That’s huge, even for him. How far can we trust Rocco that they’re not involved in Art’s disappearance?’

  ‘Fifty-fifty. He’s right that the Carabinieri won’t give a shit, though.’

  ‘And you know that because…?’

  ‘I’ve talked to them.’

  I’m prepared for a telling-off that doesn’t come. Mauro calmly pries open a pistachio and brings it to his mouth. ‘You didn’t even pique their interest?’

  ‘Not in the least.’

  ‘It’s like the other time,’ Fabio says, the first words he pronounced since we ordered our aperitivo. ‘Art’s gone and we’re left to wonder where he is.’

  For a fleeting moment Mauro looks like the teenager I used to know. There is a shade of that boy on his face – he was the quietest of us, the one who thought before acting. Then his lips curve down in a weary expression and he’s a grown-up again, a man in a line of work entirely made of grey areas. He says, ‘Let’s lay all our cards on the table, shall we? At fourteen, Art was kidnapped. Do we all agree on this?’

  I do. Fabio makes a gesture with his chin that might be a nod.

  ‘Those who kidnapped him, whoever they were, they had good reasons to trust Art wouldn’t talk, even to his family and closest friends. Otherwise, they would’ve simply killed him. Making away with a body is easy: you tie a big rock to its feet, load it on a sailing boat, and chuck it into the waves. No noise, no trouble, no leftovers.’

  I’m dazed. We’re opening up a twenty-two-year-old can of worms, and the worms had time to rot and putrefy and generate worse creatures.

  Mauro goes on, relentlessly, ‘My feeling is that Art’s abduction was a case of sexual abuse.’

  Fabio says, ‘They didn’t find any trace of violence.’

  ‘Seven days of blowjobs might leave little trace,’ Mauro says. ‘Especially if you don’t look very hard.’

  I ask, ‘What are you getting at?’

  ‘We know for a fact that Art was kidnapped as a boy. We know for a fact that, after his mum’s death, he decided to stay in Casalfranco. It seems reasonable to suppose that he dug up his kidnapping from wherever he had blocked it for the last two decades, and that became his new obsession. Then – he vanishes again. Maybe he caught up with the kidnapper, maybe the kidnapper caught up with him. Either way, there was a showdown and it didn’t go down well.’

  And at last I put all the pieces together. Shit, how dense I am. ‘You think Art is dead.’

  Mauro says, in his deadpan voice, ‘Art is dead. Probably killed by the person, or persons, who abducted him twenty years ago.’

  ‘But he had… he has the Corona’s protection!’

  ‘He had a business licence, that’s all he had.’

  ‘Why must he be dead? They might have kidnapped him again.’

  ‘Yeah, to ask for a ransom from his rich relatives. Tony, get a grip. They killed him, they killed his dog, and they found two big rocks and two pieces of rope.’

  Fabio says, ‘The story of the little girl is really odd though.’

  ‘Jesus could resurrect the dead, and he still ended up on a cross.’

  I know death; I meet it every day. I’ve had patients dying in my hands. I’ve used scalpels to cut human corpses. This is different though. This is a part of me, of my youth, leaving forever. I know in my gut that Mauro’s theory makes sense. ‘Art is dead,’ I force myself to admit. ‘Mauro is right: Art is dead and no one will look into it.’

  Mauro’s voice is bitter. ‘I’ve seen that a lot. It’s easy for lonely people to slip under the radar. Then, one day, a distant cousin comes knocking at my door, wondering if their relative had a stash of money under the mattress, and if I could find it for them, please. Art has nobody, and it takes nothing for one like him to be lost.’

  ‘Art has us,’ I say, looking Mauro in the eyes. I pray he’s not going to say that we should calm down and return to our lives, because in that case, honest to God, I will head-butt him.

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Yes, he has us.’

  Fabio says, ‘I went to the olive grove yesterday.’ He’s locking eyes with the statue of the Virgin in a staring contest he can’t win. ‘There’s a hanged dog down there.’

  10

  Mauro and I make our way to the olive grove through a red, rocky field, at sunset. We want to see the dog with our own eyes. I’ll snap a photograph too – I don’t know what for, but it might come in handy. Fabio excused himself and went back home (in his words, to my father’s place), mumbling about a Skype date with Lara. We’ll catch up for dinner.

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’ Mauro asks. ‘He’s got the face of a man on the verge of a breakdown.’

  ‘Angelo’s Alzheimer’s…’

  ‘Must be more than that.’

  ‘I promised not to tell you.’

  ‘You’re going to do it anyway.’

  Yes, I am. Loyalty is one of those tricky things which you h
ave to stretch, every now and then, in order to preserve it. ‘He’s broke.’

  ‘Wrong investments?’

  ‘No investments at all. He actually never made it as a photographer.’

  ‘But I thought…’

  ‘His name returns a few hits on Google. That has nothing to do with having money, as he made abundantly clear just after shooting the cat all over my shoes.’

  ‘But he shot high-profile stories! Stuff for Vogue, if I remember.’

  ‘Some. Enough to build a name, not a bank account.’

  Mauro stops. He’s a difficult man to read, but I can see he’s surprised. ‘Why did he never tell us?’

  I don’t answer.

  Mauro looks at the olive grove, then at me. ‘Don’t you hate it sometimes? Being a grown-up. Get a job, get a better one, pay taxes, pay more taxes, same old, same old. We are only alive at weekends; the rest of the time, we’re hamsters in a wheel. And we can never quit spinning, ’cause there’s always another bill, another mortgage, another… what the hell, another brat, to keep the wheel turning.’

  ‘It is what it is. Once upon a time you had to go get mammoths, now you go get credit cards. On the plus side, we don’t have to risk our neck every day.’

  ‘Yeah, but at least with hunting you knew what you got.’

  We enter the grove. There is a rotten smell in the air, very much like work. Like the morgue. This place triggers bad memories, but that’s all they are – memories, things in the past, holding no power anymore. It’s the present that can jump up and bite your ass.

  ‘Do you see any dogs in here?’ Mauro asks after a while.

  We scoured the grove twice. If there was a shaggy dog hanging from a tree, we would’ve seen it. I take off my shades – it’s getting dark – and scan my eyes around one last time. ‘Nada.’

  Mauro bends his neck upwards to look at the olive branches. They might as well be sculptures for how little they move. ‘Do you believe Fabio had an hallucination?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘Me neither.’

  I say, ‘I don’t like where you’re going.’

  ‘Again, me neither.’ Mauro makes a weary smile. ‘Someone took down the dog.’

  ‘They stumbled upon it? They took pity and…’

  ‘By coincidence a dog ends up hung here, of all places, just when Art vanishes again, and by coincidence someone takes it down exactly when we start looking? As Art used to say, a coincidence is…’

  ‘…a system we don’t understand yet.’

  Mauro nods. ‘There’s a system at work here.’

  ‘And we’re far from understanding it.’

  Mauro rests both his open palms on the bark of a tree, like a hippie trying to commune with its spirit. He sighs and turns to me. ‘I’m thinking we should search Art’s house.’

  ‘Changed your mind?’

  ‘Let me be clear: this is not a TV series. We won’t find the bad guys on our own, we won’t trap them with a cunning plan cooked up amongst buddies, in a crescendo of emotions. That’s not how it works down in the gutter of the real world.’

  ‘There’s no need to be patronising.’

  ‘Just want us to be aligned. Amateur sleuths don’t solve crimes.’

  ‘Why go back and search then?’

  ‘Because Art’s only got us.’ Mauro pauses. ‘And because we’ve only got us, too. Getting a rough idea of what’s going on might be the prudent thing to do, for us, for the living.’

  In a dark blue sky, a white moon rises beyond the trees.

  I’m starting to understand why Fabio is so scared of this grove.

  11

  We have dinner at a beachside restaurant, a type of eatery which was once very common. The front is a regular fishmonger. You pick your choice of fresh fish from a stall, where it is still squirming over layers of ice, and the cook grills it for you. Nothing’s fancy, but everything’s delicious.

  The cook is a tanned bald man, with a belly as huge as Elena’s. We have our dinner with the murmur of waves in the background. The tables and the chairs are plastic, but there is a touch of dolling up – fairy lights have been strung from the wooden staves holding the pergola above our heads. It always starts with fairy lights, and ends up with another good restaurant transformed into a tourist trap.

  I have a good time, considering. Art might be dead, but tonight we’re alive and we’re together and he’d love to see this. Some colour has returned to Fabio’s cheeks. After a few drinks, he and Anna kick off their shoes and go on the beach for a walk and a cigarette. They come back announcing that Fabio will take some photographs of Anna for his book. Mauro is happy about that. Fabio loves Anna as a sister, and right now he needs every last friend he can get.

  After the dessert, Mauro clears his throat, and raises his glass of Fernet. ‘To Art,’ he says. ‘A great man.’

  We all say, ‘To Art!’ Even Anna, and Ottavia and Rebecca, who toast with Coca-Cola. I will mourn my mate, but not now. My brain accepts he’s probably dead, the rest of me hangs on to that probably.

  I drive back home pleasantly fuzzy. I find Mum waiting for me in the living room, lounging in her rattan armchair in front of the TV. She used to do the same when I was at school; at whatever time I would come back, she would be there, waiting. She used to curl up, but arthritis doesn’t allow that anymore. She was once a figure of power, and now she looks so frail, with her white hair and her face cracked like a broken windscreen. She sits in the same spot, in the same chair, and it’s like she is a rock and time is the sea, washing her away wave after wave. I pray it won’t take her from me too soon.

  ‘Hey, Mum,’ I say.

  She turns off the TV. ‘Elena left a note for you.’ She points her chin to the table, where a closed envelope sits.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Is this something to do with her husband?’

  I freeze. ‘Mum…’

  ‘Just answer the question, Tony, it’s not that hard.’

  ‘No: it’s not about Rocco.’ Stretching loyalty again.

  Mum exhales. ‘You should talk to her.’

  ‘Mum, we had this discussion a thousand times.’

  ‘How could my daughter marry that man?’

  ‘He loves her, she loves him.’

  Mum scoffs. ‘I wish he would die,’ she says, her voice stone cold. ‘I can’t sleep at night when I think that my grandson will be raised a…’ She stops, and sighs. ‘I wish he would die,’ she repeats.

  ‘Me too,’ I say, sincerely.

  ‘Will you talk to her?’

  ‘Sure.’ It takes so little to make Mum feel better. I kiss her on her forehead. ‘Go to bed, Mum.’

  She closes her eyes and smiles, and I figure that, when she does that, she imagines that I’m still eleven, and Elena is five, and everything is easy, and that blessed moment of her life will never pass. ‘Good night, Tony.’

  ‘Good night.’

  She shuffles to her bedroom, and I open the envelope, my good mood crushed and buried. There’s a slip of paper, with a time and place written on it. I memorise them, then take a box of matches from the kitchen, go to the fireplace, and set the paper alight.

  12

  Fabio and Mauro promised they will come to the appointment Rocco gave me. That’s tonight, though: the day is all about searching Art’s house. We are taking a moment to look at it before heading inside, our eyes shielded behind sunglasses. It is just in front of us, at the end of the lane. Surrounding it on all sides is Art’s family plot, roughly half of which is the unkempt vineyard, while the other half is just wild plants, rocks and red dirt. At the back is the trullo, as small as a toy from this distance. The brutal sunlight makes everything tremble, as it did when we were little, as it will do long after we’re dead and gone.

  ‘Let’s get cracking,’ Mauro says, opening the door.

  The plan is to search the house and the fields. I get a pot of coffee going, while Fabio hits the books in the kitchen. A lot of people are c
onverting to electric coffee makers, but Art stuck to the old ones, those that you fill with water and powdered coffee and put on the hob. Soon enough the sound of the pot, like a person gargling, fills the air, together with the heartening aroma of coffee. Mauro and I leave Fabio at the table with a cup of espresso.

  ‘Shall we start in the bedroom?’ Mauro asks.

  ‘You’re the expert at investigation.’

  ‘In finance. I’m an expert at spreadsheets.’

  We start in the bedroom. The bed stinks of stale sweat, and the stains on the linen leave nothing to the imagination. ‘Art has been seeing a lot of action.’ That cheers me up. If you’re going to die, better if it happens after a good fuck or three.

  ‘It’d be interesting to know with whom,’ Mauro says, distractedly, while he rummages through the mess of clothes on the floor.

  ‘Always the romantic.’

  ‘This is the least romantic place I can imagine.’

  We move on to the book jungle. Getting inside is not easy, with the columns of books blocking the way. Most of them are practically floor to ceiling. I bow to Mauro and gesture to him to go in first. ‘Where’s your trusted machete when you need it?’

  Mauro makes a perfunctory chuckle and starts wading through the books, moving an encyclopaedia out of his way, kicking away a coffee-table book on Saracen towers. ‘Look,’ he says.

  We come across what I can only call a glade in the book jungle, small and Art-shaped; the columns encircle a cushion on the floor, an Olivetti typewriter and a pile of blank paper. We stare at the tableau. A typewriter. I feel something close to awe for the mounting strangeness of this house.

  ‘My God.’ I drop to one knee and brush two fingers on the typewriter’s ribbon. My skin gets smudged. ‘How did we come to this? Art is, gosh this is hard, he’s a… hipster!’

  ‘What do you think he was writing?’

  I stand up again, spreading my arms wide to embrace the room. ‘The truth is out there.’

  Mauro glances at the books, dubious. ‘What do we do now? Fields?’

  ‘Hang on, didn’t there used to be a basement?’