by David Perry
“A friend arranged it for us,” Adriano answered. “I’m not sure how she knew about it.”
“Me either.” Lee chewed his lip in thought. That was a mystery. Magda, as usual, had made all the arrangements for their sabbatical but had never revealed her connections here. It was typical Magda. Efficient, deliberate, secretive. A lot of confidential numbers spun in the centrifuge of her Rolodex. It would have been lovely to see her, but right now he was glad she had not come. She would have found Lee’s obsession with Deacon Andrea’s suicide distasteful. “Our friend, Magda, knew someone here.” She knows someone everywhere, Lee thought.
“Magda,” Luke repeated the name, holding open the door of the café. “Hmmm.”
Michelangelo, modern, bright, and bustling with activity, was the antithesis of Café Volsini. It was the only business in Orvieto that appeared never to close. It stayed open on Sundays, holidays, and even for a few hours on Christmas, according to a sign by the register (in the afternoon, with a tenuous nod to respectability). About twenty tables and a reading room with books and newspapers were spread out over two levels around a garden atrium. A long gleaming bar lined with tourists and workers, likely on their ways to and from an orbit of jobs supporting the town, was reflected in a mirrored ladder of shelves sporting liquors, wines, cigarettes, and pastries. A contemporary wooden sculpture of the café’s namesake’s most famous painting hovered over the inside of the front door: God reaching out to Adam from the Sistine Chapel. Several of the baristas wore Santa hats with bouncy white cotton balls waving from their heads. This joint was jumping.
“Couldn’t get away with a mafia hit in here,” Adriano whispered to Lee as they squeezed in between the crowded bar and the newspaper racks. “I wonder how La Donna feels about the competition.”
Luke expertly led the trio through the crowd to a table at the rear of the café with four chairs, one already possessed by a smoothly combed silver-gray sleeping cat, the same one, evidently, that had greeted them on the day of their arrival. It looked up briefly as they sat down, then went back to its nap.
“We usually go to Café Volsini for coffee,” Adriano said, settling in and gently scratching their feline tablemate behind its ears. The cat purred. “This place is quite different.”
“Michelangelo is one of the oldest and most successful bars in Italy,” Luke said, sitting down. “It is almost as old as Volsini. But, La Donna Volsini prefers to keep things always as they have been. Michelangelo is always changing, always expanding.”
Lee was thinking the same thing. If Volsini was old Orvieto, then Michelangelo was new, if not nouveau. Both cafés had clearly been around for a while, but with one looking to the future—Lee noticed the uber-diverse clientele crammed noisily against the bar—and the other, Volsini, solidly anchored in the past.
Luke summed up their thoughts with precision. “La Donna Volsini does not like change.” He raised his hand with a sharp salute and a young waitress appeared, pen and Santa bippy poised. Taking charge, Luke secured cappuccinos and cognacs for Adriano and Lee and a double espresso and schnapps for himself. They sat in silence, Luke with hands clasped in his lap, until the waitress returned with their order. When she left, Luke attempted to shoo away the cat. It looked up at him with a stubborn disregard. Luke sighed slightly and shook his head. “It is La Donna Volsini’s cat. It has the run of Orvieto. I think it comes here to keep, how do you Americans say, an eye on the competition.”
“The owners of Michelangelo don’t mind?” Adriano asked.
“It is La Donna Volsini’s cat,” Luke restated, as if he had not been heard the first time. “Plus, it is a nice, if typically imperious feline. Salut.” He raised his schnapps and Adriano and Lee met his toast.
They sat quietly for a while, sipping their drinks and watching the crowd. Lee couldn’t help but notice that Luke seemed lost in thought, distracted. Clearly, the doctor wasn’t one for idle chitchat. He sat constantly rubbing the engraved surface of his ring.
“You are German?” Lee managed finally.
“My grandfather is German,” Luke answered flatly. “I came here after medical school just a few years ago.” His tone implied that was as much generational detail as they were going to get. “Why do you ask?” He seemed annoyed at the question.
“Your accent,” Adriano jumped in. “I studied German and you sounded a bit like my old teacher.”
“You are Spanish,” Luke stated.
“You can tell by my accent as well,” Adriano said, grasping for amiability.
“Nien,” Luke said, sipping his schnapps and slipping into his native tongue. “Don Bello told me.”
Adriano translated Luke’s comments for Lee.
“My goodness,” Lee said with a slightly forced laugh, striving to break what seemed like a burgeoning tension. “I didn’t know we were the subject of town gossip.”
This time, Luke’s smile was genuine. “Gossip is the engine that powers a small town and a young gay American couple arriving in the depths of non-touristy winter with the ashes of their clerical best friend in tow is lively fuel indeed. Excuse me.” Luke made a slight bow and went to pay their tab.
“He’s an odd duck,” Adriano said, stroking La Donna Volsini’s feline sentinel. “It’s like he’s trying to be friendly or ironic but doesn’t know how. He reminds me of…”
“Magda.” Lee finished his husband’s thought and concurred. Both lacked possession of or an interest in social skills. They didn’t ask questions. They interrogated.
“Do you think he’s gay?” Adriano said.
It was usually Lee whose gaydar was on constant sweep. “He’s something, but I don’t think it’s gay,” Lee said, finishing off his coffee. Luke was at the door and motioning—rather, commanding—them to join him. “He’s more nervous than a hooker in church, as my grandma used to say.”
“Interesting analogy,” Adriano said, giving the cat a farewell rub. “Did you see his ring?”
“Some sort of symbol.”
“A very specific sort of symbol,” Adriano whispered as they pushed through the crowd toward the young German doctor. “Luke is Opus Dei.”
“Just like Bishop Arnaud.”
Adriano nodded.
Lee thought of a scene from Star Wars about the Sith, minions of the Dark Side. “Always two there are, no more, no less. A master and an apprentice.”
As they exited, Luke held the door, then led the way back to the hospital, his black greatcoat trailing behind him, not unlike, Lee thought, Darth Vader’s cape.
CHAPTER XXXV
Brother and Sister
Sunday, December 8, 2013, late evening, Orvieto
Dawud was worried. There had been no word from his sister for weeks. And, he hadn’t sold nearly enough CDs to get the money he needed. The money she needed.
“I’ll be in Orvieto for Christmas! I don’t know what it is, but I hear that Italians love it! I can’t wait! We get presents, yes?”
Maryam. That was just like her. Even facing the terrors of war, and starvation and now a journey that would leave behind her entire world, she was smiling. He could hear it over the phone. Then, the line went dead.
What have I done to you, dear sister? My Maryam. She was all the family he had left. It had been his idea for her to join him here—but not yet! He wasn’t ready. There was no way for her to pay for her passage. But, she had come anyway. He knew what she had done. She had sold her soul—her body—for the price of freedom. Freedom to be a slave.
And now, he didn’t know where she was. Still in Libya? On the train to the port? Somewhere in one of the dusty, duplicitous hideaways of Northern African’s smuggling ring? At sea? He had paid his way over a little over a year ago, in full—an obscene amount—and told his sister to wait until he had the money to send for her.
She had not listened. How could he blame her? Even here in Orvieto he heard of the news from Tripoli, from Benghazi. Their home was a bloodstained scar, a country raped and left to give birth to a fe
stering pestilence. She had taken a chance. She could not wait. And now, she would spend the rest of her life paying for the trip, if she lived through the slavery forced upon her. Better never to get off the ship. Dawud knew the sort of “jobs” waiting for young women—girls—smuggled over by ship from Africa’s corpse-ridden coast, a plastic chair outside a camper along the back roads frequented by truckers wanting a quick one. And they think we are subhuman, Dawud growled to himself. Better for her never to get off the ship.
No! He would not allow it. He would have to get to her first. He would have to get to the ship and pay for her freedom before her owners took possession first. Dawud would have to find her, but he had no idea where to look, or when.
“CDs, music for the soul,” he cried out as he walked along Orvieto’s chilly streets. He stood out in a crowd, black, despised, not Italian. He knew he was hated here. How could he not know? But, he was alive. If he had stayed in Libya, he’d be dead by now. They both would be dead, like their parents. He pushed their memory out of his head…for the moment. It always came back in his dreams, staccato nightmares like the machine-gun fire of reality and the smell of burning rubber tires around swollen and blood-bruised faces.
No, there was nothing to do but run, for both of them.
Allah, protect you, my sister Maryam, he prayed every night, laying down his head to the cold, cracked, and filthy linoleum floor of the deserted tenement a few blocks from Orvieto’s thriving center. His home, what there was of it, with no windows and slightly but not much more of a roof, used to be a barracks for female soldiers under Mussolini. Now, it was a haven for rats, drug-dealing, illicit sex for teenagers in nearby towns come to Orvieto to escape their parental overlords, and for Dawud. The building was deserted. No one knew he lived here. Actually, no one cared. He had no friends—well, he hadn’t for a year now. Andrea. The young deacon had been his friend.
Andrea, the first Christian Dawud had met who didn’t want to kill him. The first Christian who didn’t think Dawud was a terrorist.
A terrorist. It made Dawud laugh. Nothing could be further from the truth. He had been named for the Quran’s great psalmist and singer, David as the Jewish Torah named him. He had grown into the name and became an amateur musician in Tripoli. His parents, and his sister, would come to hear him play. Then, came the war, rebels, loyalists, ISIS, it didn’t matter. They all carried guns, and none of them understood God or music. And so, the family fled. Dawud and Maryam were all that was left, and a crate of CDs he had somehow managed to salvage.
He thought again of Andrea. He missed him. He wondered if Andrea would have liked the song he had written for him, the song Dawud wrote in his memory and posted online.
Andrea would never hear it now.
Andrea had spoken to him. Andrea had brought him food. Andrea has visited him, treated him like a human, not like the outcast that everyone considered him to be. Well, not everyone. Andrea’s friends—Marco, the lady from Café Volsini, the old priest from San Giovanale—they too had been nice to him, because of Andrea, he was sure. But now, if he saw them in the Corso he would turn and hurry down another street. For a year now, he had avoided their gaze. After Andrea’s…Well…after last year, Dawud couldn’t bear to talk to them. Sometimes, he would find a tray of food at the foot of the stairwell leading to his squalid living quarters, and once saw La Donna Volsini and Don Bello nearby with a basket. He was sure they were doing it, out of respect for Andrea.
He sighed and walked on through Orvieto’s chilly, tortuous streets. There was nothing to do now but wait. And pray.
If only he knew where to find his sister when she arrived. If only he knew who to ask. Of course, if he had the money to buy his sister’s freedom, someone would present themselves to answer the question. Those who answered the questions always presented themselves. One never asked to meet them first. The answer would have to come first. Then, Dawud would be allowed to ask the question, but only if had the thing he did not have nor knew how to get. Money. He needed money, and a lot of it. Otherwise, his sister would die.
“CDs, music for the soul,” Dawud called out into the darkness. No one was buying. No one was listening to the psalmist’s plea.
CHAPTER XXXVI
The First Snow
Monday, December 9, 2013, 2:29 a.m., Orvieto
Lee couldn’t sleep.
As he popped awake, at first he thought it was morning. The room was so bright. The skylight glowed as if lit by a foggy dawn in San Francisco, light as if seen through a glass darkly.
Snow! The skylight was covered in an inch of newly fallen flakes and the quarter moon was lighting it from above like a celestial scrim.
Lee turned to wake Adriano but thought better of it. His husband loved snow but Adriano was not the happiest of morning people. Being awoken this early would ensure a grumpy day. It was very cold and the snow seemed to be coming down in a steady and even clip. In a few hours, the Tower of the Moor would peal five bells, late enough to wake Adriano and early enough to ensure the snow was still virginal enough for a photo shoot. Adriano would undoubtedly want to document their wintry Italian wonderland.
Had they only arrived a week ago?
Lee turned over and tried to dive back into sleep but by now his mind was awhirl with a cacophony of thoughts and images. Andrea’s suicide. His mother’s letter to the Pope. The inscription on the back of Reverend Vicky’s pectoral cross—“01.03.83”—the same date on the photo in the dining room of St. Paul’s Inside the Walls in Rome. And the photo, a young, vibrant, and very pretty Vicky with two young priests, one of whom Lee was sure was the former bishop of Orvieto, Gio, and the other, frowning, clearly the same Bishop Arnaud now resting in hospital following a mysterious bout of food poisoning. Lee fluffed the pillow and renewed his attempt at sleep, but images kept sweeping over his brain. Luke’s strange scuffle with the muscly leather boy last week in Sant’Andrea. Who was he? Lee knew he had seen him before, somewhere, he was sure of it. It was no use. There would be no more sleep tonight. He peered over at his husband, breathing softly and evenly in the depths of deepest sleep. He was smiling in slumber like a beautiful baby. Lee kissed him gently on the forehead and got quietly out of bed. No need to worry. Adriano could sleep through an earthquake—and had. Nothing short of Sensurround could rouse him when he was this far gone.
Lee tiptoed to the front room, carefully avoiding the sloping roof in the hall, no mean feat in the predawn darkness. What he wouldn’t have given to have a balcony just now. The view of Orvieto would have been spectacular. According to Marco, just on the other side of this wall was another apartment, empty and with higher, nonconcussion-threatening ceilings, whose views of the city were epic. Oh well, this place was pretty great, and Lee was not one to complain, although, he was one to dream.
The living room skylight repeated the effect of the one from the bedroom. Its frosty pane was punctuated by the faintest sounds of gathering snowflakes against the glass. The red battery flame of Brian’s Padre Pio vigil candle flickered against his ashes. Lee blew a kiss toward his friend. The quiet was complete. Everything seemed frozen in time. He wanted to be out in the snow. Quickly, Lee grabbed a sheet of paper on which he’d been working out crossword clues. The back was blank. 2:30 a.m. Walking in the snow. Didn’t want to wake you. Back in 30 minutes. Xxxooo, me. He scribbled the note quickly and taped it to the top of Adriano’s laptop. He threw on two pairs of sweatpants, a gray “San Francisco” hoodie, grabbed a scarf and gloves, and headed out into the frigid streets of Orvieto.
The town had become a fairy tale kingdom, even more so than usual. The only sound was the atom by atom plop of each snowflake falling into place on top of each of its confederates, a silent invasion.
“Prrrrrrrrrrrr, prrrrrrrr.”
Lee looked down to see a large gray feline, vibrating like an idling Fiat at his feet. La Donna Volsini’s cat. It wove its way between Lee’s legs several times. Then with a deliberate but otherwise uncaring upward glance trotted awa
y toward the arch into the Plaza de Republica that separated the northern and southern parts of the town. The cat’s delicate paw prints were the only adulteration of the landscape, and even those were quickly filling up with falling snow.
Lee followed.
Once through the arch, the Church of Sant’Andrea became visible to the right, its simple medieval grayness now dripping with snowy accents like an oversize gingerbread house. The windows of the mayor’s office that straddled the arch on Orvieto’s axis—il sindaco—were festooned as if in white bunting, ready for an Evita-like greeting by the snow queen and her court. The octagonal bell tower, adorned with centuries’ worth of coats of arms, each now with frozen highlights, stood taller and more imposing than usual. Everything looked majestic in the snow, like a stage set or a tiny village whose roofs were adorned with glued-on cotton balls beneath a Christmas tree. Lee suddenly wondered if the handmade holiday villages of his childhood had grown large to envelop him or rather if he, in a kind of Lewisean dream, had somehow grown miraculously small and stumbled accidentally into his own secret Narnia.
La Donna Volsini’s cat had disappeared, but the paw prints remained, meandering out of the empty and moonlit plaza toward San Giovanale.
Lee followed.
Five minutes later, Lee found himself at the garden beside San Giovanale, the spot where Andrea jumped. His feline guide found a dry spot next to the overhang of the ancient bell tower. With a look as if to say, “You’re on your own now,” the imperious feline curled its tail around itself, fluttered its eyelids twice, and fell asleep to await the dawn.
Lee walked to the edge of the rock.
The snow fell upon his shoulders.
He stood on the cliff and prayed.
Useless, he thought, to turn my thoughts to God.
Behind him, the lights of Orvieto reflected in a million icy crystals. It brought back memories—dark ones.