Blue Bear_or the Impossibility of Anonymity

by Joseph Grady

  Following a thorough search of all the likely places, unable to locate anyone, she returned to her room, changed into her athletic clothes, and walked out onto the terrace to head out for a run. And there she was, seated at the patio table next to Andrew and in front of a Mokka stovetop espresso maker, two thimble sized espresso cups, and a newspaper. Andrew – being a second generation Italian/Australian in Sydney – had always refused inculturation with the roommates and their American coffee.

  Lucy lowered her aviators over her eyes, and sauntered over to the table. But before she could drum up a demoralizing conversation about lunch, Natasha started talking about something else. “Hi Lucy, looks like you’re keen for a run with your trainers on there. Are you a big runner?”

  “With my what on? And did you just call me big?”

  “Ach, sorry, no. Gosh, I’m so sorry. I mean, are you an avid runner? And by ‘trainers,’ I mean your shoes. That’s the way that we say it – ”

  “Wait, wait, wait,” interrupted Andrew. “Don’t answer that question. Lucy knows damn well what you mean. She and I had it out a few months ago on the whole trainers/sneakers argument. You’ll do well to not humour her too much. She’s just giving you a hard time. Don’t worry. She’s a little edgy to all the new people. She’ll warm up to you.”

  Lucy didn’t respond, but looked off in the distance and started stretching.

  Natasha smiled. “I sure bet I’ll need to start exercising too. What, with living and eating in Italy and all. I simply don’t understand how everyone here can eat so much pasta and stay so skinny.”

  “I think it’s all the stress and cigarettes,” said Lucy. Natasha started to chuckle, but stopped, when she realized Lucy wasn’t laughing along.

  “Here,” said Andrew, tipping the espresso pot in Natasha’s direction. “We’ve got to finish this.”

  “Oh, no, no, I really shouldn’t,” said Natasha. “Virginia made me take a cup of espresso with her straight after lunch in her rooms.”

  “Virginia?” asked Lucy. She stopped stretching and finally looked Natasha in the eyes. “Did you just say Virginia?”

  “Yes, I think that was her name.”

  “You mean Signora Pironi?”

  “Right. Her. The mean girl in charge.”

  “Did I ever tell you that her first name was Virginia?”

  “No, I don’t think you did,” said Natasha. “Because, I remember that I called her Signora Pironi a few times at lunch, and then she stopped me and told me to call her ‘Virginia’ instead. The other two did the same as well. Martina and Elena.”

  “Are you kidding me!” Lucy put her hands on her head. “You got oh-just-call-me-Virginia on your very first day? And you got invited to coffee in her rooms?”

  “Yeah, I think so,” said Natasha, with a worried expression. “Is that a bad thing?”

  “Is that a bad thing? It’s incredible! Do you realize it took me six months to get on a first name basis with Virginia?”

  “Yeah, and I’ve been here for almost a year,” added Andrew, “and I don’t think I’ll ever achieve first name status. Good on you, mate!”

  “Good night! They must really be losing it,” said Lucy. “That’s too bad, though. Those girls can be mean as hell, but they’re the only three normal residents here.”

  “Or maybe they just like Natasha,” suggested Andrew.

  Lucy looked off in the distance again. What she had just said could easily have been taken as an insult. Natasha’s expression, at least, remained unoffended. But what was more startling for Lucy was how much the mean girls had rubbed off on her. Come on. It’s just the mean girls. A silly group of old ladies. Does it even matter which student resident gets to be the fourth wheel? Really, who cares?

  Andrew was quick with a subject change, “Did you see the newspaper today? They’ve identified the murder victim.”

  “Oh yeah? Did they say why he got killed?” asked Lucy, coming around to lean on the table beside Andrew. He turned to the local news section of La Repubblica and shuffled through to find the article. Natasha started examining her fingernails.

  “Yeah, the police haven’t made any statements about motive,” said Andrew. “At least I don’t think. Okay, yeah, here’s the article. Something about a body… blah, blah, blah… some guy named Eugenio Galli… no motive… no information… no known connections to anyone at Palazzo Mortimer. It doesn’t really give us a lot of information.”

  Andrew looked up from the paper and found both girls now squeezed in around him, standing to his sides, leaning over the table and reading the article. Lucy took it slow, reading each paragraph from top to bottom, but Natasha – whose cheeks had gone from rosy to pale – hurriedly ran her fingers over paragraphs in no particular order, as though touching them might make the Italian any more intelligible. She finally let her fingers rest, trembling just slightly, under the name of the victim, before straightening up, turning around as gracefully as possible, and disappearing down the roof access door that led downstairs.

  “Well,” said Andrew, “we’ll just have to keep our eyes on the papers and see what else they can tell us.”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” said Lucy, who was now lost in her own thoughts and hardly paying attention to Andrew. She walked to the railing and looked out over the city below them. Andrew flipped through the paper trying to find the soccer article he had been reading before Lucy came along. It took him a while, though, as he had to stop and examine every advertisement along the way that featured beautiful women.

  Lucy eventually wandered off towards the door, and when it slammed shut, Andrew looked up and said out loud, “Oh, okay, goodbye, then,” to no one, except the Banana Republic models beaming back at him from below his coffee cup.

  Lunch with the new girl had been distracting enough, but Andrew’s newspaper had yanked her mind straight back into the previous day’s events. She left the building as quickly as possible, with an implicit certainty that clarity of thought would somehow be achieved somewhere outside the Palazzo.

  “Oh, Ciao, Bella. Dimmi, come stai, Lucy?” said Gambetti in the lobby.56

  “Sto bene. Grazie, Gambetti. Ciao!”57

  And as soon as she crossed the threshold, her legs began pumping automatically, with the same urgency as a junkie who can find a vein even blindfolded. But Lucy, at least, wasn’t interested in the kind of escape offered by drugs. She sought that nirvana made possible only by prolonged physical movement, that beautiful and paradoxical state wherein she simultaneously found a jarring impact with reality in the present, and at the same time, an intense distance and detachment from it all. This was also the state in which Gambetti loved to see her the most. He got up from his chair and stood by the door, to narrow his eyes at her aft side as it ran up the street. It’s the little things in life.

  Before she could round the next switchback up the Janiculum hill, though, five police vehicles raced by her. She would have kept going, without looking back, had she not heard the tires of the first vehicle screeching in front of the Palazzo. They all parked quickly and a swarm of officers descended on Gambetti and the lobby.

  “Not my problem,” she mouthed to herself. She faced away from the Palazzo and let her legs carry her up the hill towards the park, convincing herself that it was just like any other afternoon. She had only planned on running six miles, but ended up doing thirteen – not because she felt a lot of energy, but to avoid thinking about yesterday’s events and to avoid going back to the Palazzo and the police. She even stopped a mile from home, and slowly lolly gagged her way back.

  In the meantime, I had been upstairs, dozing in my storage room – the room across from the bathroom, which was now used exclusively for two purposes: getting rid of piles of unwanted things and providing a place for a bear to sleep. Five officers with surgical gloves woke me up and systematically sorted through everything – boxes of clothes, golf clubs, skis, luggage, power tools, mops, brooms, cleaning supplies, empty cases of Folger’s, Christmas decorat
ions, piles and piles of textbooks – all the things that had been abandoned or forgotten by people who had once been student residents in the servants’ quarters.

  They sorted it all out in the hallway, swabbing and dusting with all kinds of expensive machines. Other teams searched through each individual room. Andrew had been the only one home when the police arrived. He was told to remain seated on the terrace, so he read the newspaper again, or rather, read all the articles about soccer and studied all the ads.

  By the time she walked around the switchback in front of the Palazzo, there were no police cars parked out front. Lucy stopped in the lobby and looked around. Nobody was there. Completely empty. No Gambetti. No police. Good. She began her ascent, relieved. The extra seven miles had been worth it. She clambered sloppily up the final stairs to the roof access, threw open the steel door, and her heart sank. In unison, ten officers turned their heads towards Lucy, now frozen in the door frame. I had been too interested in watching the police work to think about warning Lucy downstairs. Ever so slightly, she scowled in my direction.

  “Lei è la signorina Lucy Fox?” one of the officers asked her.58

  “Sì, sono io.”59

  “Va bene. Venga con me.”60

  She was told to sit in a patio chair on the terrace. Detective Luca Speziale and his expensive shiny suit appeared in front of her. She made to stand up, but he gestured for her to remain seated. He scowled down, and took an athletic position in front of her. She crossed her legs and arms and stared back, not having to raise her eyes much to look into his.

  “Please remain seated,” he said. “And do not look at your friend over there.”

  He pointed at Andrew, and of course, the first thing Lucy did was look at him. Andrew looked up from the Dolce and Gabbana models that he’d been studying to smile and wave at Lucy.

  She jerked her head down and said, “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay. It’s okay. Just do not permit yourself to let it happen again. We have to hold all of the persons here in a separated way so as to verify that all stories are in accord. I am certain that you are understanding. Here I give to you your passport and and your permission of Italian visa card.” He handed them off, and scratched the short bristle behind his receding hairline.

  “But… wait… why do you have these? Have you been in my room?”

  “For sure,” said Luca. His way of speaking in itself was distracting, his wide mouth wiggling inside his shortly trimmed beard. A stack of papers full of Italian legal language, stamps and seals landed in her lap. “I can now offer to you a series of documentations permitting for us to search all of said property. Okay? You are to stay here. I am coming back.”

  As soon as Luca walked off, I took a seat on the ground in front of Lucy’s chair, at eye level with her. “Is there something that you know that I don’t know?”

  She just barely shook her head from side to side, indicating no.

  “Are you sure?”

  She nodded yes.

  “The keys are in the golf bag. Are you going to tell the police about them?”

  Negative.

  “Alright, well, you’ve got to decide right now what you’re going to do,” I said. “You can either explain yourself – fully – right now, or, in the next few months, you can get caught lying to the cops about critical evidence in a murder case. They will find out. I for one, however, do not want to spend significant portions of your life puttering around an Italian prison cell. I get the feeling you don’t want that either. This assignment’s already been strange enough for both of us already. Just be upfront and tell them what’s going on.”

  Giving advice to Lucy was usually like trying to convince a full grown cat to suckle sour milk from my own male breast. Her jaw dropped open and her scowl intensified, with her bottom lip twitching, full of desire to upbraid me. But she glanced behind her. Two officers stood guard over her patio chair, so instead she tried to give as much meaning as possible to her nasty glare.

  When Lucy and I had first met, I used to give her all kinds of advice about everything – as spirit animals are wont to do. Middle school girls are not usually in a good place to mount a sufficient argument against the bad advice of a giant bear with centuries of experience, so she would often go along with my somewhat antiquated ideas. Over time, though, she grew to resent this more and more, but not without good reason. It took me a while to figure out that the things I used to say to young men hundreds of years ago, did not always qualify as sound guidance for a twenty-first century adolescent girl in south suburban Denver. You live and you learn. In time, we had reached a tacit agreement about how our relationship would work, an agreement that I had just violated. That afternoon I didn’t really need to tell her that she was at a crossroads. She knew. Her eyes grew determined, no longer focusing on anything in particular. By the time Detective Luca stood in front of her again, it was clear that she had made up her mind. She wasn’t going to listen to me.

  “Ms. Fox, I have some notes that one officer took concerning your conversation with him yesterday,” said Luca. “You say that you were absent from this building at the time of the homicide, that is, you were absent from approximately 15:30 until 16:45, and that you did not see nor heard nothing at such times. You say that you were at the Doria Pamphili park and at the coffee bar in Piazza della Rovere. Is this all true?”

  “Yes.”

  “There is nothing else you would like to add to this statement?”

  She turned away from the detective, looked me straight in the eyes and said slowly, “No.”

  “Okay, please come with me for a moment.”

  She followed him to the side of the servants’ quarters. An officer held a tape measure against the exterior wall. Andrew was gone.

  “Your visa document says that you are 1.68 meters in height,” said Luca. “Is this true?”

  “Maybe.”

  “What do you mean ‘maybe’?” Luca was not happy. “You are telling to me that you do not know how tall you are?”

  “I’m five six… five feet, six inches.”

  Luca sighed. “Just stand there by the tape. Take off your shoes.”

  She was 1.68 meters tall.

  “Please return and be seated and replace your shoes.” The officers placed her in the spot at the patio table where Andrew had been. The newspaper was gone. Luca left for another half an hour. I sat by the terrace railing and glared at Lucy. She crossed her arms and pouted back at me, the same way she used to pout when she was thirteen.

  Sick of me, she made an attempt at conversation with the officers watching over her. “È una bella giornata, oggi, no?”61

  “Signorina,” responded the tougher looking one, “è meglio se noi non parliamo. Grazie.”62

  When Luca came back he had an armful of electronic equipment. He took her fingerprints, which should have already been on her police files from her entry visa. She finally started to look worried – a small place in her stomach opening up. I got worried too. It was hard to tell what Luca was up to, but whatever it was, it didn’t seem to be for Lucy’s good. Why would he need to take her fingerprints again? It made no sense unless he was convinced she was involved somehow, and needed to make some sort of extra verification. Lucy realized the same.

  Luca placed an iPad in front of her. Lucy and three of her friends from her time as an undergraduate smiled up from the iPad, drenched in rain at the top of a mountain in Colorado. The other three were having a great time. Lucy’s smile was forced.

  “Is this you, Ms. Fox?” Luca pointed at her.

  “Yes.” Lucy looked back, puzzled.

  “We have found this picture of you on the Facebook. You are wearing a green North Face brand rain jacket and black rain pants. Do these items belong to you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where are they?”

  “They’re on a hook on the wall beside the wardrobe in my room.”

  “Both the rain jacket and the rain pants?”

  “Yeah. In fact I�
�m certain the pants are there, because I’ve never even worn them or touched them since I got to Rome. They’ve just been hanging on that hook for three years.

  Luca nodded at two cops, who went inside the servants’ quarters.

  “No, they are not there. We have thoroughly searched every room in this facility. They are not here.”

  The two cops came out of the building and shook their heads.

  “But you can for certain verify that these are your rain jacket and your rain pants?” asked Luca, pointing again at the photo. “And it is true that you have had them with you in this building quite recently?”

  “Yeah. Of course. It rained just, like, last week, and I wore the jacket. But not the pants. I’ve never worn the pants in Rome.”

  I was shaking my head at her saying, “Stop talking! Stop talking! Ask for a lawyer! Ask for a lawyer!”

  It was already too late. The small hole in Lucy’s stomach got bigger. She started playing with her shorts, and looked down, saying everything at once and as quickly as possible. “No. Wait. No. No. No! What are all these questions even all about? I want to see a lawyer! I didn’t even consent to any of these questions. What is this, like… what is this… like… even all about? I need a lawyer. You didn’t give me a lawyer. You can talk to my lawyer, not me. I’m not talking to anyone!”