by Joseph Grady
“Holy shit,” she said to herself, as the key slid smoothly into the keyhole.
Opening the little metal door, she removed four items, closed the box, and left, walking quickly and keeping her gaze pointed towards the ground. She intended to go home immediately, but curiosity was too strong.
She sat down at the table farthest from anyone else at the first coffee bar she passed, and ordered breakfast, waiting with her bag shaking up and down on her knee. The waiter dropped off a pastry and cappuccino, Lucy shoved them to the far side of the table, and took out the letters. The first was an advertisement for local painters. Great. Lots of information there. The second was a weekly news magazine, L’espresso. She thumbed through it and was glad not to find herself anywhere. The third was a hand addressed birthday card for someone named Irene Spiga.
“Hmm. Does this mean he was married?”
Inside was a long note covered in loopy cursive from a distant relative down south. A certain part mentioned “Eugenio and the kids.”
Finally, she opened a white envelope with one of those plastic windows so that you can see the address is printed on the letter itself. It was one of those checks with a detachable receipt.
“Oh crap,” she whispered, as her conscience allowed itself to be felt for just a split second. It’s true, she had fully intended to steal someone’s mail. But she hadn’t planned on stealing money — especially not a check she wouldn’t even be able to cash. She distracted her conscience by taking a closer look, hoping that it would prove to be a useful clue. But her conscience roared back on the scene when she saw the little box with the quantity written on it: 352,673.61.
“Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. I’m an idiot,” she stared down at the huge number and ran her fingers through her hair. “Oh, shit I’m an idiot. Oh my God, I’m an idiot.”
She stuffed all of the papers back into her bag, getting up with the intention of returning everything to the mailbox. But — she stopped, standing up halfway — what good would that do? If the family got an open check in the mail, they’d get suspicious and look at the security footage. But then again, if a €350,000.00 check went missing, they’d get suspicious and check anyways, right? Well, maybe not. The check could have been lost anywhere, not just from their box. And come on, stealing a check isn’t stealing money. They’ll just have to cancel it and write another one, right?
She took out the slip of paper and looked at it more closely. It was written in English. Strange. It was from a company called Furniture Exports, Inc.
“So that’s why Luca wanted to know about all my nice furniture,” she nodded her head.
Her jaw dropped open, though, when she saw the address of the company: Cape Town, South Africa.
“That bitch.”
In one blinding moment, her conscience was clear. How on earth were the police so incompetent? How did they not catch such an obvious connection? Italy. Fricken’ Italy.
There was also another relief, “Okay, so I didn’t just steal 350,000 euros. That’s probably just, like, what? Twenty bucks in South African money?”
She chugged her cappuccino, wolfed down her pastry and almost ran out of the bar, needing to talk to me or Brian or anyone. Passing by a Wind cell phone store, she stopped and said out loud, “I’ve really got to stop talking to myself,” and went in.
The number forty from termini took her to Piazza Dodici Apostoli, a two minute walk to Piazza della Pilotta, the Jesuit owned square surrounded on four sides by the campus of the Pontifical Gregorian University. The Gregorian, in contrast to Sapienza, was in the heart of old Rome, spitting distance to the Coliseum, the forums, and the capitoline hill. Ignatius Loyola founded it himself five hundred years ago, but the campus was rebuilt in the 1930’s, because the Masons had stolen the original structure during the Italian nationalist craze in 1871 and turned it into a public high school.
She ignored the beggars stationed at the entrance — seminarians are such suckers — and headed into the massive atrium in the center of the main building. The campus was extra-territorial Vatican property, ceded by Italy to the Holy See in the 1929 Lateran Treaty between Mussolini and Pius XI (or, depending on how you look at it, part of the property not ceded to Italy by the Vatican), when the Italian state and the Vatican finally recognized each other’s existence. This is just a long way of explaining that the Gregorian campus, even though it was built in the heyday of fascist architecture, had been spared the popular style of the time, because it was technically not in Italy. Instead, it fit in well with the beautiful renaissance façades of the surrounding neighborhood. The students were not swallowed up by the building. Even though it was sizable, it still respected and affirmed your humanity.
Mamma Greg, as her English speaking students affectionately referred to her, had only about three thousand students, most of them priests, seminarians, religious sisters and a small smattering of lay people, like Brian. Everyone was decked out in the most bizarre mixes of prescribed religious uniforms. Lucy, who was neither a priest, nor a seminarian, nor a religious sister — far from it — in some strange way, stood out less at the Greg than at her own school. At Sapienza, nobody followed any official dress codes, but everyone ended up wearing the exact same depressing shades of European fashions. At the Greg, most everyone followed some kind of a religious dress code, but they were all wearing diverse and unique outfits. Lucy — someone with light colored fabrics and hope in her eyes — was not out of the norm. That’s not saying much, but it’s something.
An enormous stained glass ceiling covered her head, fifty yards above, held up by a two story colonnade that surrounded the main atrium’s walls. The handful of seminarians and sisters who were ditching class occupied tables set up on the marble floor underneath. In one corner, an automatic sliding glass door led to the student coffee bar, il Greg Bar.
At exactly a quarter after ten, Lucy positioned herself outside the door to one of the larger lecture halls, with its entrance right off the main atrium. The bell rang and hundreds of international students began to trickle and then stampede out of the various lecture halls. The whole stone building echoed with voices now having to yell at each other in almost every modern language known to man. Some ran to the bathrooms, and others — Scott Valentino among them — jockeyed for position to be first in line at the Greg Bar. Scott smiled at Lucy and then did a double take.
“What are you doing here? They let people like you in here?” he stopped to ask.
“Have you seen Brian?”
“Watch out Lucy. This is a Jesuit school, but they still have a chapel. You’ll want to avoid it. I wouldn’t want you to burst into flames or something.”
“Thank you. That’s very thoughtful of you. So Brian’s not here today?”
“I thought I saw him earlier. He’s here somewhere. But come on, Lucy!” Scott made an angry gesture towards the rush of people now forming all the way out the door of il Greg Bar. “Look what you did! Now I’m going to have to wait in line for coffee.”
Scott stormed off towards the entrance of il Greg Bar and Lucy entered the lecture hall with stadium seating. The last time she had been to the Greg, over a year ago, Brian had explained to her the dynamics of the class. The Americans, English, Australians and Irish sat by the windows to control the temperature. The Scots never came to class. The Spaniards, South Americans, and the scrupulous sat up front in the middle. The French sat dead center and kept to themselves. The Italians didn’t attend lectures often enough to have an established location. The Indians, Asians and Africans sat on the left, as far away from the windows as possible.
Sapienza was so big that Lucy hardly ever saw the same people twice at different courses. At the Greg, on the other hand, the first three years of theology were spent together in one giant lecture hall with one hundred and fifty classmates who all had an identical class schedule. Of course, on any given day, maybe sixty percent of them would attend lectures. Most people had developed cooperative note taking systems, so that it wasn’t ne
cessary to physically come to class every day.
At the beginning of the first year, Brian said, everyone made giddy smalltalk with one another in a new language. Over the second year, people grew tired of repetitive and superficial conversation in an Italian that never improved. By the beginning of the third year, Brian’s year, the national and linguistic groups had given up on integration and had all closed in on themselves. During breaks between classes, people stood around chatting in their own circles, staring at laptops, or with their heads on their desks, trying to sleep or imagine they were back in their own countries.
Once she came through the door, she stopped and stood in the front of the lecture hall to observe the flock. Behind her, a Powerpoint slide filled a large screen with a massive hairball of color coded information about a passage from the Gospel of John. A skinny Eastern European Jesuit in a suit and grey clerics struggled to field questions from the more nerdy looking students in a very mechanical Italian. Morale among the troops was at an all time low. A good number of them were slyly packing up their bags and sneaking out the side.
Lucy had already met the majority of the American seminarians in Brian and Scott’s class on various odd occasions. A good number of them were great. But still others were either overwhelmingly awkward around beautiful young women, or else they used her as an opportunity to “evangelize.” Lucy had once considered herself to be a consistent churchgoer when growing up — consistent on Christmas and Easter, like most reasonably religious people — and had even, on occasions, devoutly thumbed through the Gospels while suffering through long Christmas sermons. From the little that she had read, and she certainly didn’t consider herself an expert, she somehow never got the impression that Jesus wanted his followers to use the Gospel as an excuse to talk to the only attractive English speaking woman available within the wide circle of your friends’ friends, whenever you happen to find yourself abroad for a few years and are deprived of a consistent feminine presence in your life. Maybe, she thought, that was an innovation in Paul’s letters, which she had yet to peruse.
The more interesting and human seminarians — Scott and his cronies — had already cleared out of the lecture hall. She knew she only had a very small window of time to find Brian before one of the evangelizers would mount an attack, so she kept her survey of the field brief. Looking to her left, outside the door, Brian stood in the atrium, with his backpack on his shoulders, motioning for her to come join him, while trying to stay out of the professor’s field of vision. One of the evangelizers had already spotted her, and had risen from his seat. Lucy avoided eye contact, scurried out of the lecture hall, and accompanied Brian out of the building into the piazza.
“Lucy, do you realize what today is?” asked Brian, taking her on one of the narrow cobblestoned lanes towards the Trevi fountain. The crowds of tourists grew thicker, and they had to turn down armies of street vendors offering selfie sticks and light up gooey balls that made a squealing sound when splattered on the ground. Whenever she walked alone, the street vendors never bothered her. Whenever she was with Brian, they never left them alone. The trick is eye contact and confidence.
“October 12th?”
“And…”
“Monday?”
“And…”
“I don’t know. The feast of St. Brian?”
“Wait, is today the feast of St. Brian?”
“Brian, how would I know that? You’re talking to me remember?”
“Oh yeah, that’s right.”
“So what is it?”
“Well, there’s some debate,” said Brian. “There isn’t really a St. Brian on the calendar, and there isn’t really a St. Brian at all. There was this one guy named Edward, whose middle name was Brian. He got martyred in England in the 1590’s, and his feast day is sometime in October, but I don’t remember exactly when. So, if you really wanted to, you could argue that the feast of St. Brian is coming up. I just forget exactly which day it is.”
“No! Today, Brian! What’s today?”
“Oh, yeah, today is one of the most important days in Italian history.”
“Really? I guess it wasn’t important enough to cancel class.”
“No, not a historical day. Today, on this day,” he pointed at the ground, “history will be made in Italy. Today, centuries after the fall of the Roman empire, civilization returns to the peninsula.”
“What’s going on?”
“Come with me.”
They took a left turn one block before the Trevi fountain and walked down the street towards the McDonalds.
“You had better not be taking me to McDonalds.”
“No, no, no. I told you. I’m taking you to civilization.”
A block past McDonalds, he stopped her before they came around the corner. “Alright, stand here for a second, and take a deep breath, and get yourself ready for a surprise. Close your eyes. Okay, now walk towards my voice. Left. Right. Left. Right. Okay. Good. Now stop. Now turn to your right. A little bit more. A little more. Okay, stop. Good. Okay, now open your eyes.”
They posed before the glass storefront of a trendy looking coffee shop full of people. Above the door, a naked mermaid relaxed inside a green circle, looking down with condescension as Italy passed by on the streets below her.
“Can you believe this?” Brian shouted and smiled.
“Oh hey,” Lucy was completely underwhelmed. “There’s a Starbucks here. Did this just open today?”
“Yes! Do you realize that Italy was the last first-world country ever to not have a Starbucks? Civilization has returned to the peninsula. We’re living it, Lucy. This is history and we’re living it.”
He opened the door for her and followed her inside. The place was packed with tourists, who were too scared to try something new, and local Italians who were interested in the novelty of American coffee. In front of the register there was a phenomenon not seen at a coffee bar in central Italy since the German occupation: a line. Lucy felt that one of the baristas — all of whom spoke English (already a huge departure from any other Italian coffee bar) — looked familiar, but she could not quite put her finger on which one of them it was until she was at the register and the man behind it asked her a question.
“What can I get for you?” He glared at her with disgust.
The sound of that voice at first provoked in her an inexplicable moment of dread and fear, as though she had done something wrong and had just been caught. But then a light went off, and she recognized who the barista was. But what on earth was he doing here? Oh, that’s right. The poor guy was recently let go from his other job. She felt a great surprise, followed by an intense and sweet feeling of victory. It had been clear to her, in an abstract way, that it was going to happen, but she had not expected an actual concrete moment when she would get to gloat over him in her victory. The barista glared over the counter at her and Lucy could not stop herself from smiling. It was a wicked smile, she knew, but she didn’t care. It was so full of sweet sweet triumph. The barista was Detective Luca Speziale, or by now, just Luca Speziale — no prefix.
“I’ll have,” began Brian, “a grande, whole milk, one pump hazelnut, two pumps vanilla caramel macchiato.”
“Can I get a name for that?”
“Brian.”
Luca wrote Brian’s name and drink order on the cup, without making a single mistake. He looked at the man next to him in a black apron — the manager — and back at Lucy. He scrunched his nose and asked, “And for you, Miss?”
“I’ll have a caffè americano — ”
“No, she’s not going to order that,” interrupted Brian.
“But that’s what I want.”
“This is Starbucks, Lucy. You can get anything you want.”
“Yeah, and that’s what I want. That’s what I’d get even if we were in America.”
“If you order that, I am going to take it off the counter and take a piss straight into the cup, right here. Right in front of everybody.”
Luca stoo
d scowling at the register.
Lucy turned to Luca and smiled again, “I’ll have a tall chai latte.”
“She’ll have that with whole milk, three extra pumps of chai and no water,” Brian added. He paid, saw that a table had just opened, and moved towards it.
Lucy waited for the drinks and basked in her moment of victory, closing her eyes and trying to fix this moment in her memory forever. It felt so good and so delightfully bad. When she opened her eyes, the manager was looking away from Luca, who had turned to face Lucy and was scratching his beard using only his middle finger.
One of the baristas called out their orders. “I’ve got a grande caramel macchiato for ‘Brian’ and a tall chai latte for ‘You bi…’ or… wait… No. Maybe it says… I don’t know… ‘You Brick’ or ‘You Bick’? I don’t know. This one is kind of hard to read.”
Lucy picked up the drinks. The name written in Luca’s handwriting on the side of Lucy’s cup was very clear. She stood by the side of the table where Brian was sitting and said, “We have to leave. I have to tell you something, and I can’t tell you here.”
“This is Starbucks. You don’t have to pay extra to sit down.”
She gave him one of her I’m-Lucy-and-I-said-so-so-end-of-discussion looks. Brian knew debate was pointless, so they got up and left. At the Trevi fountain, they held on to their wallets and found a spot to sit by the edge. She told him that their barista was also her interrogator — still with a proud expression on her face. They tested out the camera on her new smartphone, taking a picture of the profanity scrawled out on her Starbucks cup with the Trevi fountain in the background. Brian also heard all about the apartment, the stolen mail, the birthday card, and the South African address of the furniture company.
It took a few minutes for Brian to absorb the significance of it all.
“Well, we know what that means,” he said eventually.
“Yep.”
“Our new roommate is definitely involved.”