by Joseph Grady
“Niente. No, alla fine, sto bene. Non lo so. Solo che ... solo che ... tutta questa faccenda dell’omicidio, eccetera, mi lascia un po’ sconvolta, no? Capisci?”106
“Certo, Lucy, siamo tutti un po’ sconvolti.” He placed his hand on her knee, and leaned in. “Se c’è qualcosa che posso fare per farti compagnia in questi momenti, mi fai sapere subito, eh.”107
“Si, certo. Ma ...”108
“Ma cosa?”109
“Cioè ... solo che quest’omicidio mi lascia in tanti dubbi, tante incertezze sulla vita qua al palazzo, sai? C’ho tanto desiderio di sapere tutto, ma non so proprio niente su cos’è successo.”110
“T’ho già detto la storia dell’incontro del cadavere, vuoi che te la racconto ancora?”111
“No. Solo che ... non so ... voglio vedere. Capisci? Voglio vedere ...” she leaned in closer to his eyes and wet her lips with her tongue. “...voglio vedere proprio tutto quanto che è successo, così com’è successo.”112
“Ho capito.”113
“Allora, mi aiuti?” She put her hand on her knee and let her thumb lie casually on his hand.114
“Ho capito.” He took his hand off her knee and leaned back. “Mi hanno detto che le donne americane sempre parlano in modo meno diretto rispetto a quelle italiane. Ma dai, tu non sei per niente sottile. Comunque, vedo che devo essere molto diretto con te. Guarda. La video registrazione non te la posso far avere. Alla fine, a questo punto ... cioè ... sono passati già parecchi giornalisti e avvocati che hanno lasciato delle offerte enormi alla fondazione Palazzo Mortimer per aver quella roba nei mani – in contanti, se mi capisci. Tu sei una studentessa, neh?”115
“Quanto vuoi?”116
“Il più possibile.”117
“Dai, Gambetti, almeno mi racconti che cosa è successo nelle registrazioni!”118
“Va be’. Ma non c’è molto da dire. La videosorveglianza ha ripreso questo tipo qua, Eugenio, che arriva alle 14:40, e poi esce alle 15:10. Poi, ritorna un po’ di tempo dopo al Lobby. Lo incontra là quest’altro tipo coperto totalmente da ’na giacca e pantaloni di pioggia. Parlano per tre minuti. Uno spara all’altro in testa cinque volte. Si mette nel suo veicolo parcheggiato appena fuori la porta e se ne va.”119
“Che tipo di veicolo?120
“No si sa. L’angolo della ripresa non ci lascia vederlo bene. E basta, dai, Lucy. Non c’è più niente da dire.”121
“E questo tipo, Eugenio, chi era? Perché era qui? È parente di qualcuno?”122
“Ho detto basta. Di lui non si sa niente nessuno e non si trova niente nei nostri file.”123
“E Ginevra? Chi è Ginevra? Non c’è una Ginevra qua in giro? Oppure uno che ha una parente che si chiama Ginevra?”124
“Ma cosa?”125
“Ginevra! Chi è?”126
“Non lo so, sei fuori. Ho detto basta!”127
And that was the end of the discussion. He scooted his office chair away from Lucy, and started collecting his lottery tickets from all over the desk, even the ones sticking out from under her. Gambetti was indeed a man of passions, but unfortunately for Lucy, he was also a man with a strict Epicurean hierarchy of passions. He was only interested in her relative to other passions — money — and she had made the mistake of offering him a lesser satisfaction at the risk of losing what was more important. She wandered back upstairs, wondering if a short skirt would have helped.
At 11:00pm that night, Lucy left her room and walked towards the servants’ quarters bathroom wearing just sandals and a bathrobe. She passed by the bathroom door, though, and peeked through the cracked exit door, to make sure nobody was sitting outside on the terrace. She looked back over her shoulder to double check that nobody saw her leave. She slipped out, hurried her way over to the triangle roof access door, and wound her way down, back and forth, on the steep and narrow servants’ staircase, all the way to the negative one level, avoiding the elevator so as not to be seen.
Tip toeing around the basement hallways, she crossed through the giant laundry room, and walked up to the door behind the dryer machines that was covered in lightning bolts and several harsh warnings in Italian. Anyone who dared to open the door, it said, would be immediately electrocuted upon entrance, no questions asked. With her hand on the doorknob, she gave one final look over her shoulder, and disappeared through the door. On the other side, there was no sign of anything electrical or mechanical. It was the old basement servants’ quarters: a hallway with ten bedrooms, exactly like the one upstairs, but with no windows. Back in the Palazzo’s glory days, the female staff lived down here, and the men on the roof. Now these rooms were full of old things, all carefully catalogued, marked, and appraised with post-its written in Gambetti’s handwriting. This is where — Lucy suspected — he ran an under the table antique business.
At one point, however, sometime after the end of the resident female staff, and before the remodel into a retirement home, someone had decided that the building missed one essential: a Victorian style Turkish bath. Lucy was the only grad student who knew about it, and she preferred to keep it that way. One half of the old remodeled bedroom had benches to lounge on and soak up the steam room functions, while the other half was occupied by a huge basin, that could be considered a small hot tub or a large bathtub. The stone and tile work had been done so well, that once you shut the door behind you, it was easy to believe you were really in the basement of an ancient Ottoman palace.
Lucy kept a crate next to the tub with just the essentials: a bulk order supply of bubble bath, a loofah, bath salts, soap and shampoo, candles, matches, a shower CD player, a waterlogged copy of The Poetry of Rumi, and a rubber ducky.
When I came in, I found Lucy’s head surrounded by a massive field of bubbles, listening to Norah Jones, and smoking a Marlboro Gold. I grabbed the steam nob, just above her head, turned it all the way up, and sat down on one of the benches by the door, closing my eyes and trying to relax. Lucy reached up and turned the steam back down.
“Well, Blue Bear, do you remember last Saturday when you were getting on my case for not having done anything?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve had a busy day.”
“Did you?”
“I did. Did you do anything today?”
“Just the usual. I slept in. Then I had my morning nap, and my afternoon nap. I puttered around a little, smelling things. Oh, and speaking of smelling things,” I looked at her cigarette.
“Give me a break,” she croaked back at me. “It’s been a long week.”
“Whatever.”
“You didn’t hear anything strange upstairs in the servants’ quarters today, did you? Like, in Natasha’s room?”
“Did something happen today?”
“Did something happen today? Oh, let me tell you.”
She told me the whole story, all about the unexpected ride to school, the mail theft (now, if I’m not mistaken, the second time in her life she’s committed a crime involving the mail), the visit to the Greg and Starbucks, Luca Speziale’s new job, the plan hatched with Yvette, the conversation with Virginia, Natasha’s room being searched, and her failed attempt to seduce Gambetti.
“And to be clear, I wasn’t really seducing him. I was just acting like I was trying to seduce him.” She put out another cigarette, picked up her loofah, and started scrubbing herself. “Oh, and by the way, what do you know about picking locks?”
“A bit.”
“So you can teach me?”
“I don’t know if that’s a good skill for you to have.” I didn’t give her a chance to respond. “So do you think Natasha did it?”
“It’s possible. I mean, for sure she’s involved. But I don’t get it. What does she have to do with inheritance money? She would’ve been in the building at the time of the murder. She’d have had access to my rain pants and the rain jacket. The cops think it’s a woman about my size. But why? I hadn’t even met her at that point, and she had already tried to impersonate me in a murder. What the hell? I mean, it just doesn’t make
sense for someone to want to set me up for this.”
“Does it make much sense for someone to kill someone else at all, with or without someone else to blame it on?”
She stopped scrubbing herself and pondered the floral patterns on the ceiling.
“Yes,” I went on, “there will be a motive — inheritance, or whatever — but who knows what else is going on. There’s still too much we don’t know.”
“And that’s the part that’s not fair, Blue Bear.”
“What?”
“There’s so much we don’t know. Today I know twice as much as I did yesterday, but now I’m twice as confused about what I still don’t know.”
“Yeah, that sucks.”
“Oh, come on, don’t you have some sort of ancient proverb or something? Maybe like, ‘Well, you know, Lucy, the willow is a tree of wisdom, but the Oak has experience’ … or maybe, like, ‘The owl roosts in the heart as winter in the snow of patience.’ Y’know. Shit like that?”
“Did you just make those up, or are those real proverbs?”
“No, I just made ’em up. But you know what I’m saying? Don’t you have something wise-sounding to say to a poor young soul who’s feeling all lost and searching for meaning in her life?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Let’s see what I can come up with. Hmm.” I thought out loud. “How about this. Embrace the mystery. Live the tension.”
She took the last Marlboro Gold out of the pack and held it just above the rim of the tub with two fingers to avoid getting it wet. She watched the small bit of tobacco that was visible at the tip of of the cigarette as it packed down farther in towards the filter when she dropped the butt a few times against the rim of the tub. Placing it directly in the center of her mouth, between her lips, she leaned over to one of the candles, placed the tip into the flame, inhaled deeply, held the smoke in her lungs, and then mumbled back, the cigarette still between her lips, “Embrace the mystery. Live the tension. Great.”
I closed my eyes and sat there in the sweat lodge for another hour in silence, and woke up whenever Norah Jones stopped singing. Lucy had turned the steam nob off completely. She was snoring with her mouth wide open and her head perched on the side of the tub. I reached down into the water by her feet and pulled out the plug. She snorted and woke up. I chuckled and went back upstairs to my storage room.
CHAPTER TWELVE
SIAMO DELL'AMBASCIATA SUDAFRICANA
Lucy, Brian, and I came up the steps of the Policlinico metro stop a week later. But unless you looked at us very closely, you wouldn’t have recognized any of us. Luckily, the Policlinico metro stop is the kind of place people try to avoid looking closely at anyone else. Of course, you wouldn’t recognize me because, most of the time, Lucy’s the only one who can see me. Brian and Lucy, on the other hand, are almost always visible.
Brian was in a black suit, a white shirt, and blue tie. He was wearing wide glasses — the kind popular in the eighties with a bar across the top — and was sporting a thick head of red hair, combed in a large swooping motion from right to left. He carried a briefcase and had a look of purpose in his walk.
Lucy walked slightly behind, with less confidence, in a black business jacket, a matching skirt, nylons, and shiny dress shoes that clicked at irregular intervals every time her heel struck the sidewalk. Her real hair had been meticulously straightened and pulled back into a series of braids ending in a tight bun, then immobilized with gobs of hair product to keep any of it from slipping out from under a very real looking blond wig, with a straight conservative hairstyle, parted on one side to form a perfect dome around three quarters of her head, ending at the exact point where it met her shoulders. The rich ladies at Palazzo Mortimer could sure afford some expensive wigs. Her eyebrows had been tinted blond, and she had special contact lenses with no prescription that turned her eyes blue. Brian’s glasses came with a weak prescription, but Lucy’s heavy pair of glasses, with thick and pink round plastic frames, were strong. She could only walk by keeping Brian in her peripheral vision and following one step behind.
For Brian, formal business attire was simple. He took his suit out of his closet. He put it on.
For Lucy it was not. Ever since coming up with her plan the week before, she had been going through another moral crisis, spending long sessions deliberating with herself every afternoon, walking back and forth from one end of her rug to the other. She knew she would have to wear business clothes, but had to fight all week to bring herself to buy something with a clean conscience. On Wednesday, she entered a women’s business attire store on Via del Corso. The smile from the saleswoman sent a chill straight up her spine, and she ran out immediately, gasping for air. On Thursday, she looked down at the ground and entered a similar store. Keeping her eyes square on her feet, she explained to the saleswoman what she needed and handed over a note with her measurements. When she returned on Friday, she immediately accepted the first proposal, and refused to try anything on. She walked straight to the cash register, proffered a pile of cash, stuffed everything into a paper bag, and got out of the store as quickly as possible, so she could breathe again out on the sidewalk.
Yvette had done a spectacular job on their fake I.D.s, dangling around their necks from identical South Africa World Cup 2010 lanyards. They were now employees of the Embassy of the Republic of South Africa in Rome. Yvette had even changed their hair and eye colors in their I.D. photos.
“Alright, there, mate. You ready?” Lucy asked Brian.
“That’s Australian, Lucy. You’re spending too much time around Andrew.”
“Crap.”
“Try again.”
“Hmm… I don’t know… what does Natasha sound like when she talks?”
Brian put his nose in the air, “Just pretend to be English. It’s close enough.”
“Okay. Here we go. Let me give it a try.” Lucy corrected her posture, elevated her nose just slightly, and used a very breathy tone. “Hello. My name is Ms. Alice Kloepfer. This is my colleague, Mr. Ronald Lindbeck. We’re from the Embassy of the Republic of South Africa. Would it be alright if we came up and asked you a few questions?”
“That’s good. That’s good.”
“Really?”
“Not really.”
“Dangit!” She threw her elbow and most of her weight into Brian’s side. “I really thought I had it there.” Brian’s weight was such that he wasn’t moved.
“No, you wouldn’t pass for English.” He turned his palms up in the air. “But it’s not like it matters. What are the chances this lady can tell the difference between different accents?”
“Pretty low. But still.”
“We’ll just do all the talking in Italian. There’s no way she could identify us as Americans.”
We all turned the corner heading down the block where Eugenio Galli’s apartment was. Lucy stopped and turned to face Brian.
“Listen,” her voice was low. “You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”
“Ms. Kloepfer,” Brian was now using his own terrible English accent, “please do make an effort to get into character.”
“Okay, okay.” She put her face into her hands and breathed deeply. “Watcha! What I mean to say, is that if you really don’t fancy coming along, you mustn’t feel that you need to do this for my sake. I’m quite ready to leg it alone, if need be.”
“I say, Holmes! Are you off your trolley? What are friends for if not these sorts of grand adventures, eh?”
“Ah, indeed. Smashing.”
“Hip, hip, cheerio. Bob’s your uncle.”
“Splendid. Shall we?”
“Let’s.”
They stood up straight, smoothed out the fronts of their jackets, and strolled down the block with as much of a posh English attitude as they could muster. Lucy peered over her lenses to read the names on the intercom.
“Eccolo qua, Galli e Spiga.” She pushed the button and we all waited. Nothing happened for a good thirty seconds — which actually feels li
ke an incredible amount of time when you’re working undercover.
A light on the intercom came on, and a crackly female voice asked, “Chi è?”
“Ehm… io mi chiamo Alice Kloepfer, e sono qui col mio collega Ronald Lindbeck. Siamo dell’ambasciata sudafricana a Roma.” Even in Italian Lucy kept her fake English accent.128
“Sì? E che volete?”129
“Se non La disturbiamo, vorremmo salire un attimo e farLa qualche domanda sugli eventi dell’ultima settimana.”130
“Va bene … l’ascensore è a destra, terzo piano, ultimo apartamento.”131
The door buzzed and Mr. Lindbeck swung it open, holding it for his colleague, Ms. Kloepfer, to pass through.
“Thank you, kind sir.”
“My pleasure.”
The door to the apartment swung open as they walked down the third floor hallway. From far away, Irene Spiga looked about thirty, once you got close you would say she was actually around forty, but the look in her eyes made her look much older. She held the door open, looking defeated, but almost, deep down, I would say, perhaps even somewhat relieved. Her clothing itself was its own white flag of surrender — slippers, a t-shirt, and jeans — probably the best that she could throw on in the time it took her unexpected visitors to come up three floors.
Upon seeing her — realizing that they were tricking a real person, not an imaginary one — both of the “South Africans” felt a panic in their guts, and I knew that Lucy and Brian regretted coming. It’s one thing to tell tales to an arrogant police officer. It’s another thing entirely to present yourself dishonestly to a woman who has just lost her husband.
“Please, come in.” She spoke to them in English — strongly accented, but English nonetheless. “Can I offer to you a coffee?”
“That would be delightful, thank you.” Brian compensated for his embarrassment by feigning professionality. “Ronald Lindbeck.”
“And I’m Alice Kloepfer. It’s a pleasure,” said Lucy.
Very good, this way. Italian architecture is usually imaginative, but you would never say the same about their furniture. So the impressive aspect about the Galli apartment was not just its very un-Italian open floor plan, but its even more un-Italian array of furniture, which occupied every available square inch of the apartment. While mismatched, it somehow all worked together, from austere modernity to Victorian elegance, from Amish simplicity to contemporary shock. Natasha would have hated it. Lucy wanted to move in. She lowered her glasses and her eyes moved shamelessly from piece to piece, the same way Gambetti’s eyes moved up and down her legs. Her initial panic went away and her jaw dropped in a moment of complete postmodern harmony and bliss. Every eclectic contrast was exactly how it should be and where it should be.