by Joseph Grady
“It looks like there’s a good bit of movement on the terrace down there. Looks like they’re dragging the bodies somewhere. My cousins are quite dumb sometimes, but they can sure be quick when they need to be.”
Lucy closed her eyes, and put her head back. That’s it. She’d failed. Brian and Natasha were dead. Whatever happened next didn’t matter. Andrew stayed by the railing for a few more minutes, squinting and shielding his eyes, trying to understand what was going on below.
“And there he is,” he said finally. “A big man with a black coat and jeans just walked through the porter’s office... and there he goes into the building. Now I reckon that from the building entrance to the elevator is, what? One minute? And from the elevator up to here could be another minute or two? Which means that I’ve got to get both of you over the railing before he gets to the top, but not before it would be reasonable for him to have feasibly arrived up here in time to do it himself. Otherwise who am I going to blame for your deaths? In any case, I hope to be halfway to Sicily before the cops ever get here. Better safe than sorry, right? Who’s first? Ladies first.”
Andrew squatted down next to Lucy. He picked up the chair she was sitting in, cradling her with one arm beneath the seat, and another on the backrest.
“You’re much lighter than Ludovici or Valentino. Ludovici put up quite a fight, but he went over in the end. Scott would’ve been impossible, but luckily I caught him by surprise. But this, I’m going to enjoy. And, if I may, perhaps I can offer you a final thought for your life, my dear Lucy. Your friends just died – disappeared into nothingness. And the last thing they got to think about, just before leaving the world forever, was the fact that you abandoned them. You let them die, so that you could run off with a bag of money. You’ve always been such a great friend, Lucy.”
The sky that day was extraordinarily blue, and the sun didn’t allow her to see anything else than its blinding rays and the surrounding blueness. Andrew’s words registered, but they didn’t ring true. They became completely meaningless background noise. Lucy focused instead on the last thing she would see. The sky. It was so immense and so peaceful. So incredibly different than the place where she was right now. But it was always there. Always had been there. Why hadn’t she spent more time looking at the sky? Well, at least in this last moment, she was still free to do so.
Andrew, of course, wanted to make things dramatic. He stepped up onto the small tile lip on which the railing was connected to the floor, lifting both himself and Lucy another six inches above the ground, and bringing the top edge of the railing to just below his knees. He held Lucy over the railing, above the ground. A nine-story abyss yawned open beneath her. He leaned back slightly to get his arms underneath Lucy, and then grunted, pushing her up even higher, so he could really hurl her.
And Lucy, paradoxically, rising up higher, felt every muscle in her body relax. Pure abandonment. Whatever had just happened to Brian and Natasha was now going to happen to her too, and that was good enough for her. Everything that could be done, right or wrong, had been done. The only thing left to do, was take one last look at the sky. She hardly even perceived the voice of the Italian model who had just reached the top of the tower, so intense was Lucy’s gaze upon the sky. And then she heard her name.
“Oh, ciao, Lucy. Scusa il ritardo, eh. C’è stato un po’ di traffico. Allora, che famo?... eh... Dio mio! Ma che cavolo state a fà?”186
There was a slight jerk, and the support of Andrew’s hands that had been beneath her gave way. She tumbled downwards into the emptiness beneath her. This was it. The descent into the abyss. The final plunge. It was over much sooner than she thought it would be. She felt a violent slam on the right side of her body, and then... wait... no... a tile floor, and, was that Andrew’s foot she saw disappear over the edge?
In any case, the wind had been knocked out of her. It took her a few empty breaths before her lungs would finally cooperate and allow her to take in fresh air. Her already aching head ached all the more, and the whole right side of her body was just beginning to feel the reverberation of falling straight down onto the hard tile floor, while strapped to a chair, and landing hard on her side. The ringing in her ears barely allowed her to hear the scream of the Italian model who was looking over the railing, eyes fixed on Andrew’s body, nine stories below.
Right in front of Lucy’s face, on the floor of the tower’s terrace, in front of the railing, at the spot where Andrew must have stepped backwards off the lip, distracted by the arrival of the model, there was a roll of duct tape. It was still rocking back and forth, and part of it still had the imprint of the bottom of what must have been Andrew’s shoe.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
L'ESCATON E IL TEMPIO MORMONE
The entire tower became a crime scene, and the parking lot filled up with vehicles. Over the next hours, there were all kinds of very official looking people who took Lucy from one place to the next, asking her questions, stinging her with rubbing alcohol, shining lights in her eyes, twisting her limbs to check for sprains and broken bones, demanding documents and explanations, dealing with a team of Czech and Italian lawyers who had also descended on the crime scene. She gave blank stares to investigators who wanted to know where to track down a long list of names of people who they thought might be involved. She gave blanks stares to a third group of police who explained that everything had not actually happened in Italy, but an extraterritorial Vatican property, thus complicating the whole process even further.
For Lucy, though, it all happened at arms’ length. She had given herself over to being taken from one place to the next, demanded one thing, and then another, poked and prodded. But what did it matter? That is, until, looking over the shoulder of the person in a suit talking at her, on the other side of the parking lot, she saw the police questioning a blonde girl dressed up in way too much winter clothing, an overweight American in Starbucks dress code, and a giant blue bear standing behind them. They were all there, safe and sound.
Her cheeks grew wet again, she stood up, and – knowing she wasn’t allowed to move around the crime scene, but needing to express herself to someone – grabbed onto the U.S. embassy official who had been explaining her rights to her, and squeezed him into a tight bear hug. “They’re alive! They’re alive!”
When Lucy had left with Andrew to pick up the bag of money from the storage locker, I couldn’t fit on the scooter, so I had to stay at the Palazzo. We spent a very strange time in silence. The guy with the arrow moaned about the pain in his gut. The other thug sat on the patio furniture playing a game on his phone. Brian and Natasha breathed through their noses and shot scared looks at each other. When the cousin got the phone call from Andrew with the orders to kill, he stood up, took out his knife, and without saying a word, walked up to Natasha. He removed her scarf and put the knife up to her throat. She was breathing heavily. But then he returned the knife to his pocket and stood there looking puzzled, scratching his chin. He grabbed her head and pushed it to one side like a barber, and began feeling around the side of her neck.
“Hey,” he said to his brother. “If you were looking for someone’s jugular vein, how would you find it?”
“Just find the pulse.”
“Oh right.” He felt all the way up and down Natasha’s neck, until, after much searching, he found the pulse. “Got it!”
He took his knife back out of his pocket, but in doing so, had also lost the location of the pulse.
“Well this is just downright tricky, isn’t it? None of you by chance has a marker or something like that, do you?”
Brian and Natasha both shook their heads.
“And bloody hell, look at the size of your neck,” he said to Brian. “It’s hard enough trying to figure out how to slit this girl’s throat, but how on earth am I supposed to get through all of that? Well, I’m sorry if this is gonna be a bit messy, but I promise I’ll do my best.”
He put the knife back up to Natasha’s throat, and grimaced, like he w
as about to do something he didn’t want to. The door to the servants’ quarters creaked open, and everyone turned. Fr. Damien walked out. He had a red nose, baggy eyes, and was wearing pajamas. He took a new pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and removed the plastic wrapper.
He lit up and asked, “What is happening?”
“Excuse, me, but who are you? You must be that Asian priest Andrew was telling me about.”
“Yes.”
“But you’re not supposed to be here. You’re supposed to be at school right now. You’ve got a very strict schedule, Andrew told us all about it.”
“I am sick.”
“Clearly. Crikey, this makes things much more complicated. I’m really sorry, but I am going to have to tape you to a chair. Do you mind coming over here?” He gestured at an empty patio chair with his knife. “Now, where did we put that duct tape?”
Fr. Damien took a drag of his cigarette, and walked up to the man. “I cannot comply with your request, and I must ask for release of these two.”
The man tried to take a swipe at Fr. Damien with his knife, but somehow his wrist was already in Fr. Damien’s hand. Fr. Damien twisted the man’s wrist in just the right direction and he let out a scream of pain, dropping the knife. With his free arm, the Australian took a swing at Fr. Damien, who had ducked at just the right time, and already had both of his arms around the thug’s midsection. In an amazing display of physics and martial arts, the large man’s feet went flying in the air, and he was, in no time, slammed hard on his back, on the floor, staring up with a blank expression. Fr. Damien put one knee on the man’s gut, removed the string from his own pajamas, and tied his hands together. He stood up, breathed in, and removed the cigarette from his mouth. The shirtless brother, still lying down on the deck chair with the arrow in his gut, stayed lying down, and put his hands in the air.
“What’s this?” Brian set down his coffee on the kitchenette table and picked up a piece of paper that Lucy had just slammed on the table in front of him.
“Read.”
“United Airlines, December 13th, Rome to Chicago, Chicago to Denver, ticket in the name of Lucy Fox. Is this real?”
“Oh lovely,” said Natasha, “You’re going home for Christmas.”
“It’s real. And I don’t know if ‘lovely’ is the first word I’d use to describe it, but yes. I’m going home.”
“Well that’s great,” said Brian. “It’s too bad you won’t be here, though. I just heard from Papa and Beth. They’ll be out here in Rome for Christmas.”
“You win some, you lose some,” said Lucy.
“Oh, speaking of Vacations,” Natasha said. “I got a call from my Dad. He doesn’t want me to come to Moscow this summer, but he’ll be renting a Villa for a couple of weeks in some place called Rimini this August. I guess it’s by the beach and is popular with Russians. Any takers?”
“You mean, do we want to come?” asked Brian.
“Yeah, would you like to come?”
“I’m in,” he said. “Lucy?”
“Why not?” said Lucy. “You said there’ll be Russians for two weeks in a Villa? Maybe we can solve a crime there too.”
“Great. When do you come back from Christmas break?” Natasha asked Lucy.
“Not ’til January 7th.”
“Orthodox Christmas,” said Natasha. “My name day.”
“And you’re really going to spend all that time with your family?” said Brian.
“I have a hunch she’s got ulterior motives,” said Natasha. “You don’t have a ticket for Wisconsin too, do you?”
“And what if I do?” Lucy got up and poured herself a cup of coffee. Brian smirked, and Lucy changed the subject, “I was just walking downstairs to the printer, and I went past Virginia’s room.”
“Yeah?”
“The door was open, and the whole apartment was, like, totally empty. Martina and Elena were just standing there with their arms folded, looking sad. I asked them where Virginia was and they told me she’d just up and disappeared. Gone.”
“That’s the end of an era,” said Natasha. “No more mean girls. How are we going to break in the new students arriving in January?”
“Are you allowed out of the Palazzo today?” Brian asked Lucy.
“The lawyers said no.”
“So are you going out today?”
“I don’t know. We’ll see.”
“Do you need anything from the store,” Natasha asked.
“We’re running low on coffee,” said Lucy.
“Speaking of coffee,” said Brian. “The budget’s looking pretty bad for the rest of the year.”
“Oh, we should talk about that,” said Lucy. She bent down below the sink and took out five kilo-sized bags of store brand coffee beans.
“Oh, that’s awesome,” said Brian. “Where’d that come from?”
She threw them on the table in front of him. The bags made a thud that didn’t sound at all like coffee beans.
“The police did search the servants’ quarters, but I guess not very thoroughly.”
Brian opened one up and removed a wad of cash.
“You didn’t think I was gonna leave all that cash in the storage unit, did you?” asked Lucy.
“Are you kidding me?” Brian leaned back and laughed.
“Good night, Lucy! How much is that?” asked Natasha.
“Only two million Euros. But that’ll keep us good on coffee for at least the rest of the year.”
“So the police said they found two million in the bag,” said Brian. “How much was in there to begin with?”
“The police were right. There were two million in the bag when they found it in Andrew’s motorino,” said Lucy. “If three million happened to wind up at Irene Spiga’s house, and two million somehow slipped its way into that coffee bag... I couldn’t tell you how it got there.”
That afternoon, after three transfers, and an hour and a half of bus time, Alice Kloepfer and Ronald Lindbeck — with blond and red hair and formal business attire — got off the thirty nine near the Grande Raccordo Annulare.
“Where are we? Are you sure it’s here?” asked Lucy.
“Yep,” said Brian.
“Inside the mall? Are you kidding me?”
“Right on the other side.”
They had to trek another half an hour around Rome’s largest and ugliest shopping mall and then another twenty minutes under and around a highway overpass full of weeds and abandoned construction material before arriving at their destination: another construction site.
“And here we are,” said Brian, standing in the weeds on top of an abandoned metal tube, looking over the fence, and trying to imagine what the building behind the scaffolding looked like. “I guess it does kind of look like a temple, doesn’t it?”
“Do you feel at home?”
“A little bit. More so for the shopping mall than the Mormon temple… or well, to be honest, the two don’t look all that different from one another. Unbridled Americanism on both sides of the highway.”
The pair took a lap around the construction site to the visitor’s center, which had already opened.
“How long have they been building this thing?” asked Lucy.
“Seven years,” said Brian.
“Seven years? They built the NAC tower in one. That thing does not look fancy enough to take seven years.”
“Mormons are efficient, but they can’t work with Italians. They don’t allow smoking on the job site… it’s holy ground, I guess. When was the last time you saw an Italian construction worker who doesn’t smoke?”
“Seriously? No smoking? How have they managed to build anything at all?”
Entering the grounds for the visitor center, they left Italy behind, and entered what could have easily been mistaken for any other building in Utah. Two smiling young ladies in shapeless ankle length skirts and name tags stood as sentinels in the reception area to greet them.
“Buon giorno.” They said in perky unison, with hop
elessly thick American accents.
“Hi,” said Brian, extending a reciprocal fake smile and a hand shake to both of them, “Ronald Lindbeck, and this is my colleague Alice Kloepfer.”
“Great to meet you! I’m Sister Smith.”
“And I’m Sister Young.”
“Nice to meet you,” said Lucy, wondering why they were called sisters. Do mormons have nuns now too? Have they come full circle from beginning in polygamy and ending in celibacy?
“What brings you out to the temple construction site?” one of them asked.
“Oh,” said Brian. “We both work for Initech, and we’ve been out in Rome on a business conference for the last couple of days.”
“Wow! Welcome to the city.”
“I’m LDS,” lied Brian, “but Lucy… I mean… Alice grew up unaffiliated with any Church, and we’ve just had some great conversations the last couple days working together in Rome.”
“How exciting.”
“Two things,” said Brian. “We were wondering if we could get a copy of the Book of Mormon for Alice. She’s really interested in reading it. And second, Alice and I have been talking a lot about the importance of family history, and making sure that all of our deceased family members have the same opportunities for Church membership like all of us.”
“Wow!”
“Yeah, so I’ve been trying to help Alice get logged onto Ancestry.com to find out more about her ancestors, but my own log-in doesn’t seem to work here in Italy.”
“Oh, shucks. That’s too bad. I’m sure we could definitely help you out here. I’ve got an admin Log-in that we could use together.”
In no time at all, Lucy was cradling a free copy of the Book of Mormon, and both of them were rushing down a hallway towards a computer. They spent the next half hour on the Mormon run ancestry website looking up the family history of some poor girl named Alice Kloepfer with one of the missionaries smiling over their shoulder and a healthy dose of giddy excitement. A telephone finally called the missionary away, and Lucy and Brian were left to navigate themselves.