Midnight at the Tuscany Hotel

by James Markert

  Beverly was one of the latter. And just as she was about to say something seething to Robert, Johnny Two-Times grabbed her hands and knelt before her on the travertine, apparently deciding that now was the ideal time to propose. Or perhaps he’d been so determined to do so that he thought he’d better get it done before the situation slid further downhill—Beverly looked like she was on the verge of grabbing her grandmother and leaving, and he probably sensed that too. So he not only dropped to one knee; he ignored Vitto’s earlier advice entirely and went down on both, sweating like an overheated mule as he asked for Beverly’s hand in marriage, all while Mrs. Eaves played louder on the piano keys and a trio of liver-spotted men who in the past month had named themselves the Tuscan Tenors started singing along.

  Beverly, instead of crying and saying, “Yes, yes, oh, yes,” as John had probably envisioned, slid her hands out from his and slapped him across the face quicker than a snakebite, to which her grandmother Louise cried, “Beverly, my lands, girl,” and proceeded to give the tubby copper the finger.

  It dawned on Vitto that John had probably asked Beverly’s grandmother for permission to propose and that this had not been the result Louise expected. Perhaps she blamed the officer for messing up what could be a good situation. At any rate, she seemed distinctly put out when Beverly grabbed her arm and hustled her away.

  All got quiet for a few seconds, just in time for everyone to hear young William Gandy’s voice shout from somewhere unseen. “Fire in the hole!”

  Heads tilted upward, eyes peered toward the blue sky as a German-style hand grenade soared over the fountain and the marble Cronus, bouncing to a stop a few feet from Tuffant and the coppers. By the time it rattled still, Tuffant had dived under a nearby bench and Officer Tubby had pulled his pistol, firing aimlessly. The bullet ricocheted off the church bell in the southwestern corner of the hotel, pinging loud enough to make everyone duck a second time—the first had been when the gun went off—before it whistled back toward the piazza, causing the crowd to duck a third time just as the bullet burrowed into Juba’s right arm.

  Officer Tubby got to his feet with a grunt and wiped nervous sweat from his reddened forehead. “Everybody okay?”

  And then Juba dropped to the piazza’s stones with a thud.

  Everyone gasped.

  Robert was the first to his side. Vitto was second, realizing when he got there that Juba had somehow known the bullet was heading right for Robert and had decided to protect him.

  “One last time,” Juba whispered, and then closed his eyes.

  Twenty

  March 1884

  Pienza, Italy

  “He loves me, and I love him.”

  Saying the words aloud, even if whispered in the dark confines of her bedroom, proved even more powerful than reading them from the last page of her journal, the one Lippi knew nothing about. As impossible as it seemed to fall in love with someone unremembered each sunrise, Magdalena knew she had managed it. How else to explain the smile every morning upon opening her eyes, when she had no other earthly reason to do so?

  Now, as she lay beneath the blanket, her tears flowed, even fresher than the bruises he’d given her an hour ago, spitting on her as he screamed, her crawling back on her elbows, he straddle-walking above, aware of her deceit and dishonesty. The citizens of Pienza had seen her on numerous occasions strolling about town during the day, and someone had reported to Lippi. As much as she tried, she could not hide her hair.

  He wept when he first saw it.

  “Who is he?” Lippi had demanded.

  “Who is who, Francesco?”

  “Some say they’ve seen you speaking with a man.” He’d sat on her midsection so she couldn’t move, pinning her with his bony knees squeezing against her rib cage. “The one who shows off in the piazza daily, carving his own statue of David. The tall American with the long hair and blue eyes.” His nasally voice grew strained as he raised it. “And they’re calling you his muse!”

  She’d had no answer; there was so much she couldn’t remember, so much that had melded together until very little made sense.

  “Should I keep you chained?”

  “No, Francesco.”

  “Francesco who?”

  “Francesco Lippi.”

  “Francesco Lippi who?”

  “Francesco Lippi the Great.”

  The pressure his knees had been applying eased, but only somewhat. Since he’d adopted her at age nine, his paintings had become well-known throughout Tuscany, and the commissions and sales had increased yearly until he’d become a very wealthy man, a successful painter in a region so full of artists, historical and present, that it was nearly impossible to stand out.

  “Whose muse are you, Magdalena?”

  “Yours.”

  “Louder.”

  “Yours.”

  “Mine and mine alone,” he said, his voice easing along with his insecurities. “You’re an orphan of the wheel, Magdalena. Unwanted. Abandoned. Unloved.”

  “Lies.” It had come out before she could stop it.

  He slapped her across the face. If a bruise formed there, he would make her stand the opposite way while he painted so that he couldn’t see it. “What have you done with this man? This American who dares to compare himself to the masters?”

  “Nothing. I don’t know who he is.”

  “Of course you don’t.” He stood, wavered. He’d already finished a bottle of wine but now shuffled across to the kitchen to open another. Lank hair askew, he drank from it, watched her on the floor with hateful eyes of black. “I’ll deal with the American in the morning.”

  “How?” she whispered.

  “Like any man deals with a nuisance. A rat. He kills it.”

  He wouldn’t.

  Upon seeing the bruises on her arms earlier in the day, Robert had nearly gone mad, seething, hissing that he’d kill this man Lippi with his bare hands. She had no doubt that he could, and would. He was well-muscled, with hands stronger than the stone he chipped into daily. Magdalena was nowhere near strong enough to stop Robert, though she’d tried to do so with her words.

  “No, Robert.”

  “We’ll run away then. Tonight. Under the cloak of darkness.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not, Maggie? You’re not his slave. He adopted you—that doesn’t mean he owns you.”

  No, he doesn’t, Magdalena thought now as dusk bled to night, trembling under the bedcovers as if cold, clinging hard to the memory of Robert gripping her shoulders in the afternoon, staring into her eyes as if they were portals to her soul.

  I’m seventeen years old, a woman grown. Sneaking out had not increased her monthly blood the way Lippi had warned. More lies. She reached again to her fading memory of the afternoon—Robert telling her of the news he’d learned the night before. He’d been investigating the disappearance of her old friend at the Hospital of the Innocents, Nurse Pratesi, who for years had pestered Francesco Lippi for his treatment of her Magdalena until the nurse, months before, had disappeared altogether. Lippi had told her she moved away—to Venice, he’d said when she insisted on knowing. He’d stalled in his answer to conjure another lie. According to Robert, the nurse’s body had washed up weeks ago on the banks of the Arno.

  “He’s a thug and a crook, Maggie, and he’s surrounded by thugs and thieves. Come with me tonight. I’ll be waiting here . . . at exactly midnight.”

  Magdalena flung the covers from her trembling body and steadied her feet on the floor. You can do this, Magdalena. Both Robert’s voice and her own. Do it before you have to start all over again in the morning. From the bedpost hung a cotton satchel in which Lippi used to carry his paints and brushes when he was unknown; she vaguely remembered grabbing it from a closet earlier in the day with the purpose of storing her belongings when she fled. Now she filled it with clothes, shoes, a brush, her journal and pencil, and finally the round wall clock Nurse Pratesi had given her the day Lippi had taken her from the orphanage. Tears we
lled; if what Robert had heard was true, the woman she once called Mamma was dead, possibly even murdered by the man now passed out drunk in the neighboring room.

  She opened the bedroom door and walked quietly into the hall. A red candle burned in the kitchen, wax dripping like fresh blood onto the lip of the brass holder. Lippi was no longer snoring. A stubby hallway off the kitchen gave access to his studio, and Lippi was visible from where she stood. His eyes were open, watching her.

  “Magdalena . . . bring me my wine,” he slurred, slouching in his wooden painter’s chair, the easel shielding the left side of his face. His hair was a mess, his right eye reddened from too much drink. His shirt was untucked, his belt unlaced.

  She closed her eyes, hard, pushing back a sudden memory wanting to come up. She swallowed, opened her eyes, and faced him, each peering at the other down the short hallway, where a bag of onions, peppers, and garlic hung on the wall and a wheel of cheese rested on a small table next to a jar of olive oil.

  “Magdalena . . . bring me my wine.”

  Run. He’s too slow and drunk to catch you. Run, Magdalena.

  Instead, she discreetly placed her satchel on the counter and grabbed the bottle, clutching the throat as one would a hammer. She shuffled toward the hallway, paused when she saw the bone-handled knife beside the wash basin, the blade curved and sharp but marked with apple remnants yet to be washed clean.

  His nasally voice grew louder. “Magdalena . . . bring me my wine.”

  And so she did.

  * * *

  Magdalena stumbled through the narrow streets and alleyways of Pienza.

  Tears dripped cold down her cheeks as she navigated through moving shadows and dips in the cobbles. She braced herself on buildings of brick and stone that soared high enough to blot out the moon when she needed it the most.

  As her memory faded, she moved on instinct. Her heart pounded. Her hands were wet, covered in red. Sticky red. Congealed red. She smelled smoke, then saw it rising from atop a stone building behind her, blocks away. From where I’ve come? Black, acrid smoke turned the night darker. People left their homes, moving toward the source just as Magdalena ran away from it.

  A woman screamed. Once, twice—so shrill. Magdalena moved now with her hands over her ears, but the screams still penetrated. She’d made it to the piazza. Moonlight blinked. More people hurried from doors and migrated toward the smoke and a new sound—the crackle and roar of a true fire.

  “Maggie.”

  That’s what he called me. Robert. Yes, that’s his name. Robert.

  “I love him, and he loves me,” she whispered.

  He emerged from the shadows and ushered her away from the increasing commotion. “Maggie, there’s blood on your hands.” Even in the darkness, his eyes shone as blue as the cobalt of his cloak. “And on your neck. Did he hurt you? Are you hurt?”

  She shook her head no but couldn’t remember. She didn’t feel hurt, only confused and tired and oddly free—as if something deeply buried in her had been released. Across the piazza, his statue of David towered, finished now, left as a gift to the town where he’d finally found his muse after years of searching.

  Whistles trilled, echoed down the alleyways. Flames grew, and a pocket of Pienza now glowed orange and bright. Robert protected her, concealed her, made sure the hood covered her hair as they sneaked away together into the dark, through streets she should know but didn’t. His words were jumbled in her mind; she’d lost all sense of direction. They were walking downhill now, to where the valleys and hills spread out like a Francesco Lippi landscape painting.

  Fragments of memory filtered through—Robert’s words, his plan: get to Florence, and then to the Arno River, and on to Pisa, where he had passage to the sea. She watched the ground as they walked, ran, hurried, waited, down the hillside, waiting again. Not simply running away anymore, but fleeing for their lives. What have I done? Cobbles and stone turned to grass and mud. She heard moving water and current, lapping against wooden docks, but when she looked around she saw no river. Memories of sound from another time. Why are we turning around?

  “Keep your head down, Magdalena.”

  What do you mean we’ve been spotted? He knew? Lippi—he knew? He’d had Robert watched. Why is there blood on my hands?

  “There she is,” a man called.

  A crowd moved toward them from the hillside, a cluster of toughs and roughnecks paid to guard the outskirts of the town. More running, back up the hillside, back into Pienza, more turns and tight streets, down an alleyway so narrow he had to sidestep. Her heart raced as she followed him, confused and lost but aware enough to know she was in good hands. Safe, even.

  They left the alley, found themselves in a small open area surrounded by more brick and stone. The mob closed in. Black smoke swallowed the moon. And then from the shadows came a man dressed in a cotton shirt stained by too many hot summers, brown trousers cinched above muscular calves, worn leather sandals twisted around massive feet, his skin dark as molasses, brown eyes alert.

  “Follow me.”

  “Who are you?” asked Robert.

  “No time for questions,” he said, voice deep.

  A memory emerged—she’d written of him in her journal. He sang daily in the piazza, with a basso voice so deep her heart thrummed. She had wondered if this same man, years ago and a boy himself, had saved her from the mob of people in Florence when she’d wandered away from Francesco Lippi.

  He led them through more darkened alleys and narrow streets, through a church of candles and incense and marble statues and stained glass, where praying clerics lifted bowed heads and paused in their whispered Latin to follow their escape. Unlike her and Robert’s frantic movements before his sudden arrival, his escape was fluid, like water sluicing through channels and viaducts. He knew the terrain like the back of his hand.

  They moved out a wooden door and back into the night, the smoke and flames behind them now. They passed through a heavy gate, burst through a cluster of trees, down another slope into a valley, where a carriage and two horses awaited. The man opened the door and ushered them inside. He got in with them, slammed the door, and knocked twice on the roof. The driver clucked to the horses and they pulled away, clip-clopping, the carriage lurching over the uneven terrain.

  Magdalena nestled close to Robert, who grabbed both of her hands, kissing her knuckles, the dried blood on them. The dark-skinned man sat across from them, watching as if he’d known them for years instead of minutes.

  He finally spoke. “My name is Juba.”

  “I’m Robert. Robert Gandy. And this is—”

  “I know who she is,” Juba said with the hint of a grin. “I’ve been watching over her since before we were all born.”

  * * *

  The Tyrrhenian Sea was choppy, but the night had given birth to warm sunshine and a picture of freedom.

  The man Juba had proven true to his word. The fishing boat he’d promised had been waiting for them on the shore of the Paglia River, which carried them to the Tiber and on to Rome, where a group of men and women Juba called friends had done exactly as he’d said they would—first hiding them and then, come sunrise, securing them passage on a boat with massive sails. He said it would carry them south past Naples and Pompeii to Sicily, where he promised an even larger ship that would take them far away.

  For now, Robert soaked in the sun’s rays and clutched Magdalena to his side, the top of her head resting in the crook of his shoulder. Her long hair fluttered against his neck. In Rome, the crusted blood had not been easy to remove from her hands and arms and neck and forehead, so he’d helped her scrub into the basin, trying to be as gentle as he could, until finally she’d insisted on doing it alone, scrubbing furiously until her skin turned pink and then red and tears formed in her eyes as if she were battling the memories of what had happened back in that house. He didn’t ask, and truthfully didn’t want to know; the searing flames, even though he’d seen and felt them from a distance, were still etched vi
vidly in his mind.

  With the bloodstains finally gone—proving, indeed, that none of the blood had been hers—she’d spoken stoically, without looking at Robert, choosing instead to stare at the cold brick wall above the water basin. “I’m free.”

  What had that man done to her? The beating and the mental abuse were evident, but Robert feared more. Feared the worst, and in her smile as she stared out across the choppy sea, he realized it as truth. If she’d killed the man, he hoped he’d suffered.

  The longer Magdalena watched the sea, the more it calmed, as if from some mystic command. The waves settled. The ship no longer rocked. Sunlight shimmered off the low ripples—to Robert, in various shades of gray and white—and a sense of peace overwhelmed him. He couldn’t explain it, but he sensed it had everything to do with the water, with the power held inside every wave, every lap and gurgle and spray of mist.

  Like the water back home, the water he’d found bubbling from the ground months ago, in California.

  Fearing for her mental well-being, for their future, he hugged Magdalena tight. How can she remember bits of memory from centuries ago, but nothing from the here and now? Who stole your memory, love? And now he’d taken her from the only land she knew—a land that had surrounded her with beauty even when its residents brought her pain. She might not remember it, but he knew she would miss those hills, those cobbled piazzas, those blowing poppy fields and art-lined streets, with an ache deeper than memory. Though he barely knew her, he knew this with a certainty that surprised him.

  “I will bring Tuscany to you, Magdalena,” he whispered, kissing the top of her head, kissing that orange hair that was nearly so bright it made him squint. He told her about the land on the southern coast of California, the land he’d first seen in his dreams and had recently found. He told her about the Renaissance hotel he planned to build on it. “It will be unlike anything ever seen.”