Turn to Stone

by James W. Ziskin

  “Will you be at the house with the others this weekend in Fiesole?” I asked.

  “Afraid not. Max and I are leaving for Lugano on the train tonight. Lugano’s in Switzerland,” she added.

  “Is it?” I asked. “Still?”

  “Yes, Switzerland.”

  “I see. And who’s Max?”

  “Max is Massimiliano Locanda,” she said. “We’re . . . insieme, as the Italians say. That means together.”

  “Sounds wonderful. And Max owns the house in Fiesole?”

  She nodded.

  I was about to interrogate her about this Max Locanda, but just then Franco called out to a girl in the piazza, the pretty one who’d left the previous night’s dinner at Trattoria Cammillo, Giuliana. Franco appropriated another chair from a neighboring table, and introduced the newcomer— whom Vicky welcomed as one might a sneeze on the neck—as Giuliana Pincherle, a student at the university.

  “She will join us at the villa this weekend,” he said. Vicky seemed miles away. In Lugano, Switzerland, perhaps.

  Ever the gentleman—or perhaps he didn’t actually remember the night before—Franco re-introduced me to Giuliana, adding that she was ebrea (a Jewess) as was I. That earned him a glare from me and a frown from Giuliana.

  As I might have predicted, Tato was not far off. Looking unabashed, he materialized not two minutes after Giuliana’s arrival.

  The table was filling up fast with young people, which torpedoed my plans for a quiet hour alone with my thoughts. The crowd made Teresa uncomfortable. She rose from her chair and, clutching her purse tight, announced in her little voice that she was late and had to leave. I followed her out of the café to say goodbye.

  “Is there some way I can reach you?” I asked.

  She said she’d be staying at Bondinelli’s as usual. That was her home. “And Signorina Mariangela is coming home for the funeral.”

  “Is that his daughter’s name? Mariangela?”

  She nodded then made a face and waved her hands at me, as if to ward off any more questions. I comforted her as best I could, putting an arm around her heaving shoulders as she sobbed. A few curious tourists stopped to gawk, and I indicated my annoyance at their staring with a scowl. They moved on. At length, having blown her nose lustily into the handkerchief I’d lent her earlier, Teresa composed herself and offered it back to me. I decided to make a gift of it to her.

  Back at the table, I found that Lucio Bevilacqua had arrived and made himself at home in my seat. Brandishing a playful grin, he patted his knee, enticing me to sit. I feigned distraction and ignored the invitation, even though it left me standing in the piazza, just off the Cavallo’s patio, next to Franco Sannino.

  “She’s Locanda’s mistress,” he whispered to me in Italian, referring to the pretty brunette who was trying to ignore everyone by reading her copy of the Herald Tribune.

  “Who is this Locanda anyway?” I asked.

  “I’ll tell you later. She might overhear.”

  I squeezed past Giuliana and Tato, sidestepped Lucio, and insinuated myself in the tiny space next to Vicky.

  “Hi, again,” I said, interrupting her reading. “I’m Ellie.”

  “I know. I just met you.”

  “Right. So where are you from?”

  “New York. Rhinecliff.” She didn’t ask me the same.

  “So tell me about your boyfriend, Max.”

  She glared at me. “He’s not my boyfriend. Men like Max don’t have girlfriends.”

  “What do they have?”

  “Why are you asking me this?”

  “Sorry. Just trying to make a new friend.”

  Vicky leaned in and lowered her voice. “Look, Ellie. You seem nice. I’m sure under different circumstances we might be friends. But, honestly, we’re never going to see each other again once I finish my glass of water. I’m off to Lugano with Max, and you’ve probably got a tour bus to catch for Rome or Venice or wherever is next on your itinerary. No offense, but we run in different circles.”

  If I was mortally offended—and I was—I didn’t let on. “Of course you’re right,” I said. “I was just curious about handsome Italian men. Max sounds fascinating.”

  “We’re lovers,” she said. “Does that scandalize you? If so, I’m sorry. Americans are so provincial when it comes to sex.”

  “It’s okay. I’m from New York. The city. Manhattan. Not the provinces.”

  Vicky studied me for a long moment, a smile curling on her painted lips. At length, she must have accepted me as a sister in crime. “Max is at the villa taking care of some business before we leave for Lugano,” she said.

  “Switzerland, right?” Why was I such a wiseacre?

  “I came to town for my Italian lesson. I don’t see the point, but Max insists. And he’s paying for it.”

  “So is Max an old friend of Alberto’s?”

  “I suppose. To tell you the truth, I don’t even remember meeting him.” She indicated Franco with a dismissive nod in his direction. “That guy says I did, but I don’t have the faintest recollection.”

  “Alberto never visited Max?”

  “He might have. I don’t know. He never talked about him to me.”

  Why was I quizzing this woman about Bondinelli and his friend Max? I was in Florence on my own time and shouldn’t have been worrying about tracking down stories and interviewing witnesses. Still, a man had died. And of unnatural causes. Surely he’d fallen into the river accidentally. Who would want to shove an egghead professor into the Arno? And why? Or had it been a robbery gone wrong? The legions of know-it-alls who’d told me not to drink the water had also warned me about pinchers and pickpockets and kidnappers and gypsies. “Be careful! Safe travels! Keep your eyes peeled!” I’d heard it all. Were there not murders and robberies in the US? Was dying in my own country somehow more palatable than getting bumped off abroad?

  This was silly. Vicky was so wrapped up in her own concerns she couldn’t even remember having met a tall, horse-faced friend of her lover’s not ten days before. I doubted she could tell me anything to cast light on the death of Alberto Bondinelli. She was right; we’d surely never see each other again.

  I spotted Bernie staring longingly at our crowded table from about ten yards away in the piazza. He looked like a window-shopper with empty pockets. Despite his concentration, he didn’t see or hear me calling to him, so I stepped off the terrazza and corralled him, dragging him back to join the rest of us. Vicky consulted her watch and announced she was running late. I said goodbye. She waved and left.

  “Who was that?” asked Bernie, practically drooling on my shoulder as he watched her go.

  “A geography professor,” I said.

  “Really?”

  “No. And quit staring at her behind, you pig. Yes, she’s very pretty. And taken. Locanda’s lover.”

  “Locanda? The guy with the villa? Bondinelli’s friend?”

  “The very one.”

  “Too bad I wasn’t invited for the weekend in the country,” he mused.

  “I can arrange it. But she won’t be there. Locanda’s whisking her off to Lugano.” I paused. “That’s in Switzerland.”

  Bernie gaped at me. I waved off his bewilderment just as Veronica appeared. She shimmered in and out of view like a specter. Perhaps it was because she was so quiet. Or maybe her shyness amounted to camouflage. Whatever the explanation, her sudden manifestations unsettled you the way a wet finger in your ear did. Startling and unpleasant at the same time.

  With Vicky gone, I quizzed the rest of my companions about Locanda. Of course I had no reason to dig other than my native curiosity. But these people had invaded my private afternoon, so I felt some payment in return was my due. Lucio shrugged, Tato shook his head, and Veronica had already told me she’d never met him. Bernie certainly had no information about Bondinelli’s friend. Franco had met him that one time ten days earlier, but he was hard-pressed even to provide a physical description. I was sure he could guess Vicky’s measur
ements to the centimeter, but Locanda? Niente.

  Moving on, I mentioned it was almost two and asked half-jokingly if anyone was intending to return to the symposium. There were embarrassed looks all around. The event had been organized by their friend and mentor to honor my father, after all, and no one—not even I— seemed to think it worth the few hours necessary to see it through to its conclusion. Everyone agreed that it was only proper to head back over to the university for the remainder of the conference. We settled the bill, doing the math and exchanging banknotes of frighteningly high denominations. A chorus of “andiamo”s followed, but in typical Italian fashion, it wasn’t until ten minutes later that the group finally set out across the piazza.

  I waited for Bernie on the terrace of the café. He’d run inside to use the WC, and I was left to amuse myself by monkeying with the aperture settings on my Leica. Then I heard a voice in my left ear.

  “I met him.” I reeled around to find Giuliana standing there.

  “Prego?”

  “I met him,” she repeated. “Locanda. I didn’t want to say anything with the others here.”

  “Why not?”

  She made a pouty face but didn’t answer. She was a moody one. I asked her where she’d met him.

  “He was with Bondinelli. At Trattoria Sostanza near Santa Maria Novella.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Why do you want to know about him anyway? Do you think he pushed Bondinelli into the Arno?”

  “Of course not,” I said. “It’s just that I’ve heard his name a couple of times, and no one seems to know him. Tell me about when you met him.”

  “They were together. Having dinner. That’s all.”

  “Did you speak to him?”

  She nodded, then she averted her eyes and gazed across the piazza as she spoke, as if she was looking for someone. “Sostanza’s a tiny place. I was with my friend Filippo. Bondinelli spotted me. He called me over to his table.”

  “Go on,” I said when she paused.

  “Niente. He chatted about my upcoming exams, the weather, and I introduced him to Filippo. Then his companion—Locanda—said hello.”

  “When was this?”

  “In the spring. March or April.”

  “And did he say anything to you?”

  “Just hello, pleased to meet you. That kind of thing. Shook my hand. But he held on for a long moment. You know how it is when men do that. They won’t let go. They think it’s funny. He winked at me while Bondinelli and Filippo were talking.”

  “Anything else?”

  “When Bondinelli said goodbye, I swear to you, Locanda turned white.”

  “Why? What happened?”

  A bitter smirk crossed her lips. “Bondinelli called me by my name, Signorina Pincherle.”

  “E allora?”

  “Allora, he understood I was Jewish and he reacted the way all fascists do.”

  Giuliana’s face froze as she looked over my shoulder. I turned to see Bernie sauntering our way.

  “Ready to go?” he asked.

  “Just a sec. I’m talking with Giuliana.”

  “She’s gone,” he said, his eyes following her as she disappeared into a crowd of tourists.

  “Damn it. She was telling me about Locanda. Then you had to scare her off. She’s like a deer, that one.”

  “Come on, let’s go. I really want to hear the three o’clock paper. ‘Dante, Thomas Aquinas, and the Medieval Christian Theologians.’”

  “Wouldn’t want to miss that,” I grumbled.

  “Right up my alley,” he continued. “You know who else they’ll be talking about?”

  “I don’t know, Bernie. Albertus Magnus?”

  “No, not Alber—. Well, yes, as a matter of fact, there’ll certainly be talk of Albertus Magnus. But I was referring to your father. His first book, The Twelve Lights, was a major work and an important contribution to the field of study. Surely you’ve read it.”

  “Many years ago,” I lied. “I don’t remember it as well as you do.”

  “Of course you do. The Sphere of the Sun? In Dante’s Paradiso? Your father’s book is a masterpiece.”

  I shrugged an apology at him.

  “Then you’re in for a treat. Sit beside me at the lecture. Afterward I want to hear your thoughts on Aquinas’s recounting of the life of St. Francis. That was my favorite chapter in his book.”

  “Let’s go, Bernie,” I said, reaching for my purse on the table. Then I stopped.

  “What’s wrong?”

  I frowned. Then I crouched and searched the ground around the table. “It’s not here,” I said.

  “What’s not here?”

  “One of them took it. One of them stole my letter.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “Who would take the letter?” asked Bernie once I’d explained and re-explained the sequence of events, from Teresa’s arrival to her giving me the envelope to its disappearance.

  “It had to have been one of the people at the table.”

  “That’s fantastic, El. Are you sure it wasn’t the waiter? Or the wind?”

  “Do you feel any wind, Bernie?” The air was, in fact, quite still that day. And roaring hot. “No, it must have been one of them. Let’s see, Franco was the first to show up. Then Locanda’s girlfriend, Vicky. She was sitting right there at the table reading her newspaper. She could have slipped it inside with no one the wiser. Or Lucio. He even sat in my chair.”

  “But why?” asked Bernie. “Do you suppose there was something important in the letter? Money?”

  “I doubt that. But you know, there was one strange thing about the envelope. Bondinelli had written ‘to be opened after the symposium.’” Bernie pronounced himself stumped, but suggested we confront everyone who’d been present. I wasn’t convinced, but said I’d think on it. Maybe I should change my plans again and go to the country house for the weekend after all. The same folks would be there. But as Bernie and I set off for the university, I asked myself if I truly wanted to spend more time with those people. That one of them would steal a letter addressed to me was unsettling enough, but what struck me as even more troubling was why one would want it in the first place.

  While the opening ceremonies had taken place in the Sala dei Cinquecento, the symposium itself was scheduled for the Aula Magna del Rettorato at the University of Florence. Located in Piazza San Marco, just a fifteen minute stroll from the Palazzo Vecchio, the Aula Magna was a cavernous room with a coffered ceiling at least forty feet high, hanging banners and tapestries, and four glowing chandeliers.

  The afternoon session was well underway when Bernie and I crept inside and took seats near the door. For the purposes of the conference, about one hundred and fifty folding wooden chairs had been pressed into service to accommodate the audience, which numbered perhaps fifty or sixty souls. A long conference table with microphones had been placed at the end of the room opposite the entrance. There, three tired-looking men and one ignored middle-aged woman at the far-right end listened as a young man read his paper. The audience was, at turns, yawning, doodling into their composition books, and examining their fingernails.

  “What’s he going on about?” I whispered to Bernie. My Italian, though much improved and a subject of new pride for me, was not up to deciphering recondite scholarly treatises, at least not when the ushers had seated me in the middle of the third act.

  “Epistolary tradition in medieval literature.”

  “What’s that got to do with my father’s work?”

  “Nothing.”

  An elderly gentleman in the next row reeled around in his seat and aimed a reproachful glare at us. We maintained silence for the last twenty minutes of the young man’s talk, though I may have wheezed a snore or two through my nose when I dozed off briefly. My body’s clock was still out of kilter after my transatlantic flight.

  The afternoon session consisted of a string of one academic after another pronouncing even more potent sleep incantations, some in Italian, some in
French, and some in English. I nodded off once or twice more. At about half past four—I consulted my watch for at least the tenth time— Franco Sannino was wrapping up the proceedings with a valedictory oration written by Bondinelli, of course, and a thankyou to all who’d participated and helped organize the symposium. In closing, he invited the same old priest from that morning to deliver the benediction.

  I made for the exit before Bernie could ask for my thoughts on The Twelve Lights, and returned to the hotel via the Ponte Vecchio. I was hardly paying attention, just wanting to get behind a closed door and be alone for a few minutes before the scheduled reception at the hotel. Sometimes it’s that way; you simply need some time by yourself without anyone looking at you or wanting to discuss medieval theology and your past, imperfect father.

  So as I rushed over the crest of the bridge, I failed to notice the man in the doorway of a leather goods shop. He stepped out, and I bounced off him like a pinball. As my father had taught me to do, I offered a proper apology in Italian —Mi scusi. Then I recognized him. The very same deviant who’d propositioned me two days before, practically in the same spot. He asked if I was lost. I didn’t stick around to answer him, but made a beeline for Borgo San Jacopo on the Oltrarno side of the bridge.

  He followed me at a discreet distance, without haste but purposefully, forcing me to take evasive action. I didn’t want to lead him to my hotel, so I continued past Via de’ Bardi and the Chiesa di Santa Felicita, a church my father had dragged me to see some seventeen years earlier. Something about a chapel designed by Brunelleschi and an important painting by Pontormo, he’d explained. Not the moment to worry about that. I crossed Via de’ Guicciardini and slipped into a side street. Picking up my pace, I turned right—back north—onto Via dei Ramaglianti, temporarily losing my pursuer, then regained Borgo San Jacopo. There, a municipal policeman was watching a pair of foreign girls window-shop along the street. I approached him at a run and explained breathlessly that I was being followed by a strange man. Pointing back up Via dei Ramaglianti, I directed the officer’s attention to my wormlike fellow about fifty yards away. But upon spying the cop, he turned the corner and disappeared into another side street.