by Mailie Meloy
“I have to go see my parents,” Janie said. “Will you keep looking for Benjamin?”
Vili nodded and hailed her a taxi. On the way to Cinecittà, she passed a car with its hood crumpled against a stone wall. She imagined a ghost in the passenger seat, beginning a conversation with the terrified driver. She looked out the back window of the taxi to see if anyone had been hurt, but it was impossible to tell.
• • •
At the movie studio, Janie gave her parents’ names to the receptionist in the gatehouse, who told her that a boy had just arrived to see them.
“Benjamin Burrows?” she said, excited.
The receptionist shook her head, confused. “No. Another boy.”
Janie made her way back toward the building where her parents worked. At least there were no ghosts here on the outskirts of the city.
Then she saw the boy. He wore a tweed jacket, and looked lost among the soundstages, with a rolled magazine in his hand. His dark blond hair flopped over his eyebrows, and he was taller than Janie. But there was no mistaking him. He was healthy and handsome now, but the face of the mischievous, underfed pickpocket was still there if you knew how to look for it.
“Pip!” she cried. She ran to hug him and he lifted her off the ground, then set her down.
“I had to read about your parents’ movie in a gossip rag!” he said, brandishing the magazine, Picturegoer, which had a photo of Marilyn Monroe on the cover.
“Seriously?” She remembered Vili talking about the film news. Had he planted an article there?
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Pip asked.
“It all happened too fast,” she said. “But I’m so glad you’re here.”
He waved the magazine. “D’you know they’ve got Clifford Kent starring in this film? He’s terrible!”
“I think the whole movie might be terrible, honestly,” she said. “But it doesn’t matter. I have so much to tell you. Come see my parents. You’re going to be the perfect distraction.”
In a windowless office with the door open, they found her father hunched over a typewriter, her mother pacing the room with her hair piled up on her head. “I think we need another moment there,” her mother was saying. “The chaperone gives in too easily.”
“Sorry to interrupt,” Janie said, knocking on the open door.
Her mother’s face brightened, then clouded with confusion. “Oh,” she said. “I thought you’d found Benjamin.”
“I did,” Janie said. “But look who else I found. It’s Pip!”
Her parents stared at him, puzzled.
“The kid from Robin Hood!” her father finally said.
“And my friend!” Janie said.
“Sorry, you’re so out of context, Pip,” her mother said. “And you’ve grown up so much!”
“I read about you in the film news,” Pip said, with an appealing shyness, holding up the rolled Picturegoer.
“No kidding!” her father said, standing and swiping the magazine.
“I just wanted to check in,” Janie said. “We actually have to go.”
“Already?” Pip said. “Do you know how hard it was to get in here?”
Janie shot him a meaningful look. “But we have some more locations to scout.”
“Oh, good, which ones?” her mother asked, while her father flipped through Picturegoer, looking for his own name.
“Um—the Borghese gardens,” Janie said. “And . . . that statue you put your hand in to test if you’re lying. Maybe the Colosseum.” She sounded suspicious even to herself.
But her mother wasn’t listening—she was staring at Pip. Then she turned to Janie’s father. “Is the girl still here? I’d like to see them together.”
“You know we don’t get casting approval,” he said.
“Just to see it,” her mother said. “Humor me. Something might fall on Clifford Kent’s head.”
“We should be so lucky,” her father said.
Her mother ran out of the room and down the hall.
“What girl is she talking about?” Janie asked.
“She’s an unknown, but wait’ll you see her,” her father said.
“Is she Swedish, like the princess?”
“I think half,” her father said. “She has hair like corn silk.”
Her mother returned with an actress in tow. “This is Evie,” she said. “Our princess.”
Janie heard Pip, beside her, catch his breath.
“So happy to meet you,” the girl said, smiling.
Her skin seemed to be lit from within, golden and dewy. Her eyes were amber, and her hair was much nicer than corn silk. It fell in a single platinum curve to her collarbone, so smooth and shiny that Janie wanted to tug her own hair down into submission. She hadn’t even combed it, after sleeping on the balcony. She made her hands into fists so she wouldn’t reach up, and felt impossibly scruffy.
“Evie was raised in a convent, and speaks five languages without accent,” her father said.
“The press is going to love that,” her mother said.
“Five languages?” Pip said. “I barely speak one!”
Evie’s laugh was like a wind chime, and Janie thought how irritating wind chimes could be.
“Now, look at them together,” her mother said, putting Pip and Evie next to each other, shoulder to shoulder. They looked like figures on a wedding cake. Janie found it oddly nauseating.
“It’s good,” her father admitted. “It makes me think they should end up together, in the script.”
“No!” her mother said. “It has to be bittersweet at the end.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “People like a happy ending.”
“Well, we’re stuck with Clifford Kent, so it doesn’t matter,” her mother said. “I just wanted to see that.”
“Cliff the stiff!” her father moaned. “He’s not worthy of her!”
Janie watched Evie blush and smile through all this, and she felt very confused. Even if she hadn’t grown up in Hollywood around preternaturally attractive actors, high school would still have taught her that there would always be someone prettier than she was, just as there would always be someone smarter and taller and better at chess. So what had happened to her calm acceptance of that incontrovertible fact? Was she jealous? She seemed to be jealous. Her father liked to point out that “jealous” and “envious” were not interchangeable words. You were envious of something you didn’t have, and jealous of something you did have, and wanted to keep. Janie was envious of Evie’s looks—anyone would be. But she was also jealous that Pip and her parents seemed so taken with her.
While Benjamin was missing! And Jin Lo was chasing a nuclear weapon! And Rome was full of ghosts! So why should this girl’s beauty matter to her, let alone be so painful?
“We have to go,” Janie said.
“Meet us for dinner at Angelo’s,” her father said. “I want a full report on your day.”
“I think I’ll just stay here,” Pip said, gazing at Evie.
“No, I really need your help,” Janie said, taking his arm.
Pip let himself be led out of the building, but he wasn’t happy about it. “Why do you need me for location scouting?” he asked. “I’m not a location scout! I have to go find Clifford Kent and drop something on his head!”
“We have bigger problems,” Janie said, leading him toward the studio gate.
“Bigger?” he said. “Did you see that girl? I have to be in that movie!”
Janie searched for any sign of a cab. The street was deserted except for a paper bag blowing along the wall. Taxis didn’t prowl out here, so far from the things tourists went to. “We’ll never find a taxi,” she said.
But then one veered around the corner, black with a wide green stripe on the side, as if she’d summoned it. She waved and the taxi stopped, right out
side the studio gate.
“Amazing,” Pip said.
The rear door opened and Primo leaped out, gesturing wildly for them to get into the car. “L’ho trovato!” he cried.
“Benjamin?” Janie said. “Where?”
Primo grabbed her hand and pulled her into the taxi. Pip climbed in after her, and the taxi pulled away from the curb.
“Dov’è Benjamin?” she asked.
“In prigione,” Primo said.
The taxi braked hard. Janie was thrown forward, and caught herself against the front seat with her hands. A pedestrian, nearly flattened, shouted abuse at the driver. The driver shouted back.
“Benjamin’s in prison?” she asked.
But Primo had already leaned forward to urge the driver on with a string of invective.
“Are you guys ever not in trouble?” Pip asked.
“Not really,” Janie said, her stomach knotted with worry.
“And who’s the kid?”
“Vili found him on the street. He’s been very helpful finding people. His name is Primo.”
The two boys reached across her to shake hands. Pip looked the kid over: shabby clothes, crooked grin, head shaved against lice.
“Oh, I get it,” he said, a little sadly. “He’s the new me!”
Chapter 40
The Visitation
Jin Lo and Ned Maddox made their way up the canal, but it was dispiriting. There were so many boats. Hayes might be hundreds of miles ahead of them. Jin Lo, scanning the boats with Ned Maddox’s binoculars, was about to give up when she saw a little girl sitting at the back of a barge, eating something in a red and silver wrapper. Everything else on the canal barges had been washed so many times in the silty water that it had a brownish tinge.
She focused the binoculars on the wrapper. It was torn, but Jin Lo didn’t need to read it. It was the same candy she had given to the old herbalist. The girl on the barge was no older than six, and she was utterly absorbed in the chocolate.
“Look,” Jin Lo said, handing over the binoculars to Ned Maddox.
He trained them on the barge. “Hey, she’s got a Mounds bar!”
“You have them in your navy rations,” she said.
“Always.”
Another girl appeared on the barge deck, walking on her hands. A tiny gymnast. She righted herself, spotted the chocolate, and pounced on it, sending up a wail of protest.
“I want to go aboard,” Jin Lo said.
“Do you want to hail them first?”
“No.”
So Ned Maddox brought the boat silently alongside the barge in the busy canal. Jin Lo slung her bag of supplies over her shoulder—you never knew when they might come in handy—and hoisted herself aboard. The little girls were too absorbed in their fight to pay any attention. Jin Lo saw five juggling pins in a bucket, and a sign in Chinese characters, lying on its side. It said “Xiao Family Acrobats.” She had seen small circuses like this, traveling the countryside, with children raised to do tricks as soon as they learned to walk.
She heard voices forward, and moved along the rail. A man in a broad hat and a fisherman’s clothes stood with his back to her. He was not Chinese—she could tell by the way he stood, and by his hands gesturing as he spoke. At first she thought he was talking to the air. Then she saw a shimmering disturbance beside him, like heat rising off a road.
“Just let me see you,” the man said in English. “Why can’t I see you?”
“Commander?” she said.
He whirled on her. Beneath the broad hat, he was windburned and unshaven, his face red and his beard full of gray.
“I’ve been looking for you,” she said. “Who are you talking to?”
“My son,” the commander said, his eyes wild. “I can’t see him, but I hear him. He wants me to turn myself in.”
“That’s good advice.”
“But I can’t! I’ve come so far—”
Ned Maddox had come aboard the barge behind her, and now he stepped forward. “Commander Hayes,” he said, in a voice full of military authority, “I’m first lieutenant Ned Maddox, U.S. Navy.”
The commander grabbed a boat hook hanging on the rail and held it across his body as a weapon. “Don’t come any closer! I’m on an undercover mission!”
“Sir,” Ned Maddox said, “I just want to talk.”
“Get away from me, lieutenant!” Hayes cried. “That’s an order!”
Ned Maddox started to lunge for the hook when a blur came running toward them across the deck. Jin Lo turned to defend herself, and was hit by something very solid and very strong. Ned Maddox went down, too; something flew at his head out of nowhere. She had a moment to think acrobats, before there was another blow and the world went dark.
Chapter 41
In Prigione
In the taxi, Janie made Primo repeat his explanation of what had happened to Benjamin. As far as she could tell, Sal Rocco had received a tip that the police were coming to the hotel. But Benjamin had insisted on staying, because he’d told Janie he would be there. He’d given his word, a thing Rocco respected. Rocco fled, and when the carabinieri arrived at the hotel room, they found only Benjamin. They could tell right away that he was unprotected, unconnected—fesso, Primo said. Benjamin was the kind of guy the police could threaten, and they might get him to talk about Rocco’s business. So they picked him up.
“But he doesn’t know anything about Rocco’s business!” Janie said.
“The coppers didn’t know that,” Pip said. “They’ve got the uniforms, and the badges, and the car, and they’ve gone running out on a mission. They don’t want to slump back to the station, all empty-handed.”
“But Benjamin is innocent, so they have to let him go, right?”
“They don’t have to do anything,” Pip said.
They were back in the center of the city, and Janie was starting to see ghosts again. There was so much she needed to tell Pip. As the taxi weaved through crowded streets, she began with the powder and the After-room, and Doyle and Rocco, and Pip listened carefully. A skeptical look never crossed his face, and she loved him for that. He didn’t disbelieve what she said just because it seemed far-fetched.
When she got to the ghosts streaming in through Vili’s apartment, he whistled appreciatively. “You have been busy,” he said.
They arrived at a police station, and Primo hurried them out of the taxi and paid the driver. Then they were inside, in a waiting room lined with wooden benches. A hulking uniformed officer sat at a desk.
“Buon giorno,” Janie said. “My friend is here.”
“Nome?” the officer asked.
“Benjamin Bur— I mean, Benjamin Scott,” she said.
“Il americano.”
“Sì!” she said. “Il americano.”
“Venite,” the officer said. He came out from behind the desk and took her by the arm—a little harder than necessary, she thought. He grabbed Pip’s arm, too, and started to lead them away.
“Wait, what’s going on?” Pip asked.
“I don’t know!” she said.
She saw Primo’s shaved head slip out the front door. He wasn’t stupid enough to get himself arrested.
The officer pushed them through a door, down a hallway that smelled of mold and disinfectant and soup, past what looked like an officers’ break room with no officers in it.
The next door took them to a room divided into four cells, two on each side of a passageway down the middle. The cells had barred doors, but only one was occupied: Benjamin sat on a cot with his head in his hands, a ghost standing on either side of him.
“Benjamin!” Janie said.
He jumped up. The ghosts started shouting at the officer, making accusations, asking questions. But the officer didn’t hear them. With brisk efficiency, he unlocked the empty cell across from Benjamin’s
and shoved Pip and Janie inside. Janie stumbled and caught herself, and the barred door clanged shut behind them.
“Wait!” she said. “What have we done?”
But the officer left them there.
Benjamin came to the bars of his cell. “Pip!” he said. “What are you doing here?”
“I read about the movie,” Pip said, brushing off his jacket. “I thought I might get a part. I forgot about the way you two attract disaster.” They had first met Pip in circumstances much like this, in a juvenile lockup in London. But at least this time her cell was across from Benjamin’s, so they could see each other.
“They brought me in to ask me questions about Rocco,” Benjamin said. “At least I think that’s what was going on. But then the ghosts showed up with complaints about their treatment here. Two of the cops could hear them, and they panicked. They decided I had something to do with the haunting, because I could see the ghosts, and they locked me up. And then they ran away, leaving that big guy, who can’t see or hear the ghosts. He’s not afraid. And he’s mean.”
“The ghosts are my fault,” Janie said. “I’m so sorry. Jin Lo is chasing a bomb, and I was trying to help her.”
“A bomb?” Benjamin asked.
“Oh, boy,” Pip said.
“I had to go to the After-room,” Janie said. “And they followed me back.”
“You had to go?” Benjamin asked angrily.
“Everyone thought it was a good idea!” she said.
“What say you have this fight later,” Pip said. “After we get out of here.” He jiggled the lock on their cell. “You don’t have that stuff that makes you a bird, do you?”
“I wish we did,” Janie said.
“I do,” Benjamin said.
“You do?” Janie and Pip said together.
“But there are three closed doors between us and the street,” Benjamin said. “At least one of them is locked.”
“Wait, how do you have the avian elixir?” Janie asked.
“I made some.”
“When were you going to tell me that?”
