The Lost Daughter

by Lucretia Grindle

  Enzo tried not to think of jaws, and what they did when they closed.

  “You don’t remember any of the license numbers? Anything like that?”

  The geek squad had promised they would start running possible combinations as soon as they had time. Another digit would help. The province seal would be a ten strike. But even Enzo had to admit it was asking for pennies from heaven.

  Benny shook his head.

  “What about the driver?” Enzo asked. “Did he get out? Did you see him? Any idea if there was more than one person in the car?”

  “Yeah.” Benny nodded. “He got out. He was a real gentleman. Gave her a kiss, put the bag in the trunk, held the door. Like I said, it wasn’t like he forced her or anything.”

  “What did he look like? What was he wearing?”

  “Tall. Dark hair. He was wearing some kind of jacket. I wasn’t really paying that much attention, you know? And it was getting dark. He was definitely waiting for her, though. He lifted the case in, closed the trunk, then they hopped in and, sayonara.” The frothy milk left a line on Benny’s upper lip as bright as the whites of his eyes. “The whole thing didn’t take more than a second or two.”

  “OK.” Enzo stood. “Thanks.” He clapped Benny on the shoulder and slipped a twenty-euro note under edge of the sandwich plate. “By the way,” he asked, as he turned toward the door. “I know it was getting dark. But the suitcase, you didn’t get a chance to see what color it was?”

  If Benny said black, or leather, or canvas, they’d have to think again.

  The big man’s face broke into its familiar grin.

  “Red,” he said. “I told you. She was a fox. That case.” Benny Ibrahim shook his head and laughed. “That suitcase was as red as a cherry.”

  * * *

  “So, Bambino Mio, how was your day?”

  Giulia Saenz rolled her eyes as she spoke the American TV show greeting. Enzo smiled. He plucked an olive out of a bowl in the center of the long table and bit it in half, watching his mother as she stood at the stove.

  Giulia had been no more than a girl, younger than Kristin Carson was now, when she got pregnant and married his father. At barely twenty, she left her marriage—and everything she’d ever been—and took off, pausing only to hand her son over to the safekeeping of her parents.

  Three decades later, she was a woman who turned heads. With her cloud of dark curly hair, her smile, and her wide-set eyes that, unlike his own, were an ordinary brown, Enzo doubted his mother had ever been what was conventionally considered pretty. She was tall, and moved with a faint awkwardness, as if her body was somehow unfamiliar. Her features were too strong. Her mouth was too wide and her nose too prominent.

  For as long as he could remember, Giulia had lived a life best termed alternative. She’d dabbled in every trend the counterculture of the time had to offer. Enzo wondered if youth had suited her, and suspected not. He guessed her restlessness had been less rebellion than an effort to survive—a way of marking time until she finally grew into herself. He wasn’t sure, at fifty-two, if she’d done that yet, and chose not to think too closely about what that might mean. For either of them. Traits traveled in blood and bone. Enzo had been aware of various men in her past, but none lasted long, and there had been no one at all in the last few years. Giulia had never remarried and, although she rarely mentioned him, she had never stopped using his father’s name.

  “What do you think?” She nodded toward the far wall.

  Like Enzo, Giulia had been given her house by her parents. She was their only child and they had never made her a black sheep. Never cut her off or cast her out, even when she had disappeared for years at a time. Instead his grandparents knit what ties they could, one of which was this farmhouse outside Greve. His mother had gutted and remodeled it over the years, when she was around. She leased the small vineyard and the several acres of olives, and had stripped one of the barns and turned it into a studio where she periodically made increasingly large, and to Enzo’s eye increasingly bizarre, pieces of what she called fabric art.

  Her latest creation took up most of the far wall. He suspected it might be some sort of seascape. Bits of the blue and green felt she made and dyed herself undulated in waves, interspersed with scraps of livid pink, and slices of something metallic that looked suspiciously like pieces of old tin cans.

  She was smiling when he looked back at her.

  “Never mind,” she said, reaching for a bottle from the wine rack. “Tell me about your day. Week. Month.”

  After a lifetime of sporadic contact and sometimes outright absence, in the last few years Enzo had found himself visiting Giulia, when she chose to be in Greve, more or less regularly. Occasionally he brought one or both of his grandparents, but usually he came alone, sometimes announced, sometimes not. Often they cooked and ate together. From time to time, he simply stood in her studio and watched her work.

  He reached for the corkscrew. Giulia put two glasses on the table. Enzo poured, the sound of the wine lost in a rattle of wind. It was a nasty night. Taking his glass, he went to the fireplace, picked up the poker, and jabbed at the big log. A flame jumped and died.

  “Tell me about the Red Brigades.”

  He said it without turning around. A moment later he heard rather than saw her pull out a chair and sit down.

  “What about them?”

  Enzo glanced over his shoulder. His mother was wearing her habitual jeans, red high-topped sneakers, and one of her own sweaters—what looked like a loosely held-together pile of wool the color of autumn beech leaves. In the shadowed light, with her long boy’s legs and half-pinned-up nest of hair, she might have been any age. Or no age at all. As eternal as the Medusa.

  “Did you know any of them?”

  She picked up her glass, took a sip, and shook her head.

  “Not personally. If you mean did I know anyone who was running around toting machine guns, no. But, yes, of course.” She glanced at him. “I mean, back then, everyone knew someone who knew someone. Or said they did.” She shrugged, pushing up the sleeve of her sweater. A set of silver bangles clinked. “It was the times,” she added. “What it was like. If you were young, and like-minded.”

  “And were you? Like-minded?”

  Giulia smiled. Her mouth was the one physical feature they shared.

  “Of course,” she said. “Everyone was. Well, everyone I knew. Everyone on the Left, more or less, at least at first.”

  She stopped talking. Something passed behind her eyes, and for a moment Enzo wondered who she saw when she looked at him.

  “You have to understand,” she said finally, “everything was different then. Italy was different. Europe was different. We were different. The war hadn’t been over very long, really. What? Twenty, twenty-five years? And a lot of people felt, well, that promises had been betrayed.”

  “Had they been?”

  “It depends what you thought you were promised.”

  She looked into her glass, studying the dark inky liquid.

  “The university system was collapsing,” she said a moment later. “There had been so much hope, and then there was so much anger. We were educating people so fast, promising them a different life. But there was no different life because there weren’t enough jobs. The country didn’t grow as fast as the promises did. So, yes. Some people, young people mostly, thought they’d been betrayed—been promised a better life, then had it snatched away, when in fact, it couldn’t be promised because it wasn’t there to be offered. It had to be built and that takes time. But—” She reached for an olive and shook her head. “When you’re young,” she said, “you don’t want to hear that. You just want everything. Now. Vogliamo tutto e sùbito! We want everything and right now! That was the Red Brigades’ motto.” She laughed. “We thought it was wonderful. But it seems so childish now. A sort of tantrum by spoiled infants.”

  Spoiled infants with guns, Enzo thought. He wondered if that was what Aldo Moro had tried to explain to them—th
at “everything now!” is nothing but the outraged wail of children and martyrs. In itself the message would probably have been unwelcome, more so since it was delivered from the sullied state of adulthood. No wonder they’d killed him.

  “Some people—well, a lot of people, really,” his mother was saying, “blamed the state. And, of course, NATO. And the Americans.” She sipped her wine. “Thank God we have the Americans to blame. I don’t know what Europe would do without them.”

  Enzo had a quick vision of James MacCready.

  “Anyway.” Giulia tucked stray hair behind her ear and smiled. “We all quite enjoyed feeling betrayed and hard-done-by and righteous. Imagining we were just like Che, spouting Marx and frantically understanding the proletariat. But of course Italy wasn’t Cuba, and the proletariat didn’t want to be understood. They just wanted stability, and jobs. So—” Her shoulders jumped under the russet wool. “A lot of shouting went on, especially in the universities. About Mao, and Lenin, and Marx. The usual, really. Then some people decided to take it a bit more seriously.” She lifted her glass again. “They modeled themselves on the Partisans, the Brigate Rosse. Did you know that?”

  Enzo shook his head.

  “I don’t know,” his mother added, “what the Partisans made of it. I should think people were careful not to ask them.”

  She stood up, went to the stove, adjusted the gas, and took the lid off a pot. A garlicky smell flooded the room. Enzo relinquished the poker and reached for his own glass. There was nothing remotely alternative about his mother’s taste in wine. She kept a very good cellar.

  “It was a nice idea,” she said, reaching for a wooden spoon. “To play at being heroes. Don’t get me wrong,” she added. “Some of them, the BR—no, a lot of them, probably most of them—really did want, believe in, a better, fairer society. They just misunderstood how to go about getting it.”

  Enzo watched his mother drop the spoon in the sink and put the lid back on the pot. He remembered the wool her sweater was made of, remembered the day he had watched her lift it out of the dying vat, limp and dark and dripping like something drowned.

  “They made the mistake,” she said, turning around and looking at him, “of thinking that just because you happen to have a conviction it’s a good idea to act on it.” A smile flickered across her face. Enzo couldn’t see if it reached her eyes. “That’s the problem with convictions—at least I’ve always thought so—that you have to test drive them to know if they’re any good. And by the time you find out they’re not—well, it can be a bit late. It’s a hazard of youth. Believing.” Giulia folded herself back into one of the kitchen chairs, tucking a leg under her.

  “That and having the courage to act,” she added, reaching for her glass. “A lot of the BR were awfully young. Most of them. That was part of the tragedy. Noble ideals. Courage of convictions. Living the word. I think sometimes about the university professors, who did all the preaching, and—”

  She shook her head. Enzo thought she was going to add, “Who should have known better,” but she didn’t. Instead she said, “There’s something terribly childish about notions of purity. Don’t you think? That’s what makes them so dangerous.”

  Enzo prodded the log with his toe. It rolled backward, sending up a fizz of sparks.

  “Where were you?” he asked.

  “When Moro was killed or when he was kidnapped?”

  He realized he hadn’t even had to tell her what he was talking about. It was like JFK’s assassination in the States, before 9/11 all you had to ask people of a certain age was “Where were you?” and they knew you were talking about Dallas. Now he supposed that, at least for his generation, it would mean the Twin Towers. Or something more horrible that hadn’t happened yet.

  “In Paris. I saw it on the news, walking past a shop that sold televisions. The cars in the road. That body lying there with its arms flung out—the driver or one of the guards, I can’t remember. They killed them all,” his mother said. “All the police who were guarding him. Gunned them down. The others were still in the cars. Only that one poor man fell into the road. I didn’t know what had happened, just then, standing in the street. But I knew it was Rome. There wasn’t a sign or a caption or anything. I just knew. And oddly,” she added, “I wanted to come home.”

  Enzo felt himself returning her smile. “Did you?” he asked.

  Giulia stood up and lifted a set of plates down from a cupboard.

  “Yes,” she said. “As a matter of fact, I did. It’s strange, but at times like that, when something horrible happens, it’s what you want to do.”

  Enzo watched as she laid the table, aligning the silverware. Reaching for the pepper grinder and the salt dish. Fetching linen napkins out of a drawer and folding them on the bread plates. The kitchen of the farmhouse bore no resemblance at all to the rather formal dining room of his grandparents’ apartment, but the gestures were familiar. He remembered something he had read in some magazine he had picked up on a train or at the dentist’s, a wailing lament about how, in the end, all women became their mothers. The piece had seemed to take it for granted that this was a bad thing. It had offered no opinion on whether the same was true of men and their fathers.

  He went to the oven, opened it, and lifted out the leg of lamb that was spitting and hissing. Giulia was slicing a loaf. Enzo set the meat to rest, then reached for the carving knife and the whetstone and began stropping the blade.

  “Some of them are out now, aren’t they?” She didn’t look at him as she asked.

  Enzo turned to the meat. Browned slices, pink at the core, peeled away from the bone.

  “That’s why you want to know, isn’t it?”

  They had an unspoken agreement, their own Chinese Wall. Enzo never talked about the details of his work, and she didn’t ask. He reached for the long pronged forked, picked out slices, and arranged them on the plates. Neither of them spoke as Giulia poured more wine and they sat down to eat.

  * * *

  By the time Enzo left, the sleet had stopped. Chased by a strong gusting wind, clouds shredded above the twisted branches of the olive trees. A smattering of stars appeared in the rips, cold and far away.

  His mother kissed him, then she laid her hand against his cheek, studying his features as if she was memorizing him.

  “Be careful,” she said, “of the Brigate Rosse.” She watched him for a moment, then added, “Not all of them were dangerous, even then. But some were, the true believers.”

  Enzo felt his mother’s palm, the brush of her fingers like a memory against his cheek.

  “You won’t understand them,” she said. “It’s not that you’re not clever—but your generation doesn’t have those kind of idealists. Not anymore. So you won’t know them. You won’t recognize them. But the real ones, even after all this time, they won’t have changed.”

  He leaned down and kissed the smooth, bronzed skin of her forehead.

  “Goodnight, Mama,” Enzo said. “Sleep well.”

  She dropped her hand and smiled.

  “Sogni d’òro.” Golden dreams.

  He was halfway down the path, had reached for his keys and was pushing the automatic lock and hearing the answering ping from the car, when she called to him.

  “Enzo.”

  Her voice sounded like a bird’s trill in the dark. Enzo stopped. Giulia stood in the doorway of the farmhouse, the big sweater rolled up to her elbows, the silver bangles catching the light.

  “Your father,” she said, “sends his regards.”

  Friday, February 5

  Somewhere deep inside, Enzo Saenz harbored the suspicion that, having been abandoned by Giulia, he probably shouldn’t love her, much less like her. And almost certainly shouldn’t care what she thought.

  The fact that he felt all three—and that he had forgiven, and even understood, her—was more worrisome than he cared to admit. If only because it was one more piece of evidence, along with the shape of their mouths, that they were, in fact, the same. And
therefore suggested that he was capable of doing what she had done. Abandoning. Running. Disappearing. He thought of it as a genetic flaw or hereditary disease. A tiny fragment that might one day become unmoored and drift into his blood and his organs, contaminate his liver and heart.

  It was just past dawn. He made himself a plate of eggs, then decided it was going to be a long day and added bacon. It was a trope well-beloved of in-the-know travel writers that Italians never ate breakfast. Enzo lost track of how many articles he’d read in airline magazines advising visitors to Italy to sally forth in the early hours to the nearest café where they would catch real Italians starting their day by swilling brandy and knocking back espresso before stumbling off to work on empty stomachs. Most of the people he knew considered breakfast the best meal of the day. Many even used a French press.

  He ground beans, poured water, and pushed the knob down on his own pot. As he poured his first cup, the cat rubbed against his legs, then invited herself onto his lap. He sat stroking her and sipping the hot black liquid. A second later when the phone chirped and jumped on the table, he was so certain it was Pallioti that he didn’t even bother looking at it before answering.

  James MacCready’s voice came as a surprise. “Hey, my man. How about a cup’a joe?”

  James had the uniquely American ability to say things like this without even a trace of irony. Even more amazing, when he did it he didn’t sound like an idiot.

  “Seriously, where are you?” MacCready asked, before he could answer.

  Enzo looked at the phone. Where the hell did James expect him to be at six fifteen in the morning? Out in hot pursuit of drug runners and lowlifes, making Florence safe for humanity? Running laps? Doing a hundred pushups?

  Seriously,” James said again. “You on your way in? How ’bout we meet up? In an hour, say? Have, as our British chums say, a little chatski?”

  * * *

  Even this early the café James suggested was crowded. Bankers and businessmen milled at the bar. Every time the door opened several thousand dollars’ worth of leather briefcases swooshed in and out. Enzo was probably the only person in the place, at least on the far side of the counter, who wasn’t wearing a black suit.