The Lost Daughter

by Lucretia Grindle

  Enzo hadn’t answered.

  “You said once, you said in the hotel that day,” she’d added. “You saw. You knew that I’d recognized him—and you said if I talked to you, you’d help me.”

  He had said that. It was true. He just wasn’t sure exactly what he was supposed to do about it now. Or actually he was. He knew perfectly well he was supposed to call, if not Carla Rossetti—who would have come and dismantled the plywood and brought cars and blue lights, and seen Anna Carson, and presumably wondered who she was and what the hell was really going on—then Pallioti. He was supposed to report in to Florence, lay this all in the lap of Lorenzo, who would pat him on the back and tell him what a good job he’d done, before—before, what?

  “Please,” she said. She’d been watching him, reading his mind. “Please just let me at least talk to you. Just let me do that. Then, if you don’t believe me, you can do whatever you want.” She shook her head. “It’s not like I can stop you. But just hear me out first. Please. Do it for Kristin.”

  So he had.

  He’d gathered up all the knives, the ones hanging above them, and the one she’d had in her pocket, and tossed them through the hatch. Then he’d refastened the handcuffs in front of her so she could climb through. When he’d told her that if she tried anything, anything at all, not only was the deal off, but he’d hogtie her and call every cop in Ferrara, she’d nodded. Then at the last moment she’d said, “Wait!” And gone back into the cold room and picked up the little white bear, holding it out in front of her, awkward in the cuffs. Enzo took it from her and tucked it in his jacket. Then he’d helped her climb back into the storeroom.

  In the alley he’d taken off his jacket, draping it around her shoulders, holding her close as they started down Via Mayr, hopefully looking more like a courting couple than a guy with a woman in handcuffs. Force of habit dictated that he’d already checked out the side entrance to the hotel lobby, which was fortunate. Enzo brought her in that way, avoiding the desk, counting on the fact that the drinkers in the bar would be too absorbed in their own conversations to notice the man and woman huddled with cold and lust who scuttled toward the elevators and promptly disappeared.

  Now they sat facing each other on the matching queen-size beds, Anna Carson with her hands cuffed in front of her and Enzo looking at his watch and thinking he’d give her exactly one hour. One hour he’d be able to explain, if he had to.

  He glanced up. Even in the softly lit room, she looked ragged. The sleek blond woman he had met a week ago was gone. Grubby and exhausted, her cheeks were white and blotched an unhealthy red. Enzo stood up and undid the cuffs. A voice in his head reminded him that she was still Angela Vari, that he could still end up writing Brigate Rosse a hundred times on the pad. He gave it a nod. He was twenty years younger and a cop and he had no intention of letting her out of his sight. She rubbed her wrists and tried to smile.

  “Thanks.”

  “Are you hungry?”

  She shook her head, diffident, almost shy, like a child trying to behave. Enzo felt a pang of shame, then told himself not to be stupid. He was just doing his job. Or rather, he wasn’t. And it wasn’t too late to correct that. One call to Carla Rosetti would have Anna Carson safely in a holding cell, a second would have Pallioti on the way.

  “Bathroom?”

  She shook her head, then said, “Well, yes, actually. I’d kill to wash my hands and face, with soap. And if you had a towel.”

  He helped her take her jacket off. She moved stiffly, like someone who’d been beat up. Or had been sleeping on a metal shelf. Enzo gestured toward the bathroom, then followed, stood in the door and watched her. The crest of her back, her shoulders as she bent over the sink, were narrow, fragile even, under the heavy, cheap sweater she was wearing. He couldn’t help noticing that the dyed hair, which was probably closer to her natural color, was actually more flattering than the fake blond. Even dirty, a few stray curls caught the back of her neck. When she looked up into the mirror after drying her face, he realized again that her eyes were green, not brown. They met his in the glass and he looked away, suddenly embarrassed that he was standing here.

  “OK,” she said and tried to smile again. “Thank you.”

  They went back into the room. Anna sat on the opposite bed again. She picked up the little white bear, then put him down, propping him against the pillow. Enzo retrieved a bottle of fizzy water from the minibar and poured them both a glass. She took hers, sipped it, and nodded.

  “I don’t know how to explain to you.” She looked at him. “I don’t know.”

  She ran a hand over her eyes. Enzo noticed the ringless fingers and remembered the boxes in the safe. He’d thought then that she’d abandoned them because she didn’t want to be recognized. Now he realized it wasn’t that at all. Stripping them off her fingers had been her way of reentering the past.

  “You see,” she said, “it all goes back.”

  Her voice was so tired it was wavering. Watching her, Enzo wondered what it must have been like, how exhausting it must have been to shove aside one self and grow accustomed to another—to put lives on as if they were layers of clothing, then be condemned to wear them forever.

  “It’s as if it never stopped.” She looked up and gave a halfhearted smile, as if she’d been able to hear what he’d just been thinking. “Not really,” she said. “I mean, I tried to fool myself sometimes that it was gone. But it wasn’t. It never is. It just gets put aside for a while, and now it’s happening all over again.”

  “What is?”

  The beds were so close their knees were almost touching. Enzo shook his head. A minute ticked by then another. If she wouldn’t, or couldn’t, talk to him, there was no point. He was about to say that this was a bad idea, that he had changed his mind and was taking her back to Florence, now, when she said, “Rome.”

  “Rome?”

  Anna Carson nodded.

  “Rome. Rome is happening all over again.”

  Enzo reached out and took her hand. It was cold. He held it for a moment in both of his. Then he said, “Tell me.”

  Part IV

  Rome, 1978

  THE MAN SAT ON the narrow bed, elbows resting on his knees. He wore a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and the collar open, and suit trousers of a navy blue so dark it might have been black. The matching vest and jacket were hung neatly over the back of the chair in the corner which, other than the bed and a desk made of two sawhorses and a piece of plywood, was the only piece of furniture in the room. The bulb of the overhead light buzzed like a trapped fly. There were no windows.

  Angela stood, staring. She could feel Antonio behind her, standing just outside the open door with his back turned, like a sentinel. The plate was warm in her hands. Manicotti, a recipe of her father’s. She had made it this morning and carried it here on the bus, changing three times, lugging the basket like Little Red Riding Hood.

  “Ah. You’ve brought me lunch.”

  The man’s face was long and creased. His features, the wide mouth and rounded nose, were soft and sagged slightly, as if he might be melting. Which was certainly possible. The room was tiny—no more than a big utility closet tucked between the kitchen and bathroom—and very hot.

  “Thank you,” he said, and smiled.

  Angela started and stepped back, clutching the plate as if he’d growled. She’d been told he was angry, that she had to come because perhaps he would take food from her, since he wouldn’t take it from anyone else. The description had made him sound like an enraged animal. So the smile threw her off.

  She took a breath and put the plate down on the plywood desk beside a pad and a pen, then opened her mouth, started to say, “I hope you like it,” before she remembered she wasn’t supposed to talk to him. Or acknowledge him. Or even look at him any more than she had to. Mostly she wasn’t supposed to tell him her name. All she was supposed to do was feed him and pretend he wasn’t there.

  She pulled the plastic knife and fork ou
t of her pocket, laid them beside the plate, and backed out the door.

  * * *

  Later they would ask her, and ask her, and ask her, how she hadn’t known. And she would tell them, and tell them, and tell them again, all the while knowing that most of them did not believe it, and finally wondering if somewhere, deep down in the well of herself, she did not believe it either.

  Sometimes, when they accused her of lying, she was tempted to agree with them—to say that she had lied as surely as Antonio had lied when he told her that he was enrolled at the university in Rome. When he left their tiny apartment every morning at eight, and came back every evening at six, and talked about his classes and his friends and what he had done during the day. That it was no different at all, except that the lies she had told had been to herself.

  Then she would almost agree. Would be tempted to say that of course she had known—from the start. From the moment Antonio walked into the pizzeria. From the moment he turned around. That all through that long hot summer, every time he held her in his arms, or kissed her, or moved inside of her, she had known.

  She’d been tempted to say it not only because it was what so many of them—the police and the magistrates and prosecutors and even psychiatrists—already believed. And because it would make them happy, and would be easier, and also because it would be reassuring. Much more so than the truth. Which was so simple, and so terrifying. That she had had no idea at all. That she had slept, and lived, and eaten, and made love, under the shadow of that sickening tilted five-pointed star, and never even known it was there.

  Because she loved him. Because when he told her something, she believed him. Because it is not normal to look into the face of the human being you expect to spend your life with and suspect that they are living another life. That every time they walk out the door, or around the corner, or are away from you, even for a minute, they become someone you do not know.

  It was a myth, that love encompassed everything. In fact, she had finally understood, it encompassed very little. And only what you wanted it to. Only what protected it. Like everything struggling to survive, love was selfish, and narrow, and fanatical. That was why it made so many people kill for it.

  So, no. When Antonio had finally suggested, after they had been in Rome for several months, after they had sat on the scratchy old sofa in the apartment in Trastevere and watched on television as the body of the German industrialist Hans Martin Schleyer had been removed from the trunk of the car where the Red Army Faction had deposited it after kidnapping and eventually shooting him, when about a week after that, he had suggested one evening that perhaps she should sell the apartment in Ferrara to the Ravallis after all, since surely they would never be going back there, she had not thought much of it. Certainly she had not suspected any connection between the two things. Any more than she had suspected, after the sale, that he had not put the money in the bank. Locked it, as he promised, into a savings account for their future. For the apartment they would one day buy. For the children they would one day have. Certainly she hadn’t looked at him across their rickety little table, her bare foot resting on his as they drank coffee in the mornings, and thought it was being used to construct a box, a windowless cell, a cage to keep a man in, in a utility room on Via Montalcini. That that was what he spent his days doing. That while she was keeping the books at a trattoria down the street and at the dry cleaners around the corner, Antonio was not taking classes at all, but building a People’s Prison.

  To look into his eyes and think that would have been crazy. As crazy as, she was later told, looking into his eyes and not seeing it had been.

  Love was just love, she had snapped at them then. It didn’t come with a crystal ball. And it didn’t promise not to lie.

  He had finally told her on March 20, four days after the kidnapping. And even then he had not really told her. Or she had not really heard. It was hard, later, to remember which.

  What she does remember is that it was a Monday, and that the trattoria was closed so she had been able to work in peace all afternoon and with the television in the stuffy little office turned off. Which was a blessed relief, because by then she is sick, sick to death, of hearing about the kidnapping of Aldo Moro. And even more than that, she is sick of the Red Brigades.

  She cannot read, or hear, one of their stupid long-winded communiqués without being back in the hospital. Without feeling the hard molded plastic of the chair and the newspaper as it slips from her hands. Without hearing the labored wheezing breaths of her father’s dying. She doesn’t blame the BR for his death, exactly. But she can’t separate them from it, either. The same way you cannot separate the taste of the food that is in your mouth from the moment when someone tells you they no longer love you, or the song that is playing on the radio when they raise their hand and hit you.

  So she is happy to have the television off. And when she walks home, carrying the bunch of tulips she has bought and thinking that soon she will be able to wear sandals again, she looks away from the newspaper kiosk that is still displaying the picture from two days ago, the one Brigate Rosse released of their latest prisoner, the most recent “enemy of the people” to sparito nel nullo. Aldo Moro, the sweet-looking, sad-faced man, who smiles quizzically from under a five-pointed star.

  Being one of the people herself, Angela finds it hard to feel much enmity for him. She doesn’t see why she should, but mainly she doesn’t care. What she cares about is that the owner of the trattoria is going to give her more hours after Easter, which will mean more money, which may mean they can begin to think about moving to a slightly bigger apartment. Antonio does not want to touch the proceeds of the sale of Via Vittoria—he says that should be a lockbox for their children, and she agrees. But it would be nice to rent something where the kitchen was not a closet and where the bathroom was separated from the bedroom by more than a curtain.

  Not that she doesn’t love where they live. She does. The building is on the side of a small piazza. There are mews where the carriage horses that work up in the tourist sites are stabled on the other side. She likes the smell of them, and the sound of their hooves on the cobbles when they leave in the early morning, and the soft shuffling they make as they settle themselves at night. It is warm enough now to leave the window open, so she can hear them and imagine that they reach Antonio in his dreams and take him back to his nonno’s farm, and the dogs that slept by the well, and the warmth of his brother, Piero, huddled against his back on a winter night.

  She keeps a mint in her pocket and gives it to one of the older horses that is looking out over the stable door before she goes into the building and runs up the stairs and is surprised to find Antonio, home early and sitting on the sofa, waiting for her.

  When she bends to kiss him, he pulls her down, but she waves the tulips at him, and laughs and skips toward the little kitchen where the window faces west and is open, spilling sunlight into the scratched porcelain sink. She runs the water in a vase she bought out of a car trunk on the corner a few weeks earlier and feels his hand on her back.

  “What are you cooking tonight?” he asks.

  Angela shrugs. She takes a knife and begins to strip the leaves and cut the stems of the tulips.

  “Can you make manicotti? The kind your father used to.”

  A pile of greenery is building up in the sink. She wonders if she can take it down and feed it to the horses and thinks she better not in case it’s poisonous.

  “I don’t have what we need. I’d have to go to the shop and—”

  “I bought it.”

  She turns around and looks at him. Antonio is never picky about food. If anything, he doesn’t care. And although he makes the bed and even, occasionally, washes things, she has never known him to buy groceries. Not even an apple. If the milk goes sour it sits in the fridge until she notices. He is watching her carefully.

  “Can you?” he asks, and Angela feels something inside of her. A tiny glitter of cold. As if she has swallowed an ice chip.<
br />
  She picks up the vase of tulips, edges past him, and places it on the table.

  “It’s not for me,” Antonio says. “It’s for someone special. He has low blood pressure. He isn’t eating.”

  For a second, they stand there looking at each other, with the table and the tulips, which are yellow, between them.

  Then Angela says, “Someone special?”

  She can feel herself frowning. Can this be a professor at the university? The parent of a friend? He brought two boys back once, said they had something to do with printing things. They sat at the table and drank beer and then went out to a bar. Does one of their fathers have low blood pressure? Even before Antonio shakes his head, she knows. Deep inside her, somewhere in that well, she knows. So maybe they were right—all those people who would later accuse her of lying. Maybe they were right all along.

  After he tells her, she sits down, hard. The wobbly chair creaks.

  “You?”

  She can’t finish the question, but he shakes his head anyway. He is leaning against the little kitchen counter now, the sun catching his hair.

  “I didn’t have anything to do with that,” he says. “With Via Fani. I don’t even know the people who did. Our job is just to run the prison. That’s how we do it,” he adds. “We don’t tell. Only what people need to know. That way it’s safer for everyone. I don’t even know their real names and they don’t know mine. That’s why I didn’t tell you. To keep you safe.”

  And to keep you safe, she will think later. But she doesn’t think it now. Now she just stares at him. Her stomach is doing something strange. It’s falling, in slow motion. Sinking like a sack of kittens through dark water. She reaches out and grabs the edge of the table, as if it will hold her up.

  “How long?” she asks finally. She is trying to remember. Something happened in Padua, something bad. But when? Before he went to the university? After? And then she realizes. That isn’t it. That doesn’t matter. This isn’t about that. This is about the hand of God that opened in the sky. The unions, and cost cutting, and maintenance. And Piero. This is about bread and roses.