Pallioti had said Florence would square things with Ferrara—thank them for their help and tell them they no longer needed the CCTV tapes, giving the distinct impression that everything was cleared up—and that he would come straight to the hotel where they should expect him around lunchtime. He had not said what they would do then. Or, at least specifically, that they should sit in the room waiting for him. So when Enzo had asked her what she had planned next to find Antonio—beyond waiting for him to call or send a message so she could beg him to tell her where he was—she’d told him. Then she’d reached for her coat as he picked up his car keys.
“Are we sure it’s open? That we can get in? Today? In the winter?” Anna asked again, even though she knew the answer. She’d been sitting across from Enzo at the room service breakfast table when he’d made the arrangements. The words were just something to say. Something to stop Angela Vari from creeping into the car. Not that that was possible. She couldn’t stay away. Pomposa had always been one of her favorite places.
They saw the campanile first. It rose like a needle from the gridwork of winter fields, a beacon to the weary and the faithful. To pilgrims, and robbers, and those simply in need of succor, material or otherwise, for over a thousand years. The day Antonio had finally kept his promise, bringing Angela after he showed her his nonno’s farm, the tower had seemed to waver in the thick summer sun. Now it shimmered. The pale stone was almost pink, and glowing, as if a giant mirror had been placed at its feet, gathering light from the sea.
Antonio’s father and grandfather had known the abbey when it was still a living community, before it became a tourist attraction run by the state. They had bought honey from the monks, and the herbal teas and fruit pastes Antonio’s grandmother loved. Rumor said the monks had supplied other things, too. That the campanile had been used as a watchtower, and the storerooms as a weapons dump by the Partisans during the war. That there had been coded messages sent in the ringing of the great bells. Which now, Anna thought, were almost certainly programmed, machines ringing out the notes that had first been named and written down here.
The caretaker was waiting for them. One of the perks of those credentials Enzo carried seemed to be that when he said “jump,” the only answer was “how high?” Anna glanced at him as they got out of the car. As far as she could tell his outfit—the jeans, the leather jacket, and certainly the sneakers—hadn’t changed. But he no longer felt or looked like a policechild.
They shook hands with the caretaker quickly. The small man in his padded coat was obviously both eager to know what this was about, and determined to keep his dignity by not asking. When it became clear that Enzo wasn’t going to say anything, he led them to a side gate. Anna supposed she must have come here on a weekend when she came with Antonio. Or perhaps back then it had been open all the time. Now it was only Friday and the weekend. Even if she had thought of coming here yesterday and managed to actually do it, she would have found locked doors.
Arches rose around them as they stepped into the long cloister. She remembered the library, and the refectory painted by students of Giotto who had wandered down from Padua, and the mosaics. The colors that had still been bright after a millennium, or perhaps they had only seemed that way because it had been summer, and she had been with Antonio, and everything had been bright. The caretaker paused, and produced more keys, and opened the door that let them into the bell tower.
Light fell through the narrow casements, but between them it was dark, and the steps were worn. Anna, never fond of heights to start with, kept her eyes on the caretaker’s back. His feet moved quickly, his small ungloved hand barely touching the guide rope. He could probably navigate these steps in the dark, and perhaps he did—climb up on full-moon nights and gaze down over the fields that melted into canals and merged almost seamlessly with the sea.
It was probably some kind of miracle that the abbey itself was still standing. Some divine hand must have guided the builders to this piece of solid ground, because the area was a notorious marsh, inhabited largely by seabirds and the few remaining fishermen who netted for eels in the brackish, muddy water. Their shacks were almost impossible to get to if you didn’t know the paths and causeways. Holding her around the waist as they stood in the top of the tower, Antonio had pointed out the almost invisible rush walls and roofs, and whispered in her ear the stories his nonno had told him, about how the shacks had been used by the Partisans during the war, providing a camouflaged web of all but unreachable hiding places.
The idea hadn’t occurred to her before, but it did now. If Antonio had gone there, out to one of the huts, they would never find him. They could look forever. There would be no more possibility of finding him out there than there had ever been of finding Aldo Moro innocent. And maybe that was the point—what he intended all along. They had liked to talk a lot, the Red Brigades—about the unfairness of the Establishment, the State, whoever it was they had been so damned oppressed by. But, she thought sourly, they’d always made sure they played with a stacked deck.
Then she remembered another piece of litany. It came back, unbidden and whole.
The simplest option is always the best—
The least likely to go wrong.
Never be complicated.
Keep the variables to a minimum.
Stay clean and fast.
To come out here, to hole up in one of the eel fishers’ huts, Antonio would have had to have brought in supplies, probably by boat. Which would have been possible, but far more likely to go wrong. And way too risky and exposed once he had Kristin. And he would have had to stash the car somewhere, or get rid of it. Enzo said it hadn’t been found, at a station or airport or burned out or abandoned. So unless it was in someone’s garage, which was unlikely because it would mean he was working with someone, which she was almost certain he would avoid—Each shall see and hear according only to his need—he must still have it. Which meant he would have chosen somewhere where he could hide it on-site. Not a marsh. Somewhere with a barn or an outbuilding and reasonable access to a road, to get Kristin in. And himself out.
Or perhaps not.
She realized suddenly that she’d understood, from the very beginning, from the second she’d seen the photo on that girl’s phone, that this time he did not plan on escaping. That there would be no more disappearing like smoke. For either of them.
“Va tutto bene?”
Anna did not realize she had stopped. Enzo’s hand was on the small of her back. He asked again if she was OK. The temptation to say no was almost overwhelming. Instead she nodded, and started climbing again, following the caretaker who was now nothing more than footsteps above them.
As they came out onto the top of the campanile, Enzo registered the fact that Anna Carson didn’t look well. Her face had paled and pinched in on itself. The cheap sweater was too big for her. The neck coddled her chin and the sleeves came down over her hands, cuffs sticking out from the equally cheap black coat she’d bought. He reminded himself to ask her where she’d dumped Kristin’s things—the down jacket and red pack and Graziella Farelli’s wallet. It probably wouldn’t be difficult to get them back.
Below, in the car park, it had been still, but up here a breeze was kicking. Enzo pulled a glove off, reached into his pocket for the binoculars that had come equipped in the car, and handed them to Anna. She took them without saying anything, looped the strap over her head, and pushed her hair out of her face. The light was clear and harsh, and for the first time Enzo noticed the lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth. Half a century had left its mark on her, after all. It wasn’t unbecoming, just a blueprint of her life.
The abbey was surrounded by what, in the summertime, must be a lush windbreak of trees. Beyond that, the land was barren. When Anna had suggested coming here, Enzo had honestly thought that it was probably pointless, and had only agreed—told her it wasn’t stupid—because he hadn’t had a better idea, and couldn’t stand the idea of just sitting around and waiting for Pallio
ti. Now he realized that she had been right. It was better than any map.
You could see for miles. In another season, the occasional lines of trees might screen drives or tracks or back roads or buildings. Now they were nothing but thin gray fretwork against the faded greens and duns of the fields. To the east, canals spread in a broken network of veins across the marshes. Anna held the glasses in that direction for barely a minute, then swung around and looked inland.
The caretaker had gone back into the staircase. Enzo could hear him scrabbling like a mouse in the wall as he fiddled with whatever it was he was doing. He moved to the balustrade beside Anna, trying to understand what, exactly, she was looking for, and even as he thought it, knew what her answer would be. That she had no real idea—just something, anything, that might feel like Antonio.
“Pomposa,” she’d said this morning, putting her coffee cup down. “His grandfather used to take him there when he was a boy. They could hear the bells, on the farm. Antonio thought it was the most beautiful place in the world.”
His nonno had been right, Enzo thought. Perhaps it wasn’t superlative, but it was extraordinary. A lightship built, not for boats, but for souls. A calling to God here in this empty no-man’s-land between earth and sea. For the first time he wondered if Antonio Tomaselli had a soul after all, and, if so, what had happened to it.
“There.”
Without lowering the glasses, Anna reached out and touched his sleeve.
“What?”
She was looking due southwest over a particularly barren stretch of fields beyond the road they had come in on. Enzo could only see a few tracks, a black lace of trees against the silver sky, and the metallic line of a stream or small river threading its way through the irrigation ditches. Then he got it. The nothing Anna was pointing toward was actually a cluster of buildings, low and pale and nearly lost in the grays of winter.
When he took the binoculars, they jumped like pop-up cards. Enzo could see the cube of a farmhouse, and an outbuilding that stretched beside it. There was a single large tree. No sign of any cars. Or for that matter, any life at all. He followed the track back. It curved and almost disappeared, lost in the dead uncut grass before it met a one-lane secondary road that ambled toward nowhere.
There were no telephone poles near the property, which meant no power. Which meant the farm was not in use—at least not much. Even if a generator had gone in, they were too expensive to run full-time, except possibly as storage for a larger operation somewhere nearby. Enzo couldn’t see well enough to tell whether the buildings were in good repair or not, if there were holes in the roofs or shutters hanging from the windows. He lowered the glasses.
“What makes you think so?”
Anna shrugged. She was staring intently toward the tiny fading outlines.
“Abandoned,” she said. “The outbuilding—for the car. Close enough to a road that he could get in and out without too much trouble. The drive’s long, and there’s nothing else around. Look.”
He did. She was right. There wasn’t another building within what had to be a mile.
“There are a couple of other places that are possible. Maybe. Over there.”
She pointed north toward a bigger road. The roofs of several cars flashed in the hard light. A village, probably not more than a cluster of houses and a post office, squatted off toward the sea.
“Maybe,” Enzo agreed. “But a bigger road means too many cars. And houses. Too many places to run if you got away.”
Anna looked at him and nodded.
“Would Kristin fight?”
Enzo dropped his voice to a murmur. The caretaker hadn’t come out, but he’d stopped scrabbling, which meant he’d either left, or was hovering just inside the stairwell desperate to know why it was that the police had called on a Tuesday morning in February demanding access to the campanile and were now standing scanning the surrounding countryside like bad caricatures of spies. Anna nodded again.
“If she can,” she said. “Once she realizes—what’s going on.”
Both of them knew, she meant once she realizes this is no lover’s bolt-hole. Once he stops sleeping with her, or at least making love to her. Or even stops being nice. But neither of them said it. Enzo saw a flicker of pain cross Anna’s face, and was amazed all over again at how impervious love was to reason. And time. And even self-preservation—all the parameters of what was generally considered life.
He raised the binoculars again and took one last swing across the empty landscape.
“I think it’s the place. I’m probably wrong,” she muttered. “It’s just.” She shrugged. “A feeling. And it’s not more than a couple of miles away from his grandparents’, as the crow flies.”
“Is that important?”
“I think so.”
Enzo didn’t look at her as she spoke, but kept scanning for buildings, tracks, they might have missed.
“I told you, he used to—Antonio, when he was little,” Anna said. “He and his grandpa used to walk up to the top of the hill where you could see the campanile and listen for the bells. At sunset.” Enzo could feel her looking at him. “I think he’d want to hear them again,” she said finally. “I think that would be important.”
The remark annoyed him, although he wasn’t sure why. He stared through the glasses for a few more minutes. Then he dropped them onto his chest and zipped up his coat.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go.”
* * *
They drove north first, following the bigger road they had come in on, branching down single lanes and inevitably dead-ending at well-kept, or not so well-kept, groups of buildings. A barn, a house, a shed. Sometimes there was a barking dog and curtains at the windows. Sometimes not, but all of them were obviously inhabited. And not by Antonio. There wasn’t as much as a whiff of a black BMW.
Since the car hadn’t turned up anywhere, Enzo, like Anna, figured Antonio still had it. If he didn’t, he’d had to have gotten ahold of a new one, and that probably meant he had an accomplice—somebody supplying him, covering for him, planning with him. And what that meant—Enzo didn’t even want to think about what that meant. A lone kidnapping lunatic was one thing. A pair, or God forbid, a group, of kidnapping lunatics was entirely another. Il passato scompare, viene poi di nuovo, come la luna. The past disappears, and comes again, like the moon.
He thought they might have gotten lucky once, when the track they were following crested a rise and ended up in a semicircle of abandoned sheds with an old cottage crouched behind them. But a second look revealed holes in the roofs, collapsed walls, and no sign of habitation beyond the snow-dampened remains of a bonfire and a pile of rusting beer cans. Finally they turned around and went south.
The first road they found themselves on was small and narrow enough. The one they branched off on was barely one lane, little more than a track, the tarmac cracked and falling away at the sides so severely that in a few years it would be gone altogether. If Enzo had needed more proof than the lack of power lines that the farm Anna had latched onto was abandoned, this was it. It probably wasn’t even used for storage. Tractors, trailers, all the paraphernalia that went with growing and harvesting, had not been coming up and down here with any regularity. They wouldn’t have tires left if they did. He swerved for a pothole and nearly went into a ditch.
Neither of them had spoken since coming back past Pomposa. Anna was staring straight ahead, chin sunk into the neck of her sweater, hands clutched in her lap, chewing at her lower lip, which was already chapped. Enzo slowed almost to a crawl, watching the sides of the road for the entrance of the track that would serve as a drive, and for anything else. When he saw it, he braked hard and Anna jerked against the seat belt.
“What? What is it?” she asked, getting out of the car.
Enzo, who had leapt out almost before the car had stopped, waved her back.
“Please,” he snapped, “don’t come any closer. Go and get back in the car.”
She stood still, b
ut ignored the second part of the order, watching as he crouched on the edge of the crumbling pavement, staring at what looked, on first glance, like an empty, frozen verge. Then she saw what he’d seen. Tire tracks. Wide ones, from a fairly big vehicle. They were deep, meaning it had been parked here for some time.
“When did it last snow?” Enzo looked back at her. “Has it snowed since you’ve been here?”
Anna nodded.
“The first night. Sunday. But out here, I don’t know. It can be different.”
Enzo stood up. He walked a wide circle. A business card with, say, a name and phone number on it, dropped in the ditch would be a little too much to hope for. But a cigarette butt might not be. A gum wrapper. There wasn’t one. And of course, he could be wrong. Kids could come out here to smoke dope and make out and drink themselves silly every weekend. But there were no condoms or cheap vodka bottles in the dead grass—and they’d definitely leave cigarette butts.
The tracks were recent. There had been slight melt, some sun when the car had parked here, and the wind had not yet broken down the ridges. If he knew more, if he was a real motor head, he might even have been able to tell what kind of tires they were—Pirellis, or Firestones, or whatever. He would take a bet on the car, though. It had been something very heavy. Longish. Probably four door. Like, for instance, a big black BMW sedan. Enzo frowned.
He walked down the road slowly, got about thirty yards before he found the entrance to the track, and stopped. It was rutted, and deep, and had recently thawed enough to be muddy. Which might prove there was a God after all. Because the footprints were dead clear. Someone had walked down here, recently.
Enzo crouched and looked more closely. There were tire tracks, too. Recent ones. Motor head or not, he’d put money on the fact that they were the same tires, from the same car that had parked back down the road. He stood up, reached for his cell phone, then stopped.
The Lost Daughter Page 40
