They had met at a bar in New Haven. Michael had finally worked up the courage to enter, then lost his nerve at the sight of men in eye makeup. He was leaving when Duncan, who was in his “Masterworks of the Renaissance” course, had spoken to him. Michael had tried to pretend it was a mistake, that he had only come in to make a phone call, but Duncan had pursued him around campus, invited him to meal after meal. Michael felt like Cinderella, and how could he not give in to such an insistent prince?
Though Duncan was the initial pursuer, Michael had always feared that Duncan’s attachment was not as deep as his. He was resigned to this. He repeated to himself lines from Auden: If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me. At each milestone—when Duncan graduated and moved to Scarsdale to work in his father’s firm while he went to Columbia Law—Michael had assumed it was the end, that they would never see each other again. Instead, though there were sometimes silent gaps lasting weeks or months, Duncan always eventually called, inviting him to New York for stolen weekends at the Waldorf-Astoria, or gossipy lunches at 21 where Duncan did wicked imitations of his colleagues. They always ended up in bed.
Then Duncan had gone to work for the State Department in Rome, while Michael pursued a master’s, aiming for that green-lawned boarding school job, and a quiet, chaste life where he could continue his monkish isolation from the “real” world. He had always been a nervous child, and his wartime fears of Nazis, fears that came true when Marco was killed, had morphed easily into fear of a Communist takeover of the United States. Every news report and every political speech fed that fear until, like most other Americans, he was frightened of strangers, terrified about the Soviets’ plans for world domination and anxious about the bomb. He worried about mind control—what if the Soviets were brainwashing Americans right now, via subliminal messages inserted into TV broadcasts? Having loved Duncan, he did not need to ever risk another love affair. If he could spend his days immersed in centuries whose events had been safely corralled into books, he would, he thought, be safe.
Except that when he was actually offered a teaching job at a school so exactly out of his imagination it was uncanny, he had declined it. Instead he had spoken to a rather shadowy fellow who was known on campus as a CIA recruiter. “I speak Italian, so you must send me to Rome, where I can be useful,” he had insisted with a new forcefulness. He had sailed through training, and here he was. He and Duncan could never be together, he knew that, but he would make sure they were never truly apart.
He grabbed a bottle of champagne and leaned into Duncan as he poured it, slipping a hotel key into his pocket. “Room 114,” Michael whispered.
“Darling,” said Duncan as his wife, Julie, walked into the bar wearing a black and white Dior gown and an ermine cape with matching hat. She stretched out her long neck and allowed Duncan to graze her cheek with his lips.
“I didn’t realize you were in Rome,” she said to Michael, reaching out a gloved hand to take the glass from Duncan. “How many of these do I have to have to catch up?”
“It’s Julie’s birthday,” said Duncan.
“Many happy returns,” Michael said.
‘We’re late, I’m afraid, and must run, but it’s lovely to see you. Always nice to see friends from back home.” Her affect was perfectly flat. Her face painted on, her eyes elongated, her lips blood red. A vampire. A snob.
“Michael’s living in Siena,” said Duncan. “He and his wife. An heiress from California.”
Julie’s painted eyebrows rose. “Well, we must make a foursome sometime,” she said. “Does she play bridge?”
“I don’t know. I’ll ask her.”
Duncan and Julie disappeared into the crowds on Via Condotti, and Michael hailed a cab. On his way back to his hotel, a gang of thugs surrounded the cab and tried to force the door open. Michael was terrified, certain that he was about to be killed. It would have been such a dramatic death, but the taxi driver yelled at the men and ran a red light to get away, then apologized to Michael. He seemed used to this.
“We boast we are saints, poets and navigators,” he said, “but also we are criminals. You, signore. You’re Italian, too, aren’t you? Or am I wrong?”
Michael had lain awake all night, but Duncan had not come to his room.
3.
Scottie was terribly anxious about what to tell Michael. She had to tell him something, in case they ran into Ugo when they were together and he acted strangely. But she couldn’t say, “He made a pass at me,” because then Michael might feel called to defend her honor.
Perhaps it was best just to stick to a close version of the truth.
She burst into genuine tears when he walked through the door from Rome the next day.
“I just wanted to see the city, but then I got embarrassed about whether I was doing something wrong or not, so I ran off, but he must have thought I was very rude, or crazy…” She left out the rest. “I don’t know the rules,” she said. “But I’ll learn them.”
Michael was clearly mystified by this. “You don’t have to,” he said, as if it were obvious. “You’re American.” He held her in his arms. “It’s my fault. I should never have left you.”
“But I think I’ve made an ass of myself with the mayor. And you’re opening a business here. I’m so sorry.”
“I don’t care what that Commie thinks,” he said. “We don’t answer to him. Do you play bridge, by the way?”
“No,” she said, wondering why he was asking at this moment. “Don’t leave me alone again, okay? I missed you.” She kissed him, and pulled him close to feel the warmth of his body. He smelled good, and she sank her face into his neck. “What did you think of Rome?” she asked. “Was it beautiful? What did you do?”
“Just work things,” he said. “It was pretty horrible, actually. I brought you this.” He produced a small replica of the Colosseum in white stone. “Many fewer pickpockets than at the real thing. You wouldn’t like Rome.”
She wished she’d had the chance to decide for herself. She told him about the appliances, and the plumbing, and Carlo Chigi Piccolomini.
“He came himself?” Michael explained that the Chigis and the Piccolominis were two of Siena’s oldest families, with buildings and libraries named after their various illustrious members, which included bankers, generals, astronomers and popes.
“Yes, he mentioned the popes. He was very charming,” she said lightly. “And his wife went to Smith. He raises horses.”
“Oh no.”
Scottie laughed. “I’ve sworn off them,” she said. “For you.”
4.
Scottie was distraught when he came home, told him a confusing story about going sightseeing with Ugo Rosini. She was worried that she had embarrassed him. That was sweet. His tone as he reassured her was light, but he was genuinely alarmed by the story. He had been warned about this in training. Did Rosini know why he was really there? Was he trying to get information out of her? Get into their home so he could plant a listening device? This was what they did, they went after those who were close to you.
For the millionth time he wished he could tell her why they were really there. But he had been sworn to secrecy, taken an oath, and they had stressed over and over that it wasn’t safe.
He studied her as she got ready for bed. The courtship and marriage had been a bit of a blur for him, with everything else that was on his mind. The CIA encouraged intelligence agents to marry. And Clare Boothe Luce, no less, had suggested he marry a Vassar girl. “They know how to keep secrets,” she said as he sat on a silk-striped chair in her New York apartment when he went to discuss his mission with her, already in way over his head with these glamorous people, yet determined to impress them all. Scottie was a set of very appealing labels: beautiful, Vassar, California, money (or so he’d thought), horses. And no parents to disapprove of him, to point out that he was not in her class. He couldn’t believe his luck. It was while shopping for appliances that he had felt his awe of Scottie turning to affection,
that he began to see her as a human being. She wasn’t well read, but she was game, and game was something he himself was short on, especially when he ran low on the Benzedrine his CIA trainers had introduced him to and supplied him with so generously. “Takes the edge off,” they had said. He tried on the boat over to educate her a little bit about Italy, about the history of the place and its current state, but he could see she wasn’t much interested. Her eyes would glaze over the way the undergraduates’ did when he was teaching a section of art history. Maybe it was better that he hadn’t become a high school teacher, he thought. He didn’t have the charisma for it, which disappointed him, because history was so real to him, so fascinating, so alive.
But now he was here to ensure Italy’s future would be as a non-Communist country. And he would do it. He would sway the election in the way they had trained him to, by meeting “opinion molders” in the press and government, by showing local business owners that prosperity lay in ties with America, not the Soviet Union, and by a little under-the-table, illegal campaign funding where needed.
Or he would fail, Italy would go Communist, and nuclear war would annihilate them all.
And it would be all his fault.
Oh God, he thought, reaching for the Bennies.
5.
When she was brushing her teeth that night she said shyly, “If we want to, we can, you know.”
He took her in his arms and kissed her forehead. “I’m awfully tired after the trip,” he said. “Rain check?”
They had hardly had sex since their marriage, and they hadn’t even talked about starting a family. She chalked this up to him being Catholic—they left family planning up to God. Would he believe her when in a few weeks she announced that she was pregnant with their child? She had tried to give him no reason to doubt her honesty. When he turned his back she ran a hand over her breasts. They were growing, and her belly wasn’t quite perfectly flat anymore. Mornings were queasy, but by lunch she was always ravenous. For now she could blame the pasta for her changing shape …
6.
Michael and Scottie made their mandated appearance at the Questura di Siena, the police station located under an elaborate marble arch striped in black and white.
“This would have been part of the new Duomo, but it was left unfinished when the plague hit in 1348,” said Michael in docent mode as he held the door of the police station open for her. “The workmen dropped their hammers and ran home. Within a few weeks, most of the city was dead.”
“The medieval equivalent of a nuclear blast,” said Scottie. Michael paled.
Tenente Pisano did not look particularly pleased to see them again. He became even less pleased when it became clear that they did not have their documents in order.
“You must go back to America,” announced Pisano. “America dumps on us Lucky Luciano, I send back you.” It was a sensitive subject with the Italians, that the U.S. had deported several top Mafia figures back to Italy.
* * *
Michael shut himself in the only room in their apartment with a telephone jack and placed lengthy, operator-assisted calls to Rome and dictated cables to Detroit.
As Scottie unpacked their dishes, she could hear muffled yelling coming from the next room. At last Michael emerged, red-faced and angry, and poured himself a bourbon.
“Maybe I could help,” she said.
“You?” he snapped. There was the man she liked least, back again. Michael in a state of fear and frustration. Michael feeling trapped.
She thought of Ugo talking about her “power.” Maybe she should use it. Not, she told herself, in that way, but for good. “Why don’t I talk to Mayor Rosini? It will allow me a chance to apologize for running out on him the other day.”
“We can’t have a Communist pulling strings for us!”
“He’s the mayor. You’re opening a business here that will be good for the community. What does it matter what party he belongs to?”
“It matters.”
“Oh, pooh,” she said, went into the bedroom and picked up the phone. Five minutes later, out she came and found Michael having a second bourbon in the living room.
“I can’t believe they don’t have ice in this country,” he fumed.
“You can stop worrying. It’s all been taken care of,” she said. “We won’t be deported.”
Michael brightened, surprised. “What did you say to him?”
“I said it was absurd. The police are acting like we’re criminals. We’re here to help. I reminded him we’re the good guys.”
Michael laughed. “And what did he say to that?”
“Nothing.”
Michael threw his arms around her, lifted her off the ground and spun her around. “You’re amazing!”
But Ugo hadn’t said nothing. He had said, “I would love to show you San Galgano the next time your husband is out of town.”
7.
Under Italian rules, Ugo Rosini would have made a perfect lover for Scottie. He was physically under her spell, which meant she could have made all the decisions. She was not especially attracted to him, which meant she would not lose her head. He was a man of importance in the city, so he would have willingly done things for her—as an Italian, he would have felt it to be his duty. He liked to make women laugh. She would have become the effective First Mistress of Siena, and wielded considerable power of her own.
And he was a Communist, which would have, for the Sienese, lent the whole thing such a delicious irony.
An Italian husband would have looked the other way and enjoyed the fringe benefits, but an American—perhaps not. Perhaps Michael would have found a pistol and righted the slight by shooting him, or her, or himself. Such things happened even in the expatriate community.
Americans and the British have their famous “sense of honor,” while Italians have figura instead. Bella figura is when you’ve done something notable, admirable, something that provokes a little envy. Brutta figura is terrible—you’ve done something wrong, been caught at it, and you feel shame. Figura is an outward thing, about how you are perceived, rather than how you feel inside, as honor is. The Italians are always about appearances. If you are not caught doing something unpleasant, then there is no need to feel bad about it.
8.
Scottie took a break from unpacking and sat on the windowsill, quite wide since the building’s walls were at least two feet thick. She drew up her knees and stared out at the fan-shaped piazza. It was a hive of deliveries and waiters setting up tables and chairs for the bars and restaurants that buffered the contours of the space.
It was like a television, she thought, luring her to the windows to watch the show. At midday, when she paused in unpacking plates and glasses, men in hats crossed quickly on their way to lunch, then returned slowly a couple of hours later. At three, when she was cutting shelf paper for the bookshelf that would have to serve as a linen closet until they could buy an armoire, children made their way home from school in noisy flocks.
By four p.m., it was roasting inside the apartment. Michael had been in and out all day on business. As she went to close the shutters, she spotted a slim figure darting across the square.
“There’s the ox boy again,” she said, pointing down as Michael joined her at the window. The boy was carrying suitcases for two obvious tourists, who hurried to keep up with him. The wife, hobbled by a narrow skirt, placed a precautionary hand atop her straw hat.
“I saw him earlier, too,” she said. “He was dashing in and out of buildings. He’s out there every day. What was his name again?”
Michael stared down at the boy. “Robertino Banchi,” he said.
In the evening, when the whole population of Siena emerged from the brick labyrinth for the passeggiata, which looked from Scottie’s vantage point like the swirling but deliberate movement of a corps de ballet, she saw the boy again, this time carrying a box for an older lady. Around him, swarms of teenagers flirted, little children broke and ran, and everyone moved arm in arm aro
und the piazza in a huge counterclockwise gyre of pleasantries, gossip and ogling.
“Robertino reminds me of a bellhop,” she said. “Knows everyone’s business.”
9.
Michael sat at a café table in the piazza, having a bourbon and soda and writing up his report on Rosini. He left out all mention of Scottie, but suggested he had “initiated contact through an intermediary to determine Rosini’s openness to American ideals.”
Robertino appeared at his side, all flattering eagerness. “Buongiorno, Signor Americano,” he said. “What I can do for you? Take you to Duomo? Show you good jazz bar? Find girl for you?”
Michael looked into the boy’s piercing blue eyes. Could this boy be useful in meeting people who would help him sway the election? He went everywhere in the city, unnoticed. Another invisible, like him.
“Well. I do need someone I can trust to do some work for me. Very important work. Too important for a boy, I think.”
“Can trust me. No one but me. I American like you.”
“You are?”
“Sì, sì, my father was American GI. You no see my eyes and hair? I American!”
“You wouldn’t lie to me?”
“No, signore!”
“I would need this to be a secret between us. You mustn’t tell anyone that you’re working for me.”
“Top secret!” The boy grinned. “Like Il Pipistrello!”
“Yes,” said Michael. “Just like Batman. You’ll pass my house every morning at eight. If I need to meet you, I’ll be in the window. If I’m holding a newspaper, I’ll be feeding pigeons by the Duomo at nine. If I’m holding a cup of coffee, I’ll meet you on the road near Sovicille at three. If one of us doesn’t show, we meet at the Fortezza at nine in the evening. Got it?”
The boy nodded.
He hoped he hadn’t made a huge mistake in using the boy as an asset. There was no handbook for this. In training they had said, “Be friendly but not too friendly when recruiting an asset. Set up a relationship of trust, but never actually trust him. Try to get information on him that you can use against him in case he becomes untrustworthy.”
The Italian Party Page 5
