He ordered another bourbon and soda. He had an asset!
10.
Scottie was in the stairwell carrying empty boxes, in search of a trash bin. She had forgotten to ask Carlo where it was. The front door of the building opened, and Robertino came in with a package.
“Buongiorno, signora,” he said.
Scottie, shy, echoed the greeting, then followed it up with “Dov’è la spazzatura?”—a phrase she had spent several minutes memorizing.
“Oh, you speak Italian now,” said Robertino.
“No, no,” laughed Scottie. “All I know is how to ask where the trash goes!”
He was delivering a package to the primo piano (first floor) and explained for the confused Scottie why the first floor wasn’t the second floor, because there was a ground floor.
“Why don’t you just call the ground floor the first floor?” Scottie asked.
“Because is on the ground.”
There was more to living in a foreign culture than just learning the language, it turned out.
“I can teach you,” he said.
11.
After the incident with Rosini, Michael was worried about Scottie. He sent Robertino to offer to teach her Italian, and told him to make sure it seemed like it was the boy’s own idea. He didn’t want Scottie to realize he was spying on her.
In his weekly encoded report to Luce and his unnamed, shadowy CIA handlers, Michael listed Robertino as a newly recruited “mid-level civil servant,” forty-four years old. One of the rules was that he was supposed to give his contacts aliases, so that reports could be circulated without compromising sources. The first two letters were related to the station’s location, and the names were always in all caps, to signify they were aliases. To Robertino he gave the alias IS OXBLOOD1, meaning he was the first paid source whom Michael (whose own cryp for internal purposes was Geoffrey Sneedle) had recruited.
A cable arrived from the Rome station the next day praising him for recruiting a paid asset. It seemed the vast majority of clandestine officers never recruited any. He would celebrate by taking Scottie out to dinner. He had read a few chapters of a book called How to Have a Happy Marriage, and it mentioned that sharing successes over a nice meal out made a woman feel like a real partner.
“I’m taking Italian lessons,” Scottie announced when he got home, handing him a stinger. “From the ox boy, Robertino.”
“Really? What a great idea,” he said. The brandy and crème de menthe felt heavy on his tongue. “Let’s celebrate. I’m taking you out.”
She clapped her hands and kissed his cheek.
It’s working, he thought. I’m good at this.
It was a perfect arrangement: Robertino chaperoned Scottie every afternoon, and reported to Michael where they went and who they talked to. Michael was impressed by how Scottie took to life as a foreigner—she quickly became much more comfortable in the city than he was. But of course she had no mission other than to keep house for him. He envied her naïveté, her unsullied innocence, her lack of secrets. She was the American ideal he was sent there to promote. She was like Dale Evans, he thought: a beautiful, pure, faithful, true cowgirl. She was the only one not there with an ulterior motive.
12.
Michael was a much quieter person than she’d thought when she met him at the mixer at Vassar. In Scottie’s experience, people who were shy often turned out to be very talkative when you got to know them, but Michael didn’t seem to fit that mold. He was gone every day now, setting up the new Ford showroom in the zona industriale just outside the city walls. She’d thought that he’d sell tractors all day, then be home for the dinner that she’d cook up on the beautiful American appliances. Some days, he was, and he would regale her with stories of Italian farmers making the transition from mules and oxen to tractors, and she would tell him stories of domestic life among the “savages.” But often he was out with potential clients until late, and came home so tired he could barely fall into bed.
Instead, it was mostly Robertino with whom she shared stories. Over the next few weeks, as Scottie took welcome breaks from setting up the apartment, the Italian lessons with Robertino slowly unwrapped and revealed the local culture that had been hidden from her when she arrived. Robertino would come in the afternoons when he was done exercising horses at the stable where he worked. She loved that he brought the smell of horse with him. She would think of questions for him, things that she needed to do, or buy, or wondered about, and have them ready when he arrived. Then they would go out into the city and get what she needed, learning as she went. As they walked through the city, Robertino solemnly explained that cappuccino was never drunk after lunch, because that much milk was considered too heavy late in the day. Tisana was a healing tea. You must never grate cheese on a dish containing seafood—considered a disgusting combination. Ice in a drink would cause a heart attack. Stepping in dog doo was good luck; seeing nuns behind the wheel was bad. Thirteen was fine, but seventeen was unlucky. All stores closed from one to three p.m., or sometimes four, so that everyone could go home for lunch. Lunch was at one, never at two or three, and dinner no earlier than eight p.m.
“For a seemingly anarchist culture,” Scottie pointed out, “you have a lot of rules, and most of them seem to be related to digestion.”
“Nothing is more important than eating,” said Robertino, and Scottie felt as if an important piece of her Italian education had just fallen into place.
13.
Michael was surprised how much he learned about Scottie from Robertino’s reports. The kid was always telling him about something funny Scottie had said, or done, or something she had noticed about the Sienese.
“She got very sad when I showed her where they leave the babies,” Robertino said when they met one morning out near Sovicille. They could not be seen together in Siena, as per agency protocols.
“Leave the babies? What are you talking about?”
“At the door of the nunnery, the revolving wheel. If you have a baby you don’t want, you put it there and turn the wheel to send it inside without them seeing you. The nuns give the babies funny last names like ‘Gift from God’ and ‘Little Toy,’ and they find them homes. The signora, she’s an orphan, too.”
“Yes, I know,” said Michael, but he realized he didn’t, really. He had seen it as convenient that Scottie did not have family ties, but now he thought she must be very lonely. But perhaps asking her about it would make her sad. He wished he knew more about what happy marriages were made of. If only he had time to make a study of them—he needed to finish reading How to Have a Happy Marriage, he thought. His own parents were only a model of what not to do. He wished there was someone he could ask. But he had so much to do, and so little time. The election was coming up, and he had reports to file, and tractors to sell to keep his cover intact. He would make time for that later, once the election was over. She would understand. Plus, she was so down-to-earth—she would know he adored her because he worked so hard to take care of them.
14.
Scottie and Robertino stopped by his grandfather’s house just outside the city walls one afternoon so Signor Banchi could teach her the names of the plants in the garden. He pointed out rosmarino and timo and lavanda, rubbing the leaves between his fingers to release the fragrant perfume of each.
Scottie knew she should probably get a textbook to learn Italian, but she had always had difficulty reading, and Robertino wasn’t really that kind of teacher. He simply talked to her in Italian and expected her to catch on. He began by going around the apartment and naming everything. It was pure poetry.
“Tappeto, caffettiera, rubinetto, divano, fazzoletto, asciugamano…,” he said. Then he named actions like walking, standing, sitting, cooking: “camminare, stare, sedere, cucinare.” From there they were off—she often begged him to slow down, but he rarely did, so she just made him repeat things over and over.
“Andiamo a camminare. Andiamo a fare la spesa.”
Scottie didn’t kno
w what the phrases meant at first, but she discovered as she went. Let’s go for a walk. Let’s go shopping. Robertino explained that she must address him with the tu form of verbs, while he addressed her as the formal Lei.
“It is correct,” he said, as if it were also very important, so she obeyed. She felt safe as she followed Robertino around the city, echoing him—“Vorrei due chili di pomodori, per cortesia.” Because of the way her brain learned, she didn’t think “the word for tomatoes is pomodori”; she just looked at the display and said “pomodori.” It was more like the way a child accumulates language, in large experiential verbal waves. She began to realize that most of what we say in life follows predictable patterns. We use the same phrasings for asking for things, for talking about the weather, for expressing sympathy, for expressing affection. There are scripts we follow without even thinking about it. She wasn’t learning the language word by word; she was learning it by living it. With her difficulty reading, she had always felt a little dumb, even though she had gone to the best girls’ schools in America. Every B-minus had been a hard-fought struggle. Here in Italy she felt like a different person altogether—more expressive, more curious, more open. The only problem was how bothered she felt by the way the men looked at her, something she could not bring up with Robertino, of course, who was still a boy.
“Buongiorno, Signor Sindaco,” Robertino said as they crossed paths with Ugo Rosini one day in Via di Città. Scottie now knew that sindaco was the Italian term for mayor.
Ugo smiled broadly at both of them and tipped his hat. “Beware of the most beautiful woman in Siena,” he told Robertino. Scottie felt herself blush so hard her face burned. Robertino, fortunately, didn’t notice, and launched into a discussion of the latest car he wanted to buy. As he chattered about the merits of Alfas versus Fiats, she thought of something Leona used to say. “A man liking you doesn’t make you special. It just means you have something he wants.”
15.
“Do you ever see my husband?” she asked Robertino one day as they were visiting the Duomo. They were admiring the floors, which depicted classical figures. Scottie was peering down at the Roman goddess Fortuna, who had one foot on the sphere and the other on a ship, holding her sail aloft. She often felt that same precarious thrill.
He looked straight at her. “See him?”
“Yes, you know, around Siena.” She blushed a little, despite having promised herself she wouldn’t. “I’m not spying on him or anything. He just works a lot, and I miss him.”
“If I see him, I will tell you,” he said.
Two days later he arrived at the apartment and announced, “He had lunch with the priest, Father Giovanni, at Trattoria Pepe. They both had lamb.”
She laughed. “And for dessert?”
“Torta della nonna.”
“I’ll have to learn to make that. I didn’t know he liked it.”
“He also likes spaghetti with clams. The waiter at Trattoria Il Bosco told me that. He orders it all the time, when he has lunch with the people who are shopping for tractors. You should make that for him.”
“I will. Thank you.”
He tipped an imaginary hat at her. “Anything for you, signora.”
16.
From what Michael could gather, most of what Robertino and Scottie talked about was horses. Robertino was proud to have taught Scottie all of the terms: cavallo, cavaliere, salto, scuderia, zoccolo, pelo … In preparing his cover as a tractor expert, Michael had read that before the war, horses in Tuscany were fairly rare—cart horses, mostly—and even the horses in the famous Palio horse race were just farm beasts drafted for the event. During the war, horses were primarily a source of food. He had tried to hide from Scottie the fact that there was still an equine butcher only a block from their apartment.
“I can’t look,” she said when she finally discovered what the horse sign over the door meant.
“They think it’s a cure for anemia,” he said.
Now, with incomes growing and a new prosperity in the air, there was a class of Tuscan entrepreneurs who were embracing the horse as a sign of status and building flashy places like the stable where Robertino worked in the mornings. Michael had learned the names of the newly rich Sienese who kept horses there, and included them in his reports. Anyone attracted to that kind of lifestyle would be more interested in capitalism than communism, he reasoned.
Scottie could be useful there, too. She seemed quite observant, and intuitive. She had made him spaghetti with clams the other night, even though he had never told her it was his favorite. She was a terrible cook, but he appreciated the gesture. He should buy her something nice. That was in the book, too—buy her presents even when it’s not her birthday, so she knows you care. He would ask Robertino what to buy her.
17.
“I love that the Italian word for a female rider is amazzone,” she said to Robertino as they walked along the wall of the city near Porta Romana. “Like we’re Amazons.” She bought them both gelati—cioccolato for him and limone for her—and they sat on a bench overlooking the distant hills.
He admired her bracelet. “Mr. Messina bought it for me,” she said, twisting her wrist to admire the pearls. “Do you think it’s too flashy?”
“No,” said Robertino. “I think it’s perfect.”
“I do miss riding,” she said with a sigh.
“A woman on a horse,” said Robertino, “is to be feared.”
She told him about the horses she’d had—starting with Shorty the pony, who bit and kicked and had to wear an anti-grazing strap, put in place after he had yanked many little girls down his neck and over his head in search of green grass. Shorty had taught her to have a good seat and be a decisive rider, transmitting confidence to her mounts. And he had taught her patience—hard-earned, since she had started riding as a tempestuous little six-year-old who would pound her fists on the unimpressed pony’s sides when he disobeyed.
Her voice caught as she told Robertino about her beloved Sonny Boy.
“He was magnificent,” she said, licking the small wooden spoon. “Era un cavallo magnifico.” She told Robertino the story of buying him at Saratoga, saving him from slaughter, how she brought him along slowly, encouraging him and bringing out his best.
“He loves to jump,” she said. “He just loves it.”
“Why did you sell him? Because you came here?”
She sighed. “I had to when my father died,” she said. “Last summer.”
“You have no brothers and sisters?”
“No. There’s an aunt, but that’s it.”
“So you inherited everything? Like I will inherit my grandfather’s farm?”
“I thought so,” she said, thinking of the Spanish-style mansion on Alden Street—the twisted wrought iron, the cool painted tiles, the fountain in the courtyard. “But no. I found out something secret about my father when he died.” Robertino, she knew, loved secrets and gossip.
“A secret?”
“He had no money after all.”
18.
“She thought her father was rich,” Robertino said, “but he wasn’t.”
So there is no trust fund coming her way, thought Michael. “I thought he was in oranges.”
“That’s what he told her, but it wasn’t true. He worked for a man who owned many, many orange groves.”
They were near the heavy, huge walls of the Fortezza. Michael didn’t like to meet in the city, but he was having lunch with a local winemaker later who seemed like a prospect on two fronts: buying tractors and finding out what Rosini’s weaknesses were that could be exploited to make him look bad and lose the election. The kid had signaled him that he had information, so here they were—except the information wasn’t about one of Siena’s power brokers, it was about his own wife.
“He was stealing from the man, a little bit here, a little bit there. For a long time the rich man didn’t notice.”
Michael pictured Scottie’s father raising a daughter alone, a daughter
who liked horses. An expensive habit. He would never steal himself, but he could see how it could happen, that you would skim a bit just to make your little girl smile. “And then?”
“He got caught. He was going to go to jail, so he killed himself.”
“Oh my God. I didn’t know that. She said he … died.” Michael realized he had never asked how.
“Her aunt told her, ‘You know what a mirage is? Think of it as a mirage. It was a beautiful mirage, but now it’s gone. It’s all gone.’ She never told anyone, Mrs. Messina. Not at school, not her friends. She only tell me.”
Michael pondered this. How awful for Scottie. How lonely.
“She had to sell her horse to pay for her last year of school. Me, I hate school,” Robertino said. “I would keep the horse and quit!”
She had lost everything. Her father, her money, her beloved horse. A doubt crept into his mind. Was that why she married him? Did girls marry for love, really, or was that just in the movies? Didn’t they marry for security? Did it matter? Men needed wives, and women needed husbands. If you also loved each other, it would be an amazing bonus, but you couldn’t count on it. It would be nice, he thought, if she loved him, but at the same time the idea made him nervous. Too much closeness—that could be dangerous for both of them. To really be safe, he needed to keep her in the dark.
19.
She hoped she hadn’t been stupid to confide in Robertino. It was just that he was the only person she had to really talk to. And he confided in her, too. He told her about a horse he was exercising at the stable, a mare named Camelia who was evil to everyone, but whom he adored. He described the way she shied at ducks and bikes and children, flying into the air sideways.
Scottie thought about Sonny Boy, remembering saying good-bye in the horse trailer, sitting down on the ground and sobbing as the truck pulled away.
“We can go to the stable where I work,” Robertino said as they chose ripe peaches—pesche, not to be confused with fish, pesci—from a display outside the fruit store. “I will show you all the horses. You must meet Camelia.”
She shook her head. That grief had not yet dissipated. “I can’t,” she said.
The Italian Party Page 6
