“Rome?”
“Better. I called the number in the paper. Let’s go get you a puppy!”
EIGHT
LA SELVA, THE FOREST
“TALLEST FOREST IN THE FIELD”
JUNE 29–31, 1956
1.
She was watching the tratta from her window, trying to find Robertino’s face in the crowd, hoping that this dream come true for him did not fall flat. He had not shown up for her lesson the day after he had caught her and Carlo in San Galgano, or the next day.
The horses were sleek and shiny, blacks, chestnuts, bays and grays, and the fantini (jockeys) all wore identical tunics in the black and white of Siena for this selection heat. The crowds were gigantic, seething, and the barbareschi (grooms) were all gathered inside the courtyard of the Torre del Mangia, so that was probably why she couldn’t spot him. A mare named Ondina was picked for the Porcupine. Knowing that Robertino would lead the mare from the Campo to the contrada stables and stay with her twenty-four hours a day for the next four days, until the Palio was run on the evening of July 2, Scottie decided to go see Signor Banchi and leave the money for the last two lessons for Robertino.
As the sun rose, the city was a churning mass of noise and warm flesh. When she got to Banchi’s, there were three men in suits there, agitated, talking to him out front. Banchi looked upset. She hesitated, but he saw her at the gate.
“Signora,” he said. “Maybe the signora knows something.”
She walked down between the rows of lavender to the front door, bees buzzing around her.
“Have you seen Robertino?” Banchi asked urgently.
“No. He didn’t come for the lesson yesterday or today. I assumed he was busy in the contrada.”
Banchi looked at the men, worried. “These are the officers from the contrada. Robertino did not show up at the sorta this morning. The contrada was given the horse Ondina, but he’s not there to take care of her.”
Didn’t show up? Robertino would never miss the Palio. He’d been talking about it pretty much nonstop since the day she’d met him.
The men from the contrada left, and Scottie put a kettle of hot water on to make some chamomile tea for Signor Banchi.
“Maybe we should talk to the police,” she said.
Banchi frowned. “I’m not sure. My grandson…” His voice trailed off.
“Is there someone you want me to talk to?” she said, setting the tea down in front of the old man, noting his trembling hands. “Someone he might have gone to see?”
“Perhaps his mother,” said Signor Banchi, frowning, his fear becoming anger as Scottie watched. “His mother destroys everything. She has probably asked him to do something for her. I tell him to say no, but he never does.” He slammed his open palm down on the table, making the bread crumbs jump. “And now she’s lost him his job as a Palio groom. They’ll never pick him as a jockey for the August race now!”
Scottie was confused. “I thought his mother was dead?”
“God forgive me, but I wish she were dead.” His watery eyes turned to meet hers. “Her name is Gina,” he said. “She is a prostitute.”
She thought about the way she had asked Robertino about Gina, how uncomfortable he must have been. The poor kid. But Gina was so young—she must have been a teenager when Robertino was born. Scottie did the math in her head: It was during the war. He must have been born in 1942, when German and Italian troops had been fighting side by side in North Africa and Russia.
Scottie left the money she owed Robertino with the old man and went to the corner where Gina could usually be found. She was not there. Scottie looked for the telltale pile of cigarette butts, but there were none.
* * *
It was time to meet Michael to go get the puppy. What should have been a happy event now felt like an unwelcome distraction. She met Michael by the Fortezza, where they now always parked the Ford, safely outside the city’s car-eating center. Michael backed the giant vehicle out of the lot, dodging the merchants setting up for today’s outdoor market. They zigzagged down from the city to Pian del Lago, a vast flat green expanse where cattle grazed here and there. She felt grateful for the space between them in the Ford, so sharply in contrast to the dangerous intimacy of Carlo’s little breadbox on wheels.
She told Michael about Robertino’s disappearance, but he seemed unconcerned. “That kid is like a cat,” he said. “Always lands on his feet. I wouldn’t worry about him.” She did not reveal the secret of his parentage. She felt protective of Robertino, or perhaps ashamed for him.
Michael was talking about the people who owned the puppies. “Apparently they’re leaving their farm and moving up to Turin. The husband has taken a job at a factory there. Common story these days. Huge migration going on. High time. This country’s only hope for the future is to industrialize.” He reached across and put his hand on her knee. “Let me do the talking. They’ll probably claim they’re purebreds, ask for a lot of money, but they’ll be mutts for sure and left behind if they don’t sell.”
“Leave them behind? To starve? That’s horrible.”
The road climbed again, and they picked up the Monte Maggio road. They drove for about a half hour, then turned off and chugged up an unmarked rutted gravel road in low gear, passing through a chestnut forest full of shadows.
When they turned off the gravel road and she saw the state of the farm, she understood that perhaps leaving a dog behind was the least of these people’s worries. Though the family had not moved out yet, the place already had an abandoned air. Grass grew in the gutters of the old stone house, and the roof was falling in, one huge timber already collapsed, a cascade of handmade bricks and rooftiles around it. A couple of skinny sheep and an angry goose followed them across the terra-cotta aia to the steps that led upstairs to the front door, complaining loudly. As at Banchi’s, the farm animals lived on the ground floor, but here the air was full of the acrid odor of manure, and there was a sense of disorder and hopelessness, of defeat. The roots of a large fig tree were pushing up the bricks. Six skinny barefoot children skulked around, staring at Scottie, and a baby cried somewhere inside. One of the thousands of flies flew into Scottie’s mouth, choking her.
Michael called out and went up the stairs and knocked, but no one answered, and finally a white fox terrier with black and brown spots and fabulously furry eyebrows came tearing around a corner, barking like mad, preceding a very tired-looking woman carrying a basket of wet laundry on her hip.
“Mi scusate,” she said. “I’m sorry—I was down at the stream. Basta, Ecco,” she said.
The woman smiled shyly at Scottie, a smile that revealed much warmth but a distinct lack of teeth. She’s not much older than I am, Scottie realized. She did her laundry in a stream. At least the women in the city had fountains of clean water nearly on their doorsteps. You could read statistics about how almost no rural Italian homes had running water, but seeing it written on a woman’s face was another thing.
“The puppies are gone,” she said. “Someone came this morning and bought them. But you can have this one. He’s a good dog.”
Michael, disappointed, began to say that they only wanted a puppy, that they had driven a long way, but Scottie put her hand on his sleeve. “Tell us about the dog,” she said to the woman. “What’s his name?”
“Ecco,” she said. Scottie knew it meant “here,” as in “here he is.”
They sat down in the kitchen, which had a huge open fireplace, soot stains on the ceiling, and just a simple table with a couple of stools. The woman offered them some wine, which they accepted to be polite, Scottie trying not to stare at the three mismatched chipped cups. The woman proudly explained the dog’s family tree, the barefoot children lurking in the shadowy corners of the room. Scottie got the feeling the dog had been a splurge in happier times, now regretted. The dog’s great-great-grandmother apparently belonged to an Italian who used airships to discover the hidden landscape of the North Pole in the 1920s. Titina was the first dog to
circle the Pole. On a later voyage there had been a crash, but both the explorer and Titina had survived.
“Are you talking about Umberto Nobile?” Michael asked.
“Sì, sì,” the woman said, brightening. “This dog is the grandson of his dog!”
“I’m sorry, but we can’t take this dog,” said Michael, standing up.
Scottie looked at him questioningly, asked in English, “Why? He’s a cute dog, and yes I wanted a puppy, but I won’t have to house-train him. No chewing, either.”
Michael nodded toward the outside. The woman waved a hand to excuse them, and Scottie followed Michael out.
“Umberto Nobile is a famous Commie!” he whispered. “Notorious!”
“Michael,” she said. “It’s a dog.”
“I don’t want us to have anything to do with Communists.”
“I know you hate Communists, but isn’t there some big thaw going on? Maybe the Cold War is over.”
“Who’s been telling you that?” he demanded, grabbing her arm. The goose squawked, hearing his tone. She looked into his eyes and saw raw fear. “Banchi? Did you know he’s a Communist, too? I don’t want you to see him anymore. Those lessons with Robertino are over. I’ll get you a real teacher.”
“I think you’re overreacting,” she said.
“They want you to think that things are loosening up. It’s a lie, all part of a move by the Soviets to consolidate their power overseas. To bring together the Communists and the Socialists all over Europe. In Italy the left coalition is only two percent behind in the polls. Two percent! This is their big push,” he said. “They want Western Europe. They want bases, and tanks, and nuclear missiles pointed at America. It’s the domino theory coming true. And the next domino is Italy.”
Scottie sighed in frustration. The things Michael was worried about seemed so far away from where they were standing right now, where this poor woman struggled to put food on the table. His blindness made her seethe.
“Fine,” she said, not caring that she was loud. “Let’s go home.”
Michael grabbed her hand. “We’ll take the dog. But I think it’s best if you don’t try to understand politics, okay?”
Michael was quiet in the car. The dog sat on the backseat and stared out the window.
“Ciao, Ecco,” she said to him. She liked the way he looked at her, appraisingly, before he jumped over into the front and sat next to her, his paws on her lap. He was thin and ribby, but his fur was a soft curly fleece, and his ears neatly folded over like her father’s heavy stationery. When she offered him a wafer cookie she’d stuck in her purse, Ecco sniffed suspiciously, then refused it. The dog had an aloofness about him, almost a snobbery, like the Sienese themselves. What was he hiding? She realized she was not thinking of him as a dog, but as an Italian. He would be her ambassador. She gathered him in her arms and hugged him, feeling his little heart beating under her palm. My Communist dog, she thought.
* * *
They took a different road back to Siena, which annoyed her. “I want to get back in time for the evening prova,” she said. Each of the three nights before the Palio, the horses would run morning and evening test heats, or prove. They didn’t count for anything, but gave the jockeys, the horses and the crowds a taste of what was to come on the big day. She hoped she would see Robertino in the crowd with Ondina.
“Forget the horses for one minute,” Michael said, pointing out the simple stone arch of the Ponte della Pia. “I want to show you something beautiful. It’s got a famous tragic story to it.”
She didn’t have the heart to tell him she knew it already.
“In the 1200s a doomed noblewoman named Pia Tolomei left the city over that exact bridge with her husband, who thought she was cheating on him. He locked her in his castle in Maremma,” Michael said. “And she either starved to death or jumped out the window. It got her literary immortality, though. She’s mentioned in Dante.” He had taken out a camera, was snapping a picture of her.
“I’m sorry I’m a disappointment to you,” she said.
“Oh! Oh no!” he said quickly, putting down the camera, genuinely surprised by this. “Why would you say such a thing? Did I make you feel that way?” He looked so tortured by this thought she had to say something to reassure him.
“I’m … a terrible cook. I didn’t mean to get pregnant.”
He laughed, and took her hand and kissed it tenderly. “You’re a wonderful wife,” he said. “Way better than I deserve.” He took her in his arms and held her. “You’re the best thing in my life right now.”
2.
Scottie was bathing the dog as Michael slipped out of the apartment. He stood in the shadows of the Fortezza Medicea. Although transformed during the Fascist era into a lovely public space with tall shade trees, the massive fortress was in fact a bitter symbol for the Sienese of their defeat by the odious Florentines under the leadership of Cosimo de’ Medici in 1555, marking the end of the Republic of Siena.
There is plenty of animosity to this day between the two cities, he had written in his last report.
He shifted anxiously in the darkness, listening for Robertino’s footsteps. The fortress’s almost absurdly massive walls had been built with no sense of refinement or decoration, just intimidation. Michael could imagine the Florentines pouring boiling oil off of them onto obstreperous Sienese below.
The morning after they met on the road, Robertino had passed him in Via di Città and slipped him a note that the break-in had gone smoothly and he had the Communist Party membership list.
Then Robertino had not shown up for the handoff.
What the hell was going on? Did it have to do with Physique Pictorial? There was no way the kid could know he was gay. It had to be a stab in the dark, didn’t it? There was nothing, no trace. It was a scare tactic. That was what being gay meant, that even straight men feared being accused of it. Robertino had to be testing him. Maybe he just wanted more money.
Michael had stood in the window with a newspaper at eight this morning as the crowds filed into the piazza for the damn test race, but the kid had not shown up again. So now he was waiting for him at the Fortezza, their backup meeting point. He hoped the kid had gotten distracted by all this Palio hullabaloo and would reappear. Still. If anyone found the list of party members on him, if they forced him to tell who he was working for … Michael would be at the center of a very ugly scandal, found to be interfering in Italian politics. He would be cut loose without pity. Michael had learned in training that four years earlier, two CIA officers had been captured while trying to remove an agent from China and jailed. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles refused either to acknowledge they were in fact Agency men or negotiate for their release. If Michael went to jail, no one was coming to get him out. What would happen to Scottie, and their child? He felt sick at the thought.
He checked his watch again. He would give the kid fifteen more minutes.
The moon was coming up over the old fortress. It was a warm summer night, with fireflies hovering around the bushes. Michael was reminded of evenings back home, watching movies outdoors in Van Cortlandt Park with his older brother. Marco, I hope you’re watching over me. I hope you’re proud. I hope you’re jealous.
But he wouldn’t be. Marco had teased him mercilessly when he was little, stabbed Michael’s teddy bear with a pencil and called him a fag when he cried. Michael was too little to know what the word meant, but the sense of it was clear. At those movies in the park Marco had threatened Michael if he sat too close, and at the same time protected him, chasing off boys who teased and threw popcorn.
A cloud slid over the moon, deepening the darkness outside the Medici Fortress. Somewhere a radio played “The Great Pretender.”
And then someone grabbed him from behind.
* * *
He woke up in the trunk of a car.
I’m dead, he thought. The idea was something of a relief, as he had imagined it so many times, except he wanted to know what exactly he was bei
ng killed for. Was this the KGB? Or just run-of-the-mill thugs like the ones who had attacked the taxi in Rome? It seemed important to know. Oh fuck, he thought, remembering what else was in his briefcase. Physique Pictorial. Could he get rid of it before they killed him? He did not want that mentioned in the eulogies.
They drove for what seemed like a long while. He dug deep into his memories of training and went through all the hand-to-hand combat moves in his mind.
Finally, after ten or twenty minutes of bumping and gear grinding, the trunk opened. There were two men, older than he and very strong. One of them had a bushy mustache that looked fake.
Michael started to yell and raised his fists to strike.
“Relax, it’s a drill.”
“A drill? I nearly pissed myself.”
The two men looked at each other. “Come inside,” they said.
In the darkness it was hard to get the lay of the land, but this was clearly an abandoned farmhouse deep in a forest. Michael could hear insects and saw fireflies. Water was running somewhere. It would have been charming under other circumstances.
The interior of the stone building had a dirt floor and piles of ancient animal dung, some broken glass in the corner and a table and chairs that had seen better centuries. One of the men lit a kerosene lantern.
This was a CIA safe house, they explained. They showed him a map of how to get to it, which he had to memorize, and then they burned it in front of him. Michael could sense that they were skeptical of him, that they didn’t think he was a “real” spy.
“I’m very close to getting my hands on a membership list for the Communists in Siena,” he blurted, wanting to impress them.
“An enemies list. Excellent,” Mustache said.
Michael thought of Signor Banchi and the mechanic Brunetti. “I wouldn’t say they’re all enemies,” he said. “What are you going to do with the list?”
Mustache said this meeting was about the new elections that Michael had cabled Luce about. The Catholic, pro-America candidate, the slimy tax lawyer and now acting mayor Vestri, must beat Ugo Rosini, who, if he won again, might never be shaken out of office.
The Italian Party Page 13
