The thought crossed Michael’s mind that Duncan might be having an affair with La Luce.
“Say that she’s coming for the Palio in August,” Duncan said.
“Is she?”
“God no. She’ll be on Niarchos’s yacht in August. She’s very disappointed in the Italians. Calls them ‘impossible.’ She’d love to cut off all aid to the damn place entirely. Win this election, would you? It will really cheer her up.”
“Hearts, minds and wallets, huh?”
Duncan frowned at him. “You do love your country, don’t you, Michael? You haven’t developed sympathy for the Italians because of your heritage?”
At first Michael thought he must be joking. His heritage? “Of course I love our country.” Michael stared Duncan down impatiently. “America is the greatest nation in the world, and I would do anything to protect it.”
Duncan smiled, then frowned again. “Oh, and keep your eyes open. Word is that the Soviets have a new man in Siena, too.”
5.
The heat seemed to begin even before the sun rose. Scottie’s limbs felt weighted. Ecco, who was supposed to sleep on a small towel near the front door, had clearly spent the night on the new sofa. She kissed his head and made him half a fried egg on toast. She would have to find out what Italian dogs ate, since they didn’t have Alpo or Thrivo here. After watching the already slick-with-sweat horses run the morning prova—still no Robertino—she closed the heavy shutters, but she couldn’t bear to sit inside in the dark all day. She wanted to go down to Banchi’s and see if Robertino had reappeared or sent word, but probably Michael was right. She, La Straniera, would just be in the way.
It was, after all, none of her business. She had paid Banchi for the last lessons. What right did she think she had to pry deeper?
The right of someone who cares, she thought.
She and Ecco walked as quickly as they could through the choked streets to Signor Banchi’s, but he wasn’t home. On her way back into the city she stopped at the Porcupine contrada office in Via Camollia, but it was locked. As she passed the Church of Saints Vincenzo and Atanasio, she heard voices inside. She hesitated—Catholic churches made her a little nervous, as if lightning were going to strike her the moment she set foot inside. Even though she knew your head and shoulders had to be covered, she felt like there were more secret rules she didn’t know, and like somehow her very presence there was offensive. This was one of the older churches in Siena—low, squat and plain on the outside, in the twelfth-century style. She looped Ecco’s leash over an iron dragon head outside, pulled her straw hat down securely, pushed open the door and stepped into the cool, dark interior. As her eyes adjusted to the light, she saw baroque flourishes, gold, a carved wooden altar, candlelight reflecting off huge canvases. Two men were talking in a corner. They looked at her in annoyance as she came in, and one of them, the priest, said, “No tours today,” in English. The other man was one of the men she had seen at Banchi’s, an official from the contrada.
“Buongiorno,” she said, continuing in Italian, “I’m wondering if there is news of Robertino Banchi.”
They shook their heads, and waited for her to leave before resuming their hushed conversation. It was probably about the Palio, but then again maybe it was about something else. Someone else.
She didn’t have an Italian driver’s license, but as she left the church, she passed a small mechanic’s garage where a very dark-eyed man with a sinewy body in oil-stained coveralls was lying on the ground working on a Vespa. There was a row of similar Vespas along one wall. He looked up at her and saw, she knew, a tourist ripe for the plucking.
“Do you by chance rent these machines?” she asked in English.
NINE
L’AQUILA, THE EAGLE
“THE EAGLE’S BEAK, TALON AND WING—UNGUIBUS ET ROSTRIS”
1.
The old farm buildings of Centro Ippico ai Lecci were surrounded by huge, spooky oaks that must have been hundreds of years old. Scottie parked the Vespa she had rented from the young mechanic in Via Camollia, who was, she knew full well, making a small fortune on the deal. It suited her to be seen as just a tourist out for a jaunt. It was in truth a slightly impractical mode of transportation for outside the city, putt-putting slowly up hills and threatening to stall at any moment, but Scottie enjoyed the ride out to the stable, Ecco balancing on the seat in front of her. When they arrived, she kept Ecco on his short leather leash and stood by the rail of the riding arena, watching a swaggering man do a very bad job lunging a young horse.
You have no patience, she wanted to tell him. The horse was irritated, jaw clamped, neck muscles rigid, learning nothing except to hate humans. The man greeted her and said he’d be done in a minute. Tommaso Gatti, he said his name was. Tom Cats, it would be in English. He was wearing a beautifully cut tweed jacket and tall brown boots, and was in his thirties, she guessed. Arrogant. Definitely condescending to her, the stupid American, telling her how difficult the horse was, but how he would “win.” She disliked him immediately, but when he finished and came over to the rail, she inquired about the price of stabling and whether trails were available.
“Sì,” he said. “From here you can ride all over la Toscana,” adding, of course, a weaselly “I can show you myself. It’s dangerous to ride alone.” The poor chestnut, sides heaving, wet with sweat and foam, needed to be walked out.
She asked for Robertino. “He’s my Italian teacher,” she said, “and he’s just disappeared on me.” She acted annoyed rather than concerned.
“An unreliable boy,” said Tom Cats. “Uneducated, you know. He is probably off somewhere having the time of his life. I suppose he owes you money?”
Scottie was offended on Robertino’s behalf, and on her own, as if her interest in the boy could be nothing more than financial. “Does he have friends who might know where he is?”
“A boy like that? No.”
“What does that mean?”
He lifted his shoulders.
She turned to leave, frustrated, but then felt a wave of courage and turned back to him.
“Did a woman named Gina ever come here?”
Tom Cats tilted his face up under his hat and stuck his chin out. “Gina? How do you know Gina?” He stared at her. “I don’t know her.” And with that, he finally went to walk the poor sweating horse out.
* * *
Scottie and Ecco remounted the trusty scooter. She tried to remember exactly what the hardware store owner had said about where Gina’s new “workplace” was. She followed the Via Cassia from Siena toward Grosseto, views of mountains opening up all around her, looking for a pullout that matched his description. Finally, she saw a woman sitting on an overturned bucket by the side of the road, no vehicle in sight. The woman stood as she pulled up, a hopeful look in her eyes until she saw Scottie was a woman. Scottie saw she was older than Gina—in her forties perhaps, though it was hard to tell. She was wearing a yellow dress trimmed with pink lace, and smoking.
“Buongiorno,” said Scottie. The woman glanced at her but said nothing.
“Have you seen Gina?”
The woman shook her head, trying, like the riding stable owner, to figure out why an American woman with a dog was looking for a whore.
She said something that Scottie couldn’t understand in what sounded like Arabic.
“Sorry, again?” said Scottie.
“Naples, today,” the woman said slowly, pointing down the road. Scottie realized the woman didn’t speak Italian, only the Neapolitan dialect.
Scottie nodded and looked around. Cicadas hummed in the air, and she could smell fresh-cut hay. In the distance a broad purple pyramid loomed over the softer green hills, the colors in sharp contrast to the verdant patchwork below. That must be Monte Amiata.
Across the Cassia was a one-lane dirt road that curved up the hillside. This was, she knew, the direction Carlo lived in. She should not go that way. Scottie fired up the scooter again and headed up the road. After a couple of miles
she passed several unmarked forks in the road and eventually an old cemetery. She couldn’t see any farms, just a vast expanse of undulating hills, cypresses and low dense brush spotted with bright yellow blooms. She parked the scooter at a crossroads to get her bearings and to let Ecco stretch his legs. With an excited growling bark, the fox terrier darted into some deep brush along the dusty roadside.
Twenty minutes later, he had not reappeared. She could barely hear him barking in the distance. Was he in danger, or just on a scent? Robertino’s disappearance made everything else in this landscape feel sinister. The sun dropped closer to a row of cypresses on the horizon, and she looked at her watch again. Nearly seven. Michael would be back from Rome tonight. She was meeting him at Bar Nannini at eight after the evening prova. She’d have to change first—driving a scooter on a dusty road turned out to be a messy proposition, despite the crisp ads filling the papers and magazines showing beautiful women zooming around, newly liberated from mere foot travel.
The minutes ticked on, and anxiety settled over her hot brain like a wool blanket. If she had to choose between her husband and her dog … Some loyalties were better left unexamined.
Robertino was like her, looking for adventure. When she went over their conversations together, his collection of small jobs—exercising horses, delivering his grandfather’s eggs to the hotels and running errands for tourists—seemed so innocent, but Banchi’s revelation that Gina was his mother meant that there were aspects of his life she knew nothing about. Working at the stable would have exposed him to money, and perhaps also corruption, and crime. Robertino, a naïf, could easily have gotten in over his head.
He’s the sort of boy I’ll have, she thought. He thinks the best of people, and then they disappoint him. I did.
He’s like Michael, she realized.
She turned away from the view and faced the dense brush—macchia, they called it—on the other side of the Vespa. The heavy scent of the yellow broom flowers was worsening her headache.
She looked down and saw marks in the dust. Little oblongs and sharp round holes. She remembered the first time she had ever seen footprints like that, at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre with her father. “High heels,” he had said, pointing to Betty Grable’s prints in the cement.
They led to the small opening in the macchia Ecco had disappeared into, then stopped. She got down on her hands and knees and started to climb into the thicket. Branches grabbed at her hair.
She continued down the tunnel Ecco had taken, wondering if she was going to have to back out of it. After she had gone about fifty yards, she saw sunlight ahead. She came to a small clearing in the brush and stood up. Her hands were caked with red mud. It was all over her knees as well, staining her pants. The buzz of flies filled her ears, and she gagged at the smell.
She was in a sort of room—a small cot with an ancient thin mattress half rotted away, the ring where many fires had been made. There was a body on the cot. From the flies and the smell she knew it was no longer alive. She couldn’t see the face, but she recognized the thin dress, saw red high heels lying on the ground next to the cot. Steeling herself, she took a step closer, saw a syringe on the ground next to the shoes.
There was a rustling in the brush, and she jumped as an animal ran past her, something strange and shapeless, followed by Ecco. There was a terrible snarl, then yelping. Then silence.
Her heart was pounding and she felt herself starting to retch. She had to go back the way she’d come. She dropped to her knees and crawled toward the road, getting even more filthy. When she emerged once again into daylight, a man was standing there.
Carlo. Of course.
2.
Michael sat on the train, realizing that he was looking forward to seeing Scottie. He was craving her smile, longing to hear about the mundane details of her day. He would ask her about the shopping. About whether she might like a new summer dress. She was like Central Park, beautiful and quiet and manicured and safe. They would have a nice dinner, and he could briefly pretend to himself that he was what she saw, a straight man whose only job was to sell big, beautiful blue tractors.
Art Buchwald’s column, “Europe’s Lighter Side,” was a humorous look at how American businessmen could write off a trip to Europe on their taxes. Michael smiled at the portrait of Americans abroad, spending their money, having a good time, leaving nothing but good feelings in their wake.
3.
For a moment they stared at each other, as if trying to make sense of what they were seeing.
“There’s a dead woman,” said Scottie. “In there. I think it’s Gina.”
“Dio mio,” said Carlo. “Sit down.” She sat on the scooter seat.
“There’s a syringe,” she said.
“Drugs. But how did you—?”
Why were you crawling through my property? would have been a very logical question. “Robertino is missing. I thought maybe Gina would know where he was. I found out, well, anyway, I found her.”
Carlo was in khaki pants, jacket and vest, white shirt, tie, fedora and short boots with leather ghette, or laced leggings, over them, not perfectly clean after a day of work but at least tidy. He had a long staff. He was dressed like a buttero, she recognized, an Italian cowboy. He had leaned his rifle against the scooter. A black horse with a large ugly head was standing nearby, swatting flies with its tail. “I must telephone the police,” he said. “There’s a farm nearby. I will be right back. You are okay to wait here?”
She nodded. He mounted his horse and disappeared.
She called for Ecco, but got no response. What would she tell Michael about this?
Carlo returned after a few minutes. “They are coming,” he said. They avoided each other’s eyes, but shock was setting in, and she wanted to throw herself into his arms in a really undignified way.
“My dog,” she said. “He ran off. Did you see him?” It was perfectly natural to keep her eyes moving over the landscape.
“No. But I heard him before. Don’t be too hard on him. He probably saved Gina’s body from … animals.” They were quiet for a second, both listening, looking out over the macchia, and she could smell Carlo’s scent—leather and horse and pipe tobacco and something else. There was nothing but silence, and the wind over the hills. Carlo let out a piercing whistle, and they stared and listened again. Nothing.
“She was covered in flies,” she said. “I didn’t have anything to put over her.”
Still without looking at her, he took her hand as they stood side by side, and when she felt the warmth of his fingers, how strong and rough they were, her throat closed up and she was overwhelmed with emotion, followed immediately by embarrassment.
“I’m sorry for what I said the other day,” she wanted to say, but instead she said, “That’s a lovely horse you have,” even though the horse’s head looked so heavy it seemed it would pitch forward any second. Her voice was high and unsteady.
“Sit down,” he said, now finally looking at her, frowning, handing her a handkerchief.
She still couldn’t meet his eyes, though she could feel them on her. He had seen many dead people. Had seen his own son dead. She sat down on the ground and tried to get her breathing under control. He crouched next to her, staring into the distance. Then he stood up and gave another whistle.
“I think I hear barking,” he said. He whistled again.
She inhaled. His smell reminded her of her home in California, of evenings playing cards with her father when the winter rain battered the windows and the palm trees nearly bent double in the wind.
At that moment, Ecco came bursting out of the macchia, panting, his face a horror movie mask. She gasped.
“Un istrice,” Carlo said calmly. “Porcupine.” He leaned down and picked up Ecco gently. The dog’s face was filled with quills, some dangerously close to his eyes. He was oddly quiet, and looked like he, too, was in shock.
“Oh goodness! I need to get him to a veterinarian as soon as—the police.”
He took a pair of pliers out of his jacket pocket. “Hold him,” he said. Scottie winced as Carlo began to yank the quills out of Ecco’s face one by one with a sharp flick of his wrist. Ecco stayed surprisingly quiet.
“You’ve done this a lot,” she said.
He nodded. “The hunting dogs,” he said. “They never learn.” His hands moved with confidence, and his mouth curled in a frown as he continued working on the dog.
“Poor Gina,” she said. “Signor Banchi didn’t speak to her. But Robertino tried to help her. Banchi thinks maybe she got him involved in something, that that’s why he’s disappeared.”
Carlo nodded, surprised, she could see, by how much she knew.
“Prostitution has always been somewhat tolerated,” he said, continuing to remove the quills from the dog. “But now, with the tourists, people are angry. Brutta figura. Bad impression. That’s not the Siena we want the world to see. So the police harass the prostitutes, and they come and work out here. They wait on the Cassia until a driver stops, and then they bring him to hidden places they know from…” He paused, not willing to tell her everything, she could see. “Places they know. Hiding places.”
“What do you think happened to Robertino? Is he caught up in all this?”
“I don’t know. People are on the move. It’s all different now. Things are changing so fast.”
They were silent for a moment.
“The stableman where Robertino works said he’s unpopular. Is that why? Or because of his mother?”
“That and he has nine rival contrade breathing down his neck, and the barbareschi do sometimes sabotage each other.”
“Really?”
“Palio madness. But I’m worried that it’s more than that.” His voice dropped, as if someone might be listening. “Did Banchi tell you about Robertino’s father?”
“I thought he was an American GI.”
“It’s more convenient to say that. But there are people who remember the truth. He was a German. Even for a Nazi, he was not a good man. It’s part of why Gina was tolerated, and not tolerated. She was so young. And why Robertino is … something of an outsider.”
The Italian Party Page 15
