The Missing Italian Girl

by Barbara Corrado Pope

  At the back of the huge, high-ceilinged room, a much older woman, in the same dress, sat at a desk, writing. “Madame Vergennes, this young woman wants to inquire about a place in our department.”

  Without even looking up, this Mme Vergennes murmured, “Did you tell her you need to have a great deal of selling experience and be very good at numbers to work at the Bon Marché?”

  “I know a great deal about shirtwaists,” Maura blurted out before she realized that this was not a very “Albertine” thing to say. She should have talked about her schooling, made it sound much better than it was.

  Her outburst caught the woman’s attention. She lifted her head and peered through her pince-nez. “Shirtwaists?”

  Maura stayed utterly still as the woman surveyed her from head to toe. “Yes, I sold them in a nice shop on the Boulevard Rochechouart.” Maura squeezed her eyes shut and cringed. Albertine would not have been merely a clerk, nor would she have worked near Maura’s old neighborhood on one of the outer boulevards. She would have gone to a high school, a good one. But it was done, said. Maura forced herself to meet the woman’s eyes.

  “Hmmm. The Boulevard Rochechouart. Is that near where you live?”

  “Yes.” Maura could feel the sweat sprouting under her arms. She hoped it was not staining Vera’s blouse.

  “I see.” Mme Vergennes glanced beyond Maura’s shoulder. “Mademoiselle Henri, you may go back to your post.”

  Maura heard the feet and skirt shuffle behind her.

  “Your name?”

  Maura noted that the woman’s eyes were the same color as Vera’s blouse, only their iciness pierced through you rather than covered you. She felt exposed and, even in the heat, chilled. If this woman was a schoolmarm, she was the sternest one ever, worse than the nuns that had frequently struck Maura’s knuckles with a ruler.

  “Albertine Hélène LeChevalier,” Maura whispered.

  “Age?”

  “Twenty.” Maura could not keep her chest from heaving.

  “May I see your identity card?” The woman held out her hand, which looked hardened and strong.

  Maura reached in her sack and handed over the false identity card. The woman’s silence was worse than her questions. She held the card in her two hands glancing between it and Maura’s face for what seemed an eternity, as if she were deciding what to do next, as if she were going to call the police or find someone to throw Maura out of the store. Finally, Mme Vergennes handed back the card.

  “Come with me.”

  Going down the aisle toward the door was torture. The witchy Mademoiselle Henri and another clerk watched, cupping their hands over their faces as they whispered and giggled. Maura’s face was burning, but she held her head high, never letting on that she noticed their scorn.

  Mme Vergennes led Maura around the second floor gallery into another magnificent room. But this one was not filled with merchandise. Rather it had a few tables and benches, and walls covered with paintings above shelves and shelves of leather-bound books.

  “Sit here.” Mme Vergennes took a place on a bench.

  Having no other choice, Maura followed her command.

  “Where did you get that card?” the woman demanded. She had taken her glasses from her nose, leaving them to hang by a black cord over her chest.

  It did not matter that Maura’s mind was a jumble, for she dare not say anything. She almost stopped breathing.

  “You are not Albertine LeChevalier, are you?”

  Although her mouth fell open, Maura still could not make a sound.

  Mme Vergennes sighed and rubbed the reddened spots left by the pince-nez on the bridge of her nose. When she looked at Maura again, her eyes seemed sad rather than angry. “This is dangerous, you know. The people who do this sort of thing. I hope you are not connected with them, criminals, anarchists.”

  Maura squeezed her hands together and bowed her head. “No,” she mumbled, “no,” biting down hard on her lip.

  “Good. You are young. You are an innocent girl. You’ve never committed a crime, have you?”

  The morning’s meager breakfast roiled in Maura’s stomach. Was watching a man die, carrying his body through the streets, and throwing it into a basin a crime? Somehow Maura was sure it must be a very serious one. Fortunately, she got out another denial.

  “You don’t steal. You do not sell your body.”

  “No, no, no.” This was easier because it was true.

  “Then, my child,” the woman placed a hand gently over Maura’s, “you must beware. There are so many people out there who will want to take advantage of you. You need to find honest work. And maybe someday you can come here and join our family. We are a family of sorts, you know, and I am in charge of selecting and looking after our girls.” She paused. “You should come back only after you’ve proven your worth and are willing to tell the truth about who you are.”

  When Maura did not answer, the woman withdrew her hand. “Do you see all of this?” she asked. “It is our reading room. For our clients and for our employees. There are so many benefits here, a lunch room, a pension, but you must earn it, and it is hard work. Yet, I believe, it is the best such job in all of France.”

  The worst part of being humiliated was that the woman was being kind. Maura could not hold back the tears. “Go back to your neighborhood,” Mme Vergennes told her. “Try to get a position in a shop. Be diligent and hardworking. Learn how to calculate quickly and accurately. And, then, we shall see, in a few years.” She paused before standing up over the chastened Maura. “I must get back.”

  Not until she was sure that Mme Vergennes had left the library did Maura dare look up. She couldn’t bear the thought that she had so easily been caught in a lie, that she’d let her hopes be dashed without a struggle. She wanted to scream. To tear up the stupid identity card. To rend Vera’s silky blouse. She swiped her cheeks and nose with her glove and sleeve, and sniffled until she was sure that she had stopped driveling. As the breaths came into her body, her chest expanded, filling her with angry energy. She fled to the staircase and, with her hand on the rail, raced down to the first floor. What did these people know about being poor? What did oh-so-proper Mme Vergennes know about crime, real crime? She had never lifted and pulled a bleeding, dead body. She could not possibly know what real trouble felt like. Maura did, and felt the weight of it now more than ever. Lowering her eyes to avoid any encounter with the courtly salesman, she hurried to the grand entrance. Once outside, she crossed her arms over her chest and kept her eyes to the sidewalk as she got as far away from the Bon Marché as she could. She had to think. She had to find a way out.

  After about fifteen minutes of ignoring strangers and skirting past carriages, she found herself at a gate of the Luxembourg Gardens, the park the Russian girls had described when they talked about their foray to the Bon Marché. Shrugging her shoulders, Maura decided to go in. Perhaps she’d find a bench, shade, some consolation for her terrible day. She was hungry too, and as soon as she saw a woman selling fried potatoes she knew she had to have them. Her gloved fingers ran over the money in the thin silk sack. Barbereau’s money. Maura resisted the shiver that the thought of his rigid, dead body always sent through her. She set her chin resolutely forward. The money was hers now. She took off her gloves and shoved them into the little sack, digging out a few coins. She bought a cone of frites and gobbled them up as she stood by the stand, as if eating them fast would chase away her fears. When she realized that she’d hardly tasted her rare treat, she bought another cone and munched on them more slowly as she strolled, trying to look as if she fit in.

  The labyrinth of stony paths led her past men in top hats, nannies pushing strollers, and lovers communing on benches. Had she been in a better frame of mind, she might have tried to guess whether these couples were having a tryst, or even sat down by them just to be annoying. But what was the joy in that? In any of this?

  The gardens of brilliantly colored flowers didn’t give Maura much pleasure either,
at least not until she remembered Lidia’s complaint, that every French garden looked like a regiment of soldiers on parade. That image brought a smile to Maura’s lips, and so did the memory of Lidia’s vehemence. Flowers, she had insisted, should be free, allowed to grow wild, not made to stand at attention in carefully pruned and groomed rows.

  If only she could believe the way Pyotr, Lidia and Vera did, Maura thought as she ate the last of her frites. The Russians proclaimed that everyone should and eventually would be free: free to live, to learn, to earn, to love. Maura felt too poor to believe in these dreams. And too aware that you could love someone who did not love you.

  Maura sank into a metal chair by a pair of grandmothers in big feathered hats knitting baby clothes and exchanging judgments on passersby. She closed her eyes, blocking them out. Mme Vergennes had told her to come back when she was willing to reveal who she really was. But who was Maura Laurenzano, really? A shirt finisher with high ambitions? An accomplice to a murder? A bad sister, a worse daughter? Why would she ever want to tell anyone who she was?

  Suddenly a little boy in breeches bumped into her. “Felix!” his nanny scolded, “not so fast, we’ll get to the show in time.”

  “Rude,” clucked one grandmother, and Maura could not agree more. The stupid nanny, all decked out in her black-and-white uniform, hadn’t even offered an apology.

  “You would think,” said the other old woman, “that they could offer more elevating entertainments than Punch and Judy.”

  Maura straightened up. A puppet show. Watching Punch and Judy hit each other might be just the thing to get her mind off her troubles. She crushed the greasy paper that had held her potatoes and dropped it under the chair, before getting up to follow the nanny and the rambunctious boy.

  But she never got to the puppet theater in the park. As mothers and nursemaids began to congregate with their charges toward the children’s playground, Maura heard an organ grinder playing a familiar Italian song. Heart pounding, she followed the music. What if she was about to find her tall, handsome father? As she rounded a bend she saw that the musician was stout and mustachioed, wearing the kind of silly alpine hat her tall, blond father never wore. She scurried out of sight before a little girl holding out a cup for donations spotted her. Of course, it wasn’t her father, just as that little girl was not Maura, but seeing the accordionist and the child evoked the old sadness.

  There were signs everywhere warning her against stepping on the grass, so Maura leaned against a pole and let the memories float in her mind. Her father always claimed to hate singing in the street. Like many poor Italian children of his generation, he had been practically sold by his impoverished parents to be apprenticed as an “accordion boy.” Maura remembered the bitterness in his voice when he talked about being torn from his mother and native village in the Italian mountains. He spent his childhood on the streets of French cities, playing and begging, being beaten by his master and hounded by the authorities. Abandoned in Paris, he only survived because he was rescued by a kind Polish immigrant who taught him how to lay bricks.

  He had been happy, he said, for just a little while. But once he had family to support, he took up his accordion again, every Sunday, this time enlisting his own daughters to hold out the begging cups. He’d claimed that Angela made the most money because of her blond curls. He hardly noticed that Maura was the one who listened and learned all the songs, who felt his unhappiness every time he talked about his faraway home. Her favorite songs were his favorites, sad ballads that he sang at their table after he had drunk a good deal of wine. She began to hum:

  Vado di notte come fa la luna

  I wander through the night like the moon

  Vado cercando lo mio innamorato

  Searching to find my true love

  Ritrovai la Morte acerba et dura

  Instead I found mocking, cruel Death

  Mi disse: “Non cercar, l’ho sotterato”

  Who told me, “Don’t look anymore, I’ve buried him.”

  When Maura was a child, she had always loved the notion of wandering like the moon. Back then, sitting on the floor, watching her father, she hadn’t known death or abandonment. Now she did. And the haunting melody, with its eerie lyrics, suddenly made her uneasy. She needed to get back. What if they had found the body? What if something had happened to Pyotr? Or to Angela? She searched for someone, anyone, who could tell her how to get to the Panthéon.

  6

  THE POLICE CAME FOR THE Russian girls that afternoon.

  Maura spotted the black van before she got to her street. She knew it was a police wagon because of the breathing slits slashed along its windowless side. For an instant, she thought of turning back and running. But she had to know what was happening. What if they had found Angela? Maura glanced at the driver, who sat smoking a cigarette, reins in hand, as indifferent and impassive as the horses he commanded. Heart pounding, she walked by as if she had no interest in his presence, as if she were completely innocent.

  When she rounded the corner onto the rue de l’Arbelète, she heard the shouting. A score of men and women had gathered in front of the dank wineshop across from her building. For one insane, hopeful moment, she imagined the police were there to quell a drunken brawl. Then she understood what they were saying, and she knew. “Foreigners!” “Anarchists!” “Killers!” “Bombers!” An old crone, screaming with righteous anger, stepped in front of the crowd and pointed toward the entrance to Maura’s building. Vera and Lidia stumbled out, their hands tied behind their backs. They were being poked and prodded with rifles by three uniformed men. Despite their ill treatment and the curses being flung at them, they held their heads high.

  Maura flattened herself against a wall. She felt as if someone had grabbed her by the throat and was squeezing the life out of her. Was there some mistake? Had they really come for her and Angela? Maura froze in place as the frightening entourage approached. She almost cried out when she heard footsteps scurrying behind her. A toothless old woman jostled her, trying to get a better view. “Looks like those foreigners are at it again,” the woman crowed to her companion, a man in a blue worker’s smock, carrying a street sweeper’s broom. The man grinned and shrugged his shoulders, enjoying the spectacle. Much to Maura’s relief, they ignored her.

  As the police and their prisoners got closer and closer to the corner, Maura caught Vera’s eye. Instinctively she reached for the brooch she had “borrowed” from the Russian girl. Vera shook her head ever so slightly. She wasn’t worried about jewelry or borrowed clothes. She had a more urgent message to convey: “Act like you don’t know us.”

  “What are you looking at?” one of the policemen said as he struck the tall Russian girl in the ribs with the butt of his rifle.

  She gasped with pain, but refused to bend. “I’m looking at the poor people of Paris. Those you oppress,” she said loud enough for all to hear.

  Maura’s finger nails clawed into the wall. Bullies! She wanted to run up and slap the vicious brute. But she could do nothing. The police might have found Barbereau. They wouldn’t care that Pyotr didn’t mean to do it, that he was only saving Angela. They’d say that she and Angela helped murder the bastard, and then, and then, they’d happily let go of the Russian girls and drag her and Angela all the way to the guillotine.

  The toothless old woman stepped forward and spit on Lidia. Not knowing what to do, Maura glanced at Vera, who again signaled with a slight shake of head, do nothing. Some of wineshop habitués trailed the terrible procession through the narrow street, hooting and shaking their fists. Sweating with fear and from the relentless heat of the waning afternoon, Maura wound her way past them toward her building. Angela, she had to find Angela. Maman, she bit her lip, the plea came unbidden into her mind. Maman. Oh, to be home again. Oh, to be back to the way things were, as miserable as they were.

  “I hope you weren’t part of their plots.”

  The stocky concierge, heightened by her clogs, stepped in front of Maura, blockin
g her entrance to the building. Every concierge that Maura had ever known was nosy, controlling the comings and goings of tenants and resenting the cleaning up they had to do. Maura had always done her best to steer clear of them. This one was not about to let her pass.

  “You heard what I said, missy. I know you are up there with them.”

  “What did they do?” Maura tried to sound innocent, even as she played the part of Judas. Her mind ran with questions. Why take the Russians away now? Have they found Barbereau’s body? Or have the police decided to round up all anarchists and foreigners? Maura shuddered. Either way, she was in danger. The French suspected Italians of all kinds of crimes and plots too.

  “Another bomb.”

  “Bomb?” This time Maura did not have to feign her innocence or alarm.

  “Yeah, over near Montmartre. Some Russian.” She cackled with glee. “Blew him up instead of anyone else. Served him right. At least that’s what the police told me.”

  “A Russian,” Maura whispered. Pyotr! But she daren’t ask more, daren’t admit that she knew a Russian boy. Or that she loved one. “I must find my sister,” she mumbled. “Please,” she pleaded. “We haven’t done anything wrong,” she lied.

  “I want you gone by tomorrow, you hear?” the woman said as she stepped aside.

  Maura could feel the concierge’s eyes boring into her back as she tried to walk up the stairs like a normal person. But her feet were leaden, as if already weighed down with the chains of a condemned prisoner. Still she persisted, one foot in front of the other, up all three flights, hoping against hope that Angela would be in the room waiting for her. They had to figure out what to do.

  As soon as she saw the wide-open door, she knew that her sister would not be there. Still she was shocked to see the destruction: books and pictures flung on the floor, clothes torn off their hooks and out of drawers, the bed mattress upended and slashed. Even Angela and Maura’s poor possessions had been strewn about and trampled on.