The Missing Italian Girl

by Barbara Corrado Pope

  Everything was going wrong. Everything! Frustrated and scared, Maura pulled the mattress back into place and flung herself upon the bed. She hid her head in her arms, trying to push the day and all its terrible events out of her mind. She didn’t know how long she had lain there before she felt a hand gently shaking her shoulder.

  “Maura.”

  Angela. Maura sat up and embraced her sister. “What happened?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I ran. Vera and Lidia told me to hide and not come back for a while. Do you think all this,” Angela grimaced as she looked about the room, “all this is because of us?”

  Maura shook her head.

  “If it is,” Angela continued, “then we need to go to the police. We need to confess. We can’t let—”

  “Stop it. Stop talking nonsense.” Maura put her hand over Angela’s mouth and peered into her eyes. “We can’t go to the police. They’ll send us to the guillotine, and Pyotr too.” Pyotr! Was he even alive? “Listen,” she said more calmly, “Vera and Lidia were arrested because they are anarchists. Maybe there is another roundup.”

  Maura let go of Angela and told her what she had found out. When Angela heard there was a possibility that a Russian had been killed, she rose from the bed and began picking up and folding the scattered clothes, one by one, placing them on the table.

  “It may not be Pyotr, you know. Maybe it’s just a rumor,” Maura offered.

  Still Angela lifted and folded, flattening each blouse and skirt without saying a word. This was no good. They had decisions to make.

  “We have to find out for sure. You stay here,” Maura ordered. “Fix things up for when Vera and Lidia come back.” Maura swallowed hard, suppressing her own doubts about whether the Russian girls would ever be allowed to come back. “I’ll go and see if I can find out if anything really happened near Montmartre.”

  “Don’t leave me!” Angela suddenly came to life and grabbed Maura’s arm.

  Maura patted her hand. “Don’t worry. I’m only going to look for a newspaper. Surely the late editions will have something. And, if not, we’ll know it was all lies. That will be good, don’t you think?” she added, searching for some way to reassure her sister.

  Angela nodded and turned away, surveying the destruction before once again picking and folding and smoothing out Vera and Lidia’s things, her movements slow, deliberate and futile. Maura feared that if she stayed, watching, one more minute, she’d be immobilized by the cloud of despair that had enveloped her sister. She had to get out.

  When she reached the bottom of the stairs, she waited until she could slip unnoticed past the lodge in the courtyard where the concierge lived. Once on the street, she ran to the nearest market square, hoping to find a newspaper hawker. A small crowd had already gathered. She heard the word “bomb” and pushed her way through, holding up one of Barbereau’s smallest coins and wresting a copy of Le Petit Parisien from the seller’s hands. Then she hurried to the old church on the square, yanked at its door, and went in. Her hard breathing filled her with the familiar smell of burning tallow as she scanned the interior to see if she was safe. Only a few people were there. A woman was showing a little girl how to light a candle at a side altar. Two others, on the opposite side of the church, knelt in front of thatched chairs, reciting their beads. A hatless man, near the front, sat immobile, staring up at the painted ceiling. No priest, no nosy nuns. Maura sat down, panting. Vera’s blouse was pasted to her skin. It was a relief to be in the dark, cool vastness of the ancient building.

  Maura mumbled a prayer. Please, God, not Pyotr. If she had not been so close to tears, she might have laughed. Within the last hour, she had called out to her mother, and now she expected God to hear her. How desperate can you get? Her mother didn’t love her, and Maura certainly did not expect God to answer her prayer. She was on her own. Her eyes fell on the newspaper clutched in her damp hands. The headline screamed ANARCHIST BOMB IN THE GOUTTE-D’OR! Maura gasped. Her neighborhood. Pyotr’s neighborhood. She forced herself to read on:

  Early this morning a bomb exploded in the Goutte-d’Or Quartier, disturbing those going about their daily lives, and waking others from a peaceful sleep.

  “One moment I saw a man across the street hauling his cart, then I heard a boom, and his arm fell on the ground right in front of me,” said laundress Marie Riboyet. “I’ve never seen anything like it. An arm flying in the air, with a bloody stump. The cart going up in flames.”

  Maura covered her mouth with her hand to keep from crying out. An arm? What about his body? His heart? His beautiful head. Her chest heaved; it couldn’t be Pyotr. It just couldn’t.

  Mme Riboyet still had the assassin’s blood on her forehead when the police arrived. After answering their questions, she went on about her business, to the washhouse, planning to scrub extra hard, she told this reporter, to get the dead man’s spattered blood out of the sheets in her basket.

  She claimed she did not know the dead porter, but the police soon discovered his identity, setting off an alarm that anarchist terror once again is about to strike the capital.

  Police Inspector Alain Jobert traced the cart back to its owner, the dry goods merchant Jacques Landière. He told the police that the driver of the cart was one Pyotr Ivanovich Balenov, a Russian “student.”

  Maura bit her lip, fighting back a moan. No! No! No! Pyotr. Dear Pyotr! She blinked away the tears blurring her vision.

  “I never had any trouble with him before,” Landière said. “He was quiet, always so obedient. Did everything I asked him to.”

  Jeannette Blacas, the concierge of the building where the anarchist lived, told a different story. “I never trusted him. I saw him in the café giving speeches about the poor,” she snorted, as she sucked on her pipe. “Our poor can take care of themselves. They don’t need the likes of foreigners.”

  A Parisian concierge can’t be fooled. The police searched the monster’s place in the barracks room he shared with other poor carters, looking for explosives, maps and incendiary pamphlets. Little did they know that the crucial evidence had already arrived at the nearby precinct. A pneumatic letter dated 6 A.M. revealed the fiend’s plans to destroy part of our city’s fashion district. “Bourgeois of Paris. Your Springtime is over,” it said in big block letters. “I will put your Grand Boulevards to flames.” It was signed, “The Russian.”

  What did he mean by “our Springtime”? Did he plan to throw the bomb into the grand department store Au Printemps? How many innocent women and children would have suffered and died if the anarchist had been able to carry out his diabolical plot? Can we forget the bomb that Emile Henry threw in the Terminus Café three years ago? Or that the President of France was assassinated by an Italian anarchist? Or this very May, how the Charity Bazaar fire engulfed our city’s fairest wives, mothers, and daughters with horrifying, annihilating swiftness? That tragedy was an accident, an Act of God. This would have been an Act of Terrorism. Only the diligence of the police and our citizens can keep us safe from another outbreak of anarchist violence.

  The police are continuing their investigation across Paris, looking for explosives and rounding up associates.

  Parisians! Be on alert! The bombs may be going off again!

  Maura slapped the paper on the chair next to her. It’s not true. Not true! Pyotr would never hurt women and children. Hadn’t he saved Angela from the real monster? She shook her head. No, no, no. She pressed her lips together in an attempt to muffle her sobs. Not true!

  Just then she spotted the priest sauntering down the aisle, getting ready to lock up the church for the night. She folded the paper and bowed her head, holding it to her breast.

  “My child, is something wrong?” He had frizzy gray hair and a big belly, like most priests do. She certainly wasn’t going to talk to him. What good was God when mocking, cruel Death had won again?

  “Nothing is wrong,” she murmured to the cassocked figure hovering near her. She got up and fled.

  She f
ound Angela sitting by the table, staring at Pyotr’s folded shirt.

  “Angela,” she said quietly, “it was him.”

  Her sister nodded and closed her eyes.

  Maura went down on one knee by her sister’s side and put her arm around her waist. “I’m sure he didn’t do it. Pyotr didn’t believe in bombing.”

  “I know,” Angela whispered; “he was so gentle.” She pulled away and began to sob.

  Maura sat back against the bed. It was more than his gentleness. She knew what he believed in. Despite Angela’s warnings, she used to sneak out before her mother came back from work at night. She’d go to the shabby café where he ate supper with his comrades and stand at the back, listening raptly as he argued against anyone who drunkenly claimed that a bomb or a gun might shake up the bourgeoisie. Patiently, he’d remind them of the destruction that violence had wrought in France and, worse, in his native land, where the bombings and assassinations had only made life harder and crueler for everyone. Then, emboldened by wine, Pyotr would proclaim his faith in the liberation of man’s “better nature.”

  Closing her eyes, Maura tried to recapture Pyotr in those memories. How his face was illuminated by the candle on the wooden table in that dark café. How it reminded her of the gentle living Christ on her mother’s favorite holy card. She tried to recall his voice, so sweet, so slow and careful because of his accent. In his new world there would be no Church or State, no rich or poor, no oppressed peasants or workers or women. Everyone would work. Everyone would have a good life.

  Tears rolled down Maura’s cheeks. She had loved him because he was so good, because he made her want to be good. Yet part of her always held back from believing him, because she knew that some people were bad. Now he was dead. Now everyone was going to blame him and Vera and Lidia for something they would not dream of doing—hurting other people. It was so unfair! Maura stood up, clenching her fists and her teeth.

  She paced as useless questions drove her back and forth in front of the bed. Who’d want to kill Pyotr? And why? Pyotr had always warned them about the agents provocateurs, policemen in disguise, who would say and do terrible things so they could blame and persecute the anarchists. Is that what happened? Or, Maura paused, had someone seen them with Barbereau? Someone who wanted to take revenge. Like the man on the pier, the one Pyotr claimed was a friend. Maura glanced at Angela. The one who had made her sister recoil. Who was he?

  If Angela hadn’t been so inert, staring, one arm in her lap, the other on the table, Maura would have asked her to tell everything she knew about him right then and there. Instead, she continued to pace until she saw Angela’s fingers play lightly over Pyotr’s shirt. As if her touch would bring him back to life. When nothing was going to bring him back. He’d never be whole again. Maura grabbed the shirt and smothered her face in it, breathing the last traces of the boy she had loved. She ignored Angela’s shocked stare as she thrust the shirt back to her. Then Maura dropped into the rickety chair across the table from her sister. They sat there, silent, until it grew so dark they could barely see each other.

  Finally, Angela got up and hugged Maura, telling her they needed to get some sleep. They spent the still, humid night on the Russians’ bed, holding each other and crying.

  7

  THE MORNING THE BOMB WENT off in the Goutte-d’Or district, Bernard Martin was a kilometer away, defending a mason before the industrial council. The mason, Jacques Leroux, sat uncomfortably in a cane-backed chair, pleading his case. His arm was in a dirty, ragged sling, and his face was swollen and discolored. He had taken a terrible fall. Still, without Martin, the council board most likely would have judged him to be negligent in his work habits and made him pay for the builder’s broken ladder, the bricks which came crashing down upon him, and the time lost finding a substitute. The odds were clearly against men like Leroux when five of the seven mediators sitting behind the great table were industrialists, wearing suits and frock coats, and only two, more humbly attired, had ever worked with their own hands.

  As Martin made his arguments, calling the builder’s claims for compensation outrageous, citing the latest laws, and eliciting civil, logical testimony from his defendant, he grew more and more confident. He was changing the odds in favor of the working man, if only because he was “Maître Martin,” a real lawyer, a fact that clearly impressed the board. Elation filled him as he waited for the verdict. Martin was doing the job the men at the Labor Exchange had hired him to do, wringing every bit of justice he could from a legal system stacked against them. When the council decided in favor of Leroux, it was almost an anti-climax.

  Five minutes later, after handshakes all around, Leroux limped beside Martin as they walked out of the council building. When they got a block away, Martin felt free to say some of the things he could not say in front of the businessmen, for fear of alienating them.

  “If we work together, elect the right politicians, there will come a time,” he promised, “when the builders will have to pay you and other injured workers compensation, instead of covering their faults by blaming the men they exploit for everything that goes wrong. Someday there will be real justice for all.”

  Leroux bowed his head, not answering.

  “You’ll be all right for awhile?” Martin asked, fearing that he had been insensitive to Leroux’s situation. He was still so new at this. “The mutual funds will get you through, I hope. Thank God for the union, no?”

  Leroux nodded, then mumbled, “I don’t vote, sir. I wait for the day when the workers will run everything themselves and not count on the…”

  Martin filled in the word that Leroux hesitated to say, “The bourgeoisie.”

  The mason nodded again, not wanting to look at the man he might have just insulted, for what could be more bourgeois than a lawyer?

  Martin slapped him on the back in good humor. “Two different paths, huh? We’ll see which one gets everyone their rights.” Leroux’s anarchism was the kind that Martin admired and supported, based not on terrorist tactics coming from the fringe of the movement, but on solidarity, self-education, and unions.

  Leroux looked up at him, almost grateful. “Thank you, Maître Martin; the union president told us that the Labor Exchange would be better off if we hired our own windbag to compete with their windbags, and I can see—” The man broke off again. This time, the insult had been even more pointed. “I didn’t mean…”

  Martin laughed. “Listen, you want to see windbags, lucky we didn’t have to go to the civil court at the Palais de Justice. I would have had to wear one of those black gowns, and you would have seen scores of lawyers and judges flying around the marble halls like a plague of crows cawing their own self-importance. I liked this much better.”

  When they reached the canals, Leroux stuck out his uninjured hand. “Thank you, Maître Martin, I’m going to take the tram home now.”

  Martin took the calloused hand gladly. “We made the case,” he said. “Do you have need of tram fare?”

  This time the smile on the mason’s face was genuine. “No, sir, I think I can find a brother who will let me on for free.”

  Martin nodded. Workers, Anarchists, Socialists. The mason would only be breaking a minor law, yet it was something Martin would not dream of doing. He was in their clubhouse, but not really of their club.

  After a wave good-bye, he walked along the canals for a while, which, despite the poverty of the surrounding neighborhood, glistened like jewels under the late morning sun. He loosened his dampened cravat to catch a bit of a breeze before turning down the street that led to the grand Place de la République. He stuck his hands in his pockets, strolling past the hawkers and shoppers. He was floating a little and couldn’t keep from smiling like a fool as he imagined relating his first victory to Clarie. “He called me a windbag, and that almost took the wind out of my sails, I can tell you,” he would say, and her beautiful almond-shaped brown eyes would shine. She’d smile at his bon mot and be so pleased for him. Happy that he was happy
. Rejuvenated. He had certainly dealt with more important cases as a judge, solving murders, keeping the peace where violence threatened to erupt. But now it was different. He felt part of something, a movement forward, progress in bettering the human condition, not just cleaning up its messes.

  A bent-over, toothless man, mumbling a plea, almost fell into Martin. The old beggar’s desperation and the unwashed odor that reeked from his filthy clothes vividly reminded Martin of how far he had come and why. After a moment’s hesitation, he pulled a coin out of his pocket and dropped it in the man’s gnarled hand. Martin had been brought up to believe in charity. The altar-boy son of a pious widow, he believed everything the Church taught him until he encountered the true face and smell of poverty. Merckx. It always came back to Merckx, his oldest boyhood friend. The towheaded thirteen-year-old schoolmate who hated the priests and led Martin through the tottering wooden tenements of Lille to his large family’s two miserable rooms. Martin would never forget watching Merckx’s father coughing up blood mixed with the coal black dirt of the mines, or observing how the women of the family had been misshapen by years of 14-hour days in the humid, clanging woolen mills. Mills owned by Lille’s leading and proudly “charitable” families. It was Merckx who taught Martin that charity without justice or equality was cruel and ineffective. When Martin became a judge, how Merckx had mocked his belief that the state could bring justice! He chose to live by the sword and died an anarchist with four bullet holes in him. Well, Jean-Jacques, Martin said in his mind, without really believing that his friend could hear him, I may have finally found the path I can travel on.

  He wound his way toward his new office tucked into the third floor of the Bourse du Travail, the Labor Exchange’s massive new building. He shared the floor with a warren of offices dedicated to union organizing, dispersing mutual funds to the injured and out-of-work, and providing job referrals and financial aid to craftsmen new to the city. The municipal government of Paris had authorized the construction of the building during a radical moment in its history. Ostensibly, it gave workers a place to meet, to learn, and to celebrate. But the inhabitants of the Bourse were well aware that the “gift” also allowed the government to keep an eye on their activities and had been given in the hope that unions would encourage their members to become stalwart supporters of the Republic. But many, like Tilyer, the tough head of the Carpenters’ Union, believed the Republic was run by and for the bourgeoisie and were determined to subvert any attempts to control them. Because of the anarchist or socialist leanings of those he worked with, Martin was painfully aware that his chosen path would not always be easy. Still, when he entered the Place de la République he was quite shocked to see it obstructed by an armed force.