The Missing Italian Girl

by Barbara Corrado Pope

  “I see it every day at this corner,” Clarie said, shaking her head. The fact that it was so white, so high, so expensive and so ornately Byzantine made it particularly galling. “I’ll tell you what,” she said, changing the mood. “Of course well-behaved children are not supposed to give offence, but that doesn’t mean we can’t march right down this street to the park to show that we’re not afraid of any old church. May Robert lead?” she raised her eyebrows to Emilie, who nodded her agreement. When his mother let go of him, the five-year-old straightened up and held his arms in the slightly bent pose of a toy soldier. Then, humming a military song, he led them all up the quiet street. Clarie and Emilie laughed together at the way in which Jean-Luc tried joyfully to imitate his friend.

  Half an hour later, spilled chocolate ice cream and drowsy-making sunshine were getting to Jean-Luc. “Definitely time for his nap,” Clarie announced as she picked up her sleepy son.

  “We’ll walk with you.”

  Clarie gratefully recognized Emilie’s offer as a way of prolonging the day. The rue Rodier formed part of a triangle with the rue Turgot, and the two streets met across from the Square d’Anvers. Clarie would only have to carry her load for half of a long block and up three flights of stairs, where Rose would employ her usual magic to get “her Luca” to take his afternoon nap.

  Clarie and Emilie strolled slowly. Because they were chatting intensely, getting in their last words before parting, it was Robert who noticed a post boy, dressed in a blue uniform with a leather bag strapped across his chest, coming up the street toward them.

  “Look Maman, someone is getting a ‘a little blue’!” Robert exclaimed.

  “Yes, dear,” Emilie said, as she barely looked up. “His grandmother,” she explained to Clarie, “sent him a pneumatic letter while she was out shopping, then she came home and described all the tubes, and how fast the paper had traveled, and how he got a message from the Bon Marché within the hour. My mother,” she shook her head, “she spoils him, as she spoiled me.”

  Clarie was once again about to disagree with Emilie’s assessment, when the boy stopped in front of her building and rang the bell. The concierge answered almost immediately and then looked up to see her. “There’s Madame Martin now,” Mme Peyroud told the letter carrier as she pointed to Clarie.

  “It’s for you, it’s for you, Madame Martin,” Robert sang, dancing around her. The excitement even brought Jean-Luc out of his stupor. “For you,” he echoed.

  There was a big difference between a boy, for fun, getting a “little blue,” as the Parisians affectionately dubbed their pneumatic letters, and one sent to an adult. Although Clarie tried to hide her alarm, Emilie sensed it, and offered to take Jean-Luc.

  Trying to ward off anxiety, Clarie relinquished her son to her friend and took the letter from the post boy. It was from the économe, the lycée’s accountant.

  “Perhaps they’re going to offer you a raise,” Emilie commented as she glanced at the envelope.

  “Or fire me,” a feeble joke. School was over and done with for the summer. She couldn’t imagine why an administrator was sending her an urgent message. She carefully ripped open the envelope.

  Madame Martin, I regret to tell you that one of our family has met a terrible tragedy. Yesterday, after working in a seamstress’s establishment in the Sentier district, a daughter of Francesca Laurenzano was stabbed and killed. A friend of Madame Laurenzano came to my office today to report the tragedy and to say that Francesca would not be working for a while. She also said that Francesca particularly mentioned you as someone who had been kind and who should know what has befallen her. I hope you do not find this news too disturbing. Yours, Berthe Sauvaget

  Clarie gasped and covered her mouth.

  “What does it say? What does it say?” Robert eagerly asked.

  “Shush, Robert, I’m sure this is adult business,” Emilie said. “May I?” she asked concerned.

  Clarie reached for Jean-Luc, who had fallen asleep, and gave Emilie the message. She clutched her son to her and kissed him on his forehead. She had to hide the clamoring in her chest.

  “Did you know this Francesca?” Emilie asked, puzzled.

  “I spoke to her once or twice. She cleaned my classroom.” Despite all her efforts, Clarie heard her voice falter.

  “This is terrible, of course….” Emilie handed the note back to Clarie. “You’re all right? I could stay.”

  “No, no.” Clarie had never told Emilie about her encounters with Francesca and her daughters. Some instinct had held her back from telling anyone except Bernard. That instinct had only become stronger when she learned the Laurenzano girls had a connection with the dead Russian anarchist.

  “You’re sure?” Emilie’s brow wrinkled with concern.

  “Yes, yes. I know you must go, dear Emilie.” Clarie’s eyes glistened with tears provoked by far more than their parting. “Sorry the day had to end like this.”

  “Me, too,” Emilie answered as she gave Clarie a kiss on each cheek. “Good-bye, my dearest friend.”

  Clarie forced a smile. Robert, like the little gentleman he was trained to be, reached up to kiss her too.

  “Have a beautiful summer, sweet Robert,” Clarie managed to say to him, “and when you come back, you’ll see how big Jean-Luc will be.”

  Clarie watched as Emilie and her son waved good-bye. Then she hurried through the courtyard to the stairs, away from the eyes of her concierge. Inside the darkened entryway, she began to gulp for air, but made herself be quiet so as not to disturb Jean-Luc. She pressed her hand over her mouth, smothering a sob. The question that pierced her, that would haunt her, was whether she could have done something to prevent the death of a young woman. For now she had to find the strength to get up the stairs, ask Rose to put Jean-Luc down for his nap, say she was tired, retreat to her bedroom, and decide what to do.

  2

  “WHERE IS ANGELA? WHERE IS my girl?” After Francesca Laurenzano woke up to the realization that her daughter had not returned during the night, she spent the dawn hours imploring Jesus, the Virgin Mary and Maura to tell her where her older daughter had gone.

  Maura didn’t know. All night she had tossed and turned on her mattress, growing more and more afraid. Where is Angela? Were they cursed? Were they all in danger? Barbereau, Pyotr, now Angela? When her mother again dropped to her knees and raised clasped hands up toward the crucifix over her bed, Maura could stand it no longer.

  “I’m not going to the laundry today until I find her,” she said. “Don’t worry, Maman, I’ll bring her home.”

  Francesca reached to the bed to hoist herself up. “How can you? You told me that you didn’t know where she is.”

  “Maybe she’s staying with those nice girls in the Latin Quarter,” Maura offered, fully aware that Lidia and Vera were either in prison or on a train back to Russia. “Look,” she saw, reaching in her skirt pocket, “I have money enough for an omnibus in case I have to cross the river.” Barbereau’s money. The few coins she had not sewn into the hem of her dress. Her hand trembled as she showed them to her mother. She was as shaky as she had been the night they dragged the bastard’s body to the Basin. She made a fist, squeezing the coins into the palm of her hand. What was Barbereau’s death going to cost them? Someone had already killed Pyotr. She had to think. Stay calm. Get away from her mother’s praying and weeping. And find Angela.

  “You should tell Madame Guyot—”

  “This is more important than the nasty old laundry. I’m going right now.” Maura was afraid if she stayed, she’d tell her mother what she planned to do: Go to the morgue. Make sure her sister wasn’t there. After that, she’d search every sweatshop and alley in the Sentier—the garment district where Angela had set out to work the day before.

  Before her mother could object, Maura rushed out of the room, down the stairs, through the courtyard, toward the nearest omnibus stop. If it went to the Ile de la Cité, she’d take it.

  As she hurried through fami
liar streets, she couldn’t help thinking about how she had once imagined that going to the morgue, where unidentified bodies were displayed free of charge, might be entertaining. She loved reading the descriptions and seeing the pictures in the cheap dailies: strangled babies dressed like dolls, murder victims nakedly revealing their wounds, wretched suicides rescued from the Seine in various stages of decomposition. She’d never dreamed that her first foray would be to look for her own sister.

  On the bus, she clung to a pole for support, silently repeating over and over again, “It can’t be true. It can’t be true.” The city passed by in a blur. She barely noticed the other passengers. At least she remembered to get off as soon as they crossed the river near the Notre Dame Cathedral. The morgue, a massive low stone building, sat on a broad street behind the great church. A crowd had already gathered for the day’s viewings.

  Maura frantically tried to push her way toward the front of the line. “I have to see, I have to see,” she shouted. A few refused to give up their place, muttering against her, but others recognizing her as a person of great interest—someone who could actually identify a victim—stepped aside. She heard curious murmurs. One middle-aged woman in a ridiculous hat was even bold enough to inquire, “Who do you think is in there, dearie? Your mother? Your lover?”

  Disdaining to answer, Maura kept jostling until, panting hard, she got to the front of the line close to the entrance. The people ahead of her were moving with agonizing slowness into the vast viewing hall.

  “Do you think she knows who ‘the angel’ is?” someone whispered behind her.

  Maura gasped and turned. “What angel?”

  “A beautiful blond creature,” a short, earnest working girl, in a red-and-white-striped cotton blouse, answered. “It was in the faits divers this morning. That’s why there’s such a crowd today.”

  Even if Maura had wanted to answer them, to tell them to mind their own business, she couldn’t. Her heart had jumped into her throat, blocking her from saying anything. She could hardly breathe and would have stumbled if she hadn’t been in a crowd.

  “Let her through,” the same girl shouted. “She knows the blond angel.”

  Maura tried to move her legs as she was being pushed forward. Was she going to regret everything she had ever done in her life? She’d always loved the faits divers. Any time she could afford a newspaper, she’d devour the little paragraphs that, as they days went by, eventually grew into the big stories everyone talked about, the infamous murders with full-page illustrations in the Sunday editions. Now would there be pictures of Angela? Out of the side of her eye, she saw a policeman approach. He grabbed her by her elbow and, shoving everyone else aside, led her through the door into the viewing hall. Whispers, like stinging buzzing insects, swirled around her: “She knows one of the victims.”

  And then she was there, in front of the glass window that ran all the way up to the high ceiling. At first she could not bear to look at the bodies, twelve of them, laid out in two rows, each occupying a marble slab. Instead, her eyes roved past them to the wall behind the corpses. To aid identification, clothes were hung on two rows of six hooks. Angela’s best plaid dress, the dress she put on for her first day of work, was there, right in the middle of the lower row. Maura wrested her arm from the uniformed man and spread her hands over the glass. Her breathing made a fog between her and the refrigerated bodies. She wanted the fog to last forever. She didn’t want to see. The policeman wiped the glass with his handkerchief and her eyes fell upon her sister, naked except for her private parts, her breasts exposed and the blackened wound above her heart evident to all.

  “No! No! No!” she heard her voice but it came from somewhere else, somewhere above or below or behind her. She wanted to be there, somewhere else, where the No was real, not Angela’s dead body. “No!”

  “You know her?” the policeman grasped her shoulder.

  “She’s my sister,” she sobbed and clapped her hand over her mouth.

  And then she heard a chorus behind her, “The blond angel’s sister.”

  “We need to talk to you, and after that, you’ll have to get your mother to identify her and bring money to transport her if you don’t want her buried in a pauper’s grave,” the nasty policeman said.

  “Money, we have no money,” Maura said. Burial, a priest, no, who could afford that? “My mother has no money, and I’m just a laundress,” she whispered. All the dreams and schemes that had fueled Maura’s hopes seemed to evaporate as she stared at her sister. All she could utter from the benumbed places that held her heart and mind were a few bare, necessary truths.

  A hush filled the hall. Somehow Maura sensed that everyone was hanging on her every word. They were the audience to her tragedy. This is what they all had come for. To gawk and stare at her during her darkest hour.

  Someone said, “Oh, look at her, those dark curls peeping out of the bun on top of her head, it’s like Rose Red and Snow White, the two poor beautiful sisters in the fairy tale.”

  Another called out, “Was she really an angel?”

  Maura didn’t like the uniformed man holding on to her. She didn’t want to talk to him. What if he knew about Barbereau? Some instinct broke through her paralysis and told her the crowd could help.

  “Yes,” she turned, shaking off her captor, “she was an angel. Angela, Angelina, the little angel. I am Maura. My mother is a poor widow.” Her chest was heaving in turbulent waves. Rescue me. I don’t want to talk to the police. I don’t want my sister to be dead.

  “They can’t bury an angel in a pauper’s grave,” a woman dressed in silks said, and others murmured their agreement. “Here,” the same wealthy woman unfolded a lace-trimmed handkerchief and held it in the air. “Let’s take up a collection for Rose Red and Snow White. For the Angel and her dark-haired sister. For a proper Catholic burial,” she ended with a flourish.

  The policeman’s hand tightened around Maura’s shoulder as if she could get through the crowd and flee, when all she could do was watch and wait, knowing that for the moment, she was the center of their attention, the object of their charity.

  She lowered her eyes. For isn’t that what one should do when you have just seen your dead sister? She folded her hands. Help me, help me now, were the only words running through her mind. Help get me out of here.

  The policeman cleared his throat and loosened his grip, raising her hopes, for no single man could thwart the emotions of those filling the stifling hall. But he was clever. He shouted his good will. “Do gather the money and we will send her home to her mother to arrange a burial. For now, I will take her to a quiet place to ask a few questions. You can leave your generous donations at the door. We all want to find the murderer of the Angel, don’t we?”

  “Yes,” someone yelled, and again a murmur of assent fluttered through the crowd.

  “This way, mademoiselle,” the policeman said to Maura, loud enough for those around to hear. “Come quickly. And you’ll be on your way soon.”

  Angry that he had foiled her feeble attempt to escape, Maura tried to yank her arm away. Instead of letting go, he growled in her ear, “If you don’t want to get into big trouble, come with me quietly.” Maybe he knew she was clever too.

  He led her through a door near the exit into a small room with a table and two chairs. A man smoking a cigar was waiting for them. He got up and tipped his bowler. “Inspector Jobert.” He was ginger-haired and mustached, broad as a wall, fitted like a fat sausage into his beige summer suit. “And who are you?” he asked, as he gestured with his hand for her to take a seat.

  An inspector. Why an inspector? Maura tried to resist the policeman pushing behind her.

  “Come, come,” he urged. “No use trying to stall. Better to tell the truth.”

  The odor of something far stronger than the soap and bleach of the laundry seeped into the room and mingled with the aroma of the inspector’s cigar. Nausea lurched up from Maura’s stomach.

  “Sit her down before she fain
ts,” the man called Jobert ordered. Maura felt herself being pressed into a chair.

  “Once again,” Jobert said, peering into her face. “Who are you?”

  “Maura, Maura Laurenzano.” She felt her lips moving and heard the sound of her words.

  “Good!” he said, as he reached into his pocket and slapped an identity card on the table. “Angela’s sister.”

  Maura’s eyes moved from his satisfied ruddy sneer to the card on the table. Angela’s identity card.

  “You knew!” Her heart began to pound. They had trapped her, here in the smells, by the dead bodies. Trapped. But why? Did they know she’d been involved in a murder? No longer able to hold her fear and nausea down, she bent over and threw up on the floor. When she was able to sit upright, she covered her face with her hands, trying to block everything out. She heard the door open and close.

  When she looked up she saw Jobert scrutinizing her. “Not quite as strong or as clever as you thought you were, huh? Well, we’re used to that here.”

  The door opened again behind her.

  “Ah, give the young lady the wet towel to wipe herself off.”

  She hated being grateful, but she was. She wiped her face and arms, and ran the towel down her dress. She rolled it up and laid it on the table with her hands over it. She needed its coolness. But the policeman took it away from her and slapped it on the floor, over her vomit.

  “You know,” the inspector said as he leaned across the table toward her, “it would have been much easier if you had not run away when we came to investigate Barbereau’s murder. Maybe if you had chosen to talk to me then instead of hiding, your sister would still be alive.”