The Missing Italian Girl

by Barbara Corrado Pope

  “Don’t say that!” Maura jumped up. “Never say that! We were afraid, that’s all.” How could he possibly blame her for Angela’s death? How could she live without Angela? Why had she let Angela go alone to work? Hadn’t they always done everything together? Why had she even dreamed of running away alone, without her sister?

  Putting his elbow on the table, Jobert turned away from her and took a few long draws on his cigar. She stared at his rosy, well-fed profile. He was demonstrating his calm, his control. And her vulnerability. She hated him.

  Finally, after blowing a ring of smoke in the air, he said, “Your sister played a dangerous game, being the lover of both Barbereau and the Russian anarchist.”

  “She was not their lover!” Maura shouted. “Cover her up right now. She was always modest. She’s not a show.”

  “Well, she was someone’s lover. We’ve done the full examination, you know.”

  “He violated her! And beat her. She did not love him!”

  “Which one is that?”

  “Barbereau,” she whispered, realizing her outburst had led her into a trap.

  “And that’s why you killed him.”

  Maura fell into the chair, silent. “No,” she lied. “We did not kill him.”

  “Not your Russian friend?”

  She shook head. She would say no more. They could beat her. They could keep her here forever, surrounded by that sickening smell and dead bodies. She crossed her arms. She would say no more.

  Jobert tried. He told her about all the gossip spread by the concierges in Maura’s neighborhood and his interviews with the other seamstresses that Barbereau had hired and tried to seduce. He told her that he suspected both her and Angela of sympathy with Pyotr Ivanovich’s violent brand of anarchism.

  “Lies,” she shouted out against this libel, forgetting her pledge not to speak. And then she crossed her arms, waiting for their tortures.

  “You don’t want to accuse the Russian? He’s dead, you know. It wouldn’t hurt him.”

  Some instinct of self-preservation stilled her tongue. No, she would not betray Pyotr by saying he had killed Barbereau and frightened her and Angela into hiding. She had invented that lie to protect her sister. And now Angela was dead. Angela is dead. The three words reverberated in her brain. Angela is dead. She began to sob, and the tears came in torrents. Finally, somehow, gasping for air, she stopped. She wiped the tears and snot from her face with her sleeve, ready to be defiant again.

  Jobert was close enough for her to see the wart on the side of his ruddy nose and smell his cigar-laden breath. “Don’t you see a connection?” he asked. “Barbereau, the Russian, your sister? Doesn’t it make you a little afraid?”

  Although she was sitting very still, Maura felt like someone was pressing hard against her, squeezing the air out of her chest. She could not feel her arms and legs. Her mouth fell open. It as was if all her lies were coming back to haunt her. When they were in the Russian girls’ room, hadn’t she tried to scare Angela by saying they might be in danger? And now, it might actually be true. What if the person who had killed Pyotr had killed Angela and would eventually try to kill her? Because of Barbereau. Or what if the police were involved already, killing Pyotr to prove he was dangerous, and then…. It was too confusing. Too scary.

  “We can help you, you know.”

  She didn’t believe him. Even though he seemed to be able to see right through her, she didn’t believe a word he said. Why should he help her, except to help her into the Saint-Lazare Prison for the rest of her life? Or to the guillotine. No! She’d tell them nothing.

  The door opened again, a man in a long white smock. “It’s hot out there,” he remarked to Jobert. “We’d better get this done before noon.”

  The inspector nodded and gestured that the man should talk to Maura. The attendant bent over and gave her a list. “Go home,” he explained, “get your mother to come back to identify the body, sign a certificate, have someone inform a priest, and try to arrange for a burial for tomorrow.”

  As if she were stupid and wouldn’t remember or could not read. Or as if the man had dealt with many shocked souls before. She nodded and picked up the piece of paper. “I understand that a collection has been taken up for the burial,” the man in the white coat continued. “Officer Olivier has it. We’re going to dress her now.” He said it just like that. “We’re going to dress her.” Angela’s dead body.

  When Maura walked into the hall, she paused to see the huge green curtains drawn to a close over the exhibition window. Hot tears streaked her cheeks again. Behind that curtain someone was yanking Angela’s cold rigid arms into useless bloody clothes. Holding Maura more gently this time, Officer Olivier led her out of the exit door, which was at the opposite end of the building from the entrance. She was grateful for his authority now, for no one tried to stop her or talk to her. He walked her to the bus stop, waited until he saw the bay horses approaching, then handed her the tied-up, lace-trimmed handkerchief, once belonging to the silk-dressed woman. In parting, he admonished her to bring her mother back as soon as possible.

  3

  CLARIE STARED OUT HER BEDROOM window, watching the first shadows encroach upon the quiet, sunlit courtyard. What could she have done? She was a wife, a mother, a teacher, so busy, so … what? She realized she had been clutching her hands so hard, they were almost numb. She let them go and began to pace around the bed. Wasn’t she, above all, a human being? Wasn’t she a mother who had lost a child? Yet even in the worst of times, she had never been as alone or as destitute as Francesca seemed to be. As her steps quickened, a growing frustration surged into Clarie’s sadness. She wasn’t useless. She didn’t want to be useless. Clarie paused. What had Bernard often said? That for the poor a death was more than a tragedy, it was a catastrophe, a hand lost to the labors that made survival possible, an unsanctified burial in a pauper’s grave. She could do something.

  She pulled open the drawer that held her chemises and blouses and searched underneath for the envelope containing the secret savings which she used to buy little surprises for Rose and Jean-Luc. She spilled its contents onto the dresser. Only two five-franc notes and a few coins. She put the bills in her pocket and replaced the coins. Then, because she was unaccustomed to telling lies, she took a deep breath before going to talk to Rose.

  “Madame Clarie, are you all right?” Rose came out of the kitchen as soon as she heard Clarie enter the parlor. Her eyes searched Clarie’s face.

  “Oh, yes, just a bit tired. And I realized that I need to pick up something from the school. Do you think Jean-Luc will sleep for another hour?”

  “He’s no problem, our little Luca. If he’s awake,” Rose shrugged, “he can help me in the kitchen.”

  “Thank you,” Clarie said as she put on her gloves and smiled, a smile she feared could hardly seem real. “It may take a while.”

  Without having any clear idea of what she was going to do, Clarie hurried down the steps and out of the building, striding quickly through the streets that had become so familiar to her. She had to reach the school before Berthe Sauvaget left. She was panting when she arrived at the lycée. She wiped her hot, damp brow with a handkerchief before ringing the bell. When the économe opened the door to the empty school, Clarie almost lost heart. How was she going to explain herself?

  Fortunately Mme Sauvaget spoke first. “Oh, Madame Martin, I so feared that you would find the news upsetting. But I promised that I would tell you. I wasn’t aware that you knew Francesca.”

  “I encountered her one evening when I was working late. I’m surprised she remembered my name.” Clarie bit her lip, before again heeding the instinct that kept her from telling the entire truth. “I thought if I had her address, I could send her a note of sympathy.”

  “Of course, come with me,” Berthe Sauvaget said with the cheery efficiency that allowed her to keep the school’s complicated accounts in order.

  Clarie followed the short, wide, bustling bookkeeper up the stai
rs. As they crossed through the second floor, Clarie glanced anxiously toward the principal’s office. Much to her relief, the door was closed. She dreaded the possibility of running into Mme Roubinovitch, who might well ask penetrating questions about why she was there. Mme Sauvaget, a much less formidable administrator, was quite happy to accommodate Clarie without pressing her. As soon as they got to her office, Mme Sauvaget searched through the notebooks lined up on the shelves behind her desk until she found the one containing the accounts for maintenance. “Just a moment, just a moment,” she mumbled, as she shuffled through the pages before giving out an “ah” and triumphantly announcing, “here it is. I can remember her saying it was just on the other side of the hospital when we all worried about her getting here on time.” Then Mme Sauvaget wrote the address on a piece of paper and handed it to Clarie.

  She murmured her thanks and hurried down the hall and out of the school. Once the big wooden doors had closed behind her, Clarie examined the address. If Francesca truly lived just beyond the new Lariboisière Hospital, her apartment wasn’t far away. Yet it was over a line that Clarie hardly ever crossed, on the other side of the so-called outer boulevards. So-called, Clarie thought ruefully, because they weren’t outer at all. Not since the expansion of the city in the 1860s. Yet, even though the linked, wide commercial streets coursed through outdated boundaries, they had not lost their capacity to divide one Paris from another. On one side, Clarie’s side, commerce and relative comfort reigned; on the other, factories, poverty and slums. She stood, hesitating as late afternoon shoppers hurried past her. They’ll need the money now, she told herself. And she needed to know which girl had been killed, and why.

  The surest, though perhaps not the shortest, way to reach Francesca’s neighborhood was to retrace some of her steps and then follow the rue du Faubourg Poissonnière to its northern end. This led Clarie to a jumble of broad streets rattling with carriages, carts, omnibuses and cabs going to and from the nearby railroad station. It was a perilous crossing, and a relief to arrive at the relative quiet of the boulevard in front of the massive Lariboisière Hospital. Clarie followed its thick gray walls, hoping to encounter a winged-hat nursing sister who might guide her to the rue Goutte-d’Or. She did not want to ask any of the men in worn overalls and smocks, who eyed her every time she paused to look around. Finally she approached a woman carrying a laundry basket on her head.

  “You can go back to that corner to the rue Caplat,” the woman pointed, gracefully balancing her basket with her one strong bare arm, “or maybe they live near the laundry all the way back to Islettes or,” she turned the other way, in the direction that Clarie had been walking, thought for a moment, and shook her head, “too confusing for the likes of you, I fear.”

  Clarie had an idea that by “the likes of her” the laundress meant a bourgeois lady out of place and nervous. She was about to thank her and take her leave, when the woman asked, “You ain’t here about those Laurenzano girls, are you?”

  “Yes, yes, I am,” Clarie answered, surprised yet relieved that she had found someone who might help her find their apartment.

  “I had a feeling.” The woman sighed and put her basket on the sidewalk. “One of ’em was supposed to be working for me this morning, but took off to the morgue. Found Angela there, naked as the day she was born just about.”

  “Angela,” Clarie whispered.

  “Yeah, the pretty blond one. When Francesca heard, she went a little crazy, so someone came to get me at the washhouse. We live in the same building, see. I’m goin’ there soon as I get these delivered. I already got the priest for tomorrow to do a mass. And then off to the cemetery.” The woman twisted her mouth down and shook her head again.

  “Can they bury her so quickly?”

  “Gotta, in this heat. That’s what the police said when they brought the body up. Hope she lasts the night.”

  The image of Angela’s decaying body sent tremors through Clarie’s chest. She was tempted to give the laundress the money and scurry back to her own neighborhood. She did not feel ready to confront the terrible human realities of Angela’s murder.

  “Me and Francesca are the only real church-goers in the whole place. So I gotta help.”

  Clarie perceived kindness in that hard, reddened face. She glanced at the laundress’s swollen hands, her torn cotton dress darkened by perspiration. Even as her own resolutions were fading, Clarie realized that nothing or no one could be more real or human than this big-boned gray-haired woman, who spent her days scrubbing and ironing to survive and still found the time, and the will, to help her neighbor.

  “Perhaps I can do something—”

  “A few sous would be good,” the woman said, a little too sharply, then added, “and I’m sure Francesca would be honored to see you.”

  Given her hesitations about coming, Clarie did not feel she deserved any honor. It was humbling to acknowledge that the laundress had so easily jumped to the conclusion that Clarie was capable of nothing more than sympathy and a little charity. That she could not understand or be of any real use in their hard, poverty-stricken lives. Even knowing she was unlikely to prove them wrong, Clarie resolved to go on.

  After thanking the woman for her help, Clarie retraced her steps to the rue Caplat, which led to the Goutte-d’Or, where among the low one- and two-story buildings she would find the five-story tenement where the Laurenzanos lived. Once she got there, the laundress said, she’d find someone to tell her how to get through the courtyard and up the stairs to the right room.

  A courtyard and stairs like my own building, Clarie thought, reassuring herself as she walked quickly through the unfamiliar streets. But of course the tenement on the rue Goutte-d’Or was nothing like the apartment house on the rue Rodier. The pavement that led to it was cracked and uneven, spattered with garbage, and lined with stores and shops so dank and dark that without their signs, Clarie would have had no idea of their functions. Fortunately, there was no mistaking the tenement hovering over low wooden and brick buildings.

  The large courtyard was unguarded and open; still Clarie hesitated to enter, for it wasn’t as deserted as hers would be the hour before the men of the rue Rodier began to arrive from their shops and offices. Half-naked children were all about, yelling and running, dodging a few scrawny, scratching hens and a large indolent dog that lay in the middle of the yard, as if drugged by the waning sun. Clarie heard the hissing and pounding of tools and machinery and realized that the entire first floor was occupied by small workshops. The windows above her fluttered with hung clothes and sheets. She took a few wary steps in and caught the fetid smell, worse even than in the street. She lifted her skirt ever so slightly over the uneven cobblestones searching for the odor’s source. She soon found it, for some of the children made a game of jumping over the drain that led from the middle of the apartments to the street. She began breathing through her mouth, as she looked for the concierge’s lodge. A tugging on her skirt almost made her jump. Her assailant was a dear little towheaded boy or girl. “Hello, lady,” it said, then ran away giggling. Suddenly everything seemed to stop as the other children noticed her.

  “Lady, lady,” one of them yelled, “come to give us something?” “Me first,” said another, taller boy as he ran up to Clarie.

  “You stop that, stop that right now, you ragamuffins. Let her alone.”

  Clarie gave out a sigh of relief. Only a concierge would yell with such authority. She turned to find a small, wrinkled woman in a loose, dark striped dress and slippers.

  “You here about those Laurenzano girls?” she asked before Clarie could explain herself. “You a reporter or something?”

  “No, a teacher. In the school where Francesca works.”

  “Humpf. Well, they already got the pauper’s coffin upstairs. Don’t know why they bothered. They’re going to have to carry it down before it gets all smelly. What a lot.”

  When Clarie could find no response for her harsh judgments, the woman went on, “Eh, the washer
woman will help ’em. She’s strong as an ox.”

  “Where—”

  “Five floors up that staircase,” the concierge said as she gestured toward one of the doorless openings at the back of the courtyard. “And watch your step.”

  Clarie was relieved to enter the obscure passageway out of sight of the children, the concierge and whoever else might have been watching through the windows. In the hall, the smell was no better, but at least it mingled with the odors of cooking. She climbed the uneven, unlighted stairs at a crawl, clinging to the wobbly banister. Once she almost slipped on what might have been a potato peel. After a dozen more careful steps, she panicked, fearing that she would not be able to keep track of the floors. Then she remembered that the fifth floor would be at the top where the staircase ended. A few inhabitants of the building kept their doors opened as they worked. Clarie was grateful for every bit of light they threw in her path, even as she tried to pass unnoticed. Finally she came to the fifth floor, and a door opened to a room dominated by a simple, wooden coffin.

  She heard weeping, approached and knocked on the doorframe. Someone told her to come in.

  Maura sat on the bed, holding on to her mother, whose sobs had reached out into the hallway. The coffin lay between them and the single table in the room.

  “Maman, look who’s here,” Maura said shaking her mother. “It’s that teacher.”

  “Oh, oh,” Francesca stuttered as she wiped her eyes with a handkerchief.

  “Please, don’t trouble yourself,” Clarie said, taking another step into the room. “I’ve only come to express my deepest sympathies.”

  But of course Francesca, whose life had been one long trail of humbling experiences, did trouble herself for this unexpected guest. She rose from her bed and came over to Clarie.

  “Do you want to see my baby?” she asked in voice hoarse with tears. “Someone stabbed her.”

  My baby. Someone stabbed her. There was no way to respond to the sadness and horror of those words, so Clarie merely nodded and moved around to look into the coffin. Someone had combed Angela’s hair so it framed her face with soft curls. They had placed a cross around her neck and posed her hands together as if in prayer. As angelic and obedient as the girl Clarie had seen sitting in the first row of her classroom. It was tragic, and a little grotesque. The perfectly posed girl had been murdered. It took all of Clarie’s strength not to gasp or cry out.