Death of an Obnoxious Tourist

by Maria Hudgins

  “I was shocked to see how many pickpockets ply their trade at the train station. I guess it’s the Gypsies . . . Roma, doing it. Can’t you guys do something about it? It’s really awful.” I told him about the woman handing her bundled baby to a stranger and watched his face as a wall descended in front of it. He tightened his lips and tapped his cigarette against the ashtray.

  “What can we do? We crack down on them and the human rights organizations—they come to us and say we are committing genocide. We leave them alone and the tourists complain they are the victims.” Quattrocchi moved his stiff hands, palm to palm, from one side of the table to the other. “They tell us we should make them a part of our society, bring them into the mainstream, you know, and the Roma say we are destroying their culture. We leave them alone and they say we are condemning them to starve, preventing them from making a living. Now I ask you, what are we to do?”

  “I hadn’t thought about it that way. You’re kind of stuck in the middle, aren’t you?”

  “Very much so.”

  Once we were back out on the street, his anger disappeared as he asked, “What will you do this afternoon?”

  “I’m supposed to meet Lettie at the hotel so we can go to the Accademia and see the David, but I’ve heard the lines are terrible.”

  Quattrocchi’s face brightened and he held up a finger. “Aha! I have the perfect solution. Do not stand in the line. Do you have some paper?”

  I ripped a page from my little trip diary and he began scribbling with the paper held against a nearby lamppost.

  “Sometimes it is good to be a captain,” he said. “I have a little weight to throw around, as you Americans say.”

  He handed me the note and instructed me to go to a side entrance at the Accademia.

  “Give them this note, Dotsy. They will let you in immediately . . . and Lettie, too, of course. You must not wait in that line in the front. Not on a day like this. You would die of the heat before you got in.”

  I thanked him and walked away, trying not to trip because I could feel his eyes on me.

  Chapter Eleven

  “What’s that strap over his shoulder for?”

  “It’s his slingshot. Don’t you know the story of David and Goliath?”

  “Oh! He’s that David! I never realized . . . I mean, I just thought Michelangelo did a sculpture of a nice-looking young man whose name was David. It’s the one in the Bible, isn’t it?”

  “Not so loud, Lettie.” I figured about half of our fellow gawkers understood English, and I heard a few snickers behind me. Michelangelo’s David is one of those world-famous things that, when you see it in person, does not disappoint. It was magnificent. The concentration in David’s eyes as he contemplates the giant—the tension, the faith, even the veins in the youthful but hard-worked hand. Incredible to think that it had once been a chunk of marble.

  In the long hall leading to the David room, I found Dick Kramer contemplating one of Michelangelo’s so-called “slave sculptures.” Arms folded and head on a tilt, Dick shifted from one foot to the other. When he saw me, he drew me into his space with, “Are you of the school of thought that Michelangelo deliberately left these bodies only partially emerged from the stone, or that he didn’t finish them?”

  “Oh, I’m not qualified to have an opinion on what Michelangelo intended,” I said.

  “They certainly are powerful.” He glanced from one to the other of the four bodies that seemed to struggle to free themselves from the stone. “Are they prisoners or slaves? Is there a difference?”

  “Is Michael here?” I asked, but Dick didn’t seem to hear me. He was lost in the sculptures. Sunlight poured through the high windows and cast his contorted features in bold relief. As if he himself were inside the stone, writhing to get out. His face looked like a marathon runner forging through a wall of pain.

  “Interesting, isn’t it,” Dick went on, oblivious of my question, “how he carved out the torsos first. The head, the hands, and the legs—well, they would come later, wouldn’t they? The brain, the action, they come later. After the guts say, ‘Let’s do it. We have to be free.’”

  He turned again to the next work in the series, some fifteen feet away. “The hell of it is that if you can manage to struggle free of this—” he nodded at the slave in front of him “—you only find yourself stuck in that.” He jabbed a finger toward the next one.

  I stayed quiet so he would know he could keep talking if he felt like it, but Lettie, returning from the ladies’ room, breezed past and motioned for me to follow.

  I held up two fingers, which I hoped she’d interpret as “Be with you in two minutes.”

  “I know what being stuck feels like,” I said to Dick. “That’s one reason I felt I needed to make this trip. Sometimes we need to force ourselves out of the little ruts we let ourselves get into, don’t you think? Did you come on this trip for the same reason, Dick?”

  He cleared his throat. “No. Actually, I’m here with Michael to learn more about Italian furnishings and décor. . .” He cleared his throat again. “I own a furniture business at home, you know. We also do interior decorating, designs, etcetera . I’ve recently hired Michael to head up the bigger design projes . . . uh . . .he’s a very talented young man. As you may or may not know, selling furniture is not a matter of selling folks something to sit on. It’s a matter of selling them a dream, an image, an ambience, if you will. It’s not enough to show them some nice, old world furnishings. You need to make them see themselves in that old world setting. Sell them on the feeling, the setting, and they’ll buy the furniture.”

  “So you brought Michael here to help him get a feel for the old world setting?”

  “Right. That sort of timeless, relaxed, sunny . . .”

  He paused, looked over my shoulder, and I turned in time to see Elaine King coming toward us. Several yards behind her, pretending to study an air vent, was Paul Vogel.

  After raising five kids, I know how to tell when someone is lying. When someone who doesn’t lisp starts coming out with sibilant S’s, they’re either self-conscious or lying—or both. Dick Kramer had been telling the truth when he talked to me about the slave sculptures and how it felt to be trapped. I had no doubt that Dick was imprisoned by something he couldn’t escape. But that whole spiel about Michael and soaking up Italian ambience was pure crap.

  Down a corridor to the left of the David, Lettie and I found a room crammed with hundreds of plaster casts and students’ work. This was, after all, an academy for the study of art. I was particularly entranced by a sculpture of a small boy playing with a dog. He had his finger in the dog’s mouth, like children often do. It occurred to me that dogs, even two thousand years ago, knew how to bite without hurting. Lettie gave me a nudge, the pressure of the crowd compelling us forward. The room was hot and stuffy; there were too many bodies in too small a space.

  Spots began to dance in front of my eyes. I became dizzy. “I have to sit down,” was all I needed to say. Lettie took my elbow, guided me into the corridor to a bench where she seated me.

  “Where’s your candy? In your purse?” Lettie didn’t wait for an answer, which was good because I don’t believe I said anything. She found a piece of hard candy in my bag, unwrapped it, and stuck it in my mouth.

  I rested my head against the cool stone wall and drifted on the edge of lucidity for what could have been any length of time, but the next thing I was consciously aware of was Lettie’s shaky hands spilling orange juice down my neck as she held a small cup to my lips.

  “It’s orange juice, Dotsy. It’ll work fast. There, there. Oh dear, I’m so sorry I’m spilling . . .”

  I managed to bring her face into focus. Lettie was crying. She had the most desperate look, and her mouth quivered.

  I recovered in a flash. “You can relax now. I’m okay. Where in the world did you get orange juice?”

  “I have my sources,” she said with a sniffle, swiping her left eye with the collar of her shirt.


  “Seriously.”

  “You remember that back room we came in through? The secret way your friend, the Captain, got us in? It was a sort of workroom and I saw a little cooler. I figured they’d have something to drink in there, so I knocked on the door and asked. Luckily they remembered me. ‘Ah! The woman who knows the Captain.’ They fell all over themselves offering me stuff.”

  Who, but Lettie, could walk through a room one time and remember seeing a cooler? “I should know better than to push it like I just did,” I told her. “In this heat I need to take breaks and eat a snack every so often.”

  “I’ll make sure you do from now on.”

  “No, Lettie, it’s not your job.”

  ———

  Achille maneuvered us down a country lane so narrow and steep it seemed the bus must surely have a flexible midsection. None of us would have found the restaurant on our own, because it was at the end of a dirt road tucked in between a wooded hillside and an old stone bridge over a spring. There was no sign at the main road or anywhere else to advertise that it existed. I was almost embarrassed at the way our garishly painted bus blighted the sylvan setting like a pimple on a baby’s face, and I wished I had a big camouflage tarp to throw over it.

  They were expecting us. Two or three small parties were already dining, but the eighteen of us were their big business of the night. Mismatched chairs and tables with small bunches of wildflowers, lit by oil table lamps with parchment shades, had already been pushed around so we could sit in fours and sixes.

  Beth Hines fell in beside Achille, who seated her gallantly at the table with Amy, Tessa, and their dates. Tessa introduced us to her fiancé, Cesare Rossi, and Amy’s friend, Gianni Diletti, before they took their seats. These were the same two men I had seen in the lobby after our morning meeting at the hotel. Both were extremely handsome in a Continental sort of way, but Gianni looked considerably younger. Surely, I thought, he couldn’t be long out of school. Cesare had a look of rugged assurance, a squared-off stance that bordered on arrogance, and very expensive clothes.

  “Tessa’s fiancé is an up-and-coming local politician,” said Wilma Kelly as she and Jim joined Lettie, the Reese-Burtons, and me at a table for six. The Kellys being from Canada, and the Reese-Burtons from England, we formed quite an international party.

  “A town councilman or something like that,” Wilma continued.

  “On the Florence town council?”

  “No, a little town near Florence. Tessa told me the name of it, but I’ve forgotten it now. It’s the town he grew up in and his whole family still lives there. I think they’ve always been involved in local government, and Cesare—that’s his name, isn’t it?—is following in the family tradition.”

  “Which, in Tuscany, means for the last thousand years, or so.” Jim Kelly said.

  “Oddun loose lak stul churtpan,” Geoffrey said.

  “Amy’s young man looks like he should still be in short pants,” Victoria explained.

  Tessa slipped over to help us with the menu. Lettie and I both decided on the broiled trout; I because I love fesh fish, and Tessa assured me this would be freshly caught, and Lettie because it would involve little chewing. Wilma asked Tessa to point out vegetarian dishes and to please tell the waiter she wanted hers prepared with no animal fat.

  “Funghi, that would be mushrooms.” Wilma followed Tessa’s finger on the menu.

  “It’s a mushroom casserole with onions and zucchini. I’ll make sure it’s prepared vegetarian for you.”

  “Have you been a vegetarian for a long time?” I asked.

  “About twenty years.” Wilma nodded her approval of the mushroom casserole to Tessa. “I’ve been active in animal rights matters since my school days, actually. And then I married a dairy farmer.” She glanced toward her husband.

  “Mostly so she could make sure I treat the cows properly, I suspect,” Jim Kelly said.

  “As if there was any question of that! Jim treats his ‘girls’ better than he treats me. He plays the music they like at milking time, sings to them . . . get him to show you the pictures in his wallet. You think he carries a picture of me?” Wilma nudged him pointedly.

  “Come on, Jim, we want to see your pictures,” I prodded.

  Geoffrey Reese-Burton pointed to an item on the menu, and Tessa looked over his shoulder. “Vitello—that’s veal,” she said.

  Victoria shook her head discreetly and frowned at Geoffrey over the top of her glasses.

  “What?” He looked puzzled. “What do you mean? I like veal.”

  Unfortunately, this was the first thing Geoffrey had said that came out clear as spring water.

  “Here’s a nice bistecca, Geoffrey,” Victoria said. “Let’s both have that. It says here, it serves two.”

  Geoffrey didn’t seem delighted at the prospect of sharing a steak with his wife, but his face suddenly reflected a recollection that veal is from calves raised in pens, and is at the very top of any animal rights person’s “Do not Eat” list.

  Jim had his wallet out. “This is Sandra. I call her Sandra because she’s blonde and she has big brown eyes, like Sandra Dee. You remember her? Gidget?” He started Sandra’s picture around the table, followed by another of Sandra when she was a calf. “And this is Polly. Polly is Sandra’s mother.” Jim’s picture of Polly showed another dozen or so Jersey cows, all more or less identical, in the background.

  “But Jim,” Lettie said, “all your cows are blonde and have brown eyes.”

  “But Sandra’s the one who looks like Sandra Dee—or did, when she was little.”

  After the waiter had taken our orders, I turned to Wilma. “Do you have any special . . .7 I didn’t know what to call it: projects, passions, pet peeves—none of those sounded right. “Any special interests in your animal rights work?”

  “When I was in school, I protested against the horrible massacres of newborn harp seals. The pups, you know, the hunters would club them to death, bash in their little heads, right in front of their mothers. They did that to keep from putting a bullet hole in their precious white pelt.” Wilma shuddered, her face clouding over. Jim folded his hand over hers.

  “You were successful, weren’t you?” said Victoria Reese-Burton. “They passed laws against it, didn’t they?”

  “For a while, yes, but they’re easing the restrictions again, and I do worry that we’ll go back to square one. The seals’ numbers have risen and fishermen are starting to complain.”

  Jim squeezed her hand and leaned a little toward her. It appeared to be a signal between them, I thought; a signal for Wilma to pipe down before she placed both feet on her soap box.

  Paul and Lucille Vogel got stuck at a table by themselves, and neither of them looked too happy about it. As we ate, I glanced their way several times, each time catching Paul with his gaze on our table. I recalled his pointed questions at breakfast about the whereabouts of Jim and Geoffrey at the time of Meg’s murder. Did he know something about them, something that would connect either or both of them to Meg? I wondered how many other people he had talked to, and if he had found out everything he wanted.

  “I must say I was relieved when they arrested that local bloke for Meg’s murder.” Victoria realigned her silverware while Geoffrey struggled to divide a large thick steak equitably.

  “Relieved?”

  “Yes, relieved. Just think of the cross-examination and the surveillance we’d be under right now if these police . . . whatever they call them . . . had to figure out which one of us did it.”

  “Do you think they have the right person?” I asked and looked around the table quickly. My question seemed to freeze the entire table; for a second or two, no one moved or spoke.

  Jim said, “Do you have anyone else in mind?”

  “No,” I replied. “It just seems—”

  “Well, after all, the most likely suspect has enough troubles of her own, right now, doesn’t she?” Victoria used a fork and knife to transfer a portion of steak to her own plate.r />
  “Havta ’splain that, luv,” said Geoffrey.

  “Well, I mean Shirley. She’s the only one in the group that I know of who absolutely hated the woman. Of course, if you ask me,” Victoria whispered, leaning forward, “her sister, Beth, had more than ample reason for wanting to do for her as well!”

  “I wasn’t aware that Shirley and Meg even knew each other,” Wilma said.

  “They’re both nurses,” I said. “Didn’t Shirley say she had heard abhis trip from Meg?”

  I recalled Shirley telling me she had visited Meg’s hospital recently.

  “If Meg told her about the trip,” I continued, “and Shirley came and brought her daughter, that doesn’t sound like hatred to me.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Victoria said, “but I talked to her—to Shirley—on the trip down here from Venice. She filled my ear full of fascinating stuff about Nurse Bauer.”

  “Like what? Did she say Meg was incompetent?” Wilma asked.

  “Incompetent, irresponsible, arrogant, unprofessional, you name it. Shirley told me Meg had made mistakes that killed people. She told me about one case where she had added a . . . well, basically a disinfectant . . . a hand cleaner, I believe . . . to a patient’s intravenous tube during surgery. The patient died.”

  “Oh, my.” Wilma’s mouth formed an “O”.

  “Meg didn’t get fired. You see, she was quite good at making things appear to be someone else’s fault. Usually, the rest of the staff could be persuaded to help sweep a complaint under the rug because they’d be worried about being blamed themselves. Shirley said Meg had violent confrontations with practically all the staff except the ones that could fire her—no coincidence there, I’m sure. Shirley said she saw Meg throw a bag of blood at a patient one time.”

  “Oh, no!” said Wilma and Lettie at the same time.

  “Meg denied it and said the patient was just senile, delusional, which he was, actually. Shirley said there’d been many complaints filed about Meg being rude, arrogant, leaving work early without permission, but nothing ever stuck. The last straw for Shirley was an incident where Meg gave a patient a massive overdose of a cardiac medication. The woman died, and Meg got Shirley blamed for it.”