The Art Lover

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

  The splintered end of the vanghetto sank into the man’s chest, hit an obstruction, and sank a little further before I leaned too hard and broke the shaft in two. But it had done its work. The torchlight swept and stopped. Blood bubbled out of his parted lips, darkening the tips of his shaggy mustache.

  “I know him,” I managed to say.

  This only confused Rosina more. She was whispering to herself frantically, crouching down on the other side of the bed, searching for the missing knife and a dress to pull over her shivering body.

  “Opportunist,” was all I could say, indicting us both.

  He wore pin-striped trousers, a white shirt and tie, and polished shoes that glinted in the sweep of the torchlight. Between the folds of his fleshy neck, his Adam’s apple kept working, up and down. His left leg kicked out weakly, the motion pushing up his pant leg, revealing the knife holster wrapped around his upper calf, the knife gone missing—somewhere on the floor around us, having just missed its mark. The leg finally stopped, but the Adam’s apple wouldn’t, even after his shirtfront was stained black.

  “He’s still alive,” Rosina said from beyond the far side of the bed, head and shoulders peeking just above.

  “It takes a long time.”

  Eight years, in fact. Eight years of poor sleep, until I finally woke in time to fend off the ambush that had waited for me, interrupting my sleep all that time.

  His eyes remained open, unblinking.

  And suddenly, he was only Keller. Which was bad enough, but still, only Keller. What had I done? I put my head in my hands and got sick on the floor just next to him.

  This was the end of one thing, finally; the beginning of another, but not the beginning of anything I would have desired most. The day of individual happiness had passed. There was no such thing as a small, quaint, rustic farm where a couple might hide away for years, sketching still lifes and playing old phonograph records of nineteenth-century operas. There was no such thing as a city life of books and statues and index cards—not really. Not anymore.

  Keller had not moved for several minutes when we crept outside, scanning the darkness for any sign that he was traveling with a companion, but there was no sign, only the oblivious insect noises of deepest night.

  “I’ll run up to the house,” Rosina said, one hand nervously raking her bare neck.

  “Yes—wait. But how did he come? If there is a car . . . perhaps he walked in . . . if there is someone else out there, waiting . . .”

  “It can’t be far.”

  “It can’t be far,” I repeated, unable to locate my own thoughts. “He wasn’t much of a walker.”

  We proceeded together, silently, staying to the side of the road, ducking under branches overhanging the natural berm that flanked one side. Just around the first curve, not even a quarter of a kilometer away, there was the little red Zagato Spider in which Keller had arrived, keys still in the ignition, and a valise and crumpled map on the passenger seat. During the last stretch, at least, he had traveled alone.

  I started and restarted the engine a few times before I managed to shift into the proper gear and drove slowly up and around the back of the barn, then a little farther, up and over the grass toward the pigsty, leaving a light track of flattened grass and tire-printed dirt. All the while, I kept the headlamps off, as if Rosina and I were still sneaking around, trying not to let Keller hear.

  Even without lights, the sound of the car had alerted Cosimo. He came out of the main house in pajama pants and no shirt just as we were approaching. Rosina fell into his arms, trying to explain. Gianni appeared, fingering his tousled hair. After a moment, he disappeared around the side of the house and returned with a shovel in his hands, blade up and poised to strike.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, interrupting Rosina. “I did it.”

  “Yes, we know,” Cosimo said, trying to move past me on the path, to see the scene for himself, with Gianni just behind him. “You’ve said that several times already.”

  “Have I?”

  Cosimo asked his sister, “Only one man? One car? You’re sure?”

  “I don’t know.” I reached for Cosimo’s arm.

  “It was self-defense,” he announced. “And we must keep defending ourselves in any way we can.”

  I hadn’t been preparing to offer an excuse. I had been preparing only to thank him, to apologize, and to surrender myself if it would make his life any easier. He could drive me into the village right now, into the village where the local polizia were perhaps beginning to roll in their beds, to groan and stretch, irritated by the ridiculous hour the visiting German Gestapo agents had asked to meet for this emerging investigation. I felt sure they were unaware that one man had gone ahead without them: the eccentric German liaison from Rome, eager to sniff things out for himself on the pretext of looking for any sign of local corruption, ahead of the local polizia whom no foreigner should trust, when perhaps he saw this as his last chance to make a deal and cover his tracks, simultaneously.

  “You wait here,” Cosimo said, stopping Rosina at the doorway to the barn. When I tried to follow, he stopped me, too.

  “It’s my doing. I want to help.”

  Gianni handed me the shovel, blade up, but I fumbled, my hands shaking so badly that I dropped the thing onto my foot.

  “Sit down,” Cosimo ordered, pointing to the stone stoop. “Put your head between your legs. Was he still moving?”

  I assured them he was not. But Cosimo muttered something to Gianni, who picked up the shovel and gripped it close to the blade, ready.

  The sound of dull blows came from inside the barn, continuing even as Gianni came out, pacing several times before going back in. Perhaps it wasn’t so easy to kill a man, through and through. I had forced Cosimo to finish what I could not, to finish what he had threatened the morning we’d found Enzo, though I had never believed him.

  They came out several minutes later with the inert body slung between them, grasped at armpits and knees—a drunken reveler hoisted by two friends out of a tavern, one would have liked to pretend. Rosina turned away.

  Cosimo, struggling against the large German’s weight, jacked up his end with a shrugging motion. “We’ll need someone to burn his clothes. Ernst—”

  Rosina objected. “Don’t leave me here alone. Someone else might be coming. And what about the car?”

  Cosimo reconsidered. “Stay together, then. Cover the car with anything—a blanket, branches. Scuff up the tire tracks. Check for personal belongings and hide them, but quickly. Then return to the barn, push everything back into place, clean up and wait.

  “There’s no hiding what I’ve done,” I said to Cosimo’s departing back.

  Forty minutes later, Rosina and I were sitting on the tidied bed together, hands washed but still shaking, catching a pungent smell of smoke, not a smell bad enough to explain how they are disposing of the body itself. I left it to Cosimo, who, in his line of work, probably knew ways I couldn’t imagine. The surrounding landscape, in my horrified mind, became a map of morbid options: an algae-covered pond here, a collapsed cellar, a sty full of hungry pigs. That last image was the hardest to shake, even as I felt Rosina’s hand on my back, tracing light circles with her fingertips.

  “Bitte,” she said, and I realized it wasn’t the first time she had said it. I’d been hearing it faintly without apprehending.

  Ja.

  Bitte.

  Ja.

  Then silence as we traveled down a path we had begun to travel before, but this time without banter, no attempt to study or adore, to hurry or delay; no references to past or future, or to any people other than ourselves. The consequences of what I’d done were rushing toward us, but strangely, I felt a sense of release. The worst had already happened.

  I closed my eyes without any thought of vigilance or scrutiny. I shed each layer without any thought of self-consciousness. We stopped kissing long enough to turn the covers down, but carefully, as if we were only preparing the bed for someone else. Of
course, this is what we should be doing now. Of course, this is what we must do.

  And how beautiful her body was, how soft and how singular. We took our time, and there were no interruptions or regrets and no awkwardness or shame, as if we’d made love a dozen times before, as if we’d always been lovers. How fortunate I felt, and how ready, once we were finished and I had dressed again and rolled up each sleeve with meditative care, to accept whatever would come next.

  Sitting on the bedside later, fully clothed, I laced my fingers with Rosina’s one last time as we watched the sky outside the barn’s one small window turn from black to gray to lavender, dark hills cleanly divided from lightening sky. “Now we wait for Lady Fortune. That’s what Enzo would say.”

  Rosina looked skeptical. “He never understood that she is bad fortune as well as good. Fickle and unlasting—the symbol of the turning wheel. Attracted to displays of youthful violence, some say.”

  A moment later, I asked, “Maybe you could sing something for me?”

  “Who would think of singing at a time like this?”

  “Later, then. Do you promise?”

  She turned away, but I’d already seen the thickening lens of tears darkening her eyes. “Prometto.”

  Then I heard the sounds of tires on gravel, the assertive application of brakes, the sharp metallic scrape of four car doors opening. “They’re here. I’ll go to meet them.”

  “Wait for Cosimo.” Her fingernails dug into my forearm.

  But we heard him calling out to the visitors from the hill beyond the barn, sounding falsely hale and hearty, as if he’d just been feeding chickens and shoveling manure. “Buongiorno!”

  When I stepped out of the barn, buttoning the top button of my shirt, I came up against two Germans in suits, one with a small, slim-barreled pistol in his hand, pointing. Closest to the car was a man in police uniform, an Italian supervising officer of some kind, chatting amiably with his hand on Cosimo’s sleeve. His face met mine, saw the gun pointing at me. He looked even more shocked than I was.

  “Essere attento,” the Italian said, searching his brain for foreign words. “Achtung. Easy, easy.”

  Another Italian policeman stepped out of the car, yawning, and stopped mid-stretch, alarmed by the scene unfolding. The two Germans wanted to search me, search the barn, find the truck. The two Italians wanted to go up to the main house, maybe wake up with some espresso if Cosimo or his mother would be so kind, take out their notepads and ask us some questions.

  “Va bene, va bene,” Cosimo soothed, striking a compromise. He shouted out to his mother in the house to prepare for guests. To the men gathered, he suggested, in both carefully enunciated Italian and then German, that we go directly to the truck, where the statue of the Discus Thrower awaited us. That was why they were here, was it not? It was fine, well cared for, and ready for the final leg of its transport. We would go to inspect it, without delay. When Rosina slipped out of the barn, Cosimo directed her up to the house, out of our way: Help Mamma.

  As we walked to the truck, the second German, who introduced himself simply and without rank as Herr Fassbinder, began to question me. But it was the unnamed one with the polished chestnut-colored holster riding high against his hip—Herr Luger, I’d tagged him in my mind—who held my attention.

  “Why are you here?” Fassbinder asked gently.

  “There was . . . an incident. A series of incidents.”

  “We have a report that someone was trying to steal the statue you were transporting.”

  I lowered my voice. “Someone was trying to steal it. Not these Italians. I think they’re ignorant of the entire matter.” The presence of a sympathetic listener encouraged me further. “At first, I suspected some Roman policemen, but now I think it was a private ploy, an attempt to take the statue, not to return it to the government, but to sell it on the black market.” Should I implicate Keller, or would that only prompt them to ask me if I’d seen him? Should I tell everything I knew, as fast as I could, and rely on the truth to save me?

  “Very helpful, very interesting,” the German said, returning my whisper. “We are also missing someone—a man who came out this way earlier this morning. It would be our luck if he got lost here, motoring between farms, surveying the countryside for pretty girls, no doubt.” He glanced over his shoulder at the yawning Italian walking behind us. He started to catch the yawn himself and shook it off. I couldn’t tell if this casual manner was authentic or just a tactic to earn my trust. Either way, I preferred it to the point of a gun. “They haven’t given us much help, I have to say. I was in Genoa, on vacation, when they called me. The other man—he’s on duty, sent by The Collector himself, who is waiting to hear.”

  I repeated the dreaded words back to him: “Der Kunstsammler.”

  “Yes, there is unhappiness at the highest levels.”

  Cosimo, the Italian police captain, and the German with the reholstered Luger were ahead, talking just as animatedly. Up at the house, the side door opened, and I saw Mamma Digirolamo waving, with a tray in her other hand. The espresso wasn’t ready yet, but it soon would be. All this would be settled. For a moment, this felt like a cheerful reunion, and I could imagine all of us making a best effort to sort through the confusion, in two languages, with all due respect. If only Keller had gotten lost. I could almost believe it myself. I could see him accepting breakfast in a farmhouse, dancing a waltz on a terrazza, falling in love.

  But that would have been a different Keller, not the one who had fallen in love with profit and fineries, whose distinctive cologne even now was so strong in my nostrils I was sure others could smell it, too. I brought my arm to my face as if I were just rubbing my nose, and there was the source of it, on the underside of my forearms, where I must have pressed hard against his chest as the vanghetto sank into his lungs. I unrolled my sleeves, buttoning them, but still, the sickly sweet perfume lingered.

  Up ahead, Cosimo threw open the back of the truck and was startled when Tartufa came leaping out, escaping her all-night confinement. She landed on all fours, sized up our assembly, darted forward a meter or so, and then turned to bare her small white teeth. For a moment, she seemed to be snarling at me—at the smell on my arms, at the clear look and aroma of my guilt—but then I saw her take a threatening step toward the other strangers. She picked out the Germans, perhaps because they were closest, their erect posture mimicking her own nervousness. She quieted for a moment, a gurgling sound dying in her throat, then pulled back her lips again.

  And fell, tumbling to her side. There was a yelp and a gunshot—or most likely, the reverse. Of course. The gunshot followed by the yelp, followed by the fall. My mind was still struggling to see it unfold, to understand why she had gone limp.

  Cosimo knelt down, cradling the dog’s head, while the rest of us turned toward the sound of the shot. The sleepy Italian policeman was no longer sleepy. The Italian captain, Cosimo’s supervisor, was outraged. Even Herr Fassbinder, hands anchored in the front pockets of his trench coat, looked surprised. I heard a house door slam and the sounds of women’s voices, plus a man’s—Gianni’s—ordering them back inside.

  “Remove the animal, please,” the German with the Luger ordered, and my former ally, the off-duty vacationer in Genoa, shrugged off his last vestige of casual impartiality and got down to business. He carried the dog to the side of the truck, just out of view.

  “Now, let’s get to work,” the first German ordered. “How much does this statue weigh?”

  When I told him, he laughed. “Good God. What a nuisance. I suppose we paid by the kilo?”

  No one responded to his joke.

  “All right. Five of us then.” He pointed to me, Fassbinder, the Italian captain, and the secondary officer. Cosimo was left to stand, staring down at his stained hands. “And if anyone sneezes, or drops this verdammte thing on my foot, I still have ammunition left.”

  Even Fassbinder failed to smile.

  We were told to remove the statue from the truck for ins
pection, to unwrap its makeshift wrappings and stand it up in the yard. It was harder to do now that the crate had been mostly disassembled; it would take some time and some rope and a good deal of sweaty cooperation, handling those hundreds of kilograms of marble. It wasn’t a good idea to do haphazardly, I wanted to say. But since when had any of this been a good idea?

  I was too nervous to look closely until it was fully upright, until it was done. Then I took off the last blanket and put a hand to the Discus Thrower’s side, on his exposed right ribs, holding him upright until we knew the round base was secure on the pebbly ground, and then I paused for a breath to look. Once I looked, I was unable to stop looking. This is what I had wanted to do all along—not only to look at it up close, but to touch it, unhurriedly, as I would never again be able to do, once the statue was in powerful hands, on private or public display.

  There was the taut pectoral muscle, and beneath it, the smooth and shadowy indent just below the first rib, the second, the third, the fourth and the fifth, all the way down to the muscular iliac crest. Where my hand rested, along the middle of the rib cage, was the place where I had been strong once, where I had been ashamed, where I had been attacked, where I was now healed. I ran my hand over the marble, feeling all that this statue was, and all that it was not—nearly unfathomable artistry, but not everything. Both more than and less than life. The fact that it would outlast us all was, at this moment, both an injustice and a relief.

  There was a dark line near the Discus Thrower’s hip, but when I reached down and touched it, the darkness wiped off easily. It was only soot from the truck fire, not a crack. There were no lines or new signs of breakage anywhere along the statue, from toe to fingertip, from back to front, other than the cracks that had been apparent before—on the discus itself, just below the right shoulder, a few other places, all well documented.