Red, White & Dead

by Laura Caldwell

  “It’s okay.” I stood, wiping tears. They splashed on my cheeks and chin. They felt as if they were leaving marks, burning me. “I have to go.” My voice sounded like someone else’s. And as I looked at Sam, my eyes clouded, making him look different, too. “I’ll talk to you later.” My voice sounded strangled.

  “God, Iz.” He started crying now. He stood, grabbed me fiercely, wrapped his arms around me in a way that felt so Sam, so us. We stood together, a tight mass, quietly choking out sobs.

  I heard a persistent bleat, bleat, bleat, bleat. Mayburn honking from outside.

  “I have to go.”

  He nodded, sniffed, stared into my eyes. And that stare said it all. It said, Goodbye.

  PART II

  14

  “Ciao, ciao,” the porter said to me, as I left.

  I waved at him, went out into the courtyard and walked a pathway lined with stone busts.

  My first day in Rome, and I felt as if I was in the middle of one big flashback.

  When I had arrived at O’Hare yesterday, my flight wasn’t leaving for a few hours. Using one of the public computer kiosks, I got on the Internet and searched for hotels in Rome. The rates were astronomical. Since Mayburn picked up my flight, I was willing to take on some credit card debt (something I’d never done before), but if I stayed a week in the Roman hotels, even the modest ones, I’d have to live in a cardboard box under Lower Wacker when I returned.

  I kept thinking about the summer I’d spent in Rome years ago. It was during that time that my friendship with Maggie solidified into sisterhood. Maggie and I immersed ourselves in Roma, in our fellow students, our professors, the tenets of international and comparative law, and it was as if a happy bubble had sprung up around us. Of course, there were the usual traveler’s woes-blisters adorning our feet, having to wash your underwear in a dorm sink-but I loved every bit.

  As I remembered that time, a thought occurred to me. I found the Web site for Loyola’s Rome campus. It was in Monte Mario, a neighborhood on the outskirts of the city with upscale apartments and a few piazzas full of shops.

  I scrolled through the Web site. And there, on the bottom of the Housing page, it said, Alumni: Rent a Room! Low Occupancy in the Summer Means We Welcome Visitors! I scrolled to find the cost-less than half of what the hotels were charging. I could put up with dorm-style living in order to save money and to be, once again, in Rome, where I could escape Dez Romano and where Elena couldn’t escape the questions about my father.

  The campus was set on a long, narrow, grassy plot of land, the main building a three-story unassuming brick affair. But if the architecture and the setting were somewhat unremarkable, the feel of the place-the energy-wasn’t. Rome is a seen-it-all kind of place. No matter how much the Italians delight in things-food and wine and sex, to name a few-the fact remains that their cultural DNA includes a world weariness of it all. And yet the American students who studied at Loyola were visiting Italy, and sometimes Europe, for the first time. They were wide-eyed, eager to see, to learn, to live. And so the campus with its otherwise sleepy appearance hummed with that energy. It vibrated at a low level but with a certain light that colored everything a pretty ochre, that made the place soothing and yet made it sing.

  Thank God, because dorm living and me really weren’t made for each other. But I let the energy of the place take me, happily, to the showers that scalded in such a familiar way and then turned suddenly freezing, to the teeny bed that was really just a cot with sheets that felt like paper towels. I slept a dreamless sleep-a godsend-and in the morning, I left my dorm room and strolled past the campus’s stone busts. I pushed through the tall metal door set into the high brick wall and walked onto the street.

  A bus took me to the Balduina subway station, and I rode a couple trains until I landed at the Barberini stop. I got out there simply because I couldn’t remember seeing the piazza during my last visit. When I got to the top of the subway steps, I chose a cloth-covered table at a restaurant, essentially because it was the first one I saw, and I was bleary and hungry from the overnight flight.

  Even though I normally avoided caffeine, I knew I should probably get a cappuccino, something to power through my jet lag. But when in Italy one tries to do what the Italians do, and the Italians don’t drink cappuccino with their midday meal, they drink wine. I ordered a glass of Greco di Tufo.

  Then I got out a notebook I had brought with me, opened it to the first page and wrote at the top: Christopher McNeil, Things to Do.

  Under that, I wrote:

  1. Find Elena, get her to talk

  2. Bug Mayburn to find R. J. Ohman, flight instructor. Ask him why Fed instructor needed for McNeil and also what was cause of crash

  3. Learn who killed Grandpa Kelvin

  4. Find out more about the Rizzato Brothers

  I put the pen down and looked up via Veneto, the street that the restaurant faced. It was a wide, stately avenue flanked with regal appartamenti decorated with stone balconies and potted plants. It ended at the Piazza Barberini. A hotel sat at one side of the piazza. Its unimaginative brick front looked more like an American hotel, but surrounding it were stuccoed buildings painted brick-orange, their windows and shutters thrown open. Taxis and scooters and the tiniest of cars zipped around the circular piazza. And not just any scooters. Vespas! Rome wasn’t just the capital city of Italy, it was the capital city of Vespa country. They skirted the fountain and shot up via Veneto. I itched to get my fingers on the handgrips of one of them.

  I took my cell phone from my bag and set it on the table, hoping my aunt Elena might call. I had followed Mayburn’s recommendation that I turn on my international service while in the car on the way to the airport, and so my phone worked. Since I didn’t know where she lived I had called Aunt Elena three times since landing in Rome. Each time, the phone was answered with a quick message in Italian. I couldn’t understand whether it was Elena’s voice telling me to leave a message or a recorded message notifying me I had dialed wrong.

  I had decided I would keep calling and, meanwhile, forge into the city. If there was one thing I learned on my previous visit to Rome it was how much I didn’t get to see. The treasures, the hidden courtyards, the historic sites-these are endless in Rome. And according to a guidebook I’d picked up, a rash of new musi, galleries and palazzi had opened.

  I pulled out that guidebook and flipped through it now, setting my sights on the Barberini Palace, right around the corner from the piazza. I kept studying the book, hoping I could divine the gallery Elena had mentioned, the one where she was working and which she said was close to her heart. The problem was, I didn’t know Elena very well. I didn’t know what moved her heart. Come to think of it, I wasn’t sure what moved my own heart these days.

  The sight of Alyssa in Sam’s apartment-in Sam’s T-shirt-nagged me, kept showing up in my mind like a neon-lit image. I let that image linger and filled it with more light, because sometimes that chased away the feel of Sam’s farewell embrace.

  To get rid of both of them, I perused the menu.

  I ordered a pasta I’d never heard of and watched the Sunday foot traffic on the street, hoping in vain that somehow Elena might walk by, fearing that if she did I wouldn’t recognize her.

  I looked at my watch. It was early in Chicago, but that was probably the best time to catch Q. He would make me laugh about my whole situation somehow. He would encourage me to enjoy this time.

  I called his home phone, at the apartment he shared with his wealthy boyfriend, but their voice mail picked up right away. We’re not in right now, I heard Q’s recorded voice say. In fact, we’re in St. Bart’s, and we’re not checking messages, but leave us one, and we’ll call you when we get back.

  I hung up, suddenly wistful at the thought of how much time Q and I used to have together and how our life paths had diverged so sharply. I went back to watching the foot traffic pass my table. The longer I stared at the parade of pedestrians, the more I noticed that Rome was different
from when I was here eight years ago. Or maybe it was just the Roman men.

  When I was last in Rome, if a reasonably attractive woman stopped on the street to consult a map or much less ate alone at a restaurant, as I was doing, it would invite a torrent of male attention. The men would literally surround you-touching you, shouting come-ons in a desperate mix of Italian and English. It became one of Italy ’s few liabilities.

  As I sat near the Piazza Barberini, alone and unap-proached, it was clear things had changed.

  My pasta was delivered-green-and-white striped noodles in a mushroom-y broth. Delicious.

  I kept eating my pasta and sipping my wine, depressed a bit about the change in the Roman men. Being single for the first time in years, I had envisioned a bevy of male attention that, although largely unwanted, would serve to lift me away from my questions about Sam, from a lingering taste of fear at the back of my throat every time I thought of Dez and Michael.

  In fact, most of the men strutted by, not noticing any women. The men were dressed in exquisite fashion, their heads held high. Most of them were in perfect shape, their black hair tousled to perfection. It was almost as if they expected to be watched now, expected that they should be the admired ones. They were preening peacocks, full of bravado, no longer reduced to preying on tourists.

  I picked up my phone and called Maggie.

  “What courthouse?” she barked into the phone. I could imagine Maggie in her South Loop apartment, her body only a tiny bump in her big bed. “What’s the bond?” Maggie loved to sleep as late as possible, but was constantly awakened by drug clients who often landed in holding cells over the course of the night.

  “Sorry, Mags,” I said.

  “Hey, just because you’re not working doesn’t mean the rest of us aren’t.” A pause. “Well, actually, I was going to be working because of my trial but I got directed verdict on Friday. Which means I’m going back to bed. Call you later.”

  “I’m in Rome!” I tossed out before she could hang up.

  “What?”

  “Yeah, I got here yesterday.”

  “You’re kidding me? Did you get a hold of your aunt Elena?”

  “Not yet. But I just felt like getting out of town.” And away from Dez and Michael.

  “You’re in Rome?”

  “Yeah. I’m sitting outside near Piazza Barberini right now.”

  “How is it?”

  “As beautiful and chaotic as always. You should get on a plane and get over here.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. My trial is over, but I’ve got to dig myself out of the mountain I let pile up while I was prepping for it.”

  I told her I was staying at the Loyola campus.

  “You’re kidding?” she said.

  “You have to see it again. C’mon, Mags. How often are we going to get this chance? How often are we both going to be single at the same time? I mean, in a couple of years you might be married with a kid.” Maggie very much wanted a family. It was the husband part of that proposition that was causing her trouble.

  “You’re right,” she said, her voice excited. “And we could celebrate your thirtieth.”

  “I’ve got a glass of wine in front of me and a spot across the table for you.”

  “I’m calling my travel agent.”

  “Seriously?”

  “I’m going to make this happen. I’m coming to Rome.”

  15

  I hung up after the call with Maggie, a smile on my face. I asked for my check, then went back to watching the Italian men. Many wore tailored jackets. Nearly all wore beautiful Italian shoes. And those shoes reminded me of Michael and Dez.

  I called Mayburn. He answered with a groan.

  “What’s up with you?” I asked.

  “Time change,” he growled. “Think about it before you call.”

  “Oh, please. Get up, you lazy ass.”

  “This ass was up late last night. You know how you wanted info about the people who killed your grandfather?”

  I pulled my notebook closer to me and put a star by item number three. “Yeah. Find something?”

  “I thought you were stretching to look that far back, but there’s something interesting.”

  “Don’t tell me my grandfather isn’t dead, either.”

  “No. Sorry to say, two guys did kill him at that gas station. Their names were Dante Dragonetti and Luigi Battista. The cops arrested them, but both escaped from jail before they could come to trial.”

  “Escaped? How did they do that?”

  “I tried to find that out, but the details are sketchy. It looks like they were kept in a simple holding cell in a small town out East, but these guys weren’t simple criminals. And they probably had help. The authorities think they returned to Naples, where they were from. Tried to extradite them, but they apparently went deep into hiding, maybe changed their names, because the U.S. authorities couldn’t prove exactly where they were. So no extradition was ever granted.”

  “And no one was ever tried for my grandfather’s murder?”

  “Nope.”

  “Sad.” I drew a line through item number three, thinking about how that must have made my father feel-and Elena and my grandma Oriana-to have those men living free somewhere, the same men who had stopped the life of Kelvin McNeil. Then I looked at number four on my list. “Have you ever heard of Louie and Joe Rizzato?”

  “The Brothers Rizzato? Sure. I saw a documentary on PBS about them. Disappeared. Never found the bodies.”

  “That’s the case my dad was consulting on when he died. He was a police profiler for the Detroit police force, but he worked some federal cases, too, and that was one of them.”

  Mayburn was silent.

  “What are you thinking?” I asked.

  “I’m thinking I better educate myself a bit about the Rizzato Brothers. Call you back.”

  I left the piazza and walked up a steep street to Palazzo Barberini, where the salone took my breath away. The three-story stone walls were mostly unadorned. The true draw was the fresco on the domed ceiling.

  Only one other person was in the salon when I entered, a man lying on his back on one of the four gray chaises in the middle of the room. I sat on another chaise, then feeling a little cautious, I lay back, too. The fresco, called Divine Providence, depicted historic figures frolicking across a luminous, heavenly blue sky. I thought about my father, who always resided in a similar place in my mind-in a beautiful, warmly lit other-universe where he floated about, with no worries, but always able to see Charlie and me, always watching us.

  When I left the palazzo, I kept calling Aunt Elena, and eventually I was able to translate the message. It wasn’t Elena’s voice, I realized, but a standard greeting from the phone company inviting callers to leave their own mes-saggi. Because Elena had seemed skittish when I’d spoken to and e-mailed with her from Chicago, I simply left a message, asking her to please call me back. In the meantime, I kept walking around the city, stopping at places I hadn’t paid enough attention to before-the Capitoline museum (reached by climbing stairs next to Vittorio Emanuele), the Jewish ghetto, the Napoleon museum by the Tiber river.

  On via del Banchi Vecchi, a medieval-looking street, I found a wine bar with a sign out front that only said Vino Olio. It was a tiny place where people spilled onto the sidewalk to smoke. I lucked out and found a single seat at the bar. I sat there and kept checking my cell phone, in vain, for a sign that Elena had called. I didn’t want to be rude. I didn’t want to just drop in on her, in her city, when she clearly didn’t want to see the niece she barely knew, but finally, sitting at the rough wooden bar, I decided to text her this time. I wrote, Hi Aunt Elena it’s Izzy. I’m in Rome.

  Fifteen minutes later, as I was making my way through my second glass of Falanghini wine, she called. “Oh, cara,” she said. “Why are you here?” She didn’t say it in a rude way, but rather in a manner that was both fond and weary.

  I swirled my wine, watching the smooth yellow-gold liquid swish again
st the clear glass. I thought about what to say, decided that there was nothing to say but the truth. “To talk about my dad.”

  A pause. “Where are you?”

  I told her.

  “I am just leaving work. Do you know this hotel?” She mentioned an address.

  I’d seen it in my strolls. “It’s a few streets from here, right?”

  “Yes. Mio amico, my friend, runs the hotel. It has a rooftop terrace bar. It is closed for remodeling, but he will let us use it. Meet me there at half past.”

  I looked at my watch. “In twenty minutes?” I wanted to make sure I understood.

  “Yes.”

  I said goodbye. I didn’t ask why we had to meet on a roof deck that wasn’t open to the public. I took another swallow of the wine, but it had gone a little warm and tasted slightly sour instead of refreshing.

  I pushed it away, left Euros on the bar and then left to see my aunt for the first time in eight years.

  16

  We made small talk at first. How was my mother? Elena asked. What about her husband, Spence? Were they happy? She hoped so.

  “She was very much in love with your father,” Elena said.

  And there it was-your father.

  We were sitting at a high table on a sixth-floor roof deck. The hotel was small and beautiful with a lobby library and wine bar. The place had once been a convent, Elena had told me.

  I looked at her now and noticed that her posture was still dancer-straight, her hair still a shiny chestnut, her skin faintly lined but supple. Behind her, the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica glittered a serpentine gray-green as the sun began to disappear.

  Neither of us said anything for a moment. I couldn’t read her expression because of the large black sunglasses she wore. They had a silver braid on the side that glinted in the sunlight whenever she turned her head.

  “And what about you?” Elena said, skipping over the topic of my dad. “How is your love life?”