Red, White & Dead

by Laura Caldwell

  “Like those?”

  I followed the direction Maggie was pointing. There, two stories above, were rectangular windows lit up orange.

  “That’s them.”

  “Try to call her again.”

  I did. No answer. “Elena, we’re outside,” I said to her voice mail. “Please let us in.” I thought about my first few days in Rome, when I called her over and over. She hadn’t called me back until I texted her.

  I picked up my phone and wrote her a text. I’m outside the galleria. Please let me help, whatever is going on. I will stay out here until you are ready to see me.

  I showed it to Maggie and hit Send. We stood on the street, waiting. Soon, another ring of shouts burst into the city. Apparently, the soccer match had been won. People streamed into the street, singing soccer songs, chanting and cheering. A crowd of young boys rushed up to Maggie and me, trying to make us dance with them. It made me feel ancient. I could remember a time when I would have found fun in such a scene. I would have linked arms with one of the young boys and let him twirl me around the street. Now, though, it only made me anxious. I wanted to shove them away and yell Basta! the single Italian word that meant, essentially, Enough! Stop it. Get the hell away from me. But I stopped myself. It would have been rude, I knew. I had no right to rain on the parade of these young boys. Finally, they left us. Other people pushed through the streets, clapping and cheering. Still, the two lights upstairs in the galleria remained on.

  “Maybe she’s not there,” Maggie said.

  “Maybe. I guess I don’t know her well enough to know what she’d be doing right now. It’s the only thing I can think of. It’s the only thing I know to do. It’s the only thing…” My voice rose, taking on a note of panic. I closed my mouth, then looked at Maggie. “Mags, what should I do?”

  Maggie furrowed her brow. “Okay, you’re right. We have to do something. Something else.” She stared back up at the two rectangular windows shining into the night. “There’s got to be a fire escape, don’t you think?”

  I shrugged. “This is Italy. There’s no rhyme or reason to these buildings, and they don’t have codes like we do. Or, at least, they don’t always pay attention to them.”

  “What about that?” Maggie pointed to a small garden terrace one floor up from the street and below the lit windows of Elena’s office. “If we climb over that-” she pointed at a stone wall to the right “-we could get to the stairway that leads up to that garden.”

  “They must have a security system.”

  Maggie raised her eyebrows. “Which would bring anyone inside the palazzo outside.”

  “And which would also bring the police.”

  “Not if we do it fast enough to trigger the alarm, but just be standing here like we have no idea what happened.”

  “Don’t be crazy, you-”

  But before I could finish, she was lifting her self onto the fence like a gymnast onto a beam and swinging her legs over it. She landed on the other side. “So far so good.”

  “Mags, don’t be deranged. This is my mess. My family. You don’t need to get yourself in trouble.”

  She stared up at the terrace and at Elena’s windows, then she turned to me. “Iz, we’re best friends. I know Sam took that spot for a while, and he should have. He was your fiancé. But following you around for the last hour, seeing you go through this hell, it reminds me that the best friend spot is my job again. And so your mess is my mess.” She turned away.

  “Wasn’t it my mess when I wanted to call the police a few hours ago? Now you’re going to try and get arrested?”

  “I’m not going to get arrested. I just want to trip an alarm. Let me just look around.”

  She walked up to a French door on the ground floor and cupped her hands around her eyes, peering inside. The moment her hands touched the glass, a shriek screamed through the night, louder than any cheering shouts from the soccer fans.

  “Maggie!” I yelled.

  She leapt back over the wall and trotted down the street to me, an Oh, shit, did I just do that? look on her face.

  I peered up and down the street as the alarm screeched. “Should we go?” I yelled at Maggie, who looked as if she might have changed her mind.

  But she only shook her head. “What thieves would stand here and wait for the cops?” she shouted back at me. “And we’re not going to tell them about your dad.”

  An image of him lying in that blood hit me, made not just my stomach but my whole internal body constrict with pain.

  A police car zipped up the street and parked outside the palazzo. Two carabinieri got out. They didn’t look particularly alarmed by the alarm. Maybe they were used to false ones.

  Maggie and I tried speaking to them in the little Italian we knew, but it was useless. One of them said something into his radio, squinting at me above it, and something in his look made me nervous. I’d had more than enough experience lately with suspicious cops, and the reminder sent a shot of terror to my brain.

  But just then the front door of the palazzo opened. Elena stood there. One of the carabinieri approached her. They had a quick conversation in italiano. From what I could make out, she was saying, “They are fine. They are with the galleria.”

  She gave me a long look and spoke a few more words to the police. The one who seemed to be in charge finally shrugged, nodded and gestured for the other officer to leave with him.

  Elena waited until they got in the car. She waited until they pulled away. She gave me a stern, sad look. Her eyes were red, and there were swaths of dark skin below them.

  She glanced at Maggie, then back to me. “Come,” she said. “Come in.”

  52

  Inside, the galleria was mostly dark, lit eerily with red security lights dotting the exits. We followed Elena through the grand hall. Maggie swiveled her head as we walked, squinting at the artwork, at the gold, at the frescoed ceiling three stories up, murmuring, “Jesus, this is unbelievable.”

  Elena said nothing. She was wearing the same outfit she’d had on this afternoon on the train-taupe linen slacks and a matching jacket. But the linen was sagging and creased. She kept clenching her hands into tight fists.

  When we got to Princess Isabelle’s apartments, Maggie made more murmurs of appreciation. The door to Elena’s office was already open, sending a block of light into the apartment. She stopped and gestured for Maggie and me to step inside. Once there, she slid the door closed and waved her hand at the light blue chairs under the windows. Silently, Maggie and I sat there, while Elena took a seat behind her marble table-desk.

  Maggie looked at me as if to say, You want me to try and talk to her or do you have it?

  I shook my head and looked at Elena. She had clearly been crying. She pursed her mouth together now, as if stopping more cries from erupting.

  “What happened to him?” I said gently.

  “He was killed. Apparently. I cannot believe it.”

  “By who?”

  Elena swallowed hard. Her eyes looked too wide. The whites surrounding her irises were too thick, frozen in shock.

  “Elena, are you okay?” I asked.

  “Of course.” Her voice was automated, her eyes alarmed yet vacant.

  I was on the edge, near crying for the dad I’d almost had. But seeing Elena, I was reminded that she was the one who’d grown up with him. She was the one who’d known him so long, for her whole life, even when the rest of us didn’t know he had a life. For her this had to be so, so, so much worse. I couldn’t fathom it.

  My phone rang as we sat there but I just stared at Elena, not knowing what to say or do. I’d thought, somehow, that once I found her, she would be the one to fill in the blanks, the one to make the next action happen.

  But nothing was happening except the faint sounds of horns and occasional sirens from outside.

  My phone rang again. Then again. I opened my purse and glanced at it.

  The call log read Mom three times.

  My mother was not a call-thr
ee-times-in-a-row kind of girl, especially when I’d just spoken to her. I narrowed my eyes and looked at the screen. And then she called again.

  “Izzy,” she said when I answered. Her voice was breathless. “It’s Charlie. He’s disappeared. He’s…he’s been kidnapped.”

  53

  “Charlie has been kidnapped?” I asked.

  The words hit the room like a small bomb. Elena, whose eyes had been staring blankly, suddenly came to life.

  Maggie’s mouth fell open, and she stared at me. Then she nodded at the phone. “Let us hear this.”

  I put the phone on speaker. “Mom, tell me what’s happened.”

  “He was at work. Some men were outside. They were doing something outside. They saw the men. They told Charlie to go. He went outside…” My mother, always calm even in the most stressful and tragic situations, was running at the mouth.

  I heard voices in the background, then one of them, a woman’s voice, said, “Give me that. Izzy,” I heard then, “it’s Bunny.”

  Bunny Loveland was my family’s housekeeper when we first moved to Chicago. Upon finding herself a suddenly single mom, my mother hired her, thinking, apparently, that since Bunny looked like a grandmother she would probably act like one. But this book would not be judged by its cover. Bunny was about as sour as they came, but the thing was, she was honest as hell, a trait I’d come to appreciate, even if her opinions usually felt like a punch to the throat. And eventually Bunny grew protective of us. The last time I’d seen her was a few months ago when I found her outside my condo smacking around some journalists who were hounding me.

  “Bunny, what’s going on?”

  “I heard about Charlie on the radio. So I came right to the house. Your mother is having a rough time.”

  “Well, I’m glad you’re there.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Anyway, here’s all we know. There were two rowdy assholes-” Bunny did not share my goal of trying to stop swearing “-and they were fucking around outside the station. Your brother was sent out to calm ’em down.”

  “Who where they?”

  “Apparently, they were Cubs fans. Idiots.” Bunny didn’t partake in the Sox versus Cubs debate that split apart the Chicago population. She thought they both “sucked tomatoes,” whatever that meant. “Or they were dressed like Cubs fans,” she said. “One had a tattoo on his neck that was a red letter A or some crap. It was that guy who grabbed Charlie around the neck and hauled him away. If I find that fucker, I’m going to-”

  “A tattoo on his neck?” I thought of Ransom, chasing me through the Nature Museum. In that moment, my concerns and questions about my father disappeared. All I cared about was Charlie. “Do we know anything about where they took him?”

  “Nope,” Bunny said. “All we know is he was working, he was asked to go outside and then they snatched him. No sign of him since.” There was a faint beeping sound. “Izzy, they’re getting another call. Might be those idiot cops. We’ll call you back.”

  She hung up.

  I sat staring at my phone. I looked up at Elena. Her eyes were narrowed, confused.

  I looked at Maggie, stunned. “That guy who chased me through the museum with Dez Romano-his name was Ransom, and he had a tattoo on his neck. A red letter A with a circle around it.”

  “So this thing…” she said, “this abduction isn’t random?”

  We heard a click, and the office door behind me slid open.

  “It’s not random,” a man’s voice said.

  I turned. All I saw at first was gray hair, green eyes, copper glasses. I looked down. He was wearing boat shoes.

  They were scuffed.

  And then he spoke again. “Happy birthday, Boo.”

  Part III

  54

  Charlie looked around the room. He never wore a watch, and there were no windows, but he was pretty good at figuring out the passing of time, and he thought that he had been in that room for about five or six hours now. He’d been sitting or standing in the room, studying it, for all that time. There was nothing else to do. There was no furniture. The walls were made of brick, the floor concrete. He walked to a wall and looked at the ceiling, studying it again. A fluorescent strip illuminated the room, but it was too high to reach without something to step on.

  He sat on the floor and thought about his mother. He hoped she hadn’t learned that these guys, whoever they were, had hauled him in here. She didn’t do so well in a crisis, and there certainly was nothing she could do for him now. Hell, it seemed there was nothing Charlie could do for himself. He’d tried to get out of the room for the first hour or so he was here, but with no window, no furniture and the door bolted tight, there wasn’t much effort to be made.

  Charlie crossed his legs, deciding to practice his meditation. Really, what else was he going to do? He pondered for a long while why these guys had grabbed him, why he was sitting here in this windowless room. No one came to visit him. No one gave him any information. And so, he decided to just accept what was. He had been kidnapped, he guessed, and now he was in this brick room. Surely it would all work out. It always worked out for Charlie.

  The door opened. A man he’d never seen before stepped inside. He was a handsome man in his midfor-ties. He wore his dark black hair with lots of product in it and a black suit that looked, to Charlie’s admittedly inexperienced eyes, to be expensive. Under the suit, he wore a mint-colored shirt along with a gray-and-ivory patterned tie. His expression was feral. Charlie had never before used the word feral, but that was exactly the word to describe it.

  Charlie waited for the man to speak. He seemed to be doing the same thing-he stood with his arms crossed, staring at Charlie and leaning against the door. It occurred to him that maybe the man had been taken, also.

  “Did they get you, too?” Charlie asked.

  The man didn’t respond. Charlie was pretty sure this guy wasn’t a fellow kidnappee. (Was that even a word? Was that what they called someone who’d been kidnapped? He reminded himself to look it up in the future.)

  Charlie eyed the door. If he could get around the guy…

  “Don’t even think about it,” the guy said.

  Ah, Charlie thought, a kidnapp-ER.

  Charlie studied the guy back. Who was he? What did he want?

  But Charlie didn’t get much further than that in his thoughts.

  Like a tiger, the man took three quick steps and was at Charlie’s side. At the same time, he raised his left hand and-whack!-hit Charlie with the back of that hand.

  Charlie heard the crack, felt himself bite into his lip.

  “Jesus!” Charlie yelled, cupping his cheek.

  He had never been hit before, had never been in a fight. Charlie always considered himself a pacifist, even when he was a kid. It was Izzy who got into fights on the playground, arguing with people who tried to bully him and then eventually smoothing things over with words. Lucky for him, Charlie grew tall and soon most people simply didn’t bother him.

  But this man was not scared of him. In fact, as Charlie gripped his cheek and licked the blood away from the side of his mouth, he noticed that the man was snarling, looked as though he wanted Charlie to fight so he could dish out some more.

  Charlie opened his mouth to ask, Why am I here? but before he could form words, the man’s arm shot out and-whack-he once again bashed Charlie’s face with the back of his hand.

  The man winced this time, squeezed his eyes shut and clenched his hand, but his face cleared quickly. “That’s for your sister, Isabel,” the man said. “And I got lots more of that.”

  Charlie said nothing, which made the man sneer.

  “I’ll be back with your phone, kid,” he said, “and then you and me…” The guy pointed at Charlie, then at himself. “We’re going to write some messages. Maybe a text, maybe an e-mail.”

  The man turned and left the room. Charlie could hear the door being bolted from the outside.

  He licked the inside of his mouth again. The blood streamed in earnest now
. There was nothing in the room to stop it. There was nothing he could do to stop any of this.

  55

  There he was. There he was.

  Seeing him was like stepping into some altered universe. I was eight years old and thirty at the same time. I was in Italy and also in Michigan on the lawn behind our house when my mother told us he was dead.

  It was one thing to wonder if he was alive, it was yet another to have him truly standing in front of me. My father. After all these years.

  “It’s…It’s…It’s.” I stopped. People always say I was at a loss for words. I had never understood that so well-so very, very well-until now. Finally I managed, “You. It’s you.”

  Sometimes it’s tough to see your friends and family age. It’s surreal, though, to have someone immortalized, eternalized, forever in a certain body, a certain form and face, and then to see them twenty-two years older. It wasn’t that he looked so terrible, but it was bizarre, like watching a flower bloom or a canyon form on fast-forward at high speed.

  He was a handsome man in his late fifties, his hair a salt-and-pepper gray instead of chestnut brown like Charlie’s or Elena’s. He was still trim and lean, but he seemed different than I remembered, more refined. His dark blue slacks were slimmer cut-Italian tailored, I realized. He wore a white shirt and an olive linen blazer that had breast pockets, as well as regular ones. He looked very much like a man who had lived in Italy for many years.

  I looked down at his feet again. “You still wear boat shoes.”

  He followed my gaze, seemed at a loss for words himself, then we both looked up, locked eyes. His eyes were like those of someone much older. They were the kind of eyes seen in photos of people who have lived through a terrible war-they were open too wide, they’d seen too much, and they were a little dead to that world that remained in front of them.