A Prince Without a Kingdom

by Timothee de Fombelle

  Once inside the office, he made for the desk, where he found a pile of Christmas cards ready for sending. He checked the name printed at the top: Mr. Trevor K. Donahue, Attorney — this was the lawyer he was looking for. The card showed Mr. Donahue wearing his court apparel and standing by a stream, holding an enormous salmon.

  Vango opened a drawer. The paper clips had been arranged according to color, the erasers had been shaved with a knife to make them pristine again, and the pencils were arranged according to size. Vango deduced that he wouldn’t have too much trouble finding what he was looking for.

  In the second drawer of the desk, Vango found five identical and perfectly ironed cotton shirts. In the third drawer, there was a toothbrush attached to a tube of toothpaste by an elastic band. The toothbrush had the attorney’s initials stamped on it. The word teeth had been handwritten on the elastic band, as if there were a risk of getting it muddled up with the elastic band for cotton balls or nail files. In another box were two new razors and some shaving cream. All that was missing was the shaving brush.

  Where are the files? wondered Vango.

  He also found a cigarette case filled with toothpicks, two playing cards, an address book that was mostly empty, a guide to fly-fishing, a menu from La Bohème restaurant, a key ring in the shape of an octopus, a detachable collar, a collection of theater tickets filed by title in alphabetical order, a diary for the coming year, a small painted soldier, and a raccoon’s tail in a bag marked A SOUVENIR FROM THE ROCKIES.

  Vango wanted to search the large piece of furniture at the back of the room, but it turned out to be a bar. Next, he opened two files that were completely empty. To the right, along the small but carefully ordered bookshelves, which even had a notebook hanging from a string so that any books taken out could be noted down, he failed to find a single file.

  He went next door into what was presumably the secretary’s office. The room was remarkably clean, but there was no sign of a file in there either. It looked more like a waiting room, with a few magazines, a painting on the wall, a telephone, and a fish in a bowl.

  Vango sensed that he might have to leave empty-handed. The goldfish was staring at him. Where could he find what he was looking for? Vango was about to turn out the lights when the telephone rang. Curious, he waited a moment before picking up.

  “Is that you?” came a man’s voice.

  When Vango didn’t reply, loud laughter could be heard.

  “I know you’re there. I’m downstairs, in the café, and I saw the lights on. I’ve just come out of the show. I’ll pop up. So stop pretending you’re deaf, Trevor, old boy, and don’t forget I’ve still got the key!”

  Vango hung up. He took a step backward, knocked over the goldfish bowl, and crashed into the partition wall. The bowl smashed on the floor just as the painting came off its hook on the other side of the office. Vango watched the goldfish belly dancing on the carpet, and then he looked up. Behind the painting, a steel-studded safe had appeared. Vango went over to it. Shards from the broken bowl crunched beneath his feet. He stared at the safe. Opening it required six numbers, all between zero and nine. Vango had less than two minutes for a million combinations.

  Vango tugged at the safe door. It was locked. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and tried to imagine himself in the shoes of the worst attorney in the world. After concentrating for twenty seconds, he rushed out of the office and back into the room next door, opened a drawer, and took out the address book. He went directly to the letter S, glanced through the different surnames written down there, and found what he wanted. After the telephone numbers for Simpson, Henry James; Smith, Philip; and Saraband, Plumbing, came Secret Code, J. Edward, followed by a six-digit number. Vango was appalled and thrilled.

  He went back to the safe. Somebody was ringing the doorbell.

  Vango set the first three digits.

  “Open up, you idiot!”

  More ringing.

  The man was losing his temper.

  “Watch out! I’m going to let myself in. Are you with someone, Trevor?”

  The final digit on the safe combination.

  “I can hear you, Trevor!”

  The safe opened. There was the red notebook, next to a wad of dollars. Vango grabbed the notebook and ran toward the window. He could hear the jangling of keys now.

  “I’m coming in,” announced the voice.

  Vango jumped onto the windowsill and slammed the shutter behind him.

  “Trevor?”

  The visitor took a step inside the lobby area and immediately spotted the goldfish lying among the pieces of broken glass.

  “Andy!”

  The man dived onto the carpet, caught hold of the fish, rolled with it toward the bar, grabbed two bottles of mineral water in one hand, rushed back into the lobby area, and emptied them into the umbrella stand. Then he threw in Andy.

  No animal was mistreated or injured in the offices of Trevor Donahue that evening.

  Vango scaled down the outside of the building as lightly as a snowflake. He headed back toward Little Italy, where he ran into Otello, who was closing the shutters at La Rocca.

  “I didn’t talk to you about the hot water,” said the boss.

  “Yes, you did. Five cents a pint.”

  “Well, it’s six in winter. Good night, young man.”

  “Good night.”

  “Do you realize that Alma waited up for you until very late? Not that I suppose you take such things into account.”

  Vango didn’t answer. He went up to his bedroom.

  The handwriting was careful; the words were written in Sicilian without any mistakes but in a limited vocabulary. On the first page was the sentence This notebook belongs to Laura Viaggi, much as you might expect to find in the exercise book of a primary school student. Laura would have been twenty-two years old when she started to write these pages.

  Vango was lying in bed, the notebook open in his hands.

  Laura wrote his name everywhere in the notebook, as if there were a risk of it being washed away. She might even have written it somewhere on her skin.

  Next came a few words written out in English to help her learn the language. Lists of words she would need: eat, boat, work. And phrases: Hello, I’m looking for a friend of my father, Giovanni Valente Cafarello, from the island of Salina, in Sicily. The names of the different districts of New York were scribbled in the margins, with maps, as in an explorer’s journal, as well as sketched faces always with the same recognizable features: the photo-fit of Cafarello. And his name was in every corner of the book.

  With each page, Vango was able to clamber deeper inside Laura’s mind. With each page, he also recognized his own struggle. The memory of that small wooden cross at Woodlawn Cemetery brought tears to his eyes: it was the answer to the glimmers of hope in Laura Viaggi’s notebook. The trouble was that Vango knew the end of the story. The red notebook made for heartbreaking reading.

  There were lists of accounts, the price of a bowl of soup, of a night in a convent, then some new English words, and a few sentences addressed to her two sisters who had left her, sentences she had tried to obscure but that were still visible under all the crossings out:

  Vango was reading the notebook slowly. He had enough candles to get him through the night. He would simply have to pay Otello by the weight of molten wax.

  Suddenly, between two pages, he saw Laura’s face. It was a photograph taken on her arrival in New York, stuck to an official card. The photo was thumbnail sized. Vango held it up to the flame to get a better look.

  She wasn’t staring at the camera. She was glancing to one side as if on the lookout already, over the photographer’s shoulder, for a glimpse of Cafarello. She looked young for her age. Her hair had been cut very short, probably during the crossing. A few pages back she had written about the fleas on the boat. And sometimes tiny insects appeared crushed between the pages.

  Vango scrutinized Laura Viaggi’s face. It was a long time before he turned th
e page.

  The American part of the notebook was the most painful. The only place Laura knew was her islands: where a traveler could arrive in Salina or even in Lipari and give a name down at the port, and there would always be someone who could point to the house of the person she was looking for. But when she stepped off the boat in New York, Laura’s first impressions were disastrous. How was she supposed to find anyone in this city of clouds?

  No sign of Cafarello down at the port. No sign of Cafarello in her first ten days of looking. No sign of Cafarello by the end of the first month.

  “Carello, my brother-in-law’s called Carello,” a young barber had told her on the fortieth evening. “But he isn’t from Sicily. He’s from Calabria.”

  And so Laura Viaggi had been to pay this Carello a visit, thinking that perhaps he had tried to disguise his name. But he turned out to be an old grocer. The sign on his store was enough to put Laura off: CARELLO, GOOD TASTE IN NEW YORK SINCE 1908. Ten years too early. All the same, she had asked for a bottle of wine from the islands of Lipari to gauge his reaction. Old Carello had made her repeat the name, but in the end he had brought out a bottle of Calabrian red, insisting it was the best.

  Two weeks later, Laura had seen a man in the street wearing two wooden boards, one in front, the other on his back, tied together with leather straps. Glued to them were posters advertising a brand of soap.

  And, the next day, Laura Viaggi had walked the avenues of New York with two large boards that asked the crucial question:

  People must have thought she was mad. This went on for weeks. Now Vango understood why, each time he had asked that same question nearly two years later, the name of Cafarello seemed to stir up muddled recollections. Very few of the city’s inhabitants could swear that they had never come across Laura and her famous question during the winter of 1934.

  In the early days, she watched the reactions of passersby. These ranged from amusement, to surprise, to suitors going down on their knees in the pathways of Central Park: “It’s me; I’m Cafarello. I’ve been looking for you too!” But Laura’s dark glare deterred them.

  People’s curiosity soon gave way to indifference, as happens in all big cities, where anything considered a novelty is quickly superseded by something newer.

  In the final quarter of the notebook, Vango stopped at two pages that were stuck together. He couldn’t separate them with his fingers. He left his room and tiptoed over the cold tiles to fetch a razor blade that he had spotted on the washbasin at the end of the corridor. As he was about to return to his room, he heard a voice close by.

  “Is someone with you?”

  “Alma?”

  Alma was sitting on the floor in the corridor.

  “I heard you talking to someone.”

  “What are you doing here, Alma?”

  She was wearing a hat covered in snow.

  Vango realized that he must have been reading out loud.

  “Who’s with you? What’s her name?”

  “There isn’t anyone.”

  “I heard you. Come with me, Lupacchiotto. There’s something I want to talk to you about.”

  “Not now, I can’t. Tomorrow, Alma . . .”

  Why did Vango have the feeling that someone was waiting for him in his bedroom? Laura Viaggi’s notebook was breathing on the bed.

  “Tomorrow,” Vango said again. “All right?”

  “What have you got in your hands?”

  He showed her the rusty razor.

  “You give me the creeps,” she said. “What did you want from Cafarello?”

  “He knew my family. I’ve got to go now.”

  “Good night.”

  Alma got up and walked away.

  Vango went back into his bedroom. Through the window, he watched Alma heading off in the middle of the white street.

  Down below, Alma was mulling over what she had wanted to say to Vango.

  If he had made a little time for her, just a little bit, Alma would have told him about something she had just remembered. Cafarello’s words, one day when he’d been drinking: “I am not Giovanni Cafarello.”

  She turned around to look at her footprints in the snow and at Vango’s window lit up at the end of the street.

  Vango picked up the book again under the sheets. He slipped the razor blade between the stuck pages and separated them slowly. This left some rust on the paper, but he was still able to read:

  Vango reread these lines. The attorney hadn’t even tried to prize apart the pages stuck together by the May rains. And this, in turn, gave Vango a clear indication of how weak the defense must have been. Attorney Donahue probably had his mind on his trout river, up there in the Adirondack Mountains, where he would be going the following Sunday. In his head, he was already getting his boots, hooks, and flies ready.

  It wasn’t even a case of trying to pervert the course of justice; it was just laziness. Rather than reading the notebook all the way through to the end, Donahue had spent an hour trying out a new paper-clip sorting system, or writing “small envelopes” in Gothic script on the large envelope that contained them.

  The next pages were an account of trailing Cafarello. Laura was right behind him, step by step, for several days. His age and face fitted the bill. She was amazed by his stoutness, which was very different from what Giuseppina Troisi had described to her. Perhaps the change of climate had transformed him? She herself had become a lot thinner.

  He wandered around the city, without a job, but he was never short of money. Surprised to discover a real man when she had been expecting a werewolf, Laura never let him out of her sight. One night, at the reception desk for Hotel Napoli, she had been able to take a look at the customer register. The occupant of Room 35, Giovanni Cafarello, had indeed been born at Leni, on the island of Salina, Italy, in 1885.

  She closed the register. This was her man. The murderer of Bartolomeo Viaggi.

  Vango found it hard not to tremble as he read the last pages of the red notebook. They were addressed to Laura Viaggi’s family. There were childhood memories, tiny specific details that nobody else would have thought of writing down.

  Vango appropriated them as if they were his own. This was the childhood he had never known. With these words penned in black ink, Laura was remembering.

  The sound of footsteps on the roof at night, when her parents were stargazing. Fragments of invisible lives. When her father arrived home, and the children were already at the supper table, the steam from the soup would settle back down on the bowl because of the open door. Or again, after a storm, when they used to put the twigs of broken bougainvillea in her mother’s hair. Papery flowers filled with drops of water. Or when it was too hot, the way the three sisters would sleep together with dampened sheets forming a tent around them. And silly memories: the tale of a beetle they tamed, of a cat locked by mistake inside the salting tub, funny moments, the day when this happened, the day when that happened, repainting the house white in June.

  And then there had been the night when their father hadn’t returned, when he had gone fishing with Gio, who was Cafarello’s son, violent, unmarriable, and another man, the one with the donkey at Pollara, tall Mazzetta.

  The three men had gone to sea. Laura Viaggi believed she knew what had happened. They had boarded a boat somewhere between the islands. There was much more on board than they had bargained for. Cafarello had turned crazy and bloodthirsty. And the next day, he had killed Laura’s father to seize his share.

  Vango recognized that night. It was his night too. This was what he shared with Laura Viaggi: a night of gunpowder and blood.

  The notebook ended with the words I’ll go tonight.

  There was no period. And the word tonight trailed off in its last letters, falling below the line.

  Holding the closed notebook, Vango imagined what must have happened next. The confrontation on the bridge, above the Bronx Kill, on the way back to Hotel Napoli that night. The victory of the wolf against Laura the goat. Perhaps there were
witnesses, enough to condemn Cafarello. And to end the story, a flash of electricity in Sing Sing prison.

  The next day at midnight, Vango left America. He had ventured to the foot of the scaffolding on Zefiro’s tower. He had gazed up to see a glow at the top. Then he had returned to the landing pier. By chance, the ship’s departure had been delayed by twenty-four hours because of a breakdown. The atmosphere was festive: waiting turned into a party. Hundreds of passengers ended up dining in leisurely fashion down at the port, as a whiff of wine wafted among the suitcases and traveling coats. In every nook and cranny, children lay asleep. People were singing at the foot of the gangways.

  The ship took to the seas at midnight, all lit up, waltzing and full of life again.

  Dozing in his sitting room, which resembled a cigar box lined in walnut and leather, the Irishman woke with a jolt on hearing the ship’s horn sounding. He got up out of his armchair and padded over in his socks to grab a bottle from the desk before going to the window.

  “ Barcàzza,” he said in Sicilian. Dirty boat.

  He was weary of hearing the ships’ horns sounding, and he disliked immigrants, so he would soon be moving away from Manhattan’s docks in order to be nearer Midtown. But building work on his tower was still behind schedule.

  The man they called the Irishman took a long swig from the bottle before catching his breath, like a seal emerging from the water. Apart from the origin of the whiskey, there was nothing Irish flowing in his veins.

  He watched the lights of the ship disappear on the horizon until all he could see was his own reflection in the window. With his left hand, he stroked the Cossack scarf around his neck. In eighteen years, since the massacre on the boat in the Aeolian Islands, Cafarello had never parted with this bloodred scarf: it was a token of his spoils from the sea, and the fortune he had made.

  Paris, January 1937

  Superintendent Boulard was pacing the corridors of the police headquarters in his underwear. It was five o’clock in the morning. The building was pitch-black.