The fast train sped south. In the empty compartment, he had the feeling that they were in a small room, just him and the girl, and that some film was being projected on the far side of the window. The cheerless countryside and the battering rain against the window had nothing to do with either of them.
“Why sorry? You don’t even know who I am.”
“Didn’t you say you were going to Rome? Didn’t you say you were a policeman?”
“Then you did believe I was a cop?”
Her smile was slow, the smile of a little girl who knows she has been caught telling fibs and who can rely on her charm to get out of a sticky situation. “I thought you were a detective.”
“I used to be a detective—not a very good one.”
“I was hoping you’d help me.”
“Your mother told you to be careful of men like me.”
“You looked after me in Florence. You bought me a drink when I was freezing—when all the other men thought I was just an African prostitute.”
“I never gave you an anorak.”
The far door slid open and the ticket collector entered the coach. Since looking at Trotti’s ticket, he had acquired a red scarf that he had tucked under the lapels of his blue-grey suit. As he came along the central aisle, he nodded to Trotti and smiled at the girl sitting curled up in the armchair beside him. Then with the pneumatic whoosh of the sliding doors, he was gone.
“I thought you didn’t have any money, signorina. You can afford a first class ticket?”
Wilma had kicked off her shoes. “I never intended to catch this train. Way out of my class. Then, in Chianciano, I saw you scuttling along like an irritable mouse.”
“An irritable mouse?”
“A mouse in a military overcoat.”
“And the ticket collector?”
She grinned. “What about him?”
“If the collector’d asked you for your ticket?”
“I would’ve given him a lovely, innocent smile and told him the truth about this little girl from America who’d got on the smart train by mistake.”
Trotti touched her sleeve, “I can lend you the money.”
“I’m looking for my father,” Wilma said, studying Trotti carefully. The grin turned wistful.
“You’ve lost him?”
She did not blink. “You can help me find my father, can’t you, Ispettore Trotti?”
21: Petrarca
“You work with children?”
“I’m an au pair,” Wilma nodded. “Staying with an American family in Milan, looking after the two little boys.”
“Why hang around the railway station in Florence?”
“I have a few days off.” For a moment, Wilma appeared irritated. “I’m on my way to Rome.”
Trotti said, after a brief silence, “I used to deal with children.”
“You enjoyed it?”
“It made a change.”
“How would a policeman work with kids?”
“Abused children—a couple of years before I retired. We set up our own little center and even collaborated with the city hospital.”
She sat to one side, opposite Trotti, with a leg folded beneath her and with the other knee propping up her chin. “Before coming to Italy, I was studying child psychology at university.”
“I didn’t enjoy working with abused children.” Trotti leaned back into the deep armchair as the fast train—it was called the Petrarca, the ticket collector had told him—hurried through the late afternoon towards Rome.
Rain rather than snow now battered against the window.
“I ended up with more than enough problems of my own. Child abuse? Piero Trotti abuse.”
“You love children, ispettore.” It was a statement.
“The job had nothing to do with loving children.”
“Then why get involved? Not enough robbers in this country of yours to keep every policeman busy?”
“A girl was being molested.” Trotti breathed out noisily, “A sweet little thing and we managed to help her. The newspapers heard about it and of course after that, everything turned political. Mainly the leghisti. You’ll soon discover, everything’s political in Italy. Everybody—the politicians, the doctors and my superiors—they all wanted me to stay on with the center. Suddenly Piero Trotti was everyone’s favorite flavor.”
Wilma’s smile broadened.
“I was even asked to postpone my retirement for a couple of years.”
“You didn’t?”
Trotti raised his flat hand to eye level. “I’d had enough.”
The girl was looking at him attentively. “When I met you last night—this morning—in Florence, I knew you were good. You’re a kind man.”
He opened his eyes in astonishment. “People tell me I’m irascible and selfish. An irritable mouse.”
“A kind man,” she repeated, more to herself than to him.
Trotti snorted mirthlessly. “I’m the sort of man who carries a big stick, who believes in right and wrong. The man who puts criminals in prison.”
“Criminals who don’t buy a first class ticket?”
Trotti gave a weary smile. “I hated it. With children, you can never know the whole truth. Not until it’s too late, not until the damage’s been done. Children are always the victims—and through no fault of their own. There’s neither stick nor carrot. It’s all about protecting lives, protecting children when they’ve been betrayed by the people supposed to protect them.” Trotti shook his head, “Too depressing.”
“Protection’s more important than sending a culprit to jail.”
Trotti laughed sourly, “Hitting people over the head and throwing them in prison—that’s my specialty, that’s what I do well. The big stick. I can deal with perverts, just as I can deal with thieves and pimps and murderers.” Trotti looked at her and he caught his breath, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks. I’m not a nurse, not a social worker—just an irritable mouse.” He pushed his hand through the thinning hair. “For goodness sakes, I didn’t even look after my own daughter.”
“You say a lot of things you don’t mean. Anyone can see you love children.”
“Twenty years ago, Pioppi stopped eating. She almost died. That, so I’m told, was my fault.”
“She was trying to tell you something.”
“That I wasn’t the perfect father.”
“Eating disorders are a frequent problem in adolescent girls. Various causes—including causes outside the family—can trigger anorexia.”
“Don’t use that word.” Trotti jerked his hand sharply, “It’s not a word I like.” He returned his glance to the window, to the endless passage of the wet countryside.
“You have grandchildren, ispettore?”
“Two girls,” he said to his reflection. “Francesca and Piera.”
“Your wife must be beautiful.”
“I’m sure she must.”
22: Nissan
“I’m from Chicago.”
The word sounded distant and exotic.
“An orphan.” Wilma’s eyes met his, “I never spent time in an orphanage or anything horrible. The happiest childhood, in fact—even if I was the only black kid in the neighborhood. I grew up near Northwestern University, in a very white part of town. So white I often wondered what I was doing there.”
“What were you doing there?”
“My parents live in Evanston.”
“That’s where you learned Italian?”
“At high school. And then here in Italy.” She added simply, “It’s important I should learn the language of my origins.”
“Where we come from, where we’re going to—I’m not sure that’s so very important, signorina. It’s what we do along the way that counts. Or perhaps what we don’t do.”
“You say that
because you know who you are, you have your roots.”
Her vehemence surprised him and Trotti was momentarily silenced. He turned and looked at her young face in admiration. “If your father’s black, it shouldn’t be too hard to find him in Rome.”
Wilma’s white teeth sparkled. “Why on earth does everybody assume my father’s black?”
“Possibly because you’re black.”
“Europeans all seem to think only black men can have children with white women. But black women?” Wilma shook her head in impatience. “Black women like me?”
“Very few black women in this country.”
“You’re forgetting the African prostitutes hanging outside the station in Florence. The ones you didn’t give the hot chocolate to.”
Trotti replied stiffly, “All very recent, signorina.”
“Wilma.”
“The prostitutes from Africa and Eastern Europe—that’s new for us Italians.”
“My blood mother was a nurse in the US Army. With the medical corps in Padua.”
“You know her?”
Wilma held up a finger to accompany a lopsided smile. “I met her just once.” The girl moved her legs on the seat. She was now looking at Trotti carefully, as if apprehensive of his reaction. “She wasn’t very interested in me when we finally caught up with one another.”
“She came looking for you?”
“I had to wait fifteen years before having that pleasure. She’d left the army by then and was living in Los Angeles. My father took me there to see her. I needed to know who she was.” A shrug. “She was married and working in a private hospital. Somewhere classy near Beverly Hills.” The girl stopped, “You know America?”
Trotti shook his head. “I once spent a weekend in Switzerland.”
“Switzerland?”
“I should’ve stayed at home.”
Wilma smiled perfunctorily. “This woman—my mother—has a husband from Jamaica who’s a successful doctor. A lot older than her. Not that I ever met him. I was the little secret she had to hide and so she couldn’t take me home to meet her wonderful family. She refused Pa’s suggestion of going to a hotel. So we just sat there in the airport. Didn’t really have much to say to each other, my blood mother and I. The nurse—ebony black, with beautiful skin, so slim and elegant, with her long, straight hair and her lovely clothes and shoes—was in a hurry to get away. Away from the reminder of a past she’d chosen to forget.”
“Why did you want to meet her?”
“The three of us went to a Burger King.” Wilma bit her lip, “Your own daughter—your own flesh and blood that you haven’t seen since the day the baby came squealing out of your belly, your own daughter who’s flown halfway across a continent just to see you—and all you can spare’s a half-hour at a fast-food stop in a food court in LAX?”
Trotti frowned.
“At the Los Angeles airport. She had her family to think about. Her husband and the two little boys—she showed me a photograph of them, bless their hearts. Two boys that she was putting through private school. The husband had no idea she’d had a child by another man.”
“She felt guilty, Wilma.”
“Why agree to see me? It wasn’t to go to Disneyland that Daddy and I flew out to California.” The nostrils flared as Wilma breathed in. “All I wanted was a sign. A sign she cared, a sign that I was more than just a genetic coincidence. You know what she showed me? A photo of her car. A red Nissan. I wasn’t asking her to feel guilty. I can understand the situation she must’ve been in—a black Army nurse who’d an affair with an Italian. She didn’t have to worry about me—I’d been lucky, very lucky. I grew up in a wonderful home, in a wonderful family, with very loving parents.”
“It’s what you do—not who you are—that counts. Why bother with the past?”
Wilma smiled bravely. “My adoptive parents gave me more love than my real mother could dream of. A lot more. And they don’t even have a red Nissan.”
23: Penn
“Daddy drove down to Tennessee. That’s where I was born—in Memphis. I’m told my birth was one of the happiest days in Mom’s life. At last she had a child, a little girl to call her own. She’d been trying to have children for years.”
A moment’s pause as the girl looked at Trotti.
Trotti said, “I’d’ve liked more children—perhaps a son. A little brother for Pioppi.”
“Who wants boys?”
“They have their uses. Some grow into policemen who can help young women.”
“My parents went back to Chicago and they never saw or heard from my real mother again. Not until the meeting in Los Angeles. My dad’s a teacher and less than a couple of months later, Mom was pregnant. At the age of forty-two—would you believe it? Pregnant with twins. She spent the next eight months in the hospital. Thank God our insurance paid.” Wilma nodded brightly. “Two gorgeous little girls, two daughters for my parents and two wonderful sisters for me.” She added, “The girls are in college in Philadelphia.”
Trotti waited.
“I’m different.” Wilma’s face was not sad, but the set of her jaw, the tightening of the muscles betrayed an inner conflict. Wilma reached out across the seat, opening her hand, the pale palm up. “When I was a little girl, nobody ever mentioned my skin—not even when we were buying clothes together or getting cosmetics. But of course it was always there, unspoken.”
“Your parents’d told you about your adoption?”
“Not the sort of thing they could’ve hidden from the only black girl in a white family.” Wilma laughed and at that moment, she was so pretty, so young, so sweet, so innocent that Trotti could not stop himself from sharing the laughter.
“There, at the airport in Los Angeles, I realized this woman who had given birth to me fifteen years earlier, this beautiful nurse, just like a Hollywood actress with her beautiful clothes and lustrous hair, smoking one cigarette after another and scarcely touching her food and never daring to look me in the face—I realized I had absolutely nothing in common with her. Except, perhaps, that we were both black and that neither of us liked hamburgers. When she was gone and Daddy took me back to the hotel, I didn’t even cry.” Wilma paused. “I was glad she was . . . so insignificant.”
Trotti said nothing.
“That day at the airport in Los Angeles, I realized that part of me’s American, but another part of me is from Europe. And that’s how I decided I needed to find my father.”
“One disappointment’s not enough?”
“I’m not asking him to love me,” Wilma retorted. She ran a hand through the strands of hair that poked from beneath the woolen bonnet, “I just want to see him—that’s all I ask. Just see him so that I know where I’m from. Just see him.” Wilma shrugged. “See if he cares. See if he knows.”
24: Madonna
“Pisanelli’s getting married on the sixth.”
“The sixth of April?” Wilma said, a happy smile creasing her young face. “That’s so romantic! The first day of the Renaissance.”
“Easter Saturday.”
“On the sixth of April in 1327, Petrarch first saw Laura and fell madly in love with her.”
“Who?”
“Laura was a Frenchwoman—just nineteen years old. Petrarch’s family had gone to Avignon in exile.”
“They lived happily ever after?”
Wilma retorted, “Of course not—Laura was already married, but that didn’t stop Petrarch from immortalizing her name in his sonnets—Rime in vita e morta di Madonna Laura. She inspired in him a passion that’s proverbial for its constancy and purity. And started the Renaissance.”
“My friend’s waited twenty years to marry his fiancée, my goddaughter.” Trotti snorted, “Not sure Pisanelli’s a poet, though. His passion may be constant, but I wouldn’t swear to its purity.”
The Petrarca pulled into
Roma Stazione Termini.
The weather had improved and Trotti was unreasonably surprised.
Having lived most of his life in the Po valley, he was unused to a Mediterranean climate. Admittedly, he had once spent two years in Bologna, but there the weather was just as damp and cold as at home. A further three years had been spent in Bari where Trotti could recall no particularly mild climate—no doubt because while in the south, he had spent nearly all his time in dim offices.
(“You always put your job before your family, Piero.”)
Stazione Termini appeared smaller, cleaner and a lot brighter to Trotti than the grand central station of Milan. There were no pigeons just as there was no glass-covered canopy to keep out rain, fog and cold.
“Traveling in style, commissario?” Pisanelli’s broad smile was waiting for him. “First class, eh?”
“The bastards make me pay a fine for the luxury.”
“That’s what comes of having communists in the government.”
“The first time we’ve had communists in forty-five years,” Trotti said.
“First time you’ve traveled by train in forty-five years. No wonder you couldn’t find anybody to drive you here.”
“The Ferrovie dello Stato’s always been criminal.” Trotti stepped down onto the platform. “A retired functionary of the state’s got to pay thirty thousand lire over and above the first-class fare for a wretched train that’s late.”
“Half an hour early, you mean.”
“The train’s late, Pisa—just me that’s early. It was delayed at Chianciano and I got on. Hence the fine.”
“Welcome to Rome,” Pisanelli said cheerfully, holding out his right hand for Trotti.
“At least I didn’t keep you waiting, Pisa.”
A shrug. “I have a lot of free time these days.”
Trotti put his bag down on the platform and looked appraisingly at the younger man as they shook hands. Pierangelo Pisanelli had been sitting on the edge of a boxed concrete flower bed. A couple of shrubs and a discarded can of Chinotto, a few cigarette tips.
The Second Day of the Renaissance Page 6
