One Summer Day in Rome

by Mark Lamprell

  In an attempt to drain the last stubborn splendiferousness—her word for milk foam—from the bottom of her cup she lifted it high and tipped her head back. Were it not for the strong waft of cologne that made her look, she might have completely missed the cross-eyed man and his furtive companion getting into a clapped-out silver Peugeot, just down the street. She was sure it was the same fellow who had been with the American and his wife. She had asked him earlier if he belonged to the La Barbuta gypsy settlement because one of the little girls from there had not shown up at the clinic for treatment. He had denied any knowledge of the gypsies or the little girl, and even though she had thought he was lying, Stephanie had let the matter drop. She now wondered whether that had been wise.

  As the silver car drove past, the doctor saw the passenger rifling through a bag that looked suspiciously similar to the one that the wife—what was her name? Meg—had been carrying. By the time Pietro arrived with her perfectly al dente bucatini, Stephanie had left.

  Not far away, in the pitch darkness of the cellar where they were imprisoned, Alec had crawled across the floor and found the door. Having established that it was bolted from the outside, he had tried banging on it and calling out, but to no avail. He had also tried to remove the pins from the hinges but had only succeeded in shredding his fingernails.

  His next plan of attack was to use brute strength and break the door open with his shoulder.

  Meg was also crawling around on the floor, feeling for something useful. Like a rocket launcher to blow that cross-eyed fucker off the face of the earth. So far, all she had managed to find were an ashtray, some cigarette butts, and a box of what felt like dried ham bones. She heard the thump of Alec’s shoulder hitting the door and a grunt of pain.

  “What are you doing?” she asked snippily.

  “This may sound like a wacky idea,” he answered, “but I thought I might try and get us out of here.”

  There was another thump and another groan of pain. Meg decided if Alec wanted to dislocate his shoulder, that was up to him.

  “You don’t happen to have any matches on you, do you?” said Alec.

  “As a matter of fact, I do,” said Meg. “Just in case my bag gets stolen and I’m locked in a dungeon, I have a candle and matches stuck up my butt.”

  Her fingers fell on something smooth, and she examined it; a small plastic tube with a metal wheel on top; a cigarette lighter. She flicked it, and a very small flame illuminated the floor around her. Alec turned and saw his wife dimly lit.

  “Candles!” he said and scrambled over to her. On the floor next to Meg there was a box of white candles, the kind they light at church offertories. The flame went out. Meg swore in the darkness. Alec found a candle and put it in her hand. Meg flicked the lighter again and produced a tiny flame. The wick seemed reluctant to light but eventually ignited. Alec took a second candle and lit it from the first.

  Meg slowly swept her candle in an arc around her. In the small pool of light she saw what she had thought were ham bones. They were not ham bones. They appeared to be human bones. Alec got to his feet and lifted his candle to establish whether there were any other doors or means of escape. Light flickered onto the closest wall. He got such a shock he dropped his candle. In the split second before his candle extinguished, Meg saw what her husband had seen. She screamed.

  * * *

  Across Rome, just off the Piazza Barberini, underneath the church of Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini, Father Bernadino Bassi was inspecting the damp-proofing work on one of the crypts. There were six crypts in all, five of which were lined floor to ceiling with the bones and skulls of 3,700 of Father Bernardino’s fellow Capuchin friars who had shuffled off this mortal coil sometime between 1528 and 1870. The bones were arranged in elaborate decorative patterns and scenes to remind the living of the brevity of their passage on earth. And just in case the living missed the point, a sign translated into several languages was there to guide them: What you are now we used to be; what we are now you will be.…

  The five skeletal chapels were divided into various themes: the Crypt of the Resurrection, the Crypt of the Skulls, the Crypt of the Pelvises, the Crypt of the Leg Bones and Thigh Bones, and the Crypt of the Three Skeletons. Father Bernadino had reluctantly closed the Crypt of Leg Bones and Thigh Bones because damp was leaching through its walls and corrupting the bones.

  In order for the repairs to be carried out, the leg bones and thigh bones had been carefully removed from the walls of the crypt and painstakingly reassembled on portable wooden frames. A kind parishioner had offered Father Bernardino the use of a storage facility near the Campo de’ Fiori. The room was now empty but had been used for years by a stall-owner at the markets. It was cool and dry, ideal for storing vegetables and keeping them fresh. Also ideal for storing bones.

  And so it was that the Crypt of Leg Bones and Thigh Bones had been temporarily re-created in a dark, quiet room off the Arco di Santa Margherita, where Meg and Alec were currently held captive.

  Dr. Stephanie was on her second lap of the Arco di Santa Margherita when she thought she heard a woman screaming. The sound seemed to be coming from a shuttered brown door. The doctor hurried toward the door and noticed a broken padlock on the cobblestones. She rolled up to the door, and the screaming grew louder. It was clearly coming from behind a door on the far wall of the empty space. Stephanie hurried to the door and banged on it. The screaming stopped.

  “Hello?” said Stephanie.

  A man’s voice replied. It was Alec. Meg began to bang on the door and in a strange wail begged Stephanie to open it as if she had some other plan in mind. As she grappled with the large bolt, the doctor could hear Alec’s voice trying to calm Meg, but he was having little effect. Stephanie pushed and pulled but was unable to move the bolt. She called out that she was going to look for some instrument with which to dislodge it. On the other side of the door Meg begged her not to leave. Stephanie assured her she would not be long. As she searched the floor for something to bash the bolt with, she could hear what she was pretty sure was a tirade of hysterical abuse directed at her, followed by the low rumble of Alec’s voice, urging restraint.

  In less than a minute, Stephanie had located a broken concrete brick and was bashing at the bolt. Eventually, it slid across, and she pushed open the door. Meg shot out past her, through the open shutter and out into the air of the arco. Alec followed, equally alarmed and grateful. When he had soothed his wife, Alec returned and explained what had happened, thanking Stephanie for coming to the rescue.

  While Meg sat crumpled in a doorway, Alec and the doctor went back to explore the mysterious and astonishing sight of what she confirmed were human bones. Stephanie took out her phone and was in the process of dialing the police when Father Bernadino arrived. A neighbor had reported a fracas at his storage facility, and he had come to investigate.

  As Alec explained and Stephanie translated, the eighty-six-year-old neighbor, Teresa, timidly appeared with shots of grappa to calm everyone’s nerves. She had heard the screaming, she apologized, but was too frightened to respond directly. Father Bernadino assured her that she had done the right thing. Together they all waited for the police to arrive.

  As they waited, Meg fell strangely quiet. Alec expressed concern about her to Stephanie, who took Meg’s pulse, which was running a little fast but not alarmingly so, given the ordeal she had just endured. She assured Meg that the culprits would be tracked down, that she was almost certain they belonged to a band of gypsies camped on the outskirts of the city at a well-known settlement called La Barbuta. The police would have her bag back to her in no time.

  At the mention of her bag, Meg returned to life. “I don’t care about the bag,” she said. “I just want the tile.” Drawing her knees toward her, she repeated, “I just want the tile.”

  Sensing that she was spinning off into some strange new world, Alec said steadily, “It’s best to leave these things to the police.”

  Ignoring him, Meg as
ked Stephanie to repeat where she thought she might find the gypsies. Reluctantly, Stephanie told her. Meg asked her to write it down. She knew that Stephanie, good Girl Scout that she was, would have a pen and paper in her bag, precisely for occasions like these. As the doctor jotted the details of La Barbuta, Alec said, very firmly, “We are not going on a wild-goose chase across Rome. We’re going to wait for the police.”

  “You can wait for the cops,” said Meg, getting to her feet. “I’m going to get my tile.”

  “You don’t know where it is,” he said.

  “No, but I know where to start looking.”

  “Maybe the tile maker has one just like it.”

  “Maybe he does. That will be my second port of call after La Barbuta.”

  “Meg, this is nuts.”

  Ignoring this, Meg said, “Meet you at the tile place at three. Unless you’re coming with me.”

  “I’m not coming with you. You’re not going anywhere.”

  Meg started to walk away.

  “Where are you going?” he called after her.

  She did not answer because he knew where she was going.

  “How are you going to get there?” he said.

  “Taxi,” she called over her shoulder.

  “You don’t have any money.”

  Meg stopped and walked back.

  “Could you lend me some euros?” she said to Stephanie.

  Stephanie shot a glance at Alec, who almost imperceptibly shook his head.

  “Do you need a man to give you approval?” said Meg, knowing exactly where to aim her arrow. “I’ll pay you back, double.” She added, “I’m good for it.”

  Stephanie hated being trapped like this. She knew that she should not enable this reckless behavior. She knew she was being bullied into showing solidarity to the sisterhood when it wasn’t really appropriate. But she handed over the money anyway, almost eighty euros. “I wish you wouldn’t,” she said to Meg. “It’s not safe.”

  “I’m just going to ask for the tile,” said Meg. “They can keep the rest of the stuff.”

  When he hated his wife, which he did, not irregularly, this is what Alec hated the most: her capacity to sound rational and act irrationally. She would drag him into some crisis that he would never have entered of his own volition and then blame him for not being able to resolve it. He could see this happening right now, and he was not going to tolerate it. He stood in front of her.

  “You are not going,” he said.

  Meg snorted derision and stepped around him. He grabbed her arm to try to stop her leaving. She pulled away. What followed was a brief but embarrassing wrestling cha-cha, which ended in victory for Meg when she stamped on Alec’s foot. For good measure, she threw a knowing look at the priest and the doctor—a look laden with the implication that this was a regular occurrence. This infuriated Alec for a whole bunch of reasons but mostly because in eighteen years of marriage he had never once resorted to physical violence.

  He had, however, regularly resorted to imaginary violence. Indeed, he was doing this right now as he limped around the arco. He hoped with all his heart that Meg would be able to locate the gypsies. He hoped that she would be her usual obnoxious self. He hoped that the gypsies would take offense and slit her throat and cut her up into little pieces and put her through a mincer and feed her to the rats.

  SIXTEEN

  Santa Barbara dei Librai

  I HAD TO TOUCH YOU WITH MY HANDS, I HAD TO TASTE YOU WITH MY TONGUE; ONE CAN’T LOVE AND DO NOTHING.

  —Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

  Having braved the crowds of the markets and consulted the great Giordano Bruno, Constance finally set herself and Lizzie on the right track, and they jostled through the throngs of shoppers on the Via dei Giubbonari, toward the Jewish Ghetto. In the cold light of the hot day, Constance began to feel foolish about the fuss she was making. She suddenly regretted dragging her sister-in-law though the heat and the crowds to make a point about she-was-no-longer-sure-what exactly.

  At the first turn on their left, they came to the Largo dei Librari, a funnel-shaped courtyard, three buildings deep. At the very end of the courtyard, there it was, the little church of Santa Barbara, wedged between two large, old secular buildings. The neighboring apartment building had been extended so that it sat in the airspace right on top of the left-hand nave chapel. It looked as if the big bully building was trying to nudge the diminutive church out of the way.

  “Funny-looking little thing, isn’t it?” said Constance.

  Lizzie was tired, thirsty, hungry, hot, and not in the mood to find anything particularly funny. She suggested they stop for a drink and something to eat, sinking into an aluminum chair set outside the small bar at the entrance to the Largo.

  As they waited in the shade for their acqua frizzante and panini, Constance prattled on about a series of name changes that the church had undergone in the thousand years of its existence.

  Lizzie marveled at Constance’s capacity to recall all this minutiae, although it was becoming clear to her that she was using it to delay arriving at some large central piece of information.

  “Constance, why are we here,” blurted Lizzie impatiently, “sitting outside this church?”

  “Bear with me,” said her sister-in-law. “I’m almost there.”

  She went on to explain that although the church was currently a place of worship, for a good part of the twentieth century, it had been deconsecrated and used for storage. Sometime in the early 1960s a stack of church pews collapsed, damaging one of the altars. “I was part of a small restoration team bought in to repair the damage,” she said, finally placing herself in the picture.

  “Oh, this is what you were doing when you met Henry,” said Lizzie. “You were fixing the mosaic, I remember now.”

  “It wasn’t a mosaic; it was a pietrrra durrra,” said Constance, rolling her r’s beautifully. “The altar was the most extraordinary example. The artist cuts and fits highly polished stones around each other to create an image. Ivory, mother of pearl, agate—”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” interrupted Lizzie, “all very fascinating, but please get to the point before I lose the will to live.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay. So,” said Constance. “There were two other members of the restoration team, a brother and sister, both born and bred here in Roma. The girl, Gina, and I were great chums until one day she took me to meet her boyfriend.”

  A warm breeze scooted down the Via dei Giubbonari and twirled in little eddies around the Largo, dancing here and there with paper bags and other detritus. The wind lifted Constance up, transporting her over half a century to the Ponte Sant’Angelo.

  She remembered walking toward the bridge, arm in arm with Gina, feeling slightly intimidated by her sultry radiance, by the ease with which she traveled in her body, and by her impeccably cut dress. Constance knew she was no slouch herself. She was well aware that the pair of them turned heads wherever they went, but she thought of herself as a paler, less exotic version of her knockout pal.

  Gina suddenly waved at a man on the bridge. She uncurled her arm from Constance’s and ran ahead, into the man’s embrace. Constance registered that he was pale, probably a northerner from Venice or Milan. As he kissed her friend, she also noticed that he was very handsome, with thick, wavy hair and a drooping moustache, reminding her for all the world of the Dying Gaul, a classical statue of a naked man that she visited with unseemly regularity in the Capitoline Museum. She hovered, waiting a respectful distance for them to finish kissing.

  Gina saw her friend from the corner of her eye and waved her over to make the introductions. The first surprise was that she spoke in English, not Italian.

  “Henry, this is my friend Constance,” said Gina in her lusciously accented Inglese.

  Henry offered his hand. “How do you do?” he said with a very proper English accent, which was the second surprise. When Gina had told her that she had met someone speci
al, Constance had gone mining for details, but her friend had refused to yield. “Come and meet him,” she had simply said.

  Constance took Henry’s hand. “How do you do?” she said.

  “You’re British,” said Henry. He wanted to add, And you talk like a pirate. How wonderful. But he did not. Constance had wanted to reply, And you’re British, too! But that seemed a very dull response to this very interesting man. So she did not.

  “Finely observed,” said Constance instead.

  “Thank you,” said Henry. “I’m a whiz at the bleeding obvious.”

  They stood there grinning inanely at each other.

  Through a wormhole in the space-time continuum, Lizzie shouted at her sister-in-law, dragging her back to the Largo dei Librari. “You stole him! You stole Henry from that poor Italian girl! I never knew! Oh, my dear, how appallingly sluttish of you.”

  “Before you go choking on your glee,” said Constance, “there’s more.”

  Lizzie turned to the Harrods bag sitting on the aluminum chair between them. She pulled open the handles and spoke directly to the Henry box. “And you never told me either, you dog. You dirty old dog.” She took a gulp of her water and added, “Well, this is remarkable. I find myself perking up enormously.”

  “Yes, I can see that,” said Constance.

  “Do go on,” said Lizzie, taking a great chomp out of her panino and bracing herself for the next installment.

  “Well, Henry and I get married, blah, blah,” said Constance, “and twenty years later we return to Roma for a kind of second honeymoon thing, and who should we bump into?”

  The Pantheon had always been Henry’s favorite building in Rome. He especially loved to go there during a storm and stand inside the great domed rotunda, watching the rain sheet through the central oculus and vanish into the drains concealed in the marble floor. He loved that this building invited the rain in rather than struggled to keep it out. He loved that it had been doing this for two thousand years. In these divine moments it was impossible, he claimed, not to believe in God, or gods.