The Dante Game

by Jane Langton

  The two shook hands and parted, but not before Leonardo Bindo had asked for application blanks for a friend of his, who, he said, had long wished to become a member of the Misericordia.

  “Certainly,” said the governor, and at once he opened a drawer and pulled out a blank. “The applicant must of course be a Catholic of good character, recommended by two members of the fraternity, but surely that will not be a difficulty.”

  “No, indeed. He is a man of impeccable reputation. Arrivederla, Provveditore.”

  CHAPTER 22

  … desire wafts homeward dove with dove

  To their sweet nest …

  Inferno V, 82, 83.

  The heat of summer had returned to Tuscany. It was the hottest day of a stifling autumn week. Under the broiling sun Homer Kelly rode to school on his new motorbike.

  It was a modest machine called a Bravo, and it was exactly what the doctor ordered, floating him effortlessly along the streets of the city, its little engine purring. Actually it was a trifle small for Homer’s great height. His center of gravity was too high and his knees projected sideways. But the larger machines had offended him by making too much noise or by running with ponderous heaviness. On the Bravo he was a bird in flight.

  At the villa he parked it in the driveway, mopped his forehead, walked up the stairs and joined the Dante class.

  The room was sweltering. Zee’s students sat on the sticky folding chairs in shorts and sleeveless T-shirts. Most of them were barefoot. The marble floor was cool, but the air was sultry.

  Zee himself seemed unaffected by the heat. Swiftly he wrote on the blackboard the words CENTRAL METAPHORS, and Kevin Banks groaned. Kevin hated abstractions.

  But Zee’s metaphors were accompanied as usual by nimble little figures cavorting across the board, acting out the images.

  Dorothy Orme kept falling behind. “What’s that?” she whispered to Joan Jakes.

  “A seal. It’s a seal.”

  “A seal?”

  “The seal of form,” hissed Joan impatiently, “imprinting the wax of matter.”

  “I don’t understand,” said poor Dorothy, but Zee soon cleared it up. The human body, he said, was material substance, like a blob of wax, and on it was printed the seal of form, the likeness of God..

  “Then why isn’t everybody perfect?” complained Homer, speaking up loudly from the rear. “I mean, why are we all such miserable specimens, such wretched misbegotten freakish accumulations of corrupted flesh?”

  “Ah,” said Zee, “because the wax is lumpish, and doesn’t take a perfect imprint.” He scrawled another picture on the blackboard, a scrawny little Dante with bow and arrow. “We are urged to God like an arrow from the bow, but sometimes the arrow goes astray, diverted by some false, fair lust.”

  The word lust had been uttered aloud in the hot classroom. For Zee it was an introduction to the Second Circle of the Inferno, where the souls of the lustful were blown around and around forever by a terrible unceasing wind. For Homer, looking on inquisitively from the back of the room, the topic seemed highly appropriate for this place, this day and hour.

  The whole villa was bathed in a mood of sweet amorousness. What else had undone the drapery clasps of the nymphs and goddesses on the encircling walls? What else had embittered Joan Jakes and engorged with feeble fluid the bloodless organs of Ned Saltmarsh and distracted all the others from the words on the page and cast a spell of enticement around Julia Smith? What else was so manifestly tormenting Professor Zee? Was Julia really a metaphor like Beatrice, one of those cogwheels of Dante’s that turned the heart from visible earthly beauties to the worship of an invisible God? Or was she merely an ordinary garden-variety object of sexual desire?

  Homer glanced at Julia. She certainly didn’t look like a god-bearing image. Merely by sweeping up her hair and baring her back and shoulders she had become lust incarnate. Sukey and the three Debbies were all looking at her furtively. Kevin and Tom shuffled their feet and stared. Matteo gazed at her sidelong. Poor Ned Saltmarsh seemed to sense the ambient lechery, and he stared around angrily, shoving his chair closer to Julia’s.

  It was obvious to Homer that Zee was hardest hit.

  At the front of the room Zee was aware of Homer’s piercing inspection, and he tried to control himself. Solemnly he focused on his notes and scrawled rapid pictures on the board. But, o mio Dio, he wanted to stride to Julia’s chair and gather her up and carry her away. Instead he spoke with a raw crack in his voice of the adulterous lovers Paolo and Francesca, eternally buffeted by the shrieking winds of Hell.

  And then in a moment of insanity he asked Julia to read the story aloud. Obediently she began the famous lines about the lovers’ fall into sin.

  As we read on, our eyes met now and then,

  And to our cheeks the changing colour started,

  But just one moment overcame us—when

  We read of the smile, desired of lips long-thwarted,

  Such smile, by such a lover kissed away,

  He that may never more from me be parted

  Trembling all over, kissed my mouth …

  Julia looked up in confusion, then finished the stanza—

  … we read no more that day.

  At once Zee abandoned the Circle of the Lustful, and rushed his students further down the precipitous slope of the Inferno into the drenching rain where the gluttonous were perpetually tormented.

  But even the downpour of the Third Circle of Hell failed to extinguish the fires of lust in the classroom. Zee dismissed them early, and scuttled hastily away. Homer imagined the poor wretch shutting himself in his room and beating himself with whips, or donning a hair shirt, or inflicting on his sinful flesh some other masochistic punishment to banish lecherous thoughts.

  Homer lingered, gathering up his papers, moving slowly in the heat. When he came out into the large hallway running down the center of the villa he found the cook, Alberto, leaning against one of the cloudy painted castles on the wall.

  Alberto was sweating and distraught. He stared angrily at Homer. “You see Isabella?”

  “No, I’m sorry, I haven’t seen her. She’s missing? May I help to look for her?”

  “No, no. I look allwhere already.” Alberto gazed darkly at Homer. “Franco not here also.” Turning, he strode away, striking a match with a savage gesture, lighting a cigarette.

  Tom O’Toole had witnessed this exchange. “Well, what does he expect?” he said heartlessly. “You put together a good-looking guy like Franco and a cute girl like Isabella, and it’s Paolo and Francesca all over again.”

  “I hope it’s not what he thinks,” said Homer lamely. Feeling sorry for the cook, he went out into the blaze of afternoon to look for Alberto’s missing wife. It would give him an excuse to explore corners of the garden he had never seen.

  He began with the east wing, where the tower surmounted a decaying loggia. Below the tower a picturesque stairway ran downhill, entwined with creeping flowers. Walking softly, Homer descended the stairs, which led to a half-smashed greenhouse, while bells began to ring in some distant campanile. Nearer at hand doves were cooing.

  Homer stopped. The cooing wasn’t doves. Startled, he withdrew a step or two upward, until he could no longer see Franco and Isabella, who were succumbing to the inevitable. There they were, under a blanket, lying on the floor of the greenhouse on scattered shards of glass, protected only by a piece of torn awning.

  The awning was not protection enough, apparently, for Isabella gave a sharp little cry, and her hand appeared above the stairway wall, a drop of blood oozing from one finger. She laughed. Franco laughed. The hand disappeared. The cooing began again.

  The bells had stopped. Homer dared not move, fearing the racket of falling pebbles, the shifting stones of the stairs. He sat down cautiously and waited. They were talking now. It was mostly Isabella, babbling eagerly, while Franco interjected an occasional sympathetic remark.

  Homer couldn’t help himself; he couldn’t stop trying to tu
rn the rapid-fire Italian into English. Luckily he was stupid at it, because he didn’t really want to overhear. But he understood perfectly Franco’s Tuo marito mi ucciderà, Your husband will kill me. Well, of course, it was the old melodramatic story, the eternal triangle, the cuckolded husband, the adulterous lovers, just the way Tom had said.

  Homer inched himself up another step on the seat of his pants. Now the girl was talking about her father, il papa. No possessive with members of the immediate family, Homer reminded himself. Isabella must be saying that her father would kill her too, if he knew.

  Slowly Homer worked his way backwards up the stairs, sitting on step after step. As he rose to his feet at the top he was surprised to see a stranger kneeling below the wall in the shadow of one of the stone goddesses.

  Both man and goddess were looking down at Franco and Isabella. Stone eyes and living eyes watched the lovemaking with the same silent stare.

  The man was splendidly built. He had a youthful face with a strong nose, heavy black brows and a streaked grey beard. As Homer looked at him, the man turned slowly and met his gaze.

  What did one say at a time like this? Buon giorno? Deciding that no rules of etiquette covered the proper behavior for Peeping Toms, Homer merely nodded and made his escape.

  Roberto Mori too moved silently away, slipping through the trees below the tower to his meeting place with Matteo Luzzi. On the way he encountered no one else. He was in a state of shock. Anxiously he told Matteo what he had seen and heard.

  “They said that?” Matteo, too, was astonished. “Are you sure?”

  “Si, si.” Roberto’s fine features were contorted with anguish. “And there was someone else. A tall man, an American, I think. He was watching them. He has a lot of—” Roberto made a gesture over his head to indicate a wild growth of hair. “He must have heard what they said.”

  “Oh, that was only Signor Kelly.” Matteo laughed. “His Italian is a piece of shit. Don’t worry.”

  But later on that day when Matteo encountered Signor Kelly in the dining room, he was shocked by the American’s cheery, loud “Buona sera, Matteo, stare bene?” It was clumsy Italian, but it was Italian.

  Matteo began to have second thoughts.

  CHAPTER 23

  Onward and downward, over the chasm’s rim.

  Inferno XI, 115.

  Next morning, in the corridor of the dormitory wing, someone was crying.

  Julia opened her door to find Sukey Skinner sobbing in the hall. “Sukey, Sukey, what’s the matter?”

  Heads peered out of doorways. “It’s in my room,” cried Sukey, pointing. “Oh, I can’t stand it, I just can’t stand it.”

  A scorpion was crawling across Sukey’s floor.

  “Oh, ugh,” said Debbie Sawyer, “I didn’t know we had poisonous bugs.”

  “Take a good look, everybody,” said Tom. “Sukey should consider herself lucky. I mean, Dante must have seen scorpions like this. Nice devilish little creatures to put in the Inferno. Living history, Sukey.” He ground the scorpion under his shoe.

  But Sukey was not to be comforted. She was afraid of other things as well—small noises in the walls at night, little green and yellow lizards basking in the sun. She was especially frightened by the gunshots at dawn. “They were shooting this morning,” she said tearfully to Lucretia. “Almost under the window.”

  “But they’re only hunters,” Lucretia told her, “firing at birds. Elizabeth Barrett Browning ate thrushes, right here in Florence.”

  “Well, I think it’s just terrible,” said Sukey, who had seen the little bird bodies laid out in pathetic rows in the Central Market.

  Sukey was a tender shoot from a wealthy Belmont family. She had never been away from home before. Her whole experience in Florence had been different from what she had imagined.

  The final blow was Zee’s Dante class in the afternoon, and the sketches he dashed onto the blackboard—the Violent against their Neighbors crying out for help in the river of boiling blood, the Traitors to Kindred gnawing at each others’ skulls in the frozen lake at the very lowest pit of Hell.

  Sukey wanted to go home.

  Lucretia handled it with her usual efficiency. Almost before Sukey knew what was happening she was on a train for Milan, her plane ticket in her hand.

  When Lucretia got back from the city it was almost time for supper, and Alberto was missing. The kitchen was bare. No preparations had been made for the evening meal.

  Homer Kelly was missing too. He had not appeared for his four o’clock class, and the students had drifted away. When he limped into the dining room at six o’clock, he apologized for not having telephoned.

  “Crazy guy lost control of his car, smashed into that fourteenth century cross where I park my little Bravo. Ran into me, bashed my leg.” Homer lifted his trouser cuff and displayed the bandage on his ankle. “I had to hobble to a taxi and go to the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova. I’m fine now, more or less. Nothing serious. My Bravo’s okay.”

  “What about the car that ran into you?” said Zee in dismay. “Didn’t he stop? Gesù!”

  “Hit and run,” said Homer cheerfully. “A Fiat, I think, with an American at the wheel. Skinny character with a baseball cap. I was too busy feeling sorry for myself to pay much attention. Car never even slowed down. Hey, what about supper? I could eat a horse.”

  “Unfortunately the cook has absconded,” said Professor Himmelfahrt severely, frowning at the empty tables.

  “Hey,” said Kevin Banks, “where’s the food?”

  Lucretia came bursting out of the kitchen with a tray of dishes, exclaiming in Dutch. Smacking down the tray on one of the tables, she said crisply, “I could use, please, a little help.”

  “Of course.” Dorothy Orme hurried forward.

  And then there was a terrible cry. Alberto came running into the dining room, wailing. He was sobbing in great gasps, and it took Zee a moment to understand him, while the rest of them looked on, shocked and silent.

  Homer snatched at the word morti. Someone was dead. No, morti was plural. More than one person was dead.

  Zee turned to Homer, the color draining from his face. “It’s Isabella and Franco. In the greenhouse.”

  “Good lord,” said Himmelfahrt. “This is really the last straw.”

  Lucretia uttered an involuntary cry. Then she took a deep breath and recovered her composure. “Everyone out,” she said brokenly, making a sweeping gesture to clear all the students from the dining room.

  They moved slowly, knowing only that something appalling had happened. Tom O’Toole swore in Italian, having understood what the appalling thing was, but he too went away with the others. Julia caught Zee’s eye and looked at him gravely. Augustus Himmelfahrt fussed and blustered, but then he moved away after Julia–emotional scenes distressed Professor Himmelfahrt.

  “O madonna mia. O madonna.” Alberto slumped against the wall with tears running down his face.

  Homer wondered if Alberto had seen his wife and Franco making love again in the greenhouse and had killed the two of them, the outraged husband taking righteous revenge. Putting his arm around him clumsily, he said, “Show us.”

  Wordlessly Alberto led the way, shambling out of the villa with Zee, Homer and Lucretia in his wake. Stumbling across the driveway, Alberto half-fell down the stone stairs.

  Homer’s guess was grimly confirmed. Once again Franco and Isabella were stretched out on the ground, but now their faces were torn apart and they lay on their backs, fully clothed, beneath the broken metal framework of the greenhouse, with the setting sun striking here a broken shard and there a pane of glass.

  Zee cried out with horror, and Lucretia put her hands to her face and began to weep, while Alberto dropped to his knees and clung to his wife’s legs, and sobbed, “Non ha avuto l’ultimo sacramento.” Homer understood—Isabella hadn’t had the benefit of the last rites of the church.

  Sickened and shaking, Homer tottered back up the stone stairs to call the police. He was
heartsore for Alberto. It was bad enough to have lost Isabella twice—first to Franco and then to death—without being tortured by the thought of her endless suffering in the life hereafter.

  There was one thing to be grateful for. The timid Sukey had gone home. She was no longer here to witness a new episode in the Dante Game, this overflowing of the river of boiling blood.

  CHAPTER 24

  … When time’s last hour shall shut the future’s gate.

  Inferno X, 108.

  Inspector Rossi came at once from the homicide department at the Questura. Rossi was a homely young man of slight build, with an easy buck-toothed smile. At first the smile made him look a little foolish, but Homer soon decided he was smarter than he looked. His English was better than Homer’s Italian, but not by much.

  Now, getting out of the pale blue cruiser, he introduced himself and his assistant, Agent Piro, and shook hands sorrowfully and said simply, “Andiamo. Let’s go.”

  At once Zee led them down the stone stairway to the place where the bodies lay. Homer limped after them, accompanying the stumbling Alberto, and Lucretia came running out of the house, pulling on a jacket.

  At the foot of the steps Zee and Homer stood back wordlessly. Alberto pulled out a cigarette with trembling fingers. Lucretia stood silent, looking down at her clenched hands.

  “O mio Dio,” said Agent Piro. Crossing himself, he fumbled at his camera and began taking pictures.

  Inspector Rossi said nothing. Homer guessed that in his short life Rossi had seen worse than this. Kneeling, he gently lifted the heads of Franco and Isabella, then laid them down again.

  Alberto, enfeebled by sorrow, moved away down the hillside and sat on the weedy slope with his back to them, taking deep drags on his cigarette and gazing at his shoes.

  “La guardi,” said Rossi, pointing at Franco’s right hand. Something lay beneath it on the ground, a slip of paper. Delicately Rossi withdrew it, held it up by its edges, and read aloud a phrase in Italian.