by Jane Langton
Bindo laughed. His good humor was returning. “You think of horsepower at a time like this?” They bargained. Bindo gave in, but the new car would be no more expensive than the Fiat. And then against his better judgment he agreed to pay the usual price for the removal.
“But it was two of them, not one,” exclaimed Matteo furiously. “A man and a woman. And listen, Signore, another may be necessary. Someone else heard what they were saying. It was one of the Americans. I’ve already tried to arrange it, but it didn’t work. Perhaps we should try again.”
Once again Bindo expressed dismay. Removals were all very well, they were often necessary, but they should always be cleared with him first.
“Allora, never mind,” said Matteo. “Non importa. Forget it. The poor fool studies Italian at the school, but he understands nothing.”
Then Bindo extracted from Matteo the promise that he would never appear at the bank again. They made arrangements for the next day, and parted.
On the way back to the Banca degli Innocenti, Bindo hardly saw the people on the street, the wheelbarrow rising on a pulley, the men jump-starting a car, the women shoppers, the tourists. He failed to hear the ringing bells, the strong middle note from Santa Maria Novella, the deep vibrating bong from the Campanile. He was thinking hard about Matteo Luzzi.
Matteo was a link between Father Roberto and himself. In the end there should be no link at all. Leonardo Bindo must be surrounded by silence, by emptiness, by a vacuum. Therefore Matteo must eventually be part of the silence. Earl, too, the scum from Milwaukee.
By the time he had unlocked the door of his office, Bindo had made up his mind. He would hire someone else, and hold him in reserve. A professional this time, not another gun-crazy kid. Easy enough! Tossing this heavy decision over his shoulder, Bindo went on to the next thing. Dialing the number of the Misericordia, he asked to speak to the governor. “Signor Provveditore? Ah, good morning! Bindo here.”
“Good morning, Cavaliere. What can I do for you today?”
“I merely called to inquire whether or not my friend has been accepted into the fraternity. You will remember, my friend the civil servant in the Department of City Museums? You gave me his application form last month. It is my understanding that he filled it out and presented it to you at once.”
“Un momento. Let me look.”
The governor’s office was filled with heavy furniture. On a table stood a small figure of Saint Sebastian, patron saint of the Misericordia. The lamp with its green shade illuminated only a narrow circle on the desk. Now he groped among his books and papers, tipped up his typewriter to look beneath it, and at last plucked what he wanted from under a package of Gorgonzola. The application blank smelled slightly of the strong fragrant cheese.
“Oh, yes, Signor Bindo, your friend has been accepted. He will be formally invested next month.”
“Invested?”
“It is a religious ceremony. At that time he will receive his vestments in the oratory.”
“Oh, I see. Thank you, Provveditore. Soon you must drop in at the bank and let me take you to lunch. There is an excellent little restaurant on Via de’ Servi. I am deeply grateful.”
CHAPTER 26
… My ship of genius now shakes out her sail
And leaves that ocean of despair behind.…
Purgatorio I, 2,3.
At the American School of Florentine Studies the foundations had been shaken. The violent deaths of Isabella and Franco had slashed a bloody stroke across the daily life of the school.
But classes met the next afternoon, just as usual.
Zee looked around at his students as they sat in their usual chairs in the Drawing Room of the Queen Mother. Perhaps he would leave it to Dante to carry them up and out of Hell.
For to everyone’s relief they had finished the Inferno. They were breathing the clear air on the surface of the earth, looking up at the pure stars, climbing the lofty mountain of Purgatory, encountering the penitent souls who would become worthy at last of a place in Paradise after centuries of suffering.
“Canto sixteen,” he said, forging ahead, “the celebrated discourse on the freedom of the will.” Swiftly he made a sketch of Dante pawing through the smoke that billowed around the third cornice of the mountain.
Beyond the classroom windows the real world too was hazy with smoke. Brush burned in a neighboring field. The seasonal agricultural cycle was going on next door as though nothing had happened at the Villa L’Ombrellino, as though two young lives had not been snuffed out only the day before on the hillside where grapes hung heavy on the vine.
Zee stood at the front of the room, explaining that most people in Dante’s time had blamed their fates on the stars.
“Determinism,” said Joan Jakes knowingly.
“People say the same thing now,” said Dorothy Orme, “only they blame environmental influences or their genetic inheritance.”
Zee permitted himself a glance at Julia Smith, who was looking troubled. Surely she had heard all this kind of thing before? “But Dante,” he said, “was eager to stick up for free will, God’s greatest gift to humankind.”
And then, keeping his eyes firmly fixed on a spot in the middle of the air, he brought the conversation back to love. One could not help loving, he said, his face a miracle of self-control. One loved what one loved, but impossible loves could be overcome by the exercise of free will—
Granted, then, all loves that wake in you to be
Born of necessity, you still possess
Within yourselves the power of mastery;
And this same noble faculty it is
Beatrice calls Free Will…
Homer had to stop himself from bursting out, “Zee, for Christ’s sake, let it out, open up, stop holding back. Release thy bow of speech that to the head is drawn.” It was almost comic to see Zee displaying the lesson not only on the blackboard but in his own person, in his spasmodic movements, his erect back, his rigidly controlled legs, stepping this way, carefully, then that.
“But how can you tell,” said Debbie Foster, “whether you’re acting for yourself by free will, or whether you’re, like, just programmed to behave that way?”
It was the old, old argument, but since most of them were young, it was not yet hackneyed, and they were still belaboring it at suppertime.
Tom O’Toole professed himself a determinist. “It’s like Dorothy said. Your fate is decided by the year you’re living in, the country you come from, peace or war, famine or plague. You’re helpless in the grip of outside forces.”
“Not me,” said Julia, and she began dishing up the spaghetti al sugo that had been prepared by Tom with the help of Kevin Banks. For an hour or two Tom and Kevin had opened cans and rattled pots and poured oregano into boiling kettles of sauce, leaving the kitchen splashed with sticky spots of red and heaped with dirty caldrons.
“Not you?” Tom laughed. “You haven’t got any more choice than a dog, Julia Smith. You’ll marry some guy from a certain social class—I could pick him out a mile away. He’ll have a certain set of fuzzy liberal values which he’ll abandon as soon as he starts working in Daddy’s battery-acid factory. You’ll have one-point-eight kids and maybe later on you’ll go to law school and the two of you will get rich, and you’ll buy a second home and a boat, and then you’ll get a divorce. It’s written in the stars.”
“You don’t know me very well.” Julia looked at him stubbornly, and then almost under her breath she said, “What I mean is, people can make themselves.”
Tom snorted, and shook his head with wonder. “Look, if ever there was a human being created by the stars it has to be Julia Smith. Look at you, the stars dumped everything on you. I mean, some people are lucky that way.” Tom glanced at Zee, who was sitting down, making a clatter with his knife and fork. “It’s the seal of form and the wax of matter, right, Zee? The seal came down, wham! on the wax, and there was this person Julia Smith, everything perfect, and from then on everything happened the way it h
ad to, leading straight to this school, this table, this—” Tom dipped his spoon into his bowl of ice cream—”this dish of gelato di cioccolata. Yum, there’s nothing like preordained chocolate ice cream.”
“No,” said Julia. “It’s not true.”
“Of course it’s not true,” said Net Saltmarsh hotly, confused, anxious to take Julia’s side.
“And the murders, were they preordained too?” murmured Julia.
“Certainly,” said Tom.
Zee looked at her and was silent. Inwardly he wondered if sometimes the wax could reject the seal, could become imperious and take some shape of its own choosing. But probably not. Probably Tom was right. Julia would go back to the United States and marry some goofy good-looking young jerk, and they’d move to the country and live in an expensive suburb in Connecticut, and soon she’d forget all about the narrow streets of the city of Florence, and the school for rich kids on the hill of Bellosguardd, and the teacher whose name was Giovanni Zibo.
With an effort he turned his attention back to the conversation, which was taking the course it had followed ten thousand times before, until Tom ended it by recounting a frightful story by deMaupassant about a young man who set out to seek his fortune and couldn’t decide which of three forks in the road he should take, so the story had three different endings to show what would happen on each fork, and when he took the first he was robbed at an inn and had his throat cut, and when he took the second he joined the revolution and was ran through with a bayonet, and when he took the third a runaway pickpocket put stolen goldpieces in his pocket and the magistrate hanged him for a thief.
“So you see, it’s all in the stars,” said Tom, and the rest of them shuddered and licked their ice cream spoons and fell silent.
CHAPTER 27
Cerberus, the cruel, misshapen monster …
… pot-bellied, talon-heeled,
He clutches and flays and rips and rends the souls.
Inferno VI, 13,17–18.
Next morning Homer went to the Questura on Via Zara. It was only a few blocks north of Piazza San Marco. Like everything else in the center of the city it was an easy journey by motorbike from his pensione. Homer sped along lightly, his big nose parting the air. By now he knew how to sway left and right to go this way and that, and as usual he was floating on a cloud.
The sign in the upstairs hall at the Questura said Squadra Mobile. Homer gave his name to the secretary, then sat down in the hall to wait. There was a busy hum of voices, a rattle of typewriters. At the end of the hall someone was hammering. Sunshine fell in dusty shafts on the floor. He could hear the sound of water rushing into a bucket.
Inspector Rossi seemed glad to see him. Homer was introduced to the Chief Inspector, then taken into Rossi’s own office.
Their conversation was a polyglot confusion. With his pocket dictionary in hand, Homer struggled to speak Italian. The Inspector seemed to take pride in struggling with English. “We look for Matteo Luzzi,” he said. “At the school, they not know where is his home. He was in seminary before. We cannot find the seminary.”
“What about the man I saw?” said Homer. “The grey-bearded uomo? Have you tried to find him?”
Rossi shook his head. “We ask people. They do not know such a person.”
“Well, what about the handwriting?” Homer made up a word, “Il scritto? Do you know who wrote the Dante quotation?”
“We look for a paper with the writing of Franco, and we find it from the time when he was un soldato—”
“Doing his military service,” said Homer, nodding.
“Franco write like a little child. The paper with the Dante words was more—da persona istruita.”
“Written by an educated person,” said Homer, nodding again.
“Matteo too. We look also at his writing. It is not like. He is not the person who write the words from Dante Alighieri. Now we will ask everyone to write for us, and then we will compare.”
Inspector Rossi went on to report that they had not succeeded in finding anyone who could corroborate Alberto’s story that he had been away from the villa that morning shooting birds on a hillside in the neighborhood of La Quiete. “But we try again.”
“So Alberto—resta in prigione,” said Homer.
“Si. He stay in prison.”
Homer stood up, but the inspector had something more to tell him. “We find something new in this city,” he said, gazing at the stapler on his desk, the scissors, the pencils. “There is an inflow of drugs, heroin, not here before.”
“I thought the pope was taking care of the drug problem,” said Homer jocularly. “Il Papa, his crociata antidroga.”
Rossi turned his grave attention to the photograph of his wife and children on the wall. “Alberto Fraticelli say someone has put heroin in his room. He say he do not use heroin.”
“Perhaps he was not telling the truth.”
“Perhaps.” Inspector Rossi stood up and smiled and shook Homer’s hand, and then Homer floated away from the Questura on his little Bravo, heading for L’Ombrellino. Masses of students blocked Via San Gallo in the university quarter, and he had to dodge a couple of men brushing litter into the path of a sweeping machine as it came rocking along the street, sucking everything into its maw.
On Via Tornabuoni he stopped at a newsstand to buy a paper. The headlines were as sensational as ever—
DUE BAMBINI MORTI
NEL LUOGO DI SCARICO
Dead babies again, found at the dump this time. Were Italians really as entranced by dead babies as editors seemed to think? Homer bought a copy of La Nazione and sat astride his idling bike reading the front page. Americans were all over the news this morning—
SUORE AMERICANE
RESISTONO IL PAPA
Tsk, tsk, American nuns were defying the pope. And what was this?
DUE FIORENTINI ASSASSINATI
IN UNA SCUOIA AMERICANA
Oh, lord, Rossi had released the news to the press. The school was, of course, the American School of Florentine Studies at Villa L’Ombrellino, and the two dead Florentines were Franco and Isabella. Homer stuffed the newspaper into the front of his jacket and buzzed down the street and across the river. At the villa he ran up the grand staircase, threaded his way through the library stacks and confronted Lucretia in the Office of Blue Clouds.
“The bad news is out,” he said, flinging the paper on her desk. “Rossi must have told them all about it. If the parents of our students don’t know now, they’ll soon hear, one way or another.”
Lucretia picked up the paper, glanced at it, then dropped it again. “It wasn’t Rossi who went to the papers, it was Himmelfahrt. He thought the world had a right to know. He was showing the reporters around last night, after you went home.”
At lunchtime Lucretia brought the paper to the dining room and put it on the serving table for everyone to see. Then she stuck her head in the kitchen to see how the new cook was getting on.
Signorina Giannerini was wearing a white coat, tearing a head of lettuce apart with her bare hands. She was a no-nonsense laureate from the Istituto Tecnico Domestico di Firenzi. Lucretia had found her with a single phone call.
“I don’t wash dishes,” said Signorina Giannerini. Picking up a cleaver she split a chicken in half.
“No, no,” agreed Lucretia hastily. “That is understood.”
The newspaper made a sensation. Zee glanced at it anxiously, then turned away. Tom snatched it up and flipped the pages and said, “Hey, here we are.”
The others crowded around. There they were on page five, the whole student body and Professor Himmelfahrt, standing together in front of the villa, their faces washed out in the glare of the photographer’s floodlight. Only Julia and Ned were missing. The beautiful Julia had been urged to stand front and center, but she had backed away and gone indoors. Ned Saltmarsh had eagerly crowded up among the others, but someone had clipped him out of the picture with a pair of scissors.
Ned was humiliated at having b
een left out. He banged down his plate on one of the tables, dragged up a chair between Julia and Joan, and began talking loudly about the paper he was writing for Zee’s class.
The subject was the Wood of the Suicides in the Inferno. He had chosen it strictly for the benefit of Julia.
He looked at her significantly, and she knew he was threatening, if you don’t love me, I’ll kill myself. Refusing to take him seriously, she laughed. Ned sulked.
After lunch Inspector Rossi came back to the American school with his assistant, Agent Piro. The two of them stood in the driveway beside the cruiser and looked up at the tower that rose four stories high at the southeast corner of the villa.
“I see inside, please?” Rossi asked Zee.
With Lucretia’s help, Zee found the key, but at first it failed to open the door at the foot of the tower. Then Homer leaned against the door, and it opened with an ominous crack.
“Oh, good,” he said, starting enthusiastically up the stone stairs, “I love towers. I wonder if this one has an owl and a specter, like Hawthorne’s down the road? Twenty-eight dollars it cost him, cheap for a specter, don’t you think?”
Room rose above empty room, but the large chamber on the top floor was different.
Here, just under the projecting brackets that held up the roof, they found a laboratory. In the middle of the room on a long table lay a set of metal basins. Glass tubes wound up from three enormous flasks like the apparatus of a mad scientist in a film. On a hanging shelf stood a row of jars with heavily inked labels.
Rossi read the labels aloud, “Acetone, acetic anhydride, carbonato di soda, acido tartarico, acido cloridrico, alcool puro.” He bent to examine an unlabelled bottle on a lower shelf, containing a white substance like sugar, then looked around with obvious satisfaction, grinning at Piro. “Conversione della morfina.”
“What?” said Zee.
But for Homer the light dawned. “Morfina? You mean this is a laboratory for the conversion of morphine into heroin? Good lord.”
