by Jane Langton
Delicately Rossi opened the bottle containing the white powder, careful to hold the stopper by the edges. Sticking in a finger, he pulled it out again and touched it to his tongue. Once again he smiled his ratlike smile. “Heroin.”
Zee was stunned. At once he began asking questions in Italian. Rossi answered calmly, and Zee threw up his hands.
“What’s he saying?” begged Homer, who couldn’t keep up.
“He thinks it’s Alberto again. Alberto had heroin in his room, so Inspector Rossi wonders if he’s responsible for all this.”
“Poor Alberto,” said Homer. “Now he hasn’t got a chance.” He turned to Rossi and spoke up brightly, “What about fingerprints?”
Rossi looked at him and said nothing, and Homer felt like a reprimanded child. Of course, he told himself harshly, Rossi knew his business perfectly well without extraneous advice.
And later that afternoon when the tower was crowded with technicians from the Questura, Homer looked on humbly from afar, and stayed out of the way.
But he was far from satisfied. Mounting his little mechanical pony, he set off for the city. Whenever Homer felt ignorant about something, he went to the library.
In Florence the library was the Biblioteca Nazionale on the north side of the river. The building was an example of Mussolini gigantism, a freakish monument of colored marble and tortured statuary rearing above a tiny parking lot jammed with cars. Homer mounted the steps in a mood of self-confident vanity—the experienced scholar, profoundly skilled in the arcane techniques of wresting information from vast storehouses of knowledge, certain of his ability to pluck from the massed volumes on the shelves the book precisely fitted to his needs.
Four hours later, battered and bruised, ground down by bureaucracy, hoarse with argument, exhausted with filling out pink forms in duplicate and blue one’s in triplicate, drowsy with waiting, his hands cramped and aching after copying out whole chapters on the backs of envelopes—“No, no, you cannot take home, you must read here; your passport, per favore”—Homer climbed back on his bike and struggled through the traffic in a daze, his body shaking with the vibration of the little engine.
There was a public telephone in the tiny lobby of the pensione. Homer popped his gettone into the slot and called Zee at the villa. “Listen, it’s not good enough. That lab is strictly Mickey Mouse.”
“Mickey Mouse?” Zee was bewildered. “Mickey Mouse, you mean Topolino?”
“Topolino?”
“That little cartoon mouse, Topolino.”
“Oh, I see. No, no, I don’t mean Mickey Mouse. It’s just an expression. It means feeble. Look here, if that laboratory was going to do an effective heroin conversion, it needed a lot of stuff that wasn’t there. Listen.” Homer picked up his notes and read aloud to Zee a description of the process of conversion as it had once been practiced in an illegal laboratory in Marseilles.
“I think this one is just a mock-up. They should have had a direct supply of water and a stove and a lot of equipment for safety. The process is so toxic and corrosive you couldn’t get along without powerful ventilating machines. You’d need thermometers, because if the stuff boils it destroys the morphine. You’d need measuring devices too, because if you use the wrong proportions it blows up. And those fancy glass distilling flasks were strictly Hollywood.”
“Hollywood? You mean, like in the movies?”
“Exactly. That laboratory is a fake. It was all for show, I tell you. Somebody wanted it to be found.”
“But why in hell would anybody want to pretend that there was a heroin conversion lab at L’Ombrellino?”
“Damned if I know. Maybe they wanted to ruin the school’s good name?”
“Good name?” Zee laughed sarcastically. “We never had a good name. Not with me on the faculty. Wait till they find out my history. We’ve been in trouble from the beginning.”
CHAPTER 28
… through the garden of the world I rove
Enamoured of its leaves in measure solely
As God the Gardener nurtures them above.
Paradiso XXVI, 64–66.
In the Dante class they had arrived at the topmost level of Purgatory, the Garden of Earthly Paradise, a lush Eden crowded with allegorical images, including the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, that sturdy sapling that would one day provide the wood for the cross of Christ.
Everyone was distracted by the events of the past week. It was a good time to take an afternoon’s holiday.
“We need a little light and air,” said Zee to Homer, “a touch of the Dante Game.”
“What’s the clue this time?”
“The Garden of Earthly Paradise. It’s no secret. They all know the answer.”
“Well, I can guess. The Boboli Gardens?”
“Bene, of course, the Boboli Gardens.”
The gardens were a famous tourist sight on the hill behind the Pitti Palace, that vast prison of rusty stone where the wealth of the Medici had grown entirely out of hand.
“We’ll skip the palace,” said Zee, and they followed him in a long line as he crossed the rear courtyard and led the way to a steep shady path running upward between high hedges.
Homer was amused by the mismatch. There was nothing of Dante here. As a mirror of his Garden of Earthly Paradise, the place was a counterfeit. The metaphors were wrong. These baroque caprices breathed a different air from that of the fourteenth century. The sporting gods and goddesses, the playful grotesques, the stone monkeys—all were careless of any afterlife, although they lived in a fantasy as complex and bizarre as that of The Divine Comedy.
But a garden is a garden. The birds sang in the hedges as blithely as if they were singing in Eden.
A very expensive park is a dangerous place for the besotted. Homer pitied Zee. Today the very statuary seemed to whisper, the scent of boxwood added to the conspiracy, the water in the marble pools suggestively reflected the light, the tall hedges gathered themselves into cloudy shapes as if painted by Fragonard.
For the moment, Homer and Zee and Julia and the three Debbies and Kevin and Tom and Ned and Dorothy and Joan were carried into another world. Willingly they submitted to the spell. The three Debbies frolicked up the hill, laughing, with Kevin and Tom loping along behind. Next came Ned and Julia. Homer and Zee strolled along behind them, leaning forward, taking the climb with middle-aged dignity. Joan and Dorothy brought up the rear.
To Homer, looking up, they were like players on a many-leveled stage. He was overcome by the way people were always so consistently themselves. Tom was always Tom, Ned was always Ned. Once again the seal of form had impressed itself relentlessly on the turgid jellylike mass of corporeal matter. He watched as the three Debbies danced apart and swooped together like a chubby version of the three graces. The seal had come down like an old-fashioned rubber printing device, whang, whang, whang, turning out three identical girls, the same in substance, the same in form—God in his wisdom producing Debbie after Debbie, for whatever reason known only to the Almighty himself.
Then Homer’s attention was caught by Julia. She was stopping, turning to Ned Saltmarsh, saying something, walking quickly away, leaving him standing alone on the steep path.
“Wait,” cried Ned.
But she shook her head and walked faster.
Julia’s heart was beating hard. Just this once, she told herself, just this once I spoke my mind. She had been mean, she had been ruthless, but it was about time. She was sick to death of Ned. She couldn’t bear him a moment longer.
Her revolt was partly the effect of the awful dreariness of Ned himself, and partly her overwhelming awareness that Zee was. walking behind her, looking at her, wanting her.
Poor Ned! Suddenly the golden November afternoon was turning bitter and unkind. Falling back to the rear, he was rescued by Dorothy Orme, who patted his shoulder and made him one of a threesome—Dorothy, Ned, and Joan.
Dorothy Orme and Joan Jakes were no substitute for Julia Smith. Ned’s afternoon was w
recked. He began to sniffle.
“Oh, Ned, for heaven’s sake,” said Joan.
But Dorothy was tenderhearted. Even though the boy had no outward charm, his glands were surely secreting juices as thick and viscous as anyone else’s, gushing forcefully, filling him with yearning. How terrible that his case was so hopeless! The boy didn’t have a speck of the average paltry grace that made most children tolerable to their peers. And yet there was a certain sweetness in the poor child, whenever he could be distracted from grabbing and snatching, whenever his attention was turned to something outside himself.
Dorothy wondered if the boy’s voracious attachment could somehow be transformed into something better. “Drawn upward and outward, the way Dante said,” she murmured aloud.
“What did you say?” said Joan sharply.
“Oh, nothing.”
They had come to the crest of the hill. Below them plunged a wide path lined with cypresses and white marble figures. Julia was finished with waiting, she was done with holding back. She turned to Zee, smiling, and took his hand.
Homer let them go ahead of him, and then he too began descending, watching the way the sunlight fell on them in splotches, remembering Beatrice’s approach to Dante in the Garden of Earthly Delights—
In a white veil beneath an olive-crown
Appeared to me a lady cloaked in green,
And living flame the color of her gown.
Julia had no white veil or green cloak, but her Day-Glo orange padded vest might do for a flame-colored gown. Where did the girl get her clothes anyway? Some flea market, it looked like. Of course, being Julia, she could get away with it. The general effect was always more or less divine. There she was, another Beatrice, leading Zee into paradise.
Tom O’Toole joined them at the foot of the hill. “Another triumph of genetic engineering,” he said, pointing at the tall columns in front of the Ocean Fountain, which were surmounted by fish-tailed goats.
Julia laughed. “It’s so playful. I love it when they forgot to be grandiose.”
“So do I,” whispered Zee. He was hardly able to breathe, fearful of upsetting the trembling balance that kept Julia at his side, her hand folded in his, while the same warm rays of the sun fell upon them both, and the same fine spray from the fountain grazed their faces.
Homer went back with them to L’Ombrellino for supper, and there he took poor Zee aside. He had never seen anyone so sick with infatuation. The poor man had no armor, no protection. He was drawn up by love like an arrow discharged from the bow. Every square inch of his face gave him away, even the folds of his shirt, his very shoelaces. Julia must be aware of it. Was she egging him on, getting ready to break his heart?
“Look, my friend, why don’t you wear sunglasses or something? Or pull a stocking over your head? Your naked face, it’s terrible. Why don’t you tell the girl how you feel? I thought all Italian men were womanizers. They’ve got this sexy reputation for pinching women on the street. What’s the matter with you? Why don’t you talk to her?”
“Oh, God, I can’t do that.” Zee swallowed with difficulty. “I’ve got this miserable past. And now these other horrors have come up.”
Homer went brutally to the point. “You didn’t kill your wife. Any fool could see that, just reading the Boston papers. So what difference does it make?”
“Well, I’m so old. I’m ten years older than she is. And she’s so—I mean, she could marry anybody, anybody.”
“Well, it’s up to her, isn’t it? Listen, you jerk, for you and me the women worth going after aren’t hooked on callow young guys with big chins and thick necks. They’re crazy for the Latin ablative and the precession of the equinoxes. That stuff you do, all that high-flown prattle about Dante and Aquinas, they go mad for it. It makes them burn with desire. When you talk about essence and existence they want to tear off their brassieres. You’ve got it made.”
“I don’t agree with you, Homer, but thank you anyway.” Zee caught at Homer’s arm. “The trouble is, I don’t know what she’s thinking. Usually I know what’s going on in other people’s heads. In fact I could usually supply both parts of a conversation myself, couldn’t you? But what she says is always a surprise.”
And that was the bewitching charm of her, thought Homer, feeling sorry for Zee, the poor fool.
CHAPTER 29
Dost thou not hear his piteous cries …?
Dost thou not see death grapple him …?
Inferno II, 106–107.
Next day Ned Saltmarsh drooped and dragged around the school. Ostentatiously he exposed his misery. Everyone got the message, especially Julia. Protecting herself firmly, trying to widen the space she had inserted between them, she smiled at him politely and kept her distance.
Ned moped. Sentimentally he thought about suicide. What if he really killed himself? Then she’d be sorry.
When Julia did not appear in the dining room for lunch—she was keeping carefully out of touch—Ned went to look for her. He wanted to present her once again with his pouting face, his accusing gaze.
She was nowhere to be found, indoors or out. Downcast, Ned stood in the driveway and looked up at the ancient tower, attracted by its romantic silhouette. Making his way to the door, he found it broken and ajar. Timidly he pushed it open and stumbled inside. Then with impulsive daring he climbed the stone stairway to the uppermost room where Inspector Rossi had found the laboratory the day before yesterday.
It was empty. Everything had been removed by the police. Turning away, Ned looked back at the stairs. Another flight of steps led to the roof. Breathing heavily, he climbed to the top, pushed back a hinged trap door, and crawled out boldly into the November air.
The roof was made of sloping terra-cotta tiles. There was no railing. Ned promptly sat down, afraid to go any further, although he would have liked to peer over the edge and imagine himself lying dead, or perhaps only badly injured, on the ground. Before long Julia would find him there, and bend over him, weeping, saying she was sorry.
But now he had no intention of approaching the edge. Instead he gazed out across the valley at the usual landscape of cypress trees and olive groves. Here and there he could see the rooftop of a villa. White ducks were visible in a neighbor’s garden, and rows of artichokes and lettuces. Then Ned was surprised to hear voices, quite near.
Looking down into the weedy forest of trees below the tower, he could see three men quite clearly.
One was Matteo, the missing secretary. Ned’s heart quickened. The other two were strangers. One of them spoke English with a beautiful Italian accent, the other with the flat tones of the American Midwest. The Italian was good-looking, with grey hair and a dark beard. The American was tall and gangly, with a billed cap and plaid trousers. Ned couldn’t see his face under the cap.
But the more he listened, the more frightened he became. Squirming backward on the tiles, he reached back to clutch at the edge of the stairway opening, meaning to lower himself to the steps and close the trap door softly over his head.
But his groping hand jarred loose one of the tiles, and it went clattering down the roof and careened over the edge, falling on a heap of discarded bricks with a sharp little crash.
“Oh, lordy,” whispered Ned, as the three faces looked up at him. For a moment they all stayed frozen, the three men staring up from the ground and Ned kneeling on the roof, gazing back at them in horror. Then Matteo and the man in the cap began running toward the tower.
Frantically Ned scrabbled through the trap door. Where could he go? Panting and sobbing, he hustled down the first set of steps. He could hear them pounding up one flight, and then another.
Gasping, he ran into the room that had been set up as a laboratory. Finding no hiding place, he backed into a corner, squeaking with terror.
And there, a moment later, they found him.
As it turned out, the discovery of Ned’s body was very much like his own scenario for suicide.
Julia found him, just as he had imagined she w
ould. She had been taking a solitary walk, brushing through tangled shrubbery, going down the hill and still farther down, dreamily losing her way.
The tower was a landmark, and she worked her way toward it, climbing up and up through the rough terrain of an olive grove where a plow had turned up the soil, hurrying because she was late to class.
And there, rounding one corner of the tower, she came upon Ned spread-eagled on a pile of bricks. His shirt had blown up around his neck, exposing his soft pink stomach. His small mouth was open in a soundless cry. He looked very young and pitiful. Julia screamed, then screamed again.
In Zee’s class they were beginning the Paradiso. Zee had drawn a picture of Dante and Beatrice rising to the light of heaven, accompanied by the music of the spheres. But instead of heavenly chords of music there were only Julia’s cries as she came running into the classroom, sobbing that Ned was dead.
Zee tried to hold her, but she tore away. Turning back, she ran down the stairs and across the driveway, with the rest of them streaming after her. Homer and Zee found her on the south side of the tower, kneeling over Ned, weeping in choking gasps, telling him she was sorry. Zee tried to lift her to her feet and soothe her, but she shook her head wildly.
The others gathered around, solemn, tearful, frightened. Himmelf ahrt came running up. “Good God,” he said, staring at Ned with bulging eyes, “this is too much, it’s just too much.”
Lucretia was last. She hurried around the corner of the tower with a cooking pot in her hand, stopped short and gave a despairing sob. Then Dorothy and Joan lifted Julia to her feet and helped her back indoors.
Lucretia stumbled after them, weeping. The others trailed in her wake, glancing at each other with stricken faces—Debbie Weiss, Debbie Foster, Debbie Sawyer, Kevin Banks and Tom O’Toole.
