Roman Count Down

by David P. Wagner

  “Exactly. You recall how difficult it was to get everyone to agree on doing something in school?” Rick rolled his eyes, which Art took as a yes. “Well, it’s even more difficult now that we are in our thirties. Jeez, can you believe how old we are?” He stared at his beer.

  “I will take that as a rhetorical question.”

  A cheer came from a corner of the bar where four Brits were watching a soccer match. It had been played weeks earlier, and they knew the outcome, but it was the only game in town at the moment. Guido, at his place behind the bar, didn’t look up from his yellow-covered paperback. The only other occupied table held two young British women drinking what looked like lemonade. They watched the British men, and Rick wondered if they had all come in together. He took another drink from his glass. The beer, a local lager, wasn’t Alien Ale, but it wasn’t bad.

  “All right, Arturo, bring me up to date on our classmates living in Rome. Start with the guys. Actually, start with yourself.”

  Art sighed. “A most mundane tale is mine. I’m still working for the accounting firm, spending my days looking at numbers on a screen and evenings searching for something, anything, that can brighten my drab existence.”

  “Like women.”

  “Mostly women, in fact. You recall that my marriage to Marisa did not work out as planned. Clash of cultures. She thought that an accounting firm run by Americans would have heavy social obligations—cocktail parties, lavish dinners, that kind of thing. Clearly she had not met many accountants.”

  “She thought they were all like you.”

  “Perhaps that was it. She finally decided she couldn’t make it through another tax season, when she wouldn’t see me for weeks.” He contemplated taking another drink of his beer. “I heard she’s engaged to a librarian.”

  “Lots of glitz in that profession, that’s for sure. What about Beppo?”

  “Beppo. Good question. We all assume he joined the family business and is making piles of money, but I haven’t heard from him in years. Do you remember Francesco Oliveri?”

  “Of course. The guy who crashed his father’s Mercedes into the aqueduct.”

  “Right. He’s a lawyer. Defends politicians under investigation for corruption.”

  “Sounds like a lucrative line of work. Did I hear that Reggie Lithgow was in Rome?”

  “He was. After university in England he joined the Foreign Office like his father, and Rome was his first assignment. Married an Italian woman and they immediately transferred him to Paraguay. Or maybe it was Uruguay. One of the Guays.”

  The update went on through another round of beers, and Art removed his tie and put it in his pocket. They exhausted the boys and turned to the girls.

  “I suppose you want to start with Lidia, since you two were inseparable that last year. She’s here in Rome.”

  “My guess is that she’s married. A beautiful girl like that would not have stayed single long.”

  Art took a deep breath and nodded slowly. “Actually, she is not married, though there may be a commitment and she seems very happy. We don’t see much of her. She works in the Vatican press office.”

  “Really? That’s interesting, and it makes sense. Her father was a newspaper editor and I remember her wanting to study journalism in college. Good for her.” Rick was lost in thought for a moment before his friend spoke.

  “You must remember Michela, the girl I dated when we were juniors?”

  “How could I forget her? She broke her leg on our ski week in Ándalo and the carabinieri had to take her down the mountain on a snowcat. She was on crutches for a month afterward and as I recall took full advantage of her celebrity status.”

  “Right. Well now she lives in Milan and has a travel agency.”

  “Do you still…?”

  “No, I never see her. She’s married with three kids.” He took another pull from his glass, looked past Rick toward the door, and lowered his voice. “All right, Rick. You do recall Giulia Livingston, don’t you?”

  “Giulia. Oh, yeah, the politician. Class president. Wore her hair in a ponytail, even though it was totally out of fashion. I think she dated that nerd whose name I don’t recall. What’s she up to?”

  “She just walked in.”

  Rick groaned and turned around.

  Giulia wore jeans and a sweater, both of which complemented her figure, not that any compliments were needed. Her hair was shoulder-length but pushed back over her ear on one side, exposing a pearl earring. The girl who was plain in high school was now anything but, and she knew it. She glanced at the table, noticed Rick, and her eyes went wide with surprise.

  “Rick Montoya. Is that really you?”

  What do you say when you meet someone you haven’t seen in ages, and find that their appearance has changed so much for the better that said person is barely recognizable? If you say they look great, does it imply that previously they did not? Rick was now of the very sharp horns of this dilemma. Be neutral, he decided.

  “Giulia, how good to see you,”

  They exchanged air kisses and a warm hug, both clinging longer than might be expected under the circumstances. Rick tried to identify her perfume, without success.

  She waved at Art. “Ciao, Arturo.”

  “Ciao, Giulia.” Another hug and more air kisses. “What can I get you?”

  “Nothing, I can’t stay,” she answered, but kept her eyes on Rick as she took the chair next to him, placing a small purse on the table.

  “How long has it been, Giulia? Since we graduated?”

  “I think so. I heard you moved here. Starting a translating business?”

  “I’ve had a translating business for years back in Albuquerque, so I thought with the Internet I could do it here just as well as there, and I’d like to get into interpreting as well.”

  “How ya’ gonna keep ‘em down in New Mexico once they’ve seen Roma?”

  “You can say that again. And what are you doing with your life?” His eyes moved to her left hand. “You’re not married yet?”

  She reached over and touched his ring finger. “No, and it appears that you are not either.” Her hand stayed on his for a few seconds just as Art returned and set a glass in front of her.

  Art leaned back in his chair and observed his two classmates. “You two seem to be reuniting well.”

  Rick didn’t appear to have heard the comment. “And what do you do with your time, Giulia?”

  The strand of hair got loose, and she carefully pushed it back behind her ear as Rick watched. “I have a tourism business. See the Forum, Rome by night, the Vatican museums, that sort of thing. Bus tours, small groups, VIP tours for one or two people. We do it all.”

  “Business good?”

  “Almost too good. Sometimes I have trouble keeping up with the demand.” She checked her watch. “In fact, I really should be leaving. One of my guides just quit and I have to fill in for him. I came in to meet a friend, but she doesn’t seem to be here.” She got to her feet, followed by Rick and Art. “Rick, it was so good to see you.”

  “It was wonderful seeing you, Giulia. Do you have a card? Perhaps we could get together and really catch up.”

  She pulled one from her purse, handed it to him, and took one of his. After more hugs she hurried out the door, watched by the two men.

  “That was fast,” said Rick as he lowered himself into his chair.

  “She’s changed a bit since high school, hasn’t she?”

  “You could say that. But still very intense.” He took a longer drink of the beer and inclined his head toward his friend. “Art, she didn’t just drop in here by chance. This was all arranged, wasn’t it?”

  “Of course it was. You’re already thinking like an Italian. Welcome back to Italy.”

  Chapter Four

  The next morning, Rick was almost back to his normal earl
y-rising schedule. Perhaps by the following day he would be up at dawn and do his run before breakfast. When he walked into the kitchen he found a note from his uncle saying that he could come to his office to brief him on what he’d found in the count’s notes the previous afternoon. Though worded informally, it had the tone of an order, and next to it was Piero’s business card with the address. Rick tucked it into his pants pocket, picked up the house keys, and left the apartment. He would have breakfast on the way.

  At Piazza del Populo he took the left fork and started down Via del Babuino, reminding him of the count’s project to cover the streets of downtown Rome. This one was named for one of the city’s talking statues, where Romans for centuries had pasted anti-establishment notes as a form of anonymous protest. When he was almost to Piazza di Spagna the reclining figure of the babuino appeared, a few sticky notes attached to his torso. Rick didn’t stop to read them, but continued until the street opened into the square, already filling with tourists taking pictures of the Spanish Steps. Just before the steps he walked into a pedestrian alley between the buildings, marked as a metro stop, and at the end of it into a tunnel. Rather than descend to the train tracks, he walked up the ramp to the left. There a series of ramps, escalators, and moving sidewalks carried him under the buildings, under the Villa Borghese park, and eventually returned him to the sunlight at the top of Via Veneto.

  When he reached the sidewalk at the top of the escalator he stopped to look around. It was a section of Rome he knew well, having lived in a third-floor apartment on one of the side streets when he was in high school. It was an area of the city developed in the late nineteenth century, after Italy had finally been united and Rome became the capital of the new nation. Housing was needed for all the new government workers, politicians, and hangers-on, so apartment blocks had sprung up in place of villas and gardens. Would it have changed much since he lived there? Essentially, it would not. Businesses came and went—a shoe store becomes a jeweler, a restaurant gets new owners, a bank becomes a shoe store—but the basic commercial character of the neighborhood stays the same. The restaurants and caffes along Via Veneto were still there, their tables on the sidewalk next to the street, as were the large newspaper kiosks and trees shading all the sidewalk activity. Close your eyes and it’s la dolce vita from the 1950s.

  He eschewed the fancy coffee places on Via Veneto and turned left on Via Sardegna, remembering that all the cross streets in this section of town were named for regions of Italy. His breakfast destination was Lotti, a combination coffee bar, bakery, and in summer, gelateria. When he’d lived a few blocks away, his mother often sent him there, the only place in the neighborhood that sold fresh milk on Sundays. The aroma of fresh-baked cornetti and brewed coffee hit his senses as soon as he walked in the door. Most of the regulars were long gone, already at their desks in offices nearby, but a few were still standing at the bar in various stages of wakefulness. Rick paid the woman sitting at the cash register and was given a tiny slip. Using a small paper napkin, he picked up an almond cornetto from the bakery side before crossing over to the bar and ordering his cappuccino, leaving the slip under a euro coin. Three minutes later, alert after a jolt of caffeine, he was back on the street and walking the final two blocks to the police station, a yellow fascist-era structure squeezed among nineteenth-century architecture. He identified himself to the sergeant on duty and received a pass along with directions to Commissario Fontana’s office.

  Uncle Piero was at his desk talking on the phone when Rick pushed through the door left slightly ajar. The policeman waved his nephew toward a chair in front of the desk. Rick looked around a room which was bare of anything but the essentials needed to carry on police business. A meeting table with six chairs stood in one corner, two leather chairs sat in the other with a small table between them. On a wall next to the table stretched a large street map of the city, its surface perforated with tiny holes where pins had been stuck. There was no other decoration on the walls save the required photograph of the President of the Republic behind Piero’s desk chair, flanked by the flags of Italy and the Polizia dello Stato. No filing cabinets; they would be somewhere else in the building. Rick saw no case displaying professional awards or photographs of the commissario with notable people, though Piero had been given plenty of both over the years. It was not his style, and such knickknacks could detract from the cold efficiency of the room.

  Piero closed his conversation and put the phone in its cradle. “Buon giorno, Riccardo. Did you have breakfast?”

  “I just stopped at Lotti. It hasn’t changed.”

  “Thankfully.” He leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs, exposing a bit of argyle sock. “I talked to Aunt Filomena this morning and told her you’re very interested in taking the apartment. She is so pleased to have a relative living there that she has given you a rental rate that is way below the market. If I weren’t already well located I would be tempted to take it myself. She will call the portinaio and tell him to let you in when you show up.” He tore a sheet off a notepad and passed it to Rick. “Here’s the address.”

  “I’ll go see it when I leave here.” Rick looked at the paper and put it in his pocket. “I didn’t think finding a place to live would be so easy. I will send Filomena a box of chocolates.”

  “Don’t send her chocolates, she lives in Perugia. Flowers would be better. Now tell me what you found from reading the count’s journals, or whatever they are.”

  Rick pulled the notes from his jacket pocket and unfolded them on his lap. “I doubt if much will be helpful in finding out who killed him, but I found it all quite interesting, especially relating to the city of Rome. As the countess likely told you, her husband was working on a book about the streets of the centro storico, but from the material I read, it would have been a long time before he could have started writing it. What I saw were notes on his research, if that’s the word for what he was doing.”

  “Could you get an idea of how he organized this research?”

  “I know what you’re getting at, Uncle. I had the same thought. Like what streets he had been working on at the time of his demise?”

  “Precisely.”

  “Well, at first I thought he might be doing it alphabetically, since that would be the logical order for a book. Start with Via Acquasparta, let’s say, and then go through other A streets in the area before moving on to the Bs. But I concluded he was doing it by sections, like marking off a grid and going from one street to another. That would make more sense, especially since streets in this city change names at every corner. Also it avoided his walking back and forth. I shuffled through the folders and found a city map, hoping it would be marked to show where he’d been, but unfortunately not. Still, as I read the notes I used the map to locate streets that he was writing about and found that, yes, he had been working on streets in the same small area. I can point them out.”

  Rick got to his feet and walked to the map on the wall. He pointed to a congested area of downtown Rome that nestled inside a double bend of the Tiber. “It was this section.”

  “Rione Ponte,” said Piero, referring to one of the traditional divisions of the city. “Around the antiques shops on Via dei Coronari.”

  “Just south of that, Uncle. Between Via dei Coronari and Corso Vittorio Emanuele. As I remember from walking them, the streets there are as narrow and crooked as any part of town.”

  “You remember correctly. There was a murder down there a couple years ago, and when we had to close down the streets to examine the crime scene, traffic was stopped all the way from Piazza Navona to the river. What kind of information was in his notes?”

  “Almost everything was information from people on the street. He asked them how the street had changed in the time they had lived or worked on it. He was meticulous about writing down the names of the people, even if they didn’t give him much information. It was obvious that he always looked for the oldest person on eac
h street, the one with the longest memory. If he found pensioners who had lived there all their lives, he hit the jackpot, and that happened on a couple streets. One woman went over every storefront on the street and was able to name each of the businesses that had been in it during her lifetime. A fruit vendor, then a bicycle repair shop, then a tobacco shop, then a florist, that kind of thing. The count had three pages of notes on what she told him.”

  “The man must have had a gift for getting people to open up to him.”

  “Or she just liked to talk.

  “Did he put dates on his notes, I hope?”

  “He did. Part of his British attention to detail, or fastidiousness. So I know which streets he was working on just before he was murdered.”

  “Now we could be getting somewhere.” Piero made a tent with his figures and placed his chin on it in thought. “We’ve got the streets where he spent the time just before his death, and even the names of the people he talked to. It might be a good idea for you to go down there and talk to them.”

  “Me?”

  “Well, you’re the one who has read the count’s notes and knows what they told him. You are the logical person to talk to those people.”

  “But I’m not a policeman.”

  “That’s all right. Sergeant Lamponi is, and she’ll go with you.”

  It was not good news for Rick, as much as the idea of poking around in a murder investigation appealed to him. Carmella would continue to bend his ear about her personal problems. But it appeared that the commissario had made up his mind.

  Piero picked up his desk phone and pressed a button. “Is Lamponi around? Good, send her to my office.” He put down the phone and turned back to Rick as he opened a file on his desk. “This is the Count Zimbardi file, and at this point it doesn’t have much except the initial crime scene reports, the autopsy, the bus ticket from his pocket, and the statements from the people who found the body as well as the first policemen on the scene. Perhaps what you find out will beef it up.” He held his open hand a few inches above the file to show how much more could be filled in.