Lumaga peeled off his black jacket to make himself less threatening and positioned a chair between each of their beds. Although Marcus sat behind him, he was the one the girls mainly looked at, and he rewarded each reply they gave Lumaga with a small nod of encouragement. They didn’t pay attention to the video camera on a tripod.
It was Elizabeth who gave the most substantive answers, but Lumaga frequently turned to the younger girl for confirmation. Following their blood transfusions, they had more energy and they were more animated.
“This white room,” Lumaga said. “Was this the first place you were taken to?”
They both said they thought so, but neither exactly remembered.
“Did you stay anywhere else or was this the only place?”
“Just the white room,” Elizabeth said.
“What was in the room?”
“We each had a bed. We each had a chair. We each had a chest of drawers.”
“What was in the drawers?”
“Our clothes.”
“What kind of clothes?”
“Shorts, tees, underpants, socks.”
“All white?”
“Yes!” an exasperated Victoria said.
“So, everything was white,” Lumaga said. “The walls, the floor, the bed covers.”
“Not everything,” Victoria said, continuing her impatience. “Our toys and our books were different colors.”
“Ah, toys! What kinds of toys?”
There were board games, and puzzles, and Legos, and picture books for Victoria, chapter books for Elizabeth.
Lumaga posed the question that Marcus almost called out despite his promise to observe only. How did the spacemen have games from Earth?
“I asked,” Elizabeth said proudly. “They said that they could make anything that we wanted from our planet.”
“Did you have television? Videos? Video games?”
“We had videos and video games from Earth. They got those for us.”
“And what about food? Did you have Earth food?”
“Yes, silly,” Victoria said. “We weren’t going to eat space food, were we?”
“I’m sorry. I was being silly, wasn’t I?” Lumaga said. “So, you had chicken and fish and eggs and hamburgers and pasta and ice cream?”
They both nodded and Elizabeth said, “I know what you’re going to ask next. You’re going to ask if they had farm animals in space.”
“That’s precisely what I was going to ask.”
“They said they didn’t need animals. They had machines that could make any food we liked.”
“Was the food good?”
“It was yummy,” Victoria said.
“Now what about toilets? Where were your toilets?”
“In a bathroom, silly,” Victoria said.
“In the same white room?”
“Through a door,” Elizabeth said.
He asked if the bathroom was the same as on Earth. They were. Did the spacemen ever use the bathroom? The girls thought the question was hilarious. Of course not, they said.
“Gray Man and Gray Woman don’t use toilets!” Elizabeth exclaimed.
“They built them for us because we’re human beings, silly,” Victoria added.
“Okay, then, I’d like to ask you some more things about the Gray Man and the Gray Woman now. You told Uncle Marcus that they spoke English. How did they know how to do that?”
“They can speak any language on any planet,” Elizabeth said. She added proudly, “I know because I asked.”
“Well, that was clever of you. Did you test them?”
“Oh, yes. Gray Man was very clever. He could say things in Italian, like our mother.”
“Like what?”
“Anything. He could speak fast. I couldn’t understand him. I only remember a few Italian words.”
“Tell me, how could you tell that one of them was a woman and one was a man?”
“The woman’s voice was higher,” Elizabeth said.
“The funny voice you told Uncle Marcus about.”
She nodded.
“For the camera, can you make the voices again?”
They both produced their versions of the vibrating, raspy tones.
“My goodness. They certainly are funny voices. The Gray Woman. Was there anything else that made you think she was a woman? Did she have, you know—?” With his hands over his chest, he made the universal sign for breasts.
Victoria giggled and said she didn’t know and Elizabeth explained that their white jumpsuits were too baggy to tell.
“Were Gray Man and Gray Woman the only spacemen you ever saw?”
“It was just those two.”
“Okay. Now I’m interested to know if they told you why they took you.”
“They wanted to study us,” Elizabeth said.
“Why?”
“They said they liked Earth.”
Had they visited Earth before?
The girls didn’t know.
“How did they study you?”
“They stuck needles into us.”
“That must have hurt.”
Victoria said it often made her cry.
“Did they just take out blood or did they put things into your body?”
“Both.”
“Were you sick at all? Besides these nosebleeds, I mean.”
Elizabeth said, “We were sick when we first got there, but then we got better.”
“What kind of sickness?”
“We were tired and our tummies were bad.”
“Did they give you medicine?”
They couldn’t remember.
“Did they take you to their planet?”
“We only stayed on the spaceship,” Elizabeth said.
“Did they tell you why they didn’t let your parents stay with you?”
“We asked about them at first,” Elizabeth said, “but they didn’t tell us anything. We stopped asking.”
“Okay, now this is a very important question,” Lumaga said, leaning forward.
Go on, ask it, Marcus thought. Ask the damned question.
“You’ve been gone for four whole years. When did you notice you weren’t getting any older?”
Bingo, Marcus thought.
Elizabeth leaned forward too, imitating the policeman. She had been propped on two pillows and one of them slipped behind her back.
“I didn’t notice for the longest time,” she said. “And then, one day, all of a sudden, I remember telling Vicky, ‘You’re still a little girl!’”
“And, Victoria, do you remember what you said to your sister?”
“I think I told her she looked the same too.”
“You did,” Elizabeth said. “That’s exactly what you said.”
“Did you mention this to the gray people?”
“I did,” Elizabeth said. “Vicky didn’t.”
“What did they say?”
“They said that’s what happens in space.”
“I see. That’s what happens in space. Did it seem like you were gone for four whole years?”
Elizabeth got her pillows squared away and said, “It seemed like a long, long time. I got bored a lot.”
Victoria didn’t offer her perception. She yawned and sank beneath her covers.
“You’re getting tired,” Lumaga said. “Last questions. When did you start feeling ill with these nosebleeds?”
“Not long ago,” Elizabeth said.
“Days, weeks?”
“Days.”
“Did they tell you they were taking you home?”
Elizabeth said, “One night, Gray Man told us we were going home. The lights went out, and we fell asleep like usual, but we didn’t wake up in the white room. We woke up in our old house. Gray Man wasn’t there. We haven’t seen him again. Then the old man and old woman came.”
“The housekeepers,” Lumaga said helpfully.
“They called Grandma Leonora and Grandpa Armando.”
“Okay, my dears. You’ve been so very, very helpful. We’re going to let you rest now. I’m sure your grandparents will be coming to see you later.”
Outside their room, Lumaga said, “You were very well behaved, Marcus.”
“Only because you did a nice job. In fact, I couldn’t have done it any better myself.”
“My God! High praise from my American colleague.”
“I’ll even buy you a drink tonight,” Marcus said.
“Tonight, I’ll be with my beloved.”
“She hasn’t divorced you yet?”
“Not yet. The city only has two hundred thousand residents. It would be quite difficult for her to find a better husband.”
*
Later on, Lumaga gave Marcus a ride to the Carabinieri station. The old war room with its large whiteboard was long gone, replaced by a warren of cubicles and desks. In a small conference room, Lumaga summoned his sub-lieutenant for an update on pending items.
The woman, a young Carabinieri officer named Fabiana Odorico who had been transferred to Reggio Calabria from Naples to shore up Lumaga’s squad of ’Ndrangheta hunters, flipped open her notebook and eyed Marcus suspiciously. She had severe, angular features and a short, mannish hairstyle.
“It’s okay,” Lumaga said. “Signor Handler represents the Andreason family interests. He’s someone we can trust. We’re scratching each other’s backs.”
“Very well,” Odorico said. “We have the full analysis of the fingerprints from Villa Shibui. The ones we couldn’t identify did belong to Signore Handler and Signore Andreason. So, unfortunately, there are no unidentified prints. We can presume that whoever brought the girls back to the villa wore gloves.”
Marcus said, “Either that or the girls were beamed into the house from space.”
“Is that supposed to be a joke?” Odorico asked.
“On the contrary,” Lumaga said, supporting his colleague with a wink. “It’s a theory that we have not yet been able to exclude.”
She looked at them as if they had been drinking and said, “Fine. We won’t exclude that possibility, despite the forced rear door. I called the DNA laboratories in Milan and the Hague. We’ll receive the final reports tomorrow, but they told me that it appears the girls’ DNA will match the grandparents with a 99.99 percent certainty. So, we can be confident that based on their fingerprints, facial characteristics, and now DNA, that Elizabeth and Victoria are the girls who disappeared four years ago.”
Lumaga said. “Now that we have the proof, we need to find experts who can advise us on the scope of rational possibilities for this phenomenon.”
“Besides aliens,” Odorico said.
“Now, the sub-lieutenant mocks me,” Lumaga said.
“I’ll make some calls,” Marcus said, “but I doubt we’ll find anyone who’s seen anything like this before.”
“That’s probably true, but my superiors will ask the question. I’d like to be able to hide behind a so-called expert. Anything else, Fabiana?” Lumaga asked.
“Your order to analyze CCTV files in the areas surrounding Villa Shibui is doomed to failure, I’m afraid. We don’t have any ideas about the vehicle that might have transported the girls. The team are looking for images of girls in the windows of cars or vans, but I’m afraid it’s going to be a big waste of time.”
“Also, probably true,” Lumaga said, “but it’s still necessary. Anything else?”
“Only this,” she said, pulling her tablet computer from its case. “The artist spent time this morning with the girls. We have her sketches of the Gray Man and the Gray Woman.”
“The best for last,” Lumaga grunted.
Marcus and Lumaga stared at the sketches, swiping through the images.
To Marcus, they were caricatures of the gray men from outer space that had been burned into the collective unconscious ever since the days of Roswell, New Mexico. Their bumpy skin was slate-gray. Their eyes were huge, dark ovals. Their ears and noses were nothing but membranous holes, their mouths, perfectly black spheres, no bigger than a golf ball with no visible teeth. Gray hands poked from white tunics, with four long fingers and a shorter thumb. It wasn’t possible to say which one was male, which was female.
An aide knocked and informed Lumaga that the press was assembled and waiting.
“What’s your plan?” Marcus asked.
Lumaga stood and adjusted his uniform. “I intend to lie a lot.”