It’s a Tuesday night, and we’re locked out of our apartment in San Marino. It could be worse. We speak the language. We’re sitting in the bar up in the main piazza; for three euro I can buy a glass of red wine and eat all the free food I want. Except it’s 10:00 p.m., and I’ve already eaten. I just want to go home and go to bed. Our rental car is parked down below the condominium. The car keys I have. So if worse comes to worst, we can drive up the hill and book into a hotel.
“Ask Aeneas for a locksmith’s number,” my wife says. Aeneas, our bartender friend, is pouring drinks for fifty or so people at the moment.
“What’s the word for locksmith?”
“Just explain. The door is locked. The key is inside.”
What’s the worst? There’s no local locksmith. Or there is a local locksmith, but he’s on vacation in Yugoslavia. And when he finally gets back a couple of days from now, he can’t just pick the lock; he has to drill it and replace it, which will take hours and cost us who knows what.
I’ve been waiting for this disaster to happen. Usually you know how to burgle your house. You know its soft spot, a window you left unlatched and can slide open, a back door with a lock you can jimmy. Or you keep a key outside somewhere. Our apartment has no back door. The side windows are two stories up, in back, three. I don’t know where I would leave a key outside. There’s so much outside outside.
“Don’t you have someone you can ask for a key?” Aeneas shouts over the soccer game everyone is watching. “When this happens to me, I go upstairs and ask my parents.”
I show him the set of keys my niece has brought us. Our key, I tell him, on our set, which I should be holding, is in the lock—inside the apartment, where I leave it so I don’t forget it when I walk out the door. That’s my system, obviously a failure.
Aeneas smiles, gives me a knowing look. “One of those,” he says. The lock, he means. When there’s a key inserted in the lock on the inside, a spare key inserted in the lock on the outside doesn’t work. It just turns and turns in the lock, in neutral. It’s a terrible feeling.
The number he gives us is 888-888. We get the cops on the phone. They give us another number: 888-866. The dispatcher says it may be awhile. There’s another emergency at the moment. We take a seat in the bar. What’s awhile in San Marino?
I’ve dealt with cops in Italy a few times. Years ago, I got pulled over. Wanded over, I should say. Here’s how it works: A couple of cops in their baby blue Fiat stop by the side of the road. One of them, wearing his tall black boots, tailored pants, fitted waist jacket, and cap, holding an arrow-shaped wand, waves you to the side of the road. It’s like an invitation. I don’t know what they would do if you kept on going. Use the wand to commandeer your car, perhaps.
I pull over, come to a stop, and buzz down my window. “What did I do?” I ask.
“Documents,” he says.
Cars go swishing past us. I fumble my wallet out of my pocket, realize with a sinking feeling I don’t have my passport with me. That might be against the law. Double trouble.
“Con calma,” he says. Keep cool.
I hand him my Michigan driver’s license and the rental car forms. He regards them with a bland look on his face, glances at me, and then nods.
“Va bene,” he says, and wands me toward the road.
“What did I do?”
“You go,” he says, wanding me away a little more vigorously.
So I went.
Ten months ago I got a parking ticket in Pesaro, a town down the coast. It was a secret ticket. I drove somewhere I shouldn’t have, parked in a restricted area. A stealth photo was taken of my rental car’s license plate and then transmitted to the authorities. They processed it and let me know by mail I owed sixty-two euro for illegal parking. Only it wasn’t that simple. First they contacted the rental car company, asked for my mailing address in the States, and waited a few months for it; once they got my address, they waited a few more months—why I don’t know—and then forwarded a six-page document to me in a hand-addressed envelope. It came registered mail, which I had to drive to the post office to sign for. Inside was a bad copy of the photographed license plate, a map of the scene of the crime, a verbal description of the infraction, the pertinent legal language, and instructions on how to pay the fine, which, by the time I got the mail, had tripled.
Still in Detroit, I emailed the cops in Pesaro and asked in my pidgin written Italian for an audience, which was granted, in perfect English. I could see Major Achille Manna on October 19 at 9:30 a.m.
I arrived fifteen minutes early and presented myself to a Lieutenant Mariotti. I explained I was there to see Major Manna. The lieutenant wore stylish glasses (clear frames, red bands), a white shirt and tie, and a navy blue police blazer with stripes and gold braid. He looked dazzling. I had been mentally rehearsing my police station Italian. I am guilty. I am responsible. I am sorry. Had I known, I would have paid on time.
When I was shown in to see him, the major was sitting behind his desk. No blazer. He wore a white shirt and tie and reminded me a little of Dom DeLuise. He was ready for me. He lifted a four-inch stack of tickets and shook his head. The sight of them, I think, made him tired, made him hate his job and probably me.
“These are all rental cars,” he said.
I am guilty.
“We have to contact all these companies—Maggiore, Autoeuropa, Europecar, Sixt, Car in Sicily, Hertz.”
I am responsible.
“Do you know, Mr. Bailey, how much work it is to process all of these?” He dropped the mass on his desk.
I was holding my ticket and documents in my lap. He reached for them, pulled out the page with the bad photo, and showed me. Then he turned to the map and showed me the area, Castelfidardo. This, he said, was a clearly marked area, limited access, residents only.
I am sorry.
“Had I known, I would have paid,” I said. “Ten months have passed, and the fine now is 180 euro.”
He shook his head, laid a big hand on the stack of tickets.
“It seems excessive,” I said.
“You think so.”
The meeting was not going well. I thought about how many dishes of pasta, how many liters of wine I could buy with all those euro. Thursday was market day up the mountain in Borgo Maggiore. I wanted to buy a coat. One year, at the rental car stand in Bologna, the representative told me the police will eventually forget about tickets if you wait long enough. Six months, he said, and you were free.
“Always?” I asked.
Yes. Maybe. He shrugged. Who wants to test that theory, when the rental car company has your credit card number?
The major tapped my documents and chewed at his cheek. Now what? Why would they grant me this meeting if they were going to make me pay the full amount? We sat with our guilt and frustration a long moment. Then he flipped to the payment instructions in my documents and inked an X next to sixty-two euro.
“Pay the lieutenant,” he said.
I thanked him and said, “I hope I don’t see you again.” He looked at me askance. Then he saw: I was making a joke.
“Not here, anyway,” he said.
We’ve been waiting at the bar half an hour or so when a firetruck pulls into the piazza in San Marino. The door on the driver’s side swings open and a tall fireman climbs out. He’s wearing overalls and boots. I walk across the piazza to him, and he asks me if I’m Canducci.
“My wife is,” I say.
He opens the back door and tells me to climb in.
I’ve never ridden in a rig like this, and this one is a beauty, although I see now it’s less firetruck and more all-purpose emergency response vehicle, very red, even at night. I tell him our building is just down the street. We’ll walk, he can follow.
The building is a six-story condo with a stairwell and elevator near the front of the building. The stairwell has an echo. Every ciao, buongiorno, buona sera, and salve’, every hinge squeak, key jingle, and door closing resounds from basement to top floor, amplified by the echo.
It turns out there are two firemen, one tall, one short, and they are both immaculate, Platonic images of the fireman. They have a kit that consists of thin strips of plastic, which they begin slipping into the seams between the door and its casing, above and below the latch. Then they start shaking the door, in and out, sliding their strips of plastic up and down. It’s a terrible racket; the banging and sliding echo in the stairwell, deafening.
The short one looks at my wife. “It’s how we do it,” he says.
“Won’t you break the door?”
“Never.”
“The neighbors,” she says. “They must wonder what in the world we’re doing in there.”
The big one is shaking and pounding the door.
The short one nods and smiles. “Your neighbors,” he says with a mischievous look, “when they hear this sound, will probably all be jealous.”
In five minutes, we’re in. We thank the firemen profusely, and they drive off to the next emergency.
Later we’re in bed, lights off. My wife says, “Did you see those guys? Not a hair out of place.”
“GQ.”
“I’ve never seen an ugly fireman over here,” she says.
Lying awake, I rummage through memory for uniforms I’ve worn. Cap and gown, boy scout, marching band. The band uniform was particularly terrible—heavy, stiff, oversized. It was like wearing Styrofoam. I played the trumpet and was part of the oozing green protozoa on the football field forming the letter F from Freeland. Or was the F for Falcons?
One fall afternoon my sophomore year, I found myself in a car with Cordell Bloomer and Terry Savage, heading west on Tittabawassee Road in Cordell’s ’57 Chevy. A little past Curve Road he slowed next to a landmark, a DO NOT PASS sign, that would help him find a pint of Corby’s whiskey he had hidden in the ditch. That day was my first taste of whiskey; it was also the first and last night I played the cymbals in the band, banging away at them like a fool, which I most definitely was that night. I could have brought shame to myself, to my school. One slip and I could have disgraced the ugly uniform I was wearing.
“Buona notte,” someone says. A door slams somewhere in the building, echoing in the stairway. Behind our building, a scooter accelerates up the hill. I ask myself, as most adults probably do lying in bed just before sleep: How in the world did I get here?
“You know I was in the marching band?” I say to my wife.
“Hmmm.”
“The uniform,” I start to say, but decide to let it go.
I’m pretty sure I could find that spot again on Tittabawassee Road. And there might be a photo of me in that ridiculous uniform somewhere, in the 1968 school yearbook maybe. I certainly hope so.