“I ONLY STAB IN SELF-DEFENSE”
1.
Scottie threw herself on the couch in despair. She had very conflicting ideas about sex, all of which were based on very little information and almost no experience. She had had no mother to talk to, no sisters. Only Leona, who knew as little as she did. Sex with Michael was quick, and they both kept their eyes closed.
You were not supposed to like it.
You were not supposed to long for it.
You were not supposed to think about it.
You were not supposed to dream about it.
It was not supposed to be fun.
It was not supposed to be about power.
Was it?
Women who did these things were homewreckers, whores.
Weren’t they?
2.
Michael was looking forward to celebrating the fact that he and Duncan were living in the same country, that Michael had improbably, impossibly managed to make that happen. Duncan, the blueblooded scion of an old railroad family, the consummate Yale man, was the only person other than Ambassador Luce he knew in Rome, and was the entire reason he had come to Italy at all. They had arranged to meet after work at a noisy bar near the Spanish Steps. It was full of expatriates, women in fur stoles and men in sharply tapering trousers that made them look like bandleaders. Duncan, jovial, easygoing, with the quasi-British locution of his class, seemed to know everyone, and to Michael’s annoyance they all came over to greet him with shrieks and hearty ciaos and air kisses and said the same boring things: “Where did you get that suit?” “Have you been to that new club on Via Veneto?” “The ambassador is doing a damn fine job, no matter what they say.” The bar was decorated with large oil paintings of sad clown faces. Michael was impatient as the minutes ticked by. It was Yale all over again, Duncan the big man on campus, Michael the dog under the table waiting for scraps.
They had met at a bar in New Haven. Michael had finally worked up the courage to enter, then lost his nerve at the sight of men in eye makeup. He was leaving when Duncan, who was in his “Masterworks of the Renaissance” course, had spoken to him. Michael had tried to pretend it was a mistake, that he had only come in to make a phone call, but Duncan had pursued him around campus, invited him to meal after meal. Michael felt like Cinderella, and how could he not give in to such an insistent prince?
Though Duncan was the initial pursuer, Michael had always feared that Duncan’s attachment was not as deep as his. He was resigned to this. He repeated to himself lines from Auden: If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me. At each milestone—when Duncan graduated and moved to Scarsdale to work in his father’s firm while he went to Columbia Law—Michael had assumed it was the end, that they would never see each other again. Instead, though there were sometimes silent gaps lasting weeks or months, Duncan always eventually called, inviting him to New York for stolen weekends at the Waldorf-Astoria, or gossipy lunches at 21 where Duncan did wicked imitations of his colleagues. They always ended up in bed.
Then Duncan had gone to work for the State Department in Rome, while Michael pursued a master’s, aiming for that green-lawned boarding school job, and a quiet, chaste life where he could continue his monkish isolation from the “real” world. He had always been a nervous child, and his wartime fears of Nazis, fears that came true when Marco was killed, had morphed easily into fear of a Communist takeover of the United States. Every news report and every political speech fed that fear until, like most other Americans, he was frightened of strangers, terrified about the Soviets’ plans for world domination and anxious about the bomb. He worried about mind control—what if the Soviets were brainwashing Americans right now, via subliminal messages inserted into TV broadcasts? Having loved Duncan, he did not need to ever risk another love affair. If he could spend his days immersed in centuries whose events had been safely corralled into books, he would, he thought, be safe.
Except that when he was actually offered a teaching job at a school so exactly out of his imagination it was uncanny, he had declined it. Instead he had spoken to a rather shadowy fellow who was known on campus as a CIA recruiter. “I speak Italian, so you must send me to Rome, where I can be useful,” he had insisted with a new forcefulness. He had sailed through training, and here he was. He and Duncan could never be together, he knew that, but he would make sure they were never truly apart.
He grabbed a bottle of champagne and leaned into Duncan as he poured it, slipping a hotel key into his pocket. “Room 114,” Michael whispered.
“Darling,” said Duncan as his wife, Julie, walked into the bar wearing a black and white Dior gown and an ermine cape with matching hat. She stretched out her long neck and allowed Duncan to graze her cheek with his lips.
“I didn’t realize you were in Rome,” she said to Michael, reaching out a gloved hand to take the glass from Duncan. “How many of these do I have to have to catch up?”
“It’s Julie’s birthday,” said Duncan.
“Many happy returns,” Michael said.
‘We’re late, I’m afraid, and must run, but it’s lovely to see you. Always nice to see friends from back home.” Her affect was perfectly flat. Her face painted on, her eyes elongated, her lips blood red. A vampire. A snob.
“Michael’s living in Siena,” said Duncan. “He and his wife. An heiress from California.”
Julie’s painted eyebrows rose. “Well, we must make a foursome sometime,” she said. “Does she play bridge?”
“I don’t know. I’ll ask her.”
Duncan and Julie disappeared into the crowds on Via Condotti, and Michael hailed a cab. On his way back to his hotel, a gang of thugs surrounded the cab and tried to force the door open. Michael was terrified, certain that he was about to be killed. It would have been such a dramatic death, but the taxi driver yelled at the men and ran a red light to get away, then apologized to Michael. He seemed used to this.
“We boast we are saints, poets and navigators,” he said, “but also we are criminals. You, signore. You’re Italian, too, aren’t you? Or am I wrong?”
Michael had lain awake all night, but Duncan had not come to his room.
3.
Scottie was terribly anxious about what to tell Michael. She had to tell him something, in case they ran into Ugo when they were together and he acted strangely. But she couldn’t say, “He made a pass at me,” because then Michael might feel called to defend her honor.
Perhaps it was best just to stick to a close version of the truth.
She burst into genuine tears when he walked through the door from Rome the next day.
“I just wanted to see the city, but then I got embarrassed about whether I was doing something wrong or not, so I ran off, but he must have thought I was very rude, or crazy…” She left out the rest. “I don’t know the rules,” she said. “But I’ll learn them.”
Michael was clearly mystified by this. “You don’t have to,” he said, as if it were obvious. “You’re American.” He held her in his arms. “It’s my fault. I should never have left you.”
“But I think I’ve made an ass of myself with the mayor. And you’re opening a business here. I’m so sorry.”
“I don’t care what that Commie thinks,” he said. “We don’t answer to him. Do you play bridge, by the way?”
“No,” she said, wondering why he was asking at this moment. “Don’t leave me alone again, okay? I missed you.” She kissed him, and pulled him close to feel the warmth of his body. He smelled good, and she sank her face into his neck. “What did you think of Rome?” she asked. “Was it beautiful? What did you do?”
“Just work things,” he said. “It was pretty horrible, actually. I brought you this.” He produced a small replica of the Colosseum in white stone. “Many fewer pickpockets than at the real thing. You wouldn’t like Rome.”
She wished she’d had the chance to decide for herself. She told him about the appliances, and the plumbing, and Carlo Chigi Piccolomini.
“He came himself?” Michael explained that the Chigis and the Piccolominis were two of Siena’s oldest families, with buildings and libraries named after their various illustrious members, which included bankers, generals, astronomers and popes.
“Yes, he mentioned the popes. He was very charming,” she said lightly. “And his wife went to Smith. He raises horses.”
“Oh no.”
Scottie laughed. “I’ve sworn off them,” she said. “For you.”
4.
Scottie was distraught when he came home, told him a confusing story about going sightseeing with Ugo Rosini. She was worried that she had embarrassed him. That was sweet. His tone as he reassured her was light, but he was genuinely alarmed by the story. He had been warned about this in training. Did Rosini know why he was really there? Was he trying to get information out of her? Get into their home so he could plant a listening device? This was what they did, they went after those who were close to you.
For the millionth time he wished he could tell her why they were really there. But he had been sworn to secrecy, taken an oath, and they had stressed over and over that it wasn’t safe.
He studied her as she got ready for bed. The courtship and marriage had been a bit of a blur for him, with everything else that was on his mind. The CIA encouraged intelligence agents to marry. And Clare Boothe Luce, no less, had suggested he marry a Vassar girl. “They know how to keep secrets,” she said as he sat on a silk-striped chair in her New York apartment when he went to discuss his mission with her, already in way over his head with these glamorous people, yet determined to impress them all. Scottie was a set of very appealing labels: beautiful, Vassar, California, money (or so he’d thought), horses. And no parents to disapprove of him, to point out that he was not in her class. He couldn’t believe his luck. It was while shopping for appliances that he had felt his awe of Scottie turning to affection, that he began to see her as a human being. She wasn’t well read, but she was game, and game was something he himself was short on, especially when he ran low on the Benzedrine his CIA trainers had introduced him to and supplied him with so generously. “Takes the edge off,” they had said. He tried on the boat over to educate her a little bit about Italy, about the history of the place and its current state, but he could see she wasn’t much interested. Her eyes would glaze over the way the undergraduates’ did when he was teaching a section of art history. Maybe it was better that he hadn’t become a high school teacher, he thought. He didn’t have the charisma for it, which disappointed him, because history was so real to him, so fascinating, so alive.
But now he was here to ensure Italy’s future would be as a non-Communist country. And he would do it. He would sway the election in the way they had trained him to, by meeting “opinion molders” in the press and government, by showing local business owners that prosperity lay in ties with America, not the Soviet Union, and by a little under-the-table, illegal campaign funding where needed.
Or he would fail, Italy would go Communist, and nuclear war would annihilate them all.
And it would be all his fault.
Oh God, he thought, reaching for the Bennies.
5.
When she was brushing her teeth that night she said shyly, “If we want to, we can, you know.”
He took her in his arms and kissed her forehead. “I’m awfully tired after the trip,” he said. “Rain check?”
They had hardly had sex since their marriage, and they hadn’t even talked about starting a family. She chalked this up to him being Catholic—they left family planning up to God. Would he believe her when in a few weeks she announced that she was pregnant with their child? She had tried to give him no reason to doubt her honesty. When he turned his back she ran a hand over her breasts. They were growing, and her belly wasn’t quite perfectly flat anymore. Mornings were queasy, but by lunch she was always ravenous. For now she could blame the pasta for her changing shape …
6.
Michael and Scottie made their mandated appearance at the Questura di Siena, the police station located under an elaborate marble arch striped in black and white.
“This would have been part of the new Duomo, but it was left unfinished when the plague hit in 1348,” said Michael in docent mode as he held the door of the police station open for her. “The workmen dropped their hammers and ran home. Within a few weeks, most of the city was dead.”
“The medieval equivalent of a nuclear blast,” said Scottie. Michael paled.
Tenente Pisano did not look particularly pleased to see them again. He became even less pleased when it became clear that they did not have their documents in order.
“You must go back to America,” announced Pisano. “America dumps on us Lucky Luciano, I send back you.” It was a sensitive subject with the Italians, that the U.S. had deported several top Mafia figures back to Italy.
* * *
Michael shut himself in the only room in their apartment with a telephone jack and placed lengthy, operator-assisted calls to Rome and dictated cables to Detroit.
As Scottie unpacked their dishes, she could hear muffled yelling coming from the next room. At last Michael emerged, red-faced and angry, and poured himself a bourbon.
“Maybe I could help,” she said.
“You?” he snapped. There was the man she liked least, back again. Michael in a state of fear and frustration. Michael feeling trapped.
She thought of Ugo talking about her “power.” Maybe she should use it. Not, she told herself, in that way, but for good. “Why don’t I talk to Mayor Rosini? It will allow me a chance to apologize for running out on him the other day.”
“We can’t have a Communist pulling strings for us!”
“He’s the mayor. You’re opening a business here that will be good for the community. What does it matter what party he belongs to?”
“It matters.”
“Oh, pooh,” she said, went into the bedroom and picked up the phone. Five minutes later, out she came and found Michael having a second bourbon in the living room.
“I can’t believe they don’t have ice in this country,” he fumed.
“You can stop worrying. It’s all been taken care of,” she said. “We won’t be deported.”
Michael brightened, surprised. “What did you say to him?”
“I said it was absurd. The police are acting like we’re criminals. We’re here to help. I reminded him we’re the good guys.”
Michael laughed. “And what did he say to that?”
“Nothing.”
Michael threw his arms around her, lifted her off the ground and spun her around. “You’re amazing!”
But Ugo hadn’t said nothing. He had said, “I would love to show you San Galgano the next time your husband is out of town.”
7.
Under Italian rules, Ugo Rosini would have made a perfect lover for Scottie. He was physically under her spell, which meant she could have made all the decisions. She was not especially attracted to him, which meant she would not lose her head. He was a man of importance in the city, so he would have willingly done things for her—as an Italian, he would have felt it to be his duty. He liked to make women laugh. She would have become the effective First Mistress of Siena, and wielded considerable power of her own.
And he was a Communist, which would have, for the Sienese, lent the whole thing such a delicious irony.
An Italian husband would have looked the other way and enjoyed the fringe benefits, but an American—perhaps not. Perhaps Michael would have found a pistol and righted the slight by shooting him, or her, or himself. Such things happened even in the expatriate community.
Americans and the British have their famous “sense of honor,” while Italians have figura instead. Bella figura is when you’ve done something notable, admirable, something that provokes a little envy. Brutta figura is terrible—you’ve done something wrong, been caught at it, and you feel shame. Figura is an outward thing, about how you are perceived, rather than how you feel inside, as honor is. The Italians are always about appearances. If you are not caught doing something unpleasant, then there is no need to feel bad about it.
8.
Scottie took a break from unpacking and sat on the windowsill, quite wide since the building’s walls were at least two feet thick. She drew up her knees and stared out at the fan-shaped piazza. It was a hive of deliveries and waiters setting up tables and chairs for the bars and restaurants that buffered the contours of the space.
It was like a television, she thought, luring her to the windows to watch the show. At midday, when she paused in unpacking plates and glasses, men in hats crossed quickly on their way to lunch, then returned slowly a couple of hours later. At three, when she was cutting shelf paper for the bookshelf that would have to serve as a linen closet until they could buy an armoire, children made their way home from school in noisy flocks.
By four p.m., it was roasting inside the apartment. Michael had been in and out all day on business. As she went to close the shutters, she spotted a slim figure darting across the square.
“There’s the ox boy again,” she said, pointing down as Michael joined her at the window. The boy was carrying suitcases for two obvious tourists, who hurried to keep up with him. The wife, hobbled by a narrow skirt, placed a precautionary hand atop her straw hat.
“I saw him earlier, too,” she said. “He was dashing in and out of buildings. He’s out there every day. What was his name again?”
Michael stared down at the boy. “Robertino Banchi,” he said.
In the evening, when the whole population of Siena emerged from the brick labyrinth for the passeggiata, which looked from Scottie’s vantage point like the swirling but deliberate movement of a corps de ballet, she saw the boy again, this time carrying a box for an older lady. Around him, swarms of teenagers flirted, little children broke and ran, and everyone moved arm in arm around the piazza in a huge counterclockwise gyre of pleasantries, gossip and ogling.
“Robertino reminds me of a bellhop,” she said. “Knows everyone’s business.”
9.
Michael sat at a café table in the piazza, having a bourbon and soda and writing up his report on Rosini. He left out all mention of Scottie, but suggested he had “initiated contact through an intermediary to determine Rosini’s openness to American ideals.”
Robertino appeared at his side, all flattering eagerness. “Buongiorno, Signor Americano,” he said. “What I can do for you? Take you to Duomo? Show you good jazz bar? Find girl for you?”
Michael looked into the boy’s piercing blue eyes. Could this boy be useful in meeting people who would help him sway the election? He went everywhere in the city, unnoticed. Another invisible, like him.
“Well. I do need someone I can trust to do some work for me. Very important work. Too important for a boy, I think.”
“Can trust me. No one but me. I American like you.”
“You are?”
“Sì, sì, my father was American GI. You no see my eyes and hair? I American!”
“You wouldn’t lie to me?”
“No, signore!”
“I would need this to be a secret between us. You mustn’t tell anyone that you’re working for me.”
“Top secret!” The boy grinned. “Like Il Pipistrello!”
“Yes,” said Michael. “Just like Batman. You’ll pass my house every morning at eight. If I need to meet you, I’ll be in the window. If I’m holding a newspaper, I’ll be feeding pigeons by the Duomo at nine. If I’m holding a cup of coffee, I’ll meet you on the road near Sovicille at three. If one of us doesn’t show, we meet at the Fortezza at nine in the evening. Got it?”
The boy nodded.
He hoped he hadn’t made a huge mistake in using the boy as an asset. There was no handbook for this. In training they had said, “Be friendly but not too friendly when recruiting an asset. Set up a relationship of trust, but never actually trust him. Try to get information on him that you can use against him in case he becomes untrustworthy.”
He ordered another bourbon and soda. He had an asset!
10.
Scottie was in the stairwell carrying empty boxes, in search of a trash bin. She had forgotten to ask Carlo where it was. The front door of the building opened, and Robertino came in with a package.
“Buongiorno, signora,” he said.
Scottie, shy, echoed the greeting, then followed it up with “Dov’è la spazzatura?”—a phrase she had spent several minutes memorizing.
“Oh, you speak Italian now,” said Robertino.
“No, no,” laughed Scottie. “All I know is how to ask where the trash goes!”
He was delivering a package to the primo piano (first floor) and explained for the confused Scottie why the first floor wasn’t the second floor, because there was a ground floor.
“Why don’t you just call the ground floor the first floor?” Scottie asked.
“Because is on the ground.”
There was more to living in a foreign culture than just learning the language, it turned out.
“I can teach you,” he said.
11.
After the incident with Rosini, Michael was worried about Scottie. He sent Robertino to offer to teach her Italian, and told him to make sure it seemed like it was the boy’s own idea. He didn’t want Scottie to realize he was spying on her.
In his weekly encoded report to Luce and his unnamed, shadowy CIA handlers, Michael listed Robertino as a newly recruited “mid-level civil servant,” forty-four years old. One of the rules was that he was supposed to give his contacts aliases, so that reports could be circulated without compromising sources. The first two letters were related to the station’s location, and the names were always in all caps, to signify they were aliases. To Robertino he gave the alias IS OXBLOOD1, meaning he was the first paid source whom Michael (whose own cryp for internal purposes was Geoffrey Sneedle) had recruited.
A cable arrived from the Rome station the next day praising him for recruiting a paid asset. It seemed the vast majority of clandestine officers never recruited any. He would celebrate by taking Scottie out to dinner. He had read a few chapters of a book called How to Have a Happy Marriage, and it mentioned that sharing successes over a nice meal out made a woman feel like a real partner.
“I’m taking Italian lessons,” Scottie announced when he got home, handing him a stinger. “From the ox boy, Robertino.”
“Really? What a great idea,” he said. The brandy and crème de menthe felt heavy on his tongue. “Let’s celebrate. I’m taking you out.”
She clapped her hands and kissed his cheek.
It’s working, he thought. I’m good at this.
It was a perfect arrangement: Robertino chaperoned Scottie every afternoon, and reported to Michael where they went and who they talked to. Michael was impressed by how Scottie took to life as a foreigner—she quickly became much more comfortable in the city than he was. But of course she had no mission other than to keep house for him. He envied her naïveté, her unsullied innocence, her lack of secrets. She was the American ideal he was sent there to promote. She was like Dale Evans, he thought: a beautiful, pure, faithful, true cowgirl. She was the only one not there with an ulterior motive.
12.
Michael was a much quieter person than she’d thought when she met him at the mixer at Vassar. In Scottie’s experience, people who were shy often turned out to be very talkative when you got to know them, but Michael didn’t seem to fit that mold. He was gone every day now, setting up the new Ford showroom in the zona industriale just outside the city walls. She’d thought that he’d sell tractors all day, then be home for the dinner that she’d cook up on the beautiful American appliances. Some days, he was, and he would regale her with stories of Italian farmers making the transition from mules and oxen to tractors, and she would tell him stories of domestic life among the “savages.” But often he was out with potential clients until late, and came home so tired he could barely fall into bed.
Instead, it was mostly Robertino with whom she shared stories. Over the next few weeks, as Scottie took welcome breaks from setting up the apartment, the Italian lessons with Robertino slowly unwrapped and revealed the local culture that had been hidden from her when she arrived. Robertino would come in the afternoons when he was done exercising horses at the stable where he worked. She loved that he brought the smell of horse with him. She would think of questions for him, things that she needed to do, or buy, or wondered about, and have them ready when he arrived. Then they would go out into the city and get what she needed, learning as she went. As they walked through the city, Robertino solemnly explained that cappuccino was never drunk after lunch, because that much milk was considered too heavy late in the day. Tisana was a healing tea. You must never grate cheese on a dish containing seafood—considered a disgusting combination. Ice in a drink would cause a heart attack. Stepping in dog doo was good luck; seeing nuns behind the wheel was bad. Thirteen was fine, but seventeen was unlucky. All stores closed from one to three p.m., or sometimes four, so that everyone could go home for lunch. Lunch was at one, never at two or three, and dinner no earlier than eight p.m.
“For a seemingly anarchist culture,” Scottie pointed out, “you have a lot of rules, and most of them seem to be related to digestion.”
“Nothing is more important than eating,” said Robertino, and Scottie felt as if an important piece of her Italian education had just fallen into place.
13.
Michael was surprised how much he learned about Scottie from Robertino’s reports. The kid was always telling him about something funny Scottie had said, or done, or something she had noticed about the Sienese.
“She got very sad when I showed her where they leave the babies,” Robertino said when they met one morning out near Sovicille. They could not be seen together in Siena, as per agency protocols.
“Leave the babies? What are you talking about?”
“At the door of the nunnery, the revolving wheel. If you have a baby you don’t want, you put it there and turn the wheel to send it inside without them seeing you. The nuns give the babies funny last names like ‘Gift from God’ and ‘Little Toy,’ and they find them homes. The signora, she’s an orphan, too.”
“Yes, I know,” said Michael, but he realized he didn’t, really. He had seen it as convenient that Scottie did not have family ties, but now he thought she must be very lonely. But perhaps asking her about it would make her sad. He wished he knew more about what happy marriages were made of. If only he had time to make a study of them—he needed to finish reading How to Have a Happy Marriage, he thought. His own parents were only a model of what not to do. He wished there was someone he could ask. But he had so much to do, and so little time. The election was coming up, and he had reports to file, and tractors to sell to keep his cover intact. He would make time for that later, once the election was over. She would understand. Plus, she was so down-to-earth—she would know he adored her because he worked so hard to take care of them.
14.
Scottie and Robertino stopped by his grandfather’s house just outside the city walls one afternoon so Signor Banchi could teach her the names of the plants in the garden. He pointed out rosmarino and timo and lavanda, rubbing the leaves between his fingers to release the fragrant perfume of each.
Scottie knew she should probably get a textbook to learn Italian, but she had always had difficulty reading, and Robertino wasn’t really that kind of teacher. He simply talked to her in Italian and expected her to catch on. He began by going around the apartment and naming everything. It was pure poetry.
“Tappeto, caffettiera, rubinetto, divano, fazzoletto, asciugamano…,” he said. Then he named actions like walking, standing, sitting, cooking: “camminare, stare, sedere, cucinare.” From there they were off—she often begged him to slow down, but he rarely did, so she just made him repeat things over and over.
“Andiamo a camminare. Andiamo a fare la spesa.”
Scottie didn’t know what the phrases meant at first, but she discovered as she went. Let’s go for a walk. Let’s go shopping. Robertino explained that she must address him with the tu form of verbs, while he addressed her as the formal Lei.
“It is correct,” he said, as if it were also very important, so she obeyed. She felt safe as she followed Robertino around the city, echoing him—“Vorrei due chili di pomodori, per cortesia.” Because of the way her brain learned, she didn’t think “the word for tomatoes is pomodori”; she just looked at the display and said “pomodori.” It was more like the way a child accumulates language, in large experiential verbal waves. She began to realize that most of what we say in life follows predictable patterns. We use the same phrasings for asking for things, for talking about the weather, for expressing sympathy, for expressing affection. There are scripts we follow without even thinking about it. She wasn’t learning the language word by word; she was learning it by living it. With her difficulty reading, she had always felt a little dumb, even though she had gone to the best girls’ schools in America. Every B-minus had been a hard-fought struggle. Here in Italy she felt like a different person altogether—more expressive, more curious, more open. The only problem was how bothered she felt by the way the men looked at her, something she could not bring up with Robertino, of course, who was still a boy.
“Buongiorno, Signor Sindaco,” Robertino said as they crossed paths with Ugo Rosini one day in Via di Città. Scottie now knew that sindaco was the Italian term for mayor.
Ugo smiled broadly at both of them and tipped his hat. “Beware of the most beautiful woman in Siena,” he told Robertino. Scottie felt herself blush so hard her face burned. Robertino, fortunately, didn’t notice, and launched into a discussion of the latest car he wanted to buy. As he chattered about the merits of Alfas versus Fiats, she thought of something Leona used to say. “A man liking you doesn’t make you special. It just means you have something he wants.”
15.
“Do you ever see my husband?” she asked Robertino one day as they were visiting the Duomo. They were admiring the floors, which depicted classical figures. Scottie was peering down at the Roman goddess Fortuna, who had one foot on the sphere and the other on a ship, holding her sail aloft. She often felt that same precarious thrill.
He looked straight at her. “See him?”
“Yes, you know, around Siena.” She blushed a little, despite having promised herself she wouldn’t. “I’m not spying on him or anything. He just works a lot, and I miss him.”
“If I see him, I will tell you,” he said.
Two days later he arrived at the apartment and announced, “He had lunch with the priest, Father Giovanni, at Trattoria Pepe. They both had lamb.”
She laughed. “And for dessert?”
“Torta della nonna.”
“I’ll have to learn to make that. I didn’t know he liked it.”
“He also likes spaghetti with clams. The waiter at Trattoria Il Bosco told me that. He orders it all the time, when he has lunch with the people who are shopping for tractors. You should make that for him.”
“I will. Thank you.”
He tipped an imaginary hat at her. “Anything for you, signora.”
16.
From what Michael could gather, most of what Robertino and Scottie talked about was horses. Robertino was proud to have taught Scottie all of the terms: cavallo, cavaliere, salto, scuderia, zoccolo, pelo … In preparing his cover as a tractor expert, Michael had read that before the war, horses in Tuscany were fairly rare—cart horses, mostly—and even the horses in the famous Palio horse race were just farm beasts drafted for the event. During the war, horses were primarily a source of food. He had tried to hide from Scottie the fact that there was still an equine butcher only a block from their apartment.
“I can’t look,” she said when she finally discovered what the horse sign over the door meant.
“They think it’s a cure for anemia,” he said.
Now, with incomes growing and a new prosperity in the air, there was a class of Tuscan entrepreneurs who were embracing the horse as a sign of status and building flashy places like the stable where Robertino worked in the mornings. Michael had learned the names of the newly rich Sienese who kept horses there, and included them in his reports. Anyone attracted to that kind of lifestyle would be more interested in capitalism than communism, he reasoned.
Scottie could be useful there, too. She seemed quite observant, and intuitive. She had made him spaghetti with clams the other night, even though he had never told her it was his favorite. She was a terrible cook, but he appreciated the gesture. He should buy her something nice. That was in the book, too—buy her presents even when it’s not her birthday, so she knows you care. He would ask Robertino what to buy her.
17.
“I love that the Italian word for a female rider is amazzone,” she said to Robertino as they walked along the wall of the city near Porta Romana. “Like we’re Amazons.” She bought them both gelati—cioccolato for him and limone for her—and they sat on a bench overlooking the distant hills.
He admired her bracelet. “Mr. Messina bought it for me,” she said, twisting her wrist to admire the pearls. “Do you think it’s too flashy?”
“No,” said Robertino. “I think it’s perfect.”
“I do miss riding,” she said with a sigh.
“A woman on a horse,” said Robertino, “is to be feared.”
She told him about the horses she’d had—starting with Shorty the pony, who bit and kicked and had to wear an anti-grazing strap, put in place after he had yanked many little girls down his neck and over his head in search of green grass. Shorty had taught her to have a good seat and be a decisive rider, transmitting confidence to her mounts. And he had taught her patience—hard-earned, since she had started riding as a tempestuous little six-year-old who would pound her fists on the unimpressed pony’s sides when he disobeyed.
Her voice caught as she told Robertino about her beloved Sonny Boy.
“He was magnificent,” she said, licking the small wooden spoon. “Era un cavallo magnifico.” She told Robertino the story of buying him at Saratoga, saving him from slaughter, how she brought him along slowly, encouraging him and bringing out his best.
“He loves to jump,” she said. “He just loves it.”
“Why did you sell him? Because you came here?”
She sighed. “I had to when my father died,” she said. “Last summer.”
“You have no brothers and sisters?”
“No. There’s an aunt, but that’s it.”
“So you inherited everything? Like I will inherit my grandfather’s farm?”
“I thought so,” she said, thinking of the Spanish-style mansion on Alden Street—the twisted wrought iron, the cool painted tiles, the fountain in the courtyard. “But no. I found out something secret about my father when he died.” Robertino, she knew, loved secrets and gossip.
“A secret?”
“He had no money after all.”
18.
“She thought her father was rich,” Robertino said, “but he wasn’t.”
So there is no trust fund coming her way, thought Michael. “I thought he was in oranges.”
“That’s what he told her, but it wasn’t true. He worked for a man who owned many, many orange groves.”
They were near the heavy, huge walls of the Fortezza. Michael didn’t like to meet in the city, but he was having lunch with a local winemaker later who seemed like a prospect on two fronts: buying tractors and finding out what Rosini’s weaknesses were that could be exploited to make him look bad and lose the election. The kid had signaled him that he had information, so here they were—except the information wasn’t about one of Siena’s power brokers, it was about his own wife.
“He was stealing from the man, a little bit here, a little bit there. For a long time the rich man didn’t notice.”
Michael pictured Scottie’s father raising a daughter alone, a daughter who liked horses. An expensive habit. He would never steal himself, but he could see how it could happen, that you would skim a bit just to make your little girl smile. “And then?”
“He got caught. He was going to go to jail, so he killed himself.”
“Oh my God. I didn’t know that. She said he … died.” Michael realized he had never asked how.
“Her aunt told her, ‘You know what a mirage is? Think of it as a mirage. It was a beautiful mirage, but now it’s gone. It’s all gone.’ She never told anyone, Mrs. Messina. Not at school, not her friends. She only tell me.”
Michael pondered this. How awful for Scottie. How lonely.
“She had to sell her horse to pay for her last year of school. Me, I hate school,” Robertino said. “I would keep the horse and quit!”
She had lost everything. Her father, her money, her beloved horse. A doubt crept into his mind. Was that why she married him? Did girls marry for love, really, or was that just in the movies? Didn’t they marry for security? Did it matter? Men needed wives, and women needed husbands. If you also loved each other, it would be an amazing bonus, but you couldn’t count on it. It would be nice, he thought, if she loved him, but at the same time the idea made him nervous. Too much closeness—that could be dangerous for both of them. To really be safe, he needed to keep her in the dark.
19.
She hoped she hadn’t been stupid to confide in Robertino. It was just that he was the only person she had to really talk to. And he confided in her, too. He told her about a horse he was exercising at the stable, a mare named Camelia who was evil to everyone, but whom he adored. He described the way she shied at ducks and bikes and children, flying into the air sideways.
Scottie thought about Sonny Boy, remembering saying good-bye in the horse trailer, sitting down on the ground and sobbing as the truck pulled away.
“We can go to the stable where I work,” Robertino said as they chose ripe peaches—pesche, not to be confused with fish, pesci—from a display outside the fruit store. “I will show you all the horses. You must meet Camelia.”
She shook her head. That grief had not yet dissipated. “I can’t,” she said.
20.
They were of course both children, Scottie and Robertino, Michael thought as he walked across the beautiful intarsia floor of the Duomo, stopping as he always did to admire the figure of Fortuna. It wasn’t surprising that they got along so well, though he was startled at how much Robertino had learned about her. The bond of horses knit them together. That made sense. For both of them the horse was a way to bound upward across class lines, though neither of them would have seen their hippophilia—he loved that word, and made a note to himself to look up what the word was for people who love hippos—as anything so socioeconomic. For them it was just a deeply rooted passion, profound and inexplicable. He envied them that.
He had never had that kind of friend. Even as a child he had been guarded, already aware that he was different in a way that others found distasteful. When he allowed himself to be excited about something, like when he shouted with joy as he unwrapped a Christmas present from Marco, a picture book of castles, his father had frowned and his sisters had teased him, fake shouting as they opened their own gifts of socks and pickled olives. Marco had tried to help, telling him not to be “such a girl about everything.” He dragged him over to meet the boy next door, but the boy had a bike and other friends, and ignored him. Michael had not felt hurt for long—when that same boy sat next to him in math class, he had reveled in watching him fail.
He kneeled to pray and, as he had been instructed since childhood, reviewed what his sins were, both mortal and venial, made sure he felt sorrow and resolved not to sin again. Then he stood, crossed himself, passed under the gaze of winged cherubs, pushed aside the curtain and entered the ornately carved confessional. He had a lot to say today.