On Sundays, Oscar’s pastry shop is closed all day; it opens again at two in the morning to start making the treats for the next day. My father-in-law is bored on Sunday. Since he was widowed, or since he’s become a whiplash single, as he likes to say, he only comes home to sleep. When his wife was still alive, they’d often come to our house to eat or else we’d go over to their place. Now he hangs out in Trastevere, sitting in a bar to watch the A. S. Roma game, striking up conversations with anyone capable of helping him spend a cheery fifteen minutes.
“So you know what I did last Sunday?” he asks me with uncommon cockiness.
“No, what?” I reply, following the script.
“While I was out on my walk, I saw a huge crowd of tourists emerge from the Ottaviano Metro station: a couple of classes of Scandinavian students on a field trip, a horde of Japanese photographers of all ages, and a swarm of German retirees wearing shorts. And you know what I wound up doing?”
“No, what did you wind up doing?” I hate it when he asks questions just to make sure he has the attention of his audience, which in this case is just me.
“I trooped in with the Germans. The tour includes the Colosseum, the Dome of Saint Peter’s, and the Vatican Museums. The tour guide, a certain Martina, is Italian but talks to them in German so I don’t understand a word. So you know what I come up with then?”
“No, what do you come up with then?” I ask in a resigned voice.
“I pretend I’m mute! Which makes everyone like me.”
I smile at the thought of him munching sauerkraut sandwiches offered by coquettish Bavarian eighty-year-olds, laughing at jokes he doesn’t understand, making his way up the stairs inside the big Dome of Saint Peter’s, and worming his way into crowded souvenir pictures.
“And the tour guide didn’t notice a thing?”
“Not a thing. But she was an interesting type. I overheard a phone call she was making in Italian, to her daughter, I think. She’s a widow and works as a tour guide strictly in her spare time.”
“Did you like her?”
“I didn’t talk to her. I was a German mute.”
“Oh, right.”
“But anyway, yes, I did like her. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have spent the whole day with them,” he adds with a wink.
“Did you spend the whole day with them?”
“I even had dinner with them, in a restaurant over by Campo de’ Fiori. I rode back to the hotel with them on the tour bus, went upstairs, and took a back exit. Then I followed Signora Martina out to the parking lot. I wanted to catch up with her and confess to my fraud. Maybe even ask her if she wanted to get a drink.”
“But?”
“How do you know there’s a but?”
“There’s always a but. Go on.”
“But a young man came to pick her up. I’d guess her grandson. They got in his car together and then she vanished into the night.”
“And now you want to find her again?”
“I called the company who ran the tour, but there wasn’t any Martina. And anyway they went on and on about issues of privacy.”
“Maybe Martina is a nom de plume.”
“For a tour guide?”
“What other clues do you have?”
“I have this.”
He shows me a snapshot of him standing next to a sprightly seventy-year-old woman who looks like Miss Marple, in front of the Colosseum.
“Pretty, eh?”
I nod in response to the rhetorical question. Ever since his wife died, I haven’t seen my father-in-law so interested in another woman, except for that time Catherine Deneuve came into his pastry shop to ask directions. That day is just one of a number of favorite stories that always start “When Catherine and I.” So I know it’s important to find this Martina or whatever her name is.
I e-mail myself a copy of the photo, pull out my Dino Zoff notebook, and jot down:
Track down Miss Marple.