“GOODBYE, ALDO. YOU WERE really never much of a soldier.”
They watched the bony, naked shape slip soundlessly beneath the surface of the pool, then disappear in a gentle swirl. Borghini winked at his young apprentice.
“No one saw you, Beppe?”
“No one, maestro.”
“You’re certain?”
“The street was deserted. We just drew up and asked him the way to Frascati. When he came up to the car—woosh.” The boy made a whistling sound. “We had him inside in a minute.”
“Did he make much of a fuss?”
“He was too frightened, maestro.”
“He wept, you say?”
“When he caught on who we were and all, he offered us money to let him go. When that didn’t work, he pleaded.”
Borghini chuckled at the thought of his old associate pleading. He reached behind him for one of the long bamboo poles leaning up against a nearby wall. He thrust it into the pool, and its tip quickly encountered something solid not far beneath the surface. With a deep dipping motion, the colonel pushed down hard against it, making a grunting sound as he did so. Almost at once, the murky surface surrounding the pole appeared to drop, then swirl in a counterclockwise circle as Borghini sent the pole plunging deeper.
The boy watched the roiled surface spread out and slap noisily at the edges of the pool. He stepped back to avoid the highly caustic fluid from splashing his shoes. He watched, not moving, never once lifting his gaze until the swirling vortex near the center of the pool grew still once more. By then, the colonel had returned his pole to its place among several others resting against the wall.
“In a few days,” Borghini said, wringing his hands dry on a dirty towel, “our beloved, late-lamented Pettigrilli will be ready for the flensing beam. And then, my dear Beppe.”
“Yes, maestro?”
“Can you guess what is next?”
“Yes, maestro.” The boy spoke with the quiet, unquestioning obedience of an acolyte in a sacred order. “You will then have to fetch the young lady in the photographs.”
Ludovico Borghini touched a candle to the small cigarillo clenched between his teeth and splashed another finger of grappa into his glass. It was nearly midnight. He sat at the dinner table, exhausted after a day of strenuous activity.
He’d scarcely eaten since morning. Having returned muddy and exhausted less than an hour ago, he found Beppe had left him a bland, rubbery piece of chicken and overboiled vegetables. There was even a slice of commercial cake for dessert. He gazed at it in disgust, then pushed his plate away and resigned himself to the simple pleasure of bread and grappa.
His thirst for that fiery white liquid had sharpened considerably over the past months. Its benefits to him were not inconsiderable. It had the power to quell in him the gnawing, fretful ache of life he carried about with him each day from morning until night.
A pleasant drowsy sensation had started to flow upward from his feet, radiating outward into his limbs and chest and settling finally behind his eyes. The effect was to muffle all of the jarring, dissonant noises from the street outside. He knew from the numb little circle erupting at the center of his forehead that it would soon be time for him to go upstairs to sleep. It was a particularly pleasing sensation to him—but not for the sensation in itself. He liked to recall that as a young man Fra Girolamo, the mad monk Savonarola, while casting about for some direction in life, had dreamed that while he slept a stream of icy water had poured relentlessly down on his forehead. When he woke, Savonarola felt purified, cleansed, and renewed. From that point on, he knew precisely what his life’s work was to be.
Though his eyes had begun to droop, Borghini pulled out from inside his rumpled tunic a set of photographs and, like a hand of whist, fanned them out on the table before him.
The familiar features of a young woman on the Ponte Vecchio swam before his woozy eyes. He had to struggle to focus his gaze. One had her browsing at the outdoor stand of an inexpensive jeweler. Another had her stepping from a bus near the Baptistry. Each shot, candid, unposed, registered some specific reaction in her strikingly expressive face—everything from indifference to a kind of veiled sorrow. In several photos, she chatted with a vendor …
“You can have her, Ludo.”
“I prefer the other, Papa.”
“But that one has no breasts. Why don’t you take the one with the good breasts. Or possibly even the negra. Signora, bring the tutzone here for a moment. Look at those thighs, Ludo. But be careful. She could crush you between them.”
Borghini’s eyes scanned every line of that well-remembered face. He knew each crease, each shadow. Over the years, the face had changed. No doubt of that. When still a girl just out of university, there’d been a kind of radical spark in her look. There was a defiance to it, a certain inclination to challenge authority and break laws.
Here now, in a dozen or so candid photos, he saw an older, more self-assured woman. Still young, to be sure, not yet thirty, that fever that once burned in her appeared to have been cooled by time and circumstances. The need to make her own way, to get on with life, had tempered the rebelliousness and opened her to accommodation.
No doubt she would marry soon—some professional man, a lawyer, an engineer, perhaps, or a university teacher. Some upstanding, safe, prosaic dolt who’d give her six children and a house in the suburbs. They’d go to the seashore in the summer. Shaking his head, he belched, bringing up a sour chyme of undigested grappa that burned the back of his throat.
“Well, what are you waiting for? Go on. I won’t bite you. Here … give me your hand. What’s the matter with you? Don’t be silly. I’ll make it good for you. I won’t hurt you. Here, now give me your hand. Now squeeze and rub. Back and forth. Very gentle. That’s it. Be nice. A girl likes it when you’re nice. Good. Very good. See? It’s not so terrible. I can’t believe this is really your first time. And even your papa has to bring you. How old did you say—”
“Fifteen.”
“Fifteen? Oh my. That feels nice. Keep going. Hold me close. Don’t you like it? What’s the matter? Don’t you like a black girl? I can show you things no white girl can. Here, let me—Oh, what’s wrong? We haven’t even begun and already … Oh, forgive me. I don’t mean to laugh. I’m stupid. Wait—let me wash you off. You don’t want the old man to see.”
From somewhere upstairs in the far reaches of the empty palazzo, Borghini heard the old grandfather clock strike the hour. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a crumpled, dirt-stained piece of paper on which had been written a note in a large, childish scrawl. During the past several weeks, he’d read it over and over again, each time with a sense of slowly mounting anger.
Maestro,
No mistake. It was Pettigrilli at the signorina’s place. I followed him there to Fiesole. They sat outside in the garden. They drank tea and I watched from behind a bush. He stayed about an hour.
Beppe
Borghini crumpled the note in his fist and flung it across the table. “So,” he muttered. “There is no longer any doubt. It had to be Isobel who sent the museum fellow around to the gallery. What was he looking for? Isobel knows nothing about the gallery; she’s never been there. But Pettigrilli, that pukey little strunz, had. Often enough. And he told her, ay? Well, now we’ve taken care of Pettigrilli and his long tongue. And as for you, my darling Isobel,” he cooed drunkenly at the snapshots fanned out across the tabletop, “it seems our paths are soon to cross again.”
That night, while he lay in bed upstairs in the dark, the eyes appeared on his wall. He watched them float past him—large, staring, disembodied. They would glide so close, he could see the hairs on the lashes and brows. A pale bluish aura seemed to emanate from somewhere within them, and as they dipped and swerved past, he could feel the cool trail of air left behind in their wake.
The first time he’d seen the eyes, as a small boy, not quite ten, it had frightened him. But over the months, then years, it occurred with increasing frequency, and by now he’d gotten used to it, actually come to like it. He even looked forward to their next appearance.