This Crumbling Pageant Read online

  The man in the passenger seat leaned out the window. “Sai dov’è il fioraio?”

  Do you know where the florist’s is?

  “Non lo so,” Scott answered quick. “Sono americano.” I don’t know. I’m American.

  The man laughed. “The one person I ask!” he said in English.

  Scott watched the car drive off, his heart skipping like a rabbit’s. Then he pounded his thigh.

  Enough of this shit. Where were the police? Why hadn’t they found him yet? There was no way the maid hadn’t mentioned him to them. There was no way they hadn’t asked about him themselves. They must have asked about anyone who had entered the apartment. By now they must have analyzed all the prints and hairs and fibers he’d left in the place, and the initials he’d idly chiseled with his fingernail into the wall one day. So, where in creation were they? What kind of rinky-dink operation was this?

  He needed to talk to the maid. He needed to know what information she had given about him, and what, if anything, had occurred in the days leading up to the murder. Had either Luca been seen around Janet? And what about the painting? Had it been reported as stolen? He needed to talk to the damn maid.

  On the other hand, he didn’t want to talk to the damn maid, tempt fate and jog her memory, if by any chance he had slipped her mind. Another ridiculous possibility was that Gemma had withheld information about him on purpose, that she was protecting him for some puzzling reason. But what puzzling reason? That she liked him? That she actively disliked Janet?

  &

  Scott had stopped at a busy crosswalk on Strada Maggiore, when a little pink-faced Englishwoman came up to him in a sneak attack.

  “You knew her, didn’t you?” she was saying excitedly. “Yes you did, I’m sure of it.” Vigorously, she shook under his nose a bus schedule rolled up in a baton.

  He drew back and glanced around nervously. He had no clue who this lady was. Would his downfall manifest itself like this? Dressed in granny glasses and a British accent? “I’m sorry…?” he said, sotto voce.

  “I saw you with her one day. At the supermarket. You were pushing the trolley behind her.”

  The lady with the carton of quail eggs. What was her name?

  Then another, more familiar character came shambling after her. He was a hunched, rosy-cheeked, large-framed man in a rumpled suit. Scott assumed a grave countenance. “Yes,” he said to the woman. “That’s right. It’s Robin, isn’t it? And Richard. How are you?”

  The barrister lurched forward to offer a handshake. “Fine, thanks.” Craning down, he added, “Hiya, pup!”

  Robin tappity-tapped on Scott’s arm with the rolled-up timetable. “Richard and I were just discussing poor Janet when I happened to look over and see you standing here. ‘There’s someone who knew her, as well,’ I said. I have a pretty good memory for faces…but not for names, I’m afraid—”

  “Richard!” Scott exclaimed, making believe it had dawned on him miraculously. “You were her lawyer, weren’t you? Do you have any idea what’s going on with the funeral arrangements?”

  “Can you believe it?” the woman bubbled. “A real live murder! Naturally I told the police everything I know. Have you”—she hesitated, and leered up at Scott over the bifocals—“been questioned by the police yet?”

  “Mm.” He flashed a smile, and rolled his eyes, as if how could he forget. “So how about it, Richard? Do you know anything?”

  Scott was in fact interested in hearing about the services. He’d been trying to decide whether or not to attend. There was bound to be a detective or two present, sticking out among the shabby mourners. But how would he explain skipping out on it if and when he was interrogated? Then again, the whole question was irrelevant if he didn’t lose this little busybody here.

  Richard was looking off as if pondering distant shores. “Well…” he began, “it’s rather complicated at the moment. I know she took a dim view of how they handle interment here. She was actually quite horrified by the idea of being buried in Italy, and then dug up ten years later and shelved in a vault. I’ve been trying to see about having her body flown back to the US. However, in murder cases, this can take a long time. Mortal remains cannot be repatriated until the defense no longer requires them for the post-mortem. Sometimes that’s no more than one, two weeks. But I’ve heard of instances where the body waits around a lot longer, up to three months on one occasion. Of course, it’s a little premature to say, especially since the Questura has not even ruled the death a homicide yet—”

  “Oh, don’t be silly, Richard!” Robin said authoritatively. “Of course they will.” She looked around, then leaned in and said in a stage whisper, “They say her body was found in the fireplace, chucked in with all those frightful dolls.”

  Scott broke out in a sweat. He was dead certain he’d caught Holly’s flu. “Does anyone know when she was murdered?” he heard himself ask. He suddenly felt as if he were in the presence of Sherlock Holmes and Miss Marple incarnate.

  The woman’s eyes went up to Richard. Again, he had that faraway look on his face. He held himself like that as an ambulance wailed and wheeled around the corner, ruffling a strand of his scanty hair.

  “It’s my understanding,” he said at last, “that the death occurred not minutes before the body was discovered.”

  Scott was getting short of breath. Questions about Holly and the credibility of a wife as an alibi swirled in his head. He asked, “And do they have any idea who did it?”

  The jazzy, alternating tones of the siren bended mournfully in the distance. A private smile played on the Englishman’s lips. “Oh. They have an idea.”

  “I’m sorry,” Scott said dizzily. He was feeling almost too weak to stand now. “I have to go. My wife hasn’t been well.”

  Richard gave his regards. Scott nodded, and then said good-bye to Robin.

  “What did you say your name was again?” she asked.

  “Scott.”

  “Scott…?” she said, trying to coax a last name out of him.

  He forced a friendly smile. “Yes. Scott.”

  &

  He made it home, the symptoms passing.

  He expected Holly to be in bed, curled up under the comforter as if cast in ash. Instead she was up and about, chatting on her phone in musical Italian. She looked vibrant in her pink Victoria’s Secret pajamas, and thin as a child. She’d carved a pear and some Asiago cheese into slices, and passed with her plate from the kitchen to the living room table. Scott wrestled with the dog leash while attempting to translate stray phrases:

  “I thought I was going to die.”

  “I’ll start work again tomorrow.”

  “…the exhibition.”

  Shop talk. She sat at the table, on which sat a mug of caffè latte, a glass of mineral water, and a cutting board of bread. She cradled the phone with her shoulder, flicked her hair, sundered a hunk of the unsalted bread, and tore into it with her teeth. Scott wandered thoughtfully to the bookcase and stood at eye level with the onyx obelisk.

  He’d already looked through Holly’s cell phone, taking advantage of her recent incapacitation to see if he could uncover any clues. But all he’d uncovered was a scroll of foreign names and phone numbers, and yards upon yards of text messages. There were plenty of communications to and from both San Michele and Gallo, portioned out evenly. All were in Italian. None looked even a little dirty.

  Scott’s finger plowed through the dust on the black obelisk.

  The newspapers hadn’t named a murder weapon. A fatal “hit” to the head was all they said. But the murder weapon…the murder weapon… What was the murder weapon?

  It was staring him in the face.

  “The obelisk,” he heard himself whisper.

  Immediately he peeked over at Holly. For a moment she was silent. Then she went mach speed in Italian again.

  He picked up from the bookshelf the Christmas gift Janet had given him. She had kept hers in front of
the painting on the mantelpiece, and though it was impossible to say for certain that it had been missing, he remembered very distinctly that at the murder scene there had been nothing in its place but a bare section of red wall plaster.

  Scott weighed the bludgeon in his hand, then flipped it around. It was scarily bottom-heavy. It would take no more than a glancing blow against the head with its sharp-edged granite base to kill someone on the spot. As he stood in contemplation, Scott caught amid the stream of Holly’s gibberish the name “Luca.” He looked over sharply. And again, a moment later: “Luca.”

  “Feeling better?” he asked after she hung up.

  “I am!” she reported with a winning smile and leapt out of her seat.

  “Who was that?”

  “That? That was Arpi.”

  “Why’d you call her?”

  “I didn’t. She called me. She wanted to invite us to an open studio party tonight.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s just when an artist opens up his studio for people to come see.”

  “The artist being Luca.”

  “Mm-hm.”

  “And you want to go?” She wanted to go?

  “Sure! Why not?”

  21

  Signs of night were appearing in the sky when they left for the party. They walked up Via Santo Stefano toward the center.

  “Do you know how to get there?” he asked.

  “Arpi told me where it is.”

  It wasn’t that Scott expected to snoop out, hidden away in Luca’s studio, the Kensett painting, or a smoking obelisk. Nothing as dramatic as that. But if he could corner Arpi with a few questions, such as where was Luca Gallo around 6:30 on the night of Lincoln’s birthday, he could then look for corroboration from the man himself.

  Holly skipped beside him. She was glib, reborn. They passed the green neon cross of a pharmacy and she said she never wanted to take her health for granted again. She talked about how the people at work wouldn’t stop saying what a disaster everything was without her. Scott said little in return, and became even more taciturn when the route they were taking started to look familiar. When they made their first left, after the No Dogs Allowed sign, he didn’t pay it much attention. Then, when they made the very same right, at the dry fountain, suspicions began to tipple in the deep. Here was the wrought-iron sewer grate. There the customs house. Then as the walk progressed, he grew angry. Here was the potted juniper! There the Communist bar! There all the old people! Angrier and angrier grew Scott, while Holly piloted him through a series of rapid alleys.

  The ground beneath their feet turned ancient, Roman. By the time they reached their destination, Scott was utterly silent. The only thing he said as they waited outside the building for someone to buzz them in was “Interesting door knocker.”

  “What?” Holly said. “Oh, yeah. Freaky. Don’t look at it or you’ll turn to stone.”

  The door clicked. Holly opened it and people spilled out. Scott followed her up the stairs through the throng.

  Okay, he said to himself. Try to calm down a minute. It’s still possible I’ve misread everything. So she used to walk the dog to Luca Gallo’s studio. Maybe she was just coming here to pose for a portrait. Maybe she was just coming here to pose for a portrait she’s going to surprise me with for my birthday. That’s probably it, Scott thought, as he elbowed his way through the crowd. She was posing for a portrait, nude, to give me for my birthday, in seven months.

  The party gushed from the top floor, first door on the right. The entryway led to a large, lofty, smoke-filled room. About a hundred Europeans were packed inside, pontificating at the top of their lungs. The spacious walls were covered with paintings in stretcher frames, illuminated by ceiling lights. Along the back wall were French windows and a balcony looking onto trees in one of Bologna’s many concealed courtyards. Holly eyed a shapeshifting coat rack and nimbly draped her jacket over it. Sweeping in to greet the new arrivals was Arpi. She wore cuffed jeans and a slinky black sweater. She was dressed the part of the outsider artist, with a folksy touch because of the headscarf. She handed them wine glasses from a table and screamed a few pleasantries with Holly. Scott was winded from the stairs. Then Holly saw some people she knew and charged at them shrieking.

  “Thank you for coming,” Arpi yelled in Scott’s ear.

  He cast around for Luca Gallo, and spied him standing against the wall on the right, motionless among a jolly group of men and women in their thirties. He looked different somehow. Almost emaciated. Or consumptive—consumed, no doubt, by guilt. His cheeks were sunken, his eyes hooded, his hair… His hair still looked good.

  Arpi put her hand on Scott’s shoulder, strained up, and again yelled in his ear. “I cannot tell you how difficult it was to convince Luca to do this.”

  “Oh really,” he forced himself to respond.

  “If it were up to him,” she went on, “he’d never show his work. Those people he’s with are from some of London’s top galleries. I was able to get them all to fly over here.”

  “How did you manage that?” Scott asked, though his mind was elsewhere. He was preparing to point a ghoulish finger across the room and cry out, “Murderer!”

  Trippingly now, Arpi said, “This is what I do. Didn’t your wife tell you I’m working to become a… What’s the English term for someone who represents artists?”

  What’s the Italian term for get the hell away from me?

  “By the way,” she said, “have you ever seen Luca’s work before?” She indicated the wall behind them.

  “Yes,” Scott shouted, unwilling to take his eyes off the man in question. Nevertheless, at Arpi’s insistence, he turned to look.

  The paintings were genuinely weird. The one before him particularly so.

  “That’s a portrait of his niece,” Arpi hollered.

  “It looks like someone kicked a hole through her chest,” he hollered back.

  “Someone did.” She took his arm and moved to the next. This was simply a big scrap of canvas, held on by staples. “And this was a detail of a still life.” She cocked her head. “It’s hard to tell what it was originally. I think it might be sideways.”

  “It looks like someone took a knife to it.”

  “Someone did.”

  She explained to him about the vandals.

  “But then,” she continued, “as he was going through it all to put in the rubbish bin, he noticed that some of the paintings actually looked more interesting torn apart than they did intact. The compositions of the paintings were improved. Artists always struggle with composition, more than light, color, perspective, or anything. They tend to fall back on certain habits, like putting whatever attracted them most to the subject in the middle. It sounds silly, but it’s true for a lot of painters.”

  Holly’s laughter fluttered over the noise of the party guests. Scott turned and peered through the bodies. She was on one side of the room, balanced on the arm of a crowded sofa. Then his eyes traveled to the opposite wall, where Luca Gallo was standing, same as before, except now his head was pointing in Holly’s direction.

  Arpi’s voice barely registered. “But when he saw all his work cropped so randomly, he was able to look at it in a new way. He says it’s really taught him something about how to use space in a painting.”

  Abruptly, Gallo started across the room. Scott made a motion, but then tensed up. He watched as the artist went over to Holly and laid hold of her elbow, killing her conversation.

  “So,” Arpi said. “San Michele is supposed to come tonight.” She’d said his landlord’s name almost sarcastically. “You’re tall: Can you see if he’s here yet?”

  Luca Gallo bore Holly away from her friends, leading her roughly to a private corner of the room, where the two began a heated discussion.

  “Would you like me to introduce you to anybody?” Arpi asked when Scott didn’t respond about San Michele.

  “What I’d like,” he told her, �
�is to know what my wife and your boyfriend are arguing about so passionately.”

  She waved the question away. “Oh, they’re just friends.” In a quieter voice, she added, “And he’s not my boyfriend. I don’t know what we are anymore.”

  Some people called to Holly, and she broke off from Luca Gallo mid-argument. Scott finally turned his attention to Arpi, to the sad smile on her solemn face. He felt sorry for her all of a sudden. Poor girl was obviously dealing with her own issues, and was in the dark about everything. Plus she was acting a little differently to him this time around. Less high and mighty, or low-down and mean. He gazed around the room.

  “This is a pretty nice place,” he said. “I’m surprised Luca uses this just as a studio. If I were him, I’d live here, too.”

  “Actually, he does.” She pointed. “That sofa over there folds out.”

  Scott looked over again at the sofa, this time with distaste, and drank the last of his wine.

  “I’m sorry,” Arpi said. “I’ve got to drag Luca back to his guests. He’s been incredibly rude to them since they got here.”

  Alone now, Scott splashed some more of the red wine into his glass and drained it in one gulp. Then somebody passed him a joint and he sucked down half in one breath. Time to act. First, confront Holly. He’d amassed his storm long enough. He took a step forward, when a surge of adrenaline, anxiety, and very good marijuana hit him. He immediately floated out of the apartment, down the stairwell, and into another dimension.

  He found himself in the alien light of the street. There was no one around. The still night air revived him a little. He fumbled for a cigarette, struck a match, and studied the flame until it stopped trembling. He exhaled the first drag slowly, trying to calm the crazy syncopations of his heart. He was high out of his mind.

  “Stronzi,” cursed a man bursting out of the house.

  It was Luca Gallo. He was scowling at the ground with an unlit cigarette in his mouth.

  “Ciao, Luca.”