This Crumbling Pageant Page 19

  Scott seemed to catch him off guard. Luca’s head shot up. “Ciao,” he grunted back. Then he cleared his throat and stifled a cough.

  “Non ti senti bene?” Scott asked alertly. Not feeling well?

  “Stavo malato.” I’ve been sick. Luca patted his pockets. “Ce l’hai una luce?” he asked. Do you have a light?

  “Certamente.” Certainly, Scott said. He squared his shoulders and flicked his lit cigarette at him.

  It hit Luca in the chest and fell to the ground, trailing sparks. He looked into Scott’s eyes a moment, and then threw his own cigarette down and began marching up.

  Scott instantly felt himself reverting to a wild state. He squeezed his eyes shut and took a blind swipe and then entered a state of weightlessness and incapacitation so powerfully reminiscent of being a baby in his mother’s arms it was a shock to realize he was lying in a puddle on the ground.

  For a while he just lay there, full of wonder. Is it over? Is he gone? He tried moving, lifting his head up to give a glance around. He was alone. Reluctant to get up and inspect the damage, Scott stayed on the ground, and reviewed his life. Then he heard German.

  Strolling up the street were Luca San Michele and a warlike blonde with stiletto heels and bulging calves. San Michele halted and in English exclaimed, “I know this person! This is my friend.” He rushed over and helped Scott to his feet, brushing his coat, straightening the collar. Scott hadn’t cried since he was a kid. But he’d felt so starved lately for some little human ministrations that just this taste caused his features to tremor and contort and become altogether gooey with tears of gratitude.

  San Michele looked over and said something to his date, who after some solid German resistance went up to the party without him. Then he attended to Scott again. “Are you alright?” he asked. He wore a scarf and Armani eyewear. He had the beginnings of a beard, flecked with silver.

  Scott made an effort to compose himself. “You speak German,” he said, sniffling.

  “What happened?”

  “She cheated on me.”

  “Who did? Holly?”

  “Yes.” He hung his head. “With Luca Gallo.”

  “The bitch,” San Michele said, with instant brotherly righteousness.

  “And I think he’s the one who killed that American woman.”

  Luca’s expression changed to a sober smile. “Perhaps you’ve had a bit too much to drink tonight, Scott. What are you talking about? What American woman?”

  “Just some poor, lonely American woman who didn’t deserve to die.”

  “And you think she was killed by our friend, the painter?” He pointed up at the building for clarification. “Luca Gallo?”

  Scott was shaking his head. “I don’t know,” he said, and began sobbing again.

  San Michele tried to comfort him with a manly clap on the shoulder. “But what makes you say all this?”

  At that moment, however, a gaggle of girls came tripping outside from the party, and Scott escaped, staggering down the street in hot shame.

  22

  Puffing on a crushed cigarette, Scott walked due west, down Via Ugo Bassi, where a lot of the students rent their rooms. He’d been here once before, on a cold, sunshiny morning with a light snow coating the red tiled roofs. He had driven over with Janet to pick up Gemma for a little road trip to the mall. Her house, he remembered, was the color of the Statue of Liberty. But now the conditions and his state of mind were altered. He gawked up at a shadowy building from the sidewalk (the arcades had ended blocks earlier), then squinted, truly confounded, at the dimly lit directory by the door. He remembered that her apartment was listed under the name of a former tenant, a Sig. Something. Was it Nuzzo? He didn’t know. Tentatively, he pressed the button next to the name, and continued to hold it down as he forgot what he was doing and lost himself in the noise of the buzzer.

  Wooden shutters flung open from the second story above.

  “Ma chi è?” someone called out. Who’s there?

  Leaning out the dark window was a young woman in a white turban. Scott realized his mistake, yet stared spellbound at the turban, glowing in the dark.

  “Ah!” the woman said. “Scott!” She reached to her side, clicked on a lamp, and instantly materialized into Gemma the maid, her hair done up in a wet towel.

  “Thank God!” he said. He apologized, in whacky Italian, for bothering her, and asked if they could talk.

  She paused for only a moment, before giving one of those great Old World shrugs—shoulders up, corners of the mouth down. And it was a very pretty and slender pair of shoulders, bare. “Okay,” she said. “Aspetta.”

  She disappeared and Scott waited with his hand on the door knob. Then she called for him at the window again and began lowering a basket on a string. “La porta non funzione bene,” she explained. The door doesn’t work well. Scott caught the basket and found a key inside. In English, she told him to come up. She’ll get dressed.

  By the time he got to the second floor landing, in the back of the building, she was already at her door. She waved a stick-thin arm at him. As he approached, Scott noticed that she had dressed hastily in a short-sleeved top and—he presumed—something on the bottom, but this was just a guess, for even though she had long ago stopped waving, his attention was still on that skinny arm.

  “Sorry,” he repeated, “for uh… bothering you like this.”

  The top was tight enough that it bunched up around the shoulders and caused the tiny sleeves to flare out daintily. And from them hung two of the longest, loveliest, most naked arms he’d ever stared rudely at. They were so thin he thought he could make a ring around her wrist with his fingers and slide it uninterrupted all the way up to her armpit. Yet at the same time they were quite soft and shapely, too. She had some muscles on her, this girl, from all that scrubbing and stuff. The skin was pearly and unblemished.

  “You no bother me,” she was telling him sweetly. “I no do nothing tonight.” Her damp hair was tucked behind her ears now. Scott smelled apple shampoo as she hung his coat and led him, past prying eyes, through the apartment and into her bedroom.

  She closed the door behind her and swirled around. “Eccoci!” she sang. Here we are!

  Scott gazed red-eyed around the small room. So this is how single Italian girls live, he thought—not that he had ever wondered. It wasn’t bad. Clean. Uncluttered. A few pieces of furniture from IKEA. A poster for something technological that featured a black baby with an Afro. No closet, but there was a sturdy new wardrobe. A rainbow-colored flag hung over her bed, and Scott disguised his shock with a faint nod of approval. In the past, he’d always imagined there was some chemistry between them. Turned out she was gay all along. Amazing how an idea can collapse after the slightest investigation. He couldn’t help but wonder what other, bigger ideas of his were likewise pure fancy or figments.

  He was spacing out on the implications of this mind-blowing realization for what may have been several minutes, or a few seconds, when he dropped back to earth.

  “Oh man!” he said in awe. “Are those your parents?”

  He crept forward and hunched over a desk. Scotch-taped to the wall was a photo. A handsome, unsmiling couple looked out.

  “Yes.” She moved near him and spoke wistfully. “These are my parents, back home.”

  Scott gaped at the photo. The faces were baby-faced, the dress particularly formal. An ornate little church crumbled behind them. It was a wedding picture.

  “Wow…” he breathed. He kept bouncing back and forth between the faces of the mother and father, and comparing their faces in his mind to Gemma’s, until soon he was unable to distinguish any of their faces. He blinked and drew his head back. “Where are you from again?”

  “From Calabria. A little village in Calabria.”

  “Wow… Calabria!” The name alone evoked scrublands and cactus and lawlessness.

  Flaunting her arm, Gemma pointed to another photo. “And this is
my family.” She listed off the members seated around a dinner table, tapping her finger over her mother, father, sisters, baby brother, aunt, grandma. Scott chastely lowered his eyes from her arm.

  “And where are you from?” she asked.

  “From a place called Cape Cod.” He prepared for the usual explanation. “Do you know where New York is?”

  “I know where is Cape Cod,” she said with pride. “I work there for a summer, on the ferry in Hai-ah-nees.”

  “Oh my God! Are you serious?” High or not, Scott was always excited when his region was brought up. “Well, do you know where Truro is? That’s where I’m from.”

  There was a little knit on her brow. “Tururro…?”

  “Look.” He put his right arm up, as if to make a muscle. “If this is the Cape,” he began, waving at his arm. Gemma stood up straight and smiled, already impressed with the lesson. “And this is Provincetown,” he went on, pointing with his left hand at the curled fist, “then my town is right here.” He touched a spot on his wrist. “Truro. It’s kind of a village, too.”

  Her eyes ranged over his arm. “And where I stay?”

  Scott’s sleeve was rolled up to his bicep. He gave a tap underneath. “Here. Hyannis.”

  Gemma’s eyes widened. Then she put her own arm up in a limp imitation. “Here?” she asked, directing an uncertain finger at her elbow.

  “No.”

  Scott took her shapely arm in his hands and held it firmly in position. His brain visualized what those slender muscles would look like working as she pumped up and down on his upright cock. Frowning, he went over the lesson again.

  “And this,” he concluded, pressing the spot softly with his thumb, “is where you were.”

  A silence. Scott was impressed that even in their impaired state his mental faculties had somehow been able to engineer a situation in which he could indulge his new arm fetish like this. On the corner of her mouth, he kissed her. When he leaned back, he saw that she had transformed into something sly. They kissed on the lips, deeply, their limbs snaking into a natural embrace. Burying his nose in her spiced hair, Scott lifted her up with one arm and conveyed her gently to the bed.

  It was his first experience with a lesbian. Or at least a bisexual. Or at least that he knew of. She put a condom on him. Then Scott found himself, in medias res, having sex, banging away and meditating upon a magenta handprint radiating on her bony white butt. Rosary beads clattered around the bedpost. She made noises like oy, which he didn’t usually associate with sexual pleasure. But as soon as she started saying si si si, he came.

  He lay beside her under the gay flag. “Can I ask you a question?” he said.

  She was feeling around the floor for her underwear, with her back to him. “Dimmi,” she said. Tell me.

  “Did you ever tell the police about me?”

  She turned to him and didn’t hesitate. “Yes, I tell them.”

  “You did?”

  “Of course. But they no seem very interested.”

  “Why not?” he asked in exasperation. Then he laughed at himself. “I’m just confused why no one’s come to question me about it.”

  “Probably they no have time yet,” she told him. “Because they are too busy looking for the husband.”

  “The husband!”

  “No,” she corrected herself. “No the husband. The, uh… How do you say? Ex-husband. They divorce a year ago.”

  Scott heaved himself out of bed. “But she told me her husband died!” What was it Janet had said? Heart cancer?

  “No, he no die. He leave and move to the south with a woman more young. A Filipina.” Scott had pulled on his boxers and was pacing around. Gemma continued, “At first, I come to work for them when they stay married. They was always fighting.” She made a high, whiny noise that was supposed to represent the hell of marital discord. Then she pretended to faint at the remembrance. “Many, many fights. Oof! It was horrible. I almost quitted. And the divorce was more ugly. The signora always angry, always want more money, always on the phone with her lawyer. The police think her husband live at Roma, but I hear they no find him yet.”

  Scott planted himself on the floor, Indian style. An estranged husband… Of course! Who better to kill Janet? That was the “person of interest” the Examining Magistrate was referring to in the paper. That was who the Englishman meant when he said the police “have an idea.” Scott was off the hook.

  From the floor he picked up one of his socks and began methodically turning it inside out. “Gemma,” he said, “do you remember that painting the signora kept above the fireplace?”

  She sat up and had to think for a second. Then: “Ah. Si. I remember. Why?”

  “It was missing when she died.”

  “It was?” She looked down in recollection, then shook her head and shivered. “Non lo so.” I don’t know. After some more thought, however, she said, “Ah! I know why. I think she say she want to change the…” She pursed her lips. “Come si dice? La cornice.” Her hands described a rectangle in the air.

  The banality. “It’s called the frame.”

  “Thank you. Yes, I think she send it to the shop where they make the frames.”

  So that was that. Thus ended The Mystery of the Body Chucked in the Fireplace. The painting was completely unrelated, and the only story here was husbands and wives destroying each other. The only mystery was what time did the frame shop close tonight.

  He stopped by on the walk home. He knew how to get there because it was the one store of its kind in town and that was where he, as a mildly degrading favor to Holly, had taken Luca’s pencil sketch of her (his own sketch had been shredded in the dryer).

  The shop was closed. He peered through the plate glass. Inside, the workshop was dark and misshapen. It was upon checking the store hours on the door that he saw the note. In a fishy, handwritten scrawl, it said that they were temporarily closed. They were sorry. They didn’t explain, or say when they had closed, but they would reopen 21-2. In other words, February 21st. Next Tuesday.

  Scott concentrated. The owner—if memory served—was an oily Eastern European who, after appraising the portrait of Holly, had quizzed him about her pushily. Scott remembered thinking he didn’t trust the man.

  He resumed his walk home, chewing on his lip.

  Of course, there was still a possibility the painting and the killing were connected. If that was the case, it swung open the door to a veritable rogues’ gallery of murder suspects. Right now the frame shop owner was looking very shady, but actually it could have been any hawkeyed workman Janet had had going in and out of her apartment through a revolving door. For that matter, why rule out Richard, her “wimp” lawyer? Perhaps the Englishman had revealed himself to be not such a wimp after all, but rather a homicidal maniac. It’s been known to happen. For all Scott knew it could have been the swindled antique dealer, after finally wising up. Too many leads. First among equals, naturally, was Janet’s ex-husband, and yet increasingly it seemed the culprit could have been anybody. Decreasingly, it seemed it could have been Holly’s inamorato.

  Scott looked at his cell phone. As expected, he saw numerous calls from Holly. The last batch had come from the phone in their apartment. He called her back.

  “What happened to you?” She sounded concerned. “Why did you leave me?”

  “Nobody said anything to you?” he asked.

  “About what?”

  “Nothing. I’m sorry. I wasn’t feeling well, so I went for a walk.”

  “Oh no! Did I get you sick?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Come home. Let me take care of you.”

  “I’m coming. But Holly—” He controlled his voice. “I don’t want you to see Luca Gallo ever again. You understand?”

  She gave a regretful sigh. “Scott—” she began.

  “Do you hear me?” he said over her. “I want you to promise me you’ll never see him again.”

  Sh
e paused, but didn’t argue. “Okay, sweetie. I won’t. I promise. Just come home, please. I miss you. I need you. I feel like I haven’t seen you in forever.”

  They hung up.

  They would put it behind them. Their marriage wasn’t pretty anymore, but who the hell cared about that? Wasn’t that the badge of a true warhorse marriage anyway? The “marital knot” wasn’t meant to be smooth. It was meant to be a problem and by definition a tangle. For his part, Scott felt capable of putting it all behind him. They were both cheaters now. As far as he was concerned, the score was tied.

  23

  Thursday of that week Luca San Michele called and extended an invitation for a get-together at his beloved castello the following Saturday evening.

  “My girlfriend,” he confided, “is returning from China, and I want people to meet her.”

  It was the first time Scott had ever heard of his girlfriend. “I’m not sure we can make it,” he said.

  “Please,” Luca implored him. “You don’t have to worry. I won’t be inviting ‘Il Gallo.’”

  Scott laughed. “Well… okay.”

  That night he awoke from a nightmare about Janet. All he remembered about it, however, was the ending, when cadaver Janet sneered, “Dead! He’s not frigging dead! I wish he was. He left me for some young Filipino whore.” Or did she say “horror?”

  On Saturday morning, the police finally caught up to him. He and Holly had both risen early and decided to treat themselves to some cappuccinos and chocolate croissants. They had just begun a sprightly jaunt from their building when a man flagged Scott down.

  “Signore! Signore!”

  He commenced by accusing Scott, half-heartedly, of making it hard to find him. “You make it very difficult, my job, eh?”

  Scott asked if they should go inside.

  “No, no, no, no, no, no, no,” the detective said, searching the pockets of his quilted jacket. “This take only a moment.” With pen and notebook in hand, he took a breath, cleared his throat importantly, summoned up all his English-language powers with an optimistic “Okay!”—then slouched and asked with a feeble laugh, “Per caso, parlate italiano?” Do you speak Italian by any chance?