This Crumbling Pageant Page 22

  Twice during the night he had taken Holly’s elbow and hissed in her ear his desire to leave. But she had only smiled vacantly—those bright, false eyes glancing over him—and gone back to her conversation. And he had wandered back to the game room to play yet another round of pool with this guy named Franco, a tan, taciturn Italian with coal-black eyebrows, a fleshy nose, and light-colored cat’s eyes.

  At around 3:00 am, the party finally wound down. Scott and Holly were among the last to leave. Even Luca’s girlfriend, the so-called guest of honor, had already left. San Michele walked his guests out to their cars, bid his final farewells, and made his solitary way back to the castle. Scott got behind the wheel and started the ignition. Holly stood outside the passenger door, saying good-bye to everyone, then got in, slammed the door, and murmured, “Hurry up, honey.”

  He glared at her. “I have to wait for the other cars.”

  She put her seatbelt on. “Are you okay to drive?”

  He pressed down on the gas pedal and let the strained roar of the cold engine answer for him.

  In silence, they descended San Michele’s hill. Their car was the last in line. Scott tried to follow the taillights of the little hatchback in front of him, but like flares they flew off, and he was left without a guide. He forced himself not to ponder too deeply his environment. The blind and narrow snake road. The iffy traction. The joke of a guardrail. The moonlit void below. After several minutes, Holly broke the silence. “Scott—” she began.

  “I know about you and the landlord.”

  The surprise announcement, with its purposefully tawdry phrasing, had disarmed her, and for an instant Holly’s face showed the guileless curiosity of a child. Then she burst into tears.

  On a straight stretch of road, he stopped the car, and turned to her. “Go ahead.”

  She started by describing how lost she had felt after dropping out of school, and how for years she had relied on Scott for her identity, which wasn’t fair to him. And she explained that this was why the job at the museum was so important to her, and why she had started spending so much time with Luca San Michele. And she swore she and Luca never did anything—but, she admitted, she did start getting close to him and, one day, she slipped and mentioned something about the painting, and—

  “Wait,” Scott stopped her. “What are you saying? You’re saying you didn’t cheat on me with Luca?”

  “No, but I did tell him about the painting,” she said guiltily.

  Scott saw red. “I can’t fucking believe it! That was it, Holly. That was your last chance to come clean. It’s all over now.” Her eyes widened in the moonlight, fleetingly, and he pointed a finger in her face. “I know you used to go to his apartment in the city.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Who told me? Who told me?” he stammered. “Luca the dog told me, that’s who!”

  Holly shook her baffled head. “If you’re talking about the place he rents out to the other Luca—yes, I used to go there sometimes in the morning for coffee. But that was with Luca Gallo, and most of the time Arpi was there. I just kept it from you because you were acting so jealous all the time and I knew you would get mad.”

  Scott looked at her, impressed. “The balls on you! But I don’t get it, Holly. So you told Luca about the painting. So fucking what? Is that what you’re so upset about? I don’t care about that anymore. If it makes you feel any better, I know he’s not the one who took it.”

  Holly lowered her eyes and knuckled mascara from her cheekbone. Without a word, she got out of the car and walked to the back. Scott turned off the engine, put on the emergency brake, and went over to her.

  “What is wrong with you?” he said.

  She was jittery. She stood staring down at the car. “Open it,” she said.

  He looked down at the trunk, then, apprehensively, at her again. Her face was hooded by her hair.

  The keys were in his hand. He found the little button to pop the trunk, lifted the lid and, in the dim light inside, beheld: a sky, an upside-down sea.

  He banged the trunk shut. “Where did you get this?”

  She went into another crying jag. “I found it in his house, Scott. He did it! He killed that woman!”

  “Found it? What do you mean? Where?”

  “I snuck away during the party and found it in one of the rooms upstairs.”

  “And you took it?” he cried, stumbling. “What are we going to do when he sees it’s missing?”

  “It was hidden away,” she said desperately, grasping for his sleeve. “He might not notice for a while.”

  Somewhere up the hill, an engine revved. The road followed the contours of the hillside in a series of switchbacks. Lights beamed out, and from one of the folds emerged the gorgon headlights of San Michele’s vehicle.

  26

  The lights disappeared into another fold.

  “Get in the car,” Scott said.

  They scrambled inside and he fumbled with the ignition. He’s going to kill us, he told himself. He’s a killer and he’s going to kill us. He’s going to run us off the road, or else shoot us with his songbird shotgun and bury us next to his dog.

  He stomped the clutch, fired up the engine, and wedged the stick into first. The tires spun, gained traction, and he raced off for about twenty yards before having to hook slowly around a promontory. The road slashed down into blackness. At the bottom it angled, then curved toward another steep, acute-angled turn, and thus their car roared sporadically down the hill. They had maybe a half mile head start, but Scott soon recognized his disadvantage. This was Luca’s road. While Scott was compelled to peer ahead and ride the brakes at every plunging and perilous twist, his pursuer could slalom down freely, back tires slinging pebbles. Scott stared through the windshield without blinking, his hands and feet working the wheel, gearshift, and three pedals as thriftily as possible. He alerted all his senses and reflexes to the flight, wakened whatever prey instincts lay dormant in his proto-brain. He was operating under the weight of an injustice. It wasn’t fair to put him, wholly unprepared, in this fucking lunatic position, and then expect him to save the day.

  “Faster, Scott,” Holly quavered.

  “Shut up.”

  Something was wrong with the engine. In the few instances where the road straightened and he could hit the gas, their otherwise trusty Passat reacted with a nightmare sluggishness. An electronic dinging nagged at him, and the Check Engine light had gone on.

  Suddenly the road swooped down and leveled off and they were covered—simply swallowed up—by great, thick, wonderful fir trees. Scott remembered where they were. Farther up they’d find that tiny village.

  He shifted into the next gear. Again the strained response. And now a burning smell.

  “What the fuck...?” He stole a glance around him and muttered, “Jesus, the parking brake.”

  He released it, then quickly downshifted and lowered his foot on the accelerator. But still the engine wasn’t right. It felt like it was running on three cylinders. The road wound through the firs, the rearview mirror was black. Then a full moon popped up, and they reached a haunted little setting of crooked crosses, marble vaults, and fenced-in family burial plots. Scott flicked off his lights. For about forty yards he coaxed the lagging VW along. Then at the fork with the twisted road sign, he turned, drove another twenty or so feet down the intersecting road, hid the car behind a close stand of graveyard cypresses, and killed the engine.

  A moment after the dust settled, he and Holly observed close-up the sci-fi lights of San Michele’s dark Escalade, flashing past them.

  “I’m calling the police.” Scott took out his phone. “Fuck. I have no signal,” he said. “Do you?”

  Holly checked. “No,” she said.

  “You probably didn’t even need to look, did you? You probably knew from experience.”

  “Scott!” she sobbed, tears coursing down her cheeks. “I swear—”

  “Forget it
,” he spat. “I don’t give a shit about that right now.” He added, “You’re dead to me now.”

  He looked away and tried to think, while Holly wept weakly beside him. It was going to be San Michele’s word versus theirs. Scott would be content if he could simply hand the painting off to the police, clap his hands, and be done with it. Tell his story and let Bologna’s Finest take it from there. But what if Luca turned the tables somehow, made it seem as if Scott and Holly were the culprits? He could deny knowing anything about the painting. Wait, Scott thought. Could Luca really deny it? Wouldn’t his fingerprints be on it? Scott felt a rush of triumph. Yes! Of course they would. And what could Luca say about that? It was undeniable evidence. So going to the police was safe. Right?

  Scott quickly checked his theory for holes—and found one. Because even this could be turned against them. Luca could say, for instance, that he knew nothing about the painting, except that one time Scott and Holly had tried to sell it to him. He could say that they had shown up at his castle, one dark night, trying to unload some landscape painting on him, claiming it was worth millions, acting very funny…

  Scott’s mind was staging elaborate scenes of false imprisonment, when he looked over at Holly. Her weeping had grown fitful, slightly alarming. The body shuddered and died over and over. The pretty face was the picture of bitterness. He watched her and became almost curious. Was it even remotely possible she was being wronged?

  He put his hand up and shushed her gently.

  She spun around. “What?” she asked, peering in terror out the rear window. “Is he back?”

  “No. Relax. I just wanted to say it’s okay. I’m sorry about what I said. All that’s not important now, anyway. What’s important is for us to get to safety. We can drive until we get cell phone reception and then call the police.”

  She sank back into her seat, still looking uneasy. Her eyes lowered. “It won’t work, Scott,” she said. “They’ll never believe us.”

  “Sure they will. We can tell them to check the painting for his fingerprints.”

  “No, you don’t understand.” She spoke hopelessly. “Luca knows everybody. He’ll just lie and then they’ll think we did it.”

  Scott became impatient. “Well, what’s your idea, then?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, sniffling. “But…maybe we can just leave?”

  He snorted and turned away in disgust. She was contributing nothing.

  “No. Really, Scott. Think about it.”

  She was looking at him with a worrisome gleam in her eye.

  “What are you talking about?” he asked.

  “We have the painting now,” she said. “It’s ours. We can just go.”

  “Go where?”

  “Anywhere. Away from here.”

  Scott gathered his wits. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Now she wanted the painting? “You’re out of your mind…”

  “Why?”

  “We can’t even go to our apartment. He’ll be waiting for us.”

  “I mean we can leave right now.” The tears had evaporated. “Don’t you realize what we have back there?” she asked, indicating the trunk. “We don’t need anything else. We can start over. Wherever we want.” A pause. “We can go back home, sweetie.”

  It had been his idea all along. In a somewhat fainter voice, he said, “And what about our visas, our passports…”

  “Forget them. We can say we lost them. Oh!” Her small hand glued itself to his shoulder. “I got it! We can go to Naples. Yes, we can go stay with your father in Naples. We have his address. We can go stay there while we figure out what to do.”

  Scott began to rock in his seat. As wild as it sounded, they might actually get away with it. What could Luca do? His hands were tied. The painting was lost to him forever. Short of executing them in the streets, he could never get it back. For him the next best thing would be if they simply vanished in the night. Holly was right: Nothing prevented them from fleeing, that instant. But wait. “What about the dog?”

  Holly bowed her head. “I forgot about Pucci,” she said. “I don’t know… We’ll have to leave him, I guess.”

  “Leave him?” He imagined the puppy being left behind, curled up with one of Holly’s shoes. “How can you say that?”

  Defensively, she said, “I don’t know! I’m not saying I know what to do. Okay, fine! Let’s call the police if you think we can.”

  Scott eyed her skeptically and then looked away. Her most resonant argument was about Luca knowing “everybody.” That jibed with Scott’s own concerns about going to the police. He stared out his window, sucked into the blackness of the cypresses. Then his chest expanded, and he turned to her. “No,” he said. “We can do this. But listen.”

  &

  There was one hitch. The car wasn’t starting. It wasn’t even cranking. Scott got out and started sniffing around blindly under the hood, while a useless Holly went over to watch. “What did you do to it?” she asked.

  He clenched his teeth, stood up straight, and slammed the hood. From the trunk, he grabbed hold of the painting. An unusual reunion. The moonlight made it look almost phosphorescent. Janet had gotten it reframed after all. And the back now wore a protective cloth covering. He gave the car a last look, then tucked the picture under his arm and set off on foot, leading the way.

  Though it was probably no more than a quarter mile to the village, it felt like a wilderness they were in. Scott wondered what the wildlife there was like. Wolves. Vipers. Bears, maybe. Wild boar definitely. He had never been afraid of the idea of a wild boar before. But an actual wild boar was terrifying.

  Holly followed his footsteps. The country road had become narrow, with a stony embankment that forced them off the shoulder. High above, the bare branches of the roadside poplars creaked in the wind. The sky was star-dusted. The full moon stood as if in a spotlight.

  A car approached up ahead.

  “Scott…” Holly said.

  “It’s okay,” he told her. “That’s not his car.”

  It wasn’t. It was a little Fiat, and it zipped past them harmlessly and, for no good reason, beeped.

  There were two things in the decrepit village that were new—brand-spanking new, by the looks of them. One was a sleek, silver payphone, outside a Tabacchi shop in the small, unlit square. The other was a shiny metal sign that marked the name of the place. San Sansepolcro. That was all they needed.

  It took half an hour for the taxi to arrive. The time was 3:45. The driver pulled up next to Scott, cracked the window, and screwed up his eye.

  In formal Italian, Scott said, “Can you take us to a rental car agency?”

  Holly poked her head in. “Whichever one you think is open on Sundays.”

  Her smiling little face put the driver at ease, and he waved them in. On the ride back to Bologna, Holly’s phone rang. She opened her purse.

  “It’s him,” she said. “What should I do?”

  “See if he leaves a message.”

  No message. Now that the reception was back, they saw that San Michele had called her phone and hung up three times already.

  Because of WWII, much of Bologna’s architecture in the north of the historic center was plainly ahistoric. The rental car company was located on a concrete block of nondescript, seven-story buildings. On the glass door, a paper clock face was set in military time at zero six hundred hours. Provided they weren’t being led astray by the mercurial pixie which governs business hours in Italy, this meant they had nearly two hours before the agency opened. They lay low in a corner of the nearby Parco Montagnola, on a bench under a gigantic yew tree gnawing on a park lamp. Before long, Holly was passed out on Scott’s shoulder. They were alone, except for some wandering eccentrics. A man wearing a cape. Another man in a tricorn hat. But Scott, huddled over the painting face-down on his lap, outdid them all in eccentricity, and threw a feral look at every passing madman.

  &

  At the ren
tal car agency, Scott let Holly do the talking and tried to follow along. The employee was a petite little guy with tousled hair and a five o’clock shadow. He looked about a hundred pounds, but when he spoke it was in a voice so deep and resonant it practically sprang from the bosom of the earth.

  The man tapped at the computer keyboard and asked to see a credit card and driver’s permit. Scott took his death grip off the painting, leaning it on the floor against the counter, and handed over his MasterCard and Rhode Island driver’s license. The man was sorry, but he needed to see their international driver’s permit.

  Scott had left it in the car.

  The man was very sorry indeed. Scott listened to the impressive baritone.

  “He says the laws are very strict,” Holly translated. “All foreigners must present an IDP when picking up their vehicle. The only thing he can legally rent to us with our US licenses are motor scooters.”

  The employee shrugged his thin shoulders and added, “Oppure un ape.”

  “Or an ape,” Holly said.

  “What’s that?” Scott asked.

  “We’ll take that,” Holly said to the man.

  Minutes later, he was pulling up to the curb in one. Ruefully, Scott laughed. He’d seen apes before. They were a kind of three-wheeled pickup truck, marginally larger than a tricycle. The employee got out, leaving the engine running. As requested, the truck bed came with a cover, a mini tonneau. Scott jammed the painting in at an angle. The sound of the motor was transporting him to the days of childhood and go-karts and push mowers. The vehicle’s interior was even less promising. For a gearshift there was a joystick. For pedals, little metal tabs.

  He folded himself into the cab. Holly sat in the passenger seat, above the battery. After playing around with the controls a bit, Scott pulled away onto the empty street and tried to get a feel for the machine. It was like an arcade game. Once he’d maneuvered the ape in the right direction and settled into gear, he took a deep breath and said to Holly, “Alright. I want you to dial Luca’s number and then give me the phone.”