This was fourteen months after Bev had left; fourteen months during which I'd been jokingly reintroduced to a singles scene that had changed so much I never did get my bearings in it—or wanted to get them, for that matter. At thirty-four I felt like a dinosaur from another planet, let alone another era. I even started to think that maybe I didn't like women anymore; modern women anyway. Anne changed that. Intelligent, self-sufficient, career-oriented, she was as modern as they come, yet I loved being with her, being anywhere near her. I started thinking that maybe I was healing, becoming whole again. I started thinking that maybe I loved her.
My European assignment lasted six weeks. Then I had to go back to San Francisco to resume my regular job at the museum. Anne and I stayed in touch, of course, and when the final divorce proceedings came up, she offered to take a week's vacation to be with me during what she figured would be a rocky time. I told her it wasn't going to be rocky at all— in my own mind it was already over and done—but it would be wonderful to see her. And when the whole business was finished, I would show her San Francisco. If she could afford to take two weeks, I'd show her the whole West Coast.
It turned out to be a mistake. I just wasn't able to keep my two worlds straight. The court appearances were bad enough, but I was ready for them. What I wasn't ready for were the out-of-court negotiating sessions in which Bev and I bitterly carved up and appropriated the rubble from a decade's shared history while our lawyers nodded sagely and dispassionately to each other: "That seems fair to me, Bernie, what do you think?" "Oh, I think we can live with that, Rita. We're not trying to be vengeful here."
Like hell we weren't. One thing you learn in a divorce is that you have reserves of vengefulness you never dreamed were there.
It had been far worse than I'd expected. In the afternoons I would slouch home to a waiting Anne, drained and dispirited, sullen and combative. And unable to make love.
Which, on top of everything else, made me defensive and quick to take offense. At one point, following a particularly humiliating nonperformance in bed, I remember ranting and going around kicking chairs and wallowing in noisy self- recrimination. Anne, after four or five days of unbelievable tolerance, finally blew up.
"Goddammit!" she yelled, suddenly sitting bolt upright in bed, "I didn't come 6,000 miles to get laid, so just shut up, will you!"
It was so unlike her, it stunned me into silence.
"You jerk!" she added after a moment, and whacked me with a pillow. It was the sort of thing that should have ended in teary laughter, but it turned into an ugly, heart-searing fight instead. Early the next morning, after lying all night with our backs turned stiffly to each other, we patched it up. But not really, not satisfactorily. It was never the way it had been before. Anne stayed another two gingerly days, then told me she really had to get back to her job in Germany. My heart was like lead, but I didn't argue. And so she left, looking tense and pale. God knows what I looked like.
In her place I would have left, too, only sooner. She had come to offer comfort, and I wasn't having any. I just wasn't ready for it.
That had been five months ago. Since then we'd exchanged two or three guarded letters. I didn't know if she was seeing anyone else, and she didn't know if I was. (I wasn't; the divorce, and then the miserable hassling with Anne had scraped me raw, worn me down. I gave it a try, but I just couldn't face the modern pre-mating ritual, not yet.) I'd wanted to call her a hundred times, but never got myself to do it. The thing was, I felt like such a twit. What would I say? Apologize? I'd already done that. So, afraid to bring things to a head, I had let them drift unresolved. In five months we hadn't spoken to each other.
And then this call. "No message. Just called to say hi." Surely it was time to see if we could work things through, and here was Anne—blameless, openhearted Anne—making the first move. And here was I, in Europe—as Debbie had probably told her—only a few hundred miles away from her base at Berchtesgaden. All I had to do was call her, tell her where I was, arrange to meet .. .
I looked at the telephone a long time, unmoving. After a while I undressed and went to bed.
Chapter 10
Trasporti Salvatorelli was located on the city's western outskirts, beyond the Florence-bound railroad tracks, in the Ouartiere Mazzini. It was one of several low buildings in a sterile, modern industrial park near the intersection of Viale Vladimir Ilic Lenin and Via Carlo Marx. And for that matter, not all that far from Via Stalingrado and Via Yuri Gagarin. As I mentioned earlier, despite its overlay of luxury hotels, great restaurants, and glittering boutiques, Bologna was not exactly a hotbed of capitalist ideology. To give credit where due, however, you couldn't really accuse it of being parochial, either, at least when it came to names. Not far from where I stood Viale Lenin crossed underneath Tangenziale JFK. There was a Piazza Franklin Delano Roosevelt too, and a Via Abramo Lincoln. No Via Adam Smith, however, and as far as I knew no Piazza Ronald Reagan was being contemplated.
You may be wondering, with some justification, what I was doing at Trasporti Salvatorelli. That is, why were we entrusting Northerners in Italy to a firm that had proven itself inept at best (the accidental shipment of Clara's Rubens), or "bent" at worst (Paolo's assassination and presumed connections with the underworld)? The answer is that we had no choice. Their unsettling recent history aside, they were simply the best there was in Bologna, and the most experienced by far; not only when it came to the handling, crating, and shipping of valuable artwork—which is a demanding field in itself, and one requiring considerable expertise—but in coping with the Byzantine complexities of getting anything officially deemed an art treasure out of Italy, even temporarily and for the most virtuous of purposes.
The Pinacoteca had been using them satisfactorily for years. The nearest shipper of comparable reputation was in Milan, but to use them we would have had to ship the paintings to Milan in the first place, which would have put us back where we started. So we were stuck with Trasporti Salvatorelli. Not that I'd given them much thought until the last hectic week or so. Several months ago Benedetto Luca had volunteered the service of Ofelia Nervi, one of his deputies, to make the necessary arrangements with Salvatorelli. This was fine with me. Having someone on the spot was more efficient than my trying to conduct business from Seattle. Instead, I had simply chatted every couple of weeks with Ofelia to head off any potential problems, few of which had arisen. As far as I knew, everything was in order.
Still, I had to visit Trasporti Salvatorelli myself. For one thing, I was nominally responsible for the whole affair, so I had to sign the ton or so of paperwork that had no doubt accumulated by now. Besides, by this time I'd gotten more than a little uneasy about the firm. I wanted to see the place, get some idea of how it was run, meet Bruno Salvatorelli himself. So at ten o'clock on Friday morning I found myself stepping out of a taxi in front of a long, gray, windowless building, featureless except for an unobtrusive sign over the entrance: "Trasporti Salvatorelli. Per tutte le destinazioni. "
Inside, the front part of the building was walled off from the operating area by moveable, six-foot-high partitions. Here there was a tiny reception area staffed by a short-skirted, bouncy woman of perhaps twenty-five; a conference room with massive flow charts and schedules pinned to the walls; and a small private office. Everything was modem and well- maintained, but utilitarian in the extreme. No pictures on the walls, no flowers on the desks. The only object there for its cosmetic value was a lonely, failing rubber plant in a corner near the copier. And possibly the receptionist. From beyond the far partition came the thumping, creaking, and cursing to be expected in a busy shipping firm. I was cheered.