Just after dark, the well-dressed young woman set her carryall down on the stazione platform. Instantly two ragged ten-year-old kids with shoe-button eyes approached her, one from either side. “Signorina!” exclaimed one of them. When she turned toward him, the other snatched the carryall.
Yana grabbed each boy by one arm, sinking her fingers into the flesh. “Muchwaya?” she demanded. They shook their heads. She let go, gestured at one boy to open the carryall. He boldly unzipped it. It was stuffed with cheap plastic toys, red and blue and yellow, silver and gold. Their eyes widened in astonishment.
“Muchwaya?” she asked again.
“I Muchwaya Americani. Ma non sono qui, Signorina. Sono in Trastevere.”
“Trastevere?” she asked.
They both nodded and gestured vigorously. The second one said, “Trastevere, si! Il Papa. Il Vaticano. Hanno fatto una bella storia, i Muchwaya Americani!”
A pretty story? Back at the hotel, she used the lobby pay phone to call Geraldine in San Francisco and tell her about a rather astounding phenomenon that she thought might interest some of Geraldine’s friends. She was sure some of them would want to take advantage of it.
Forty-eight
Bart bounded into DKA like he was entering the ring. He leaned across Giselle’s desk to point a demanding finger at her.
“That college roomie of yours, Sofia Ciccone, who works in Records at the Hall of Justice, has to get me a mug shot of Yana from the time she was booked for running a bogus mitt-camp.”
“Who lit your fire?” demanded Giselle. Bart flopped in the chair across the desk from her.
“I’ve never had a picture of Yana to show to Etty Mae down in L.A. It’s ridiculous!”
Giselle deliberated. If she was wrong about Yana, she would be in serious trouble for what she’d done. She sighed.
“I’ll call Sofia,” she said.
“I can’t steal mug shots for you, Giselle!”
“Why not? Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are flashing her pic all over town, why can’t we?”
“They’re cops, for God sake. I’m a cop. They got the right to show it around and you...” She paused, sighed. “Oh, okay. But next Sunday we go up to the wine country in your little red car for the entire day. Just you and me, with the top down. Chasing after any foxy guys we see.”
Brother Bonaventura emerged from a rose-colored building on Vicolo della Cinque in Rome’s Trastevere quarter, contemplating the fact that sin was not new in this world. For at least two thousand years, pickpockets and fingersmiths had dwelled in this short street close to the River Tiber. Pilgrims’ purses from distant Anglia, porte-monnaies from Gaul, oversized fine Moroccan leather wallets, all had been emptied here, then thrown into the blond river to float down to the sea. The street’s name, cinque, referred to the five fingers of a pickpocket’s hand.
There wasn’t time to stroll along the Lungotevere to the Basilica of St. Peter, so he cut across Piazza San Egidio past the large entablatured windows of Vicolo del Cedro, judiciously cross-barred with heavy iron grillwork not even a two-year-old could penetrate. The young Brother swung along at a thoughtful, contemplative pace, his summer robe flapping happily around his sandals, his tonsure, surrounded by black curly hair, growing warm in the sunshine.
After dropping Bart at the airport limo to SFO and his flight to Burbank, Corinne Jones drove against the grain of rush-hour traffic up into Marin. She crossed the San Rafael — Richmond Bridge to Point Richmond, soon was drinking coffee with Johanna Knudsen in the triangle park across from Johanna’s office.
“I knew he was too good-looking and well-mannered to be true,” Johanna lamented. “Alberto Angelini, Angelo Grimaldi, those names are close — and he fits your Rudolph Marino description to a T. I put his people on Alitalia’s daily flights to Milan, spread over four days, ongoing to Rome.”
“They probably went on phony passports and stolen credit cards,” Corinne warned. Johanna shrugged.
“The bank and the feds and the airline can fight that one out. I’ve gotten my commission and I’m hanging on to it!”
Bart Heslip parked his rental car in front of Etty Mae Walston’s white frame house on Marathon Street in L.A. Someone new was living in Ephrem Poteet’s place next door; one of the fancy lightweight silver kid’s scooters called Razors was lying abandoned on the porch beside the front door. He wondered if the tenants knew that a man had been murdered in their bedroom.
Etty Mae’s front room curtains stirred, the door opened before he could lay his finger on the buzzer. She dragged him into the sitting room for iced tea, then was disappointed when he took out the envelope that held Yana’s mug shots.
“Aren’t you supposed to show me a bunch of other women’s pictures at the same time so I can pick her out by myself?”
“I’m not a cop and this isn’t a formal identification.” They were going through the glossies of Yana’s full-face and profile together. Yana glowed with beauty. “They’re police mug shots, which should be pretty good for identifi—”
“This isn’t her.”
“What?” Bart was stunned. “Now take your time, Miz Walston. It was night, it was dark—”
“I don’t need any time. Remember, I saw that woman two nights under a streetlight with my binoculars. She’s got more of a hawk nose, different-shaped forehead, fuller mouth, rounder face. She’s not this woman. I’ll swear to it in court any day.”
“Well I’ll be damned,” said Bart Heslip.
“Have some iced tea instead,” suggested Etty Mae Walston.
Incense thickened the air inside St. Peter’s ornate Basilica. Great spiraled pillars supported the domed tentlike canopy over the main altar, which had been covered with red and white linens. Ramon Ristik, mating Gypsy adroitness with the respect his tonsured scalp and clerical garb demanded, had passed with many other pilgrims through the immense crowd to the end of the pew closest to the wide central aisle. Tears came to his eyes when the wail of a bosh — the Gypsy violin — rose to the vaulted dome. A soulful Spanish guitar accompanied the choir’s traditional Latin chanting. The Pope wore unusually colorful vestments: fiery red, yellow, and orange that looked like flames.
During the processional the Papal entourage of bishops and cardinals in red robes and tall mitres walked right past Ramon. He was so awed he didn’t even think of picking anyone’s pockets.
Outside in St. Peter’s Square, big as a couple of football fields laid out side by side with a huge fountain in the middle, was a different story. It was jammed with forty thousand people, which meant at least eighty thousand pockets. The sun was glaring now. Ramon wiped sweat from his tonsure with a handkerchief. In bringing his hand down, he jostled a fat balding tourist wearing plaid shorts and a T-shirt reading LIONS TEN — CHRISTIANS ZERO.
“Scusi, Signore,” said the bogus Brother Bonaventura, using a tenth of his entire Italian vocabulary with those two words.
His handkerchief-shielded hand dropped the tourist’s wallet into the long pocket of his soutain to join the dozen-odd other wallets already there. The pig deserved it, wearing an irreverent T-shirt like that to St. Peter’s.
A long red banner unfurled from one of the top windows of the Papal apartment overlooking the square and the Pope’s frail white-clad figure appeared in the open window.