“Viva il Papa!” thundered forth, and again, “Viva il Papa!”
The Pontiff, voice amplified by speakers hidden among the carved biblical figures topping the pillared walls, announced the canonization of the first Gypsy saint in the church’s history. In 1936, Ceferino Jiminez Malla was arrested by Republican forces during the Spanish Civil War for defending a priest. When he wouldn’t renounce his faith, he was executed.
“Ceferino Malla brought to all of us his heart, rich with faith. It is time to take up his journey, on which we are announcers and witnesses.”
While the Pope spoke, Gypsies wearing bright bandannas worked the crowd. A score of them were selling Jiminez Malla’s finger and toe bones. A dozen more were explaining that the fifth nail — the one meant for Christ’s breast, which had been stolen by a Gypsy at the foot of the cross — had come down to the new saint in Spain and here was that very nail, right here, which the owner must now sell to be cured of his maladies.
All this activity made Ramon nervous. With so much going on, someone was going to get arrested, and he didn’t want it to be he, unable to talk himself out of trouble because he couldn’t speak the language. He drifted silently away to slip between the ranks of tour buses parked behind the square in Piazza Leonina. Someone grabbed his arm. He spun around, ready to run — but it was a nun in the brown and black ankle-length habit of the Franciscans. She put out her arms as if to embrace him. He stepped back, shocked and disoriented.
“Brother of mine, aren’t you glad to see me?” she said.
“Yana! But... the San Francisco police—”
“This is Rome.” She was leading him past the buses and away from St. Peter’s Square. “You must find me a boojo room — and a Romni who does not know that I am marime to lend me her infant for a few weeks. For a small cut of the take, of course.” She slipped her arm through his. “In the meantime, what’s this pretty story about the American Muchwaya?’
He was confused, then beamed. “Oh Yana, wait till I tell you!”
Giselle buzzed Dan Kearny with the news from Corinne Jones that the Gypsies had decamped for Rome, and for some reason he didn’t seem surprised. Two hours later, her private phone rang. She picked up.
“It wasn’t her,” said Bart’s voice. “Etta Mae said she was definitely not the same woman.”
Yes! Yana was innocent! Giselle leaped to her feet, trotted twice around her desk, and pounded her fist on the blotter with glee.
When she went to tell Kearny the news, his desk was empty. Jane Goldson saw Giselle and pulled off her lightweight headset phone.
“Mr. K? He left as soon as you told him the Gypsies had done a bunk.” She pointed to a stack of files on the edge of her desk. “He said for you to carry on.”
Giselle called Corinne Jones at the travel agency again.
“Round-trip to Rome, business class, no return res,” Corinne confirmed. “He just picked up his ticket on his way to SFO.”
“You wouldn’t happen to know where he’s staying, would you?”
“I found him a place called San Filippo Neri.” Corinne added, chuckling, “A convent. Dan Kearny in a nunnery. They converted the upper floors into accommodations for paying guests. It’s very reasonable and it’s near St. Peter’s where all the action is.”
With his American passport and single modest suitcase, Kearny cleared customs at Fiumicino’s sprawling Leonardo da Vinci International Aeroporto di Roma without breaking stride and was directed to a tall taxi driver with a fair command of English.
“The convent of San Filippo Neri in Prati,” Kearny said. Corinne Jones had written the address in Magic Marker, bold print; he didn’t even have to grope for his glasses.
“Seventy-five thousand lire,” said the driver promptly.
Dan tried to lean back against the seat and relax, but it wasn’t easy. He was just coming off eleven hours in the air, nonstop, and all the way in from the airport the hackie drove one-handed with his cell phone to his ear, talking nonstop. Neither he nor any of the other drivers had any concept of traffic lanes.
Once inside the city limits it was sirens and loudly buzzing motorcycle engines in every direction, inescapable as Muzak. At an intersection a bus, ATTACK written on the side in red letters, stormed through a red light a foot in front of them.
Half a block farther on a little kid wearing baggy jeans and tattered shirt and hightops was hawking watermelon from the sidewalk. Dan’s driver said something into his cell phone, screamed to a stop in the middle of the traffic, and jumped out. He came back to put a watermelon carefully on the seat beside Kearny, and roared away again — never lowering his cell phone from his face.
Finally the taxi turned into a narrow tree-lined street made even narrower by angle-parked hordes of the small European cars Dan had already realized the Italians favored. They slammed to a stop in front of a narrow mid-block mustard-colored building with wide steps up to a formidable door. Dan stepped out stiffly to retrieve his single bag from the back seat.
“One hundred fifty thousand lire,” said the driver. “You said near St. Peter’s. This is very far north of the Vatican.”
Kearny slapped eight 10,000-lira notes into the man’s hand, said, “Keep the change,” and started up the wide stone steps with his bag. At the top he turned to look down at the angry driver.
“You ought to pay me for that ride,” he said.
Forty-nine
Ephrem Poteet’s dying words were, It was my... wife... from... ’Frisco... After a pause, he croaked, Yana, and with his last breath howled out her name: Yana-a-a-a-a... Etty Mae heard him clearly. Cut and dried. But on seeing Yana’s mug shots, she said just as clearly that Yana was not the woman she had seen on those two fateful nights. So far so good. But none of it proved Yana’s innocence.
Giselle had puzzled over this ever since Bart had reported it, but it wasn’t until she was driving to work that she was able to catch the thought that had been tickling at her brain. What if after saying his wife had killed him, Ephrem called out to Yana, not in accusation, but in despair because she was his only true love and he was dying all alone without her there? What if there had been another, bigamous wife?
The Bureau of Vital Statistics was in the ornate newly earthquake-refitted City Hall. Behind the counter of the otherwise-empty office a large indifferent black woman in a print dress was giving someone a cake recipe over the phone.
“You stick a broom straw down into each layer. If it comes out clean, the cake is done.” She gave a booming laugh. “I’m gonna get me more than a piece of that cake, girl!” and hung up.
She looked at Giselle sternly; no cake recipes for her.
“I need a vital statistic,” said Giselle.
The laugh again. “Them we got plenty of.” She shook her head, chuckling, “Yessir, got plenty of them. Whut you need?”
Never confuse a bureaucrat. Giselle literally spelled it out for her. She was looking for a marriage license issued to a Poteet, P-O-T-E-E-T, Ephrem, or to a Mihai, M-I-H-A-I, Punka.
“Ain’t gonna be many, not with no goofy names like those.” There weren’t. On Friday, March 3rd, Punka Mihai had married Nadja Gry in a civil ceremony right here at City Hall.
Giselle went out into the June sunshine to sit on a bench by the reflecting pool and congratulate herself a little and reflect on what she had. She had a start. A bigamous marriage. What she needed now was Nadja Mihai’s current name.