“Perfect. Your name is Celine Morrisette and you don’t speak any Italian at all. If it gets bad, start crying and screaming in French.”
“If what gets bad?”
“If they catch you.”
“What about you?”
“Du er sе grim at du gшr blinde bшrn bange.”
“What the hell is that?!”
“Danish for ‘you’re so ugly you scare blind children.’ ”
“I didn’t know you spoke Danish.”
Hilts smiled, leaned over, and kissed Finn’s newly bronzed cheek.
“There’s a lot you don’t know about me. And I didn’t mean the bit about the blind kids.”
22
Finn walked through the hundred-foot-high entrance to Milan’s Stazione Centrale trying to think in French, an old trick from her days writing high school exams. The trouble was, it didn’t work. Instead she kept on hearing the nasal voice of her history professor at NYU telling her that the English word “crap” came from the British infantry during the Napoleonic Wars, when they couldn’t pronounce the French word for “frog”-grenouille-so they used the Gallic word for “toad” instead, which was crapaud, zoologically close enough for the average English foot soldier. For some reason the story had stuck in her mind, and at that particular moment Finn couldn’t think of any other word in the French language with the possible exceptions of oui and non. Trying not to panic, she made her way down the main concourse, which was roughly the size of a football field.
The interior of the station was irrationally, and wastefully, large, especially when one considered its fascist origins, a regime priding itself on ruthless efficiency. The cornerstone of the gigantic building had been laid in 1906, when Italy was still a monarchy. By 1912, the architect, a man named Stacchini, had stolen the plans for Burnham’s Union Station in Washington, D.C., and had simply doubled the scale. Twenty years after that the station was finally opened, complete with a parade of goose-stepping Blackshirts marching through the same enormous archway that Finn had just walked through. The whole station, including the twenty-five platforms and the barrel-vaulted iron and glass canopies, was 1,118 feet long and covered an area of a little over 700,000 square feet. Seventy-five years after its opening the station was now home to everything from packs of meandering gypsies to several hundred professional pickpockets, twice that many homeless people, 320,000 passengers coming and going each and every day, a Gucci outlet, two McDonald’s, and a Budget Rent-a-Car. It also sold railway tickets, even at midnight. Between the first McDonald’s arches and the ticket counter Finn was approached by four single men of varying ages, each one attesting to his virility and his desire to buy her a drink, coffee, or a hotel room. The word “crapaud” turned out to be more useful than she’d thought. On her way to the ticket counter she also noticed at least a dozen blue-uniformed cops checking the relatively thin late-night crowds, each one carrying some kind of handbill. Hilts had been right: they were on the lookout for her and the photographer. She was suddenly grateful for the bad cut and dye job and the new clothes. She was also acutely aware of the fact that their passports were back at the hotel and that she didn’t have a single piece of identification to corroborate her sudden incarnation as Celine Morrisette, crossover Canadian singing sensation.
“Crapaud is right,” she whispered to herself, standing in the short line at the counter. Checking the big boards showing the next departures, she’d seen that there wasn’t much to choose from. She reached the head of the line, tried to put on what passed for a French Canadian accent in English, and bought her ticket. Turning away from the counter she brushed past Hilts, as they’d previously arranged.
“Lyon, car eleven, compartment D, platform nine,” she said under her breath, looking away from him as she passed. Hilts joined the ticket line and Finn went on ahead. The train was due to leave in ten minutes. She moved slowly, watching the entrance to the track area. There were four uniformed policemen at the gate and two plainclothes cops speaking into walkie-talkies. They weren’t asking people for papers, but the plainclothesmen were eyeing the passengers as they headed through the small opening in the looming iron grille. Once again it looked as though Hilts was right, because they were paying particular attention to younger couples.
With her ticket visible in one hand Finn moved between the two policemen with their walkie-talkies, keeping her eyes forward and holding her breath. Once she was between the two men flanking the opening there would be no way to escape. She thought about how long she would last as Celine Morrisette under questioning by the police. Not long, she knew, and after all, what would be the point? If they had her, then that was that. She thought about how her mother would react back in Columbus. A simple summer job turned to crapaud. Strangely she also found herself thinking of Hilts. He was the kind of man her mother always referred to as a scoundrel, but every time she said the word it was wistful and she was smiling. Her dad, according to her mom, had been one.
“Scusi, signorina, parla Italiano?”
“Pardon?” She froze. She was a French Canadian named Dion. No, Celine. Crapaud.
“Parla Italiano, signorina?”
“Je ne comprends pas.” That was it, the absolute bottom of the barrel. There wasn’t a syllable of French left in her and her mouth had dried up like being at the dentist.
The bigger of the two men stepped forward, half blocking her path. Out of the corner of her eye she could see the sign for platform nine and the train’s destination in white on black.
“Signorina, per quanto tempo sei stato in viaggio?”
The cop was asking her how long she’d been traveling. She understood every word, even in his thick, Milanese accent. But she wasn’t supposed to understand him. She didn’t speak any Italian because she wasn’t Fiona Katherine Ryan, young art-historian-fugitive-killer-on-the-run, she was Celine Morrisette, carefree French-Canadian girl on her own, seeing Italy for twenty bucks a day and taking night trains to save on hotels.
“Signorina, per favore…”
And then, suddenly, miraculously, she had it, complete with that strange twang like a Cajun on steroids that always lurked in the back of Celine Dion’s voice when she talked to Larry King. Finn let out a torrent of words, most of them to do with Raymond and his student-exchange visit and how exciting it was and all of it somehow remembered chapter, verse, and word perfect from her junior-year textbook, Premiиres Annйes de Franзaise. She buried the Milanese plainclothes cop in it up to his eyeballs, all at blinding speed, along with the atrocious accent. It seemed to work. Finally Finn ran out of Raymond and his new friend Elaine’s exploits, so she just shut up and smiled. The big man turned to his partner.
“Esse un po’ di fuori,” he said, which meant that Finn was a nutcase. She smiled even more. She waved her ticket.
“Canadian?” said the first cop.
She gave the cop her best revolutionary student glare. “Non, je suis Quebecois!” She laughed, waved the ticket, and said, “S’il vous plait, messieurs! Mon train est on depart а ce moment!” It was true, the Lyon train gave a shrieking blast on its whistle. Last call.
They let her go. She made it to the train, showed her ticket to the official on the platform, and climbed aboard. The night train was one of the slower and older Corail TRNs that were being slowly replaced by the high-speed bullet-nosed TGVs, the Trains a Grande Vitesse. She found her compartment, empty at the moment, and sighed with relief. Half a minute later the whistle shrieked again, and true to Mussolini’s promise, the train began to move, right on time.
Trains in Europe are almost all electric, so there was none of the North American diesel pull-and-tug as they started; the train simply began to move in a gentle, gradually accelerating motion that swept them out of the massive station and into the dark of Milan’s industrial suburbs. The small compartment remained empty and Finn began to relax. It looked as though they had made it-if Hilts had managed to make it onto the train.