“The bag,” Monica said to herself.
She opened the bedroom door. The living room was empty. The bag was by the French windows, which were ajar, bringing a cold draught into the room. Monica cursed herself. It was a night for getting careless. Outside, the two gas heaters still burned, hissing quietly, like vents in the side of a small volcano sitting on a rooftop in the middle of the city.
She checked the single front door. It had this incredible lock-multiple bolts, the kind you’d expect on a domestic Fort Knox. All of them still thrown from the outside as he left. She couldn’t open it however hard she tried. But there was an old-fashioned manual bolt on the inside too. She threw it and felt a little better. Maybe she couldn’t get out, but Peter was now unable to get back in unless she allowed him.
“Let’s get this over with,” Monica whispered to herself. She went back to the sofa and picked up the black bag, finding it unexpectedly heavy, placed it on the table and blinked, trying to see better. The interior lights were terrible. Insignificant, tiny yellow bulbs that barely penetrated the shadows of the cabin. She glanced at the terrace, with its hissing heaters. Two big fluorescent spots threw a bright semicircle under the awning there. It would be so much easier. She went outside and laid the bag on the plastic picnic table under the awning.
The night was extraordinary: starlit, perfectly still, beautiful, like a painting on one of those pretty picture Christmas cards old people sent each other.
You’ll be old one day, the little voice inside her said.
“Yeah,” Monica agreed. “But you won’t find me sending out crap like that.”
Even though the main door was bolted she closed the French windows behind her. It seemed like a good idea.
She started to open the zipper, then shut her eyes. Was this really such a good idea? Going through a stranger’s things, looking to find proof he wasn’t what he claimed? She could stay where she was, safe from anyone getting in, wait until morning, call the cops and tell them she’d lost her keys.
Unless she met him on the stairs on the way out. Unless…
Too many possibilities started to crowd into her head. Monica pulled the zipper all the way back and was dismayed to find staring out at her exactly what she would, in ordinary circumstances, have expected. Peter O’Malley’s modest, inexpensive bag revealed a black woollen sweater, just the kind a priest would wear. Neatly folded, the way an organized man, one who lived inside an institution, would have learned over the years.
She hesitated and looked behind her into the cabin. The living room was still empty. It wasn’t even dawn. Maybe he was gone for good, out doing whatever he really did for a living.
Which was probably nothing exciting at all.
She pulled out the sweater and placed it carefully on the terrace table, which, being well protected against the weather by the awning, was still relatively dry and clean. Monica was determined everything would go back in as it came out, in exactly the same condition, exactly the same order. As much as possible, anyway.
One more sweater. Some underwear. Socks. All very clean. And a pair of light shoes, not the kind you’d normally wear in winter.
It was all so ordinary.
Then two shirts, folded so they creased as little as possible. Peter O’Malley, or whoever he was, knew how to pack.
The last shirt was different. Kind of khaki, woollen. Almost military issue, although maybe the Church made priests wear this kind of thing too, just to remind them who they truly were.
“You’re prying, Monica,” she said. “You’re a stupid, nosy bitch who’s just got the night terrors from drinking too much. Who…”
She removed the khaki shirt, placed it in order alongside the rest of his belongings and felt her lungs freeze, go still, in unison with the breathless quiet of the night.
There was a gun there. A small, black, deadly looking gun.
She took it out, held it in her hand, where it fitted neatly, wondered how you made a weapon like this work if you needed one, then put it in the correct position on the table.
Next to the gun was a selection of things she couldn’t quite comprehend. What looked like a radio, with a little earphone. A bunch of silver tubes the size of cigarillos, with wires sticking out of one end, emerging from what looked like a wad of wax. A few notes: euros, dollars, all small denominations. And finally something that really bewildered her.
Monica Sawyer took the stuff out of the bottom of the bag and held it up to the sky. It was a carefully rolled-up hank of material of some kind. When she unravelled a little she saw it was cut into a repeating geometric pattern, a series of slashes that were clearly part of the design. She stretched it with her fingers and watched the way the precise slashes in the fabric stretched and pulled, keeping their shape, seeming to have some odd, internal strength that came as much from the material’s pattern and its precise arrangement of tears as from the textile itself.
“It’s rude to look,” said a voice from somewhere behind her.
Monica Sawyer tried to speak but all that came out was a kind of clack-clack-clack. She was scared. Of the shapes in the fabric. Of this place. Of this cold, cold night.
But more than anything, she was scared of this voice, which kept on speaking, using words her mind blocked her from hearing, kept on changing accent, changing tone, all coming from a shape that must have been perched somewhere on the roof all the time, looking at a frozen Rome perfect beneath a frozen sky.
Venerdi
NIC COSTA LOOKED OUT OF THE LIVING-ROOM WINDOW, out at the bright morning and a garden that was a perfect sheet of white, broken only by the bent old-men backs of olive trees sagging under the weight of snow. The farmhouse off the Appian Way couldn’t cope with the weather. It was still cold, in spite of two log fires roaring away at either end of the big, airy room. This was home, though, a good place to be. Since his father died and Costa had embarked on a lengthy, solitary recuperation from a near-fatal shooting, the house had rarely echoed to anything but his own footsteps. That was a shame. It was a place that needed people to make it live again.
He glanced at last summer’s logs crackling and sputtering in the ancient fireplaces, still damp from the snow, and remembered what his father had looked like during those final days, swathed in a blanket in his wheelchair, slipping away gradually, battling his disease every inch of the way. Then he heard the deep, round sound of Gianni Peroni’s guffaw roll out of the kitchen, followed, a little more hesitantly, by light young laughter.
Teresa Lupo walked out, shaking her head, and eyed the tray in his hands. “Are you going to take it up to her, Nic? Or shall I? That coffee’s going cold and there’s nothing Americans hate more than cold coffee.”
“I’ll do it. How is he?”
“Gianni?” Teresa’s eyes were shining, as if she’d been close to tears. She looked exhausted, but happy too. Costa had called her after the incident in the Campo. It was her decision to drive there straightaway, then on to the farmhouse. Costa wondered how they would have coped without her.
“He’s fine.” She sighed. “For an idiot. She’s a messed-up immigrant kid, Nic. I talked to the social people on the phone when you were asleep. They’ll have to take her into care. You can’t just”-she formed the words very deliberately-“transfer the way you feel about your own kids to someone else. However much you need to. Gianni just wants to be home with his own family. I know that. I don’t blame him.”
Costa wondered if it was really so simple. “The girl looks happy, Teresa. Maybe it works both ways. She’s seeing a little of her own father in him. Besides, he’s doing his job too. She refused to say a damn word until he began clowning around.”