Red, White and Dead Part 11

"As beautiful and chaotic as always. You should get on a plane and get over here."

"Oh, I don't know. My trial is over, but I've got to dig myself out of the mountain I let pile up while I was prepping for it."

I told her I was staying at the Loyola campus.

"You're kidding?" she said.

"You have to see it again. C'mon, Mags. How often are we going to get this chance? How often are we both going to be single at the same time? I mean, in a couple of years you might be married with a kid." Maggie very much wanted a family. It was the husband part of that proposition that was causing her trouble.

"You're right," she said, her voice excited. "And we could celebrate your thirtieth."

"I've got a gla.s.s of wine in front of me and a spot across the table for you."

"I'm calling my travel agent."

"Seriously?"

"I'm going to make this happen. I'm coming to Rome."

15.

I hung up after the call with Maggie, a smile on my face. I asked for my check, then went back to watching the Italian men. Many wore tailored jackets. Nearly all wore beautiful Italian shoes. And those shoes reminded me of Michael and Dez.

I called Mayburn. He answered with a groan.

"What's up with you?" I asked.

"Time change," he growled. "Think about it before you call."

"Oh, please. Get up, you lazy a.s.s."

"This a.s.s was up late last night. You know how you wanted info about the people who killed your grandfather?"

I pulled my notebook closer to me and put a star by item number three. "Yeah. Find something?"

"I thought you were stretching to look that far back, but there's something interesting."

"Don't tell me my grandfather isn't dead, either."

"No. Sorry to say, two guys did kill him at that gas station. Their names were Dante Dragonetti and Luigi Battista. The cops arrested them, but both escaped from jail before they could come to trial."

"Escaped? How did they do that?"

"I tried to find that out, but the details are sketchy. It looks like they were kept in a simple holding cell in a small town out East, but these guys weren't simple criminals. And they probably had help. The authorities think they returned to Naples, where they were from. Tried to extradite them, but they apparently went deep into hiding, maybe changed their names, because the U.S. authorities couldn't prove exactly where they were. So no extradition was ever granted."

"And no one was ever tried for my grandfather's murder?"

"Nope."

"Sad." I drew a line through item number three, thinking about how that must have made my father feel-and Elena and my grandma Oriana-to have those men living free somewhere, the same men who had stopped the life of Kelvin McNeil. Then I looked at number four on my list. "Have you ever heard of Louie and Joe Rizzato?"

"The Brothers Rizzato? Sure. I saw a doc.u.mentary on PBS about them. Disappeared. Never found the bodies."

"That's the case my dad was consulting on when he died. He was a police profiler for the Detroit police force, but he worked some federal cases, too, and that was one of them."

Mayburn was silent.

"What are you thinking?" I asked.

"I'm thinking I better educate myself a bit about the Rizzato Brothers. Call you back."

I left the piazza and walked up a steep street to Palazzo Barberini, where the salone took my breath away. The three-story stone walls were mostly unadorned. The true draw was the fresco on the domed ceiling.

Only one other person was in the salon when I entered, a man lying on his back on one of the four gray chaises in the middle of the room. I sat on another chaise, then feeling a little cautious, I lay back, too. The fresco, called Divine Providence, depicted historic figures frolicking across a luminous, heavenly blue sky. I thought about my father, who always resided in a similar place in my mind-in a beautiful, warmly lit other-universe where he floated about, with no worries, but always able to see Charlie and me, always watching us.

When I left the palazzo, I kept calling Aunt Elena, and eventually I was able to translate the message. It wasn't Elena's voice, I realized, but a standard greeting from the phone company inviting callers to leave their own mes-saggi. Because Elena had seemed skittish when I'd spoken to and e-mailed with her from Chicago, I simply left a message, asking her to please call me back. In the meantime, I kept walking around the city, stopping at places I hadn't paid enough attention to before-the Capitoline museum (reached by climbing stairs next to Vittorio Emanuele), the Jewish ghetto, the Napoleon museum by the Tiber river.

On via del Banchi Vecchi, a medieval-looking street, I found a wine bar with a sign out front that only said Vino Olio. It was a tiny place where people spilled onto the sidewalk to smoke. I lucked out and found a single seat at the bar. I sat there and kept checking my cell phone, in vain, for a sign that Elena had called. I didn't want to be rude. I didn't want to just drop in on her, in her city, when she clearly didn't want to see the niece she barely knew, but finally, sitting at the rough wooden bar, I decided to text her this time. I wrote, Hi Aunt Elena it's Izzy. I'm in Rome.

Fifteen minutes later, as I was making my way through my second gla.s.s of Falanghini wine, she called. "Oh, cara," she said. "Why are you here?" She didn't say it in a rude way, but rather in a manner that was both fond and weary.

I swirled my wine, watching the smooth yellow-gold liquid swish against the clear gla.s.s. I thought about what to say, decided that there was nothing to say but the truth. "To talk about my dad."

A pause. "Where are you?"

I told her.

"I am just leaving work. Do you know this hotel?" She mentioned an address.

I'd seen it in my strolls. "It's a few streets from here, right?"

"Yes. Mio amico, my friend, runs the hotel. It has a rooftop terrace bar. It is closed for remodeling, but he will let us use it. Meet me there at half past."

I looked at my watch. "In twenty minutes?" I wanted to make sure I understood.

"Yes."

I said goodbye. I didn't ask why we had to meet on a roof deck that wasn't open to the public. I took another swallow of the wine, but it had gone a little warm and tasted slightly sour instead of refreshing.

I pushed it away, left Euros on the bar and then left to see my aunt for the first time in eight years.

16.

W e made small talk at first. How was my mother? Elena asked. What about her husband, Spence? Were they happy? She hoped so.

"She was very much in love with your father," Elena said.

And there it was-your father.

We were sitting at a high table on a sixth-floor roof deck. The hotel was small and beautiful with a lobby library and wine bar. The place had once been a convent, Elena had told me.

I looked at her now and noticed that her posture was still dancer-straight, her hair still a shiny chestnut, her skin faintly lined but supple. Behind her, the dome of St. Peter's Basilica glittered a serpentine gray-green as the sun began to disappear.

Neither of us said anything for a moment. I couldn't read her expression because of the large black sungla.s.ses she wore. They had a silver braid on the side that glinted in the sunlight whenever she turned her head.

"And what about you?" Elena said, skipping over the topic of my dad. "How is your love life?"

Now I was the one who wanted to skip over the question. I raised my left hand, the ring finger conspicuously unadorned. "I was engaged."

"And now you are not."

"No."

"Why?"

"A lot of reasons." I suddenly felt tired of explaining my breakup with Sam, or the need to put a neat narrative spin on it.

"It's hard to explain," Elena said, as if answering her own question.

"Yes." I looked at Elena's hands. They were the only parts of her, really, that gave away her age. She wore a thick gold band on her wedding finger. "And you?" I asked. "How is Maurizio?"

My mother had once encouraged me to call him Uncle Maurizio. He had, after all, married my aunt long ago. But I'd never met him. They hadn't come to the States for my father's funeral-I don't remember hearing the reason why-and when I'd visited Italy during law school, Elena had spoken of him but he'd always been busy.

She looked down at her wedding ring. "Did you know..." Her words died away, as if rethinking them. She sighed. "It's very italiano to have affairs."

"I've heard that."

She chuckled. "Yes, I suppose it's a cliche by now. And believe me, it's not something that every Italian gets involved in. There are many people now who don't, but..."

I felt a sear of pain for her. Whatever Sam and I had been through, even seeing Alyssa at his house, at least he hadn't cheated when we were together. I had learned a lot about infidelity lately-the different kinds, the different reasons-but it was still the one thing I didn't think I could tolerate. "It's part of your culture," I said.

She nodded. "It is."

We said nothing else about the subject.

"Do you and Maurizio still live together?" I asked.

"Yes, of course."

"And is he good to you?" I almost held my breath as I asked the question. It seemed so adult, somehow, to be asking such a personal thing of my aunt.

"He is. In his own way." She smiled a small smile. "You know, I was a couple years younger than Christopher, your father, and he was always the one who took care of me."

Elena had apparently decided that we were done chatting, and she was ready to deal with the topic I wanted to talk about.

"Your father was usually very serious," she said, "but he could be wickedly funny."

"I remember that," I said. "He had that way of laughing-"

"And his eyes laughed, too," Elena finished for me.

"Yes!"

"And he always wore gla.s.ses, but you could still see the life in his eyes. Always."

The words the life halted me for a second. I had no idea how to have this conversation, this Is it possible he's alive? kind of discussion.

And so I just came out with it. "I think I saw him."

She shook her head fast. "What?" Her tone was incredulous, but I couldn't see her full expression because of the sungla.s.ses.

"I guess I didn't see him so much as I heard him."

"What do you mean?" She kept shaking her head. The braided silver arms of her gla.s.ses sparkled with the motion.

I looked away from her, over the rooftops and through the mustard sky to the oxidized green dome of St. Peter's. "I got into some trouble the other night." I shrugged, as if shrugging off the details. "Some guys were ha.s.sling me, and I ran away from them. They caught up to me, but a man pulled me into a stairwell and got me away from them. He came out of nowhere. And it was black in the stairwell. I couldn't see a thing." I turned back to her. "But he said something to me."

"What?"

"Well, it wasn't what he said, exactly. He said, 'You're okay now, Boo.' It was that Boo part. That's what-"

"What your dad used to call you," Elena said. "I remember."

"Right. And no one else calls me that except my mom. So..." I shrugged again.

Elena took off her gla.s.ses. Her eyes were deep brown, but there were flecks of green in them and something else. It looked like sympathy. "Did this man say anything else?"

"That was it, really. He told me how to take the stairs. He told me to get going."

"Did he call you by your name?"

"No."

"Did you see his face?"

"No, not really. When the guys were chasing me, he was behind them, but he had a cap on, and he was looking down."