The Detour (31 page)

Rosina objected. “Don’t leave me here alone. Someone else might be coming. And what about the car?”

Cosimo reconsidered. “Stay together, then. Cover the car with anything—a blanket, branches. Scuff up the tire tracks. Check for personal belongings and hide them, but quickly. Then return to the barn, push everything back into place, clean up and wait.

“There’s no hiding what I’ve done,” I said to Cosimo’s departing back.

Forty minutes later, Rosina and I were sitting on the tidied bed together, hands washed but still shaking, catching a pungent smell of smoke, not a smell bad enough to explain how they are disposing of the body itself. I left it to Cosimo, who, in his line of work, probably knew ways I couldn’t imagine. The surrounding landscape, in my horrified mind, became a map of morbid options: an algae-covered pond here, a collapsed cellar, a sty full of hungry pigs. That last image was the hardest to shake, even as I felt Rosina’s hand on my back, tracing light circles with her fingertips.

“
Bitte
,” she said, and I realized it wasn’t the first time she had said it. I’d been hearing it faintly without apprehending.

Ja
.

Bitte
.

Ja
.

Then silence as we traveled down a path we had begun to travel before, but this time without banter, no attempt to study or adore, to hurry or delay; no references to past or future, or to any people other than ourselves. The consequences of what I’d done were rushing toward us, but strangely, I felt a sense of release. The worst had already happened.

I closed my eyes without any thought of vigilance or scrutiny. I shed each layer without any thought of self-consciousness. We stopped kissing long enough to turn the covers down, but carefully, as if we were only preparing the bed for someone else. Of course, this is what we should be doing now. Of course, this is what we must do.

And how beautiful her body was, how soft and how singular. We took our time, and there were no interruptions or regrets and no awkwardness or shame, as if we’d made love a dozen times before, as if we’d always been lovers. How fortunate I felt, and how ready, once we were finished and I had dressed again and rolled up each sleeve with meditative care, to accept whatever would come next.

Sitting on the bedside later, fully clothed, I laced my fingers with Rosina’s one last time as we watched the sky outside the barn’s one small window turn from black to gray to lavender, dark hills cleanly divided from lightening sky. “Now we wait for Lady Fortune. That’s what Enzo would say.”

Rosina looked skeptical. “He never understood that she is bad fortune as well as good. Fickle and unlasting—the symbol of the turning wheel. Attracted to displays of youthful violence, some say.”

A moment later, I asked, “Maybe you could sing something for me?”

“Who would think of singing at a time like this?”

“Later, then. Do you promise?”

She turned away, but I’d already seen the thickening lens of tears darkening her eyes. “
Prometto
.”

Then I heard the sounds of tires on gravel, the assertive application of brakes, the sharp metallic scrape of four car doors opening. “They’re here. I’ll go to meet them.”

“Wait for Cosimo.” Her fingernails dug into my forearm.

But we heard him calling out to the visitors from the hill beyond the barn, sounding falsely hale and hearty, as if he’d just been feeding chickens and shoveling manure. “
Buongiorno!
”

When I stepped out of the barn, buttoning the top button of my shirt, I came up against two Germans in suits, one with a small, slim-barreled pistol in his hand, pointing. Closest to the car was a man in police uniform, an Italian supervising officer of some kind, chatting amiably with his hand on Cosimo’s sleeve. His face met mine, saw the gun pointing at me. He looked even more shocked than I was.

“
Essere attento
,” the Italian said, searching his brain for foreign words. “
Achtung
. Easy, easy.”

Another Italian policeman stepped out of the car, yawning, and stopped mid-stretch, alarmed by the scene unfolding. The two Germans wanted to search me, search the barn, find the truck. The two Italians wanted to go up to the main house, maybe wake up with some espresso if Cosimo or his mother would be so kind, take out their notepads and ask us some questions.

“
Va bene, va bene
,” Cosimo soothed, striking a compromise. He shouted out to his mother in the house to prepare for guests. To the men gathered, he suggested, in both carefully enunciated Italian and then German, that we go directly to the truck, where the statue of the
Discus Thrower
awaited us. That was why they were here, was it not? It was fine, well cared for, and ready for the final leg of its transport. We would go to inspect it, without delay. When Rosina slipped out of the barn, Cosimo directed her up to the house, out of our way:
Help Mamma
.

As we walked to the truck, the second German, who introduced himself simply and without rank as Herr Fassbinder, began to question me. But it was the unnamed one with the polished chestnut-colored holster riding high against his hip—Herr Luger, I’d tagged him in my mind—who held my attention.

“Why are you here?” Fassbinder asked gently.

“There was … an incident. A series of incidents.”

“We have a report that someone was trying to steal the statue you were transporting.”

I lowered my voice. “Someone
was
trying to steal it. Not these Italians. I think they’re ignorant of the entire matter.” The presence of a sympathetic listener encouraged me further. “At first, I suspected some Roman policemen, but now I think it was a private ploy, an attempt to take the statue, not to return it to the government, but to sell it on the black market.” Should I implicate Keller, or would that only prompt them to ask me if I’d seen him? Should I tell everything I knew, as fast as I could, and rely on the truth to save me?

“Very helpful, very interesting,” the German said, returning my whisper. “We are also missing someone—a man who came out this way earlier this morning. It would be our luck if he got lost here, motoring between farms, surveying the countryside for pretty girls, no doubt.” He glanced over his shoulder at the yawning Italian walking behind us. He started to catch the yawn himself and shook it off. I couldn’t tell if this casual manner was authentic or just a tactic to earn my trust. Either way, I preferred it to the point of a gun. “They haven’t given us much help, I have to say. I was in Genoa, on vacation, when they called me. The other man—he’s on duty, sent by The Collector himself, who is waiting to hear.”

I repeated the dreaded words back to him: “
Der Kunstsammler
.”

“Yes, there is unhappiness at the highest levels.”

Cosimo, the Italian police captain, and the German with the reholstered Luger were ahead, talking just as animatedly. Up at the house, the side door opened, and I saw Mamma Digirolamo waving, with a tray in her other hand. The espresso wasn’t ready yet, but it soon would be. All this would be settled. For a moment, this felt like a cheerful reunion, and I could imagine all of us making a best effort to sort through the confusion, in two languages, with all due respect. If only Keller
had
gotten lost. I could almost believe it myself. I could see him accepting breakfast in a farmhouse, dancing a waltz on a
terrazza
, falling in love.

But that would have been a different Keller, not the one who had fallen in love with profit and fineries, whose distinctive cologne even now was so strong in my nostrils I was sure
others could smell it, too. I brought my arm to my face as if I were just rubbing my nose, and there was the source of it, on the underside of my forearms, where I must have pressed hard against his chest as the
vanghetto
sank into his lungs. I unrolled my sleeves, buttoning them, but still, the sickly sweet perfume lingered.

Up ahead, Cosimo threw open the back of the truck and was startled when Tartufa came leaping out, escaping her all-night confinement. She landed on all fours, sized up our assembly, darted forward a meter or so, and then turned to bare her small white teeth. For a moment, she seemed to be snarling at me—at the smell on my arms, at the clear look and aroma of my guilt—but then I saw her take a threatening step toward the other strangers. She picked out the Germans, perhaps because they were closest, their erect posture mimicking her own nervousness. She quieted for a moment, a gurgling sound dying in her throat, then pulled back her lips again.

And fell, tumbling to her side. There was a yelp and a gunshot—or most likely, the reverse. Of course. The gunshot followed by the yelp, followed by the fall. My mind was still struggling to see it unfold, to understand why she had gone limp.

Cosimo knelt down, cradling the dog’s head, while the rest of us turned toward the sound of the shot. The sleepy Italian policeman was no longer sleepy. The Italian captain, Cosimo’s supervisor, was outraged. Even Herr Fassbinder, hands anchored in the front pockets of his trench coat, looked surprised. I heard a house door slam and the sounds of women’s voices, plus a man’s—Gianni’s—ordering them back inside.

“Remove the animal, please,” the German with the Luger ordered, and my former ally, the off-duty vacationer in Genoa, shrugged off his last vestige of casual impartiality and got down to business. He carried the dog to the side of the truck, just out of view.

“Now, let’s get to work,” the first German ordered. “How much does this statue weigh?”

When I told him, he laughed. “Good God. What a nuisance. I suppose we paid by the kilo?”

No one responded to his joke.

“All right. Five of us then.” He pointed to me, Fassbinder, the Italian captain, and the secondary officer. Cosimo was left to stand, staring down at his stained hands. “And if anyone sneezes, or drops this
verdammte
thing on my foot, I still have ammunition left.”

Even Fassbinder failed to smile.

We were told to remove the statue from the truck for inspection, to unwrap its makeshift wrappings and stand it up in the yard. It was harder to do now that the crate had been mostly disassembled; it would take some time and some rope and a good deal of sweaty cooperation, handling those hundreds of kilograms of marble. It wasn’t a good idea to do haphazardly, I wanted to say. But since when had any of this been a good idea?

I was too nervous to look closely until it was fully upright, until it was done. Then I took off the last blanket and put a hand to the
Discus Thrower’
s side, on his exposed right ribs, holding him upright until we knew the round base was secure on the pebbly ground, and then I paused for a breath to look. Once I looked, I was unable to stop looking. This is what I
had wanted to do all along—not only to look at it up close, but to touch it, unhurriedly, as I would never again be able to do, once the statue was in powerful hands, on private or public display.

There was the taut pectoral muscle, and beneath it, the smooth and shadowy indent just below the first rib, the second, the third, the fourth and the fifth, all the way down to the muscular iliac crest. Where my hand rested, along the middle of the rib cage, was the place where I had been strong once, where I had been ashamed, where I had been attacked, where I was now healed. I ran my hand over the marble, feeling all that this statue was, and all that it was not—nearly unfathomable artistry, but not everything. Both more than and less than life. The fact that it would outlast us all was, at this moment, both an injustice and a relief.

There was a dark line near the
Discus Thrower’
s hip, but when I reached down and touched it, the darkness wiped off easily. It was only soot from the truck fire, not a crack. There were no lines or new signs of breakage anywhere along the statue, from toe to fingertip, from back to front, other than the cracks that had been apparent before—on the discus itself, just below the right shoulder, a few other places, all well documented.

The gathered men were all looking at me. They would have to believe what I had to say, or better yet, I could show them the di Luca guide. The two nubs at the top, like the faint traces of two little devil horns—of which Herr Luger asked, “Did something happen there?”—were part of the authentic Roman statue, artifacts of the molding process. I could explain everything in fine detail about what didn’t matter, and almost
nothing about what did:
Was it worth all of this, including what would come next?

“There it is, safe and sound,” I said as we all looked on with some awe. At the very least, we had not damaged a masterpiece.

Maybe that thought made me believe we were past the worst of it, or maybe I was not optimistic at all but only reckless, intoxicated by the presumption of imminent liberty, ready to accept the lash rather than cower from it.

“There is money,” I stammered. “Money from the people who were trying to steal the statue, who paid Cosimo’s brother, Enzo …”

Fassbinder translated this into Italian. Now I had everyone’s attention.

“Enzo?” the Italian police captain asked, looking worried. But not nearly as worried as Cosimo, whose eyes grew wide.

He stared at me, entreating. But he couldn’t worry about Enzo’s reputation now. It was too late for that. We had to save ourselves.

Fassbinder squinted into the pale yellow dawn breaking over the farm, still wanting to be back in bed. “This implicates you, I’m afraid.”

“How could it? If I were going to be paid for stealing the statue, I would not have received the money yet—not from people who didn’t know or trust me. No, this money went to a local man, a member of the
polizia municipale
, who was trying to misdirect us.”

The Italian police captain didn’t like this. Now it was more than just Enzo’s reputation at stake; it was all of his police
force. But then again, who were these German investigators to meddle in a local affair? Was this a police matter now or a diplomatic one? Shouldn’t there be higher-ranked officials involved?

The German, ignoring all questions of rank and policy, continued pressing me. “And how did you get it from him?”