The Historian (7 page)

―Now you‘re talking nonsense,‖ my father said contentedly. ―I like to travel, that‘s what I like.‖

―Ah.‖ Massimo shook his head. ―And you, Signor Professor, once said you‘d be the greatest of them all. Not that your foundation isn‘t a wonderful success, I know.‖

―We need peace and diplomatic enlightenment, not more research on tiny questions no one else cares about,‖ my father countered, smiling. Giulia lit a lantern on the sideboard, turning off the electric light. She brought the lantern to the table and began to cut up atorta I‘d been trying not to stare at earlier. Its surface gleamed like obsidian under the knife.

―In history, there are no tiny questions.‖ Massimo winked at me. ―Besides, even the great Rossi said you were his best student. And the rest of us could hardly please the fellow.‖

―Rossi!‖

It was out of my mouth before I could stop myself. My father glanced uneasily at me over his cake.

―So you know the legends of your father‘s academic successes, young lady?‖ Massimo filled his mouth hugely with chocolate.

My father gave me another glance. ―I‘ve told her a few stories about those days,‖ he said.

I didn‘t miss the undercurrent of warning in his voice. A moment later, however, I thought it might have been directed at Massimo, not me, since Massimo‘s next comment shot a chill through me before my father quashed it with a quick shift to politics.

―Poor Rossi,‖ Massimo said. ―Tragic, wonderful man. Strange to think anyone one has known personally can just—poof—disappear.‖

The next morning we sat on the sun-washed piazza at the town‘s summit, jackets firmly buttoned and brochures in hand, watching two boys who should, like me, have been at school. They shrieked and punted their soccer ball back and forth in front of the church, and I waited patiently. I had been waiting all morning, through the tour of dark little chapels ―with elements of Brunelleschi,‖ according to the vague and bored guide, and the Palazzo Pubblico, with its reception chamber that had served for centuries as a town granary. My father sighed and gave me one of two Oranginas in dainty bottles. ―You‘re going to ask me something,‖ he said a little glumly.

―No, I just want to know about Professor Rossi.‖ I put my straw into the neck of the bottle.

―I thought so. Massimo was tactless to bring that up.‖

I dreaded the answer, but I had to ask. ―Did Professor Rossi die? Is that what Massimo meant when he said
disappear
? ‖

My father looked across the sun-filled square to the cafés and butcher shops on the other side. ―Yes. No. Well, it was a very sad thing. Do you really want to hear about that?‖

I nodded. My father glanced around, quickly. We were sitting on a stone bench that projected from one of the fine old palazzi, alone except for the fleet-footed boys on the square. ―All right,‖ he said at last.

You see, my father said, that night when Rossi gave me the package of papers, I left him smiling at his office door, and as I turned away I was seized by the feeling that I should detain him, or turn back to talk with him a little longer. I knew it was merely the result of our strange conversation, the strangest of my life, and I buried it at once. Two other graduate students in our department came by, deep in conversation, greeting Rossi before he shut his door and walking briskly down the stairs behind me. Their animated talk gave me the sensation that life was going on around us as usual, but I still felt uneasy. My book, ornamented with the dragon, was a burning presence in my briefcase, and now Rossi had added this sealed packet of notes. I wondered if I should look through them later that night, sitting alone at the desk in my tiny apartment. I was exhausted; I felt I couldn‘t face whatever they held.

I suspected, also, that daylight, morning, would bring a return of confidence and reason.

Perhaps I wouldn‘t even believe Rossi‘s story by the time I awoke, although I also felt sure it would haunt me whether I actually believed it or not. And how, I asked myself—

outside now, passing under Rossi‘s windows and glancing up involuntarily to where his lamp still shone—how could I not believe my adviser on any point related to his own scholarship? Wouldn‘t that call into question all the work we had done together? I thought of the first chapters of my dissertation, sitting in piles of neatly edited typescript on my desk at home, and shuddered. If I didn‘t believe Rossi‘s story, could we go on working together? Would I have to assume he was mad?

Maybe it was because Rossi was on my mind as I passed under his windows that I became acutely aware of his lamp still shining there. In any case, I was actually stepping into the puddles of light thrown from them onto the street, heading toward my own neighborhood, when they—the pools of light—went out quite literally under my feet. It happened in a fraction of a second, but a thrill of horror washed over me, head to foot.

One moment I was lost in thought, stepping into the pool of brightness his light threw on the pavement, and the next moment I was frozen to the spot. I had realized two strange things almost simultaneously. One was that I had never seen this light on the pavement there, between the Gothic classroom buildings, although I‘d walked up the street perhaps a thousand times. I had never seen it before because it had never been visible there before. It was visible now because all the streetlights had suddenly gone off. I was alone on the street, my last footstep the only sound lingering there. And except for those broken patches of light from the study where we‘d sat talking ten minutes earlier, the street was dark.

My second realization, if it actually came second, swooped over me like a paralysis as I halted. I say
swooped
because that was how it came over my sight, not into my reason or instinct. At that moment, as I froze in its path, the warm light from my mentor‘s window went out. Maybe you think this sounds ordinary: office hours finish, and the last professor to leave the building turns off his lamps, darkening a street on which the streetlights have momentarily failed. But the effect was nothing like this. I had no sense of an ordinary desk lamp‘s being switched out in a window. Instead it was as if something raced over the window behind me, blotting out the source of light. Then the street was utterly dark.

For a moment I stopped breathing. Terrified and clumsy, I turned, saw the darkened windows, all but invisible above the dark street, and on impulse ran toward them. The door through which I‘d made my exit was firmly bolted. No other lights showed in the building‘s facade. At this hour, the door was probably set to lock behind anyone who walked out—surely that was normal. I was standing there, hesitating, on the verge of running around to the other doors, when the streetlights came on again, and I felt suddenly abashed. There was no sign of the two students who‘d walked out behind me; they must, I thought, have gone off in a different direction.

But now another group of students was strolling past, laughing; the street was no longer deserted. What if Rossi came out in a minute, as he certainly would after having switched off his light and locked his office door behind him, and found me waiting here? He had said he didn‘t want to discuss further what we‘d been discussing. How could I explain my irrational fears to him, there on the doorstep, when he‘d drawn a curtain over the subject—over all morbid subjects, perhaps? Embarrassed, I turned away before he could catch up with me and hurried home. There, I left the envelope in my briefcase, unopened, and slept—although restlessly—through the night.

The next two days were busy, and I didn‘t let myself look at Rossi‘s papers; in fact, I put all esoterica resolutely out of my mind. It took me by surprise, therefore, when a colleague from my department stopped me in the library late on the afternoon of the second day. ―Have you heard about Rossi?‖ he demanded, grabbing my arm and wheeling me around as I hurried past. ―Paolo, wait!‖ Yes, you‘re guessing correctly—it was Massimo. He was big and loud even as a graduate student, louder than he is now, maybe. I gripped his arm.

―Rossi? What? What about him?‖

―He‘s gone. He‘s disappeared. The police are searching his office.‖

I ran all the way to the building, which now looked ordinary, hazy inside with late-afternoon sun and crowded with students leaving their classrooms. On the second floor, in front of Rossi‘s office, a city policeman was talking with the department chairman and several men I‘d never seen before. As I arrived, two men in dark jackets were leaving the professor‘s study, closing the door firmly behind them and heading toward the stairs and classrooms. I pushed my way through and spoke to the policeman. ―Where‘s Professor Rossi? What‘s happened to him?‖

―Do you know him?‖ asked the policeman, looking up from his notepad.

―I‘m his advisee. I was here two nights ago. Who says he‘s disappeared?‖

The department chairman came forward and shook my hand. ―Do you know anything about this? His housekeeper phoned at noon to say he hadn‘t come home last night or the night before—he didn‘t ring for dinner or breakfast. She says he‘s never done that before.

He missed a meeting at the department this afternoon without phoning first, which he‘s never done before, either. A student stopped by to say his office was locked when they‘d agreed on an appointment during office hours and that Rossi had never shown up. He missed his lecture today, and finally I had the door opened.‖

―Was he in there?‖ I tried not to gasp for breath.

―No.‖

I pushed blindly away from them toward Rossi‘s door, but the policeman held me back by one arm. ―Not so fast,‖ he said. ―You say you were here two nights ago?‖

―Yes.‖

―When did you last see him?‖

―About eight-thirty.‖

―Did you see anyone else around here then?‖

I thought. ―Yes, just two students in the department—Bertrand and Elias, I think, going out at the same time. They left when I did.‖

―Good. Check that,‖ the policeman said to one of the men. ―Did you notice anything out of the ordinary in Professor Rossi‘s behavior?‖

What could I say? Yes, actually—he told me that vampires are real, that Count Dracula walks among us, that I might have inherited a curse through his own research, and then I saw his light blotted out as if by a giant—

―No,‖ I said. ―We had a meeting about my dissertation and sat talking until about eight-thirty.‖

―Did you leave together?‖

―No. I left first. He walked me to the door and then went back into his office.‖

―Did you see anything or anyone suspicious around the building as you left? Hear anything?‖

I hesitated again. ―No, nothing. Well, there was a brief blackout on the street. The streetlights went off.‖

―Yes, that‘s been reported. But you didn‘t hear anything or see anything out of the usual?‖

―No.‖

―So far you‘re the last person to see Professor Rossi,‖ the policeman insisted. ―Think hard. When you were with him, did he do or say anything strange? Any talk of depression, suicide, anything like that? Or any talk of going away, going on a trip, say?‖

―No, nothing like that,‖ I said honestly. The policeman gave me a hard look.

―I need your name and address.‖ He wrote down everything and turned to the chairman.

―You can vouch for this young man?‖

―He‘s certainly who he says he is.‖

―All right,‖ the policeman told me. ―I want you to come in here with me and tell me if you see anything unusual. Especially anything different from two nights ago. Don‘t touch anything. Frankly, most of these cases turn out to be something predictable, family emergency or a little breakdown—he‘ll probably be back in a day or two. I‘ve seen it a million times. But with blood on the desk we‘re not taking any chances.‖

Blood on the desk? My legs were weakening under me, but I made myself walk in slowly after the policeman. The room looked as it had on dozens of other occasions when I‘d seen it in daylight: neat, pleasant, the furniture in precise attitudes of invitation, books and papers in exact stacks on the tables and the desktop. I stepped closer. Across the desk, on Rossi‘s tan blotting paper, lay a dark reservoir, long since spread and soaked and still. The policeman put a steadying hand on my shoulder. ―Not a big enough loss of blood to be a cause of death in itself,‖ he said. ―Maybe a bad nosebleed, or some kind of hemorrhage. Did Professor Rossi ever have a nosebleed when you were with him? Did he seem ill that night?‖

―No,‖ I said. ―I never saw him—bleed—and he never talked about his health to me.‖ I realized suddenly, with appalling clarity, that I‘d just spoken of our conversations in past tense, as if they were ended forever. My throat closed with emotion when I thought of Rossi standing cheerfully at the office door, seeing me off. Had he cut himself somehow—on purpose, even?—in a moment of instability, and then hurried out of the room, locking the door behind him? I tried to imagine him raving in a park, perhaps cold and hungry, or boarding a bus to some randomly chosen destination. None of it fit. Rossi was a solid structure, as cool and sane as anyone I‘d ever met.

―Look around very carefully.‖ The policeman released my shoulder. He was watching me hard, and I sensed the chairman and the others hovering in the doorway behind us. It dawned on me that until proven otherwise I would be among the suspects if Rossi had been murdered. But Bertrand and Elias would speak up for me, as I could for them. I stared at everything in the room, trying to see through it. It was an exercise in frustration; everything was real, normal, solid, and Rossi was utterly gone from it.