The Missing Italian Girl (23 page)

“We all live close to the walls, but I don’t live with the other ragpickers,” Nico explained. “They are mostly families or groups of runaways like you. And it can smell terrible, especially in the morning when everyone returns to divide their finds. Ever since I found a widow’s wedding ring in the garbage, she has let me stay in a shed by her vineyard. She trusts me to watch over things. And even lets me take eggs from her chicken coop once a week and water from the well.”

Maura had trouble understanding his pride about living in a shed until they passed through a street of one- and two-room hovels, made of wood and tin, huddled up against each other. The stones, where there were cobbles, were so uneven and loose, they had to step carefully in order not to trip. Low mounds of stinking debris were strewn in front of the shacks. A strange quiet pervaded, and except for a goat and a rabbit, a few toddling naked babies, and children playing in the dirt, there was no one about. “Shhhh,” Nico whispered. “The pickers are still getting their sleep. Old men don’t need so much sleep,” he said pointing to himself. The odors were making Maura gag. She swore she’d never sink as low as these people.

Mercifully, after a few blocks, they reached a vineyard. Nico paused and stretched out his arms. “This is it. We must have beauty in our life, don’t you agree?”

Maura snorted. The vines looked spindly and dry to her. She could not imagine anything beautiful coming out of this place. The clothes and the women on the Boulevard Saint-Germain and in the Bon Marché, they were beautiful. Yet ahead of them, the hut Nico called home glistened in the sunset. When they drew near, Maura saw that he had adorned his shed with the faces of decorated tin boxes, the kind containing fancy biscuits and candies. He had pounded this colorful display into the plain graying wood that comprised the outside of the shed. There was also a real window. Beauty! Maura humphed to herself.

The door was a moth-eaten floral rug. He held it aside for her to enter. In the shadows she could make out a narrow bed pushed against the wall opposite the window, two chairs and a table in the middle, and a big basket of the kind, she presumed, ragpickers used to ply their trade. When Nico slid around her, struck a match, and lit the four candles that sat upon the table, she gasped. Instead of being bare and drab, most of the walls were covered with pieces of cloth, shiny and dull, hundreds of them, in stripes and flowers and every imaginable color. She had to smile. How Lidia, the anarchist student, would have loved the wildness, the chaos of it all. And, in its way, it was beautiful.

“You like it?” he asked. “This is why I so wanted the dress. I sell most of my rags and bones to the ragpicker mistress. But if I find something really pretty, I always keep a piece for myself.”

The candlelight illuminated his eager smile. But Maura was not willing to concede any admiration. Not yet. She sank into one of the two wooden chairs. The memory of Lidia made her sad. Lidia, Vera, Pyotr, Angela, all gone. She peered at her companion, taking in his pallor, his white whiskers, and his cloudy dark eyes. His life had to be sad and lonely. The realization pierced her, if only because she had learned that very morning, lonely old men were worthy of more than scorn and ridicule. The opening in her heart frightened her. “It’s nice here,” she finally said. “Perhaps I’ll give you a piece of my mother’s dress later.”

“Good!” He opened a tin, a banged-up version of a fancy cake box, and took out some bread. “Eat,” he said. “It will help.” Then he dipped a cup into a bucket of water beside the table, and placed it before her. She sipped some water and munched on the bread, which did offer some comfort. “You can use my bed until I come back. Then I must sleep for a while. And now,” he said, getting up from his chair, “I must go. It takes me longer than the others to get to my territory.” Maura watched as he strapped the basket to his back and took up his stick. She marveled that he could carry the basket, let alone fill it. “Blow out the candles before you sleep,” he admonished her. Then he smiled again. “Don’t worry. You’ll be safe. No one knows you’re here.”

As soon as she was sure he had gone, Maura got up to watch his progress from the window.
You’ll be safe,
she repeated to herself. Maybe. But she felt like a prisoner. She paced around the table, scrutinizing the familiar objects of poverty: the hooks on the walls holding old clothes, the single cupboard with its motley collection of dishes and pots, the little stove that heated and cooked, the narrow bed. She blew out the candles, grabbed the bread and plopped down on the bed, chewing, fighting back tears, waiting for night to fall.

At dawn, Maura woke to a familiar song. “
Vado di notte come fa la luna
. I wander through the night like the moon.
Vado cercando lo mio inamorato
. Searching to find my true love.”

She sat up. “Why are you singing that?” she shouted. “Who are you?”

“Nico, Domenico Scarpaci. Your friend. You are in my house. What is wrong?”

Coming out of sleep’s dense fog, Maura realized where she was. She fell back on the bed. Her head was heavy, but not in pain. Not like yesterday. Oh God, yesterday! “Please don’t sing it again,” she said.

“You know it?”

She nodded. “My father used to sing it,” she whispered, as if that would explain everything she hated about that song, as if she would ever tell anyone that she had recited the verse about a dead, lost lover just hours before she learned that Pyotr had been killed.

“I used to sing it to my dear Jeanne, God be with her. Did your father sing in the streets?”

Maura closed her eyes. “Yes.”

“And you?”

“When I was very little. Before he left us.”

“Then it must be sad for you.”

She curled up toward the wall. She didn’t want to say any more. She needed to be left alone.

But she was not alone. Behind her she heard Nico rustling around the shed, putting things on the table and moving the chairs.

“Pierre,” he called.

She didn’t answer, because at first, she didn’t recognize herself in the name.

“Pierre?”

She rolled over. Seeing Nico standing at the table, she remembered that he needed the bed in the daytime after his night work. She sat up and, out of habit, reached to smooth the unruly curls that were no longer there.

“Look, I got some fresh bread and a piece of fruit and a nice newspaper with a pretty picture on it.”

Still blurry-eyed, Maura got up and took the few steps necessary to pull out a chair. He wanted to have a regular breakfast with her! She sat down and stared at a hunk of dense, dark bread.

“I thought you could read to me from the newspaper while I go to sleep.”

With a heavy sigh, she picked up the paper, unfolded it, and gasped. The pretty picture was her sister’s corpse. She dropped the newspaper as if it were on fire. It called Angela an
Angel of Death.
An instant later, she grabbed it and began to read. Angela, Pyotr, evil killers. “It’s not true! None of it!”

“My child.” Nico got up to see what was troubling her.

“It isn’t true, I tell you.” Maura was sobbing. She slid the dish away to make room for her head, and buried her face in her arms on the table. Her whole body shook, convulsing with an explosive combustion of sorrow and anger. She did not know how much time had passed before she felt two hands on her shoulders. Nico’s papery thin hands felt warm and strong as they pressed and released in a rhythmic effort to comfort.

When she had quieted down, he gave her one of his “pretty rags.” “I washed it in the well,” he said. “You can wipe your face.”

Although he did not ask, Maura could tell from the questioning look in his dark brown eyes that he wanted to know why she was crying. And she needed to tell him, to tell someone. She started at the beginning, telling him about working with her sister twelve hours a day in their little room, about the man who brought the shirts and tried to seduce Angela, about the way he beat and raped her, and about the iron rod that Pyotr used to stop him. They hadn’t meant to kill him, she explained, only to stop him from hurting Angela again, to make him understand that they were not his slaves. And then, without admitting her love for Pyotr, she told of his death and Angela’s murder. “She was too gentle to hurt anyone. Too good. Not like me. That’s why Barbereau made promises to her and my mother that he never intended to keep. I tried to tell them.” Maura shook her head. “I tried.”

Nico had pulled up a chair beside her as he listened. He reached out for her hand. “Yes, my Maurina, you tried to protect your sister. You are a good, strong girl.”

Maurina. Her father used to call her Maurina, “his little dark one.” When he still loved her. Before he left. She gazed at Nico’s kind face. He believed she was good. That what she had done was right.

“You can stay here,” he said, “as long as you like. Help me if you wish, until you know what you must do. You will be safe.”

Maura took her hand away and bowed her head, making a fist. The newspaper had ignited something inside her. She didn’t want only to be safe. She wanted the truth to be known. As Pyotr would have said, she wanted justice.

9

O
N
T
UESDAY, AS SOON AS
she put Jean-Luc down for his morning nap, Clarie told Rose that she was going for a walk until lunch. This was not exactly true. She intended to walk, but only after perusing the headlines of the newspapers that covered the sides of the kiosk at the Square d’Anvers. She had to know if Maura was still missing.

Yesterday’s newspapers had reported nothing new, even though
L’Intransigeant
had promised to reveal “The Secrets of Angela’s Violent Longings.” Today she could not resist buying one of the most popular tabloids,
Le Petit Journal,
because of its alluring headline, “The Russian Anarchist’s Women.” After giving the man inside the kiosk a few centimes, Clarie quickly folded the paper in her gloved hands and headed through the wrought-iron gates into the small rectangular park. She sat down on an isolated bench under one of the trees that lined each side of the square. It was a beautiful July day. The flowers bordering the grassy central oval were in full bloom. The sun was shining. She was doing nothing wrong. Why, then, did she feel guilty?

Clarie frowned. It was not in her nature to keep secrets, even innocent ones, from Rose or from Bernard. But, since their contretemps at Saturday’s breakfast, Bernard had been strangely silent on the subject of the Laurenzanos, even though he must have encountered headlines about them at every street corner. Perhaps he was saying nothing because he did not want to provoke another disagreement. Or—and this made her smile—perhaps he thought it would hurt or embarrass her if he cited evidence that he had been right after all, that Francesca’s daughters were criminal or dangerous. Bernard Martin, the judge and the lawyer, had no compunction about going after miscreants, using their words against them. But this was not his way with those he loved. With her and Rose, with her father and his mother, he was the soul of kindness and discretion.

Clarie sighed and opened the newspaper. If Maura remained missing, it would be up to Clarie to bring the issue of Francesca and her daughter back into the Martin household.

Le Petit Journal’
s account did not immediately deal with the supposed love affair between Angela and the dead boy. It began by linking him to two Russian medical students who had been held for two weeks in the notorious Saint-Lazare Prison for fallen women. Despite persistent questioning, they continued to deny any part in bombing plots. Clarie laid the paper down and slumped back against the bench.
How terrible,
she thought.
How alone the Russian girls must feel.
They were only a year or two older than Clarie’s students and yet the authorities saw fit to jail them with prostitutes and interrogate them over and over again. Bernard had told her how brutal the police could be when they were looking for “answers.” Clarie stared at a man, whistling complacently as he passed. Was anyone standing up for these girls? Or were they being ignored and scorned because they were foreign, because they were accused of violence, because they dared to enter a male profession? The reporter implied that the two young women were particularly suspicious because they had had the audacity to travel unescorted to Paris to study at the University.

Prickling with irritation, Clarie picked up the newspaper again. Where were all those Republican men with their high-flown rhetoric about equality and justice when it came to these girls? Sometimes she thought Emilie was right: women needed their own party, their own advocates. Clarie shook her head, trying to vanquish her frustration and focus on her search for news about Maura and her mother. There was nothing she could hope to do for anyone else at this point.

Unfortunately, the second half of the story merely repeated the same unproven lurid speculations about Angela and the Russian bomber: that they had formed a love triangle with Barbereau in order to trap and kill him. Clarie refused to believe this version of events. When the reporter concluded with the stock, meaningless line, “the police are continuing their investigations,” Clarie slapped the paper down in her lap.

She should have known better.
Le Petit Journal
was one of the scores of dailies that fed a gullible public’s appetite for titillation and scandal. These papers didn’t care about truth or justice. They were all part of the Paris “noise”: hawkers hectoring you at every step, advertisements for bawdy entertainments screaming from every blank wall, the crowds at the morgue, the wax museum that specialized in recreating the scenes of horrific crimes … and in the last few days, Clarie had bought into it by expecting that a sensation-mongering tabloid would tell her what she needed to know.

The angry shame of that brought Clarie to her feet. Francesca and Maura were not sensations, they were human beings. She whirled around, looking for a gentleman with a watch, then heard a single bell toll from a nearby church. Eleven-thirty. She stood calculating for a moment. She was closer to the Goutte-d’Or now than she had been when she walked from the lycée. There was only one way to know what was really happening to Francesca and Maura. She left the paper on the bench, knowing that some bored nanny would gratefully pick it up, and resolutely strode down the gravel alley of the park toward the Boulevard Rochechouart.