Blood Makes Noise (25 page)

“What’s that?”

She pulled another cigarette from his shirt pocket. “My town.”

They took the stopping train north, into the hill country. Watched the Renaissance jumble of Milan loosen as towns drew themselves into tight, sober hamlets, felt Caesar’s grip weaken with the chill of the barbarian north. As the coal-fired train heaved its way up steeper inclines, the villages compressed tighter and tighter, till the trapped energy squeezed itself out in a profusion of church spires lurching up defiantly against the icy peaks above. Norman cathedrals heaped on Carolingian chapels and themselves topped, like layered Neapolitan, with gussied, Hapsburg clock towers.

Her town was no bigger than others, its church no less layered. They walked from the station, he with his father’s suitcase, older than both of them together. He hauled it up steep cobbled lanes, past a small piazza, in its tidiness somehow more German than Italian. It was Sunday, and Sunday people lounged everywhere, having coffee, playing chess. They all stared but Gina made eye contact with none of them.

“Do you know these people?”

“Of course.”

They continued down a narrow alley. A young man yelled down from his window, “Gina!”

She stuck her arm in the air but kept moving. Out of the alley, to the far edge of town and a prosperous, two-story home. “This is it.”

Gina opened the gate, walked past a battered pet dish. “You have a dog?”

“Had. Killed in the war. Same bomb that got my little brother’s eye. Landed right in the pond out behind the house. There’s still mud from the explosion up under the eaves. Probably some dried Poitzel too. Poitzel was the dog. I don’t know why we still
have the dish.” She keyed the door and pushed it open. “You’d have to ask my parents.”

They walked in, and the house was silent.

“Where are your parents?”

“Oh, they’re gone. All week.”

They packed a cold dinner, carried it up the wildflower hill behind the house. Sunset flared insects purple and green. The town below glowed coppery and in doing so at last, to Michael, seemed Italian.

They drank hot Chianti, ate hard bread and sliced tomatoes. Gina pulled up fistfuls of fragile mountain flowers. “This used to be a graveyard, long ago. If you look around here, in the grass, you can find bits of marble with Latin on them. Sometimes pieces of iron and teeth. Roman teeth.”

“You always picnic in graveyards?”

“All Europe’s a graveyard.”

She stood with her wine, looking across mountain pastures. “Someday you and I will lie in a place like this, with children picking at the pieces of our tombs.”

“I suppose so.”

“You don’t think about it?”

“Why draw it any faster into your life?”

Gina flopped down beside him. “I’m drunk.” She emptied her glass into the earth. “Chianti. Chianti for the dead. Do you miss it, Mr. Centurion?” She broke a piece of bread and let the crumbled fragments fall. “How about some bread?” She lay back on the crumbs, crossed her hands across her chest, and closed her eyes. “It must have been like this, don’t you think? Maybe a sword to keep him company…”

He was silent, and she looked at him from a cocked eye. “You disapprove.”

“It’s morbid.”

“Not talking about death won’t make it go away. Better to have the courage to look it in the face.”

Michael felt his face flush. “
Courage
? Christ, you were in the middle of a war and the only thing you lost was a
dog
.”

He regretted it immediately and lowered his voice. “You’ve got so much. Family, a nice house, a hometown where people know you, things I can’t even imagine…Why on earth obsess about death?”

“Because I know life will take all from me, Michael—I just know—and I won’t let it have the satisfaction.”

“That’s no kind of life, Gina.”

“What is?”

It stumbled in his throat. “I don’t know. I’m trying, but honestly, I don’t have the slightest idea.”

And Michael, who had never really understood the intentions of women, was surprised when she kissed him.

Just glancing. He held her hand lightly, like a prized lab specimen. And kissed her black eye. She replaced it with her mouth. It tasted of cheese and cigarettes, then didn’t, and they were down, fragrant herbs against his cheek. He breathed her in, floated on dark-blonde hair enclosing him.

There were fireflies when he came up for air. Soft, lethargic sparks. He started to get up, his head lightened, and he sat down again. Tiny chunks of Roman tomb stuck to arms and backs. As he rubbed them off himself and her, it came out of him quietly: “Tombs. Nothing but tombs my whole life…”

In her parents’ house they built a fire, and the clothes, grass stained with buttons that fastened on opposite sides in America, came off awkwardly. Neither of them had bathed since the train, and there was a tang to their skin. He lifted Gina, curled her close to him, and she was lighter than he expected. Broad, dark nipples on teardrop breasts like small pillows against his chest.

She explored his body, her eyes closed, and found the boyhood scar on his thigh. “Where did you get this?” she breathed.

He didn’t answer, instead brushed his hand across the inside of her thigh. It was moist, warm, and one labia was longer than the other.

“Nobody’s perfect,” she said.

He kissed it.

In the morning they had brioche and coffee in a sudden and confusing silence. It was as if a heavy motorbike, cruising at high speed, had inexplicably begun to tip, and no matter your effort, the momentum was cast.

Words that had seemed so simple the night before now choked midair, embarrassed. He didn’t touch her, found it hard to imagine he ever had, and after a few hours of tortured pauses, bewildered, he said he’d better be getting on. She slapped her thighs, said okay, and before he knew it, she was seeing him to the platform, the walk a thousand times longer than the afternoon before. He sputtered some hopeless half sentences about how long she’d be in town, how long he’d be in Europe. He felt tainted and humiliated. She gave him a phone number both of them knew he’d never call.

In the train he took his seat numbly, and shot a glance at Gina out the window, but she’d already given the station, and Michael, her back. The engine lurched, her retreating image slid sideways, and at the last instant, when she was sure he was no longer watching, when he had in fact nearly averted his eyes, she turned to him a face stained with tears, and Michael understood.

Gina fought the chaos of life by giving up to it all that she cared about before it could be taken. Michael had touched her and so was given up.

There was a small note left in a battered novel he didn’t find till his return to Chicago. Only a few lines in Italian:
I don
’
t consider myself a happy person, but I was happy with you.

I
t was knocking that woke him. Insistent. Drawing him up from black lakes. “Signore?” More knocking. “Signore? Is everything okay?” Michael looked at the window. Afternoon slanted through it.

“What?” It surprised him how strangled it sounded. “Of course.”

“We were concerned.”

“I’m okay. Jesus.”

“Will you be staying Monday night?”

“Monday? I don’t know. I’ll tell you later.”

“We need to know now, Signore. Checkout is one p.m. Excuse me.”

Michael groaned and struggled off the bed. A cacophony of cathedral bells had begun somewhere and felt like it was going on in the next room.

Michael opened the door. “What’s the problem?” He rubbed his face. The nap had left him feeling like shit.

The hotel employee’s repertoire was limited to a shrug. “Checkout is one o’clock.”

“Why are you bugging me with this now?” The bells were starting a world of a headache. “What the hell
is
that?”

“The church, Signore. They are ringing for Saint Maxima day.”

A glimmer of catechism flared in Michael’s brainpan. “Isn’t that Monday?”

“Of course.”

“But it’s only Sunday morning. I arrived on Sunday…”

The employee looked at him peculiarly. Michael was growing weary of everyone he met since getting off the plane treating him like a mental patient. “What day is today?”

“Saint Maxima day. Monday.”

“That’s impossible.”

The employee shrugged.

“You mean I slept a day and a half?”

“We were concerned. You never came down for meals.”

Hector’s nephew. Michael spun around to collect his wits. Get moving. A day and a fucking half.

“Signore. The room.”

“Yes, yes. I’ll keep it.”

The employee nodded and left.

He hit the streets in the clothes he’d slept in, snaked through afternoon traffic to a small café on the Piazza Cincinnato, where he was supposed to meet Hector’s nephew.
Yesterday
.

The cappuccino was lukewarm and Michael ignored it, watched instead the sidewalk clutter, bet on the nephew hanging around an extra day. He’d been there an hour, staring at the same dead coffee, when a young man in a black polyester suit and red open-necked shirt appeared before him. “Michael Suslov?”

“How’d you guess?”

“Only an American would drink a cappuccino at two in the afternoon.”

The young man sat in the chair opposite, snapped for a waiter, pushed gold-rimmed teardrop aviators back up the bridge of his nose. “They don’t have calendars where you come from?”

“I was held up.”

“Really? I hadn’t noticed during the three fucking hours I sat here yesterday. Slipped right past me.” He hunched his shoulders, adjusted his lapels. The guy seemed to be in constant motion. “We can speak Spanish if you want. Or English.”

“Italian’s fine. It might be the one thing about you that doesn’t attract attention.”

Hector’s nephew did a kind of pimp roll and curled a lip in disgust. “Hey, pal, I don’t do this kind of shit, understand? I’m only here as a favor to my uncle. Sooner I’m back on a train to Bonn, the better.”

Michael could picture him there. A third-rate embassy clerk haunting fourth-rate discos for country hat-check girls, who probably found him exotic and were five inches taller. Thirty seconds with him convinced Michael there were no dark alleys in this dandy’s past—in short, nothing of Hector’s essence. Michael understood now why the crippled spook hadn’t asked his nephew to take care of this on his own.

“What’s your name?”

“Giancarlo.”

“You have something for me, Giancarlo?”

Hector’s nephew pushed across the table Michael’s Argentine ID in the name of Carlos Maggi and a copy of the telegram requesting the exhumation of his aunt. Michael looked up at Giancarlo. “What do you know about this?”

“Nothing. Except that one look at you means it’s gonna be low-rent.”

The two of them rode the streetcar out to Musocco Cemetery. The day had clouded over but lost none of its heat, beads of toxic sweat tumbling down Michael’s temple.

“You okay?” Giancarlo asked.

“I’m fine.”

“Well, you look like day-old death.”

How would you know?

The streetcar squealed to a stop. Musocco was not only the end of the line for its residents, but for the streetcar as well. The remaining passengers drifted away, leaving just the two of them.

“What now?” Giancarlo asked.

Michael explained briefly and elliptically that they were here to complete the exhumation of a certain woman. He’d arranged a hearse for the journey to Spain. Giancarlo would stick around as an extra hand till Michael left Milan, hopefully that same afternoon.

They stepped off onto the broad cul de sac that formed the cemetery entrance. The grand portal to the necropolis was nineteenth century and rose in imposing blocks like an edifice of state. Tall Doric columns supported a sweeping half circle of cement gallery topped by bronze flames. The effect was more of a national frontier than an entrance.

The squat district around this principality had, if anything, declined since his last visit. There was an unnatural silence of abandoned factories and sullen neighborhoods. The autostrada at midday hissed without enthusiasm, and the only voices came from chatty women selling flowers from a dozen booths around the cul de sac.

The cemetery was laid in a complex series of gravel drives, each bending and reforming into districts much like the ancient streets of the city it served: neighborhoods wealthy—expensive marble adorned with life-sized Christs kneeling with tortured gazes to heaven; neighborhoods urban—high-rise vaults looming like condominiums; neighborhoods bourgeois—retouched photographs of the beloved cemented to their crypts like a marble field of high school yearbooks; and neighborhoods poor—simple grass plots with generic markers to keep track of the moneyless dead, whose space would be reserved only seven years before being given over to the next.

An army of workers swarmed this city, sweeping gravel, polishing stone, driving small red buses with smaller old women, conductors announcing lettered quadrants like Disneyland parking lot zones. The cemetery offices were in a faux chapel. Michael left Giancarlo outside
among the sighing cypress and went in to find the superintendent’s office. He was at his desk, halfway through a coffee and magazine. He bade Michael sit. He wore a Mack the Knife suit and thick horn-rimmed glasses. His handshake was correct, and he smoothed his desk blotter afterward, an action he repeated compulsively.

“Mr. Maggi, a pleasure to meet you.”

“You received the telegram regarding my aunt?”

“Coffee?”

“I’m fine, thank you.”

The superintendent finished his, set it aside, and smoothed his desk blotter.

“The telegram?” Michael prodded.

“Yes. The telegram…” The sentence died awkwardly.

“Is there some difficulty?”

“You must understand, Mr. Maggi, that we are very sensitive about our record keeping here at Musocco.”

“Of course.”

“A predecessor of mine has been accused, just this week in this very magazine, of hiding Mussolini’s body here under a false name during those confusing days at the end of the war.”

Michael felt his chest tighten. “That was decades ago. Surely you’re not suggesting my aunt is Mussolini?”