One Thing Stolen (21 page)

The intensives are incremental. They are relevant. They are specific. With every word Nadia wrestles back, with every advance in fluidity, we make it harder, up the ante, give her more of herself back. Week one was the food intensive: rigatoni, gnocchi, gemelli, pappardelle; spumoni, cannoli, panettone, tiramisu;
labneh
, shawarma,
kafta, tawook
. Week two (thank you, Mrs. C.) we focused on fashion: midi skirts, hot pants, skinny jeans, bell bottoms; mohair, rhinestones, leather, suede; platforms, Mary Janes, wedges, slingbacks.

Week three is now, and it is my turn, and I drew every one of the sixteen pictures with a couple of Vitale gel pens, then multiplied the force by two at the copying machines at the
biblioteca
, then trimmed and slicked each card with glue, to give it all a steady shellac.

“What do we have?” Katherine asks on this Monday, when we arrive, the little girl in her red sweater and cowboy boots back in her house.
Ciao. Ciao
. I say, “What we have here is architecture, good and simple. We have the places we have been.” I spread my cards out on Katherine’s kitchen table for all of us to see—Nadia, Katherine, Mrs. C., and me. We all take a good long steady look. Katherine sips tea. Mrs. C. smiles.

“Let us begin,” Katherine says, tipping an egg timer, and I go first. “Nadia, do you have a picture of Manakeesh, where we eat the fine
labneh
?”

“Manak—eesh,” she says, handing me the card. “Manakeesh.”

No air between the sounds.

“Maggie,” Katherine says. “Do you have a picture of Second Mile Style, where apparently you buy all your fabulous things, and which I will surely visit as soon as I return to the city of Brotherly Love?”

“I am Second Mile Style,” I say. Standing up. Twirling my high-low fashion. Then slapping a card down.

“Do you have a picture of San Miniato, that little church on the top of the hill?”

“I do,” Mrs. C. says. “Absolutely.”

We go three rounds. We get in good stuff. My cards are really working—Florence and Philadelphia. Sister cities, after all. Maybe more than a strand of shared DNA. We go around asking questions, go around telling stories, go around with our fatter book of nouns. And now it’s Nadia’s turn, and she’s asking me a question, she’s laying her last card down, and it’s the Basilica of Santa Croce, the sketch I’m proudest of. She puts it right down, faceup, on the table between us, and she looks at me, steady, in the eyes, and says:

“Maggie, may I pleasehave—Bene—det—Benedet—”

“You want Benedetto,” I say quietly.

“Yes,” she says.

“A friend?”

She nods.

“Tell me where to find him.”

She points to the card.

“Benedetto is in Santa Croce,” I say, wanting to be very sure.

“Yes.”

“In the church? In the piazza? In the neighborhood?”

She touches the card, hard, three times. Fierce, almost, almost so fierce that Katherine places her hand over Nadia’s, calms her, watches.

“Are you sure?” Katherine says. “Are you sure this won’t upset you?”

Nadia shakes her head. No. Yes.

Katherine looks at me. “Can you?”

“Benedetto,” Nadia says. And she begins to cry.

“I will find him,” I say. “I promise.”

I look for the boy. I look everywhere. This thing I can do, this hero I can be, for my best friend. In the shadows, by the church, in the pews, at the feet of Dante. I am searching everywhere.

In the meantime, I have not come close to completing the business of returning the stolen stuff to its proper casings, tier four. I have, for example, the problem of that watch—a Timex military, as it turns out, plastic, black, disposable, circa 1982. A rare species of time, in the country of unceasing bell-chime time.
Where in the world of sauce and pasta did you get this thing
, I’ve wanted to ask Nadia, several times. But Katherine says that reminding Nadia of the steal will just lava-melt the guilt in her—throw her off the rails and all the way back to who she hopes not to become.

So I go along, hunting the match-to-match—up and down the alleys, in and out of shops, rummaging the old-and-new and the watch-repair fronts and the stores in which you can’t really tell, from the sign and the interior darkness, what in fact they sell. I
wear the watch on my wrist like a jailer’s cuff. I hide it inside my gingham check or my seersucker sleeve and, of course, my coat royale with the frogs for buttons. I have traded out my patent-leather boots with the buckles for a pair of three-inch painted clogs, easier on the feet, which have gained a half size, thanks to the blisters. When I think I’m close to a match, I’ll take the shopkeeper aside and ask for the scoop on their recent watch collection, making like I’m in the mood to buy.

“Ever get one of those weird Timexes in, military style, 1982?” I’ll ask, using my Italian dictionary or a little of Perdita’s help. When all I get is a shaken head, I tuck my chin, say I’m sorry, and move on. Return to the Vitales’ with my watch arm feeling longer than my regular arm—like the weight of time itself has stretched it thin. The double hems on my coat royale have turned the color of rain.

Sometimes Perdita comes along with me, and it’s fine because we talk about Jack, or because we talk about spicing, or because we talk about style, or because we both get that just walking side by side is a trusted form of friendship. Perdita comes to help with the Italian and she comes to help with the alleys and how they bend and how the storefronts tuck in, and I never go too far with Perdita out there, because she always knows when to turn back.

“It’s spicer knowledge,” she tells me. “Like how you know precisely how much chili pepper you can add before a dish goes from dancing to crashing.” I let the theory slide. If we’re done already for
the day, we’ll grab an early lunch at Sant’Ambrogio—the stall in the back, where they slap some sweet cream cheese onto the bread with a spatula knife and then lay out a line of proscuitto. We’ll get chocolate later at the Bianchini bottega: mango-coriander-ginger for us, passionfruit with szechuan pepper for Jack, back at the apartment, working the Brunelleschi paper now like it’s a doctoral thesis. Like Nadia’s life depends on it.

“The crazy genius of the guy,” Jack will say.

And we’ll know what he means.

But this morning it wasn’t Perdita who wanted to head out on the match-to-match. This morning I was slurping through my second cup of the prof’s hot-milk specialty when he asked if he could come along and help with the unstealing project, and with the boy Nadia’s desperate to find.

“You want to . . . help?” I asked.

He nodded.

“Could be futile,” I said, and he said, “I am my daughter’s father.” And that, I agreed, is quite enough, and then he said, “This is my fault. All this. I was too flood-obsessed to see what was happening in real time.”

“Don’t be stupid,” I said, as respectfully as I was able. “It’s a disease,” I said, “hurtled down the tracks. You don’t trust me? Ask Dr. Roy. ‘Disease is never anybody’s fault,’ he says. ‘Blame abnormal proteins,’ he says. ‘Blame loss of neurons. Blame scar tissue in the brain.’ Blame not yourself, and don’t blame Nadia.”

“I’m her father,” the prof said.
I’m her father
, and I said, “I’d be privileged to have your help, Prof,” and he thanked me, like it was a gift I’d given. He gathered his hat and coat, neither one (in case you’re wondering) high on any particular style. I grabbed the Timex and my coat royale. I waited as he kissed Mrs. C. I waited as he roughed up Jack’s thatchy hair, threw the Skullcandies out of alignment.

“Yo,” Jack said.

“Tell Katherine and Nadia I’ll be there closer to ten,” the prof said, because that’s how the days are divided here—Jack and the prof on the hill in the morning, me and Mrs. C. in the afternoon.

“Start it without you?” Jack asked. The music that had been pounding in his ear now pounding in the flat.

“I won’t be that late.”

Jack hitched the tune back onto his ears, said goodbye, and we were off.

Out the door and through the vestibule and farther out. The across-the-street neighbor had hung her clothes on a line outside her window, and the underwear was stiff, and the prof looked up and shook his head. “Funny to live in a city where you know the size of people’s shorts but never the people,” he said. Then he fixed the hat on his head, blew heat onto his hands, and asked me where we were going, and I told him my plans.

I’d had a thought about the neighborhood east of the
biblioteca
. I’d thought that we should go down Verrazzano and through
the German market and past the Santa Croce gates, the cloisters, and around the library and out onto the Lungarno and then cut back in toward the poorest streets of all of Santa Croce, where there are a few shops, according to Perdita, and maybe, just maybe, a boy. Two birds. One stone. The prof agreed. We walked and together scanned the shadows. Nothing. A few birds high up, a few close, but no more. When we got to the Lungarno, he crossed over and stopped. Stood in the raw weather and stared into the face of the Arno. I crossed with him, stood there too, asked him what he was looking for, said I doubted the boy was down there.

“The river’s a trickster,” he said. And then he asked, “What are our chances?” And then he said, “What I don’t get is why the kid himself hasn’t come back. If he exists. If he is real. What are our chances?”

I thought you could take the question to mean anything. What are our chances at unstealing the Timex? What are our chances at finding the boy? What are our chances at saving Nadia? What are our chances of ever actually knowing when any story begins? What are our chances of figuring out how a story like this one might end?

What are our chances?

I thought on it. I watched the smokers down on the dam and the seagulls that peck around like pigeons, and a great heron lifting off from the banks near the Ponte Vecchio. I watched our own reflections in the flat, mealy river—the prof in his white hair and
me in my red hair, blowing over the shoulders of my coat. I said chance is what we make of it, that’s all I knew, and he said, if only that were so, if only we could make more of the chances we had. If only we could make more chance itself.

“It’s all how you see it,” I said.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“Well,” I said, “take Azelide, the old lady the river killed fifty years ago.”

“What about Azelide?”

I told him what I’d been told by Jack and Perdita one day when we were stuck in the house because of the rain and we were watching it slide down the windows. Perdita told the story. She told it sad and well. It’s a family story, she said, and it was hard to picture because I’ve never seen the girl’s family. But she talked.

Azelide was, I repeat back to the prof, a lady sixty-six years old with numb legs and a wheelchair. She lived on the ground floor of an apartment building behind the Santa Croce basilica. Her apartment was grilled in, in defense against thieves, and on the day of the flood her apartment, being low in a low place, was one of the first to start drowning. By the middle of that November day everything Azelide owned was in a float—the bread, the flowerpots, the couch, the books. She cried for help, and help came—the priests and the nuns. They came, and they stood in the street trying to break down the door, trying to yank the window grilles out, but poor Azelide was barricaded in and all they could do was tie
a sheet to her wheelchair and knot the sheet around the window grille and pass the sheet back through the window into the street, and to stand there, holding the sheet that was holding Azelide up, above the water. In the terrible rain, on this terrible day, the priests and the nuns stood outside Azelide’s window and held onto that sheet until the water rose above their own chins. And then, when they could not stand there any longer, they said a prayer for Azelide.

“It’s a very sad story,” the prof said. “It’s tragic.”

And yet, I say, it was the best chance taken. Love. Faith. Hope. They stayed with Azelide until the end. They did everything they could.

Every.

Single.

The prof scratched a place behind his ear and ground his jawbones so I could see them working, like an animal inside his skin. He stared down into the mirror of the river and into the mirror of my eyes and shook his head. Yes and no and yes again.

“Love. Faith. Hope,” he said. “The best chance taken.”

“Yeah.”

The trickle of the river was running. The cars of the Lungarno were going past. The big windows of the
biblioteca
looked down on us from across the street.

“How old are you, Maggie?” he asked.

“Same age as Nadia. Seventeen.”

“To going the distance,” he said.

We stood there for a while, let the wind blow. We watched a seagull fight the breeze to land on the barren concrete of the dam, where a lone fisherman now stood, looking for action. It would rain soon, but snow would not be coming, and the Christmas red that lit the belly of the bridges was still Florence-style festive.

“We have work to do,” I told him, and we started off again, east, before cutting into a side street, north. Pulling our coats close against our chests.