Cabaret (15 page)

Later I heard him saying to Fiamma:

“They were on the floor, I tell you.”

“Shhhh, they’ll hear you.”

“Your sister’s a fast one; there is no mistake about it. She was on top of him. If I hadn’t gone in when I did…” At dinner I was seated between two of the Chinese businessmen. There weren’t enough translators to go round, so we smiled and nodded a lot. I tried to mime what I did for a living, but I don’t think they understood. The one to my left built an elaborate structure out of fruit and then stabbed at it with a knife.The other one pursed his lips and made a rich variety of animal noises. It was fascinating.

Across from me, on the other side of the wide table, sat the Detective. All the time I could feel his dark eyes on me. I wondered at first if it was because I had spilled some of the tomato sauce down my front, but when I took a look, I couldn’t see any. I began to feel warm and sticky, and was pleased when the intermezzo was served—a refreshing pear sorbet arranged in little dishes made of ice.

At this point I noticed there were wisps of smoke coming from my purse: the leaves were still smoldering. I poured a jug of water in and snapped the clasp shut. Assuming it was a local custom, the Chinese businessmen opened up their briefcases and filled them with water.Then we nodded and smiled.

Soon I felt my legs being caressed under the table. The lightest whisper of a touch running up the insides of my calves. I wondered if it was Polibio playing a joke, but he was far away at the other end of the long table. I began to squirm in my seat, feeling hot and damp inside.Taking their cue from me, my neighbors began wriggling too. Opposite, the Detective never removed his eyes from me, and the hint of a smile played upon his lips.

Under these circumstances, I hardly even noticed the hour of speeches given in Arabic and Mandarin, and all too soon the banquet was breaking up. Fiamma was already aboard a helicopter bound for Brussels, so I wasn’t able to broach the subject of Alberto. Neither did I have the opportunity to speak to the Detective again, for by the time I had completed the elaborate farewell ritual with my businessmen, he had disappeared. With their briefcases dripping trails of inky water, they rejoined their delegation on the tour bus, and I climbed into the waiting limousine for Pesco to drive me home.

Thankfully the carnival of animals had moved on by the time he deposited me outside my building. In the hallway was the lingering smell of smoke, and the communal light wasn’t working. I had come to dread what I would find whenever I came home. In total darkness, I felt my way up the stairs.

Outside the door to my apartment, a figure was lurking.

I froze, stifling a scream. Who was it? What did he want?

Then the flame from a cigarette lighter illuminated the scarred face of Dario Mormile, the proprietor of the Berenice cabaret club.

“Freda,” he hissed out of the side of his mouth. “Don’t turn on the lights. They could be watching me.”

“Who?” I whispered back.

“Don’t ask me any questions. I know you need money.

Take this.” He shoved a number of folded bills into my hand.

“It’s okay, take it; think of it as what was owed to Alberto.You need a way to earn some extra cash, right? I got a job for you.

Hatcheck. At the club. No strings. Come by tomorrow. Don’t say nothing to nobody.”

With that he slithered down the staircase like a snake, keeping flat against the wall.

Although I had left every window open, Pierino had still not returned. I climbed into bed fully clothed and pulled the covers over my head. I just needed the whole of today to go away.

O
n my way to work the following morning I actually saw Alberto some distance ahead of me on the sidewalk. I recognized him immediately. Like someone I had known a long time ago in a different life. Already a gulf separated us. Although it had only been three days, he seemed smaller and fatter than I remembered. He was wearing the gold lamé suit that had gone missing from his closet, and, strangely, he had the hairpiece on his head, although I was sure that it was still in the apartment. How could I have married him? I asked myself, aghast. How could I have slept in the same bed with him? How had I endured (albeit only once or twice) those things that never should have happened?

Clearly he wasn’t in the clutches of the Mafia. So was he a bank robber? I had to know. I started running, dodging between the early morning ranks of trainee priests, nuns, veg-etable vendors, office workers, hairdressers, and acrobats.

Suppose he offered to come back? What then? My pace slowed momentarily as I pondered this thought. But then I speeded up again.This was the perfect opportunity to tell him I wanted a divorce.

I gained on him and reached out, taking hold of his costume at the back. It ripped.When he turned around, it wasn’t Alberto at all. It was another man entirely, and he was furious that I held the back panel of his suit jacket in my hand.

“Attack,” he screamed. “Help. Police. Murder.” A crowd was quick to gather.

“I’m sorry,” I shouted. “I mistook you for someone else.

Take this—” I thrust at him, along with the piece of his jacket, one of the notes given me by Dario Mormile. “This should cover the cost of repairs.”

But the man screamed on, “Assault. Battery. Mayhem.” How typical that I should run into a maniac.

Then others in the crowd started shouting:

“You can rip my jacket for thirty.”

“Twenty-five.”

“Twenty and I’ll throw in the cravat for free.” I ran away across the Via del Pellegrino, my pulse racing.

I was no nearer to discovering the truth, and today was set to be as crazy as yesterday. As I stumbled into the Via Sora, I heard the flutter of wings. Not any old flutter. A distinctive flutter that I immediately recognized. I looked around, and sure enough, Pierino was just above me, clinging to a stone scallop on the side of the building. My heart sang. If only I could catch him.

“Pierino!” I shrilled. “Come here, come on, come to Mamma.” He looked at me, winked, and flapped lazily away toward the Palazzo del Governo. I ran after him, dodging the cars, mopeds, buses, and pony carts in search of early tourists.

There was a great deal of cursing, gesticulating, and hooting of horns. I ignored it. My only thought was to get my Pierino back.

He flapped on at a steady pace, and every so often he looked round to check if I was still there. Like this we went along the Via di Parione and continued north.Then, in the Via della Pace, he suddenly swooped onto the railing of a balcony and began a systematic preening of his plumage.

I called him and called him, stretching out my arms and making the clucking and sucking noises with my lips that I knew he loved above all others. Although I could see he was enjoying my display, he still wouldn’t come to me. After making a massive dropping, which splattered down onto the sidewalk by my feet, he ducked inside the open window.

I chose the lower bell by the front door and buzzed on it loudly, then stood back and worked out what I was going to say. After a while, the door opened and a little old woman appeared whose head was sparsely furnished with hair. She seemed annoyed.

“What do you want?” she demanded. “I don’t want any rosaries, lottery tickets, lucky charms, love potions, or marshmallows, I tell you that now…”

“I’m from the ornithological society,” I lied, flashing my library card at her and putting it away quickly before she could study it. “A rare parrot has just entered this building and by the powers invested in me by the State I am obliged to pursue it.”

I pushed past her and ran up the stairs. There was a door on the upper landing, and I hammered on it. Eventually it opened a crack and a nose poked through. I barged my way in.

The nose belonged to a woman who was now flattened behind the door. She peeled herself off the wall like a cartoon character and stood facing me. She looked for all the world like a ventriloquist’s dummy. She had a painted face with two rouged spots in the center of her cheeks, shiny wooden hair, unnaturally pink limbs, and a stiff way of walking, as though her joints had seized.

“Just what is going on here?” I demanded. “You’ve got my parrot. I saw him fly in through the window.Where is he? I’m taking him back.”

Her jaw dropped following the grooves that led from her mouth down to her chin. No sound emerged but she clip-clopped in a wooden way down the passage and into the room beyond. I followed.

“There is no parrot here,” she said at last, with a motion of her squeaky arms. I had heard that voice before; I knew I had. I had heard it in the dead of night, in my own bedroom.

It was one of the voices that simpered with Alberto, and it made me shiver.

I scrutinized every corner of the room. She was right.

There was no sign of Pierino. Without asking her leave, I walked around the apartment, looking into cupboards, under tables, on lampshades: there was not a hint that Pierino had been there. Not a feather. No droppings. No half-chewed fruit. The air was still—without a rumple. Although I could have sworn I saw him enter, I must have been wrong.

In a bedroom I found a swollen baby sleeping in a crib. It was the image of a baby Alberto, and the other Lippi off-spring. This one also had waxy red cheeks and what looked like painted-on hair.

“Is this Alberto’s child?” I demanded.

She shook her head violently, and her neck produced such a lavish selection of squeaks I thought her ears were likely to fly off.

From the passage a voice was calling. It was the old woman from the lower floor.

“Genoveffa,” she began.

Genoveffa,
the name struck a chord with me. Many times I had heard Alberto whisper it in the dark.

“Have you got any parrots in here? If so you must surren-der them to the authorities. It’s against the terms of the lease, and we don’t want an investigation, do we now?”

“If you have been secreting the parrot,” I snapped on my way out, “you can expect an extremely thorough investigation by the authorities. They will leave no stone unturned, believe me.” With that I walked down the steps and into the street.

Strangely the dropping that Pierino had deposited on the sidewalk had disappeared, and I began to ask myself if I was going mad.

T
hat day at work was memorable because we had a miracle, and they didn’t often happen. When we removed Mafalda Firpotto from the cold storage area and uncovered her withered body, we found a fine carpet of violets growing upon it. Signora Dorotea, who had seen many things during the course of her long career, threw her arms into the air shouting:

“It’s a miracle. A miracle, Freda. Porzio, come quickly.

Calipso, come and look.”

Signor Porzio hurried in, and immediately dropped to his knees and began crossing himself. Behind him was Calipso Longo, the receptionist, who collapsed and had to be brought round with smelling salts.

“By the grace of the Madonna,” she gurgled. “Truly it is a miracle.”

I didn’t know much about miracles, but it was certainly strange. From a scientific point of view, it shouldn’t have been possible, but I examined Mafalda Firpotto closely and saw with my own eyes the violets growing out of her flesh. They covered her torso and meandered along her arms and legs, where they culminated in a flourish on her hands and feet.

Immediately Signora Dorotea put in a call to the Santa Fosca convent, where Mafalda Firpotto, a widow, had spent her last years immersed in prayer and contemplation, in the care of the sisters. While Signora Dorotea was still speaking, the sisters piled into their antiquated minibus, driven by the mother superior, Sister Prisca, and hurtled toward the center of the city from their convent in the suburbs.

We worked fast to arrange Mafalda Firpotto in a fine ma-hogany coffin, and then propelled her into a chapel of rest, where the chairs were set out neatly in rows, and the music of a harp drifted gently over the public address system. Immediately the air became suffused with the sweet scent of violets, magnified to an extraordinary intensity, and, skeptical as I was, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of astonishment.

Somehow the news had traveled, and in no time the reception area was filled with onlookers. The bloodstained butchers from the adjoining shop had rushed in with the hairdressers and bedraggled customers from the salon on the other side. Ballerinas, firemen, zookeepers, melon vendors, rat catchers, schoolboys, priests, and tailors pushed their way in behind. There was even a juggler and a clown from the Circo Ippolito, who just happened to be passing. Calipso Longo, enjoying her moment of glory, kept the crowd behind a cordon and maintained order with a ruler.

When the sisters arrived, they were ushered into the chapel of rest, and immediately they prostrated themselves before the coffin, hailed Mafalda Firpotto as a saint, pro-nounced the phenomenon of the growing violets a miracle, and claimed for their convent the glory associated with it.

Their priest, Padre Bonifacio, held an impromptu mass, and then a press conference for the many journalists and television crews that had gathered in the staff room.

Among them I recognized my old friend the photographer from
Mortician’s Monthly,
and we were to feature on the front page of the August issue. More exciting still, Signora Dorotea and I were actually interviewed by Channel One and we appeared on the television in a news bulletin. Aunt Ninfa was so excited by my moment of fame that she threw a party for the neighbors, and brought in a selection of
pizzetti
and opened a bottle of wine. Although our item was over in seven seconds, and, naturally, given her garrulous nature, Signora Dorotea did most of the talking, still Aunt Ninfa basked in my reflected luster for ages afterward, and felt, for the first time since her suspicions of Birillo’s infidelity were aroused, that she could hold her head up high in the district.

At five I slipped away, because it was impossible to get any work done in the mayhem caused by the miracle, and besides, there was other business demanding my attention. I had the idea of taking myself down to the area by the station where the most unsavory characters in the city lurked. There, it was widely known, you could find escaped convicts, cutthroats, pirates, itinerant assassins, underworld gangs, mercenaries, and, naturally, the most merciless mafiosi. I would ask a few questions—see what I could find out.