Phantom (18 page)

As he spoke absently, he put one finger on the back of my hand, gently tracing the knotted veins that ran through my dry and wrinkled skin, so roughened and whitened after years of contact with stone dust.

"I must go," he repeated sadly.

"But you'll come back," I insisted, wondering a little at my inexplicable reluctance to see him disappear for good into the labyrinthine streets of Rome. "You will come back, won't you… I still have so much to show you."

More men were arriving now in the courtyard beneath us, hailing each other and cursing the heat which was already beginning to hang oppressive in the airless sky and wring a heat haze from the damp ground. The boy looked down through the unglazed window, and every line of his painfully thin body mirrored the anguish of despairing conflict. I knew then—as perhaps I had known from the first moment I saw him—that he was deep in trouble, dragging behind him the chains of some unspeakable crimes. The darkness in his soul cast a shadow that seemed to embrace my own, and as I looked at him I had the strong feeling that I was watching him drown before my very eyes in the black waters of his own past. I suddenly felt a deep urge to throw the rope that would pull him from that poisoned lake; for, whatever he might have done—and there was unquestionably
something
!—I could not believe he was evil, not when he had touched my hand with all the silent wonder of an innocent child.

"Come back!" I repeated steadily. "Tomorrow at dawn I will meet you here."

He turned and looked at me searchingly, as though he wished to read on my sagging face the quiet sincerity that he heard in my voice.

"Tomorrow at dawn," he echoed softly.

There was a sound of heavy footsteps crossing the floorboards of the landing outside the room and instantly, without a word of warning, the boy slid through the empty window casing to drop almost soundlessly into the courtyard below.

When I went to look out the window, I saw that he was already gone.

I was a practical man and, had anyone asked me, before that strange and disastrous interlude, I should have said a most unlikely candidate for spiritual revelations.

At fifty-eight I was old in a craft that traditionally claimed life early. Constant dust and fine chippings clog a stonemason's lungs over the years, while the sheer grinding hard labor of the job wrecks the muscles of the fittest. Few of us reach the age of forty without the racking cough that heralds the grave, but I had been more fortunate than most; it was only in the past year or so that my lungs had begun to show the familiar ominous signs of decay.

There had been some distinguished moments to my career. My work with Giuseppe Valadier on the Piazza del Popolo had established my reputation as one of the foremost master masons in Rome. My private tenders received such favorable viewings that I turned inevitably to contracting and became a man of substance as well as a master craftsman; in consequence it was more than ten years since I had taken an apprentice.

My last boy had been a serious disappointment to me. Six months of slovenly work and a single piece of impertinence were sufficient to convince me that the lad was quite unworthy of the knowledge I had to impart. I canceled his indentures without compunction and declined to accept any further recommendations, telling myself that I was now too old and too set in my ways to struggle with inept hands and suffer the general disruption engineered by a boy around the house. I know that few in the trade now take an apprentice into their home; they are content to let the boys remain under their own roofs, growing soft with the attentions of their mothers. I myself had always favored the old ways, the grand traditions of the Gothic builders. A young mason should model himself upon his master in every way, and how is that possible unless that boy sits at your hearth, eats your salt, breathes your air, your views, your entire being? No… the old ways were best for anyone with the patience left to use them, but the contracting system had inevitably brought decay in its wake. Too many boys were now content to pick up a mere smattering of knowledge, preferring to travel the countryside in building gangs rather than apply themselves diligently to the hard discipline of a seven-year apprenticeship. Soon there would be no master craftsmen left, only powerful, soulless contractors who had no interest in whether their buildings would still be standing a thousand years from now.

I was old and my lungs were beginning to heave like the creaking leather in a pair of ancient bellows, but I cannot pretend that was the sole reason for my nebulous discontent, the nagging sense of frustration that somehow robbed me of all pleasure in my success. Even in my prime I had never found an apprentice who wasn't glad to complete his daily quota of work, eager to return to a boy's amusements, fighting and carousing on the streets of an evening or lingering in dark alleyways with a new sweetheart. 1 used to tell myself that it would be different when I had a son to follow me into the trade, but though I sowed my seed with diligence (and enthusiasm!) I waited in vain for the ultimate reward. Three daughters, plain, dutiful girls who married well and never gave me a moment's trouble; a ten-year dearth, in which I largely abandoned hope and tried to resign myself to my fate.

And then…
Luciana
!

My wife wept with chagrin the night that Luciana was born and I myself hung dutifully over the cradle, preparing . to hide my bitter disappointment. But the moment 1 parted the covers to look at her I was lost in wonder at the sight that greeted me. She did not look like the wrinkled prune that I had come to believe typified my newborn children. Even then she was beautiful, and her tiny little hand closing around my finger was only a symbol of the tenacity with which she wound herself around my heart in the following years.

Luciana never got along with her mother, not even as a small child. I was forever coming home to complaints of insufferable behavior and a hot, tragic, tearstained face burrowing into my coat. I never dreamed then that I should one day find myself sending her away from home for the sake of my own sanity. I never dreamed…

But I will not think of Luciana! Not now! I will think instead of the boy; the boy who should have been my son…

"I want to see everything," he said in answer to my question, when we met that following dawn with all the ridiculous stealth of young lovers, "
everything
!"

"That's a tall order," I said with a smile, "but if you really want to see the city in one fell swoop you can't do better than to climb the Janiculum. That hill commands the finest view of Rome. You won't see everything, but you'll see enough."

We were silent as we climbed the steep road that wound its way beneath the pine trees to the crest of the hill, but our silence was companionable and gave me a chance to observe him more closely in the open light. He was leading two of the most beautiful horses I have ever seen, one black and one pure white; both mares, I noticed, each carefully groomed and bearing well-balanced packs, but no saddles or harness.

I asked him how he managed to control the animals without a bit.

"I never use a bit," he said coolly. "It is an unnecessary cruelty. These horses choose to carry me, there is no question of control."

I realized then that he was not leading the creatures; they were simply following him like dogs. When we stopped he made no effort to secure them, merely lifted a hand to caress each one briefly before turning away to look at the view.

"Oh!" he said.

Hardly a word, more a simple sigh of ecstasy, a sound that I sometimes hear still in my restless dreams, the sound of a soul lifting from the clay. As I watched him drift toward the edge like a sleepwalker in a trance, I had the sudden horrified suspicion that he wasn't going to stop, but simply keep on walking right out into the treacherous void beneath.

I ran forward to catch his sleeve and drag him back a step to safety.

"Be careful!" I said urgently. "The ground is unstable here, you must keep away from the edge."

"Keep away from the edge," he echoed dreamily to himself. "Must I always keep away from the edge?"

Something in the odd, otherworldly quality of his voice sent a shiver running through my gut—for I knew he was not talking to me, but to some terrible unseen presence that was suddenly at his side. Something that had claimed him before and now returned briefly, like an absentee landlord checking its rightful property.

I shook his arm violently and he opened his eyes to look at me with blank confusion, as though it was not me he had expected to find beside him. After a moment he seemed to remember where he was and turned once more to look out over Rome, as though nothing untoward had taken place.

"What is that flat facade over to the right?" he demanded, suddenly alert again.

"Santa Maria d'Aracoeli," I said, glancing at him uneasily. "The shallow dome is the Pantheon and just behind it stands the Quirinal Palace. Over to your left"—I swept my hand in the direction I wished him to look—"you can see the drum of Castel Sant'Angelo. That great park in front of you is the Villa Borghese and the two towers on the edge of it—no, you're not looking—just there, do you see?"

"Yes, sir… the two towers. To what do they belong?"

"The Villa Medici."

He reacted to those words as though I had struck him, turning away, with clenched fists, as though he could no longer bear to look on the vista which had given him such delight only moments before.

"You have heard of the Villa Medici?" I asked curiously.

"Oh, yes." he said, in a voice which seemed to be plummeting down some bottomless abyss into darkness, "I've heard of it!"

He drew a sharp intake of breath and then continued as though he was repeating text and verse of some lesson learned by heart.

"The villa was built in the sixteenth century for Cardinal Ricci di Montepulciano and passed to the Medici family in 1576. In 1803 it became home to the French Academy after the Palazzo Salviati was sacked and burned during the revolution. The Academy is open exclusively to artists, musicians, and architects. Entry is determined strictly by competition—
the Grand Prix de Rome
!"

Powerless to comprehend the black bitterness suddenly pulsing through him, I could only stare and wonder how a Gypsy boy had come by such knowledge, and why the mention of it should be capable of throwing him into the grip of such violent rage.

He flung away from me abruptly, returning to the horses as though he intended to ride off without another word; but as the white mare gently nuzzled his masked face I saw control return slowly to his tense body. And after a moment he came back to me with hesitancy.

"I'm sorry," he said simply. "I didn't mean to be uncivil. If you can forgive me, sir, I should greatly like to see whatever else you care to show me."

A strange, disturbing boy, and yet the more I saw of him the more strongly drawn I felt toward him, the more convinced of our mutual need of one another.

I accepted his disarming apology without hesitation or comment.

"Come," I said, with a simplicity that matched his own, "let me take you to the Colosseum."

Over the course of the following two weeks we continued to meet at intervals, and those days when I did not see him were filled with a restlessness that I found hard to comprehend. He parted with personal information with the greatest reluctance, as though the smallest confidence might leave some gaping hole in his defenses against the world. Questioning him presented all the ease of prizing open a reluctant oyster shell, and yet I could not rid myself of the certainty that gentle persistence would ultimately show me an extraordinary pearl.

It was almost a week before he told me his name and the occupation he was pursuing at the fair in the Trastevere.

"I do magic," he admitted with a little shrug of self-contempt. "Not very good magic really, not yet—but people are very easily amused."

And showing me his empty palms, he reached up with a graceful, theatrical flourish to pluck a purse out of thin air and drop it carelessly into my hand.

The purse was mine!

"I see you don't starve," I observed dryly, replacing the little leather bag in my pocket. "Why didn't you keep it? That was your intent, wasn't it? And I wouldn't have known."

"It didn't feel right," he sighed.

"You keep others, though."

"Oh, yes," he confessed cheerfully, "all the time."

"You're not ashamed of stealing from people, then?"

"No," he said, "I don't like people"—there was a moment of hesitation before he added in a whisper that was barely audible—"as a rule."

I thought of the Trastevere, one of the least respectable districts in Rome, home to charlatans and rogues of the worst kind; and I thought of his hands, those slim, nimble instruments of mischief that could be so much more nobly employed if only… if only…

I repressed an impulse to sigh.

"I think you ought to see the Vatican" was all I said.
*

I made sure we arrived at Saint Peter's when the great basilica was deserted, save for the odd devoted pilgrim; and for two hours or so 1 watched him explore the extravagant architectural splendors of previous centuries. His wondering delight made me feel young again, as though I were being reborn through his vision, and that day, as I answered his whispered questions, it was as though I, too, were seeing Saint Peter's for the first time. The colors seemed more vivid to me, the sweep of the barrel-vault ceiling more awesome, the perfect harmony of the basilica's proportions more inspiring. I had never felt quite so close to God before, so utterly sure of His benign existence.

The great church echoed with a throbbing silence as we came to stand before the bronze statue of Saint Peter. I paused to make the customary reverence, pressing my forehead briefly to the right foot where the bronze toes had been worn smooth and featureless by the caresses of thousands of pilgrims through the centuries. I looked at the keys of heaven held close against Saint Peter's heart and the upraised right hand which symbolized hope to countless sinners; and I stepped back automatically, expecting Erik to repeat my gesture.