The Detour (17 page)

“Of course,” Keller said, taking a menu. “There has always been interest. That goes without saying.”

When I stood up to relinquish my seat, unwilling to disrupt the lunch party any further, Röthel held onto my wrist. “If I’d had you at my side, a young voice passionate about history, we might have talked some important people into loosening their purse strings.”

Herr Keller, eyes hidden and chin tucked into his neck, grumbled to himself. “Demand is never the question. Supply is the question.”

“Of course it is! We’re not negating the art dealer’s role. But what the Reich needs—outside of the existing museums—is an entirely new apparatus, a small staff to research these issues.”

“There is work being done in Berlin.”

“Must everything always be done in Berlin?” Röthel pointed
to the bag beneath my feet, my parcel of paper and pencils, which I had been unwilling to have checked because I wanted to be able to make my exit freely, without fuss. “Tell me again, who is your commanding officer? How much longer do you have to serve in the Wehrmacht Heer? How would you like to meet some interesting people?”

I said I would, and Röthel would go on to prove himself and his connections, many times over, as I knew he would. As I recalled our fortuitous encounter later that night, lying on my bunk back at our guarded compound, I already felt more free.

And what happened to Ackerman while I was away from camp? A little skirmish, but he had fought back and achieved some sort of tense stalemate with our comrades. What bothered me most upon my return to camp was how he tried to thank me for the meager warning, as if I’d done him some favor. If anything, I’d learned the wrong lesson: that a middle ground—dare I call it a pose?—between paralysis and action was possible.

My antiques job with Betelmann had never impressed my father. My new job, to which I reported barely a week later thanks to Röthel’s apparently effortless pulling of strings, most definitely did impress him. He would have much preferred me as a top athlete, but second to that, a government career wasn’t bad—especially when I explained to him how the top Nazi officials were art collectors.

“Really? All of them?” he asked.

“Yes. Each wants to imitate the other, to see who can collect the most,” I replied. Well, this sort of basic competition my father could understand.

“Your luck has turned, my son,” he said, sounding the happiest I’d ever heard him. This was perhaps the only moment when his hand on my shoulder felt non-threatening, like a simple exchange of joy and warmth. “A little dignity and reward for the Vogler family, at long last.”

“C
an’t we go any faster?”

“No. We’ll miss something.”

“But the faster we go, the faster we can get to his girlfriend’s farm and wake him up and be done with all this.”

“He isn’t at the farm.”

“How do you know that?”

“He isn’t sleeping.”

Cosimo spotted the shrine we had passed the night before and made a swift turn. But once stopped, he seemed hesitant to open the door.

“This morning,” he explained, “I walked up toward the main road, away from where we parked—I was just off the
shoulder, taking care of morning business—and I saw a red car go by.”

“Interesting,” I said as flatly as possible.

“He did not see me. He did not see the truck.”

“Which he?”

“Keller. That was his prize car that I saw. His red Zagato Spider.”

“And the Roman truck, too?”

“No. He told us they were
suspekt
. But maybe that was only to get us away from them, traveling the road alone, so that he and any others he has hired could take the statue without being seen.”

While I skeptically resisted absorbing this news, Cosimo opened his door and gestured for me to do the same. We walked past the shrine to a water spigot that had been dripping slowly, dampening the dusty ground. He leaned down to pick up a cigarette butt, squeezing the end between his fingers. Thirty or forty of them littered the ground.

“At least three or four men waited here last night for us to show up.”

“Or one chain smoker.”

But Cosimo was serious. “He would need that many to move the statue. Keller assembled a team to take the statue and to sell it to whatever buyer is waiting.”

“A team of four.”

“Or five.” He returned my stare. “My brother could never have afforded that engagement ring.”

“He said that Keller paid him for helping to choose a new car.”

“Keller paid my brother enough to buy his
own
car. My brother bought an expensive ring. He can’t even afford a good pair of shoes but suddenly—diamonds. Don’t you see?” Cosimo sniffed his fingertips: “Turkish tobacco.”

“We should fear the Turks, now?”

He gave me his heavy-lidded look. “Many German smokers prefer Turkish tobacco.”

“And many Germans,” I countered, “don’t smoke at all. We’re discouraged from it, as a matter of fact. It’s not even allowed in our offices. You Italians light the second before you throw away the first.” A ridiculous argument, but I still didn’t want to believe. “Even if Keller were in charge, even if this were his own private heist, wouldn’t he have mostly Italians helping him?”

Cosimo began to swear, cursing Keller’s name again.

“You knew something was wrong last night,” I reminded him. “You knew it as soon as you saw the ring. You knew when Enzo told you, ‘Don’t worry, go along.’ Why didn’t you do more?”

Cosimo inhaled deeply. “I hoped he would change his mind. I could not change it for him. But now it is bigger than that. I fear, Mister Vogler, that it is bigger than both of us.”

Back on the road, we traveled in silence to the Monterosso turn-off, and I kept my eyes fixed on the di Luca guide in my lap, fingers tracing the embossed letters on the thick, green leather spine while Cosimo, driven with what I hoped was only paranoia, steered us ever farther from the main road.

Goats bleated from the shade of a chestnut tree. Above us in the hills, a rooster crowed its dawn alert several hours too late. Just one of many reasons not to live in the countryside.

“I need to visit the bushes,” I said.

When I walked back to the truck, Cosimo was sitting with a photograph balanced against the steering wheel, studying it as his lips moved silently—seeking comfort or guidance, it seemed, which was only further proof that Cosimo was taking his own dire premonitions too seriously.

A raven-haired woman stared back from the center of the curling photo with one blurry hand lifted to her forehead, sweeping back a piece of hair. She had prominent cheekbones, a wide mouth, and an impatient but somehow not off-putting expression, like someone who didn’t want to be photographed. That explained the blurry hand. This woman, attractive as she was, had no desire to be admired, or to wait for a man’s approval.

“Rosina. She would know what to do,” he said, acknowledging my presence, eyes still focused on the curled image in his hand.

Rattled by Cosimo’s superstitious gloom, I feigned a lighthearted tone. “I wouldn’t say it if Enzo were around, but she is much more beautiful than Farfalla.”

When Cosimo responded with a dismal expression, I continued uncertainly. “Intelligent eyes, a wonderful smile.”

“She isn’t smiling.”

“But she wants to smile; she is considering, but perhaps she isn’t easily persuaded.”

“Trust me,” he said, “she isn’t a woman who can be persuaded about anything.”

The more I looked, the more I saw it. In the photo, the woman appeared undecided about whether to berate the photographer or burst out laughing.

“I’m not teasing you, if that’s what you think. I’m trying to make you feel better. You haven’t broken it off with her, have you?”

“No,” he said, pushing the photo back into his pocket. “I see her all the time.”

“Well, then—one ray of hope in dark times, yes?”

“Mister Vogler,” he said, starting the truck again, tapping the gas until the guttering roar eased back into a steady rumble, “she is my sister.”

We saw a young boy tugging a goat alongside the road, the animal’s satiny blue collar glinting in the sun.

“There.” Cosimo swung toward the shoulder, jumped out of the truck and stood next to the boy, questioning and pointing while the boy pulled his goat nearer.

“We’re close,” Cosimo explained, back in the truck.

“To the farm?”

“No.”

“What did the boy say?”

“I gave him a coin and I asked him if he saw a yellow sports car early this morning. He said yes, maybe. I asked
him if he saw a silver sports car. Yes, also. And a blue one—that, too.”

“You paid him. He was trying to please you.”

“But when I asked him if he saw a red car early today, he said,
‘Assolutamente no.’
The problem is not that I paid him. The problem is that someone else already paid him more.”

“But surely you’re not going to take a little boy seriously—”

“You think I was only listening? I was looking. I saw the collar on the goat. The boy told me he has owned it since the goat was born.”

“So?”

“It was Enzo’s necktie.”

I hurried to look over my shoulder at the boy, getting smaller on the road behind us. It was possible that the tie had fallen from Enzo’s jacket pocket the night before, while he was riding. But Cosimo was impervious to doubt. Tense with dread, he was sitting up so straight that no part of his spine touched the back of the truck seat, and he was driving slower yet, at barely more than a brisk walking pace.

“This is very important,” he said after a while. He instructed me to look on the right side of the road; he would search on the left. “If we find his scooter on my side, he was coming back from the farm. If we find it on your side, he never made it.”

“If we find his scooter at all. If it isn’t parked safely up some dead-end road kilometers from here,” I added, but Cosimo showed no sign of hearing.

In some places the shoulder was clear and climbed directly up to farmlands or dry, unplanted hills. In other places there was brush and high grass. I scanned with concentration, arm
hanging over the sun-beaten windowsill, sweat tickling my neck. But we found no sign of anything in the next two minutes or in twenty.

And of course, this search was taking us farther away from the bigger road along which we’d been traveling. We were losing time. Even the addled roosters had stopped crowing, silenced by the day’s building heat. Our
benzina
supply: diminishing. Our own energy for the long drive still ahead: draining away. This was idiotic. We were going the wrong way, damn it all. We were digging ourselves deeper.

“Anyway, is there a difference?” I finally asked. “Does it matter, if he was coming or going?”

Cosimo would say no more.

Irritated as I was, I was not immune to the contagion of his superstitious imagination. As the hot, slow minutes ticked by, the paired possibilities took shape in my mind: Enzo making it to the village, halfway through his future in-laws’ celebratory dinner, making a grand entrance, being enfolded by the arms of Farfalla’s brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles. Fitting an extra chair at the table. Bringing another plate, another glass. Enzo apologizing for his appearance—the dirt of the road, the golden hair standing on end. And then toasting and dancing for the bridal couple. Enzo cornering Farfalla’s father, and then returning to the table and tapping a glass. A proposal to the bride’s younger sister. I imagined her saying yes, and everyone turning a blind eye when Enzo fell asleep not in the main parlor, where a half-dozen male relations shared a nest of blankets, but somewhere else—a cellar perhaps, or a farmer’s shed. Somewhere with Farfalla.

But that was only the first possibility. The second possibility was a night ride, dusty eyes straining to see the outline of road, an obstacle—rock or stick or wild animal—and then the spinout of scooter against chalky road. The scooter sliding toward the shoulder and into high grass. No party, no Farfalla. No memorable night in the cellar. At the last minute, in that coldest part of the night just before dawn, a thought sent out into the starry ether, toward the only person who could receive it.