The Lover From an Icy Sea (28 page)

The scooter accelerated. It was already thirty yards off before Daneka realized she’d been robbed, and then hollered without reserve: “
Al ladro!
”

There was no need. A pair of shopkeepers at the far end of the street, out for a smoke and a chat, had seen the whole thing start to finish. As if acting on instinct to a scenario they might’ve witnessed many times before, they quickly armed themselves with tools of the kind shopkeepers use to roll their awnings up each day at the close of business, then took them in hand like javelins. One of the two men quickly crossed the street to the opposite side. They waited—and when the scooter finally passed by, each thrust his tool, now a weapon, into its spokes. The fine, metal spokes of a kid’s motor scooter were no match for the angry iron spikes in the hands of two defenders of a woman’s virtue and property. The scooter upended, sending its two occupants off and up, then slid on gracefully and eventually came to a mangled stop. Its two occupants flew through the air like plastic bags scooped up by a sudden draft, and slammed into the rear window of a parked car, shattering it. That same impact likely shattered several of their bones, but the shopkeepers paid no attention to the agony of a pair of young thieves. Instead, their eyes scoured the area for the location of Daneka’s purse.

They spotted and retrieved it, then walked the hundred yards from where it had lain to where Daneka stood—and presented their booty. Kit marveled to see the quick transition: just moments earlier, two warriors bent on vengeance if not precisely on murder; now, those same fierce warriors meek and apologetic, as if they had committed the crime, or had somehow been involved in its perpetration.

Daneka was equally quick to show her gratitude. What she said to them, or they to her, flew by Kit like gibberish. It was, in any case, clear she wanted to offer them something—some token of her appreciation. They refused. They were merely honorable men, behaving as honorable men should, in times that sorely tested notions of honor.

Eventually they bowed, welcomed both Kit and Daneka to Rome, wished them an enjoyable stay—if possible, without any further such unpleasantness—then shook hands and left. Kit knew his first attention should be to Daneka; after all, she’d been the victim. However, he couldn’t get his mind off the two kids.

“
Are you all right, Daneka?” he finally asked.

“
I thought you’d never ask!” she barked peevishly. It was rare for Daneka to complete a sentence or a question without first making sure that the caboose of “darling” was firmly attached at the end. Leaving it sidetracked suggested to Kit intentional negligence—or worse, anticipation of a wreck up ahead.

“
Look, I know this kind of thing is distressing. I’m sympathetic. Really. But I’m also wondering about those two boys. They’re probably in bad shape. I need to do something.”

“
Why do you need to do something about them? Why can’t you do something about me for a change? They’re fucking criminals, for Christ’s sake. They just didn’t get away with it this time.”

Kit was torn between Daneka’s clear yet callous logic and the need, his personal need, to help two young kids, however he could, out of a life-threatening situation. As he glanced first at Daneka—apparently at least as angry with him as she’d been, moments earlier, with her two assailants—then up the street to where the halves of two bodies dangled out of the smashed rear window of a parked car, he remained torn. The upshot? He stood motionless, pinioned to the spot by the weight of his indecision.

As the same moment, he saw one of the shopkeepers violently kick the rear bumper of the car out of which the kids’ bodies half-hung, and he heard the same man give voice to his anger: “
Cazzi napoletani!
” he cursed, and Kit instantly recognized that other, larger, centuries-old prejudice based on geography alone. They could indeed be gracious, chivalrous—in all manner, perfect gentlemen to a light-skinned woman whose personal sanctuary, whose private fucking property, had just been violated. But they could be equally quick, equally ruthless, equally pig-headed, and yes—he allowed himself to draw the mental comparison—equally red-necked in rushing to assign guilt to half the population of an entire country for one act of villainy committed by an isolated pair of individuals. And why? Because those two individuals were obviously poor, probably unskilled, untrained, ill-prepared, hungry—and, most obvious of all—darker-skinned.

Kit was as angry as everyone else, but he was angry for his own reasons—none of which had anything to do with Daneka, with the attempted theft, with the apprehension of the two criminals, or with the unfortunate outcome of that apprehension. He was simply angry at the world, at the way it operated, at the persistent and pig-headed wrongness of it.

Finally, he channeled anger into action and started off in the direction of the injured boys, though not knowing precisely what he was going to do or how he was going to do it once he got there. Lucky for him, he was saved by the sound of an approaching siren. A small white car with a roof-mounted beacon and the word Polizia printed on the side ripped out of the Via Giulia and into the Via Cappellari, then screeched to a halt. Two officers in full battledress jumped out. What followed—at least from Kit’s perspective—resembled more vaudeville than police action.

Both officers immediately unholstered their guns. They looked to one of the assembled shopkeepers for a clue as to where the miscreants might be lurking. They then crouched and made their way slowly towards the car whose rear window had, apart from the boys, borne the brunt of the damage in the whole incident. Each carefully unclipped a pair of handcuffs.

What the whole scene lacked, Kit decided, was flares, or at least some kind of high-intensity lighting in case the original siren—and the drama of two cops on the prowl for a pair of world-class terrorists—wasn’t sufficiently attention-getting to round up a couple of hundred spectators. In the meantime, Kit thought, these kids were probably bleeding to death.

When the officers finally made it to the back of the car and saw the kids’ condition, their first reaction was a clear sense of relief that they, themselves, were not in any danger. Each took out a cigarette and lit up. Kit couldn’t hear their conversation. But from their gestures to each other and their occasional glances at the two bodies, also from their obvious reluctance to retire the handcuffs, Kit could see that law enforcement—apart from a quick cigarette—was still their first priority. They seemed, finally, to reach an accord and divided the boys between them. Then each took his own set of cuffs and clipped one end to “his” boy’s ankle and the other end to the car’s bumper. They then walked off, Kit noted, in the direction of a caffè.

Law enforced. No emergency call. No administration of first aid. No examination of any kind to ascertain whether the boys were even still alive. Priorities. First: a cigarette. Second: their personal safety. Third: a cappuccino—maybe even a newspaper.

Kit was on the verge of taking matters into his own hands, whatever it might cost him to challenge the authority of a cop in a foreign country. At that same instant, however, he heard a second siren and saw an ambulance turn the corner and pull up alongside the police car. Three emergency medical personal jumped out of the ambulance and ran to where the boys were located. All business, they set to work immediately to determine how serious the boys’ injuries were. They spoke in hushed, businesslike tones to one another, concerned only with saving a pair of lives that were clearly in jeopardy, and not giving a second thought to the question of whether or not these particular lives were worthy of being saved.

Only when they’d made preparations to move the bodies to stretchers did one of the attendants notice the handcuffs. He gave his colleagues a blank, incredulous stare. Kit recognized a few of the expletives, but his Italian wasn’t fluent enough to understand and savor how each particular word or phrase condemned first the cops in their private parts; then the cops’ mothers in their private parts; then various acts between the cops’ mothers and a particular shepherd; and finally, similar acts between the same cops’ mothers and the shepherd’s goats. However, one thing was perfectly clear to him: love and respect between the medical establishment and those responsible for the enforcement of law and order in Rome might be lacking in what the Anglo-Saxon world might like to call, on a good day, vigor—and on a bad day, rigor.

The same attendant went off in search of two of Rome’s finest. When the three of them returned moments later, Kit observed the officers’ expressions, which more closely resembled those he’d seen on the faces of babies just seconds after they might’ve dumped a little something into their nappies; the news might not yet have reached others’ noses, but it was most assuredly sticking in their own.

The officers unlocked the hand-cuffs. The attendants carefully moved the bodies onto stretchers, then moved the stretchers to the ambulance. The driver of the ambulance swung his vehicle into reverse, turned on his siren, then began to back out onto the Via Giulia. In an effort to save whatever small portion of face might yet be salvageable, the two officers moved to the center of the street and brought traffic to a halt so that the ambulance could exit safely.

It did, then left the scene quickly. The officers disappeared back into the caffè. The crowd dispersed and went about its business. Only as he turned to walk back to the hotel did Kit notice that Daneka had also disappeared.

*  *  *

When he unlocked the door to their hotel room, he saw Daneka standing in front of the French doors, arms crossed over her chest, looking out through thin, lace curtains onto the piazza below. She remained standing with her back to him as he closed the door.

“
I hope you had a wonderful time, darling.” Her tone was frigid, but at least the caboose was back with the train. Kit wondered how firmly hitched it really was; marveled at how easily she could disconnect and reconnect the ‘darling’; wondered, too, about the reliability of train travel with her if she was the only one deciding which cars traveled, which didn’t, and for how long or short of a journey.

“
I’m sorry, Daneka. Somebody needed to do something for those boys, and I just didn’t see anything happening. Turns out, I was wrong. Somebody had called the police—and an ambulance. They’ll be fine now. I thin—”

“
Yes, I’m sure they will be. At least I hope so. To rise and strike another day. The poor darlings!”

Kit found her riposte slightly nettling. He noted the tone, but also her use of the word in a distinctly unaffectionate context. He was beginning to hate the sound of it, her careless use of it, her fucking abuse of it as she seemed quite willing and able to apply it to everything short of a dishtowel. It was like some kind of patois for the jet set. So much of her vocabulary was, to his ear, original, spontaneous, at times even poetic. She could make adjectives dance on tip-toe, invert nouns and verbs like jelly-jointed contortionists, put even simple pronouns on parade in a way that made him want to sit back and applaud. But this other, this affectation that sounded to him like the yip of a nervous poodle, this was beginning to stick in his ear. If only there were a way to disabuse her of—.

“
Darling, I forgive you,” she said as she turned around and faced him. “Let’s not squabble or quibble. Let’s, instead, cuddle.”

Case in point. The ear-jerk clang of her first word was immediately muffled by the mess of crazy quilts in which she dressed the rest of her consonants. The initial zing to his darling-weary ear became a mere tickle in the flutter of butterfly wing-like syllables that followed. He was once again wax; she, once again, flame.

She pushed him to the bed, climbed on top, and straddled his hips. “Do me, darl—“

Kit quickly put a finger to her lips. She hushed. With the same hand, he reached between her parted thighs and pulled her panties to one side. She raised up on her legs just enough for him to turn his hand over and pull his zipper down. At the same time, she pulled her dress over her head and threw it across the room, knocking a table-lamp to the floor. He reached around behind her to undo her bra, but fumbled with the snap. She reached up in front and tore the bra off, then threw it in the direction of the table-lamp and dress. In the meantime, her panties had slipped back. He pushed them once again to the side and prepared to enter her, but the soft, silk material slipped back yet again.

Daneka reached down with both hands, set them in opposition to one another, grabbed the silk and tore. She then took hold of him with one hand, raised her knees off the bed while propping herself up with the other hand, guided the tip of him two or three strokes across the moist petals of her inner labia, and plunged down.

The thunder-cluster of consonants that had served moments earlier to bring them under a common umbrella became, instead, a spring shower of sibilance.

“
Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! YES! YES … ” The only variation to Daneka’s declaration was in its crescendo, which neither of them made any effort this time to stifle. When she came, seconds later, and he right after her, an appreciative street vendor down below paused long enough in his packing to glance up at their open window.

“
Bravi!
” he said, nodding his head in approval.

A languorous minute later, Daneka climbed off Kit, then turned away from him and curled up in a fetal position. He curled up behind her—placing his knees behind her knees, his stomach against her lower back, one arm over her breasts, and his lips against the nape of her neck, which he kissed progressively more softly until both of them drifted off to sleep.