“Che cazzo fai?” The man pushed himself off the organ case and cracked his back, sending a rifle shot of an echo through the arches of the church. Erect, the man stood at least six feet tall, Malory thought, maybe double that. “Che cazzo fai qui?” and the apparition stumbled away from the pipes and towards Malory on the organ bench.
The only exits available to Malory were between the giant’s legs or over the balustrade of the organ loft, fifty feet to the stone nave of Santa Maria sopra Minerva. Malory slid carefully down the organ bench as the man approached. But the closer the man came and the more Malory slid, the further he put himself from any reasonable solution. At the end of his options, Malory grabbed his Kit Bag and his Universal Organ Tuner and stood.
He hadn’t meant to hold the Universal Tuner, a piece of metal nine inches long — pointed and ridged of course — in a threatening pose, as if he were, in fact, one of those very bovver boys in front of the Taboo Disco Club. And he hadn’t meant to tread with his own boot on the low C pedal of the organ. But in one movement, Malory’s theatrical gesture and the low C of the organ, which let forth a roar like the unleashed menagerie of Noah’s Ark, so surprised and so overwhelmed the giant, that he fell against the balustrade of the organ loft and began to pivot backwards over the edge. And that equal and opposite reaction so surprised Malory that it wasn’t until the last rumble of the low C died away in the fissures of the church that Malory realized he had somehow lunged forward and caught the giant by the belt with the Universal Organ Tuner. He was stretched out at full length, the toes of his own boots caught painfully, if securely, by the bench. His two hands gripped in agony the rough metal that had served all sorts of other purposes in the twenty years since he had found it in a field near Narbonne, but never to hold two men away from certain death on the floor of a Dominican church in Rome. Forse oggi, Malory thought. Forse oggi, gravity will have its way. And the sadness that he would die without seeing Louiza again was unimaginable. But just as Malory felt the last of the Universal Organ Tuner begin to slip through his hands, the giant pivoted his torso up with another echoing crack, and fell onto the floor of the organ loft, with Malory somehow on top of him.
“Sorry,” Malory apologized, worming his body off the stranger’s and fiddling uncomfortably to disentangle the Universal Organ Tuner from the man’s waistband. “Mi dispiace, ma …”
“American?” The man was breathing heavily.
“Sorry,” Malory apologized again, wishing he wouldn’t. “No. British. English.”
“So—” The man pulled himself into a sitting position on the floor, back against the balustrade. “You British come all the way to Rome to play organs and wake me up at … what the fuck is the time?”
“Not exactly,” Malory said.
“Not exactly?” the man said. “Fututi pizda matii!” The man laughed and wiped his eyes with thumb and forefinger.
“Sorry,” Malory said, “I don’t speak much Italian yet.”
“Not Italian,” the man said. “Rumanian. It means ‘fuck the …’” He stopped and turned to Malory. “Do you have a mother?”
“Actually,” Malory said, “she died some years ago.”
“In that case,” the man said, “I won’t waste the explanation, or curse the private parts of a dead woman.”
“You are Rumanian?” Malory asked.
“Not exactly,” the man said with an actor’s attempt at sobriety that quickly gave way to more laughter. He reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and pulled out a pair of rimless glasses. “What are you not exactly doing up here?” He tweezed the glasses over the back of his ears and onto his helpless eyes. Malory realized that the apparition breathing heavily and laughing lightly next to him on the organ loft floor was essentially harmless.
“I was planning on tuning the organ, actually.”
“Actually?”
“This piece of metal”—and Malory held up the Universal Organ Tuner—“is what I use to scrape and bend the pipes. Put them in tune.”
“Not to rescue Rumanians?” The man took the tuner from Malory and scratched the end of his nose.
“Not exactly,” Malory laughed. And he thought that it had been a while since he had laughed and a long while since he had laughed at himself. “What does it mean to be not exactly Rumanian?”
“So,” the man began, “you have heard of Dracula?”
“Mmm,” Malory said.
“Don’t worry,” the man said. “I’m not a biter. It’s just to give you a geographical idea of how fucked my part of Rumania is — fucked by the Ottomans, fucked by the Hungarians, the Austrians, the vampires, and, most recently, the Red Star Pioneers of the Soviet Union and its finger puppets, Monsieur and Madame Ceauşescu.” He handed the metal back to Malory. “I come from a place that has been scraped and bended, but is not exactly in tune.”
Malory had little grasp of Eastern European history. But it occurred to him that the man’s voice itself was out of tune. In the months that had followed his discovery of Louiza and the Pip, Malory’s own internal tuning had become so acutely wired that he felt the need — like Charlie Chaplin with his spanners in Modern Times—to take his own bent piece of metal and tune the horns of cars, the cries of seagulls, the whistle of the wind, to tune the world. And the voice that came to him first from the organ case and now from beside him on the floor of the organ loft of Santa Maria sopra Minerva was out of tune in a way that was unsettling.
“But you didn’t come here, I mean to Rome, for a tuning.”
“Not exactly,” the man said, but this time he didn’t laugh. “Back in Rumania, I was a little bit of a big shot. Which means Ceauşescu let me direct Shakespeare and Chekhov three or four times a year, and I had enough friends in the Securitate to keep me tranquilized with Carlsberg and Camels.”
“But you left.”
“I left,” the man said, “because I followed La Principessa.”
“La Principessa?” Malory asked. “Is she living inside the pipe case, too?”
“Living?” the man looked full at Malory. “You think I am living there?” It seemed to Malory that he was on the verge of laughing, but something more painful arrested the impulse. “I only came up here to get a little sleep. La Principessa,” he continued, “at this moment is in the Ospedale Fatebenefratelli, preparing to give birth.”
“Congratulations,” Malory said, “I mean, I assume …”
“That the baby is mine? I assume too,” the man said. “It is no consolation.” The man pulled himself standing and turned to face into the vacuum of the church. “I told her,” he said in a whisper mixed with a low bass undertone, “if it is a girl, you must give her away before I fall in love with her. If it is a boy, I will strangle it with my own hands.”