“La Principessa is your wife?”
The man pulled Malory to his feet.
“You tune organs. You also play?”
“Well …”
“You will play something for me. Something for La Principessa and the baby.”
Malory sat once more on the bench, the Rumanian beside him. Once again, he brought the little finger of his left hand down on the B-flat and introduced the theme of i = u, MALORY = LOUIZA, this time without interruption. Lucky Rumanian, Malory thought. In the seven months of absence, the seven months of searching, Malory had named not two, but three of the children he would have with Louiza. If he ever found her.
But as he played, another note crept into the improvisation, a note that hadn’t been part of the melody in any of the many variations he had played over the past seven months. It was a low F-sharp, two octaves below middle C, a note that had its own force, its own gravity. The note came from a different scale, and added a discordant voice, especially when played with the toe of Malory’s left boot on the far reaches of the pedals. As surely as the Rumanian had taken his place on the bench next to Malory, so had the low F-sharp taken its place in the music. MALORY = LOUIZA was unimaginable without this note.
Malory finished. His hands sat in his lap, his feet dangled from the bench. Only the whir of the motor for the bellows could be heard in the distance.
“Tibor,” the man said softly. “My name is Tibor.”
“Malory,” Malory managed to breathe, even though his lungs were exhausted.
“Malory,” Tibor said, placing his large palm on Malory’s shoulder. “Malory, you saved me this morning.”
“Saved you?”
“Come with me to La Principessa and save my child.”
Malory had left Cambridge and traveled to Rome against all reason, thrown himself across Europe with only the vague instructions in the letter from his grandmother and the dim light of a single afternoon’s memory of Louiza to guide him. He had spent a restless and ultimately torturous night in the very cell where Galileo had endured the worst of the Inquisition. And yet, at this very moment, with the touch of the man’s hand, with the touch of Tibor’s hand, all the pain in his neck and back, all the uncertainty about Louiza drifted away from his body and out the drafty walls of Santa Maria. Tranquility replaced terror.
Tibor. Even the man’s voice changed with the sound of his name — Tibor. It came into tune, on that low F-sharp. That low F-sharp reminded Malory of another sound, a note he remembered from fifteen years before, a sleeping giant from the foothills of the Pyrenees, a note that Malory identified with a care and affection he had heard only a few times and long ago. In the organ loft, Malory felt that he had found someone who might take seriously his quest for the lost Louiza. Maybe, even, a friend.
“Come, Malory,” Tibor said, and turned towards the door to the organ loft. Malory thought he should make an excuse. He had an organ to tune. There was an appointment with a lawyer, Signor Settimio — his grandmother’s letter had been vague. There were reasons why it made sense for Malory to stay in the organ loft of Santa Maria sopra Minerva and continue to do what he was doing before this Tibor appeared. Instead, Malory let himself be pulled by this new acquaintance, this new sensation. He stood up from the organ bench. He opened the flap of his Kit Bag, put the Universal Tuner back in its place, and swung it over his shoulder.
But Malory had forgotten the 35-millimeter canister. At the moment he stood, either Malory knocked the Pip off the music stand of the organ or the Pip, of its own volition and magnetic charge, flew in search of the Kit Bag but miscalculated. Hitting the floor of the organ loft, the 35-millimeter canister rolled slowly along the tiles towards the opening of the balusters and off into the darkness below.
“The Pip!” Malory’s shriek, louder than the first note that had awakened Tibor, louder than Tibor’s own awakening roar, echoed in the church, bounced off the stone columns and the painted chapels, off Michelangelo’s statue of Christ the Savior at the altar and the more pedestrian bulk of Cardinal Torquemada in the right nave, and performed a ski dive of an arabesque off Bernini’s funerary marble in the near apse in the tones of a crumhorn. As the highs and the lows settled, Malory leaned over the railing, searching into the black for an answering sound from the canister hitting the paving stones. But the echo that returned was in a softer pitch. It was a voice he remembered from another church, a voice he had never forgotten.
“Malory?” Something moved below. “Malory?”
Next to the tomb of the headless and thumbless Santa Caterina, a figure shifted in the dawn shadows and called his name again. Malory ran.
The corkscrew of the spire of San Ivo unwound, the saucepan lid fell back onto the cauldron of the Pantheon. The colors of the rainbow drew themselves back off the wall of the tower into the white light of the sun to the clang of Malory’s footsteps — one, two, then four at a time — his ear and his heart harnessed to gravity in the singular desire to reach the ground floor of the church before that voice died away. Seven infinite months had passed since he had last heard it. But he had no doubt that, even through the confusion of his meeting with the giant Rumanian, the overturning of the 35-millimeter canister and the vacuum of the church, it was—
“Louiza!” Breathing hard but not shrieking, Malory ran out of the door of the staircase and into the nave. Although he slowed down the panic of his legs, it took a moment for his blood to catch up with him. Here she is, Louiza, here in Rome, where he’d least expected. Here she is, oggi, risen from the tomb of Santa Caterina below the altar and sitting on the second pew to the right of the aisle, the position Mrs. Emery took every week in a different church in a different time.
Malory walked as calmly as he could, tugging at Kit Bag and lapel, conscious suddenly that his own unwashed and rumpled appearance might be important. Because something else was different, different about Louiza. Even in the dawn shadows, with his heartbeat searching for escape through his eyeballs, Malory could see how tightly Louiza’s cheeks clasped her face, the red at the edge of her lobeless ears, softened only by a fine pale down. The shadows of pre-Mass dawn draped a shawl of care around Louiza’s neck, as if all nourishment, all strength had leached away in the past months, flown south to sustain a fullness, a roundness of the belly that pressed to bursting through her gray jumper. Louiza was pregnant. Louiza. Pregnant.
“I thought,” Louiza began.
“I knew,” Malory continued, and then corrected himself, “or at least I think I knew.” Because although he had come to Rome in the trance of the instructions that his grandmother had left with the vicar, Malory knew that something was pushing him off course, as surely as it had pushed him off his bicycle on the towpath by the river. He had felt the same pull, the same gravitational tug that he had felt since arriving in Rome, since that March afternoon with Louiza in the organ loft of St. George’s Church, Whistler Abbey. A pull he felt most strongly now, a pull he recognized that dropped him to his knees in adoration. He wanted to touch Louiza’s face, to pull her lips, swollen and chapped as they were, to his.
“So …”
Malory had forgotten the Rumanian.
“Is this what you dropped?” Tibor held up the canister. Malory broke his gaze from Louiza’s belly and stood.
“Yes,” he said. “Thank you.”
“And this is your Principessa?”
“Louiza,” Malory said, confused as always with introductions. “This is Tibor. I met him …”