“It will be all right,” Malory whispered to Louiza. He bent down and scooped a strand of hair, black with sweat, behind Louiza’s ear. Her lips were chapped with exhaustion. But the warmth of her kiss removed all doubt. Louiza was here, the child was here. The equation was balanced. But as he followed Tibor into the hall and the red-haired giant of a doctor winked and closed the door behind him, a jerk from his Kit Bag made Malory turn. The red-haired American, the plate of scones at the Orchard. Was it the same red-haired American who had bought him tea at the Orchard when he’d first lost Louiza, Malory wondered? Had a demon followed him? Had he once again played a false note?
1/7
IGNOR MALORY?”
A new man took his elbow in the corridor. Tall, tight-fitting dark suit, sunglasses, good shoes, hair combed back in ranks of well-oiled centurions. Italian, Malory thought. The director of the hospital, or maybe a chauffeur.
“Please,” the man said, “you must come with us.”
“Us?” Malory said, turning back to Louiza’s room.
A second man appeared from the same nowhere as the first. He wasn’t barring Malory’s way back to Louiza’s room, but he was present in a way that rearranged Malory’s center of gravity. Even shorter than Malory, he was dressed in a long, night-blue woolen coat. The hint of cufflinks and a double Windsor at the collar suggested a formality that Malory hadn’t seen in either the Master and fellows or the porters that served at High Table at Trinity. The afternoon light from the far end of the corridor sprinkled the man’s face with a Roman dust that softened his silver hair. The maze of lines and shadows that ran from eyes to smile, made Malory think the man was as ageless as his grandmother, Old Mrs. Emery.
Of course! Malory shook off the anesthetic charm of the maternity ward. This was the man his grandmother had written about, the man who would tell him about his inheritance. Malory looked again. The clarity of his eyes, pale, past blue, a color nearly newborn in its transparency and openness, led Malory to understand that the man, the men came from a world where numbers and ages were counted according to a different system, a system that might prove invaluable to Malory, with an uncertain future and a new family on the other side of the door.
“Signor Settimio?” Malory said, thinking — how fortunate! He and Tibor could have a coffee in the cortile with Signor Settimio and his Driver. Signor Settimio could hand over whatever bank account and safe-deposit trinkets that Mrs. Emery had left to her neglected grandson. And then Malory would be free to welcome his child into the world and spend the rest of his life with Louiza.
“Settimio. Simply Settimio,” the man said, the words almost sung in a tenor accent, somewhere between Puccini and Britten. “Eternally at your service.” He bowed his head and, it seemed to Malory, also his right knee as his left hand went to his heart. Malory looked to the younger man with the sunglasses to see whether the appropriate response was a laugh or a giggle. But the other man’s head was also bowed. Towards Malory.
“Please,” Malory said. “Prego, thank you, grazie,” running through his full vocabulary of Italian. “You are, you were a friend of my grandmother’s, of Mrs. Emery. May I offer you a coffee down in the cortile?”
“There is not time for a coffee. I have much to tell you, mio Principe,” Settimio said — the Principe flummoxing Malory as much as the rejection of the coffee. Was everybody in Rome a principe or a principessa, like Tibor’s gray-eyed wife? Settimio raised his head and turned to the man with the gloves. “We must go.”
“I’m sorry,” Malory said, “I need to stay close by …” He paused, searching for the word to most accurately describe Louiza and his necessity. “If this is about my inheritance, certainly it can wait until tomorrow. I’m staying at Santa Maria …”
“There is a certain urgency,” Settimio said. “For you and for many others. Prego.” And with that prego, both Settimio and the man in the sunglasses touched Malory on the elbows — lightly, but with an electricity that began to move Malory’s feet down the corridor.
“One moment,” Malory shook himself loose and turned back to Louiza’s door. This time it was Tibor who stopped him with a gentle palm to the shoulder.
“Go,” Tibor said.
“Let me speak with the doctor.” Malory eased Tibor’s hand away and stepped towards the door. Tibor wouldn’t be budged.
“I’ll wait here and look after your Louiza. Come later, when you’re finished with your business.” The palm again on Malory’s shoulder. Comfort and assurance. “We will celebrate.”
“We must hurry,” Settimio said, his childlike eyes icing into something barely warmer than insistence. “The Driver will take you. I will follow.”
“The Driver? Where?” Malory said again. “I really have only five minutes. Ten minutes maximum.” But Malory felt his feet begin to jog down the corridor, down the staircase with a sense of urgency, the two Italians at his elbows, the confidence of Tibor behind him. Louiza was in good hands — a doctor, a hospital, a new Rumanian friend who owed Malory his life. Perhaps the bank was closing. Perhaps there were papers that he needed to sign by the end of the day. Malory’s Cambridge had effectively been sealed by the death of Mrs. Emery and the dismissal from Trinity College. Whatever Settimio was leading him to in Rome was, of necessity, the key to new beginnings with Louiza and their new baby. Louiza would understand. He would hurry. Determination, Malory whispered to himself. Courage.
At the entrance to the hospital, the tall man helped Malory straddle the passenger seat of a Vespa. Settimio turned to another motorino by the fountain.
“I’m sorry,” Malory said. “You must tell me where we’re going. What is so important at this very moment?”
“All shall be clear,” Settimio said, as he steadied Malory’s elbow on the narrow cushion behind the Driver. “Prepare yourself”—and Settimio started up his own Vespa—“prepare yourself to become a king.”
King? King! Had he heard Settimio correctly? He wanted to shout, Wait! Or, What! But the Vespa took off beneath him, over the bridge and onto the Lungotevere, leaving all courage and most of his breath behind. King? Organ tuner, yes. Possible father, possibly. But King? Hadn’t he told this man, this Settimio that he only had a few minutes to spare? What had induced him to take Settimio’s hand, to follow these men and leave Louiza when she was on the verge of giving birth? What had persuaded him to climb onto the Driver’s Vespa? What did Malory know of Vespas, how to stop a Vespa, how to jump off a Vespa? What did Malory know of the streets of Rome? What could Malory know about the one-way systems of the future that, in any case, would do little to assuage the panic of any hapless passenger on the back of a motorino speeding down the narrow cobblestones of the Lungaretta, veering off to the right just before the peeling, neglected mosaics of Santa Maria in Trastevere, past the pasticcerie of the Via del Moro and the smells of lunches just finished and the sounds of dishes drying almost drowned out by the unmuffled hum and denatured smell of the engine? How could Malory know that Settimio, riding ahead of them on an identical machine, was no lunatic but merely serving the function of regal processions in centuries past, going back to the times of Renaissance princes, medieval warlords, Roman emperors, and consuls before them, who first built the streets leading from the Tevere to higher ground, who haggled and bartered and even killed in order to out-dazzle their neighbors with the splendor of the processions that brought them from this place to that. How was Malory to know that Settimio and the Driver and their matched Vespas were the economical evolution of the equine consorts of yore? Indeed, at the speed of the Vespas, which slalomed past the mothers with prams and grandmothers with canes and dodged the traffic spewing from the tunnel beneath the Gianicolo like stuntmen, at such a speed, how was Malory to identify this breakneck, hair-raising, flesh-crawling dash as anything other than the final lap of the race of his own life? How could he have possibly thought that these men, these Italians who had introduced themselves into Malory’s universe only a few minutes before and then motorinoed him off in the opposite direction from where he wanted to be, were leading him to the modest bank account that he hoped might finance his new beginnings? He had whispered prayers over the past few months, usually upon waking and again at that hopeful moment of dusk when just one more ray of sunshine might bring Louiza’s bright face into his vision before darkness fell — prayers that his quest for his Louiza might quickly be done so that he might embark on the project of the rest of unconscious mankind: life.