“She’s gone,” Malory said.
“Gone?” Tibor changed key and looked at Malory. Malory nodded and looked down at the platform. “I’m sorry, Malory.” Tibor put his palm on Malory’s shoulder, but Malory stepped back. “These things happen,” he shrugged.
“I don’t mean that she left today or yesterday. That day at the hospital — I was only gone for an hour or so,” Malory said. “I must have got back just after you left. But she was gone.”
Malory raised his head. He saw Tibor’s eyes. Tibor was looking into him. There was a new focus, he thought, perhaps anger. “What do you mean gone? Not just in the operating theater?”
“I mean that Settimio and I searched the entire hospital for two hours, spoke with nurses, doctors, administrators. No one had seen her, no one had seen the red-bearded American doctor or the English nurse or the babies. Only the next day, when I met Suor Anna …” Malory recounted Suor Anna’s story to Tibor, the disappearance of the doctor with Louiza, the single baby in the cradle in the lamplight of the operating theater. “If you and Cristina didn’t take your baby, then the baby that Suor Anna saw must have been yours. And Louiza must have been taken away with hers. With ours.”
“And the hospital didn’t say anything?”
Malory shook his head. “Not one record. Nothing.”
There were footsteps in the column, and then Radu’s black eyeglasses followed by Sasha’s mop.
“Mission accomplished,” Radu said, sucking in the evening air as best he could. Sasha had his hands on his knees in the hope that his breath might catch up with him more easily at that height. Down below, the crowd was sifting out towards the Piazza Venezia in one direction and the Colosseum in the other.
“A new mission,” Tibor turned to them.
“Really?” Sasha looked up.
“We have to find a girl. And her baby.”
“That’s not why I came,” Malory said. “I’ve already tried the police, the embassies.”
“Please,” Radu said, and Sasha straightened up to join him and Tibor at the railing. “We are the Bomb Squad. We know how to find anything and everything.”
“You really think?” Malory began.
“It may take some time,” Radu said.
“But if they are here, we will find them,” Sasha said.
“What can I do?” Malory asked.
“Leave it to us,” Radu said. “You are obviously no good at finding things.”
“We had to find you, after all,” Sasha added, “no offense.”
“Tibor,” Malory started again.
“I will be your Virgil,” Tibor said, “I will guide you. I will help you find your Beatrice, if you will be my Dante.”
“What do I have to do?” Malory asked.
“Not much,” Tibor answered. “Go through hell, that’s all. Otherwise nothing, absolutely nothing.” And with that, he stepped into the column and began his descent.
2/4
Oh the sheets of roe
Are filled with rubber
Anchovy prints
Are everywhere
IBOR’S PAW GUIDED MALORY AROUND A FRAGRANT CORNER OF the prison of Regina Coeli in the direction of the music. Tibor had insisted — and now that Malory had found him, there was no real question he would follow — that Malory come home with him for dinner and plan the search for Louiza. They walked at a measured pace — as if Tibor were calculating strategy or counting syllables in a canto — from Trajan’s Column through the Ghetto and out the back end of the Teatro Marcello, to the Synagogue and across the Isola Tiborina. Part of the route was familiar from Malory’s dash with Tibor and Louiza two weeks earlier. But part was different and new. Even without the weight of Louiza in his arms, Tibor’s determination lightened Malory. He let Tibor guide him, be his Virgil, across the Ponte Cestio and into Trastevere, the dome of St. Peter’s making the occasional flirtatious appearance according to the curve of the river. He followed Tibor down a set of steps fragrant with rotting leaves and urine into the medieval circle of Rome, past the prison of Regina Coeli up to a high gate that shivered with the sound of drums, an electric guitar, and a Rumanian-accented song he thought he recognized.
Cuttlefish ink
Cappuccino double
With a fork and knife
On the Spanish Stairs.
“Dylan?” Malory asked. It was the soundtrack of garden parties and May Balls along the Cam, but in a less self-conscious key — F-sharp major, perhaps — one whose strings were less taut, whose harmonics were less forced than the madrigals and pantos and practiced frivolity of Cambridge. Tibor pushed open the gate. Seven or so first-and second-tier members of the Bomb Squad, tie-dyed and batiked and bandanaed and bejeweled, and a variety of Danube mädchens, befrocked like Florence Nightingale auditioning for The Night Porter, were gathered around Sasha who, guitar draped like a Kalashnikov across his chest and perched on the bonnet of a shipwrecked car, was in full chorus:
Gotta get a bag from my hotel room,
Where I got me some dates from a pretty little girl in Greece,
She promise, she beat and whip me,
When I pain my fututi pizda!
“So …Welcome to the Dacia.”
Radu handed them glass jars filled with a bubbling, celebratory punch of indistinct origin. Nurses thrust ramekins beneath their chins, full of mozzarella and olive and some impossibly hot Carpathian pepper. More of them, dozens of them, Nurses and Bomb Squad, danced through the gate and in and out of the shadows of Christmas lights hanging like Babylonian grapes from the iron struts of the Dacia. Smudge pots of citronella lit the dying moments of quixotic mosquitoes who had slouched over to the Dacia from the neighboring Botanical Gardens. The Dacia, as Malory discovered over the succeeding weeks of punch and grill, had once been a nursery of fig and pear and apricot and apple trees for princes and cardinals who lived at the fecund base of the Gianicolo, two healthy spits away from the Vatican. The Nurses and the Bomb Squad took over the ruins of a house and garden from impatient families who used it as a rest room around the corner from the prison of Regina Coeli. They fixed the holes in the roof, put locks on the doors, ran the whole thing through with industrial brooms and whitewash, and baptized the compound as the Dacia, not because of any romantic memories of the summer dachas of Pasternak or Akhmatova or the Bucharest nomenklatura, but because Brendushka’s diminutive Dacia 1300 finally dropped its gearshaft in the middle of the garden after her flight from Bucharest. It was late October 1978 to Malory, the physics dropout from Cambridge. But to refugees from the other side of the Iron Gate it was still the Summer of Love.
That first night, Malory did little more than sip at his jar of punch as Radu and Sasha — once he’d relinquished his guitar to Dora or Brendushka or one of the other many Nurses Malory eventually came to know — and a handful of other members of the Bomb Squad peppered him with questions. Not just searching for the obvious physical details about Louiza, but for behavioral quirks — the way she walked, the way she talked, the way she thought. Malory gladly told and retold the stories of his two encounters with Louiza to an audience far more demonstrative than Settimio. He told them about Louiza’s mathematics, he told them about Whistler Abbey. They were intrigued by the story of negativity and soberly awed by the image of Louiza tracing i = u onto Malory’s naked chest in the late afternoon light of St. George’s.