“Do not forget the Pip.” Tibor pulled at a cigarette and wiped the smoke from his beard. And so Malory told them of the Pip, from Louiza’s discovery in the shutters of the steeple of St. George’s through its fall from the organ loft of Santa Maria and Tibor’s miraculous discovery of the tiny apple seed in the morning shadows of the pavement below the altar. Malory tried not to embellish or editorialize. But Radu in particular encouraged him not to worry himself too much with the effect his own attraction to Louiza had on his description of the girl.
“We need to find the girl you are searching for,” he said. “Not just some little blonde named Louiza.”
When he was finished, Malory excused himself and walked out the gate. The Driver found him around a discreet corner and drove him on the Vespa back home to the Villa Septimania. Malory returned the next night and the next for an update from this new family of dispossessed. The Nurses and Bomb Squad would wander in at odd moments from their occasional jobs. Some evenings Tibor was already at the Dacia when Malory arrived, some evenings he showed up later or not at all. But Malory always found a Nurse chopping vegetables she had seduced off a fruttivendolo in the markets of Campo dei Fiori or San Cosimato, and Radu or Sasha or Vlad scaling and grilling a fish that one or another extra from Tibor’s production had donated to the cause. Malory listened to tales of discovery as they chopped and scaled and he experimentally sipped on a glass of whatever was placed in his hand. He listened to stories of escape from the East — Radu and Sasha wrapped in horse blankets in a corner of a refrigerated truck, Dora and Anda less insulated in the boot of an English tourist’s Morris Minor. Tibor and Cristina had flown out of Bucharest in style, of course, thanks to Cristina’s discovery of an uncle in Ramat Gan, who wangled her an Israeli visa with a flight connection in Rome.
“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita,” Tibor quoted to whomever would listen. “We got off the plane in the middle of the flight, and that particular yellow line suits us just fine.”
Much of the truth of Tibor’s story was veiled in cigarette smoke, but no one dared contradict Tibor when he was in voice. The paw that Tibor had first placed on Malory’s shoulder, that Transylvanian crag of a hand, was nothing compared to the force that hogtied the Bomb Squad, the Nurses, and any others he corralled into the garden of the Dacia with his stories. Malory was as happy as the rest of them to recline on the paternal speechifying of Tibor.
Cristina, as Principessa, held her own court and followed a different protocol. Cristina never had to queue for auditions. She arrived in Rome to three well-paying jobs — cleaning a Canadian journalist’s office in Piazza Barberini, wiping the noses and bottoms of four-year-olds in an asilo on the Via Sistina, and preparing lunch for a lonely fiddle maker in an attico off Piazza Navona twice a week. Cristina never followed Tibor on his evening tours of the garden. Cristina perched gray-eyed on a sprung sofa off the kitchen, smoking a filtered cigarette of exotic origin. Some evenings, she would look over to Malory, and Malory would join her. He didn’t smoke. But he shared their loss in a silence that he hoped gave her as much comfort as it gave him. And sometime during the evening — before dinner, during, or most often once the dishes had been piled up in the Dacia bathtub — Cristina would stand up from the sprung sofa. The Bomb Squad, or occasionally a non-Rumanian guest, would strike a guitar or a zither or a drum, and Cristina and the Nurses would throw on costume boas or army greatcoats or strip down to their Weimar nighties and perform a post-Brechtian, pre-Madonna cabaret with a determined chaos that, for at least a little while, helped all of them forget the daily indignities of exile.
Malory expected it would be a matter of days until the Bomb Squad found Louiza and their child. But as the rains of November rose higher up the embankment of the Tevere, overflowing the Isola Tiberina and threatening the trees along the upriver prow and the more untraveled cargo holds of the Ospedale Fatebenefratelli, as the rains of December drove Tibor’s Divine Comedy rehearsals under sheets of plastic and corrugated scrap, the Bomb Squad returned every evening to the Dacia without a single wisp of fair hair or dyslexic, mathematical clue.
“Sometimes,” Radu said to Malory one evening, wiping the rain off his glasses with the sleeve of Malory’s jacket, “you get closer to your treasure by figuring out where it definitely is not.” Malory put his own palm on Radu’s shoulder. Perhaps he had lost, perhaps they all had lost at least as much as Malory and had even less of a chance of recovery. “Some bombs are hidden very deep.”
“Accidental discovery, mio Principe.” Settimio listened every morning at breakfast, as he served Malory his Earl Grey and scones in front of the statues of Newton and the Woman and the Apple, as Malory recounted the previous evening’s Tales from the Dacia. “The history of man, and I suspect nature in general, is one of accidental discovery, finding something precious while looking for something else.”
“But don’t you understand? I don’t want anything else.”
Settimio knew that the cure for petulance was to be found in the Sanctum Sanctorum. And during the days — while Malory waited for the evening summons to the Dacia and hope of news from the Bomb Squad — Settimio profited from Malory’s other passions and cushioned him with manuscripts around the seven-sided desk.
One of those mornings, the day before Christmas, Settimio appeared at the padded door of the Sanctum Sanctorum.
“Mio Principe.”
Malory had been examining the manuscript of Newton’s Principia—although he found himself taking frequent breaks to read back over Haroun al Rashid’s encounters with the daughter of Charlemagne. He placed a slip of paper into the book, slightly embarrassed that Settimio might have found him out, and looked up.
“You may recall Fra Mario. From the Dominicans. Santa Maria …”
“Of course!” Malory said, climbing up from the stables of the Jewish butcher back to memories of an organ left untuned and a girl left unfound.
“Fra Mario rang,” Settimio said, “on the telephone, a moment ago. A young lady, he said.”
Malory jumped up — less petulant now — and headed towards Settimio and the padding. He had known, at least he had hoped that, even if his own gravity was insufficient, the bulk of Santa Maria sopra Minerva might pull Louiza back to its pews and end his two months of anxiety and search. This was better than any voyage of transformation.
“Not that young lady, purtroppo,” Settimio said. “A young Italian lady. Quite insistent. Fra Mario said that she must see you at once.”
“Italian?” Malory asked. “I don’t know any young Italian ladies.”
But when fifteen minutes later the Driver parked the Vespa in the Via del Beato Angelico and escorted Malory through the rear entrance of Santa Maria, past Michelangelo’s Salvatore, past the tomb of the anorexic Santa Caterina and past the pew below the organ where he had last found Louiza, the copper curls bobbing above the gate of the Carafa Chapel reminded Malory that yes, indeed, he did know one Italian lady.
“Malory,” Antonella whispered — but with the same enthusiasm she used to serve him biscuits and tea in the Maths Faculty. Malory hugged Antonella back — not caring that the Lippi Madonna was looking down at him with contempt — happy, grateful at this very fleshy reminder of a life before his landing on the planet of Septimania. “Look at you!” Antonella said finally, releasing him only to hold him at the length of a nose and a little more. “What a change.”