At 9:30 A.M. on the second day, Romula’s helper hissed from the window seat. A black void appeared across the street as one of the massive palazzo doors swung inward.
There he was, the man known in Florence as Dr. Fell, small and slender in his dark clothing, sleek as a mink as he tested the air on the stoop and regarded the street in both directions. He clicked a remote control to set the alarms and pulled the door shut with its great wrought-iron handle, pitted with rust and impossible to fingerprint. He carried a shopping bag.
Seeing Dr. Fell for the first time through the crack in the shutters, the older Gypsy gripped Romula’s hand as though to stop her, looked Romula in the face and gave her head a quick sharp shake while the policeman was not looking.
Pazzi knew at once where he was going.
In Dr. Fell’s garbage, Pazzi had seen the distinctive wrapping papers from the fine food store, Vera dal 1926, on the Via San Jacopo near the Santa Trìnita Bridge. The doctor headed in that direction now as Romula shrugged into her costume and Pazzi watched out the window.
“Dunque, it’s groceries,” Pazzi said. He could not help repeating Romula’s instructions for the fifth time. “Follow along, Romula. Wait this side of the Ponte Vecchio. You’ll catch him coming back, carrying the full bag in his hand. I’ll be half a block ahead of him, you’ll see me first. I’ll stay close by. If there’s a problem, if you get arrested, I’ll take care of it. If he goes someplace else, come back to the apartment. I’ll call you. Put this pass in a taxi windshield and come to me.”
“Eminenza,” Romula said, elevating the honorifics in the Italian ironic style, “if there is a problem and someone else helps me, don’t hurt him, my friend won’t take anything, let him run.”
Pazzi did not wait for the elevator, he raced down the stairs in a greasy boilersuit, wearing a cap. It is hard to tail somebody in Florence because the sidewalks are narrow and your life is worth nothing in the street. Pazzi had a battered motorino at the curb with a bundle of a dozen brooms tied to it. The scooter started on the first kick and in a puff of blue smoke the chief investigator started down the cobbles, the little motorbike bouncing over the cobbles like a small burro trotting beneath him.
Pazzi dawdled, was honked at by the ferocious traffic, bought cigarettes, killed time to stay behind, until he was sure where Dr. Fell was going. At the end of the Via de’ Bardi, the Borgo San Jacopo was one-way coming toward him. Pazzi abandoned the bike on the sidewalk and followed on foot, turning his flat body sideways to slide through the crowd of tourists at the south end of the Ponte Vecchio.
Florentines say Vera dal 1926, with its wealth of cheeses and truffles, smells like the feet of God.
The doctor certainly took his time in there. He was making a selection from the first white truffles of the season. Pazzi could see his back through the windows, past the marvelous display of hams and pastas.
Pazzi went around the corner and came back, he washed his face in the fountain spewing water from its own mustachioed, lion-eared face. “You’d have to shave that to work for me,” he said to the fountain over the cold ball of his stomach.
The doctor coming out now, a few light parcels in his bag. He started back down the Borgo San Jacopo toward home. Pazzi moved ahead on the other side of the street. The crowds on the narrow sidewalk forced Pazzi into the street, and the mirror of a passing Carabinieri patrol car banged painfully against his wristwatch. “Stronzo! Analfabèta!” the driver yelled out the window, and Pazzi vowed revenge. By the time he reached the Ponte Vecchio he had a forty-meter lead.
Romula was in a doorway, the baby cradled in her wooden arm, her other hand extended to the crowds, her free arm ready beneath her loose clothing to lift another wallet to add to the more than two hundred she had taken in her lifetime. On her concealed arm was the wide and well-polished silver bracelet.
In a moment the victim would pass through the throng coming off the old bridge. Just as he came out of the crowd onto the Via de’ Bardi, Romula would meet him, do her business and slip into the stream of tourists crossing the bridge.
In the crowd, Romula had a friend she could depend on. She knew nothing of the victim and she did not trust the policeman to protect her. Giles Prevert, known on some police dossiers as Giles Dumain, or Roger LeDuc, but locally known as Gnocco, waited in the crowd at the south end of the Ponte Vecchio for Romula to make the dip. Gnocco was diminished by his habits and his face beginning to show the skull beneath, but he was still wiry and strong and well able to help Romula if the dip went sour.
In clerk’s clothing, he was able to blend with the crowd, popping up from time to time as though the crowd were a prairie dog town. If the intended victim seized Romula and held her, Gnocco could trip, fall all over the victim and remain entangled with him, apologizing profusely until she was well away. He had done it before.
Pazzi passed her, stopped in a line of customers at a juice bar, where he could see.
Romula came out of the doorway. She judged with a practiced eye the sidewalk traffic between her and the slender figure coming toward her. She could move wonderfully well through a crowd with the baby in front of her, supported in her false arm of wood and canvas. All right. As usual she would kiss the fingers of her visible hand and reach for his face to put the kiss there. With her free hand, she would fumble at his ribs near his wallet until he caught her wrist. Then she would pull away from him.
Pazzi had promised that this man could not afford to hold her for the police, that he would want to get away from her. In all her attempts to pick a pocket, no one had ever offered violence to a woman holding a baby. The victim often thought it was someone else beside him fumbling in his jacket. Romula herself had denounced several innocent bystanders as pickpockets to avoid being caught.
Romula moved with the crowd on the sidewalk, freed her concealed arm, but kept it under the false arm cradling the baby. She could see the mark coming through the field of bobbing heads, ten meters and closing.
Madonna! Dr. Fell was veering off in the thick of the crowd, going with the stream of tourists over the Ponte Vecchio. He was not going home. She pressed into the crowd, but could not get to him. Gnocco’s face, still ahead of the doctor, looking to her, questioning. She shook her head and Gnocco let him pass. It would do no good if Gnocco picked his pocket.
Pazzi snarling beside her as though it were her fault. “Go to the apartment. I’ll call you. You have the taxi pass for the old town? Go. Go!”
Pazzi retrieved his motorbike and pushed it across the Ponte Vecchio, over the Arno opaque as jade. He thought he had lost the doctor, but there he was, on the other side of the river under the arcade beside the Lungarno, peering for a moment over a sketch artist’s shoulder, moving on with quick light strides. Pazzi guessed Dr. Fell was going to the Church of Santa Croce, and followed at a distance through the hellish traffic.
CHAPTER
26
THE CHURCH of Santa Croce, seat of the Franciscans, its vast interior ringing with eight languages as the hordes of tourists shuffle through, following the bright umbrellas of their guides, fumbling for two-hundred-lire pieces in the gloom so they can pay to light, for a precious minute in their lives, the great frescoes in the chapels.
Romula came in from the bright morning and had to pause near the tomb of Michelangelo while her dazzled eyes adjusted. When she could see that she was standing on a grave in the floor, she whispered, “Mi dispiace!” and moved quickly off the slab; to Romula the throng of dead beneath the floor was as real as the people above it, and perhaps more influential. She was daughter and granddaughter of spirit readers and palmists, and she saw the people above the floor, and the people below, as two crowds with the mortal pane between. The ones below, being smarter and older, had the advantage in her opinion.
She looked around for the sexton, a man deeply prejudiced against Gypsies, and took refuge at the first pillar under the protection of Rossellino’s “Madonna del Latte,” while the baby nuzzled at her breast. Pazzi, lurking near Galileo’s grave, found her there.
He pointed with his chin toward the back of the church where, across the transept, floodlights and forbidden cameras flashed like lightning through the vast high gloom as the clicking timers ate two-hundred-lire pieces and the occasional slug or Australian quarter.