A Prince Without a Kingdom (18 page)

Laura wrote his name everywhere in the notebook, as if there were a risk of it being washed away. She might even have written it somewhere on her skin.

Next came a few words written out in English to help her learn the language. Lists of words she would need:
eat, boat, work.
And phrases:
Hello, I’m looking for a friend of my father, Giovanni Valente Cafarello, from the island of Salina, in Sicily.
The names of the different districts of New York were scribbled in the margins, with maps, as in an explorer’s journal, as well as sketched faces always with the same recognizable features: the photo-fit of Cafarello. And his name was in every corner of the book.

With each page, Vango was able to clamber deeper inside Laura’s mind. With each page, he also recognized his own struggle. The memory of that small wooden cross at Woodlawn Cemetery brought tears to his eyes: it was the answer to the glimmers of hope in Laura Viaggi’s notebook. The trouble was that Vango knew the end of the story. The red notebook made for heartbreaking reading.

There were lists of accounts, the price of a bowl of soup, of a night in a convent, then some new English words, and a few sentences addressed to her two sisters who had left her, sentences she had tried to obscure but that were still visible under all the crossings out:

Vango was reading the notebook slowly. He had enough candles to get him through the night. He would simply have to pay Otello by the weight of molten wax.

Suddenly, between two pages, he saw Laura’s face. It was a photograph taken on her arrival in New York, stuck to an official card. The photo was thumbnail sized. Vango held it up to the flame to get a better look.

She wasn’t staring at the camera. She was glancing to one side as if on the lookout already, over the photographer’s shoulder, for a glimpse of Cafarello. She looked young for her age. Her hair had been cut very short, probably during the crossing. A few pages back she had written about the fleas on the boat. And sometimes tiny insects appeared crushed between the pages.

Vango scrutinized Laura Viaggi’s face. It was a long time before he turned the page.

The American part of the notebook was the most painful. The only place Laura knew was her islands: where a traveler could arrive in Salina or even in Lipari and give a name down at the port, and there would always be someone who could point to the house of the person she was looking for. But when she stepped off the boat in New York, Laura’s first impressions were disastrous. How was she supposed to find anyone in this city of clouds?

No sign of Cafarello down at the port. No sign of Cafarello in her first ten days of looking. No sign of Cafarello by the end of the first month.

“Carello, my brother-in-law’s called Carello,” a young barber had told her on the fortieth evening. “But he isn’t from Sicily. He’s from Calabria.”

And so Laura Viaggi had been to pay this Carello a visit, thinking that perhaps he had tried to disguise his name. But he turned out to be an old grocer. The sign on his store was enough to put Laura off:
CARELLO, GOOD TASTE IN NEW YORK SINCE 1908.
Ten years too early. All the same, she had asked for a bottle of wine from the islands of Lipari to gauge his reaction. Old Carello had made her repeat the name, but in the end he had brought out a bottle of Calabrian red, insisting it was the best.

Two weeks later, Laura had seen a man in the street wearing two wooden boards, one in front, the other on his back, tied together with leather straps. Glued to them were posters advertising a brand of soap.

And, the next day, Laura Viaggi had walked the avenues of New York with two large boards that asked the crucial question:

People must have thought she was mad. This went on for weeks. Now Vango understood why, each time he had asked that same question nearly two years later, the name of Cafarello seemed to stir up muddled recollections. Very few of the city’s inhabitants could swear that they had never come across Laura and her famous question during the winter of 1934.

In the early days, she watched the reactions of passersby. These ranged from amusement, to surprise, to suitors going down on their knees in the pathways of Central Park: “It’s me; I’m Cafarello. I’ve been looking for you too!” But Laura’s dark glare deterred them.

People’s curiosity soon gave way to indifference, as happens in all big cities, where anything considered a novelty is quickly superseded by something newer.

In the final quarter of the notebook, Vango stopped at two pages that were stuck together. He couldn’t separate them with his fingers. He left his room and tiptoed over the cold tiles to fetch a razor blade that he had spotted on the washbasin at the end of the corridor. As he was about to return to his room, he heard a voice close by.

“Is someone with you?”

“Alma?”

Alma was sitting on the floor in the corridor.

“I heard you talking to someone.”

“What are you doing here, Alma?”

She was wearing a hat covered in snow.

Vango realized that he must have been reading out loud.

“Who’s with you? What’s her name?”

“There isn’t anyone.”

“I heard you. Come with me, Lupacchiotto. There’s something I want to talk to you about.”

“Not now, I can’t. Tomorrow, Alma . . .”

Why did Vango have the feeling that someone was waiting for him in his bedroom? Laura Viaggi’s notebook was breathing on the bed.

“Tomorrow,” Vango said again. “All right?”

“What have you got in your hands?”

He showed her the rusty razor.

“You give me the creeps,” she said. “What did you want from Cafarello?”

“He knew my family. I’ve got to go now.”

“Good night.”

Alma got up and walked away.

Vango went back into his bedroom. Through the window, he watched Alma heading off in the middle of the white street.

Down below, Alma was mulling over what she had wanted to say to Vango.

If he had made a little time for her, just a little bit, Alma would have told him about something she had just remembered. Cafarello’s words, one day when he’d been drinking: “I am not Giovanni Cafarello.”

She turned around to look at her footprints in the snow and at Vango’s window lit up at the end of the street.

Vango picked up the book again under the sheets. He slipped the razor blade between the stuck pages and separated them slowly. This left some rust on the paper, but he was still able to read:

Vango reread these lines. The attorney hadn’t even tried to prize apart the pages stuck together by the May rains. And this, in turn, gave Vango a clear indication of how weak the defense must have been. Attorney Donahue probably had his mind on his trout river, up there in the Adirondack Mountains, where he would be going the following Sunday. In his head, he was already getting his boots, hooks, and flies ready.

It wasn’t even a case of trying to pervert the course of justice; it was just laziness. Rather than reading the notebook all the way through to the end, Donahue had spent an hour trying out a new paper-clip sorting system, or writing “small envelopes” in Gothic script on the large envelope that contained them.

The next pages were an account of trailing Cafarello. Laura was right behind him, step by step, for several days. His age and face fitted the bill. She was amazed by his stoutness, which was very different from what Giuseppina Troisi had described to her. Perhaps the change of climate had transformed him? She herself had become a lot thinner.

He wandered around the city, without a job, but he was never short of money. Surprised to discover a real man when she had been expecting a werewolf, Laura never let him out of her sight. One night, at the reception desk for Hotel Napoli, she had been able to take a look at the customer register. The occupant of Room 35, Giovanni Cafarello, had indeed been born at Leni, on the island of Salina, Italy, in 1885.

She closed the register. This was her man. The murderer of Bartolomeo Viaggi.

Vango found it hard not to tremble as he read the last pages of the red notebook. They were addressed to Laura Viaggi’s family. There were childhood memories, tiny specific details that nobody else would have thought of writing down.

Vango appropriated them as if they were his own. This was the childhood he had never known. With these words penned in black ink, Laura was remembering.