The Detour (18 page)

(Did I believe that twins could be connected in such a way? Given my own genetic anxieties, I had to believe it was possible. Do I still believe, a decade later? If the world holds no mystery at all, no romantic possibility, then my second trip to the Piedmont is futile—so yes, I choose to believe. War takes away nearly everything, but perhaps not that final illogical tendency that allows us to continue living.)

Scanning the road for any sign as the truck continued along at its creeping pace, I weighed the scenarios, wondering which was better or worse: to leave behind a ruined woman, following a night of pleasure; or to miss that night, but in missing it, to spare her considerable grief.

“Where are you hoping to find him, Cosimo?”

“To anyone who has felt love, it is clear.”

It wasn’t clear to
me
.

There was a long pause as Cosimo stewed before surrendering the answer. “Left side. Coming back. To have one night with her at least. To have one night with a wonderful, beautiful woman. Of course I must wish this for him.”

The truck swerved and braked. Ignoring my questions, Cosimo jumped out and paced along the left side of the road, where he’d evidently glimpsed something. I copied him, pacing along the right. But he seemed so certain that I couldn’t stop looking over my shoulder, watching as he pushed a long stick into what looked like a trampled stand of thick roadside grass. He crouched. Dropped the stick. Reached a hand into the grass, near the ground, and left it there.

Even from across the road, I recognized the look on his half-turned face: the same look that Greta had worn the day I’d come home from my part-time job with Betelmann and she’d come to the hall, holding a handkerchief that had belonged to our mother. “The doctor just left.
Vater
isn’t back yet, he doesn’t know. You should go see her now, have your own moment, before he gets back and turns the place upside down.” But it was hard to take the next step. “Go now.” It was hard to move from that in-between realm of knowing and not knowing, accepting and not accepting; that frozen place from which every step is a step toward unhappiness.

Nearing the spot, I saw that Cosimo’s hand was resting on Enzo’s ankle, just above his black shoe. The laces had come untied, and after a moment, Cosimo tied them, slowly and carefully, making the loops even and snug. That tender gesture held my complete attention as the rest of my mind raced to catch up with what I was seeing, what I was not believing: the shoe and the foot, the trampled grass, the motionless body.

Then Cosimo patted his brother’s ankle again, leaving his hand there for a moment, until he nodded for assistance.

Waving away the flies that were already buzzing around, I reached forward to help Cosimo roll the body over and struggled to resist recoiling. Enzo’s thigh was slightly stiff, but even through the cloth of his trousers I could feel a greasy emanation of heat. Yet there was no pulse. I’d expected a corpse to be cold. This was worse.

“Normal?” I heard myself ask Cosimo, losing somehow the “is” and the “it,” along with the basic rhythm of breathing and swallowing, which now seemed to require considerable conscious effort. When the body in front of me lost solidity, I had to look away just to force open the shutter that was closing in my mind, blackening the view in front of me.

Cosimo winced at the road rash on one side of his brother’s face. “There is warmth—for twelve hours, sometimes more.” His voice came out in a warped staccato, tinny and uneven, as if it had traveled over a long distance through a metal tube.

He turned to cough into his sleeve before facing the body again, wiping at a bloody temple with his handkerchief, dabbing at Enzo’s matted, sticky hair, each touch tender but tentative, as if he could barely bring himself to make contact and then barely bring himself to break it.

When Cosimo began to cough again, face hidden, I moved away and busied myself by pushing the scooter back onto the road. A string bag was still snagged on the left handlebar on the scooter, filled mostly with glass shards now, as well as some food items wrapped in newspaper. The ground was stained grayish white from what I realized was milk—milk
that had been collected just hours earlier and handed to Enzo with a farewell clap on the shoulder. Milk in a glass jar, for Cosimo. That famous statue—of the twin boys with their cherubic, upturned faces, nursing side by side from a she-wolf. The founders of Rome. Romulus and Remus. Fifteenth century. Which brother slew the other and why? I couldn’t recall. It was the simplest question, but my memory wouldn’t cooperate.

The countryside was quiet. No vehicle traffic or animal noises. No shepherd’s distant bells. A faint breeze failed to lift our clinging shirts from our damp backs.

Cosimo stood next to me, a few meters from the accident scene, fumbling to strike a match and keep it lit within his cupped palm. Finally, he managed to light the cigarette and took his time smoking it. When the final ash fell, something more would have to be done. That part of the future seemed—for an odd moment—endlessly far away. Until the moment was now. Then it seemed too soon.

He gestured for me to approach, and while he reached down for his brother’s top half again, I tried to take the bottom. But the trousers kept bunching and slipping. I worked my way higher up his legs, trying to get my shoulder under his thighs to push him up. As I was pushing, something edged out of his right trouser pocket: a corner of a banknote—a thick, folded pile of currency.

Cosimo had seen. He ordered me to set the body down, crouched low to the road and emptied the pocket slowly—first, the folded Italian
lire
—one clipped-together bundle, then a second. He looked at me, and then pushed his hand
into the pocket again. The third bundle was a thicker fold of
Reichsmarks
.

“I thought Keller ran him off the road, but now I am not sure,” Cosimo said. “Keller knew he carried money. If they saw the crash, they would have checked his pockets.”

“You’re saying it was just an accident?”

“Maybe he saw them coming in the distance, maybe he recognized the sound of the Spider coming around a curve. He panicked and skidded out.”

“So you’re not blaming Keller.”

He stared at me, eyes blazing. “Of course I blame Keller for talking Enzo into this. I will kill Keller if I see him.”

“No, no,” I stammered. “We don’t need any of that.”

Cosimo resumed digging through Enzo’s other pockets. I looked away, trying to give him a moment to do what he needed to do, trying to give myself a moment to breathe, to think. When I turned around again, Cosimo’s lips were pressed together, a fresh unlit cigarette between them. He held something toward me: Enzo’s lighter, shaking violently.

I looked at it for a moment before understanding. I took and lit Cosimo’s cigarette for him.

He inhaled once before holding out the other hand. The diamond ring rested in his flattened palm.

“He didn’t propose?”

Taking the cigarette from his lips, Cosimo pushed his face into the crook of his elbow, wiping once. “She said no.”

“Maybe he didn’t even propose.”

“I am certain. He would not fail to propose.”

“You’re certain he asked?”

“This was Enzo. Of course he asked. You can see that he made it there—the milk—and he was coming back. But she said no.”

Cosimo crouched near Enzo’s body again, a little unsteady on his feet. “I have seen bodies before,” he said after his breathing had become more even. “But it isn’t the same.”

“Do you need to rest for a moment?”

The suggestion alone seemed to irritate him, bolstering his resolve. He was stoical beyond belief—an effect of his police training, I could only imagine. Again, he lifted Enzo under the arms. I struggled to hoist his lower half, my arms wrapped around his stiffening calves, feeling repulsed by the slightly pliable feeling of skin over hardening muscle, the curly hair pasted down with grit, dried sweat, trickles of brown blood. The bad smell wouldn’t leave my nose. It wasn’t the smell of death—not yet—only spoiling milk. Gripping Enzo’s legs, I tried to ignore the dizziness building in my head.

We brought him to the truck, set him down on the ground. Both of us tried to look away, to see any part of Enzo but his stained face.

“A minute, please,” Cosimo said, and I willingly walked toward the front of the truck and rocked on my heels as I listened for Cosimo to call me back again. I heard him jump into the back of the truck, rummaging and clanking around. Then a long pause, followed by quick steps, a thud as he jumped to the road, followed by an anguished moan.

Racing to the back of the truck, I saw Cosimo doubled over, vomiting into the dust. I led him, still doubled over, farther away from the truck, farther away from Enzo’s body, to a low
stone wall that ran along part of the road. He did not want to sit, but I made him, as I wiped his face with my handkerchief. I took each of his hands, guided them to a mat of herbs growing just behind the wall, and urged him to rub the old smell away, replacing it with the scent of rosemary. “A little better?” I asked.

He had caught his breath. “It should have been me.”

“Cosimo—”

“No, please. Say nothing. It is better that way. ”

When my mother had died, I had said nothing helpful to my father, nothing even to my sister. When my father had died just before Christmas, I had such mixed emotions I was afraid to open my mouth, fearful of what would escape, the compressed emotions of my youth unrelieved by his passing.

“It’s a common reaction,” I told him now, searching for the right phrase. “But there is no way to trade your life for his. You cannot bring him back, Cosimo.”

“Truly,” he said. “It should have been me.”

“It doesn’t help—”

“You don’t understand.” He was firmer now. “It should have been me. Not me to die—me to propose. Farfalla and I were supposed to be married.”

“She was yours? Enzo stole your girl?”

“For a while. With Enzo, it was always for a short while.”

“But this time …”

He stood up from the stone wall. “What could I do? He is me, the same—but better.”

“No, Cosimo. You and he were not the same …” I found the anger building so suddenly, so irrationally, that it was hard
to finish. “And he was
not
better. Don’t make it worse by believing that.”

Cosimo was attending to his own obsessions, his own wounds: “But last night, she must have said no to him. That is what the dream meant, when he apologized and told me to look in his pocket. Not for the money, for the ring.”

He continued to nod, trying to absorb all that had happened. It was like watching a heavy man pull himself, hand over hand, up a thick rope, feet kicking and sliding, failing to get solid purchase.

“She said no. But that is the worst thing, because now, I can never ask her. I can never profit from this. I cannot be a replacement. So yes, it might as well have been me, lying there.”

“T
hey’ll be looking for us,” Cosimo said when he was behind the wheel again, eyes dry and engine running. “They don’t know about Enzo. They don’t know if I was helping him or helping you. But Keller and his men know we have the statue.”

“You’re not well. Let me drive.”

“You don’t know how to drive.”

“It can’t be that difficult.”

When Cosimo ignored me and began to turn the truck back toward the main road from which we’d come, I picked up the empty wine bottle from the floor near my feet and raised it shoulder high. “You
will
let me. That way, there will be two of us, driving day and night if necessary.”

He leaned back, eyeing the raised bottle in my hand. Cosimo was a little bulkier than me. I was a little taller.

“Your mistake,” he said after a moment, looking back at the road, “is not breaking the top of the bottle. I can tell that you’ve never hurt a man.”

“And this means I never will?”

He hesitated. “You’re right. I can’t tell. Sometimes a quiet man is the most violent because he has been holding back so much for so long.”

Cosimo brought the truck to a gradual stop and got out so that I could slide over and take the wheel. He watched as I made an inventory of the dashboard, the view out the front window, the view out the sides—there couldn’t have been any lonelier section of road. The engine stalled and I restarted it. I tried again, got the truck rolling, struggling to remember how to shift and steer.

“We’ll choose a route to the border, together,” I said over the screech of the grinding gears. “We’ll look at the map at our next stop.”

I dared not take my eyes off the road in order to check his expression. I had driven forward only a hundred meters when the engine stalled again.

“Enzo’s body—we’ll figure that out,” I said, trusting that Cosimo’s red-rimmed eyes were on me still. “We need to bring him somewhere close and then keep going. We’ve stolen nothing; we’ve done nothing. All we have to do is deliver the statue. If it goes missing, we’re suspect. But if we deliver it, they’ll believe us.”

“The Italian government?”

“The Germans.
Der Kunstsammler
himself—he wants only the statue.”