The Miracles of Santo Fico (18 page)

A pale glow shone in the eastern mountains and everything was bathed in a hint of pallid blue light. Dawn was still some time away, but it was quickly approaching and this was a job best performed in darkness. Finding a spot well away from the dangerous wall, he nestled his treasure in a clump of mint. A moment later he was back in the cathedral, kneeling before the fresco and patiently working his fingers under another panel.

This nervous work continued for too long, Leo thought, but it couldn’t be hurried—prying and lifting section after section away from the wall and tenderly carrying it to a safe place among the herbs in the garden. Twice, aftershocks jarred the frail room as Leo was in the midst of his task. After the first one, a large section of plaster fell from the ceiling, grazed the side of his head, and crashed into his shoulder. Instead of diving for the safety of the sanctuary, he had wrapped his body around his fragile cargo, trying to shield the painting from damage. But when he saw the size of the plaster that had crashed to the floor and almost split his skull, he determined that self-preservation is a valuable instinct and he should be willing to use it.

Leo noticed that as he worked his way up the wall, moving away from the fracture at the base, the fresco was less affected by the buckling and became more and more reluctant to be pried loose. His arms and shoulders ached and sweat stung his eyes as he worked on the massive tablet that was slowly allowing itself to be pried away. But the harder Leo worked, the more he feared the result of his efforts. What would actually happen when he finally pried such a large piece loose? Experience told him that it was going to come free quite suddenly and drop like granite toward the floor. How would he hold it, or balance it, or carry it to safety? By freeing a panel this large, all he was going to do was destroy it. He had just decided to stop and devise a more reasonable plan when the final aftershock hit.

The tremor was brief, but it was enough to pitch Leo’s balance into the wall. His fingers were already wedged under the edges of the panel, and when he lurched forward he felt the fresco rip from its tenuous moorings, and a slight snapping sound accompanied a clean crack that shot directly up the center of the deep blue sky. Seconds later, when the tremor stopped, Leo discovered that his large panel had not only broken free, but now there were two of them. They slid toward the floor like twin toboggans and Leo smashed his face and body against the wall in a desperate attempt to pin the panels in place. His arms and back strained to support them and his legs began to cramp as he pressed his weight into the wall—it was obvious that gravity was going to win this battle. Then he heard someone entering the church.

“Woo-Whoo . . . Anybody here? Leo . . . ?”

Topo’s thin, whispered call filled Leo with ambivalence greater than any he’d ever known. Should he scream for joy or anger or help? The panels were separating along the newly cracked sky, splitting completely apart and slowly slipping down toward Leo’s navel. He thrust his stomach harder against the wall to check the downward plunge and his dilemma was settled. He tried to sound casual, but right now his driving force was a desperation that was hard to hide.

“Here . . . I’m in here!”

He heard Topo stumbling through the garden and he prayed the clumsy little snoop wouldn’t step on any of the rescued panels. He heard him tripping and falling over the debris as he entered the garden door. He heard him moving around behind him in the sanctuary. And then he heard him clucking his tongue in appalled condemnation.

“Oh, my God! Leo, you broke Saint Francis.”

Leo was glad he couldn’t get his hands on the little rodent’s neck right now.

“I didn’t break Saint Francis, you idiot. There was an earthquake.”

“Does Father Elio know you did this? He’s going to be so mad.”

“I didn’t break it, damnit! I found it like this!”

The awkwardness of trying to support the sections of fresco and explain himself to Topo was more than Leo could manage. The two sections suddenly slipped farther and Leo mashed his pelvis painfully into the wall. Topo offered what he considered to be sound advice.

“Well . . . You better be careful and not drop those.” Whether Topo would have eventually figured out Leo’s dilemma on his own or not will never be known because Leo smashed his forehead against the wall and growled in such a horrifying way that Topo immediately understood and sprang to action. Together they lowered the panels to the floor.

The landscape outside was washed with the pale dawn as Topo surveyed Leo’s efforts. Placed with meticulous care among bunches of rosemary, fennel, thyme, sage, and lavender were nine large sections of fresco that made up the majority of the Mystery. Scattered around them were a dozen smaller pieces. The small herb garden had become a surreal-istic museum and it was all so incongruous and yet so perfectly serene, Topo couldn’t speak, but Leo knew what he was thinking.

“The room is going to fall in. You can see that.”

Topo wandered around the garden shaking his head and clucking his tongue in disbelief. Leo remembered Topo’s mother used to cluck her tongue like that.

“This was the only way to save it. You can see that.” Topo scratched his head and sighed. He had to ask. “Are you going to keep them?”

There was something about the stillness of the pale morning that made Leo’s pause seem longer than it probably was. He knew in his heart from the beginning what he intended to do, but now Topo was asking him to say it out loud. He wanted Leo to admit that he was going to steal from the church; that he was going to take the only thing of any value in the whole town; admit that he was going to get enough money to leave Santo Fico and never come back.

“Yes.”

The gray stillness again covered the moment like a veil, but this time it was Topo who writhed silently on the horns of the dilemma. Leo knew what he was thinking as his little friend studied the ghostly chunks of broken fresco. The words of the two fat men from Roma echoed in his brain too. At last Topo sighed deeply.

“Well, I guess it’s like my father used to say— Since the house is already on fire, we might as well stay warm.”

Leo’s voice was no more than a whisper. “There’s an old door leaning against the shed behind the sanctuary.”

Topo was gone in an instant. Leo returned to the church and found the dirty blanket that Father Elio had used to cover and protect the Mystery for as long as he could remember. The lamps still shone on the sad wall at the end of the transept—now only a scar of naked plaster and broken lath. Leo thought it looked like Nonno, abandoned and confused. He pulled the plug of the extension cord and the lamps went out. Even though it cast the room in darkness Leo knew the wall was still there, staring back at him open-faced, asking why. It would be good when the room finally collapsed.

When he scrambled back out to the garden Topo was lugging the old door across the broken wall and they immediately began piling the corpses of the Mystery onto it. Using the blanket for cushioning they tenderly folded it over each giant jigsaw puzzle piece as they stacked them in sturdy layers.

Then, as the eastern horizon showed the inescapable traces of first morning, they carried their treasure through the gap in the broken wall and around the corner of the church toward the piazza. The load was heavy, the door was wobbly, and as a team they were not a good match. They tried to work together, but Topo was too short for Leo and Leo was too tall for Topo. Topo took hurried, scurrying steps and Leo could only keep steady with a long swinging stride.

They stopped at the corner of the church while Leo ventured a furtive peek at the piazza. It was empty. After a few bickering whispers, they hurried across the square and made a quick right onto the street that led down the hill to the north coast road, then on to Leo Pizzola’s farm and the old shepherd’s hut by the sea.

Standing on the steps of the church, hidden in the shadows of the great doors, Marta watched her two childhood friends disappear around the corner with their peculiar freight and knew in her heart what they were doing without even having to look inside the church. And she cursed them for it. Cursing Leo Pizzola had almost become a habit, but this was different. She cursed him for what he was doing to the village and to the church. She cursed him for Topo too—always so willing to follow Leo anywhere. She cursed him for her uncle who didn’t know how to curse. And she cursed him for herself because he had let her see his crime and now she would have to do something.

ELEVEN

B
efore most of the people of Santo Fico bothered to notice that the sun was coming up, it already had. And as often happens, the horrors of the night weren’t nearly so horrible once they were bathed in sunlight. There was damage, to be sure, but not as much as had been imagined in the darkness. Best of all, no one had died. Nonno was extracted from the ruins of his room with some cuts and bruises and an injury to his knee. He would limp and need a cane for a time, but the expectation was that he would be fine. In fact, many remarked that a limp and a cane might be, considering his age and eccentricities, just the right touch.

The real marvel of the night though was the old gray dog. As the workers cleared away the rubble of the room the dog was nowhere to be found, he seemed to have vanished. But just when it had been decided that the dog was buried too deep and they would have to retrieve his carcass later, the mutt crawled out from under Nonno’s bed where it had been patiently hiding since the room collapsed. The dog yawned and stretched, then walked carefully through the opening that used to be the room’s only door, and wandered off down the road looking for a familiar spot to relieve himself.

Candles in the windows of the Albergo di Santo Fico were finally extinguished and the last exhausted casualties of the night’s ordeal straggled across the piazza to survey their own ruins and hopefully sleep half the day. And Marta could no longer avoid doing what she knew she had to do. She had to cross the piazza and enter the church again.

She set Nina to work upstairs putting their rooms back in order while she and Carmen attacked the disaster that was formerly her spotless kitchen. It would take days to put things back in order, weeks for the smells from the broken bottles of sauces and herbs to fade, and months to replace all the shattered crockery. She and Carmen worked side by side, both thankful that circumstances prevented them from having to mention the unpleasant Solly Puce affair of the previous evening—now so long ago. Besides, at the moment Marta was much more concerned with Uncle Elio than she was with her daughter’s flirtation with a greasy postal carrier.

The eastern sky had been crimson gold when Marta stood at the hotel’s front window and watched her uncle Elio trudge up the hill from the harbor. She had watched as he beheld his damaged cathedral for the first time in the morning light. Fully a third of the roof had simply vanished. Although the structure appeared as though a bomb exploded on top of it, everything else around the building was completely normal. Marta, like Father Elio, knew where the debris lay. She wanted to run to him and hold him so they could weep together. But she couldn’t. She had seen Leo and Topo and she knew that what awaited him inside the church was a violation far greater than any pile of debris. She watched him sit on the edge of the fountain and bury his face in his hands. His poor broken church looked the way she imagined his poor heart must have felt. She thought of her father’s old pistol hidden beneath her underwear in the bureau upstairs, and bullets, and what she would like to do to that damned Leo Pizzola—and that foolish little Topo too. Instead she watched her uncle wipe his eyes, struggle across the square, and disappear around the side of the church.

She waited for an hour. She wanted to give him privacy she told herself; some time to mourn. “Give him a chance and maybe he’ll come to the hotel,” she told herself. The real reason, of course, was that she couldn’t bear to see the look on his face when he discovered the emptiness of the wall. But an hour was long enough and the time arrived when she had to make the walk across the piazza and see about her uncle. And as she left the hotel, again she thought of Leo Pizzola. She knew exactly where the pistol was, but she wasn’t so sure about the bullets.

Marta entered the church through the kitchen the way she always did, and from the moment she stepped through the door she knew that her uncle hadn’t been back here. His kitchen was a smaller, simpler version of the disaster she had found in her own. Marta prayed that he might be in his bedroom. The night had been long and exhausting and maybe he was so worn out that he’d just gone back to his bed and was now asleep. Sleep would be the best thing for him right now. But when she peeked into his little cell and found the bed empty, she knew where he was.

As she made her way down the low passageway to the sanctuary, the sound of her feet scraping across the stones seemed intrusive. Just being there made her feel like a trespasser and she wanted to turn around and quietly leave, but couldn’t.

The chapel did indeed look as if a bomb had exploded on the roof. The main devastation took place at the west end and the great mound of beams, bricks, plaster, and tile lay in front of the vestibule, with smaller shards of debris spreading out through much of the great hall. Broken glass crunched beneath her feet. The windows surrounding the room, both low and high, looked as if small boys had been throwing stones at the ancient leaded glass; none were completely broken out, but many of them had lost pieces. What was amazing was that the east end of the building, from the altar all the way to the end of the curved apse, was undamaged. The beautiful quatrefoil windows gleamed with the morning sun and were unharmed by anything more severe than a layer of dust. But what was most startling for Marta as she stepped out of the dark tunnel was the almost painful amount of light that filled the room. The domed ceiling that she had known all her life was now interrupted by an astonishing patch of infinite blue sky that took up much of the west end.

Father Elio sat on one of the wooden benches directly across the room from her, his shoulders stooped, his hands folded serenely in his lap. He might have been someone’s grandfather sitting patiently in some large station waiting for a train, or perhaps a confused parishioner who arrived too late for a mass that was already over. Daylight streamed in through the hole in the roof and lit up the northern transept; always cast in the darkest shadows, this was usually the most unnoticed corner, but now every detail of the damaged little room was visible. Plain to see was the split and sagging ceiling, the fractured and collapsing northern wall, and the gaping gray wound that leapt out like a scream.