The Missing Italian Girl (20 page)

Maura blinked back tears as her two saviors ambled off, back up toward the Montmartre hill. “Thank you,” she called. But she wasn’t even sure if they heard her. Clutching the piece of paper in her hands, she slowly ascended the all-too-familiar steps to her room. When she got there, she reached into what little water was left in the basin and tried to wash the rouge off her face. Then she lay down beside her mother, staring at the ceiling. She kept going over in her mind how stupid she had been. She was not like Yvette and Mimi. And she didn’t want to be. She wished that Pyotr and Angela were still here. They would comfort her and teach her how to be good.

6

“I’
VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT IT
,” Bernard said between sips of his morning
café au lait
; “perhaps it would be a good idea if you and Jean-Luc went to Normandy for part of the summer.”

“Thinking about it?” Clarie looked up, surprised. “I didn’t think we could really afford—”

“Train fare? Surely we can, for you and little Luca. And when you get there, you’ll be the guests of the Franchets.”

“And you?”

“Rose can take care of me.”

In their tiny kitchen, Rose heard everything as she bustled around getting the baguettes sliced and the
confiture
on the table. She never joined in the Martins’ conversations unless invited to, and seemed grateful to be concentrating on buttering Jean-Luc’s bread.

Clarie placed her bowl of coffee gently on the table and, raising one eyebrow, gave her husband a skeptical look. “Is this about our conversation two nights ago? Are you afraid that I am going to do something ‘foolish’?”
Like visit Francesca again.

“Oh, no, I was just—”

“Mmmm,” Clarie twisted her mouth into a smile.

“Really, you know how hot it was last summer in the city. Think of how good it will be for Jean-Luc. As you said yourself, Robert is like a cousin to him. The fresh air. The sea.”

By this time, Clarie had folded her arms and was gazing at her husband, who had picked up his bowl to drink, but also, she suspected, to hide his face.

“You’re not afraid that Emilie will be a bad influence on me?” She could not resist tweaking him.

“Of course not!” He looked genuinely shocked.

“You know what Emilie says?” She paused to let the rapier possibilities of her friend’s wit sink in. “She says that our republican husbands love to talk about how they believe in women’s rights, but somehow they still believe they are more rational, more capable, and, shall we say,” she let her eyes roam over the ceiling as if searching for the right words, “less foolish than we are.”

“Perhaps Emilie has gone to too many women’s rights conventions,” Bernard said dryly. The blade had found its mark.

“And perhaps not,” Clarie responded.

Bernard wiped his mouth with his napkin. “Still something to think about,” he mumbled as he rose. “I have to go to work.”

Clarie got up, too, and put her hands on his shoulders. “Darling,” she said, “let’s scrimp and save this summer, and go to Arles together in August to see Papa. It will make him so happy, you can tell him all the wonderful things you are doing, and we can give Rose a real vacation from all of us.”

It took less than a moment for Bernard to accept the truce. He always said that he could not resist Clarie’s almond-shaped brown eyes. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow when we have all the time in the world to decide. For now,” he said, before kissing the tip of her long, slightly upturned nose, “I have to get to work.”

“All the time in the world” meant Sunday, a day that Clarie had come to treasure more than ever since her arrival in Paris with a child, a demanding teaching post, and a husband desperately looking for a position. Sundays were even better now, for Bernard had found his place and was as happy as she had ever seen him. Sundays meant letting Rose enjoy the day off, going to the bakery to get their own bread, strolling to the Square Montholon playground with Luca in Bernard’s arms, buying a treat from the ice cream man, picking up a roast chicken for dinner, reading, laughing, enjoying each other. On Sundays Paris always looked brighter. There was less hustle and bustle, fewer people and carriages hurrying from one place to another as if their life depended on it, more time to see the city with the wonderment of a child.

That Sunday, Clarie sighed with contentment as they headed home after the park. She listened as Bernard and Luca tried to decide what they should buy to have with their cold chicken. Tomatoes were not yet ready, but strawberries were still available. Clarie listened with pleasure as Bernard tried to teach their son about the seasons.

“Summer is the hot time of year,” she explained to Jean-Luc, whose head was bobbing over his father’s shoulder. “Don’t you feel hot?”

“No,” her boy shook his sweaty head. When they stopped at a corner, she smoothed away some of the dark curls from his drowsy damp brow before kissing his sticky little hand.

“Or tired, after all that swinging?” she asked.

“No!”

She walked a little forward to catch Bernard’s attention. “I think it’s time. You take Luca and I’ll do the shopping.”

“No!”

She and Bernard both laughed. Luca was getting to an age when it was harder and harder to hide their intentions from him.

“And when you wake up, my boy,” Bernard said to console him, “we’ll have chicken
and
strawberries.” Bernard picked up the pace as they approached the rue Condorcet. “Wave to your Maman,” he said, before leaving Clarie behind to do the marketing.

She watched as “her two men” started back to the apartment.
Chicken and strawberries
. Bernard was in a good mood. While Luca was sleeping, they’d talk about going to Arles in August, and Clarie planned to broach the subject of inviting his mother to Paris for a week in July. Free from schoolwork, Clarie was fully prepared to host the sometimes difficult Adèle Martin. If Bernard balked, she’d remind him that family was important and how helpful his mother had been when Henri-Joseph died.

Those last words always brought her up short, making her gasp as if someone had pulled a rope around her throat.
We have Jean-Luc now; he is thriving
. After standing stock-still, in the midst of jostling shoppers, she exhorted herself forward. She had to get to the
rôtisserie
before the early Sunday closings.

By the time she got there, people were packed tight in the stifling shop. After purchasing one of the last chickens, Clarie stepped, triumphant and relieved, into the street. At least here, despite the afternoon heat, she could breathe. She was approaching a cart selling fruit when she heard the news hawker.

“Who killed the Angel of Anarchy? Is Paris Under Threat? Read about the Angel of Death in today’s
Petit Parisien
.” The boy, who could not have been much more than ten, strode through the rue Condorcet, shouting at the top of his lungs and waving a newspaper.

“Madam?” the farmer, who had spotted Clarie surveying his produce, tried to get her attention.

“Oh, sorry, not now, maybe later,” she murmured, staring as the boy passed them. Sunday was the day when the cheap Paris dailies printed their illustrated editions. She had to see the picture. She needed to know if they were talking about Angela. Squinting toward the picture he was holding up, Clarie followed the hawker, who had attracted a small crowd. She did not have to push through them to recognize the subject of the tabloid drawing: Angela Laurenzano as she had seen her in the coffin, as the morgue had dressed her, in white, like an angel.

Clarie didn’t want anyone to see her buying the scandal sheet, yet she had to know what they were saying about the Laurenzanos. She pretended to be examining the dresses in a store window until she heard the throng around the newsboy dissipate. When the shouts and footsteps died down, she turned back toward the street.

“Garçon!” she called, trying to catch him before he got away.

“Yes, lady?” The boy stopped. She saw that his face was grimy and bruised. Who had done this to him? Did he have to sell a certain number of papers to go home safe, or was he apprenticed to a cruel printer? Is this how Angela had looked after a night spent with Barbereau? Clarie took in breath. She knew so little about the city’s life outside her family and the school.

“A paper,” she managed.

“Five centimes, it’s the Sunday special.”

Her trembling fingers searched for a sou in the sack hanging from her wrist. She wanted to get the transaction over with as quickly as possible.

“There,” she dropped the coin into his hand. Without even a thank-you, he thrust a copy of the Sunday
Petit Parisien Illustré
into hers.

She tucked the paper in her basket and headed up the rue Turgot as fast as she could without attracting attention.
I’ll tell Bernard the stores were crowded. I’ll say I met one of the teachers on the way home. I’ll—
She could hardly believe that she was already spinning a camouflage of lies around the simple act of buying a newspaper. But in her heart, she knew it was not so simple. Bernard was so set against her having anything to do with the Laurenzanos.

Aware of the fluttering in her chest, Clarie took special care to cross the wide street to the Square d’Anvers. When she reached the little park, she plopped down on an unoccupied bench, grateful for the meager shade offered by a young tree. She wiped her damp forehead with the back of her gloved hand before summoning the courage to look at Angela’s picture again. The headline read
ANGEL OF DEATH
.

With trembling fingers, Clarie turned from the full-page illustration to get to the story.

Paris has been deceived! The police have been deceived! Angela Maria Laurenzano was neither an innocent angel nor an accidental victim of a senseless cruel crime, but the deceiving lover of two men recently murdered on the Paris streets. Evidence is mounting that she plotted with the dead anarchist Pyotr Ivanovich Balenov to kill and rob her boss, the deceased Marcel Barbereau, who was fished out of the Basin de la Villette ten days ago. We must also assume that the Russian, his angelic-looking lover and their dastardly accomplices plotted to set off a bomb on one of the capital’s fashionable boulevards. Instead, as we know, the bomb killed him before he could cart it out of the Goutte-d’Or quarter.

Clarie let the opened newspaper drop in her lap and stared into space, trying to conjure up her first meeting with Francesca’s daughters. She did not want to believe that Angela had willfully practiced deception, that she had had two lovers, that she was a terrorist. She pictured Angela sitting in the front row of the classroom, innocent and afraid, obedient to her mother’s wishes to seek Clarie’s help. Or so it seemed. Clarie had seen the traces of bruises on Angela’s face. She knew the girl had been beaten. Yet as time passed she had become more and more certain that Francesca’s daughters had not told the entire truth about Marcel Barbereau’s death or about their relationship with the Russian anarchist. Were they really terrorists, or just girls in trouble? Terrible trouble. But, if that were the case, why would anyone kill Angela?

Thinking,
reasoning
calmed Clarie down. She bent over the article, scouring it for some proof, some logic. She found very little, even though, according to the newspaper, the police thought they had all the answers. An inspector Alain Jobert asserted that the deaths of Marcel Barbereau, Pyotr Balenov and Angela Laurenzano could not be “mere coincidence.” He hypothesized that Angela had been killed by a
“fellow violent anarchist, who was afraid her loyalty to their cause perished in the explosion that killed her Russian lover.”
The article concluded with the inspector’s clever turn of phrase.
“If Angela Laurenzano was the weak link in the plots, then her sister, Maura Laurenzano, has become the missing link.”
The police had searched yesterday and not been able to find her.

Brow furrowed, Clarie fell back against the bench. Maura, missing? She had really taken off, and poor Francesca was left with two daughters gone and no idea of what they had gotten themselves into. Clarie’s heart ached for her, but she didn’t know what to do. Or what or who to believe. Bernard said the union anarchists he worked with had abjured violence, if only because the terrorists and their associates had been persecuted, rooted out by the police years ago. And yet the police inspector claimed the Laurenzano girls might have been part of a gang. Clarie’s every instinct cried out against this. At least some of what she had heard and seen at their first meeting had to be true. Both girls had sworn that Pyotr was gentle and would never have planted a bomb. They had told her about Barbereau’s cruelties. Maura, especially, was sure that no one in authority, including Clarie, would help or believe them. Clarie grimaced as she once again acknowledged the possibility that Maura’s scornful attitude toward her was justified. The girl perceived Clarie as someone with neither the will nor the power to help them. Bitter Maura, clever Maura had managed to penetrate Clarie’s soul. She pitied Francesca, as a mother, but she was beginning to realize that Maura was the one she could not forget, a girl with intelligence and determination. A girl who desperately wanted to live and strive. A girl worth saving.

Numbly, she rose from the bench. She folded the paper with quiet, deliberate motions before putting it in the basket. Strawberries: she had to find strawberries.

Fifteen minutes later, having tracked down one of the last farmer’s carts near the square, Clarie hurried into her building. She paused before climbing the stairs, and retreated. The concierge kept her cleaning supplies under the staircase. She would enjoy a copy of the illustrated paper. Clarie folded the journal and placed it near a bucket and mop. There was no reason to disturb her Sunday with Bernard, she reasoned. He’d find out about the accusations against Angela soon enough. By tomorrow, the tabloids would be pasted on walls and hanging from every kiosk. She was not really keeping any secrets from him.

7

T
HE SHARP WHISTLE PIERCED THROUGH
the courtyard, rousing Maura from a restless sleep. Her head was heavy and aching. After last night, she had no idea how she was going to face Yvette and Mimi at the washhouse. She had been so stupid.