The Flight of the Falcon

  “When does the invasion start?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Anytime now,” he said, “if the weather mends. The municipality do their best to put Ruffano on the map, but we’re poorly placed. Those who are heading for the coast prefer to go direct. We depend mostly on the students for selling this stuff.”

  He thumbed his postcards and the little bicycle-flags bearing the insignia of the Malebranche Falcon.

  “Are there many of them?”

  “Students? Over five thousand, they say. A lot of them come in by day, the town can’t house them. It’s all happened in the last three years. Plenty of opposition from the older folk, the place getting spoiled and so on, the students rowdy. Well, they’re young, aren’t they? And it’s good for trade.”

  The intake at the university must have doubled, possibly tripled. I could not be sure. The students gave little trouble in the past, as far as I remembered. I had the impression then that they were all studying to be teachers.

  My informant ambled off and as I waited for the Turtmanns, smoking my cigarette, I became aware, for the first time for months, for years, that the hour no longer pressed. I was working to no schedule. There was no Sunshine Touring coach drawn up in the piazza in front of me.

  The snow was melting rapidly under the hot sun. Children were chasing one another round the fountain. An old woman came to the door of the baker’s opposite, her knitting in her hands. More student groups of youths and young women passed into the ducal palace.

  I stared up at the Falcon above the palace door, his bronze wings poised for flight. Last night, snow-covered, oblique against the sky, he had seemed menacing, a threat to all who trespassed. This morning, though still the guardian of the palace walls, the spread wings hinted freedom.

  The deep-toned bell of the campanile by the Duomo struck eleven. Hardly had the last notes died away when the Turtmanns, gesticulating, slammed the Volkswagen door. They must have emerged without my seeing them, and were now impatient to be gone.

  “We have seen all we want to see,” barked my client. “We propose to leave the city by the opposite hill, after photographing the statue of Duke Carlo. This will give us longer in Ravenna.”

  “It’s up to you,” I said.

  We climbed into the car, I in the driving seat, as yesterday. We left the piazza Maggiore and went downhill to the piazza della Vita, and so across the city’s center and up the northern hill to the piazza del Duca Carlo. I realized now why the Longhis had lost business. The new hotel Panorama, with its view of the city and surrounding country, its gaily-painted balconies, its grass verges and little orange trees, held more glamour for the tourist than the poor hotel dei Duchi.

  “Ha!” said Herr Turtmann. “Look, that is where we should have stayed.” He turned on me, angrily.

  “Too late, my friend, too late,” I murmured in my own tongue.

  “What? What is it you say?”

  “The hotel Panorama does not open until Easter,” I said smoothly. I stopped the car, and they got out to film the statue of Duke Carlo and the surrounding view. This used to be the regulation walk on Sundays. The local dignitaries, their wives and children and dogs, would parade about the plateau, neatly laid out with trees and shrubs, and bedding plants in summer. Here there was some change, if nowhere else. New houses had been built below the summit, and the orphanage, that once had stood alone in its stark ugliness, was now hemmed in by smarter dwellings. This, I took it, was the affluent quarter of Ruffano, the modern challenge to the more famous southern hill. I got out of the Volkswagen, carrying my small grip, as my clients, having finished the morning’s filming, came towards the car.

  “This, Herr Turtmann,” I said, holding out my hand, “is where I say good-bye. The road to the right out of the piazza will take you downhill to the Porta Malebranche, and so on your way north. Take the coast road to Ravenna, it’s very fast.”

  He and his wife stared at me, and he blinked behind his gold-rimmed spectacles. “You are engaged as our courier and chauffeur,” he said. “It was arranged with the agent in Rome.”

  “A misunderstanding.” I bowed. “I undertook to escort you as far as Ruffano, no further. I regret the inconvenience.”

  I have some respect for the Tedeschi. They know when they are beaten. Had my client been a fellow countryman, or a Frenchman, he would have burst into a tirade of abuse. Not so Herr Turtmann. He looked at me a moment, his mouth tightened, then he ordered his wife curtly into the car.

  “As you please,” he said. “I have already paid in advance for your services. The Rome office must reimburse me.”

  He got in, slammed the door, and started up the engine. In a moment the Volkswagen was on its way, across the piazza del Duca Carlo and out of sight. Out of my life as well. I was no longer a courier. No longer a charioteer. I turned my back on the good Duke Carlo, high above me on his pedestal, and stared south to the opposite hill. The ducal palace of the Malebranche, with its twin towers facing westward, adorned the summit like a crown. I started to walk downhill into the city.

  5

  At noon the piazza della Vita earns its name. The women, their shopping done, have all gone home to prepare the midday meal. The men take over. Crowds of them were assembled there when I reached the center. Shopkeepers, clerks, loafers, youths, men of business, all talking, gossiping, some merely standing still and staring. It was the custom, it had always been like this. A passing stranger might have thought them members of some organization about to take over the city. He would have been wrong. These men were the city. This was Ruffano.

  I bought a paper and leaned against one of the pillars of the colonnade. I searched the pages for the Roman news, and found half a dozen lines about the murder in the via Sicilia.

  “The identity of the woman murdered two days ago in the via Sicilia has not yet been discovered. It is believed that she came from the provinces. A lorry driver has stated that he gave a lift to a woman answering to her description after leaving Terni. The police are pursuing their inquiries.”

  We had passed through Terni yesterday, before turning right to Spoleto. Traveling south from Ruffano to Rome a wanderer, a vagrant, would be glad to seize the chance of a lorry ride for the remaining distance. Doubtless the lorry driver had come forward and identified the body, but in any case the description of the dead woman would by this time have been circulated to every city in the country, so that the police could check with their list of missing persons. What, though, if the dead woman was not upon the list? What if, filled with a sudden wanderlust, she had simply left her home? I could not remember if Marta possessed relatives. Surely not. Surely she had devoted herself to my parents after Aldo had been born, and had remained with us ever after. She never talked of brothers, sisters… Her devotion, her whole life, had been given to us.

  I put the paper down and stared about me. No faces that I knew, not even among the old. Hardly surprising, when I had left Ruffano aged eleven. The day we drove away, my mother and I, in the staff car with the Commandant, Marta had been at Mass. She always went to Mass each morning. Knowing her custom, my mother had timed our exit deliberately.

  “I’ll leave a note for Marta,” she said, “and she can follow later, with all our things. There’s no time to bother with them now. The Commandant has to leave immediately.”

  I did not understand what it was all about. Military persons were always coming and going. The war was apparently over, yet there seemed to be more soldiers than ever before. Germans, not ours. It was beyond me.

  “Where are we going with the Commandant?” I asked my mother.

  She was evasive. “What does it matter?” she answered impatiently. “Anywhere, as long as it’s out of Ruffano. He’ll take care of us.”

  I felt certain Marta would be dismayed when she returned from Mass. She might not want to go. She hated the Commandant. “You are sure Marta will follow?”

  “Yes, yes, of course.”

  And so to leaning out of the staff car, saluting, watc
hing the passing country, thinking of Marta less often each day, being fobbed off in the months to follow with more lies, more evasions. And then forgetting, finally forgetting. Until two days ago…

  I crossed the piazza to the church of San Cipriano. It was shut. Of course it was shut. All churches closed at noon. As a courier it was part of my job to reconcile the tourists to this fact. I must bide my time as they did until the afternoon.

  Then, suddenly, I saw a man I recognized. He was standing in the piazza, arguing with a group of cronies, a cross-eyed fellow with a long lean face, hardly altered in old age from what he had been at forty-five. He was a cobbler in the via Rossini, and he used to repair our shoes. His sister Maria had been our cook over a period, and a friend of Marta’s. This fellow, and his sister if she lived, would surely have kept in touch with her. The question was, how could I approach him without giving myself away? I lit another cigarette and kept my eye on him.

  Presently, the argument finished, he moved away. Not up the via Rossini but to the left out of the piazza, threading along the via dei Martiri, and so across it to a narrow street beyond. Feeling like a detective out of a police novel, I followed him. Progress was slow, for he paused now and again to exchange a word with an acquaintance, and I, more furtive than ever, was obliged to stoop to tie a shoelace, or stare about me as if a tourist and lost. I could have done with the Turtmanns’ cameras to save my face.

  He ambled on, and at the further end of the narrow street turned left again. When I caught up with him he was near enough to touch, standing at the top of the steep steps beside the small oratorio of Ognissanti. The steps descend abruptly, almost vertically, to the via dei Martiri below. He stood aside for me to pass.

  “Excuse me, signore,” he said.

  “Pardon me, signore,” I countered, “I was simply following my nose, a stranger in Ruffano.”

  His gaze, cross-eyed, had always been disconcerting. I did not know now whether he looked at me or not.

  “The steps of Ognissanti,” he said, pointing, “the oratorio of Ognissanti.”

  “Yes,” I said, “so I see.”

  “You wish to visit the oratorio, signore?” he asked. “My neighbor has the key.”

  “Another time,” I said. “Please don’t trouble yourself.”

  “No trouble at all,” he said. “She is sure to be at home. Later on, in the season, she opens the oratorio at regular hours. At the moment it isn’t worth her while.”

  Before I could prevent him he had called up at the window of the small house adjoining the chapel. It opened, and an elderly woman thrust out her head.

  “What is it, Signor Ghigi?” she called.

  Ghigi, that was it. That was the name above the cobbler’s shop. Our cook had been Maria Ghigi.

  “A visitor to see the oratorio,” he called, then waited for her descent. The window slammed. I felt myself unwelcome.

  “I’m sorry to make myself a nuisance,” I said.

  “At your service, signore,” he said.

  The cross-eyes were surely searching me. I turned my head. In a moment or two the door opened and the woman emerged, fumbling for her keys. She opened the door of the oratorio and motioned to me to pass. I stared about me, feigning interest. The attraction of the oratorio is a group of martyred saints, modeled in wax. I remembered having been brought here as a child, and being reproved by the attendant for trying to touch the models.

  “Very fine,” I observed to the couple watching me.

  “It is unique,” said the cobbler, and then, as if in afterthought, “did the signore say he is a stranger to Ruffano?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I come from Turin.” Instinct made me give my stepfather’s city, where my mother had died.

  “Ah, Turin,” he said, as though disappointed, and added, “You have nothing like this in Turin.”

  “We have the shroud,” I told him, “the shroud that wrapped the Savior. The marks of the sacred body are upon it still.”

  “I did not know that,” he replied, rebuked.

  We were all silent. The woman jangled her keys. I felt the cobbler’s cross-eyes upon me, and grew restless.

  “Thank you,” I said to both. “I have seen enough.”

  I gave the woman two hundred lire, which she stowed away in her voluminous skirt, shook hands with the cobbler, and thanked him for his courtesy. Then I walked down the steps of Ognissanti, guessing they were staring after me. It was possible that I had reminded him of something, someone, yet there was nothing to connect me, a man from Turin, with a lad of ten.

  I retraced my steps to the piazza della Vita and found a small restaurant in the via San Cipriano, a few yards from the church. I had lunch and smoked a cigarette, my head still empty of plans. The restaurant must have been popular—it was new since my time—for it filled rapidly and customers were obliged to share tables. Instinctive wariness made me bring out my newspaper and prop it against the carafe of wine in front of me.

  Somebody said, “Excuse me, is this place free?”

  I raised my eyes. “By all means, signorina,” I said, making room, jarred by the sudden interruption to my thoughts.

  “I believe I saw you in the ducal palace this morning,” she said.

  I stared, then swiftly begged her pardon. I recognized the woman lecturer who had been in charge of the crowd of students.

  “You tried to escape us,” she said. “I can’t say I blame you.”

  She smiled, and the smile was pleasing, though her mouth was too large. Her hair was parted in the center and drawn smoothly back, her age a possible thirty-two. She had a large mole close to her left eye. Some men find these marks attractive, enhancing sexual charm. To each his own taste…

  “I did not try to escape you,” I said, “only your audience.”

  After mixing so much with nationalities other than my own, especially Americans and Anglo-Saxons, and being always in a subservient position, I had lost touch with the women of my own country, who demand flirtation as a common courtesy.

  “If you had wanted to know about the pictures in the palace,” she said, “you could have joined us.”

  “I am not a student,” I said, “and I dislike to be one of many.”

  “A private guide would be more to your choice, perhaps,” she murmured. Gallantry, I saw, would be the order for the remainder of the meal. When I tired of it, I could always look at my watch and make the excuse of time.

  “The choice of most men,” I said. “Haven’t you found it so?”

  She smiled, a conspiratorial smile, and gave her order to the waiter. “You are probably right,” she said, “but as a lecturer on the staff of the university I have a job to do. I must make myself agreeable to both boys and girls, and endeavor to put facts into their reluctant heads.”

  “Is that a hard task?”

  “With the majority of them, yes,” she answered.

  Her hands were small. I like small hands in women. She wore no ring.

  “What are your duties?” I asked.

  “I’m attached to the Faculty of Arts,” she said. “I lecture two or three times a week in class to the second- and third-year students, and escort the first-year batch to the palace, as I did this morning, and to other places of importance. It’s quite interesting. I’ve been here two years now.” The waiter served her, and after eating in silence for a few moments she glanced at me and smiled. “And you?” she asked. “Are you on a visit here? You don’t look like a tourist.”

  “I’m a courier,” I said. “I look after tourists, as you look after students.”

  She grimaced. “Have you your charges with you in Ruffano?”

  “No. I wished the last godspeed this morning.”

  “And now?”

  “You might say I’m open to offers.”

  She said nothing for a moment. She was busy eating. Then she pushed aside her plate and turned to her salad.

  “What sort of offers?” she asked.

  “You make them. I’ll tell you,?
?? I answered.

  She looked at me in speculation. “What are your languages?”

  “English, German and French. But I’ve never given a lecture in my life,” I told her.

  “I didn’t suppose you had. Any degree?”

  “Degree in modern languages, Turin.”

  “Why, then, a courier?”

  “One sees the country. The tips are good.”

  I ordered more coffee for myself. The conversation did not commit me.

  “So you’re on vacation?” she said.

  “Self-imposed. I’ve not been sacked. I just wanted a few weeks off from my regular work. As I told you, I’m open to offers.”

  She had finished her salad. I offered her a cigarette, which she took.

  “I might be able to help you,” she said. “They’re temporarily understaffed in the university library. Half our stuff is still housed in a room in the palace. Later it will be moved into new quarters between the university and the students’ hostel, but our fine new building won’t be opened until after Easter. For the time being chaos reigns. The librarian, a good friend of mine, could do with extra help. And with a degree in modern languages…” She left her sentence unfinished, but her gesture implied that the rest was easy.

  “It sounds interesting,” I said.

  “I don’t know about the pay,” she said quickly. “It wouldn’t be much. And the job is only temporary, as I said, but that might suit you.”

  “It might indeed.”

  She summoned the waiter in her turn for coffee, brought out a card from her bag and gave it to me. I glanced at it and read the words, “Carla Raspa, 5, via San Michele, Ruffano.”

  I handed mine in return. “Armino Fabbio, Sunshine Tours, Turin.”

  She raised ironic eyebrows and put it in her bag. “Sunshine Tours,” she murmured, “I could do with one. Ruffano can be very dead after working hours.” She drank her coffee, watching me as she did so. “Think it over. I must leave you—I have a lecture at three. I’ll be in the library myself after four, and if you want to take this up I can introduce you to the librarian, Giuseppe Fossi. He’ll do anything for me. Eats out of my hand.”