Her thin face lit up as she sat on the coffee table.
“Maestro?”
“Hmm?”
“I wish you weren’t . . . sick . . . so often.”
“Allora, Fatima.” He patted her hand and then returned to sipping his broth.
“I know you are sad.” Fatima said quickly, as if not wanting to lose her nerve. “I know you’re sad and you miss them, but I don’t think they’d want you . . . like this.”
Luciano looked up at Fatima’s abrupt speech. He sighed and looked down at the dust clotting the lines of his hands. “Sometimes I wonder. I don’t know, Fatima. I simply don’t know how to wake up into a world that doesn’t have them in it.” His speech turned ragged and he choked back a sob.
Fatima moved next to him and patted his shoulder.
“I think you do know, Maestro. It’s like you told me about learning Italian. You said I had to trust myself to understand one day and not get tangled into how hard it was. Remember? You said that I had to let the words and the music of the language surround me, and not fight it, but trust that one day the pieces would fall into place. And they did. Remember?”
Luciano fought back tears.
Fatima went on, “Maestro, you need to put one foot in front of the other. And you don’t expect perfection, you just expect to move a little. Just a little. Piano, piano.”
Luciano ran his thumb over the rim of the cup and inhaled the concentrated scent of roasting meat with delicate spices. He looked into Fatima’s wide eyes. “How did you get to be so wise, cara?”
She grinned. “You taught me, Maestro.”
Magda slapped the damp newspaper on the bar, prompting the two officers to flinch. “Chiara! I told you! I told you the developers were coming!”
Chiara sighed inwardly, before checking herself. Magda was like a shark. She couldn’t control her combative tone. “What’s happened now?”
“The developers! Did you not read this?” Magda pushed the paper toward Chiara with the edges of her fingers, as if she couldn’t bear to be contaminated with this filth.
“I didn’t read the giornale yet, not today. What does it say?”
Magda rolled her eyes at the ceiling and grumbled. “Jesus, Chiara. I have a busy vacation rental and many people who require my expertise, and I somehow managed to read the paper by evening. What’s wrong with you?”
“Just lazy, I suppose.”
Magda glared at Chiara, wondering if she was mocking her. The corners of Chiara’s lips twitched. Magda tried to hold her glower, but it was impossible in the face of Chiara’s determined cheer. At the seal-like barking laugh that finally got the better of Magda, Edo looked over curiously. He returned to buffing the water spots out of the glassware.
“Okay, okay, Chiara. So let me tell you what the article says. A developer is coming from Rome to scope out the swamp land where the falls meet the river. To pour concrete over the marsh and build a shopping center! A shopping center!”
Chiara’s face fell. “Let me see that.” She reached for the paper with her left hand while she pulled her glasses suspended on a chain around her neck to the bridge of her nose with her right. Snapping the paper open, she read quietly, her lips moving. After a few minutes while Magda loudly stirred the sugar into her coffee and sniped at Edoardo for not making hers with enough foam, Chiara smoothed the paper back on the bar and dropped her glasses back to rest top of her ample chest. “I don’t see a reason for panic.”
“What? Did you read the right article?” Magda snatched back the paper and scanned the headlines to see if it was possible that Chiara had read the wrong one.
“Yes, yes, I read the right one. But it says it’s a proposal. You should know by now, this idea comes up every three or four years. Someone realizes that there is a beautiful space for building, within walking distance of the station in Girona and surrounded by picturesque mountains. But once people start investigating, they realize it won’t work.”
“Won’t work? Why won’t work? It could work! It’s a special piece of land! Those falls are famous!”
Chiara leaned forward and spoke softly, looking earnestly into Magda’s eyes, which were darting from the paper to Chiara’s face. “Of course they are,” Chiara soothed. “But every time the engineers come and start poking about in the swamp, all of a sudden, everyone disappears, and the idea is abandoned for another couple of years.”
Edoardo, whose attention was caught, brought his espresso over to stand by Chiara. “Why is that, Zia?”
Chiara smiled at her nephew, he so rarely called her “aunt.”
“I’m not sure. But there are townspeople, I won’t say which ones, who speculate that it’s because of all the dead bodies in the swamp.”
Magda let out an involuntary shriek of alarm and then covered her mouth quickly while furtively gawking at the officers. She leaned toward Chiara, while Edoardo smiled and thoughtfully sipped his coffee, one thumb hooked on his apron.
In a strangled whisper, Magda said, “Chiara. You can’t be serious.”
“Well, I’m not saying I believe there are bodies in there. I’m just telling you what I’ve heard. Seems as good a reason as any, and far more interesting than there’s a rare kind of frog in the marsh. You must have heard that one.”
“Frog? What are you talking about? You go from dead bodies to frogs?”
Chiara laughed easily and began wiping the fingerprints from the bar with the towel looped through the apron around her waist.
At the sound of the bell over the door, all heads turned. Luciano stood planted, twisting his hat in his hands. At the assembled blank looks, Luciano sagged and retreated into the dusk.
Edo and Chiara communicated
