“Good morning,” he said in Italian to the small, plump nun at the desk. “Are you the Suor Claudia I spoke to?”
“Yes, I am.”
Pendergast shook her hand. “Pleased to know you. As I mentioned over the phone, the guest we spoke of-Miss Mary Ulciscor-is my niece. She has run away from home, and the family is extremely worried about her.”
The plump nun was almost breathless. “Yes, signore, in fact I could see she was a very troubled young lady. When she arrived, she had the most haunted look in her face. And then she didn’t even stay the night-arrived in the morning, then returned that evening and insisted on leaving-”
“By car?”
“No, she came and left on foot. She must have taken the bus, because taxis always come in through the gates.”
“What time would that have been?”
“She returned about eight o’clock, signore. Soaking wet and cold. I think she might have been sick.”
“Sick?” Pendergast asked sharply.
“I couldn’t be sure, but she was hunched over a bit, and her face was covered.”
“Covered? With what?”
“A dark blue woolen scarf. And then not two hours later, she came down with her luggage, paid too much money for a room she hadn’t even slept in, and left.”
“Dressed the same?”
“She’d changed her clothes, had on a red woolen scarf this time. I tried to stop her, I really did.”
“You did all you could, Suora. Now, may I see the room? You needn’t bother coming-I’ll take the key myself.”
“The room’s been cleaned, and there’s nothing to see.”
“I would prefer to check it myself, if you don’t mind. One never knows. Has anyone else stayed there?”
“Not yet, but tomorrow a German couple…”
“The key, if you would be so kind.”
The nun handed him the key. Pendergast thanked her, then walked briskly through the piano nobile of the villa and mounted the stair.
He found the room at the end of a long hall. It was small and simple. He closed the door behind him, then immediately dropped to his knees. He examined the floor, searched under the bed, searched the bathroom. To his great disappointment, the room had been fanatically cleaned. He stood up, looked around thoughtfully for a minute. Then he opened the armoire. It was empty-but a careful look revealed a small, dark stain in the far corner. He dropped to his knees again, reached in, and touched it, scratching a bit up with his fingernail. Blood-dry now, but still relatively fresh.
Back in the reception room, the nun was still deeply concerned.
“She seemed troubled, and I can’t imagine where she went at ten o’clock at night. I tried to talk to her, signore, but she-”
“I’m sure you did all you possibly could,” Pendergast repeated. “Thank you again for your help.”
He exited the villa onto Via di Ripoli, deep in thought. She had left at night, in the rain… but for where?
He entered a small cafe at the corner of Viale Giannotti, ordered an espresso at the bar, still pondering. She had encountered Diogenes in Florence, that much was certain. They had fought; she had been wounded. It seemed incredible that she was only hurt, for normally, those who came within Diogenes’s orbit did not leave it alive. Clearly, Diogenes had underestimated Constance. Just as he himself had done. She was a woman of vast, unexpected depths.
He finished the coffee, bought an ATAF ticket at the bar, and stepped across the viale to wait for the bus into the city center. When it arrived, he made sure he was the last one on. He held up a fifty-euro note to the driver.
“You don’t pay me, stamp your ticket at the machine,” the driver said crossly, pulling roughly out of the bus stop, his hammy arms swinging the wheel around.
“I want information.”
The driver continued to ignore the money. “What kind of information?”
“I’m looking for my niece. She got on this bus around ten o’clock two nights ago.”
“I drive the day bus.”
“Do you have the name of the night driver and his cell number?”
“If you weren’t a foreigner, I’d say you were a sbirro, a cop.”
“It’s not a police matter. I’m just an uncle looking for his niece.” Pendergast softened his voice. “Please help me, signore. The family is frantic.”
The driver negotiated a turn, then said, his tone more sympathetic, “His name is Paolo Bartoli, 333-662-0376. Put your money away-I don’t want it.”
Pendergast got off the bus at Piazza Ferrucci, pulled out the cell phone he had acquired on arrival, dialed the number. He found Bartoli at home.
“How could I forget her?” the bus driver said. “Her head was swaddled in a scarf, you couldn’t see her face, her voice all muffled. She spoke an old-fashioned Italian, used the voi form with me-I haven’t heard that since the days of the Fascists. She was like a ghost from the past. I thought maybe she was crazy.”
“Do you remember where she got off?”
“She asked me to stop at the Biblioteca Nazionale.”
It was a long walk from Ferrucci to the National Library, which stood across the Arno River, its brown baroque facade rising in sober elegance from a dirty piazza. In the cold, echoing reading room, Pendergast found a librarian who remembered her as well as the bus driver had.
“Yes, I was working the night shift,” the librarian told him. “We have few visitors at that hour-and she looked so lost, so desolate, I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. She stared at a particular book for over an hour. Never turning the pages, always on the same page, murmuring to herself like a crazy woman. It got on toward midnight and I was getting ready to ask her to leave so I could close. But then all of a sudden, she jumped up, consulted another book-”
“What other book?”
“An atlas. She pored over it for perhaps ten minutes-scribbling furiously in a small notebook as she did so-and then ran out of the library as if the hounds of hell were after her.”
“Which atlas?”
“I didn’t notice-it’s one of those on the far reference shelf, she didn’t have to fill out a slip to look at them. But let’s see, I do still have the slip she filled out for the book she stared at for so long. Just a moment, I’ll collect it for you.”
A few minutes later, Pendergast was seated where Constance had sat, staring at the same book she had stared at: a slim volume of poems by Giosue Carducci, the Italian poet who had won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1906.
The volume sat in front of him, unopened. Now, with infinite care, he upended it and allowed it to fall open naturally; hoping, as books will sometimes do, that it would open to the last page that had been read. But it was an old, stiff book, and it merely fell open to the front endpapers.
Pendergast reached into the pocket of his suit jacket, drew out a magnifying glass and a clean toothpick, and began turning the pages of the book. For each page he turned, he gently dragged the toothpick along the gutter, then examined the dirt, hair, and fibers that had been exposed with his magnifying glass.
An hour later, on page 42, he found what he was looking for: three red fibers of wool, curled as if from a knitted scarf.
The poem that straddled both pages was called “ La Leggenda di Teodorico,” the Legend of Theodoric.
He began to read:
Su ’l castello di Verona
Batte il sole a mezzogiorno,
Da la Chiusa al pian rintrona
Solitario un suon di corno…
Above the great castle of Verona,
