private affairs. Financial difficulties, as well as recent illnesses in my family, have forced me into the position in which I find myself. My associate and I must come to your hotel this afternoon and kidnap you. Be entirely assured that no harm will come to you, and that your freedom will be immediately reinstated once a ransom of five thousand lire, or the equivalent in your British pounds, has been transferred to you by wire from your most highly esteemed family in Great Britain. It is my greatest hope that, once I have received this money, you will continue your travels in the sunny South. Perhaps you will see the ruins at Pompeii? Of course, that is your affair, not mine. I only wish you the least inconvenience during this kidnap, as well as many happy returns to our beautiful city.
With Sincere Regrets and Fondest Hopes, Mr. Z
She read it back to the criminals, and they leaned back in their chairs and closed their eyes, Gratiano sighing now and then while the bald man nodded and murmured words of praise. She didn’t understand some of the words she’d written, and she wondered how an Englishman might decipher their idiom, but the robust approval of the two men made her chest puff out in its baggy, hand-me-down dress. What a prodigy! Gratiano exclaimed. A genius, the bald man said, and he added two more lire to the three. But he didn’t like the Mr. Z part and wanted it changed to The Shadow. Gratiano said Mr. Z was fine since nobody’s name began with a Z, and he pinched the girl’s cheek and winked at her. Rosari’s face colored. She took her bread and money and ran back to her father, resolved to tell him nothing of the adventure.
There was constant talk of America in her neighborhood, particularly in the barbershop and the piazza. Cholera and malaria, starvation and poverty, all manner of suffering were driving rural people to the crowded city or to caves in the mountains, and as they huddled before their fires they dreamed of America. The hill folk had used the ancient cave dwellings as goat stables for as long as anyone could remember, but now the goats were being eaten or turned out for miserable human families to reclaim. Rosari had seen them from the train, the little archways dug into pale limestone cliffs high above the coastline, the women in black shawls and head coverings squatting before them. In America there would be fresh air to prevent disease, work for good money, and open space to plant gardens and keep animals, people said. Lazaro, contrary to his neighbors, maintained that he was more apt to return to his hometown than to leave the country. Once the plague has passed, and all the rats have left the sinking ship, he told his daughter, we can return to our home. Perhaps your mother will come back to us, too, he added with a sniffle.
About three weeks after she’d written Gratiano’s letter a policeman came to the barbershop, and Rosari heard that an Englishman had been kidnapped from the local hotel. She swept the floor and averted her eyes. Her father told her to go upstairs and make the soup, but she wanted to hear the conversation, so she knocked over the glass filled with combs and spent another five minutes cleaning up after herself. She heard the men laugh, whistle, and cluck their tongues, but she didn’t catch much of what they said.
In the books beautiful women were sometimes kidnapped by scoundrels and rescued by knights or gentlemen. Gratiano was far from a scoundrel in her eyes, and some Englishman at the hotel was hardly a beautiful woman, so she hadn’t really sensed that her use of the word in the letter could amount to something like real kidnapping until now. It had seemed more likely that the word might have other meanings when used in other contexts. She prepared the soup with the wife of Fratelli the barber and brought it and the bread out to the steps where the three families usually ate in the heat of the day. There were twelve altogether, the wives and children of the two other barbers spread out along the shade of the busy street, and they all spoke of the kidnapping now, the three barbers, sworn to secrecy moments before by the carabinieri, having spilled the beans to their wives and children instantly.
Among the more urbane of the criminal society, particularly la mano nera of Napoli, a prekidnapping note such as Rosari had written was common practice. The wealthy victim was given a chance to put his things in order, prepare his family and finances for the inevitable, perhaps even pack a few necessities. Resistance was, essentially, futile. Organized criminals of the South could afford to extend this courtesy with little risk, and the families of victims generally paid the ransom, which was never exorbitant, immediately. But this Englishman’s father hadn’t followed custom; rather, he’d sent twice the ransom to local military and police, who had arrested Gratiano and his partner in the bar where they and the Englishman had been sharing a chianti and playing pinochle. The word on the street was that they would soon hang from a tree in the piazza, but that the judge was waiting to arrest a third conspirator first because, clearly, neither of these men could write their names, let alone the kidnap note found on the victim.
Rosari felt sick and asked to be excused.
For three days she didn’t eat, and Lazaro sent for one of the local fortune-tellers to diagnose her illness. The old woman poured olive oil into a bowl of water and gasped at the shape it took on the surface. Lazaro, Claudia, Fratelli the barber’s wife, and two of her children gasped and cried out as well, although none of them knew what the shape signified. Herbs, entrails, and other measures were recommended, but before Lazaro went to get a few coins for remedies the girl pulled him close and, weeping bitterly, confessed.
The room fell silent. Then the fortune-teller shrugged and said, Well, that would do it.
Lazaro applied for work permits to America and Argentina that very day. He would work in a steel foundry, a coal mine, a gaucho ranch, a fort surrounded by Indian tepees, anywhere, yes. And he could read and write, and he was a highly skilled barber trained by the army outside Roma when he was a youth, and he had no physical ailments, and no, he had no . . . He paused, then reported that he had no wife, that the woman had died two years previous, but that he did have one child still living with him, just a little girl. Only a simple little girl who tried to help out around the barbershop, but, bless her heart, she was very slow and stupid, poor thing.
For the next few weeks Lazaro forbade his daughter to hold a book or a newspaper. When she delivered the linen she had to turn down the romances offered by the merchants’ wives, and sometimes she told the ladies that she couldn’t read and had only been looking at the drawings. Articles about the kidnapping and the trial lay curled on the barbers’ chairs, tempting her like the serpent in the garden, and opinions about the case were aired by the magistrates of the piazza and the orators of the street corners while their hair sloughed off their heads and fell onto the floor, but Rosari kept her mouth shut. Some said that the Englishman wanted to drop the charges and had found the experience a lark rather than an ordeal, but that his father and the police saw the matter differently. Others claimed that the police, emboldened by the infusion of money and the rhetoric of a British prefect from Rome, had suddenly remembered that Gratiano and Umberto were already under suspicion for previous crimes, particularly for perforating the bodies of a dishonest landlord and a known child molester with butchers’ knives and dumping the same into the Tyrrhenian Sea.
The day before their departure two remarkable things happened, the first of which came in the form of a court summons. Father and daughter had just packed what they could into a trunk and two sheets made into shoulder sacks when a scrawny officer told them to follow him. They walked on stiff and trembling legs behind the little man’s quick strides, a train of the other barbers’ children, some nosy neighbors, and a few unemployed curiosity-seekers hitching behind. The little man ordered the others to stop at the foot of the steps, then led Rosari and Lazaro into the courthouse.
They descended a dank, smelly stairwell to the row of jail cells. The top of Umberto’s bald head could be seen at the end of a blanket where the big man slept with his face covered. A stink of piss and excrement came from one end of the dark corridor, and Rosari pulled her scarf across her nose. The little officer had them raise their arms and, begging their pardon first, he patted their clothes, then led them to Gratiano.
The criminal sat in sleeveless shirt and suspenders, an unlit, hand-rolled cigarette between his lips. He put on his coat
