The Death of Noah Glass Page 18

  As the girls passed, they called out something in dialect that sounded mocking. Martin looked at them with the disinterested eye of an artist. He thought of the shape they created, a sculptured object, the way they broke into pods of three and two to let him pass, their swaggers, their posture, their sassy confidence. And he thought: I must find this hoodie as a gift for Nina.

  Every now and then the sky clouded over, but mostly it remained clear. Martin could hardly believe it. The buildings shifted from grey to pale apricot; the streets were busy; pedestrians appeared everywhere. It was not yet warm, but it was a world renewed. These were, he knew, the Australian thoughts of someone who could not endure a European winter, or even a Mediterranean lapse into untypical bad weather. But the Sicilians felt it too—how bleak the world had become when all they expected was light. It was the first week of March. It was time for winter to be over.

  At the Quattro Canti, the octagonal crossroads where tourists gathered to photograph the four fountains, and the monuments to four Spanish kings and four patronesses, Martin saw how rapidly the city revived. A Japanese woman made two-finger peace signs as her partner photographed her; a couple, who may have been Dutch, were consulting a map; enthusiastic Chinese passed by in a decorated pony cart. Marvelling at the holiday-snaps scene, Martin saw another man standing apart and alone. It was the policeman from Sydney, Frank Malone. Even idle fancy would have made his appearance unlikely. He gave a restrained wave and walked towards him.

  ‘I wasn’t sure there, at first,’ Malone said. ‘How long have you been here?’

  Martin wanted to ask the same question.

  ‘So what are you doing here?’ Malone persisted.

  ‘Is this an official question?’

  ‘Jesus, I’m just asking. How about a quick beer?’

  Martin suggested coffee. He led the way to the café he knew in this area.

  There was a tension between them. His and Evie’s mourning had been disturbed and somehow blemished by Malone. Martin remembered the interview in his office and the accusation of guilt.

  ‘How are you getting on?’ Malone asked as they walked.

  It was a question Martin couldn’t hope to answer.

  ‘You know,’ he responded.

  Conversation dropped as they entered the café.

  ‘It must be hard,’ Malone added.

  Martin could hardly believe he was having this daft conversation. With a policeman. In Palermo.

  ‘It’s a surprise seeing you, Detective.’

  ‘Call me Frank.’

  ‘Frank.’

  Martin hailed the waiter, who he knew had a cousin in Sydney. Gino chatted for a while with Martin, excluding his companion. There was a satisfaction in seeing Frank at a loss. When Gino swept back with their espressos, finally they could talk.

  Frank explained he was here only semi-officially. The blokes ‘upstairs’ wouldn’t fund his travel, but he had wanted to get away for a couple of weeks from his fucked-up marriage, so he’d struck a deal that meant he could ‘follow up his inquiries’. Leave without pay, but a little support. The Carabinieri Cultural Heritage Protection Agency was hosting him, but they didn’t give a flying fuck, he said, about the Australian connection.

  ‘Still, they’re all hoping for a visit to Sydney some day. Scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.’

  So he was an opportunistic bastard, Martin was thinking. Cynical, disengaged, probably on the take.

  Nevertheless, Martin told Frank Malone what little he had discovered. It was good to speak of it. He described his meetings with Antonio and Dora, and realised how thin and vague it all sounded.

  ‘So you think Noah was involved?’

  ‘Dora says no, Antonio says yes. I wouldn’t have a clue. I’m doing artwork, not detection.’

  Frank asked for Antonio’s contact details. ‘He’s the man,’ he added. ‘The side guy always has the goods.’

  Martin smiled. It was time to go home to Sydney. A stubborn policeman was speaking in fatuous code. He felt ridiculous, not following his father at all, but pursuing a twisted story. ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘No?’

  ‘No, I don’t think Noah was caught up in anything. It’s art-world rumour, like Chinese whispers. Everyone has heard a snatched scrap of something. My father is dead. A sculpture is missing. So what? You want to impose a criminal reputation on my father? You want to impress your bosses? You want a medal?’

  Frank looked chastened, like a schoolboy rebuked. ‘Jesus, give us a break.’

  He was probably lonely. Amped up in Italy. ‘Lugubrious’, Martin thought, was coined for the face of Detective Frank Malone.

  ‘Changeable weather, isn’t it?’ Frank was trying hard. He indicated the sudden glare after a swift interval of gloom. A Cinzano awning flapped audibly outside the window. This was not the Italian holiday Frank Malone had expected.

  Taking pity, Martin decided to invite Frank to join him for dinner. He’d introduce him to true Sicilian cuisine. And then they could check out the new Bruce Willis movie. They’d go to a cinema that didn’t dub, where he could hear untampered English and ignore the subtitles. Frank Malone looked overjoyed; he might have been a passenger pulled from the Titanic. Martin saw his relief to be treated like an ordinary guy, stranded on a whim of escape. They had that in common, he realised. They were both fleeing something emotionally imprecise and freighted with familial danger. They were both enticed by the possibility of explanations and understandings.

  He looked across the table, absorbing the implications of Frank’s presence. In truth, he was unnerved. It was possible that his father had been lured into something, and felt unable to tell them. Or was simply himself, separate and mysterious as parents are, with his own adult complications, now irrecoverable from the void of his passing. Martin felt insulted by the easy presumption of guilt, by this detective’s wish to pursue his father beyond the grave. But he too wanted the truth. Though sullen with the threat to the reputation of his father, he too wanted to know.

  When they parted, Martin resumed his walk to the harbour. Three boys passed, dance-playing football with a plastic water bottle, which they sent flying towards him as a glittering missile. Martin took up the challenge and scooped the bottle onto his knee, then flicked it up and performed a header back in their direction. The boys let out a whoop of congratulation, danced again and were gone. He smiled to himself. Their innocence. Their harmoniousness. The sea wind was high. He took a few deliberate deep breaths against the vision of a man crushed beneath a truck.

  27

  NOAH HATED THE flight to Tokyo. Dora was seated in the centre of the plane, over the wing; he was right at the back, on the other side, in the shuddering darkness. Just behind him the flight attendants read magazines or gossiped as they endured the twelve hours of confined servitude. Occasionally they emerged from their hiding place to beam a flashlight and offer a plastic cup of water or a tray of ersatz food. In the strobe of their visits they all looked indistinct, the dark pits of eyes, the masses of hair. It was the scary effect kids like to create with a flashlight under their chins. Before him glowed a small screen of movies on a zombie loop; non-awake viewing, his body long forgotten. He could not read or think. He felt bug-eyed and needed both antacid and aspirin. This was how the twenty-first century felt, the anti-natural long haul of it, the exhausted otherworldliness, the sad experience of a shuttered sky.

  He saw Dora rise once, to stand in line for the tiny toilet, but imagined she was sleeping most of the time. She always slept abnormally deep and still, like one trying out death. Once he’d shaken her shoulder in bed just to check, as one does with babies and little children. She woke with a start, and he could not explain to her what anxiety he was trying to allay. She’d immediately slept again, and he felt then as he felt now, almost annoyed at how easily she found her escape.

  They had taken separate flights to Rome. Dora left a day earlier, and checked out where they would exchange their hand luggage. She texted him the
details on a new mobile phone and then discarded the sim card. She carried the Ragusa, obtained, she said, by Antonio Dotti, and a substantial bribe to a guard at the museum. Noah carried an identical bag packed with her clothes. The Ragusa needed a duffle bag, not a wheeled case, and even without the plinth it was unusually heavy and conspicuous. Dora’s contacts in Palermo had told her the bag would go through the X-ray detection system without any questions or trouble. She must arrive at the luggage screening at a certain time, look for a certain man, who would give her a certain sign, and join his line. Palermo would be easy, but Rome airport would be more difficult: she must find the right line and time her arrival so she met the bribed man in the last five minutes of his shift.

  Noah had listened to these plans in fear and disbelief. The smuggling of Italian art treasures was not unusual, Dora reminded him. Workers at airports were paid handsomely not to notice items of interest. No one would be hurt. They would exchange bags, without seeming to, after moving through the security screening at Rome. Here Dora would buy duty-free items to bulk up her swapped luggage. They would not speak to each other or appear anywhere together. At the other end Dora would take a transit flight to Sapporo. It would still appear, of course, as if she was carrying the Ragusa. She would meet someone there, and would discover to her horror that the bust had gone missing. The bought men at Palermo and Rome would confirm she had carried it, and she would invent a robbery of the robbery somewhere at the Tokyo end. Meanwhile Noah would join a connection to Sydney.

  ‘But won’t my hand luggage be scanned in Tokyo?’ he had asked.

  Yes, Dora conceded, but there would be no suspicion: an Australian with a souvenir, an art object of no interest. Unless someone from Palermo informed on them, he would be passed through without question. In Sydney he would walk from the plane with his bulky bag, and settle back into his old life. After that, two weeks later, he would ring her at her flat.

  Noah was initially unconvinced. Surely Vito would still be in danger if she didn’t deliver? It was a risk, Dora agreed. But they were already entrapped and Vito had wanted her, urged her, to carry out the plan. He wanted the capo outwitted. He had talked to her of what it meant to outlive most of his family: he wanted to know that if he died there would be some loss to those who killed him. Dora would not speak of the risk to herself. She could handle herself, she said. Her main worry was Antonio Dotti, whom she did not quite trust. She had paid him most of her savings to stay quiet.

  Noah could hardly absorb all this information. It was Vito he was thinking of. He realised that Vito possibly considered himself posthumous. His niece would act for him, but he was already in a remote and woeful heaven, already part of an impersonal design larger than himself, just as on the day of the massacre that included his brother’s death.

  In the plane, Noah felt a similar condition of nonentity. He was caught in some unidentified criminal’s plan, even as he was hoping by proxy to subvert it. Noah had not even seen the sculpture, stowed above his head, but knew its form from the sketch in Dora’s flat. It was the devotional figure of a Japanese woman, Vincenzo Ragusa’s wife, Eleonora. Her kimono had fallen aside so that it revealed her shoulder and breast. It was a rendering of that suspended moment before one kisses the shoulder of a lover. Now she was stowed in the darkness, lying face-down above him, hovering as if for a kiss.

  He felt spooked thinking of her there, a guilty, sexual object. A Japanese woman in Italy, longing for her homeland, trapped by love. Or obedience, perhaps, or parental command, or Ragusa’s defining power over her life. This was the first time Noah had sincerely imagined the life of the figure whose work and image he had lifted, with some difficulty, into the overhead locker. The lives of artists, the persistence of their artworks in the real world, to be traded, or purloined, or venerated, or destroyed. He said to himself, Vincenzo Ragusa, Eleonora Ragusa. Their transnational marriage obligated him in a way he could barely acknowledge.

  When Noah considered discovery, trial, ignominy and jail, he was overcome by dread. He could not allow himself to think in this hypothetical way, to move cause and effect forward. So it was a fictitious present tense he inhabited. The throb of the plane, the pitch and roll of its aerodynamics, the undeviating flight path around half of the globe: these were much easier and more impersonal thoughts. He might have cherished this negation of himself if he had not also thought of Dora nearby, of what he felt for her, and of what he would not relinquish. And his children, his adult children, from whom he would withhold this knowledge.

  Noah walked up the aisle, between the toilets and back again, just to see her sleeping. She was wearing a small acrylic mask over her eyes. She was dead to the world. He said to himself: Dora Caselli.

  When they arrived at Narita, Dora didn’t look back. He saw her lower her bag from the compartment, balance it on the aisle armrest, then move off, following others, on the left side of the plane.

  By the time he entered the walkway, she was already gone. In the crowd of international travellers, in the boom of high airport spaces, bouncing noise and relentless lights, she was nowhere to be seen. Noah knew they were both heading to Terminal Two for their separate onward flights: he might still catch a glimpse of her. He followed the signs and walked quickly. But there was no Dora, anywhere. In the peculiar stress of airport searching, Noah felt the labour of his heavy bag and the burden of his task. He turned left and right. He backtracked and deviated. He scanned again and again, but still he could not see her.

  28

  THE VIEW FROM Angela’s apartment offered an expanse of grass, across which children and dogs looped to and from each other in asymptotic curves. There was a cycleway at the perimeter and a path beside it, so that cyclists and walkers were perpetually streaming by, and, beyond that, the blue harbour and a smattering of small yachts. In all weathers, it was lively. There was just a glimpse of the ferry dock behind a clump of shrubs and figs. From Angela’s window Evie felt she could see further and keener; through the silver light she could almost see the distant faces on the ferries, and the remote movements of families gathering for a picnic.

  ‘It’s that boy again,’ Evie said. ‘The boy who was blown from his bicycle.’

  Angela moved to stand by her side. ‘He’s always there, that kid. Always alone. He must spend the whole weekend on his bike.’

  Last time he had seemed in a kind of vaporous time warp, half Evie, half emblem, falling into the wild gusts speeding across from the water. Now he was a lonely child, pedalling stiff-backed, with his hands floating free. Sometimes he grasped the handlebars, but mostly he was making a point of his exceptional balance, riding as if daydreaming, as if his legs belonged to someone else. He may have been riding this way on the day of the wind, tempting the elements, expecting to be blown over.

  Nina was standing beside her aquarium, tapping at its glass with her fingernail. Her two goldfish made insolent movements with their yawning mouths, and swam away. She bent down to attract their attention, making nonsense sounds of endearment. There was a plastic figurine of a diver, a minuscule treasure chest, and a pipe producing bubbles. Evie realised that Nina was talking to the diver, not the fish, which like all goldfish looked essentially unreal. Nina reached her giant’s arm into the aquarium and lifted the doll-man out, gave him a little kiss, then pushed him back under the water. She had wet her sleeve. She turned around and saw Evie watching, held up her dripping arm, and let out a rascal yell.

  ‘After the implant she’ll have more friends,’ Angela announced. ‘I want her to be out there mucking around with other kids, not talking in her own language to plastic toys.’ She gestured with a hand towel, and Nina made a drama of wriggling as her mother tried to dry her. ‘Martin thinks I’m exaggerating, of course, but she’s becoming too interior, too like a child shut away.’

  ‘She seems happy,’ Evie ventured.

  ‘That’s just what Martin says. Did he tell you to say that?’

  ‘Of course not. She just seems happy, that’s all
.’

  Angela wanted to insist on her daughter’s unhappy isolation. She made a point of saying that it was unnatural for a child to spend so much time in solitary play.

  As if to contradict her, Nina seized Evie’s hand and dragged her into her bedroom. She threw herself onto the floor before her Barbie doll’s house, retrieved from Martin’s place before he went away. Evie saw now what he had seen, the arrangement of arches and pavilions that might inspire a story, the way the placement of a figure established human scale. In its simplicity it was not unlike a drawing Noah had once done for them, explaining perspective. Nina began chattering in her private language, apparently to Evie, but also to convey the enchantment of her doll’s house. Such a tacky object, Evie thought, to create whole worlds.

  Later, they ate sultanas on the beanbag, slumped in cheerful intimacy. They took turns popping them into each other’s mouth. Physically, Nina resembled her mother more than Martin, but something indefinable, possibly her curiosity and a larrikin attitude, made her seem fundamentally more Martin’s child. Evie was surprised to find herself thinking in this way. Too many holy families in her childhood, too much mystery around the parent who disappeared, too much attention from their father, trying to mother them and be omniscient. She bent over Nina and kissed her, making her lips pudgy and fishlike. Nina screamed in pleasure and with her two hands held Evie’s face, distorted her own in a mirror of the fish lips, and returned the kiss.