The Reincarnationist (19 page)

Josh forced himself not to react, not to repeat his question and not to get up and grab the detective by his suit lapels and make him answer.

“We don't have proof of whether she left Rome on her own or if something has happened to her. We're checking the airlines now.”

“Do you mean she's missing?” Josh asked.

The detective took another bite of his roll, chewed and swallowed. “Until we find her, yes, exactly. She's missing.”

T
wo
carabinieri
were on their way out of Gabriella's building when Josh and Malachai got there. Inside, they found the landlady standing in the hall beside a partially opened door, watching the last of the activity with a curious expression on her face. In broken English she answered Josh's questions, telling him that she hadn't seen Gabriella in several days and didn't know what had happened to her.

“I think maybe she just went home,” she said. “No problems. Just home.” She kept looking past him into the hallway, up the staircase, as if she was making sure all the police were gone.

“Is there a reason you think she went home?” Malachai asked.

“Why you two asking me all these thing? I already talked to them.” She motioned to the empty hall the uniformed men had just passed through.

“Because she was here at eleven last night when I left, and if she went out after that you might have seen her go,” Josh said.

She was slowly closing the door, inch by inch, as she
spoke. Unmistakably wanting to get rid of them. “Not that late, no. I no see anything.”

“We'd like to take a quick look around her apartment to see if she left a note for us,” Malachai said, trying to press money into her hand, but she pushed him away.

“I can't let you in. The
carabinieri
told me. There will be trouble if I let anyone in.”

Somewhere in the building a telephone rang. A baby cried. The hallway was hot and Josh was sweating. He could smell garlic.

“We won't disturb anything,” Josh insisted. While Malachai was hoping to find something about the stones, Josh was anxious to find anything that might explain Gabriella's disappearance.

Signora Volpe backed up, shaking her head, and without any further response, closed her door on them. Josh started knocking on it, despite hearing her turn the lock.

“All we want to do is look around,” he shouted.

Malachai pulled at his arm. “Come on, let's get out of here. She's not going to let us in, and we don't want to be here if the police come back.”

“I don't care if they come back. Something's going on, Malachai, and I want to know what it is. What if…” He couldn't think it, much less say it, but he feared the worst.

They walked out onto the street. The gray sedan was there. Had it been there when they arrived? Josh wasn't certain.

“Wait a minute. Tatti had that car following Gabriella ever since the professor was shot. It was here when I left last night.”

“If Tatti knows where she is, and he didn't tell us, he must be trying to trap us.”

“Or to see who comes to her apartment for the same reasons we're here,” Josh suggested.

“Well, the last thing we want is to give Tatti any additional reasons to suspect we are involved in the robbery, now that he's about to give us the go-ahead to leave Rome,” Malachai warned. “Let's get out of here.”

At the end of their breakfast, after the unsatisfactory interrogation, the detective had surprised them by returning Josh's passport and saying they were both free to leave the country, though he hoped Josh would agree to return if there was a trial. Malachai had immediately booked the only seats for New York that were available at such short notice, but they weren't on the same plane.

“Tatti will change his mind in a heartbeat about either of us leaving if he thinks we're holding back information or are involved as anything other than innocent bystanders,” Malachai said as they walked down the street.

“You go home, then,” Josh said. “I'm staying. At least until I find out where she is.”

“Why does finding Gabriella matter to you that much?”

“Maybe she was seen at the site,” Josh said, ignoring the question because he wasn't sure what the answer was himself.

“Josh? What's going on?”

They'd stopped for a light on the corner.

“I don't know. I can't explain it. It's just a feeling I have—” He broke off, too embarrassed by what he had been thinking to say it out loud.

Malachai guessed. “Do you think Gabriella is part of your past?”

There were no cars passing. It was quiet in the street, but Josh's whisper was still hard to hear.

“Maybe.”

They found a taxi and gave the driver the site's address. As they passed through the center of the city, Josh stared at
the large, pitted, gray stone stumps that seemed to fill in and rise up as tall, proud, shining columns in front of his eyes.

“My brother was murdered not far from here,” he said morosely as they passed by the ancient coliseum.

“Your brother died in Rome?”

There are a few moments just as you're falling asleep, Josh thought, when, already half in a dream, you blurt out words or phrases from inside your slumber. Speaking wakes you up and you realize you've been spouting gibberish. The moment was like that for Josh.

“I don't have a brother.”

“You just told me your brother was killed not far from here.”

Josh couldn't focus on Malachai's voice; a tornado of fractured images was swirling in his head.

“Give me a second.”

He'd been overcome so quickly he hadn't noticed the jasmine and sandalwood, but yes, it was in the air. He felt the current tugging at him, despite it being such an inopportune moment. He didn't need to be a victim of his memory, he
could
control it. But he had to choose, then or now. If he stayed in between he'd get sick. He could feel the first sparks of the migraine. Shutting his eyes, he focused on the litany Dr. Talmage had worked out with him and repeated the mantra silently:

Connect to the present, connect to who you know you are.

Josh. Ryder. Josh. Ryder. Josh Ryder.

They'd gone another two blocks when Malachai shifted in his seat slightly and subtly turned his head, glancing out the back window.

“I think we're being followed,” he said.

“By the gray sedan?”

“Yes, and I don't like it.”

“It's just the
carabinieri.
”

“How certain are you of that? What if it's someone sent by whoever has the stones, who thinks we know their secret or someone who has a problem with the foundation and is looking for a way to implicate us in this mess? We have enemies, you know. We're not very popular with the Church. The Catholic Church, especially. And we are in Rome.”

“The professor was saying the same thing about the Church down in the tomb before…before he was shot.” Josh looked out the window. After a moment, he continued. “He told me the site was getting its share of protesters from religious groups. I saw a few of them there that morning.”

Outside the taxi the scenery changed as they got farther from the city and deeper into the countryside. “You know,” Josh said, “if it is some crazy group, and if they killed the professor, Gabriella could have been their next target.”

I
t was raining at the site but not hard enough to discourage the crowd of three or four dozen sightseers and protesters. The grass was matted down and muddy from having been trampled. A patrol car with two officers inside sat by the side of the road like a warning sign.

Malachai and Josh circumvented the throng, trying to get a glimpse of the field and the entrance to the tomb, but the wooden lean-to was gone. On the spot where the makeshift structure had stood above the hole in the ground were flat wooden planks.

The tomb had been closed.

Josh's chest tightened. He had known loss before, but never a deprivation that was tied to so much promise.

“Hope hangs on too long sometimes,” his father had
told him once. They were in the darkroom. The illness had not yet felled the tall, strapping man. Josh was still in denial about the looming disease that would change both of their lives so drastically.

“With it goes possibility,” Ben continued. “We can manage the darkest nights and the longest drops as long as we think someone might be waiting for us with a lamp to light our way or with a net to catch us when we fall.”

Josh felt the air undulate around him and shivers shoot up and down his arms and legs. Once again, while he stood perfectly still in one dimension, he was being sucked down into that vortex where the atmosphere was heavier and thicker. He was back in the darkness, in the tunnel, unable to breathe, the panic gripping him and not letting go.

“Did you know that suffocation is supposed to be one of the most painful ways to die?” Josh asked Malachai, who put his arm around the younger man's shoulder and led him away from the field and from the crowd, toward the grove of trees beyond and behind the site.

The rain had let up. Indicating a log, Malachai said, “Sit down. You're white as a ghost. What happened to you back there?”

Josh heard his own voice as if it was coming up from underwater, miles down deep. “I couldn't breathe. For a second everything went black and I couldn't get a goddamned breath. I was on my hands and knees in that tunnel again, in total darkness, and I couldn't get out fast enough.”

“Was it then or now?”

Josh shook his head. It might have been either. It didn't matter.

They sat quietly for a few minutes while Josh concentrated on the present. On where he was now. His name. The date. The time. Where the clouds were in the sky.

“I'm okay now.” He stood up, but instead of heading
back where the taxi was, he found himself walking toward the forest.

“Where are you going?”

“There's a stream back in here. I need to wash my face. It's healing water. I'll feel better.”

Malachai stared at him the same way he had in the cab when Josh had mentioned his “brother's” murder, the way he had stared at him in his office the first day they'd met when Josh had told him a young man named Percy had once lived—and died—in the building that now housed the foundation.

“Did you walk out there the other day with the professor?”

Josh shook his head.

“How do you know what's there?”

“I've seen it.” The implication was clear; he didn't need to explain it.

“How much of it do you remember?”

“More than I could back in New York. Since we've been in Rome, whole scenes from the past have been playing out in my mind.”

“So you haven't walked here yet?”

“No.”

“Can you tell me what we'll find, other than a stream?”

Josh shut his eyes. “Giant oaks, a pond where we bathed, a clearing covered with pine needles. A rock with a crevice in the shape of a crescent moon.”

They had hiked for a quarter of a mile when, in the leafy shadows, they came up to the oaks and then the brook.

Kneeling down, Josh scooped up water and washed his face. Then he dipped his hands back into the rushing water and this time drank it down.

“What do you know about this place?” Malachai asked, amazement and curiosity mixed together in his voice.

“It was a sacred grove. A holy place and one of Julius's responsibilities. It's also where…” Josh stumbled over his words, not because he cared how he sounded but because it was still too new and too raw and he didn't trust himself to be able to talk about it without becoming emotional. Confronting these images was complicated enough without acknowledging the maelstrom of feelings they aroused. Yes, of course, the pictures that showed up in his mind were interesting, worth discussing, curious, but the loneliness they triggered, along with the guilt and the eternal longing, were unbearable.

“What's happening?” Malachai asked.

“Someone I can't see or talk to has control over me and is force-feeding me his poor, sick soul.”

Next to Josh, solemnly, Malachai bent down to the water, made a cup with his hands, filled it with water and, with his eyes closed, drank it as reverently as if it were holy water and by ingesting it, he might have a vision, too.

Josh turned away.

He knew how desperately Malachai wanted to experience what he had and how much the older man envied his affliction, and it shocked him to see him like that instead of in control, clever and razor-sharp.

Coming out into the clearing, they headed back toward the crowd for a last look around for Gabriella, even though Josh knew that with the tomb shut down, she wouldn't be here. It was a last futile effort.

A
carabiniere
was approaching, and when he met up with them he spoke quickly in Italian. From his tone and his gestures it was clear that he was chastising them and ordering them off the premises.

“We only speak English,” Malachai said.

The policeman pointed toward the barricades where the field ended and the cars were parked. “Go now, please.”

“We were leaving, anyway,” Josh muttered, not caring what the cop picked up from his inflection. They walked back toward their waiting taxi. Everything was wet and muddy and the whole place bothered him now. He just wanted to get away. From the tomb, from Rome, from the fucking insane thoughts inside his head.

When they were three feet from the barricades a little girl of six or seven, with curly black hair and olive skin, broke free from her mother and ran right up to Josh and, throwing her arms around him, broke into tears.

Her mother came running after her, shouting her name, which was Natalie, but the little girl ignored her, holding tight to Josh as if she was trying to keep him tethered to the ground.

“Do you speak English?” Malachai asked the mother.

“Yes. Yes, I do.” She had an accent but spoke very well. “I'm Sophia Lombardo.” She wore jeans and a leather jacket, and she had the same black hair as her daughter and very blue eyes that were filled with concern.

“Natalie,” she said as she put her hand on her daughter's shoulder. She murmured something to her in her native tongue.

The little girl jerked her shoulder away, and against his legs Josh felt her whole tiny body stiffen and her arms grip him.

“Is she all right?” Malachai asked.

“We were watching on the news this morning the report about the tomb and the terrible accident, and she became very agitated and said she wanted to come here. I said it wasn't possible—she had to go to school and I had to go to work—but she became hysterical. She never has tantrums, this was different. My husband and I became worried. I'm not a mother who gives in, but she was so upset, in so much pain, all because of
the news report.” Sophia was bewildered by her daughter's reaction.

“I think I can help her. Would it be all right if I talked to her?” Malachai asked. “Does she by any chance speak English?”

“Oh, yes, she is bilingual. Her father, he is British.”

Malachai crouched down on his knees so that he was eye level with Natalie, murmuring in the soft, singsong voice he used with the children. “Don't be afraid, Natalie. Don't be afraid. Not you.”

With each word, the sobbing slowed, and when she was calm he asked, “Tell me what's wrong. Why are you so upset?”

“She…” The sobbing started anew.

“It's all right. Go slow. I can help, I promise.”

“She was…my…sister….”

“Who was, Natalie?”

“I'm not Natalie,” said the little girl, who was still gripping Josh's leg.

“Who are you?”

“Claudia.”

“And how old are you, Claudia?” Malachai asked.

“I'm twenty-seven.”