Grove Koger

Or -

 

Despite their suspicions, the polizia were eventually forced to accept the woman’s story: that a stranger had been stalking her for several weeks, and that she feared for her life.

 

***

 

Provoked by the chance comment of a mutual friend, Dan had once asked, “Do you really think there’s anything below the surface? Why agonize over it?”

 

Paul would never have put it that way himself—it sounded too cynical—but he knew what Dan meant. He had been a collector all his life: stamps and insects when he was a child, prints and old postcards later. Well, most of those were all surface; he liked their flatness, their order; there were no hidden depths.

 

Insects were different, of course. Insects had been his first passion. He had a good eye and enjoyed the solitariness of it all, hunting through the fields during the day and the shadows at night, and then later, back in his room, spreading and pinning the specimens while they were still soft. But beneath the iridescent sheen of those dragonflies and beetles there was nothing that attracted him and more than a little that repelled him.

 

Then, too, Dan was clearly a success. He made money effortlessly, women liked him, he coasted though life easily, as if on skates. He didn’t seem to give things a second thought. Paul did noticeably less well, and while he had never suffered harshly, he had no illusion of skating. His friend—well, acquaintance—had it right.

 

***

 

“There’s someone there, you know.” Marti stepped closer, stared intently, raised a finger to point to one of the arches. “I can barely see him—I bet it’s a him—peering out.” She stepped closer still.

 

“And over here … over here is someone else. Is it a woman? I can’t tell. But it’s wonderful to think so, isn’t it?” She clapped her hands. “An assignation! Or—” She frowned then, hesitated for a moment, turned to him. “Where did you get this?”

 

Marti was Dan’s current girl, current and likely future. She was small rather than petite, had the solid body of a swimmer and short, dark hair. Languid much of the time, she was quick and unpredictable in motion—catlike. Paul had a hard time taking his eyes off her, but he turned his gaze to the photograph.

 

A wide-angle view of the Colosseum, it was nearly five feet wide and more than two high, taken, surely, in the late nineteenth century. It had been printed on heavy photographic paper, and might well date to within a few decades of the negative. Framed behind wavy glass, it had spent untold years in the attic of the library where Paul worked. After rescuing the treasure one day from a zealous janitor intent on making room, Paul had it reframed beneath conservatory glass. Its muted tones had the quality of a nearly forgotten memory, and he felt as if he had been destined to own it.

 

He explained some of this to Marti as he leaned forward to take a closer look. Dan had once confided that his girl had extrasensory perception, lowering his voice as if commenting on the plumpness of her breasts. Paul suspected that Dan didn’t really know much about ESP. Well, Paul did, and didn’t believe it for an instant, wouldn’t have believed it of anyone. But he played along, leaning forward thoughtfully.

 

To his eye the scene was remarkably free of figures. A horse-drawn carriage stood on the dirt track encircling the structure, and on first impression those were the only elements—and they were tiny—that suggested the size of the ruin.

 

Marti gripped his arm as if to pull him into the photograph with her as she pointed again at the arch. “See?”

 

Frankly he couldn’t, or, rather, if there really were someone standing there within the shadowy archway, there might have been multiple someones lurking within all of them.

 

“And she—whoever—is here.” Marti pointed toward a grove of umbrella pines in the background.

 

“Uh-huh.” Once again he couldn’t be sure that he was seeing anything, although this smudge did seem a bit more, well, person-like.

 

“That’s the Arch of Constantine on the right, by the way.”

 

But now that he was examining the photograph more closely, Marti’s attention had wandered. She had slipped outside, out the French windows and onto the deck to admire the view over the valley. The sun had set and the shadows would be creeping across the city and up the foothills. He started to follow but realized at the last minute that Dan already stood beside her, his hand resting on her buttocks.

 

***

 

Paul thought about that evening again and again over the next few months as he sat staring at the photograph and remembering the warm pressure of Marti’s hand on his arm.

 

He thought of himself a connoisseur of travel, but he had never ventured south of Florence. It was time, he realized, to see the Colosseum with his own eyes. It would give the old photograph meaning, and he would be able to tell Marti about whatever restorations had taken place.

 

The morning before he left, he took out his cell phone to snap several close-ups of the sections in which she had seen the figures—seen or, more likely, “seen.”

 

***

 

Reality, as it had so often turned out to be the case in Paul’s experience, was a little disappointing. Rome was shabby and vulgar compared to Paris, most of its architecture banal compared to Barcelona’s. The seemingly constant traffic was daunting, the crowds rude. The weather alternated between rainy days and hot, stuffy ones. Even the pasta was characterless.

 

But lying just beneath the skin of the modern city were far older ones, the remains of which poked up haphazardly here and there. The Colosseum itself was immense, far grander in scope than the photograph with its tiny carriage had suggested. The building’s lowest arches would have dwarfed him had he been able to stand within one, but each was closed off with a metal barricade.

 

Paul spent most of a morning circling the vast amphitheatre again and again, thinking that it was surely a finer sight in ruins than it would have been untouched by time. He knew its cruel history, but found it difficult to connect that panoply of gladiators and savage beasts with the weathered stones he saw before him. He photographed it from a dozen angles, but the jostling crowds—augmented by several tour groups and their guides—made it impossible to get any unobstructed shots.

 

***

 

After four nights in an anonymous hotel, Paul broke his Roman holiday with a week in Fiesole, the little town nestled in the hills above Florence that he had discovered so many years before. Florence itself was claustrophobic, its narrow streets packed with cars and sightseers, and once again he ended up photographing as many people as monuments. Cool, still Fiesole with its pines and vistas was as delightful as ever, but the sight of so many couples reminded him of how much he missed the frisson of flesh on flesh, and he thought of the past, and of Marti.

 

He returned to Rome for the final week of his trip, staying in a furnished apartment near the Baths of Diocletian. He had no interest in St. Peter’s, but the Forum drew him repeatedly, and he stood for hours one crisp morning at the Portico Dii Consentes, gazing across the vast field with its pillars and piles of brick. He knew from his guidebook that the Portico was the city’s last shrine to the old gods, and he felt a bewildering, almost vertiginous nostalgia for a world he had never known.

 

Afterward he found that he had been gripping the iron railing so tightly that his palms were stained with rust.

 

***

 

Attuned at last to the pulse of the city, and realizing that his time was growing short, Paul bought a baguette, a short salame and a half-liter of Montepulciano late one afternoon. He asked the shopkeeper to pull the cork for him, but the sausage presented a different problem, so he added a cheap folding knife from a counter display. Then, after enjoying an al fresco meal on a bench in the Parco Oppio, he made his way to the Colosseum once again.

 

He wondered whether he might have the place to himself in the dusk, but to his surprise he found the vast structure flooded with light. Small groups of people strolled here and there, talking and gesticulating lazily. The cool breeze carried a faint earthy smell, and fat moths flitted in and out of sight. A busker played a plaintive melody on a tenor sax. He felt a little drunk.

 

The artificial light was disconcerting, yet it struck Paul that it was somehow preferable to the matter-of-fact light of day. Would he have felt that way two weeks ago? The question reminded him of the photograph that hung on his wall at home, and he remembered the close-ups on his phone. Could he identify the arch Marti had been pointing at? It would be intriguing to have a record of how it looked today, and might impress her the next time he saw her.

 

It was difficult to make out the screen, but it occurred to him that he could stand close to the arcade with his back to one of the floodlights and hold the phone in his shadow. The image was better, yet the differences in scale between the tiny screen and the towering structure made comparison impossible.

 

He turned, searching for more shadows, and then saw her— Marti, of all people, standing slightly apart from the crowd and dressed in her usual tight jeans and some sort of red top. It couldn’t be, of course, but he recognized her swimmer’s figure immediately. He called her name, but she must not have heard, so he called again, louder, “Marti! Marti!” and started off toward her. What on earth could she be doing here?

 

When she finally looked up, Paul realized his mistake. Her face was that of a much older woman, wrinkled and strangely distorted. It was not Marti at all, of course, she had simply been on his mind …

 

But now the woman was gesticulating at him, yelling, almost screaming. People turned to look, first at her and then at him. He was befuddled. What was going on?

 

“Signora, mi scusi!” He stepped forward. “Mi scusi! I am—” He held up the phone, saying, “photo, fotografia—” He tried to think, tried to remember his Italian, pointed at the phone, that earthy smell was filling his nose, it was all some bizarre misunderstanding, but she really was screaming now and he saw her reach into her purse and

 

***

 

Despite their suspicions, the polizia were eventually forced to accept the woman’s story: that a strange man had been stalking her for several weeks, in Rome as well as Florence—where her work as a freelance journalist occasionally took her—and that she feared for her life. She had complained to the polizia, and her complaints were on file. Indeed, she showed up in a number of the photographs on the dead man’s phone. She had obtained a permit to carry the handgun, and insisted that the man, who was found to be armed with a knife, had approached her in an aggressive manner that night—a fact corroborated by witnesses. She had fired to protect herself. She had no criminal background, or she would not have been able to obtain the permit. After undergoing several intensive interrogations, she was finally released. What might have happened to her afterward is unclear, however, as later efforts to contact her in order to confirm certain details proved fruitless.