Parking Under the Porticoes

Saturday, 9:40 AM. Via dell’Indipendenza.

Maresciallo Aldo Moretti had fourteen days left in the Carabinieri, and he had planned to spend this one on a chair.

Instead he was standing on Via dell’Indipendenza in the wet morning light, with a paper cup of espresso that had gone cold, watching a woman write a parking ticket for his car.

“You can’t do that,” said Carabiniere Vanni.

“I am doing it,” said the woman. She did not look up. She wore the dark blue of the city police, the Polizia Locale, with a white cap and a name badge that said ZUCCHI. She wrote in small, hard capitals. “Two wheels on the pavement. Front bumper under a protected portico. No permit displayed.”

“It’s a Carabinieri vehicle.”

“I can see that. It has the word on the side.”

“We are on a call.”

“Then you are on a call with a ticket.”

Nicolò Vanni was twenty-four years old and had been sent up from Rome three weeks ago. He had a very straight back and a very clean uniform. He turned to Moretti.

“Maresciallo. Tell her.”

Moretti drank the cold espresso. It was terrible. He finished it anyway, because in thirty-four years of service he had learned that an espresso was a promise the day made you, and you did not break a promise just because the day had.

“Officer Zucchi,” he said.

“Maresciallo.”

“It was raining. We parked where it was dry.”

“The whole city parks where it is dry, Maresciallo. That’s why we have porticoes. They are for people.” She tore off the ticket and held it out. “Not for cars. Not even cars with words on the side.”

“Who owns the portico?” said Vanni.

Zucchi looked at him properly for the first time. “What?”

“The portico. The walkway. Who owns it? Because in my understanding, the portico belongs to the building. It is private property. The public only has the right to walk through it. So if the portico is private, then the city has no power over what parks in it, and therefore—”

“Where are you from?”

“Rome.”

“Of course.” Zucchi put the ticket under the windscreen wiper herself. “The portico belongs to the building. The use of the portico belongs to the city. That’s been the law since 1288. You want to argue with 1288, you go in there and argue with the concierge. I hear he’s a doctor of it.”

Behind him, through the glass doors of the Hotel Bella Vista, somebody was screaming about wine.

The call had come in at six minutes past nine. A man named Gino Rossi, eighty-one, reporting two crimes: the theft of a gift, and the theft of a groom.

“A groom on his wedding day is not stolen,” Moretti had told Vanni in the car. “A groom on his wedding day is thinking. By lunch he’ll be back, and he’ll be embarrassed, and the grandfather will shout at him, and we’ll go home.”

“And the gift?”

“The gift is a gift. Someone moved it. In a wedding hotel, everything gets moved.”

Now Moretti stood at the hotel door, looking in, and began to think his fourteenth-last day would not involve a chair.

The lobby was full. There were thirty or more people in it, half dressed for a wedding and half dressed for breakfast, and all of them were talking at the top of their voices. He could pick out the grandfather easily, a small old man with a big voice and a wrist that beeped. Across from him, a woman in green was holding a handbag like a weapon. Around them, relatives shouted about the cellar, the key, the groom, the gift, Naples, and something called a sauce.

As Moretti watched, two men walked in off the street.

He noticed them because one of them was wearing a mustard-yellow suit, and it is hard not to notice a mustard-yellow suit. The other was tall and tired and had a coat folded over his arms, as if he was carrying something heavy and round underneath it. They walked past Moretti at the door. The man in the suit was whispering to the other one.

“We put it back. We take the right box. We leave. Correction, Leo, is the highest form of crime.”

“There are forty people in there.”

“All the better. Nobody sees anything in a crowd.”

Moretti watched them go in. He thought: I know that suit. Then Zucchi said something about 1288, and he turned back to the car.

“Maresciallo,” said Vanni, a moment later, in a changed voice.

“What.”

“The chandelier.”

Moretti turned around again.

The chandelier of the Hotel Bella Vista was a large thing of brass and glass, with thirty small bulbs shaped like candle flames. It was moving up.

It was not swinging. It was rising, slowly and smoothly, the way a balloon rises when a child lets go of it, and its chain was going slack beneath it and folding up in loops. Crystal drops were lifting away from the arms and floating a little above them, turning and catching the light.

Under it, the shouting got louder.

“It’s the Lambrusco,” a woman with purple hair was saying. She had her hand flat on top of her head, holding her hair on. “I told you. I told you at the dinner, it was a bad bottle, it goes to your head, look—”

“Carla, I’m off the floor! Look at my shoes!”

Moretti looked at the shoes. They were off the floor. So were the shoes next to them. A whole row of Rossi aunts had lifted perhaps three centimetres, and were standing on nothing, arguing, with their handbags floating gently up beside their elbows.

In the middle of the room, the man in the mustard suit had stopped walking. The tall man with the coat had stopped behind him. From under the coat, between his arms, came a light the colour of warm brick.

“Anarchists,” said Vanni.

“What?”

“It’s a device. It’s an anarchist device. Maresciallo, they’re targeting the wedding. The wine, the key, the missing groom. It’s a campaign. It’s a coordinated campaign against a Bolognese family institution.”

A man in round glasses and a linen jacket had stopped on the pavement beside them. He had a newspaper under his arm. He looked through the glass at the floating chandelier and the floating aunts with deep, calm interest.

“Of course,” he said, to no one. “The hotel lobby as a space of false elevation. It’s a critique of the decor.”

“Who are you?” said Zucchi.

“I teach,” said the man, and walked on.

Inside, the man in the mustard suit was trying to get to the back of the lobby, toward a door behind the front desk. The grandfather and the woman in green were standing directly in his path, shouting into each other’s faces. He tried left, then right. There were relatives everywhere. The tall man shook his head, once.

They turned around and walked out.

They passed right by Moretti again at the door. The tall man was holding his coat very tightly. The one in the suit was sweating so hard that his collar had gone dark.

“The situation,” he was whispering, “has evolved.”

The moment they were out on the street, the lobby went quiet. Everyone inside had stopped talking at once, to look up. Thirty people, in total silence, staring at a chandelier.

In the silence, the chandelier came down. It came down gently, all the way, and its chain straightened, and it settled onto its hook with a soft click, and every crystal drop fell back into place. The aunts came down with it. The purple-haired one landed first, and staggered, and sat on a velvet chair.

“Bad bottle,” she said.

“Maresciallo,” said Vanni, very quietly. “Did you see that?”

“I saw it.”

“What are we going to do?”

Moretti looked at the hotel. He looked at the ticket under his windscreen wiper. He looked at Zucchi, who was already writing another one, for a delivery van.

“First,” he said, “I’m going to find out who owns that portico.”

He was not really listening to himself. He was watching the breakfast room, through a second glass door at the side of the lobby. A very tall guest in hiking sandals had been standing at the buffet with a croissant on a plate. As the two men left, the tall guest put the plate down, carefully, with the croissant untouched.

Then he wiped his fingers on a napkin, folded the napkin into a neat square, and walked out after them.