The Window on Via Piella

Saturday, 11:04 AM. Via Piella.

Leo went down the hallway on his toes and put his eye to the little glass hole in Aunt Rina’s door.

On the landing stood the tallest man he had ever seen. He wore a rain jacket, shorts, and very clean hiking sandals. He had a large backpack on his back and a black umbrella in one hand, closed, and he was waiting with the patience of a statue.

Leo came back down the hallway.

“It’s the one from the hotel,” he whispered. “The tall one. From breakfast.”

“A guest?”

“He has an umbrella.”

“Everybody has an umbrella. It rained.” Marco had gone pale under his sweat. “Maybe he’s a collector. Maybe he wants to buy it.”

“Good morning,” said the voice through the door, as if it had heard them. “I apologise for the interruption. I have come for the object you took from the Hotel Bella Vista. It belongs to my employers. I would be very grateful if you would give it to me now.”

Marco looked at Leo, and then at the sphere on the yellow table, and then, with a slow, hopeful face, back at the door.

“And then what?” he called. Not loudly. Carefully.

There was a short pause.

“And then I will have to kill you both,” said the voice. “I am sorry. It is part of the contract. Anyone who has seen the object.” Another pause. “I would prefer to do it after lunch. But my lunch is at half past twelve, and I do not think I will be there.”

Leo picked up the sphere.

He did it without deciding to. It was heavy and warm against his chest, like carrying a sleeping child or a very large loaf. He pushed it into his cycling backpack, which was hanging on the back of the kitchen door, and he pulled the zip shut over the light.

“The back stairs,” he whispered.

“There are back stairs?”

“There are always back stairs.”

Behind them, at the front door, there was a small sound. It was not a kick or a crash. It was a soft, clean click, like a pen being closed. Aunt Rina’s lock, which had kept out burglars for forty years, turned by itself. The brass chain lifted out of its slot and hung in the air, like the spoons.

They were already running.

The back stairs went down into a narrow stone passage, and the passage came out, through a green door, onto Via Piella.

It was a short, quiet street of old houses painted in the colours of Bologna: rust, ochre, a pink that had faded to the colour of the inside of a shell. There was no portico here. The sky was open, pale blue after the storm. A few tourists were standing halfway down the street in a line, waiting their turn at something on the wall.

Leo and Marco came out of the green door and turned left.

The tall man was already standing at the end of the street.

Leo did not know how he had got there. He had not come down the back stairs. He had not come out of the green door. He was simply there, at the corner, with the sun behind him, and his umbrella in his hand.

They turned right.

“Go,” said Marco. “Go, go, go.”

They went. The tourists in the line looked round at them. There were six of them, a family with two children and a pair of old men in walking shoes. The line was for the little window. Leo had walked past it a thousand times without looking at it. A small wooden shutter, painted brown, set into a plain brick wall at the height of a man’s chest. Every tourist in Bologna came to open it, because when you opened it you saw, behind the wall, the canal running between the houses like a street in Venice. People took photos. People said oh. That was all it was for.

Behind them, the tall man had begun to walk. He did not run. He walked in long, even steps, and he opened his umbrella.

It was not an umbrella.

It opened like one, with a soft snap. But its ribs were not metal. They were thin and white and they glowed, and a sound came off them like a finger run around the rim of a glass. The man lowered it and pointed it at them the way you would point a torch.

A flowerpot on a first-floor windowsill, between Leo and the tall man, turned to glass. Clear glass, pot and earth and flower and all. It sat there on the sill, shining, perfect, like something in a museum.

The family with the two children stared at it.

“Excuse me,” said the tall man to them, politely, still walking.

The street ended in a wall. Of course it did. This was Bologna. Every escape in this city ended in something eight hundred years old.

“Leo,” said Marco. “Leo, what do we do?”

Leo was looking at the little window.

The father of the family had it open. He was holding up his phone to take a photo of the canal. Leo walked up to him and said, “Sorry,” and took the phone out of his hand and gave it back to him, and then pushed the shutter as wide as it would go.

The opening was about the size of a kitchen cupboard. On the other side of it, three metres down, the green canal slid past between the backs of houses, under little iron balconies, under washing lines.

“Leo,” said Marco. “No.”

“It’s shallow.”

“How do you know?”

“I grew up here. We used to throw bicycles in it.”

“Leo, you are forty-one years old!”

The tall man was ten metres away. The umbrella hummed. The two old men in walking shoes had gone flat against the wall.

Leo put his arms through the straps of the backpack, turned it round so it sat on his chest, and climbed into the little window. It was a window meant for looking, not for going through. He went through it anyway, shoulders first, then the rest of him, scraping skin off both elbows, and for one long second he hung there, half in Bologna and half in Venice.

Behind him, he heard Marco. Marco was running the other way, back up the street, past the family, past the tall man, with his mustard jacket flying out behind him. And he was shouting, over his shoulder, the one line he loved more than any other line in any film.

“LEAVE THE GUN! TAKE THE CANNOLI!”

Leo fell.

The water was cold. It came up to his waist, then his chest, because he had landed badly, and then his feet found the stones of the bottom and he stood up, gasping, with his hair in his eyes and the backpack against his chest. The sphere was humming through the canvas. He lifted it above his head, out of the water, with both hands.

Above him, framed in the little window, a very tall man looked down.

He looked at Leo. He looked at the water. He looked, for a long moment, at his own feet, in their very clean sandals.

Then the current took Leo, gently, and turned him round, and carried him away, under a low brick arch and into the shadow beneath the houses.

It was dark under there, and green, and it smelled of stone. Light came down in bars through gaps in the buildings above. Leo floated, and walked, and floated, holding a glowing sphere over his head like a waiter with a tray. He passed under a balcony. On the balcony was a woman in a dressing gown, hanging a sheet on a line.

She looked down at him, and at what he was carrying, and at the light it made on the water.

“Not again,” she said, and went back to her sheet.