Gentel tiptoed closer to the maudlin scene: a young assailant gripping a young woman, not much older than Annie, in a medieval alley at midnight in far-away Florence. Jesus nailed to the golden cross hanging from the man’s neck reflected soft light from the incandescent lamp and contrasted with the shiny steel blade of the knife that had sliced her. The man held the knife close to the blade such that the handle extended beyond his grip. The curved blade, stained with blood, tapered to a needle-sharp point. The patina of dark wooden handle glowed, and a silver plate capped the end of the handle.
The two men locked eyes. Gentel froze, his eyes wide. The attacker grimaced, feigned another thrust of the knife into her side, and then lifted the blade threatening Gentel. He shook his head slowly from side to side as if switching roles from criminal to policeman.
Disoriented, Gentel imagined the assailant saying, “Look at what we’ve done!”
The abductor dropped the knife and vanished into the dark. He disappeared, just like that, like Rachel, like Annie, leaving Gentel alone with the woman. She folded to the ground like a torn silk scarf. He leaned down, touched her arm and brushed the back of his hand along her cheek. She felt clammy and remained stone still.
“What an angel,” he muttered. “What a perfect, human angel.”
A fleeting image of Annie stabbed to death gave him a chilling pang of guilt, for letting Rachel take his little girl away, for being neglectful. He knew that Rachel was too selfish to look out for Annie; that was his job, his privilege, and he had failed.
What to do now? He was alone in Florence, a strange city for him, in the middle of the night, and he didn’t speak Italian. He sat on the curb, stunned, confused, feeling inadequate.
“I have to do something,” he thought, suppressing panic.
In her early twenties at most, she wore a thin wedding band on her left ring finger. He slid his arm under her head, lifting it from the hard cobblestones, and placed her shoulders tenderly on his lap, as he had done so often not to awaken Annie when she’d fallen asleep.
Suddenly, her eyes opened to narrow slits and her right thumb twitched.
“Are you alive?”
Silence.
He placed his ear against her chest listening for a heartbeat, but heard nothing. He searched for a pulse from the jugular artery on her neck, but detected nothing. He put his cheek next to her mouth; no breath. He squeezed her fingers and pinched her firm cheek. No sign of life, but how could he be sure? He wasn’t a doctor.
“Help! Can anyone hear me?” he yelled. No response. He tried again. “Is anyone around, anywhere?” He heard a faint of a motor scooter fade away in the distance.
And then his panic increased when he repeated to himself the accusation he imagined hearing: “Look at what we’ve done!”
Desperate to regain his composure, he gazed at the pillars and the cobblestone street, the scraps of trash strewn here and there, the closed shops, and took a deep breath. He then looked at her, lying peacefully, her lips parted just enough to show a glint of white enamel behind her coral lipstick, her eyes closed, beyond sleep. Her head and shoulders nestled on his lap, naturally, comfortably. Her soft hair smelled of fresh pear. Surely she’s gone now, he thought.
He shed a tear.
He picked up the knife and was startled to see faint initials – AP – inscribed in the center of the silver plate at the end of the handle. “Annie Pinskal!” He wiped off the blood on the blade with his fingers, as if to undo the crime and revive her. He dropped the knife in horror when he realized what he was doing.
“Perhaps AP stands for the manufacturer,” he thought, or the initials of its owner.
“I’m so sorry, so very sorry,” he whispered.
He leaned against the pillar, his grey shirt stained with her blood. He embraced her waist, partially covering the mean slash on her side with his hand, strangely cherishing this moment in the alley. The blood from the wound was drying.
The assailant’s dark, accusing eyes flashed through his mind.
“I didn’t cause this, did I? She was stabbed before I came, wasn’t she?” he asked himself, but his cruel inner voice tortured him. “You let him get away. You heard a scooter in the streets. There might have been someone to help. But you wanted to be alone with her.”
Gentel caressed her body with his eyes. Her weight against his thighs ignited chills in the hot night. He started to talk to her as if she were alive, as if she would understand his feelings, as Rachel never did, and Annie couldn’t because she was too young. He closed his eyes and spilled his heart. It didn’t matter that she couldn’t hear his words. Feeling her perfect little body press against his was all that mattered. Her blood on his hand felt warm and so right, perhaps partly because it was so wrong, so illicit, yet exciting and comforting. They became one in a dream world between life and death.