Florence at night
The city of Florence slept at midnight in the gray-black humidity of a hot July. Gentel Pinskal, still jet-lagged from his trip from Ohio the day before, strolled the dead-empty streets feeling alone and foreign. The deluge of facts and theories he’d suffered through all day dissolved in the mist. He hadn’t come to this conference on gene expression for information anyway; that was available in the scientific journals. He was escaping abandonment.
“I need a life outside of test tubes, and Annie needs more attention,” Rachel had told him a year ago. Gentel retreated to his laboratory, angry that she didn’t understand the pressure on him to achieve tenure. Soon after the divorce he became an Associate Professor, but now his success felt empty. Rachel had moved to San Francisco and in the process stolen their daughter, Annie, sixteen, with golden curls and an asymmetric smile so captivating that even her crooked teeth looked adorable. He talked to Annie from time to time on the telephone, but with each call she sounded increasingly detached. “I’m fine, Dad,” she’d told him before he went to Florence, but he became worried when she described her new boyfriend as “…cool.” When he’d asked her to describe him, she sounded annoyed and said, “He’s got a heavy gold chain necklace, a neat snake tattoo on his right arm and a pony tail.” Gentel wondered whether this was all true, but her grades were falling, that was true, and he began to think that maybe Rachel had been right; Annie was more important than tenure.
Despite the late hour, woozy from the many glasses of Chianti chasing the mugs of dark draft beer and the long day of scientific talks, Gentel explored the neighborhood before retiring. The shops, many protected by bars to keep out thieves, were closed; the streets were deserted. The only sounds of life were Gentel’s quiet footsteps and the muted motor of an occasional car or motorcycle in the distance.
He strolled into a narrow alley. A dim glow from a lamp attached to a building sprayed orange-yellow. Squinting, he saw an archway ahead.
A stylish lady’s shoe, red with a very high heel next to a stone pillar framing the archway caught his attention. Black lacings like wire. A small foot with pink toenails and a bare, cream-colored calf. He heard muffled, feminine sounds and edged closer to peek around the column.
A youngish man with wavy hair, half-open shirt, tight pants and patent leather shoes held a woman with arms limp by her side, knees bent. A gold crucifix with a thick gold chain dangled against the man’s chest. His heavy brass ring with an oval onyx pressed against her ghost-white face.
“Holy shit,” thought Gentel, too scared to make noise. He looked around for help, but no one was there. There were no homes along the alley, only the closed boutiques with bars across the windows and doors.
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.
She looked young and helpless, five feet tall at most. Annie was about that height when he last saw her a year ago, and thin like her, frail. But the victim before him was no child, and her abductor was no parent. Her short auburn hair was in disarray and her white, sleeveless blouse ripped, exposing her left breast. And blood, yes, a lot drenched her blouse that overlapped the waistline of her tan skirt, also splotched with patches of dark red. Blood seeped from a gash in her side and formed a small puddle with short streams between cobblestones. Her eyes, glazed, her mouth, suffocated by his hand. Her groans weakened, her eyes shut, her body slumped.