“She seemed troubled, and I can’t imagine where she went at ten o’clock at night. I tried to talk to her, signore, but she—”
“I’m sure you did all you possibly could,” Pendergast repeated. “Thank you again for your help.”
He exited the villa onto Via di Ripoli, deep in thought. She had left at night, in the rain… but for where?
He entered a small café at the corner of Viale Giannotti, ordered an espresso at the bar, still pondering. She had encountered Diogenes in Florence, that much was certain. They had fought; she had been wounded. It seemed incredible that she was only hurt, for normally, those who came within Diogenes’s orbit did not leave it alive. Clearly, Diogenes had underestimated Constance. Just as he himself had done. She was a woman of vast, unexpected depths.
He finished the coffee, bought an ATAF ticket at the bar, and stepped across the viale to wait for the bus into the city center. When it arrived, he made sure he was the last one on. He held up a fifty-euro note to the driver.
“You don’t pay me, stamp your ticket at the machine,” the driver said crossly, pulling roughly out of the bus stop, his hammy arms swinging the wheel around.
“I want information.”
The driver continued to ignore the money. “What kind of information?”
“I’m looking for my niece. She got on this bus around ten o’clock two nights ago.”
“I drive the day bus.”
“Do you have the name of the night driver and his cell number?”
“If you weren’t a foreigner, I’d say you were a sbirro, a cop.”
“It’s not a police matter. I’m just an uncle looking for his niece.” Pendergast softened his voice. “Please help me, signore. The family is frantic.”
The driver negotiated a turn, then said, his tone more sympathetic, “His name is Paolo Bartoli, 333-662-0376. Put your money away—I don’t want it.”
Pendergast got off the bus at Piazza Ferrucci, pulled out the cell phone he had acquired on arrival, dialed the number. He found Bartoli at home.
“How could I forget her?” the bus driver said. “Her head was swaddled in a scarf, you couldn’t see her face, her voice all muffled. She spoke an old-fashioned Italian, used the voi form with me—I haven’t heard that since the days of the Fascists. She was like a ghost from the past. I thought maybe she was crazy.”
“Do you remember where she got off?”
“She asked me to stop at the Biblioteca Nazionale.”
It was a long walk from Ferrucci to the National Library, which stood across the Arno River, its brown baroque facade rising in sober elegance from a dirty piazza. In the cold, echoing reading room, Pendergast found a librarian who remembered her as well as the bus driver had.
“Yes, I was working the night shift,” the librarian told him. “We have few visitors at that hour—and she looked so lost, so desolate, I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. She stared at a particular book for over an hour. Never turning the pages, always on the same page, murmuring to herself like a crazy woman. It got on toward midnight and I was getting ready to ask her to leave so I could close. But then all of a sudden, she jumped up, consulted another book—”
“What other book?”
“An atlas. She pored over it for perhaps ten minutes—scribbling furiously in a small notebook as she did so—and then ran out of the library as if the hounds of hell were after her.”
“Which atlas?”
“I didn’t notice—it’s one of those on the far reference shelf, she didn’t have to fill out a slip to look at them. But let’s see, I do still have the slip she filled out for the book she stared at for so long. Just a moment, I’ll collect it for you.”
A few minutes later, Pendergast was seated where Constance had sat, staring at the same book she had stared at: a slim volume of poems by Giosuè Carducci, the Italian poet who had won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1906.
The volume sat in front of him, unopened. Now, with infinite care, he upended it and allowed it to fall open naturally; hoping, as books will sometimes do, that it would open to the last page that had been read. But it was an old, stiff book, and it merely fell open to the front endpapers.
Pendergast reached into the pocket of his suit jacket, drew out a magnifying glass and a clean toothpick, and began turning the pages of the book. For each page he turned, he gently dragged the toothpick along the gutter, then examined the dirt, hair, and fibers that had been exposed with his magnifying glass.
An hour later, on page 42, he found what he was looking for: three red fibers of wool, curled as if from a knitted scarf.