“Science is…well…I need more,” he told her, “I want love.” The word love reverberated in his mind, “…love…love…love.”
His mind drifted momentarily to the life of Michelangelo that he’d read about last month in “The Agony and the Ecstasy,” and wondered how much of that historical novel was true and how much imagined by the author.
“I’ve always wanted to be a writer,” he told her, “to create my own paper world. I’d like to write a poem about us running away together to another country where they speak a language neither of us knows, and…”
Abruptly, he stopped talking as panic invaded his fantasy again.
“What am I doing? Am I nuts?”
He gazed at her high cheekbones, delicate brown lashes, lightly applied greenish-blue eye shadow, and tiny dimple that he noticed for the first time marking her chin: he’d fallen in love with perfection.
He had to leave the scene immediately. How could he explain this situation if someone strayed by now? Before escaping he covered her breast with her torn blouse and placed her head softly on the ground. “Sleep in peace,” he said. Foolishly, he didn’t think to rub off his fingerprints from the handle of the knife next to her before he left. He’d never been trained in crime.
Gentel slept until noon the next day. Imagine; he could sleep! He was that drained. Later that afternoon he told his colleagues that he had a bout of diarrhea, too much dinner he presumed, and apologized for missing their lectures. He thought about reporting that he saw a dead body in the alley late the night before, but it was too late, the police would want to know why he didn’t go to them immediately, and then he remembered his fingerprints on the knife handle. He didn’t think anyone saw him in the area last night, but he how could he be sure? What if someone had seen him? He had to act as if nothing had happened.
He scanned newspapers and watched the news on TV the next two days before returning home, but there was no mention of the murder. This confused him, but he thought it must have been reported in some local media. Dreams of the sweet pear odor of her hair and light pressure of her body against his filled his mind when he flew back to his barren apartment in Ohio.
Her image consumed him for the following year.
Gentel returned to Florence the next summer as a member of an advisory panel for funding his field of research in Europe. After his first day of work, he went back to the alley where the murder had occurred. The narrow street felt empty without her presence. He wondered who had found her. He sat on the curb where he had the summer before and imagined her on his lap, but his arms wrapped around himself now.
“I’m so sorry, so very sorry,” he said again quietly as he had the night he’d discovered her. During his moments of recollection and mourning and guilt, tourists and residents walked by, glancing at him sitting on the curb and speaking to one another as if nothing unusual had ever occurred there.
When Gentel’s panel discussion concluded the next day, he went to library archives of newspapers in English searching for homicides a year ago in Florence. He checked lists of deceased persons in small print in the obituaries, hoping there might be some clue identifying her, perhaps mention of a knife gash on her left side or with luck a small picture, but he found nothing. Had he imagined the whole thing? Of course not.