Return to Umbria by David Wagner (13 ebook reader txt) 📗

“It is the specialty of Orvieto, Signor Montoya. There is much to see.”

“So I should be off to see it and allow you gentlemen to talk.” Rick shook hands with both men and walked to the door.

His departure was followed closely by Luciano Pazzi. The journalist was now sitting in one of the metal chairs at the side of the room. Waiting patiently.

***

Betta looked up at the cathedral from her place on the long, stone bench, its surface indented and shined by decades of tourist posteriors. Other early-risers, in twos and threes, were glad to have the seating, as hard as it might be. She studied the multicolored facade through a set of small binoculars and chatted with an elderly couple next to her. Noticing Rick walking into the far end of the piazza, she waved to get his eye. He returned the wave and walked to her.

“I didn’t know you’d brought binoculars, Betta.”

“I didn’t, these nice people let me use theirs. It really helps to appreciate all the detail.”

She gave the binoculars to the gray-haired man and thanked him before getting up to take Rick’s arm. The couple smiled, as if recalling a fond memory, when Rick and Betta went toward the doors of the church. As they walked she listened carefully as he recounted his meeting at the police station. The square was not crowded; it was much too early for the Roman tour buses, and the tourists staying in the city’s hotels were still enjoying their second cup of morning coffee. Afternoons, when sunlight bathed the west-facing front of the cathedral, was the best time to enjoy the spectacular facade. At this hour, shadow covered the steps they climbed to reach the entrance. Inside was even darker. Both dipped their hands lightly in the font inside the door and crossed themselves. As the architect had intended, their eyes were drawn the length of the nave to a tall, arched window where light poured down through the stained glass, covering the altar.

“I can’t believe you actually knew this policeman. No, now that I think about it, perhaps I can believe it. Why don’t you become a cop and be done with it?”

“You sound like my uncle,” Rick said, his eyes taking in the space.

The total lack of pews made a bare interior appear even larger. The only obstructions between the side walls were rows of thick columns that separated the nave from the two side aisles. Unadorned wood beams crisscrossed in support of the high roof above the nave before reaching the more ornate transept. Stone was the main material in this main part of the church—unadorned, cold, and permanent—in alternating black and white stripes. The layered pattern continued on the columns themselves, giving them the look of stacked Oreo cookies, though Rick opted not to share such a sacrilegious image with Betta. They were on their way to the Madonna di San Brizio chapel to see frescoes by Luca Signorelli, which she told him were among the great masterpieces of the Renaissance.

“You’re going to interpret for the inspector when he interviews the other two women?”

“Once he tracks them down.”

“That should be easy. Mannaggia.”

Rick’s eyes jumped from the ornate transept ceiling down to Betta. “What’s the matter?”

She pointed at a sign perched on a wooden easel. “We need tickets from the tourist office across the piazza to get into the chapel. It would have been nice to put the sign at the entry door.” She turned.

“I’ll get them, Betta. You stay here and read your guidebook so we know what we’re looking at.”

She waved her hand. “You paid for the funicular tickets, Rick. It’s my turn. We agreed.”

They walked back to the door and into the sunlight where more tourists had appeared and were peering up at the spires. Rick watched five old men, dressed in coats and ties, who stood in a circle listening to a sixth. Some important point, likely political, was being made by both word and gesture. Was there a town square in Italy that didn’t have its own regular group of pensioners? Perhaps they were assigned their spots by the local authorities.

A small white car with the city coat of arms, the sole vehicle in the pedestrian-only square, almost blocked the steps into the tourist office. As they walked around it a man stepped from the door and called out.

“Mi scusi, I should not have parked so close, let me—Oh, it’s you, Riccardo.”

Rick introduced Betta to Livio Morgante, the man he’d just met in the police station. Morgante repeated his request to be excused for his parking job. “And you are starting your day of tourism in the shadow of our masterpiece.” Their eyes moved with his to the cathedral. “It took over three hundred years to complete, if a cathedral can ever be called finished, under the hands of several architects. The mix of mosaics, sculpture, and architectural elements in the facade is unlike any other church in Italy, perhaps the world. But it is spectacular inside as well. Scholars come from all over the world to study the frescoes, though one does not need to be a scholar to appreciate them.” They were words expected of the tourism chief, but despite the biased view, Rick and Betta nodded in agreement.

Morgante suddenly turned serious. “It causes me great sadness that a visitor who comes here to see such beauty, as this American woman did, could find such ugliness.”

“Crime can and does happen anywhere, Signor Morgante.”

“That may be true, Riccardo. We want all our visitors, without exception, to have an experience filled with beauty, whether they are staying here in town, renting villas in the countryside, or passing through.”

“That will be the case with us, I’m sure,” said Betta, trying to reassure the man. It appeared to work, for a smile returned to his face.

“But you two must let me give you a tour of the cathedral. I don’t get to show off Orvieto often enough to