CHAPTER 7

“La vita è breve e l’arte è lunga.” Art is long. Life is short.

—Italian Proverb

“Great art is a hymn that does not dissipate in the immediacy of time and space. I believe that there are greater sermons in the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel than in all the texts preached below it—that the brush of Michelangelo was far more articulate than the smooth tongues of the religious orators of his day, and, without a doubt, truer and far more lasting.”

—Ross Story’s diary

Ross woke in the same bed he had gone to sleep in, his alarm chirping a few feet from his head. Dream or not, I’m still here, he thought and smiled. He left his apartment before dawn, walking a quarter mile to the SITA bus stop.

He arrived in downtown Florence with more than an hour to spare, so he got off the bus at Piazza Beccaria, where he stopped at a pasticceria for a cappuccino and pastry before catching a compact inner-city bus. In spite of the early hour, the bus was already crowded. He moved to the back and grabbed a ceiling strap.

At the next stop a couple boarded who reminded Ross of a Duane Hanson piece he had once seen on display at an art gallery in Minnesota: Tourists. They might as well wear a sign, Ross thought, looking at the camera hanging from the man’s neck. A bent tourist guidebook stuck out of the back pocket of his shorts. The woman wore a sleeveless shirt and pink-lens sunglasses, and a large bag hung over her arm.

The doors shut behind them and the couple hovered near the bus’s stamp machine. When they spoke, Ross recognized the accent immediately. They were from Minnesota or Fargo, close to where Ross once called home.

“Judy, will ya just put the darn ticket in the machine?”

“What for?”

“It’s what the man in the tobacco shop said to do. It stamps it or something.”

“Which machine? There’s two of them.”

“How would I know?”

“What if I put it in the wrong one?”

“Try them both.”

Ross didn’t speak, but he pointed to the orange box mounted to the wall.

“Did you see that?” the woman said. “That man just pointed to the orange one. Grazee, signora.”

“You just called him missus.”

“I can’t ever remember which one it is. He’s a good-looking Italian man. Grazee, signori,” she said, speaking loudly, with a large, deliberate stretch of her lips. “Th-ank y-ou.”

She looked so comical Ross tightened his mouth so as not to laugh. “Prego, signora.”

“That means you’re welcome,” her husband said.

Just then a young man slid past Ross. Ross had noticed him as he boarded the bus and watched him as he moved closer to the couple, who were all but oblivious to what was happening around them. At a corner all the passengers leaned with the bus and the young man brushed against the tourists, easily lifting the man’s wallet from his back pocket. Ross was waiting for it and caught the thief’s wrist, lifting it with the black leather wallet he held. “Ha trovato qualcosa?” Find something?