Nathaniel Rich - The Mayor's Tongue

"He's not alive?"

"Are you a dreamer? Not even Sonja believed he was. Now I must get back to selling my meats. But maybe we could have some wine later?" She sucked in her cheeks and winked at Eugene.

On a strip of butcher's paper she wrote out her number, as well as the address of a café in the old Jewish ghetto where Sonia's friend Poldi worked as a bartender.

"She was always fond of older men," said Poldi, who looked about fifty himself. He wore a short white bib splattered with coffee and crystallized milk foam, under which was visible a white fleshy paunch that ribbed over the elastic of his underwear. He spoke with deep heaving motions, as if the burdens of advancing age had consolidated deep within him and ached to come out in a cascading display of sighs and mutters and other gestures of regret. The subject of Sonia's disappearance seemed to have put him over for good. As he spoke he yanked at his hair in such a violent manner that it seemed he might pull his whole clever face off with it.

"It was not so long ago that I was with her in the hills above Tartini Square, picking pendolini. We were having so much fun. But I never heard from her again. I am sure she is with an older man now."

When Eugene told him that she had been abducted by Constance Eakins, Poldi scoffed, flapping his bib at him. It was lunch now, and university students had begun to enter the café in jittery, loquacious groups.

"Constantino Eakins? The writer?" asked Poldi. He turned away from Eugene to line up espresso cups for the students. "What are you talking about? He's been dead forever."

Poldi wouldn't say anything else on the subject, but he did mention that Marco, another friend of Sonia's, would soon stop by. Several minutes later, the screeching uproar of a braking Vespa filled the café, followed by the sputter and cough of its tailpipe. Poldi was smiling at Eugene.

"The fanciulle love this guy," he said, flapping a coffee-dampened towel over his shoulder. Marco appeared in the doorway, wearing a bomber jacket and platinum sunglasses, with a green scarf swung around his neck — a flamboyant Italian simulation of James Dean cool. The tables of female students flittered and flustered, while the adolescent boys shook their heads in what was evidently a daily expression of disgust and resignation.

"Ciao, Poldi! Avanti!" said the bedecked bomber pilot, swaying over to the counter. "Tre," he ordered, holding up three long splayed fingers.

Poldi grinningly placed three coffees on the mahogany bar. Marco swigged the first and then scanned the café with a ladykilling smirk. He found a suitable, blushing victim at a nearby table, and was about to make straight for her with the two remaining saucers when Eugene grabbed his wrist. Marco turned to him, his smirk fading into a perturbed grimace. He yelled a couple of syllables of indecipherable Triestino but calmed when Eugene spoke Sonia's name.

"Ah, Alicia," sighed Marco, and downed another coffee. The image of Sonia on the back of Marco's bike passed through Eugene's head and he wondered, again, what girl he was searching for.

"She ran off with an older man," offered Poldi from behind the bar.

Marco slumped over. "I figured," he said. "Sonababic." Then, with sudden merriment, he looked up again at Poldi: "But what ass! Can't blame the old pig."

"It was some ass!" said Poldi, immoderately loud. Eugene suffered his horrors silently.

In a patient voice, Marco described to Eugene the last time he had seen her. He had been riding at night along the coast, past Miramare, to a nightclub with an American name — Enjoy — that played American hip-hop, Italian disco, and Slovenian pop, which sounded like polka with a drum machine. On his way out of the city he spotted Sonia, standing by herself in Piazza Scorcola at an out-of-service tram stop. She was slumped over her duffel bag and seemed dazed when he woke her up; she said she didn't want to go to the nightclub. When he told her that the tram would never come, she shrugged, and said she'd walk. But she refused to say where she was headed. He returned to the piazza several hours later, but she wasn't there. He had assumed she had gone off with another man.

"Another man?" asked Eugene, stunned. "Maybe someone attacked her, left alone on the street at night like that. Or something worse!"

"Pish-posh," said Marco. "Our city is safe. Only thing our women need to fear are—" and he said a number of vulgar words in Triestine dialect. Poldi snorted and made wild humping motions against the espresso machine. To make him stop Eugene overturned what was left of his coffee on the bar. Poldi rushed over with his towel.

"This kind of thing happens every day," said Marco. "Find yourself another girl. There are plenty here, for example," he said, making a sweeping gesture over the room. The girls in the café looked up, following the path of his hand as if it was holding the Rod of Aaron. "Did you say Eakins?" Marco asked, turning back to Eugene. "I love Eakins. Have you read Songs for Agata ? Fantastic poems. But you must be confused. He's long dead. We Triestini have known it for years. He often came to the city — we'd see him in Piazza Unità by the boardwalk, staring at the sea. When he died, we all knew it. Even if no one else in the world believed it until now. It was like the weather had suddenly changed and his influence on our city would be no more."

And with that, Marco downed his third coffee.

Eugene didn't have any ideas but to walk to Piazza Scorcola. The piazza was like a bicycle wheel crushed by a car, with street spokes flying off in several directions. The tram line curved through the center of it, before turning up toward the mountains north of the city.

Eugene wasn't sure what he expected to find there. A group of commuters yawned and harrumphed at the slow trams: a circle of Italian bankers in three-pieces and black polished spats holding quartered copies of Trieste's daily newspaper, Il Poliglotto ; secretaries in checkered rayon blouses speaking rapidly in their after-work slang; a bonbon of a woman halfheartedly trying to prevent her two tussling grandchildren from spilling over into the road; and a teenage couple engaged in an argument with angry, declamatory hand gestures, exaggerated pouts, and bulging eyes. Eugene looked at the bankers, and realized that he had been trying to find one who resembled his father. A black sadness tumbled through his body, and he vowed to write his father a letter as soon as he returned to Lang's. He would talk about the glories of Floridian life, he supposed, and would promise to visit soon. But he knew that was a lie. It would only hurt his father worse when he found out.

A young man, roughly Eugene's age, stood apart from the crowd. He wore a black double-breasted blazer over a wrinkled, untucked shirt, and slumped around like someone who had recently suffered a great loss. Despite his mild-mannered appearance— tidy brown schoolboy's hair and a stringy build — he had an odd intensity of gesture that made him seemed capable of wildness or, perhaps, violence. He rubbed his face with gnarled hands and walked in a circle, skidding the soles of his feet against the ground. He had been crying. No one in the commuting crowd besides Eugene seemed to notice him.

The teenagers' bickering turned into a screaming match and the boyfriend threw up his hands and walked away. The girlfriend took a step toward him, faltered, and then stood still, her anger crumpling in on itself. Immediately the weeping man in the double-breasted blazer sped over to her. His arms were thrown apart wide in an awkward gesture of consolation, but more than anything he resembled an eagle swooping in on his prey with outstretched wings. He started to holler at the stunned girl through his sobs: