The Body in the Piazza

The Body in the Piazza

A Faith Fairchild Mystery

Katherine Hall Page

Dedication

For My Good Friend and Fine Writer Valerie Wolzien

It's Always About the Journey

Epigraph

When you travel your first discovery is that you do not exist.

—E
LIZABETH
H
ARDWICK
,
Sleepless Nights

Contents

C
HAPTER
1

F
aith Fairchild was drunk. Soused, sloshed, schnockered, pickled, potted, and looped—without a single sip of alcohol having crossed her lips. She was drunk on Rome. Intoxicating, inebriating Rome.

It had started before the plane had touched down when she glimpsed the sea—“Mare Nostrum,” “Our Sea,” the Romans had called it. Soon the coast gave way to towns, fields, and the green serpent that was the Tiber. On the bus from Fiumicino into the city, the views were not as spectacular, but there were occasional patches of brilliant roadside wildflowers and long rows of twisted pines—Respighi's
Pines of Rome
—flashed by. Leaving the highway at the city limits, the streets narrowed abruptly. The flowers were in planters now outside stucco-sheathed apartments and shops painted just as she had imagined them—yellow ochre, burnt sienna, raw umber, deep rose—Italian Crayolas. Dense traffic had caused the bus to slow to a crawl, an imposing vessel upon a mighty ocean of motor scooters and tiny cars, darting perilously like schools of minnows into the oncoming traffic lane, honking as if the road had been usurped rather than the other way around. She'd laughed to herself at the host of metaphors Rome was already inspiring.

When the bus left the airport, it had been filled with the excited clamor of arrivals speaking so many different languages it was impossible to distinguish one from the next. As riders got off and others took their places, Italian dominated. They were probably talking about the weather or mundane problems at work or home, but their gestures, faces, and the musical quality of their voices suggested that they were debating Verdi versus Puccini or heady matters of state. Faith wished she had had time to study the language and vowed to sign up for at least an online course when she returned.

The bus stopped abruptly, immobilized by the traffic. “Could it always be like this?” Faith said to her husband.

Tom Fairchild shrugged, intent on maintaining the tiny perimeter of space they'd claimed on the crowded bus.

“
Scusi,
” a man next to Faith said. “This morning it is a, how do you call it, ‘strike'? Yes, strike by the
trasporto
workers. It will be over in a few hours. It's very usual.”

“What are they asking for?”

“
Tutti
. Enjoy your stay.” He got off and was soon making faster progress on the sidewalk than he had been on the bus. “
Tutti
”—Faith knew the word—“Everything.”

She didn't mind the delay. It gave her more time to look out the windows. By the time they reached their stop and she stepped onto the Corso Vittorio Emanuele's sidewalk, her head was already filled with the sight of places she'd only seen in photographs, paintings, or on the screen. She'd grabbed Tom's arm repeatedly at the views—St. Peter's, Castel Sant'Angelo, the Ponte Principe—and now as she wheeled her small suitcase—for once she'd packed lightly—across the street and into the Campo de' Fiori toward their hotel, she grabbed his arm again. If heaven were in any way a reflection of life on earth, the Campo de' Fiori market
had
to be the model. Stall after stall was filled with the kinds of produce she'd only seen in the pages of glossy food magazines. Artfully arranged crates of ruby-red and pearl-white radicchio, shiny dark eggplants, silken orange zucchini blossoms, and shimmering silver-scaled fish, none of which had been sprayed with fixative or whatever else stylists used to achieve perfection for those photo shoots. One stall was filled with stacks of white porcelain, another with colorful pyramids of spices in cello-wrap. All she needed was a large basket—and a kitchen. She stood transfixed before a display of more kinds of mushrooms than she had ever seen in her life and knew that she'd have to come back to Rome, rent an apartment, and cook. For now—and why had it taken her all these years to get to the Imperial City?—she would have to be satisfied with just dreaming.

She glanced up and her eye was drawn to a rather forbidding-looking bronze statue of a hooded monk that towered incongruously over the bright white canvas umbrellas sheltering wares, and she made a note to check the guidebook. Who was the enigmatic figure? Rabelais—didn't he spend time in Italy?—would have been more appropriate. But nothing seemed to be curbing the bustling crowd's appetite, and Faith realized that the sight of all this luscious food had awakened her own. She was starving.

They'd boarded the plane in Boston at dusk last night. Faith had brought her own repast, a ciabatta roll stuffed with fresh mozzarella, prosciutto, sliced tomato, and basil that gave a nod toward her destination, while Tom had said he'd opt for whatever the galley served up. That had been “steak tips with seasonal vegetables.” She'd commented pointedly that the vegetables must represent some fifth or even sixth season as yet unknown to man and he'd responded by asking her to order a meal for herself. Like the old joke, the food might be lousy, but the portions were too small—especially in this case, when the airlines were cutting back on everything from pillows to peanuts. Tom had consumed his meal and hers, too, commenting that he liked the challenge of eating from those little trays with doll-size cutlery.

Faith was an unashamedly admitted food snob. It went with the territory. She'd started her successful catering business, Have Faith, in the Big Apple just before meeting Tom and restarted it in the more bucolic orchards of New England when their second child, Amy, began nursery school.

Since she'd eschewed the breakfast offered in flight—what looked like some kind of ancient Little Debbie snack cake and brown-colored water passing for coffee (she'd sniffed Tom's cup)—Faith hadn't had any food for hours, never a good thing in her book, and the only question now, here in foodie paradise, was where to start?

“Happy, darling?” Tom asked. The trip was an anniversary one and had been his very own idea. “A significant anniversary deserves a significant marking,” he'd said.

She wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him. People didn't do that in the Fairchilds' neighborhood back home; they
did
in Rome.

“Very—and very hungry.”

“The hotel's not far, so why don't we check in and then eat? The rooms won't be ready this early, but we can leave the bags.”

“Okay, but let me get one of these little tarts first,” Faith said. They were passing a bakery, the Forno Campo De' Fiori smack on the square, and she had her eye on what looked like some kind of
crostate
oozing with apricots that was seductively displayed with other pastries, pizza, and panini in the window.

Tom decided he needed one, too,
and
several pignoli-studded almond cookies. Munching contentedly, they were soon making their way across the market to the street leading to the hotel. As Faith passed the monk's statue, the morning sun cast his shadow in their path and, feeling superstitious, she pulled Tom to the side to avoid walking through it. Kind of a “step on a crack, break your mother's back” thing she told herself. She also told herself “better safe than sorry.”
Nothing
was going to spoil this trip.

She adored her two children: Ben, despite his occasional irritating teen attitude—had she and her younger sister, Hope, similarly known absolutely everything in the world at that age?—and Amy, feet still planted firmly in childhood with a passion for Harry Potter. Yes, Faith could honestly say that most of the time she not only loved her children but liked being with them. That said, she was joyfully anticipating the almost two weeks stretching out before her sans the crises that made up her everyday life: a science project due tomorrow and not started; a mean girl spreading rumors that Amy had B.O.; and every Sunday morning the mad dash to get the Reverend Thomas Fairchild in a clean collar and matching black socks—well sometimes one was navy blue. When Faith had mentioned the possibility of the trip to her closest friend and next-door neighbor, Pix Miller, Pix had immediately offered herself and husband, Sam, as in loco parentis not just in spirit but in fact. Empty nesters, they would simply move next door for the duration. “It will be fun,” she'd said. “And good practice for grandparenthood.” Pix was a bit older than Faith and like Virgil guiding Dante had steered her through the perilous shoals of everything from toilet training to how to get the teacher you wanted at Aleford Elementary.

After the Millers' offer, the rest of the plans fell into place with surprising ease. Faith's assistant, Niki Constantine, was more than capable of running things at Have Faith for the duration with the help of Trisha Phelan, one of the firm's part-time workers. Niki was a new mom and had been bringing the baby to work with her, which would continue until, she told her boss, “The little darling learns to walk and becomes a nuisance.” Since she spent every waking minute of the tiny girl's life cuddling her adoringly, Faith doubted Niki would regard Sofia as a “nuisance” even when the baby became ambulatory. Of course things could change once she hit her teens.

And so Tom and Faith would eat, drink, and be merry. Just the two of them, the way they had begun all those years ago.

Meeting at a wedding reception Have Faith was catering at the Riverside Church on New York's Upper West Side, what Faith did not realize until the wee small hours of that fateful night was that the handsome friend of the groom had come to town from Massachusetts to perform the ceremony, changing out of his robes immediately afterward. Earlier in the evening, Tom Fairchild had literally swept her off her feet: one dance as the party was winding down, one song—Cole Porter's “Easy to Love”—and one ride across Central Park in one of those horse-drawn carriages she'd previously thought strictly for tourists, never realizing how impossibly, absurdly romantic they were. When Tom had revealed his occupation, surprised that she hadn't known, it was too late. She was hooked.

Daughters and granddaughters of men of the cloth, Faith and Hope, a year younger, had made a pact to avoid that particular fabric, knowing the kind of fishbowl existence it meant. Years earlier their mother, Jane Lennox, a Manhattan native, had put her well-shod foot down, insisting that her fiancé, the Reverend Lawrence Sibley, could tend to a congregation in her hometown as well as any other place. Sin was not dependent on locale. Well, perhaps in some cases, but she had been firm, and he accepted the call to a parish on the city's Upper East Side. Jane, a real estate lawyer, found them a bargain duplex when their daughters were born. Not exactly a moss-covered drafty old manse with inadequate hot water, but the Sibley girls had still had to grow up under a congregation's omnipresent eye—“Are those girls old enough for that kind of makeup?” and “Did you hear about the way the Sibley girls danced at the Young People's last get-together?” Hope's occupation—she'd gone straight from
Sesame Street
to Wall Street with her own subscription to the
Journal
before she turned ten—met with general approval, Faith's years in the wilderness trying to figure out what and who she wanted to be less so. Even when she did finally find her true calling, the parish was puzzled. “A cook?” Not until raves started appearing in the
Times
and elsewhere did they wake up and smell the coffee—coffee it was exceedingly hard to get booked.

Tom was consulting the map. Rome was new to him, too. They'd been to Northern Italy during their honeymoon, but no farther south than Siena.

“We came down Vicolo del Gallo, so this is definitely the Piazza Farnese. The hotel should be on that street over to the side there.” He pointed.

“More like an alley,” Faith said, hoping it would be quiet. The piazza was almost empty, especially compared to the neighboring market square. She knew from the hotel's online information that the imposing building across from them was the Palazzo Farnese, built during the Renaissance. For many years it had been home to the French embassy. A French flag and the flag of the European Union hung above the wide main entrance. Two ornate fountains that looked like huge bathtubs occupied opposite ends of the large cobbled square.

Another thing to check out in the guide, Faith said to herself. There had to be a story behind them. She'd had every intention of reading up on Roman history and the major sights but, in the end, skimmed the introductions in several books and told herself that this way she'd be coming to everything fresh. She'd memorized a few key phrases that would take her far: “
Quanto costa?
” and “
Vorrei mangiare
.” “How much?” and “I want to eat something.” She wouldn't need Berlitz for deciphering a menu. Faith's food linguistic skills spanned all nations.

Her plan was to wander, eat, and wander some more. Emilio Bizzi, an old friend originally from Italy who lived near Aleford, where Tom's church, First Parish, was, had given them his Late Renaissance, Early Baroque suggestions, a tour the Fairchilds were already calling “The Caravaggio, Bernini, Borromini Trail.” It would be fun to follow it all over the city, giving them a focus for the three days they had for this part of the trip. She wasn't going to miss the Colosseum, though. Or the Spanish Steps. Or the Trevi Fountain. Or . . . they'd just have to come back.