Chapter 105
AFTER THAT NIGHT IN AGGIUS, I went home and tried my best to pretend that nothing had happened.
I grocery-shopped and cooked and cleaned and ferried Paul back and forth to the pier, and on Tuesday I went to my Italian lesson with Francesca, where I never would have admitted how far I’d let things go with Teo.
“You are so distracted,” she said, “it’s like I’m talking to a wall. ” She wasn’t wrong.
We were coming up on Easter, and Francesca showed me how to make pardulàs Sardi, these little tartlets made with ricotta cheese and served hot, with honey drizzled over them.
The ricotta they call for isn’t like ours—it’s made with sheep’s milk, which gives the treats a sharp tang that takes some getting used to, but which I decided I liked.
She wanted to teach me how to roast a lamb, but when she explained that sa trattalia wasn’t just a rack of lamb but the whole thing stuck on a spit, wrapped in its own entrails, and braised in the fat of its peritoneum, I demurred.
“It’s a baby animal,” I said, but she told me I was acting like an American and should cut it out.
On Thursday, Teo’s story broke.
He had clearly tracked down Mike, although he called him “someone familiar with the incident.” I suspected Mike had put him in touch with at least one of the sub’s crew members; the article detailed how, when the Chartridge struck rock, the bow heaved upward and then rolled hard onto its port side—something only a person inside the sub would know.
After the initial impact, the commodore apparently ordered a surge because he was nervous that the sub would wind up beached on the rocks. It was then that the rudder hit.
Teo also confirmed that the commodore was the officer of the deck that night.
He had been up on the bridge when the sub’s navigation system went down, and then it was just bad luck (and maybe poor training) that the navigators—caught unaware—couldn’t quickly figure out where they were.
Even at that point, Teo wrote, Greer could have saved the day.
But he’d have needed to know the charts like the back of his hand. And he didn’t.
I read the story three times, and when I ran into Francesca at the Comiti Uno’s cheese counter, it was all she wanted to talk about. “I can’t believe it,” she said, then corrected herself. “I mean, I can believe it. But even so, it’s outrageous.”
I kept waiting for her to congratulate me on the role I’d played in breaking the story, but what became obvious as her rant continued was that Teo had not told his aunt I was the one who had tipped him off.
I liked this because, while I would have trusted her with the information, it meant he had taken seriously his promise to protect me.
By Friday, the story of the Chartridge’s grounding had been picked up by the wire services and was showing up on the front pages of big Italian papers on the continent.
The headlines were brutal, and Paul was furious that no editor in all of Italy seemed willing to reprint Daniel Bornemann’s press releases word for word.
The command’s saving grace was that the story broke during Holy Week.
People were out of town or hosting company or just not paying attention, so the reaction was muted, the protests less intense.
Everyone was angry—of course they were. But it was the season of renewal, and in the eyes of the Maddalenini, Jesus’s resurrection was the perfect reminder that light always triumphed over darkness.