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 theChartridgestruck 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 commodorewasthe 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. Buthe’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 theChartridge’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.
106.
PAUL INSISTED THAT WE GOto Mass on Easter Sunday, and I didn’t argue because I was about due for a big serving of Catholic guilt.
The command held a Protestant service at the compound and a Catholic service over in Palau, but among the higher-ups, there was a push—even if you didn’t speak Italian—to attend Mass at the Church of Saint Mary Magdalene downtown. Politically, it was smart to put in facetime with Father Guglielmo, and this was especially true when NSA La Maddalena was under fire.
We arrived at the church at a little before ten and immediately found the Stearnses seated in a pew toward the back. “Isn’t this just a beautiful little church?” said Roberta as we took our seats.
The church had been built in the seventeen hundreds, and because the community was composed primarily of fishermen and shepherds, there were no stained-glass windows or frescoed ceilings. Everything was very plain, from the butter-yellow walls to the black-and-white-checkerboard floor—but I liked the simplicity. It made the place feel less intimidating.
There was, of course, a prominent portrait of Mary Magdalene up near the altar. She looked very saintly in her billowy robes, and maybe it was Teo’s kiss fresh on my lips, but I started to feel a weird sense of connection to this woman who had possibly also kissed the wrong guy or, in her case, several wrong guys. We’d never get to the bottom of whether Mary Magdalene was a prostitute, but it did strike me that, in any century, including mine, the easiest way to deal with a woman who didn’t know what she wanted was to call her a whore.
The pews were filling in, and while we waited for the church service to get underway, Roberta told me about a friend whose husband had just gotten assigned to Hawaii. “It’s like here, only you can take a hot shower any time you want. That’s the dream, right?”
“Yeah,” I said, but I wasn’t in a good headspace to be dreaming about our next assignment. Instead, I scanned the crowd.
I recognized the woman who ran the focacceria I liked and a man who had helped me find a tape measure at the hardware store. The old man who sold me theHerald Tribunewas sitting a few pews in front of us, and beside him were the Jenkinses. Mary Lou was wearing a patchwork dress with giant lapels, and when she turned around at one point to look for someone or something, she made eye contact with me and waved.
The Bornemanns arrived just as Mass was about to begin. For a moment, I worried they might sit with us, so I was grateful when they slid into the Jenkinses’ pew. After they were seated, I studied the back of Daniel’s head, trying to decide if he looked especially sad now that Janine was gone, but his posture didn’t give much away.
Someone started playing the organ, and we stood while Father Guglielmo proceeded past us. He was wearing a gold stole, and I thought he looked very regal under all that fine white linen and silk brocade. When he reached the altar, he made the sign of the cross and gave us his blessing. “Fratelli, per celebrare degnamente i santi misteri, riconosciamo i nostri peccati,” he said as he led us into the Penitential Act.
I always liked the way Catholics broke down sin into two categories—venial sins, which didn’t really risk your relationship with God, and mortal sins, which were the biggies. As a kid, I had only ever been in danger of committing a venial sin. I might lie to my mother or envy my brother, but those sins could be washed away by attending Mass. When it was over, I was a blank slate, ready to go out into the world and try to be a good person all over again.
It was different now. The sins I was committing were bigger, and this prayer of Father Guglielmo’s wasn’t going to get me out of anything. I didn’t know if a kiss qualified as adultery or just marital infidelity, but either way it was a mortal sin, and in the Catholic faith, the only way out of it was to go to confession, which I absolutely was not going to do under any circumstances.
As Father Guglielmo came to the last lines of the prayer, in which he asked God to have mercy on us and forgive us our sins, I started to get a little emotional, but then Roberta, whose Italian was terrible, leaned in and whispered, “Do you actually understand any of this?” and I choked back a laugh.
Amen.
107.
THE FOLLOWING WEEKENDwas the seventy-fifth Submarine Birthday Ball, which the command was holding at the Cervo Tennis Club in Porto Cervo. Someone had reserved a block of rooms at Le Ginestre, a nice hotel near the club, and had arranged for the liberty boats to ferry all of us back and forth between La Maddalena and Porto Cervo beginning at noon on Saturday, which gave the guys enough time to play a round of golf before the real festivities got underway.
When we checked in at Le Ginestre, Laura asked for adjoining rooms, which was smart because after Paul and Bobby left for the golf course, we flung open the doors and wandered back and forth between the two rooms, admiring the dresses and accessories we’d packed for our big night out.
I had bought my gown in town, at Solinas. It was lilac with spaghetti straps and a two-tiered silk skirt, and I thought it was perhaps the prettiest thing I’d ever owned. Laura had mail-ordered a dress from Spiegel, but when it arrived, it was a size too small, so she’d borrowed a dress from Mary Lou, of all people. The dress was bright orange, with a scoop neck and sheer sleeves, and while there was technically nothing wrong with it, it was maybe a little too conservative. If I’m being honest, the color also made Laura look like a giant kumquat.
“What are you doing for jewelry?” I asked, and she removed a black satin case from her bag and handed it to me.
“Bobby gave me this last night. He’s calling it an early birthday present.”
