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‘I suppose so.’ I sigh. ‘But wouldn’t it be amazing if she were Stella?’
Now Marco sighs. ‘Look, Tori, I was going to tell you about this later. It’s one reason I wanted to see you today. Apart from the pleasure of your company, of course.’
‘What is it?’
‘I hope you don’t think I’m interfering. But I did a bit of research and the fact is, the woman you met is very unlikely to be Stella Infuriati. From an official point of view, Stella Infuriati doesn’t exist.’
I stare at his profile as he looks calmly at the road ahead. ‘I… I… what?’
He shrugs. ‘I know it sounds bizarre, but it’s true. Basically, if you’re born in Italy or you move here legally, you have a paper trail. Wherever you happen to be living, you’re obliged to register with the Anagrafe in your commune – Florence, or Romituzzo, or Siena, or wherever.’
‘Like I’ll be doing shortly.’
‘Yes,’ Marco says. ‘Although it’s worse for you because you’re new, so you have to get into the system. Once you’re in, though, it’s pretty straightforward. If you ever leave Florence – God forbid – and move somewhere else, you’ll just have to fill out a form and show a couple of documents, and the Anagrafe there will do the rest. They’ll even tell your old commune you’ve moved. So if you want to find out whether someone is alive and living in Italy, you don’t even need to know the last place they were resident. You just have to know that they lived in a certain place at some point and then you can trace them from there. We know Stella started out in Romituzzo, so I called the Anagrafe there and asked about her.’
‘Wait, can you do that? Just ring up and ask for information about a total stranger?’
‘Oh, yeah, anyone can. If you wanted to find someone’s street address, that would be one thing, and if you wanted to go to the State Archives and get copies of documents, that’s another thing again. But the really basic information – name, date and place of birth, commune of residence – that’s all public. If you ask the relevant Anagrafe for those details about someone, anyone, they’re legally obliged to tell you.’
‘I don’t think I like that,’ I say.
‘It’s just the way it is,’ Marco says. ‘But yes, now you say it, I don’t like it either. Anyway, I had a good chat with one of the administrative guys in Romituzzo, and – well, this is the situation. Stella Infuriati was born there on the first of May 1929. Obviously, she’s then registered as living in the family home with her mother, father and brother. In early 1955, so a few months after Achille’s death, her parents both leave Romituzzo and move to Florence. But Stella doesn’t go with them. I double-checked with the Anagrafe in Florence, just in case there was some bureaucratic slip-up – after all, this was well before computerised record-keeping. But they had no record of her at all.’
‘So her parents moved away and she stayed behind?’
‘Now, this is where it gets mysterious. If Stella stayed in Romituzzo, there should still be a record of that. She’d move to another address, or become primary resident at her parents’ old one. And if she moved to a commune other than Florence, or left Italy altogether, there should be a record of that too. But there is no record. She doesn’t stay, she doesn’t leave, she doesn’t die, she isn’t reported missing. Her file just stops being updated, and there’s a new family resident at her parents’ address from 1956.’
‘And there’s no way she’d have changed her name at some point, is there?’ I ask, remembering our conversation about the tax code. ‘Even on marriage?’
‘Actually, she could still have taken her husband’s name. The law we have now didn’t come into force until 1975. But to do that she’d have to marry legally – and if she married legally, then it should be in her records. The commune keeps track of anything like that: births, marriages, deaths.’
‘Maybe she still went abroad,’ I say. ‘Wasn’t there a huge wave of emigration after the war? I’m sure a few of them fell through the cracks, officially speaking.’
‘That was my first thought,’ Marco says. ‘Fortunately, there’s an entire industry in finding people who left Italy. You can search passenger lists, landing lists, all these different records across different databases. Stella doesn’t show up in any of them. She’s a ghost.’
‘Bloody hell.’ I’m dazed by all this new information. ‘You did all that in a couple of days?’
Marco smiles. ‘More like a couple of hours. You can’t imagine how much time I spend helping American clients track down great-great-uncle Giovanni, who lived somewhere near Naples at some point after 1861. I could do this stuff in my sleep. I just hope I didn’t overstep.’
‘You didn’t,’ I say. ‘I’d never have figured all this out. You’ve saved me so much time and stress.’
‘That’s what I hoped, though I should have asked first, and I’m sorry about that. But most of all, I’m sorry I don’t have better news. Shit,’ he says, and laughs. ‘I’d have felt like a hero if I’d managed to find Stella for you. As it is, all I have is theories, and those are pretty far-fetched. You wouldn’t believe some of the ridiculous things I’ve imagined.’
‘Please tell me. I’d love to hear some ridiculous imaginings.’
But Marco shakes his head. ‘I don’t think they’ll hold up to questioning. And you’re taking a break from the book, remember?’
‘Of course,’ I say. ‘Taking a break. Totally. Let’s talk about something else.’
‘Good idea,’ Marco says, and we both fall silent. He stares at the road and I stare out of the window, trying to process everything he’s just told me.
After a few minutes, Marco clears his throat. ‘I guess I have one theory that’s a bit more grounded than the others. Or maybe it’s just more hopeful.’
I nod vigorously, trying to dispel visions of bodies under floorboards, buried in barns, dissolved in acid. My own imaginings took a dark turn pretty fast. ‘Hopeful sounds good.’
‘It’s also strictly relative, but okay, here goes. I don’t know much about Stella, but I think we can say that she was politically serious. Achille was fifteen when he joined the Resistance – that’s already very young. Stella was fourteen, and she wouldn’t have been whizzing around on a motorbike like he was. She’d have been going through German checkpoints on foot or by bike. That takes a special kind of guts.’
‘I’d say so.’ I’ve read a few stories about women partisans over the last couple of days, looking for mentions of Stella. They make terrifying reading.
