Free The Missing Italian Girl by Barbara Pope

pamphlets. Little did they know that the crucial evidence had already arrived at the nearby precinct. A pneumatic letter dated 6 A.M. revealed the fiend’s plans to destroy part of our city’s fashion district. “Bourgeois of Paris. Your Springtime is over,” it said in big block letters. “I will put your Grand Boulevards to flames.” It was signed, “The Russian.”
    What did he mean by “our Springtime”? Did he plan to throw the bomb into the grand department store Au Printemps? How many innocent women and children would have suffered and died if the anarchist had been able to carry out his diabolical plot? Can we forget the bomb that Emile Henry threw in the Terminus Café three years ago? Or that the President of France was assassinated by an Italian anarchist? Or this very May, how the Charity Bazaar fire engulfed our city’s fairest wives, mothers, and daughters with horrifying, annihilating swiftness? That tragedy was an accident, an Act of God. This would have been an Act of Terrorism. Only the diligence of the police and our citizens can keep us safe from another outbreak of anarchist violence.
    The police are continuing their investigation across Paris, looking for explosives and rounding up associates.
    Parisians! Be on alert! The bombs may be going off again!
    Maura slapped the paper on the chair next to her. It’s not true. Not true! Pyotr would never hurt women and children. Hadn’t he saved Angela from the real monster? She shook her head. No, no, no. She pressed her lips together in an attempt to muffle her sobs. Not true!
    Just then she spotted the priest sauntering down the aisle, getting ready to lock up the church for the night. She folded the paper and bowed her head, holding it to her breast.
    “My child, is something wrong?” He had frizzy gray hair and a big belly, like most priests do. She certainly wasn’t going to talk to him. What good was God when mocking, cruel Death had won again?
    “Nothing is wrong,” she murmured to the cassocked figure hovering near her. She got up and fled.
    She found Angela sitting by the table, staring at Pyotr’s folded shirt.
    “Angela,” she said quietly, “it was him.”
    Her sister nodded and closed her eyes.
    Maura went down on one knee by her sister’s side and put her arm around her waist. “I’m sure he didn’t do it. Pyotr didn’t believe in bombing.”
    “I know,” Angela whispered; “he was so gentle.” She pulled away and began to sob.
    Maura sat back against the bed. It was more than his gentleness. She knew what he believed in. Despite Angela’s warnings, she used to sneak out before her mother came back from work at night. She’d go to the shabby café where he ate supper with his comrades and stand at the back, listening raptly as he argued against anyone who drunkenly claimed that a bomb or a gun might shake up the bourgeoisie. Patiently, he’d remind them of the destruction that violence had wrought in France and, worse, in his native land, where the bombings and assassinations had only made life harder and crueler for everyone. Then, emboldened by wine, Pyotr would proclaim his faith in the liberation of man’s “better nature.”
    Closing her eyes, Maura tried to recapture Pyotr in those memories. How his face was illuminated by the candle on the wooden table in that dark café. How it reminded her of the gentle living Christ on her mother’s favorite holy card. She tried to recall his voice, so sweet, so slow and careful because of his accent. In his new world there would be no Church or State, no rich or poor, no oppressed peasants or workers or women. Everyone would work. Everyone would have a good life.
    Tears rolled down Maura’s cheeks. She had loved him because he was so good, because he made her want to be good. Yet part of her always held back from believing him, because she knew that some people were bad. Now he was dead. Now everyone was going to blame him and Vera and Lidia for something they would not