You are on page 1of 25
 
1
O
n May 2, 1918, a short article appeared in the
Boston Globe
. It was only three sentences long; not an article
really. Just a mention. It appeared on page twenty-four on the
outside column, where most people hold on to a newspaper. I’m
sure you wouldn’t be very surprised to know that few people
noticed it as they read the paper that morning and several people
smeared jam on it as they turned the page. Only a very few
read it.
z
COUNT BLOWN UPHeiress Disappears
On the night of April 12, the Count of Roma was assassinated
by an anarchist’s bomb at his house in that eternal city. His mother, the contessa, and his daughter were not harmed in
the blast, but were later found to have disappeared. The new count suggests sinister persons may be involved.
z
 
12
Siri Mitchell
Rare was the person who consulted the
Globe
 those days for any news other than the war. There were no tears in America to
spare for luckless Italian counts and their vanished daughters;
there were still too many left to shed for lost sons and wounded
fathers. For the scores—the hundreds, the thousands—being killed
on the battlefields of Europe every day. So it could be expected that a small article about an insignificant foreign incident, buried in the depths of the newspaper, garnered little attention.
Except that actions committed on one side of the world have a way of impacting the other. And people previously unknown to
one another happen to meet all the time. In the Italian-speaking North End that day, copies of the
Globe
 were used to wrap fish and line cupboards, while up on Beacon Hill, the newspaper was
read from page to page, top to bottom. And in one particular
house, the lady of that mansion sniffed as she sipped her tea and thought how it was just like an Italian to be blown up by one of his own kind.Two of the people mentioned in the article had access to the paper that day, but the hapless heiress couldn’t read English, and the sinister persons were too busy hatching evil plans to bother with a propaganda tool of the capitalists’ machinations. And so the fact that there had been an assassination registered to no one in particular. And life went on just the way it usually does.But fate has a way of laughing at human ignorance and God spins mysterious plans, and by August that Italian count’s death would start to matter very much to quite a few people who had never known him at all.
z
Stealthy and silent as the cats she so admired, Julietta Gior-dano slipped past her papa and mama, her elder sister, and her three brothers as they ate breakfast at the table.Or she tried to anyway.
“You forgot your
salame
!” Mama leaned toward the sideboard,

Reward Your Curiosity

Everything you want to read.
Anytime. Anywhere. Any device.
No Commitment. Cancel anytime.
576648e32a3d8b82ca71961b7a986505