Page 63 of Two Chances With You

“Ele!”

“Why, does your mother play hard to get?”

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“Well, Step, I have to bid you farewell for the moment. When do we have our next appointment with Romani, the Serpent, and the rest of the sordid demimonde?”

“Tomorrow at eleven. Well, this takes the cake. Now I have to remind you of the appointments.”

“Certainly. This is the real job of an assistant. Well then, we’ll see you tomorrow at that time, or a few minutes before then.”

I watch Marcantonio walk away with a cigarette already in his mouth. After barely taking a single step, he turns around. He looks at me and smiles. “Hey, let me know if there’s any news with Biro. I’ll be waiting to hear your stories, and don’t invent anything. After all, a blow job is easy to beat!”

Chapter 22

In the Prati district, near the headquarters for the national public broadcasting company, RAI, is the Residence Prati, home and hotel to so many starlets of Italian film and television. And just a little farther along is a gym.

I head downstairs because it’s a basement facility. You’d never think it, but it’s 4,500 square feet easy, if not even bigger, nicely arranged with plenty of mirrors and a perfect ventilation system, a large steel duct that wends its serpentine way overhead, exhaling and inhaling relentlessly.

“Hello, are you looking for someone?” A young woman with short hair smiles at me from her hiding place behind a strange desk. She’s hiding a textbook, shut with a pencil as a bookmark and a pair of highlighters beside it. A classic of the first year of university.

“Yes, I’m looking for a young woman I know.”

“What’s her name? Maybe I know her. Has she been a member for long?”

I’m tempted to laugh, and I’d like to answer her “Since never!” But that would amount to dismissing any chance I might ever have with Gin. Ratting her out in her network of gyms, that would not be a great move.

“No, she just told me that today she’d be doing a trial lesson.”

“Tell me her name, and I can call her on the intercom.”

“No, thanks.” I smile, feigning innocence. “I want to surprise her.”

“Okay, as you like.”

The young woman goes back to her studies. Criminal law. I was wrong. She must be on her third year at the very least. Then I laugh to myself. Someday she might be my lawyer. It’s a good possibility.

There she is now, Gin Biro. She’s tirelessly jumping around the boxing bag. Suddenly she reminds me of Hilary Swank when she goes to the gym, all alone, on her birthday. She moves quickly around the bag, and Morgan Freeman decides to give her some pointers on how to punch.

I’d heard rumors that Italian women were obsessed with boxing. But I just assumed they were nothing but that, idle rumors. This, on the other hand, is reality.

“Go on, that’s good. Punch from the shoulder.” Someone is training her but he doesn’t resemble Clint Eastwood.

I look at her, and it seems as if I’m looking at her in a whole new light now. How strange. When you look at a woman from a distance, you notice the slightest details, the way she moves her mouth, how she pouts, the way she bites her lip, how she sighs, the way she does her hair, and, well, lots of other things. Things that you overlook from up close, things that from up close are pushed aside by her eyes.

Gin keeps punching the bag and huffing and puffing.

“Right, left, and down! That’s good, start again, right, left, and down…Do it again, just like that…”

She continues to sweat as she punches and tosses her black hair back. I creep closer, careful not to let myself be seen.

“Now try a lunge and down.”

Gin throws two left straights and then tries a lunge with her right. I suddenly yank the bag aside and block her right arm. “Boom.” I see the look of astonishment on her face, practically aghast. Quickly, I form a fist and tap her lightly on the chin. “Hey, there, Million Dollar Baby.”

She wriggles free. “What the heck are you doing here?”

“I just wanted to try out this gym.”

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