by Sarah Dunant
She sat on my lap, holding it to her head, as I hugged her tight. To my surprise my calm was as great as her distress, and after a while she seemed to take comfort from it, allowing herself to be stilled and quietened. The tears subsided, then finally stopped altogether. We sat in silence, her body hot and clammy in mine. Eventually curiosity got the better of her and she put up a hand to feel the lump.
“What d’you think?” I said. “Egg or billiard ball?”
She made a clucking noise with her teeth. “Mum always says it hurt the cupboard more than it did me.”
“Oh, I see. You hit it regularly, do you?”
“Steeellla,” she complained, then relaxed back against me. We stayed like that for a few moments. We were, I realized, both so tired.
I put her in her pajamas and brushed out her hair carefully so it wouldn’t hurt the bump while we sat together watching a rerun of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids on the television. While she seemed fine now I was the one with the jitters. I found the scene of the attack by the giant predatory insects unbearably tense.
After it was over we made hot chocolate and went up to Anna’s bed. It wasn’t yet nine o’clock, and outside summer was still strutting its stuff. I closed the curtains on an outrageously pink sky. I could barely keep my eyes open. Downstairs the answering machine would talk to Paul. If I didn’t pick up his call he would know that was because there was nothing to tell. I could hear about the hotel décor tomorrow morning. I needed to be fresh and early to cope with the school run.
We played Twenty Questions in the gloom for a while, then fell silent. She snuggled into my crook. She felt comfortable there. So did I. You did all right, Stella, a tiny voice said in the back of my skull. I really think you did all right.
“Mummy’s back tomorrow, isn’t she?” she asked, maybe as much as ten minutes later, when I was sure she was already asleep.
“Probably, darling,” I said. “We’ll have to wait and see.”
Away—Sunday P.M.
HE PLACED HER outside in the sunshine, away from the fumes and the chemicals and the dark, in the meadow down by the lake where he had offered to take her that very first day when he had asked her to stay on as his guest and she had refused.
Despite the altitude and the lateness of the hour it was still hot, that blissful un-English heat that drains both energy and tension equally, leaving one listless and sublime. He had chosen somewhere with a tree roof of shade, but of course the shade had traveled with the passage of the sun and by late afternoon she was directly in its glare, the heat soaking into her body, the light poking its way under her eyelids. It was the first thing she became aware of—a shower of shining golden needles raining down on her, trying to get in through the lids.
She opened her eyes and the intensity was so fierce that she had to shut them immediately. She felt sick and heavy, as if she could never get up out of the chair. That was partly to do with the weight upon her. There was something lying across her lap, pinning her to the seat. She opened her eyes again and this time forced herself to look at it. It was a cardboard box, shaped like a shoebox, only much bigger, for boots maybe. Paola’s boots.
She was alive and lying in the garden with Paola’s boots on her lap.
The thought got her halfway to her feet. But the deck chair was low to the ground and her balance still so far from perfect that she fell forward, the box tumbling off her lap and spewing open on the grass, its contents scattering all around.
She found herself on her hands and knees amid a storm of pictures of herself: glossy black-and-white prints of all sizes and shapes, taken in cafés, in mirrors, in bed, drugged and awake, happy and scared, wounded and whole. So many of them. All of them, surely.
Nearby lay two large envelopes. Ripping open the first she loosed a shower of negatives into the air, dark secret strips of frozen moments, the footnotes from a history of obsession, now complete. In the other envelope she found her own wallet, soft with a padding of extra notes. She checked the denominations. Fifty thousand lire. Enough to buy whatever was needed in the way of return tickets, on land and in air. And there, at the very bottom, her passport.
She lay back in the grass clutching it to her chest, her fingers curling themselves in and around its pages, as if by feeling her way through it she somehow became herself again: Anna Franklin, thirty-nine-year-old British tourist on a summer break in Italy, now heading for home.
The sunshine poured over her, heavy and sweet like running honey. It stuck to her skin and her clothes, making her want to give in and relax. She could do that now. She could stay and rest or get up and go. She felt sick and exhausted, but she would cope. He had not killed her. He had set her free. She closed her eyes again and for a while let the sunshine dance across her eyelids.
When she felt she could manage it, she pulled herself to her feet and gathered the contents of the box back into it again. Only now did she notice the plastic bag, which had fallen behind her. In it were a clean set of clothes: trousers, T-shirt, top, and shoes, Paola’s designer wardrobe at its most casual, and—in tissue paper—the wooden horse, its hind leg half-severed halfway up. She held it for a moment, then rewrapped it carefully and put it back in the bag.
She changed her clothes in the forest, rolling the crushed red silk into a tight little bundle and slipping it next to the photographs. Then, tucking the box underneath her arm, she set off along a half-obscured path that snaked its way through the trees. She had been walking for less than a minute when she caught sight of the house ahead in the distance. She stopped, old fear curdling her stomach juices anew. From afar it seemed so benign, emerging out of the forest landscape like an advertisement for summer lets, a beautiful old Tuscan building, proud of its ability to withstand weather and history. The sun was behind her, blowing hot breaths across her shoulders and the back of her neck, teasing her with its warmth. She stood for a long time watching it, wondering if in turn it might be watching her. But she could feel no malevolence. She took a few steps closer.
She realized now that the house was closed up, its shutters drawn tight against the insistent attention of the sun, as if the building too was resting afterward, protecting itself against any further madness of its occupant. She could make out the front gravel drive, and as she did so she could hear again the sound of his feet as he pulled her from the car, the beautiful nausea of the evening sky. But there was no car there now. He had gone. Had he followed his wife into that last good night or simply locked the door on the past and walked away?
As she thought this she realized with a shock that she was no longer so afraid of him. It was as if her freedom and his absence allowed almost an acceptance of him; the way you might feel toward a companion with whom you’ve shared a terrible journey; someone you have disliked, even hated and despised at times, but someone with whom you have seen it through, have come out the other end.
She slipped back into the trees, negotiating her own track through the forest in the direction of the road. She took it slowly, aware of the aftereffects of the drug still washing through her. The sweet, almost familiar sickness played at the edges of her brain, making every step intense, concentrated, so that it took her a long time to cover the couple of miles to the main road, guided onward by the growing sounds of car engines and a haze of sunlight.
Once there, she could probably have got a lift immediately if she’d stuck out her thumb. But the summer traffic that passed her was mainly small cars full of families, and she knew that she couldn’t be close to any child but Lily right now; so instead she stayed parallel to the road, hidden in the forest, and walked on alone. The land continued to climb steeply, the low sun fracturing in between the tall towering trunks of the trees, like the pillars of some vast Gothic cathedral suffused with light. At an intersection half a mile on, the forest began to die away and she saw a sign to the Monastery of the Stigmata of St. Francis of Assisi, an austere chapel perched high on a spectacular outcrop of rock to her right, with its adjacent long white buildings se
eming to sprout straight out of the stone. St. Francis. There was a man who knew a thing or two about trials and tribulations. The people who visited his shrine would be the sort to help a woman in need without asking too many questions.
After all, she had perfected her Italian now.
One way or another she would get herself a lift, if not to Florence then to Arezzo. If not in time for tonight’s flight then in time for tomorrow morning’s. It was over. She was going home.
Away—Sunday P.M.
THE WOMAN WAS lovelier than she had remembered her from the church. But then they hadn’t been this close to each other before.
She was sitting in the middle of an Italian landscape in high summer, cypress trees and dusty roads, with her son’s body draped like a monstrously heavy bolt of cloth across her lap, her crisp blue skirts crushed under the bulk of dead flesh.
Yet despite her body’s complaint, her expression was serene. She was beautiful, younger than she ought to have been given her son’s age and her own suffering, an almost teenage plumpness to her features, a peach-blossom sheen in the brushstrokes of her skin. Her eyes were cast down as befitting her grief and modesty, yet the overall impact was more human than ethereal. She looked more like someone’s daughter or sister than the Mother of God. Take away her awful burden and she would, you might think, have the inclination to go dancing. It was that earthy quality that made her the more arresting, marking her out from a hundred other Madonnas as loving but less alive than her.
Her. The pronoun stuck like a fly in syrup, impossible to miss once you had heard its panic buzzing. “Her.” Of course. This was the “her” in the message on the mobile phone; the “her” that had to make all the right connections, the “her” they had to get back as planned because the client was waiting. The Madonna of Bottoni’s pietà, plucked from a rural Casentino church and spirited away at the bottom of a lover’s gift.
But how and when had she got here? When you are learning to read, you can only get to understand the big words by sounding out all the syllables. She started with what she knew.
Yesterday morning she had stood in front of a tabernacle pietà in a Casentino village, transfixed while a rheumy-eyed old man had waxed lyrical about the minor masterpiece the work had almost been. What was it he had said about it? That there had been a rumor that it might be a work of the eighteenth-century painter Pompea Bottoni: a gift made to a nearby religious house celebrating the entrance of a young woman into their order, a young woman who some believed to be nearer in kin to the painter than would, at the time, have been considered respectable.
Whatever the truth of the story, had the work actually proved to be a Bottoni it would have been of considerable worth. Not simply because it was unusual for a court painter to execute a religious painting, but because the face of the Virgin reflected his talent for portraiture, especially when it came to capturing the features of a daughter he loved but could never acknowledge. All in all, a tasty item for the right collector. If, that is, the Church had been willing to sell it. Which it almost certainly would not.
But as it turned out the Church had never had to make the decision, because the act of restoration had revealed not an original Bottoni but an anonymous nineteenth-century painting, nice enough for a Romanesque altar, but no more than that. A lost opportunity, for both art and Mammon. Cause for disappointment, certainly, but hardly for accusations of fraud, fakery, or theft.
Except that all of those things had, in fact, taken place. The original Bottoni would have been copied while it was in the restorer’s hands. It was the perfect opportunity: restoration was a painstaking and transforming process (as was copying; the same man might well be adept at both), and the painting that came out of the studio would, by definition, not look the same as the one that went in. Since its authenticity had always been conjecture rather than fact, restoration would simply have cleared up the matter in a way which, presumably, even experts would accept.
So the Casentino church would get back a pietà that they could accept and love for what it was—not the real thing—while the actual painting would be on its journey to its new owner. And to keep the operation anonymous, they had selected the perfect courier: an innocent tourist with no connection to the art world and no earthly reason to arouse the attention of Her Majesty’s customs officials in London. Thus Our Lady and her dead son would travel from a Florentine studio to a safe house in West London, from where they could be picked up and delivered by the people who were selling them. No wonder he had been so eager for them to visit the church. What job satisfaction he must have got from seeing the fake successfully installed, while the original was sitting outside in the boot of his car.
So clever, so simple. And so cheap. What had her art lover said the real painting would have been worth? Upwards of three hundred thousand on the open market. And when the market was closed and this was a onetime special, the chance to own something unique, something that no longer even officially existed? Presumably, if that was what turned you on, then you would pay whatever it took to get it. Even with expenses the profit margin would be considerable. Take away the price of a good faker, the services of a talented leather merchant, and the time it took to wind the right woman around your little finger, and you had—what? Two hundred thousand pounds? Probably more. The last item of cost would hardly register anyway. Even drug barons pay their carriers for the stomachaches they cause. Diseases of the heart, however, do not qualify for compensation. All in all, a highly profitable venture.
But only if you got the product home safely. If something went wrong in transit, if the luggage got damaged or mislaid, then all that handsome profit would turn into loss, and the reputation of the supplier would become as dingy and cracked as the paint on an unrestored old master. Not to mention the damage it would do to their monstrous confidence.
She slipped the plump young Madonna back into her firm leather binding, sealing her off from the immorality of the world around her, then made her way back to the station, where, before catching the night train to Florence, she did what had to be done with left luggage.
When the train got in she grabbed a few hours’ sleep on a bench in Santa Maria Novella station, then rang him as early as she dared before she left for the airport: 5:35 A.M. European time. It rang a long time. Where would he be now, this man with his mobile life and phone? At another airport? Reading another set of want ads? Or at the end of a homecoming night with a partner in crime? Ah well, time to wake up now . . .
“Hello, Samuel,” she said, standing by the bank of phones, a tower of coins on the top.
“Who is this?” he said, perplexed rather than sleepy.
“What, forgotten me so soon?”
“Anna?” And to her satisfaction, his astonishment was impossible to miss. “Anna—is that you?”
“Yeah,” she said gaily. “The same. How are you?”
“I’m okay. My God, how incredible to hear your voice. How did you—”
“I got your letter. It was . . . it was very moving. How is she?”
“She’s . . . she’s, er . . . going to be fine. Listen, er . . . I can’t really talk to you now. I’m, er . . . well, I’m still at the hospital, actually. Why don’t you give me your number and I’ll call you back in a bit.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I can’t do that. I’m in Florence, about to get on a train to the airport. I wanted to tell you about your suitcase, but we can leave it if you like.”
“The suitcase? Listen, just hold on for a sec, will you?” The line went quieter, as if he had put a hand over the mouthpiece. She stood and waited, shoving in a few more of her fast-diminishing five-hundred-lire stash. Money-hungry things, mobiles, rather like their owners. Where are you really? she wondered. Hard to tell with a man whose skill was to be close even when he was far away. “Hi. Hi, I’m back.”
“Good. She’s okay, then?”
“Um . . . she’s off the danger list. They can’t tell me any more yet. So what did you want to tell me abou
t the suitcase?”
“It’s just I can’t take it with me. Home, I mean.”
“Why not?” And you could hear that he really wanted to know the answer.
“I . . . I had an accident getting onto the train at Arezzo station yesterday evening. I fell and did my back in. I think I might have strained something. Anyway, I couldn’t carry it anymore. I had to transfer my stuff to my old holdall. It’s got a shoulder strap and I can manage that better.”
There was a pause. He would be thinking very fast now, a dozen roads leading away from a single fact. He would be good at that, presumably. “So what did you do with the bag?”
“I put it in left luggage at Arezzo station. I mean, it was too beautiful just to leave. I thought you’d probably come this way for work sometime, and maybe you could pick it up then. If you give me your address I’ll send you the left luggage receipt when I get home.”
The pause lengthened. Damage limitation. Isn’t that what they call it in flash companies? However good you are, it’s not going to be good enough, she thought sweetly. “Anna. Listen, it’s great to hear from you. Really. I . . . I mean tell me, how on earth did you track me down?”
“Your mobile number, you mean? Oh, I forgot to tell you. While you were in the restaurant last night it rang. I found the receiver in your jacket pocket. The number was in the system and I jotted it down. You were always saying you’d give it to me, remember, but you never got around to it.”
“You took a call for me last night?”
“No. I just heard the phone ring. I didn’t get to it in time. I presume they left a message.” She paused. “Though after I’d read your letter I did wonder if it might have been your wife.” He didn’t say anything. She fed four more coins into the silence. The line flickered.
“You still there?” he said quickly.
“Yes, I’m here. It wasn’t her, was it, Samuel?”
“Er, no . . . no. It was business. Listen, about the case?”