The Drowning River

by Christobel Kent

  ‘OK,’ said Sandro. ‘I want you to think very carefully. Was he alone? When he went into the water? Did anyone go down there with him? Did anyone – push him?’

  ‘No one pushed him,’ said the boy, laughing as if it was funny. ‘There wasn’t anyone. He was on his own. He came out of the bar and went to the river, all on his own. I thought he would take his clothes off, but he didn’t. I thought they told him at the ambulatorio to do the therapy.’

  Sandro heard him make a slightly panicked sound, a kind of grunt, and wondered if the boy might just hang up on him and run. He tried to think; he knew there was a physio department at the little ambulatorio because they’d treated Luisa for a broken ankle, years back. Whether it was still running he didn’t know; there’d been cutbacks.

  ‘Do you do the therapy?’ asked Sandro quickly, to keep the boy talking. ‘Do you go to the ambulatorio here?’ It might be why the boy hung out down here; he couldn’t think of any other reason anyone would come to the Lungarno Santa Rosa.

  ‘They’ve finished with me,’ said the boy, and he sounded angry. ‘They said I couldn’t come back. It wasn’t the same nurse.’

  ‘What do you mean,’ said Sandro, ‘not the same nurse?’

  ‘The one talked to Claudio, after he came out of the bar, after his drink. She was telling him off. Not the same nurse. Not my nurse.’

  ‘A nurse talked to him?’ He looked across at the ambulatorio; he could see a tall nurse in green scrubs right now, smoking a cigarette.

  ‘She put out her hand and he gave her something,’ said the boy. ‘Maybe he didn’t want it to get wet. He dropped it in her hand.’

  ‘Did they say anything?’ asked Sandro. ‘Did you hear what they said?’

  ‘I saw their mouths move,’ said the boy. ‘Don’t you remember?’

  ‘I wasn’t there,’ said Sandro, close to despair, trying to be patient. ‘How could I remember?’

  ‘That’s what she said,’ the boy went on in his monotone. ‘Don’t you remember – that’s what she said.’

  She must have tried to help, thought Sandro. What would he have given her? His ID? A letter? Surely she’d have come forward?

  ‘What did she look like?’ He realized there was almost no point in asking an autistic person such a question. ‘Is that her now?’ he said. There was a pause. ‘On the steps of the hospital?’ he prompted. Craning his neck, he saw the overgrown boy get to his feet.

  ‘No,’ said the boy, ‘wrong colour. That one’s the wrong colour. I have to go now. I have to go now.’

  ‘No,’ said Sandro urgently and he pushed away from the wall. ‘Come back – don’t – please –’ He ran to the kerb but had to pull back because a truck thundered by and when it had passed all he could see through the rain was a grey, huddled shape flying along the embankment away from him, too far to see, too far to catch, flying like the devil was after him. Poor kid.

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw the nurse watching him; saw her flick her cigarette into a puddle and turn to go back inside. He hurried towards her. She was a tall girl. Wrong colour, mused Sandro, as he came towards her. So the nurse who spoke to Sandro was black?

  ‘Excuse me,’ he called after her. She turned back.

  It took an hour in Personnel with a demoralized-looking temp behind a bare desk, almost half of which was spent trying to persuade her that he was who he said he was, and that he had a genuine request. He showed the girl (Ana Lukic, it said on her tag) the picture of Claudio, and asked, as circumspectly as he could, about black or Asian nurses. The good news for him – although not, he supposed, for the patients – was that the place was running on a skeleton staff, had been for months, and there weren’t many names to check. The ambulatorio certainly had a deserted, run-down feel to it.

  Ana Lukic had a computer, at least, so it didn’t take her long once she knew what she was looking for; she even brightened a little. There were three black nurses and one Filipina; none of them had been on duty the day Claudio had disappeared. Wrong colour; how many gradations of skin colour would he have to consider before he could approximate what wrong colour might mean in the mind of an autistic boy?

  ‘Do you have a physiotherapy unit here still?’ Sandro asked as he stood to leave, more out of curiosity than anything else.

  ‘We do,’ said Ana Lukic defensively.

  ‘All right if I pop up there?’ asked Sandro. ‘I think I remember where it is.’

  There were plenty of cubicles; there was a woman pushing a wide soft broom up and down the aisle between them. But the place was empty. Eventually he found the office, where a middle-aged woman in a white coat sat by a window, smoking.

  ‘They’re closing us down,’ she said, when he asked where everyone was. ‘Moving all physio out to Careggi.’ He asked the same question he’d asked in the office, trying to be delicate all over again, about black nurses. She frowned at him, perplexed. ‘Why do you ask?’ she said, and as Sandro stared at her coat in embarrassment it came to him. White coats. ‘Are you a physio?’ he asked, and she nodded, still frowning. The girl on the steps was the wrong colour because she was wearing green scrubs; up here they wore white. The medics the boy knew – they were physiotherapists, maybe, rather than nurses, but how was he to know the difference?

  Sandro’s elation subsided when he came up against a brick wall all over again. ‘Well, I’ll ask around,’ the woman said, looking at the picture of Claudio, ‘but I certainly didn’t talk to him, and it’s been just me all week.’ She sighed. ‘Was he the guy they found in the river?’ Sandro nodded; he handed her a card and watched as she poked it into an overstuffed desk-tidy. ‘I heard he had Alzheimer’s,’ she said with a shrug. ‘Happens all the time. They wander off.’

  Outside in the rain again and no further ahead, Sandro stood under the dirty concrete pillars of the ambulatorio, and stared across the road at the playground, then back towards the bar. Someone tried to help him, thought Sandro, that’s something. And now at least he knew Claudio went into the water on his own. And he knew when.

  And now he knew whose voice he wanted to hear.

  Chapter Ten

  When Luisa Answered, He could tell the shop was busy behind her, all those tourists come in to keep warm and dry, fingering the goods. He could hear the harried tone in her voice.

  ‘I tried to call you,’ she said.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he said, unable to keep the anxiety out of his voice. ‘Sweetheart?’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Sandro,’ she said, ‘it’s not about that. I’m fine. You start calling me sweetheart in public I’m going to get into a terrible state.’

  ‘So what is it about, then?’ he said, trying not to sound petulant.

  ‘I’ve got a customer for you,’ she said, then, ‘hold on,’ and her voice turned muffled as she talked away from him. ‘Giusy, can you do this lady for me? Just give me a minute.’

  When she spoke again the quality of the sound was different and he knew she’d ducked into the stockroom, her voice muffled by shoe boxes and cellophane-hung party dresses.

  ‘A customer for me?’ he said stupidly, thinking he can’t have understood. She must have been talking to Giusy, the deputy manageress.

  ‘Yes, you,’ said Luisa with impatience. ‘Listen, it’s all a bit mad. It’s a client, a foreign client, didn’t I tell you they’d come to you?’ She paused then, ‘Only this one called from Dubai, if you can believe that,’ and Sandro knew she was considering her own indiscretion, but she hurried on. ‘Anyway, I might have said to a few people, and one of those people might have been the Contessa Badigliani who has the place in the Piazza d’Azeglio – ’ and only then did she pause for breath.

  Dubai? Sandro couldn’t take it in.

  Luisa was off again. ‘Right. Have you read about the girl they’re looking for?’ she said. ‘They found her bag in the Boboli, a Carabinieri case?’

  The missing girl. Sandro squeezed his eyes shut in a futile, childish attempt to avert something, but
Luisa went on. ‘Well, she is – or she was – staying in Giovanna Badigliani’s piano nobile. And the mother’s all worked up, says the Contessa, doesn’t trust the Carabinieri, stuck out there in the desert.’

  ‘Stuck?’ said Sandro incredulously.

  ‘Can’t get back, not in a hurry anyway. I don’t know the details.’

  Sandro leaned back against the cold flank of the building. Thought of this woman in the desert, thought with resentment of the blazing heat, the empty skies. ‘She needs someone to find out what’s going on?’ he said, reluctantly. ‘Make enquiries. About the missing girl.’

  ‘That’s it,’ said Luisa with relief. ‘The mother doesn’t seem to think – well, it’s happened before; she’s a live one, apparently. Just a matter of fielding the Carabinieri. I gave Giovanna Badigliani your number.’

  ‘Right,’ said Sandro helplessly. He wanted to run a mile from this complication; he didn’t want to track down a runaway, he didn’t want to butter up the Carabinieri, but mostly he just had a bad feeling about the whole business.

  ‘OK,’ he said, defeated because although he didn’t believe in fate, he knew that there was no other word for it. He’d turned the newspaper over so he wouldn’t have to look at that girl’s face and some power beyond him had turned it back over and held it up to his eyes. He sighed, pulled the paper out of his pocket and made himself study it.

  The girl, wide-eyed but sly, a typical pretty teenage girl, knowing her own power, or thinking she did. The photo of the school’s frontage.

  ‘She was at the Scuola Massi,’ he said. ‘How do I know that name?’

  ‘Caro,’ said Luisa patiently, ‘do keep up. Badigliani’ll have recommended them, she sends everyone there, the usual stitch-up.’

  ‘But I’m sure I’ve heard of Massi,’ Sandro went on, doggedly.

  Luisa sighed. ‘I don’t know, caro. It’s an old family.’ She paused, then went on, grudgingly. ‘A good family, I suppose, partisans, all that, the father ran a printing press through the war.’

  ‘But do you know them?’

  Luisa clicked her tongue, thinking. ‘Not him. The wife – Anna? Yes, Anna Massi, not that we’re on first-name terms. She comes into the shop now and again. It’s always the good families of Florence that complain about how they can’t move for the tourists in here any more; she’s one of those.’ There was a pause, and she lowered her voice a touch. ‘You never know who might be in. That set, the old families, they wander in and out of here like they owned the place, expecting discounts.’

  Sandro tried to summon up a picture of the couple; had he seen them in some social setting? Perhaps a newspaper photograph at one of the cocktail parties they held – for charity, of course – at the Palazzo Corsini or the Torrigiani gardens. He knew it quite likely had nothing to do with anything – why should it? But it seemed important; what he needed to get his bearings in this case. He was floundering, and he wanted a few facts.

  ‘So what do you know about her?’

  ‘Well,’ said Luisa; he could see her frown of concentration in his mind’s eye. ‘Anna Massi, Dio, one of those women, could be any age, the way she behaves, but she must be around fifty.’ Then, grudgingly, ‘Pretty, if you like that kind of thing. Dark-haired, big eyes.’

  ‘The way she behaves?’

  ‘She doesn’t seem to care too much how she dresses generally’ – Sandro smiled inwardly despite himself: in Luisa’s book, this was a sign of mental imbalance – ‘only she’s got a thing about shoes. She’s always trying on completely ridiculous shoes. Only the other week she had the high-heeled grey suede, so impractical, and five hundred euros to boot.’

  Sandro felt a twinge of pity for the woman, despite himself, under Luisa’s watchful eye. And he didn’t know how he could fit a shoe fetish into this, but five hundred euros was a lot of cash. ‘The school must be doing well,’ he said, absently, trying to work it out. ‘Still, maybe there’s a lot of money in art students.’ He chewed on his lip; he knew he’d heard the name Massi before, and in connection with an investigation, too; the explanation was coming to him, but it was maddeningly incomplete. ‘Are there – well, rumours? Of any kind? About the Massi family, or the school?’

  He was close to giving up on this; it was a waste of time, a tactic to avoid doing what he dreaded, which was talking to the Carabinieri.

  ‘A lot of people wonder how the marriage works,’ said Luisa, thoughtfully. ‘But they probably wonder that about us, too.’ She laughed.

  Sandro was thinking hard. ‘I think it was the Guardia della Finanza,’ he said, finally. ‘I have a feeling that name, Massi, came up in a tax fraud investigation.’

  ‘Whose hasn’t?’ said Luisa, impatiently. ‘Sounds like a bit of a red herring to me, the girl’s just run off with a boyfriend. Go see the Carabinieri, caro.’

  Sandro grunted. ‘You’re right, as usual,’ he said, resignedly. ‘I’ll go right away.’

  ‘That’s all, then,’ said Luisa, but he heard hesitation before she went on, hastily. ‘And my hospital appointment’s fixed for Monday. They called me.’

  ‘That’s good,’ said Sandro as easily as he could manage. Although he was thinking, So quickly? They must be worried. ‘Sooner’s always better than later.’

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ said Luisa, and he knew that she was lying, too.

  In the end, they didn’t stay long. There was one carabiniere this time, the taller of the two she’d seen in Massi’s office, and awkwardly Iris showed him through into the salotto. He stared around the room, ill at ease, while Paolo Massi, hands in pockets in the doorway, looked at him with impatience. She’d heard somewhere – actually, she thought it had been Antonella, holding forth over one of their sandwich lunches – that the Carabinieri had a reputation for being slow, for being recruited from impoverished areas of the south, and that everyone despised them. They had always seemed preposterously full of themselves to Iris, looking down their noses as they sat on their gleaming mounts in the Piazza Signoria, long riding capes perfectly draped over the horses’ flanks. Preposterous but romantic.

  This one seemed less confident; Massi had to speak for him, in the end, taking a step out of the shadows.

  ‘There have been no developments,’ he said, forestalling the question that perhaps he could see in her eyes. ‘Maresciallo Falco would like to go over a few things with you.’

  ‘In Italian?’ asked Iris nervously, trying to translate her suspicions in her head; I think someone has been here.

  ‘If you can manage,’ said Massi softly, ‘though I’ve come in case you need me.’ She looked at him with gratitude. ‘On a Saturday?’ she said. ‘Don’t you. . .’ But she didn’t know how to phrase it. Don’t you have a life?

  Paolo seemed to understand. ‘My wife is as worried as I am,’ he said earnestly, and he did have the drained look of someone who hasn’t slept. ‘We – well, we haven’t got our own. But she’s so young. We’re in loco parentis. We have to take responsibility.’ He put both his hands to his forehead.

  So he did have a wife. Weirdly, Iris found herself feeling grateful that he had no children, grateful for his undivided attention. Unlike her own father; unlike Ronnie’s either, putting as many miles as he could between him and his daughter.

  The carabiniere cleared his throat.

  ‘Look,’ said Massi, holding up a hand to the man in apology, ‘why don’t you try in Italian? I’ll – I’ll keep out of the way, just call if you need me. OK?’ He seemed uneasy.

  ‘All right,’ said Iris. ‘But look – Mr Massi, Paolo. I think someone’s been here. I think someone’s been in the flat, I don’t know why. Maybe – looking for something.’ Even as she said the words she thought they sounded ridiculous, melodramatic.

  ‘What?’ said Massi, and he looked about him, as if the person, whoever it had been, might still be there. Whoever it had been. And Iris’s heart gave a great leap.

  ‘Ronnie,’ she said. ‘It could be Ronnie, couldn’t it? It could be he
r, popping back? To collect clothes, or something?’

  At the sound of her excitement, the carabiniere got to his feet and said something to Massi impatiently and Massi held up his hand again, backing off.

  ‘OK, OK,’ he said, ‘I think we need to take this slowly.’ And Iris sat down, Falco sat back down, and Massi retreated to the doorway.

  Laboriously Iris began to explain.

  Falco didn’t seem particularly convinced by her clues – the computer, the window. He shrugged. She took the man through the flat, pointing out what she had seen; he made notes, occasionally scratching his head. In the doorway to Ronnie’s room he stopped, looking around, peering inside the open wardrobe and as she followed his gaze Iris’s excitement ebbed.

  She’d had it in her head that Ronnie had met someone, was just taking off somewhere with some new man, and what she’d have come back for would be to pick up some more clothes. It had all seemed to slip into place, a non-nightmare scenario, Serena right all along, and Ronnie loved her clothes, it’d be just like her to pack a few bits – a capsule wardrobe, ha – and decide she needed more. The only problem was, they were all still there, the dresses hanging in the massive dark wardrobe, the stack of jeans on the shelves, the favourite purple cashmere sweater.

  ‘Her passport?’ the carabiniere asked. ‘Documenti?’

  Iris thought; where did Ronnie keep stuff like that? Her own were all together in an elastic band, health card, passport, driving licence, house keys for France, stowed carefully underneath a book in the bedside drawer. She frowned, thinking. Trying to visualize the last time she’d seen Ronnie do anything with her passport.

  ‘It was not in the handbag,’ said Falco, interrupting her train of thought. ‘Did she keep it on her person usually? In this country you have to carry the documents with you.’ His expression was one of unsmiling reproof.

  ‘We tell them at the beginning of the course,’ Massi said wearily.

  ‘Ronnie wasn’t used to that,’ Iris apologized, to both of them. ‘We don’t have to do it in England.’ She averted her gaze from Falco’s look of faint disdain and tried to get back to Ronnie.