The Drowning River

by Christobel Kent

  A man in a fluorescent tabard, face upturned, was yelling something up at him in Italian. Jackson looked at Iris blankly for help.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said in Italian, leaning down. ‘What was that?’

  ‘Diluvio,’ said the man. ‘There is some flooding.’

  ‘The Arno?’ asked Iris. ‘The river?’

  The man shrugged, his face slick with water. ‘Maybe,’ he said.

  ‘Maybe soon,’ and he pointed. At the foot of the building, grey water was bubbling up through an iron drain cover. ‘Is better if you evacuate,’ he said. ‘Is temporary.’

  Jackson held up a hand. ‘Sure,’ he said, nodding with eager politeness. ‘Five minutes, yeah?’ The man shrugged, already turning away; further around the piazza Iris saw other fluorescent tabards moving from door to door. At Rivoire, the big flashy bar on the corner, the tables and chairs had gone, and boards were being placed across the ornate threshold.

  Turning back to Iris, all Jackson’s plaintiveness was gone, and he was as excited as a small boy. ‘If we’ve got her sim card, it’s, like, we’ve found her phone.’

  Iris stared at him blankly.

  ‘You can put it in another phone,’ he said, ‘well, actually, not mine, the iPhone – um never mind,’ he finished as he saw her impatience with the technology that had once made him seem so nimble. ‘Gimme yours.’

  Iris handed it over and deftly he slipped off the back, the battery, slid out its sim card, wrapped it carefully in a receipt from the pile of junk still on the floor and handed it to her. He slipped the new card inside in its place, carefully, laboriously put the phone back together and they stared at the screen, waiting. Then there it was, an unfolding logo, an icon. Jackson punched the air; ‘Not even blocked,’ he said triumphantly.

  Iris stared at the tiny bit of Ronnie, glowing up at them.

  ‘See who she was calling, the night of the party,’ she said. Wanting final confirmation that it was him, not Jackson, not some bar owner on the other side of town – not her mother, though fat chance of that. She wanted to know who Ronnie had been talking to when she looked so dreamy and happy leaning out of the big window in the Piazza d’Azeglio.

  Jackson was humming to himself, his fingers flickering over the keypad. In his element. Call info, it said and he handed it to her.

  She flipped back down, two, three, four days ago – 31 October, Halloween, was what she was after, eleven thirty-three p.m., on the left a little arrow to denote a call out. Paolo, it said. She went to the address book; Paolo, an Italian mobile number.

  Yes.

  When Ronnie had been hanging out of the window on the phone to someone who had made her smile all evening, all night, all the next morning, she had been talking to Paolo Massi.

  Not finished yet, though. Iris flipped to the next day, up; 1 November, nine-ten, Claudio; nine-twenty, Jackson. She called Claudio to fix their meeting, then Jackson to get him over, to see if he’d guess, to tease him, only he didn’t guess, did he? They had a glass of wine and she sent him on his way. At ten-forty she had been back on the phone to Paolo; calling him to make last-minute arrangements?

  Then nothing.

  Jackson was at her shoulder. ‘Try missed calls,’ he said, leaning across her. Concentrating, Iris nodded. Outside someone was shouting again. ‘Go and look,’ she said, distractedly. ‘Tell them we’re coming out.’ He was gone.

  Missed calls; Iris. A lot from Iris; she was working backwards this time, from today, yesterday, Friday; Iris, Iris, all Iris. All those calls Iris had made, that niggling anxiety when she heard, The number you are calling is not in service.

  One from a girl they’d known at school, Joey, on an English landline, one from Jonathan, the boy who’d called Iris the fat chick. Just random, bored calls, Iris imagined, if she’d answered they’d have said, Hey, Ron, what’s up? What ya doin? I’m bored. But, still, only two calls? Iris felt suddenly sad for Ronnie, who didn’t have so many friends after all.

  None from her mother.

  And none from Paolo; not then. Iris scrolled down further, and there they were, 1 November, three calls, one after the other, 12.03, 12.05, 12.06; urgent calls, that had gone unanswered. All from the same mobile Ronnie had called at the end of the Halloween party; only this time, Paolo was calling her, on the day she went missing, over and over again.

  ‘We have to go,’ said Jackson, from the window, pulling on a jacket. And they went.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The Rain Beat On the roof of the car and Sandro sat inside, listening, alone. He needed to be on his own, to get things in the right order.

  Luisa had known that; it was one of the many good things about Luisa, that she could read the runes. ‘Come on, Giuli,’ she’d said briskly to the girl, hauling her to her feet. ‘Let’s make ourselves scarce. Let’s go find Cat Lady.’ Giulietta had been going over it all again and again until Sandro’s head hurt. ‘So it was him?’ she said, after the waiter had left.

  All Sandro could think, his heart going down like a stone, was no, no, no. But he had no reason to doubt what Beppe DiLieto had said.

  Sure, he was a dubious sort, but, then, seasonal waiting staff always were, drifters, barely employable. Watching the man talk, Sandro had noticed that DiLieto’s eyes were a different colour, one a faded grey-blue and the other yellowy hazel; there was a breed of cat, he dimly remembered, with the same combination. It lent him an otherworldly air. The hands shook a little, he combed his thinning hair over, he was on the camp side but that was neither here nor there, waiters often were. He’d been decent; he’d come all the way over to Nello on his day off, hadn’t he? When Luisa called, and never mind if a whole season of unemployment yawned ahead of the man now the rain had come.

  Sandro was sitting in the car on the Via Romana, outside the gate to the Boboli, parked between two dumpsters, opposite the darkened window of the Galleria Massi. Through the grey skein of pouring rain he could see the dark stretch of woodland; he stared up at it, as if willing it to give him an answer, but it gave nothing back.

  There had been a time, such as the occasion he’d gone looking for a murderer in a godforsaken corner of the city’s outskirts between highways and electricity substations and trailer parks, and had found him there, that Sandro had had a spark of instinct for a terrible place. He was a rational man, but he couldn’t quite shake off his primitive belief that violence left its mark behind it, as if somehow it turned the air bad. From this stretch of green alleys and ancient trees, though, he felt nothing.

  The rain battered out its tattoo on the car roof; you have no time left, it told him, no time to lose. No time to sit here waiting for that worn-out old instinct to finally kick in and say, here. Somewhere across the street a light went off.

  What was the hurry? The girl was almost certainly dead by now, if she hadn’t been dead for days, hastily buried under the dust and gravel on the hillside above him. They’d find her eventually. It was the answer he’d been avoiding for days, since he saw that photograph in the paper.

  They’d showed it to Beppe DiLieto and his face crumbled, just a little, with self-reproach. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘I should have said something earlier, shouldn’t I?’

  No need to ask why, or where he’d been when the Carabinieri had been asking questions – from the moment Beppe DiLieto, scarecrow-thin, lifted his tremulous hand to correct Sandro’s order, four coffees, to say, ‘And I might have a little something in mine, if you please,’ you could see that he was a bit of a drinker. Laid off for the winter and crawling home with a box of cheap booze, he’d only resurfaced to go back to the supermarket, probably; what would he be doing reading newspapers?

  Sandro had been patient with him, felt a tug of fellow feeling for a man long past his best. He let him drink his coffee that was more grappa than coffee, then beckoned for another one. The old padrone had looked mistrustfully at Beppe DiLieto, but Luisa had given him a pleading smile. ‘A favour,’ she said, ‘just another fifteen minutes?’ and h
e relented, though when he set DiLieto’s little cup down it rattled disapprovingly.

  Then at last the trembling hand was still, and the coffee gone. He gazed into the dregs, his two-coloured eyes watery.

  ‘I served them, yes, I served them,’ DiLieto began. ‘It was a beautiful day, I think I was serving five, maybe six tables on the terrace when he arrived. He arrived first, you see; she came about five minutes after. The other tables were mostly Americans, one Japanese couple.’

  All foreigners, thought Sandro. No Italian would sit outside in November, even if the sun was shining.

  ‘I was surprised when he sat down,’ said the waiter, as if he’d read Sandro’s thoughts, ‘because it wasn’t that warm. Of course, when she arrived – the situation was clearer. When I saw that she was English.’

  ‘What did you think of them?’ said Sandro, curiously.

  ‘What did I think?’ DiLieto sighed. ‘I don’t know if I. . .’ He wrinkled his papery forehead in an effort to retrieve what he had thought. He nodded and when he spoke it was with care. ‘I thought at first he was a grandfather, or a more distant relative, even a guardian, perhaps. And she was a foreign girl who had to be polite to an old man.’

  Fair enough, thought Sandro, I can live with that. But DiLieto went on.

  ‘Of course, after – what happened, that went out of the window.’

  Here it comes, thought Sandro. ‘What do you mean?’ he said carefully. ‘Do you mean – the newspaper report? So you did see it in the paper, about the girl?’

  Beppe shook his head, ‘Not really, I mean, I might have glanced at it, but I didn’t realize it was that girl. No. I meant, after what happened, later. What he did to her – I mean –’

  ‘Take this step by step, please.’ Sandro felt hope ebb away. He prompted; ‘You served them.’

  Again DiLieto seemed to be making an effort to be methodical. ‘He had a small glass of Four Roses.’ He paused. ‘And she had a glass of champagne.’

  ‘Huh,’ said Sandro, thinking, at eleven-thirty in the morning? And before he could stop himself, ‘That must have been expensive.’

  ‘He paid,’ said DiLieto, and Sandro nodded; a gentleman.

  ‘Did he – seem to be prompting her to take alcohol?’ he asked.

  Slowly DiLieto pondered. ‘I wouldn’t say so,’ he said. ‘She seemed to be full of high spirits, it seemed to me that they were drinking because they were celebrating. Almost as if – well, young couples on holiday do it, honeymooners.’ His eyes were distant, as if trying to recall an occasion on which a morning drink was innocent.

  Iris March had said that Veronica Hutton had already had some wine before she left the apartment, hadn’t she? She must have been close to drunk, after a third, maybe a fourth glass?

  ‘Did you hear any of their conversation?’ said Sandro.

  ‘Snatches,’ said the waiter, still distant. ‘You know, I had other tables to serve.’

  ‘But you heard some of what they said?’

  ‘Yes.’ He hesitated. ‘That was when – the last table, the one next to them, I – this woman sat there and she took her time ordering, so in fact I did hear what they were saying then. They were talking about art.’ He frowned. ‘Yes, that’s true, they were talking about art. She was getting out a sketch book to show him, very innocent.’

  He spoke resentfully, as if the innocence was an affront.

  ‘But in fact not innocent?’ Sandro prompted him. The hand was trembling on the table again, but Sandro didn’t want to buy him another drink, not yet.

  The waiter seemed to have shrunk into himself at the table. He shrugged. ‘Florence is full of old men who take advantage of young women, by talking to them about art,’ he said. ‘You know this. She was full of excitement, she’d had a bit to drink.’

  ‘And he – what?’ Sandro wanted at all costs not to lead this man with his questions. ‘He took advantage of her?’

  ‘He wasn’t in a rush to do it,’ said Beppe DiLieto, in a voice rich with disillusion. ‘I was there long enough – the woman who – the woman on the next table wanted a camomile, she said, then wasn’t sure if she wanted lemon, typical Florentine artistic sort of skinflint. And he got out his own sketchbooks, showed her some of his stuff, was telling her about the commissions he’d had.’ He paused. ‘I lingered a bit, because I thought they might want another, while I was there.’

  ‘And you wanted to be sure of the kind of man he was?’

  DiLieto shrugged. ‘I wanted to see which way it would go, yes. Because he didn’t strike me as that kind of guy, to begin with. Just goes to show.’

  ‘She was – she’s a pretty girl, isn’t she?’ Luisa said quietly.

  ‘Yes,’ said DiLieto, ‘I suppose she was. And she had her hand on his arm, maybe that’s what did it.’

  ‘Did what?’ Sandro wondered what effect that might have on him, under the influence of a glass of whisky, on a bright November morning, when the end of his life had just come into view.

  ‘That’s how it goes, I’ve noticed,’ said Beppe. ‘Give a girl a drink, she loses her bearings a bit. She was excitable, anyway.’

  On her way to meet her lover, thought Sandro. He was refusing to believe all this; he needed to be more objective. He pushed on.

  ‘So she put her hand on his arm. And then what?’

  ‘I was on my way in to get the orders,’ DiLieto said, ‘and that’s when he made his move.’ He was sitting back in his chair, fleshless as a ventriloquist’s dummy under the cheap suit.

  Sandro saw Giulietta shift in her seat, but she didn’t say anything. They were keeping pretty quiet, for once, the women.

  ‘What move?’ Something in Sandro’s mouth tasted sour.

  ‘Touched her up,’ said DiLieto. ‘A hand in the wrong place. She might have given him a peck on the cheek, and he misinterpreted it.’

  ‘Might have?’

  ‘Well, I did see her lean up and put her face near his, like she was going to give him a kiss, when she had her hand on his arm. Just as I was going back inside.’

  Sandro leaned in. ‘What did you see, exactly?’ He was clutching at straws. ‘Sounds like it was her making the move, not him.’

  DiLieto had that funny, sad, watery look in his eyes. ‘I wasn’t going to hang about staring; we get all sorts doing all sorts in public, American honeymooners are the worst. None of my business.’ Out of the corner of his eye, Sandro saw Luisa nodding.

  ‘Perhaps not,’ said Sandro. Around them the empty restaurant was hushed and dark; outside the light was almost gone under the leaden sky.

  ‘And a peck on the cheek, well – I can’t say I thought anything of it. Except –

  ‘Except I just caught a look of something on his face. Like he’d gone blank, like he wasn’t sure who she was, or who he was. Then I went inside.’

  He sighed, reluctant, dragged himself on. ‘But he must have made the move just as I turned my back because the next thing I knew there was a great racket behind me, one of the chairs went over – and they’re cast iron, you know, weigh a ton, the devil to get back up. So I came back out and the camomile tea lady was on her feet and shouting, saying how disgusting it was, shouldn’t be allowed, filthy old man, get your hands off her, she said.’

  Sandro’s tired brain grappled hopelessly with it, the worst-case scenario, and surrendered.

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then the girl ran off, down the alley towards the vineyard, and he went after her.’

  ‘But no one intervened? No one stopped him?’ Giulietta spoke at last, her face ashen, although Sandro didn’t know if it was in horror at what nice old Claudio had done, or a story of her own she was re-enacting.

  DiLieto turned towards her, his face crumpled with shame. ‘It all happened so quickly,’ he said. ‘And then they were gone and I was left with my tray and a camomile tea, no lemon and the barman shouting at me because they hadn’t paid.’

  ‘What about the other customers?’ said Sandro, despairing.
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  ‘Well, the camomile tea woman, of course, she had a go, set off after them – she was the type – but they were out of sight, she wouldn’t have caught up with them, would she?’

  ‘Hold on,’ said Sandro, ‘hold on – who was she? This camomile tea woman? What did she look like, where did she come from?’

  Beppe looked uncomfortable. ‘I can’t – I can’t really remember that well, you know? I was looking at the old man and the girl while I was taking her order, if the truth be told. She was wearing something over her head, scarf or something. Sort of a duster coat, light-coloured. Arty Florentine type, like I said; I only got an impression.’

  ‘Italian, then,’ said Luisa quietly. Beppe turned to look at her, and nodded. She looked thoughtful. ‘Did you get the impression – did she know either of them, the girl and the old man? Or vice versa?’

  The waiter began to shake his head, then stopped, and shrugged. ‘Well, the girl had her back to her but, you know, I did see the old man look across at the woman, when she was giving me her order, sort of bewildered for a second. Like he might know her from somewhere, he just couldn’t be sure.’ He scratched his temple. ‘And with the scarf – well. There wasn’t much of her to see.’

  ‘She didn’t come back?’ She must be on camera somewhere, thought Sandro, but without much hope. Their solitary witness.

  Beppe shook his head, grey in the face. ‘And the rest of the customers –’ he sighed, ‘well, they just looked the other way, foreigners, on holiday. Perhaps they thought we are all like this, Italians, always shouting, making drama. I just got on with clearing off the tables. I wasn’t to know. . .’ and he drew in a breath. ‘The expression on the old man’s face, though, when the girl leaned over and kissed him.’ He put a hand to his own face as if he might find it there, and Sandro saw the tremor. ‘He looked bad.’

  ‘You should ease up on the drinking,’ he said softly, and saw panic in DiLieto’s eyes.

  There hadn’t seemed any point in going on torturing the man after that.