A Season for the Dead

by David Hewson

  She took in the TV clip, and the possessive way in which it portrayed him, with her customary passivity. Costa apologized. Sara said, simply, ‘It’s your job, isn’t it? But I don’t understand why you think he’ll come. If there are so many police around and the press too. It would be stupid.’

  ‘It’s a gamble,’ he replied, trying to convince himself. ‘I guess we’re hoping he can’t resist taking a look.’

  This was the best he could do. Falcone was, he judged, either clutching at straws or playing some deeper game altogether.

  He’d told her about Marco in the car, withholding nothing. To his surprise she’d turned to stare at him and there was something new in her eyes, a different expression, of sympathy and perhaps something more: understanding.

  ‘What do you want me to do? How do I talk to him?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t have an easy answer for that. At least I never found one myself. Treat him as if nothing’s different. I think he likes that. He likes to amuse, too, and be amused.’

  She was silent for the rest of the journey. Fifteen minutes later they left the city, entered the countryside off the Appian Way, and passed through the media posse at the front gate.

  Bea was at the big barn-door entrance, waiting. She wore a gaudy floral shirt and cream trousers. Her tanned arms were crossed. She seemed ambivalent about welcoming a stranger into the house.

  ‘How is he?’ Nic asked. The inevitable question.

  ‘Hungry. Or so he says. You kept him waiting.’

  ‘Sorry.’ He glanced at Sara. ‘We have a visitor.’

  ‘So I gather.’ She held out her slim hand and examined Sara Farnese frankly. ‘Don’t let the old devil talk you into giving him wine. Or anything else for that matter. He’s sick but he’s not beyond mischief. And mind the dog. He’s funny with women. It’s a family trait.’

  There was a scratching from behind the half-closed door. A paw worked its way around the woodwork and made the gap wide enough for a small body to squirm through. Pepe saw Bea and sat immediately, emitting a low growl.

  ‘See what I mean?’ Bea asked.

  Sara reached down and touched the creature’s head. It watched her warily then lifted its chin, deigning to be stroked. It had typical terrier colouring: white, brown and black, now tinged with the distinct grey of age.

  ‘You seem to be accepted,’ Bea said, surprised. ‘It’s a rare honour. I’ve known that beast for a decade or more and it’s only in the last few months he’s stopped trying to savage me.’

  Sara smiled and stroked the dog more fondly. He closed his eyes, delighted. ‘Dogs are easier than people,’ she said.

  ‘This is the Costa household,’ Bea replied. ‘“Easy” never comes into it. Am I right, Nic?’

  ‘No argument there.’ He kissed her cheek. ‘Thanks, Bea. You can come tomorrow? I don’t want to press you if it’s awkward.’

  ‘I don’t want to be anywhere else,’ she said, and Sara noticed how she failed to meet his eyes when she said this. ‘It’s just selfish, I know. You can’t keep me out.’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of trying. He needs you. We all do. We always have.’

  ‘The ever loyal servant,’ she said, with a measure of bitterness. ‘I’m sorry. I …’

  She walked briskly to her car, shaking her head. Sara watched her go. She was an intense person, she thought. But Bea needed the Costa family as much as they needed her.

  The dog looked at her, barked once, then turned into the house. Sara followed him inside and walked straight to Marco Costa in his wheelchair, taking his hand, smiling, full of a level of small talk Nic had never expected. While he took her bags upstairs, Marco guided her around the ground floor, the dog following on faithfully behind in his tracks. His son then did the same for the rest of the sprawling house. She was staying in Giulia’s room on the first floor, one of six, at the far end from his own. It was private, with its own bath, and, like the house itself, secure. There was only the single barn door into the farm. Marco had insisted on the authentic, bucolic design for all its inconveniences. His son was satisfied that it was a good choice for the purpose he had outlined to Falcone and surprised too to find that he was looking at the place in a different way through Sara’s enthusiastic eyes. When the tour was over she followed him downstairs looking more content than at any time since they had first met. This was, he realized from what she had told him about herself, something foreign to her: a home.

  Marco Costa dressed for dinner: a white shirt, impeccably pressed by Bea, black trousers and a silk neck scarf which hid the scar of an operation. The old man had combed his thinning hair carefully. The spotlights in the farmhouse kitchen made his face seem cruelly cadaverous. Nic Costa had grown up seeing his father’s round, caring, persistent features at every turn of his life. They were losing their form now under the punishment of the disease. The generous skin was sagging, as if something was removing the vitality that lay beneath the surface. And this was an entirely physical ailment. His father’s personality, so warm when he wished it to be, and his quick intelligence were undiminished.

  The three of them sat around the table eating pasta and salad and Nic Costa was astonished to find that he was the one feeling uncomfortable. Sara and his father seemed to have come to accept each other, as if they recognized some mutual trait.

  ‘You’ve a beautiful house,’ she said.

  ‘We built it,’ Marco boasted. ‘Most of it, anyway. All with local stone. There’s masonry here that Seneca might have touched. Forget all the nonsense the press wrote about Red Marco and his country palace. When I bought this plot no one wanted to live here and it cost me next to nothing. I don’t care what it’s worth now. What you see is what we created, through our own labour, with no help from anyone.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Nic agreed. ‘No arguing there. I spent five years sleeping in a bedroom without heating, next to a bathroom with no running water. We were given a fine proletarian upbringing.’

  ‘Quite right too,’ his father declared.

  ‘Except,’ Nic objected, ‘I seem to recall you grew up in a nice, comfortable council apartment …’

  ‘Which is why I knew what was best for my own offspring. Look at this place, Nic. It’s too familiar for you to see it properly but I can still remember how much we put into it. I can look at some of the brickwork and recall your mother laying in the mortar. I can touch something you plastered, and pretty well too, when you were thirteen. You could have made a builder. Instead it’s his sister who’s the artisan. I’ll show you her paintings later. She gets that from her mother. Whatever he has comes from me, I guess.’

  Sara raised a glass to them both. ‘I don’t think either of you have much to complain about.’

  ‘No,’ Marco replied, looking at his son with an obvious measure of pride. ‘I don’t believe we have.’

  ‘Drink,’ the old man added mournfully, watching the red wine in her glass. ‘Lost pleasures.’ He looked at her frankly. ‘My son tells me you never had a home like this. Your parents died when you were young.’

  She shrugged. It occurred to Nic that she was never unwilling to talk about herself. What was missing, all too often, were the details, which had to be prised from her carefully, one at a time. ‘I don’t recall ever living at home with them. I was at a convent school in Paris in the early years. There was an accident.’

  ‘I can’t imagine what that would be like,’ Marco said.

  ‘The nuns were kind to me. I never lacked anything. Money least of all.’

  ‘Money and happiness,’ the old man declared, ‘exist apart from each other. When I was in politics I met some of the richest and most miserable men in Italy. Five minutes’ walk from that door I could take you to people who are dirt poor and wouldn’t exchange their lives with anyone’s.’

  ‘Money with happiness,’ Nic said. ‘I think that’s the goal.’

  ‘Really?’ His father looked disappointed. ‘Why? Money’s something you can strive for, something you can make
yourself. Happiness, in my experience, only comes from others, when they decide to give it to you. You can’t force people to do that, not even with money, though there’s plenty out there who seem to think otherwise. It has to be earned and that’s what makes it worthwhile.’

  Sara finished her wine. Nic refilled the glass. She was dressed down tonight: a blue shirt with an exotic pattern, dark trousers. She looked young, naïve almost. She was relaxed too; the hard mask she wore so much of the time was gone. He wondered about her life; why no man had come to fill it properly, and, against his own instincts, could not help but wonder what was needed for that role. There would be pre-conditions. Honesty lay at the base of any relationship. He felt that strongly, so strongly it had ruined several of the liaisons he had enjoyed in the past. To love someone demanded more than physical attraction. There had to be some closeness, some pact of alliance against the cold, inexplicable vagaries of the world. Without those any affair was, it seemed to him, doomed to be a brief, shallow ghost of passion, something Sara Farnese seemed to know well.

  ‘Is that what a family’s for?’ she asked. ‘To give you that love?’

  ‘Ideally,’ Marco agreed. ‘I hope we did that. Not perfectly perhaps, but then families aren’t about perfection. They’re about trying.’ He stared at Nic. ‘Any complaints?’

  ‘You made me read Marx when I was ten.’

  ‘And the Bible would have been worse?’

  He thought about this. ‘Probably not. I was ten. I wouldn’t have taken much notice of either.’

  ‘So there. Where’s the harm? But don’t think families are some kind of magic formula for happiness. They can cure you, they can kill you too when they go wrong.’ The old man saw her reaction and grimaced. ‘Sorry, I was being stupid.’

  ‘Why?’ Nic asked. ‘It’s true. You should see some of the families I meet.’

  ‘But the alternative,’ she said, ‘is to walk down the middle. You know the highs. You know the lows. I don’t really. It’s like being … incomplete somehow. You’re lucky. Both of you.’

  The two men glanced uneasily at each other. It had not been the most comfortable of relationships at times and each bore equal weight of guilt and resentment for some of the arguments that had occurred in the past. In the present circumstances these seemed petty matters. There was a reckoning coming, and certain things needed to be said.

  ‘You’re right, we’re lucky,’ Marco Costa said, watching her wine glass enviously. ‘I’m a stubborn old man who always thought he knew what was best for the world. I don’t imagine that made me an easy person at times.’

  ‘You can say that again,’ Nic agreed. ‘But that was never the problem. It was the fact we always lived under your shadow. We were always the offspring of Red Marco, the man in the papers, the one who made the headlines. We were never individuals in our own right. We were parts of you. I know that wasn’t your intention but it’s what happened and it was hard. To have parents you loved so much you couldn’t quite separate their identity from your own.’

  The old man laughed. ‘Now I understand! You see what this woman does? Tells us something we should all have seen years ago. I bring you three up as good revolutionaries. And what do you become? A cop, an American lawyer and an artist, and you do this in order to say, “We are ourselves.” Good for you, son. More power to your elbow.’

  Nic smiled. It was, he thought, the first time he had ever heard his father approve explicitly of his career.

  Marco raised his glass to Sara. ‘And thanks to you too. For extracting this from us. You grew up in a convent. Is this the Christian in you?’

  ‘You mean do I believe?’

  ‘Exactly!’ It was as if no one had ever asked her.

  ‘I suppose so,’ she answered. ‘I go to church sometimes. I pray and it makes me feel better, though I’m not so sure I think there’s a God. If there were, he would surely do something about the state of the world. That old excuse about free will isn’t good enough. Still, as a way of explaining why we live, why we do what we do, it has a point. And they’re very beautiful stories, some of them anyway. I always thought that as a child when they were read to me in the convent. Beauty counts. I don’t know anything better.’

  Marco stared out of the window, into the darkness, thinking. ‘I suppose I’m meant to argue it’s politics. Communism or social democracy. I don’t think I have the energy any more.’

  Nic felt a dark thought rising at the back of his head. ‘You’re kidding me?’

  ‘No. Oh, it’s not the sickness, Nic. It’s just being realistic. What matters, I think, is that you believe in something, and something that’s not too comfortable, something that keeps you awake at night from time to time. If that’s religion, so be it. I never took you into that chapel down the road but you know the story, surely? That it was where Peter stopped while fleeing Rome, and Christ appeared to him. “Domine, Quo Vadis?” he asked. Lord, where are you going? And what did Jesus say? “To Rome to be crucified again.” It’s just a story, of course. That doesn’t make it any the less powerful. The Church then wasn’t what it is now. Peter would surely be horrified if he saw what’s been built in his name in the Vatican. These people were revolutionaries. They were trying to change the entire Roman state, and the world after that. They weren’t persecuted for no reason. Their beliefs were dangerous, treasonable. What the story of Quo Vadis is about is not giving up, not turning round when you’re in trouble. Remembering that people have made sacrifices to get you where you are. Sometimes the biggest sacrifice of all.’

  He closed his eyes briefly. Nic wondered if he was in pain. ‘I haven’t told you this before,’ he said. ‘But that was why I bought this plot of land. Because it was so close to that chapel. I thought it would serve as a reminder in the hard times, and it did. You know something else? If I’d been alive then I would have joined them. I would have been a Christian too. Maybe things will change sometime and people like me will take to it again. I don’t know, but I do know we all need some kind of faith.’

  ‘What’s yours now?’ Sara asked carefully. ‘The same as you always believed?’

  ‘That’s a dead faith,’ he answered. ‘It killed itself before any of us ever had the chance to understand if it would work.’

  He looked at his son. ‘My faith rests in my children. This one in particular. One day Nic will find his calling. Perhaps in the police, where he’ll cast out all those crooked bastards who give this country a bad name. Perhaps elsewhere. I don’t know but I have faith it will happen, even if he doesn’t believe it himself.’

  There was a knock on the door.

  ‘I’ll get it,’ Nic said. ‘There are too many confessions for me tonight.’

  They watched him go to the front of the house, take his police pistol out of the shoulder holster that lay on his carefully folded jacket, and gingerly open the door latch. There was an exchange of low, male voices.

  He came back and said, ‘Someone needs to see me. Outside. He doesn’t want to come into the house. There’s a guard by the door. Keep it locked. I’ll let myself in. You don’t have to wait up.’

  Marco Costa nodded at the dog. ‘Don’t worry. We’ve got protection.’

  Sara laughed. Nic looked at the two of them and the animal, its head cocked to one side, peering at him. He tried to understand why they should be so comfortable in each other’s company. Then he mumbled an excuse and was gone.

  ‘Did I make him feel awkward?’ the old man asked, feeding the rest of his food to the dog.

  ‘A little, I think,’ she said. ‘There’s a conversation he needs to have with you. He can’t do it with me around.’

  Marco Costa’s shoulders rose. A dry laugh emerged from his throat. ‘Sara. Without you around we would never have spoken like that at all. That was the frankest talk we’ve had in years. You were the catalyst. We’re both grateful.’

  She was flattered by his compliment. ‘I did nothing, but if that nothing helped I’m glad.’

  He nodd
ed at the bottle. ‘Now I’ll have some wine.’

  She snatched it away from his grasping hand. ‘No.’

  ‘Whose house is this, girl?’ he demanded. ‘For pity’s sake. You can’t refuse a dying man a glass.’

  ‘Convince your son of that, not me.’ She started to clear the table of the plates, the glasses and the wine. ‘If he doesn’t want you drinking, he’s got a reason.’

  ‘I suppose a cigarette’s out of the question then? It’s medicinal.’

  ‘Medicinal cigarettes?’

  ‘These ones are. All the way from Morocco. Or Afghanistan if you prefer.’

  She tut-tutted and loaded the dishwasher. ‘Are you serious? Your son’s a policeman.’

  ‘It eases the pain. Really it does.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Jesus,’ Marco Costa moaned. ‘Relax. There are no medicinal cigarettes. You know you’re the first woman he’s brought back that I can’t wind around my little finger. What irony.’

  Sara returned with a bottle of mineral water and poured some for both of them. ‘I don’t believe I quite fit that picture. I’m not here under the same circumstances, am I?’

  The old man’s face hardened in mock anger. ‘So, there’s something wrong with my son, is there? Not intellectual enough for the likes of you? You should hear him talk about painting. About Caravaggio. That’s one legacy I left him. He knows a rebel when he sees one, and he knows a hell of a lot about him.’

  She didn’t blush. ‘I’m not rising to the bait, Marco.’

  ‘Ah. You’re thinking he looks down on you for all this publicity.’

  She sighed. ‘And why shouldn’t he? I thought I led a normal life. Now I’m painted like some … creature.’

  ‘Pah! The press. If you listen to what they say you’ll go crazy. You know what you are. He knows too.’

  ‘Quite. It still shocks him. I see it on his face from time to time. Perhaps he’s right.’ She toyed with her glass. ‘I like being on my own. I don’t feel the need to be close to anyone. I can take men, I can leave them. It doesn’t bother me.’