When we try to stand her up, Sophie almost falls down. She howls in pain. She has no shoes and he’s done something to her feet. Cut them. Burnt them. We might get her down the stairs, but then what would we do? Drag her down the long drive? Across the olive groves? He’ll be coming soon and he’ll find us.
I turn to Isabella. ‘Maybe one of us should go for help? Go and find the phone?’
‘Don’t leave!’ Sophie wails. ‘Please don’t leave! He’ll come.’
Isabella looks at me in the dark, both of us terrified. ‘We have to get her out of here,’ she says. ‘We can only do it if we stay together.’ She’s right. He would almost certainly overpower one of us and Sophie. The three of us have a chance. I grab Sophie’s arm and sling it over my shoulder, and Isabella does the same. Between us, we lift her off the chair and out of the fetid, stinking closet.
‘Come on,’ Isabella says. ‘We can carry her like this.’
We each get an arm around Sophie’s waist, and she holds on to Isabella’s shoulder with her good hand. Without the candles it’s dark, but we can see well enough to make our way along the gallery.
‘OK,’ I hear myself saying, ‘that’s great, that’s fine.’ It’s mindless, words to reassure myself as much as Sophie.
We work our way to the head of the stairs, then we have to stop, trying to figure out how to get Sophie down without hurting her more. We decide Isabella will go first since she’s tallest, Sophie will follow a step or two above, her arms over Isabella’s shoulders using her as support, and I will come last, holding Sophie from behind. When we get ourselves in place, Sophie even giggles. Then a glow of lights washes the fan window above the front door.
It’s dim but growing brighter, and for a wonderful second I think it’s the police, that they have somehow found out where we are, that my shadow followed us, and called help. I even whisper, ‘Polizia.’ But Sophie shakes her head.
‘It’s not blue.’ Her voice is very small. ‘A police car or an ambulance would be red or blue,’ she says and I freeze. Isabella looks back at me.
‘It’s him,’ Sophie mews. ‘It’s him.’ The lights are getting brighter. Now we can hear tyres crunching on the gravel.
Sophie starts to scream, but Isabella shoves her hand over her mouth. ‘Quick,’ she hisses, ‘quick, quick!’ And we stagger backwards.
Isabella throws open the door of the first empty room. ‘We have to hide,’ she says. ‘We have to hide!’ But there’s nowhere here to hide except the alcove, and even there there’s barely room for the three of us.
‘We wait,’ Isabella whispers. ‘We’ll hear him go by. Then we run. We can get downstairs. To his car.’
We all nod, but I think: With Sophie? I can’t see Isabella’s face in the dark, but I know she’s thinking the same thing I am. Whoever he is, he’ll be strong and fast. He’s abducted four young, healthy women. And we’ll have only a few seconds between the time he goes along the gallery and the time he realizes Sophie’s not in the closet. I can’t even remember if we shut the door. If he sees it open, he’ll know. And he’ll come looking for us. Right away. Both of us grip Sophie’s arms, and she whimpers. Below, the car stops and we hear a door slam. Footsteps crunch on the gravel and then, all at once, the night is ripped with an explosion of sound.
There is the furious barking of a dog, yelling, running, and more barking. Fonzi. I had completely forgotten about him. He must have followed us up from the groves. A gun cracks, and there is the screeching sound of acceleration, then another shot.
Isabella lets go of Sophie’s arm and screams. She doesn’t care any more who hears her or what they do about it. Instead, she leans against the grimy wall and howls, for her sister and her dog and everything that has been taken from her.
Isabella is still crying when, a few seconds later, the house is washed in lights, and filled with the sound of running footsteps and men yelling, ‘Polizia!’
In the confusion, slamming of doors and shouting, I am more afraid now than I have been all night. Clinging to Sophie, I feel as if I’m drowning, as if a dam has broken inside me, and all the awfulness of what has happened in the last few weeks is rising up in one terrible black wave of fear. When Pallioti finally takes my arm and tries to speak to me, I can’t even hear what he’s saying.
Medics take Sophie away on a stretcher. They wrap Isabella in shiny paper-foil blankets, and even though she is told over and over again that Fonzi is fine, that he screwed up a police stakeout, but nobody shot him and he’s downstairs waiting for her, she can’t stop crying. She apologizes, repeating herself as if she can’t stop saying the words, and finally the police guide her down the stairs, wrapped in a cocoon of blankets.
I sit on the stairs where someone has put me, wrapped in a foil blanket, although it isn’t cold. Below me, half of the Florence police force seems to be streaming in and out of the front door of the villa. There’s an air of euphoria. Policemen slap hands and pat each other on the back. Until they follow the forensics spacesuit people upstairs. Then they come down rather more subdued.
Eventually I hear that, though he got away, they have a clear sighting and, despite the dog, they got a shot at the car. It’s only a matter of time now before they bring him in. He was medium height, medium build, dressed in black. The sports bag he’d taken out of the boot, and subsequently dropped when Fonzi attacked him, is being examined by the scene-of-crime people. A few minutes later a murmur goes around: it contained cord. A knife. And a red silk bag.
From my perch I pick out the cop who fired the shots. He was outside when the car drove in, and would have nabbed this guy, except that he couldn’t bring himself to shoot the German shepherd when it got in the way. He’s tall and thin, with nubbly bones at the back of his neck, and when he finally turns round and climbs the stairs towards me I feel as if I’ve known him a long time. He fixes me with his strange golden eyes. ‘I should thank you,’ he says, ‘for the tulips.’
‘I brought you lunch too. But you’d gone.’
He nods, and we watch each other for a second. Then I ask, ‘Where’s your dog? Or isn’t he your dog?’
He laughs. His face creases up and suddenly he doesn’t look as thin as he did in the portico of an abandoned church. Now he looks like a greyhound. Lean and mean. Like he could be a policeman, if he wore the right uniform. ‘Oh he’s mine all right,’ he says. ‘I left him at home with my wife tonight, though. Sometimes we argue over who gets to take him to work.’
‘Is she a cop too?’
‘No,’ he laughs. ‘She’s a travel agent.’
‘I thought you were an angel.’
“It’s a common mistake.’ He holds out his big El Greco hand. ‘Lorenzo Beretti, Signora Thorcroft. I’m pleased to meet you, officially.’ His grip is warm and strong.
‘How did you know I was here?’ I ask. ‘Tonight?’ Then it dawns on me. He’s my shadow. He always has been. I look over his shoulder for Pallioti, but I can’t see him.
‘You told me,’ Beretti’s saying. ‘I tailed you as far as Signora Lucchese’s. I was waiting to pick you up as you came out, then we got a signal from the cell you were carrying. You left it on long enough so we could triangulate it.’ Of course. I turned it on when I tried to hand it to Isabella, and never turned it off. ‘When we saw that the signal came from here, and not Signora Lucchese’s, we put two and two together.’
‘I’m glad you came up with four.’
Beretti shrugs. ‘I got here first, that’s all. The rest of the cavalry took a little longer.’
‘But you’d been following me before. For weeks.’
He inclines his head. ‘I prefer to think of it as being—what did you say? Angel? You’ve had a few guardian angels, actually. We usually work in teams.’
I think about this for a second. ‘The electricity van?’
He laughs, and I don’t need more of an answer. Then he says, ‘I’m sorry if I frightened you. You weren’t supposed to notice me quite as much as you did. My fault.’
/>
‘No.’ I shake my head. ‘No, you couldn’t know. You—’ I shrug, wondering how I can possibly explain. Finally I just settle for: ‘You look a lot like someone I used to know.’
‘Well,’ Lorenzo Beretti says, ‘I hope he was nice. The someone you used to know.’
‘Yeah. He was.’ Lorenzo smiles at me and turns away.
Pallioti’s standing in the gallery. I don’t know how long he’s been there, but he snaps his cell phone closed. Without being aware of it, I stand up. Something’s going on. There’s a palpable buzz in the hall below.
‘Signora.’ Pallioti takes my arm. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, ‘but I’m going to have to ask you to come with me.’
He hustles me down the stairway, through the crowd, and out into the night. Vans, police cars, unmarked cars and another ambulance are pulled up on the gravel in front of the villa. People turn, looking at us as we hurry by, but when I ask Pallioti again what’s going on all he will do is shake his head and say, ‘I am afraid we have a situation.’
Pierangelo, I think. I stop, feeling like Niobe, turned to stone. But Pallioti takes my arm again. He’s putting me into the back seat of a car.
‘Please,’ he says. ‘I’ll explain on the way. We have to hurry.’
He gets in the other side, and his driver spins us round and down the drive. The carnival-like lights that wash the House of the Birds recede, and soon all I can see is Pallioti’s profile against the window as Viale Galileo flies past. We dive through Porta Romana, the driver switches the siren on, making people part, cars move over, and Pallioti turns to me.
‘We were following him,’ he says. ‘Our most important goal was Signora Sassinelli’s life, so we hoped he’d lead us to her. You got there about the same time. Beretti was going to let him get inside and trap him, separate him from his car. But the dog startled him.’ Pallioti’s face goes still. He looks out of the window past me, as if he’s seeing something on the street. ‘Beretti got off a couple of shots. We found the car.’
‘Is he dead?’ My head feels hollow, like an echo chamber. The words ring back and forth, but Pallioti doesn’t seem to hear them.
‘He must have known the game was over,’ Pallioti says softly. ‘Maybe Babinellio was right, and he wants it to be finished. Anyways, we have him.’
‘You have him?’
Pallioti nods. ‘But he wants to talk to you.’
I stare at him, my tongue as thick and dry as cotton wool. ‘You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to, signora,’ Pallioti says. ‘But I promised the cardinal I would try.’
‘The cardinal?’
Pallioti nods. ‘The cardinal has been following this case closely,’ he says. ‘He’s been very distressed by it.’
The car swings sideways, jumps over a kerb, and as I look out of the window, I realize we’ve turned up past the Uffizi, and are nosing our way into the Piazza della Signoria. Ahead of us, the Palazzo Vecchio is bathed in floodlights. Neptune and David are bright, icy white. Banners fly off the battlements, but no one is sitting at the cafés or buying ice cream. The carriages are gone. There are police cars, and a crowd mills around looking up towards the high-arched windows on the upper floors of the palazzo. We stop, and Pallioti gets out and opens the door for me.
‘Please,’ he says. ‘He’s waiting for you.’
He escorts me past barriers that have been thrown up around the building, and through the courtyard tourists usually come out of, past frescoes and under the little arches where the fountain plays. A carabiniere officer pulls aside a red velvet rope, and Pallioti leads me up the stairs, going faster and faster until finally I take two at a time to keep up with him. Even if I wanted to think, I don’t know if I could. My brain’s closed down, and I see myself from far away, running after Pallioti like a wind-up toy, following him through room after room of the Palazzo Vecchio, as if we’re working our way to the centre of a maze.
Pallioti leads me through the Queen’s apartments, past the entrance to the loggia, through the chapel. People are standing in clumps, whispering. Finally doors swing open, and we come into the anteroom of the Sala dei Gigli.
A knot of men in dark suits stands by the door. One of them is Cardinal D’Erreti.
He’s forsaken his crimson, and is wearing just a suit and dog collar, like he was the last time I saw him, at the restaurant in Santa Croce. This time, though, he doesn’t bless me. Instead, he takes both my hands in his.
‘Signora,’ he says, ‘thank you. I know how difficult this is for you, but you must remember that every human life, every soul, is God’s, and precious. You are the only person he has asked for.’
The cardinal looks at Pallioti, and the doors to the room of the lilies swing open.
The windows are big, and arched, and very high off the floor, the sills themselves shoulder height, as if it’s a room made for giants. Iron grilles run halfway up the glass, so getting up there can’t have been easy. The building’s open late for civic work. He must have got in and run up here before anyone realized what he was doing, then grabbed the chair he’s kicked away, and climbed up to where he’s perched now—balancing on the railing, and holding on to the moulding to keep himself from falling two storeys to the piazza below.
Behind him, lit up like a postcard, I can see the dome of the cathedral, and it occurs to me that’s probably why he chose this window. I wonder how long he’s had it in mind for. He must have bought a ticket like the rest of the world, walked through here with tourists, stood and pretended to admire the Gozzoli frescoes, while really he judged the height, noticed the guards, the chairs, figured how fast he would have to be to grab one before he could be stopped. Babinellio said he was an excellent planner. But this must be at least a change of schedule. Surely he planned to clean up Eden completely, use all four of the red bags before this.
He’s pale. There are bright patches on his cheeks, and his lips look red too, as if he’s wearing lipstick, maybe one of mine. A breeze blows in from the river and I catch the distinct, familiar perfume of acacia.
‘Please—’ I don’t even know who I’m talking to, or what I’m asking for. Apart from not to be here. Not to have this happening.
The cardinal squeezes my shoulder. ‘Every life is sacred, Maria,’ he whispers. And I want to say: He didn’t think that. He didn’t think that when he killed my husband, and Eleanora. When he plucked Isabella’s sister out of the dark and dressed her up like a doll, or flayed the skin off Ginevra Montelleone and took Carlo Fusarno’s mother away from him for ever. Did he think life was sacred then? Did he ever care? But I know the answer. No. No, he didn’t. He didn’t give a damn about their lives. He was way too busy saving their souls.
Marcello sways like a branch hit by a breeze, and everyone in the room gasps.
His eyes are fixed on me, and I can’t stop staring at him either, although I’d like to. He’s barefoot, his toes curling at the edge of the rail, his naked feet pale, the skin stretched taut as if it might split. I see him in his ridiculous red apron, winking, throwing me Baci, kisses with a fortune locked inside. Then I close my eyes and see Sophie.
I turn to the cardinal. ‘I don’t think I can.’
‘Yes.’ Massimo D’Erreti nods. ‘You can.’ His dark eyes look into mine. ‘No one,’ he says. ‘No one is beyond God’s love, Mary.’
I turn round and step towards Marcello, not sure what I’m supposed to do.
‘Come closer,’ he whispers. So I take another step, then another, until I have broken out of the semicircle of men standing around the window and entered a space that contains only him, and me.
‘Closer.’
I reach the stone wall. Marcello’s feet are in front of me. The railing is just wide enough to stand on, and I can see the tendons in his ankles straining.
‘The chair.’
I right it, drag it over and climb up on the seat. Now I can feel night air on my face, and see the rooftops, the campanile, the top of the Baptisery, and the Duomo, Santa Maria d
el Fiori, lit up against the sky. Someone shifts uneasily behind us, and without looking back I know it’s Pallioti. Marcello reaches down for my hand and I reach up until our fingers meet.
His eyes are wide, the whites, bright white, and under the perfume a strange smell is rising off him. Fear. Babinellio was right. He’s terrified. Probably he always has been.
‘Maria,’ he whispers. I can barely hear him. I stand on my toes, his fingers cupping mine. ‘I had to give them to God.’
‘I know.’ I tighten my hand around his.
‘Flesh shall pay for the sins of the flesh. To live we must die,’ Marcello whispers. Then he says: ‘They were lost, and I brought them back. But not you, Maria.’ Marcello bends towards me, his eyes on my face. ‘I never hurt you.’
‘Marcello, please.’
‘Serviam!’
He shouts. His fingers leave mine and he throws his arms open.
For a split-second, Marcello balances, framed in the window, the Duomo lit up behind him. Then he’s gone.
My hand is still outstretched, and I am still standing on the chair when I feel myself begin to shake. It’s the cardinal who lifts me down like a doll.
Minutes later, when we drive out, my face pressed to the glass, I see Marcello for the last time. His bare feet are white in the lights, and kneeling beside him, cradling his head in his lap, his hand raised to deliver the last rites, is Father Rinaldo.
Chapter Twenty-seven
IT’S TWO DAYS later when Pallioti calls and asks if I would like to come to the Questura. They’ve found out some things about Marcello, if I’m interested, and he’d like to talk to me. I am interested. And I’d like to talk to him too. In fact, if he hadn’t called me, I was going to call him.
The Faces of Angels Page 43