The View From the Tower

by Charles Lambert

He was surprised to get the call from Fausto, but not for long. He’s always respected Fausto and the fact that he knows the respect isn’t mutual has given his own respect for the older man an unselfish, ethical aura, reflecting well on him and giving him a sort of advantage. And he’s grateful for the way Fausto assisted in his defence from the pulpit of more than one newspaper, not to speak of strings he must have pulled behind the scenes. It’s good to see the old man again, Giacomo acknowledges to himself, magnanimous in victory, curious to see what role he might still have. There’s nothing sadder than someone whose power to influence events has been wrested from him, thinks Giacomo, who can only imagine this appalling fate. Of course, there are ways and ways, he knows that. He’s been quoted as saying that, in politics, there are buccaneers and there are bookkeepers. Giacomo, despite his ever more sensible and pondered manner, his handmade shoes and tailored suits, his wasted hours in airport lounges and at meetings, is convinced that he’s still a buccaneer. Fausto, in his own way, has also played a reckless, even dangerous game: partisan, prison, internal exile. And now, sitting opposite Giacomo in the bar of this luxury hotel, he is talking about the moral question, an expression Giacomo has almost forgotten, and Giacomo is trying to concentrate.

  “Federico knew he was running risks, of course,” says Fausto, shaking his head. “But we never imagined this, this moral desert.”

  “Risks,” repeats Giacomo, lost for a moment.

  “It wasn’t a political appointment. But he was expected to do something that mattered, not only by the minister, but by the people who knew him, who knew what he really wanted to do.”

  “And the minister pulled one way and Federico pulled the other? That was inevitable, surely? Did you see the point of what he was doing?”

  “I mean,” says Fausto stiffly, “that everything he tried to do was in vain. The practice of government in this country is nothing but shameless self-interest.”

  Well, yes, thinks Giacomo, but how surprising is that? How new? Your lot managed to stay in opposition for forty years and, as soon as they had the chance to govern, you and a bunch of others got on your ideological high horses and rode off. You pulled out in time. Now you complain about other people’s low moral standards. You never had the chance to be corrupted. You never had anything to sell. And that’s what the practice of government is. And that’s why I’ve always stood outside, deliberately. But he doesn’t say any of this, partly out of pity, but primarily because it’s all been said before. He has the feeling that Fausto, too, is talking for the sake of it, talking until something that actually matters can be slipped in as secondary. Fausto pauses, resting his squat liver-spotted hands on the low table between them, the hands of a worker; although Fausto, to Giacomo’s knowledge, has wielded nothing heavier than a pen since the war. Strong, small hands, like paws, on the gleaming wood.

  “I think he was going mad,” says Fausto, almost in a whisper. “These last few months.”

  “Yes,” says Giacomo, relieved that the purpose of their conversation has finally been broached. “I think so too.”

  “What did he say to you?” says Fausto.

  “All kinds of things. We didn’t actually talk, but he sent me emails, text messages. He said we were governed by forces that have nothing to do with politics, that would never be understood. It was madness to think we had control over them in any rational sense.”

  Fausto nods, apparently reassured, eager to confide in Giacomo now that his doubts about Federico have been confirmed. “Yes, yes, that’s exactly the sort of thing he said to me. Forces. Dark forces. He called them dark forces. I didn’t know what he meant at first. I thought it was some sort of metaphor for, I don’t know, globalisation, the free market. I never for a moment imagined he thought the forces were real. He looked so ill. These last few months, he’d lost weight. I don’t think he was eating, though Helen didn’t seem to notice. He talked about the need for sacrifice, you know; I don’t know what he meant, some final sacrifice. Isn’t public service sacrifice enough? He couldn’t even move without bodyguards.” Fausto shakes his head, helpless. “I went into his office one day and he was sitting there with a bowl of crystals. He had his hands in it, playing with them. I couldn’t believe my eyes. He looked across at me and said he was absorbing their auras. I was absolutely dumbfounded. ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ I said, and he started laughing. ‘Don’t worry, Dad,’ he said. ‘I’m not completely mad.’ He pushed the bowl to one side and started talking about something else, something serious. I didn’t know what to make of it. I still don’t.” He crouches forward, stares intensely into Giacomo’s face. “Did he talk about crystals to you?”

  “No,” says Giacomo. He picks up his empty coffee cup and uses his spoon to scrape out the dark brown crust of sugar at the bottom. “Didn’t Nero play with crystals?” he says. “Crystals, precious stones? He said it relaxed him. They are believed to have curative powers, aren’t they? Perhaps that’s why Federico was doing it: to relax.”

  “Did he mention the conference in these messages he sent?”

  “Not really, no.”

  “He told me he was working on something that would make everyone sit up. He said it would end the war.”

  “You don’t know what?”

  Fausto shakes his head in a hopeless, exhausted way. This odd, earnest, loveable little man, thinks Giacomo, who has wasted his whole life on a futile quest for utopia, who still, in his bones, believes in Marx and the Marxist dream though he’s learnt not to say so and prefers to talk of social democracy like everyone else. This decent little man – with his paw-like worker’s hands and his squared-off pugnacious bullock-like build continues to worship the notion of social perfectibility, in spite of Auschwitz and Buchenwald and the gulags and Hungary and Gaza and 9/11 and Madrid, in spite of the fact that the bigger the dream the greater the toll of the dead – continues to worship rationality and safety nets for redundant workers and the movement to stop the war, while the country he’s fought for, and been imprisoned by, and been prepared to die for, goes down the plughole.

  And now, as Giacomo watches him run his fingers through his stiff white hair in a sudden intensely upsetting gesture of desperation, so that Giacomo wants to comfort him in some way, Fausto cries out, his voice trembling: “Why did they kill him? Why did they have to kill Federico? Do you know why? It makes no sense.” He looks at Giacomo, eyes wet with tears. “You don’t know, do you? You’d tell me?”

  Giacomo shakes his head.

  “All I know is that there’s something fishy about this whole business.” With Fausto in front of him, about to weep, he can’t bring himself to say the word murder. “It’s the kind of thing that used to go on in the Seventies, in my day, not now. The world’s moved on. And yet someone’s done this here and now, this stupid brutal thing, and it’s in no one’s interests at all: it’s pointless, anachronistic. It doesn’t solve anything.” Giacomo lifts his empty hands, exasperated. “It isn’t even terrorism. Who’s terrorised? Who’s threatened, apart from a handful of civil servants and academics? They’ve simply destroyed a life for some trivial political vendetta. Terrorism’s moved on. It hits the innocent. That’s how things work now. Hasn’t anybody told them?” He pauses. “Don’t ask me who did it. I wish I knew.”

  Fausto is too emotional to speak.

  “I’m sorry,” says Giacomo, taking pity. He should have kept his mouth shut. “There’s no justification for what’s been done.”

  They are both about to stand up when Giacomo reaches across and touches Fausto’s arm.

  “Can I ask you a question?” he says. “It’s something that’s been bothering me for years.”

  Fausto sits back in the chair.

  “Everything you did to get me released from jail, my pardon. I’ve always known you didn’t like me. There was no reason why you should. I know you thought I was a bad influence on Federico. But I didn’t know then how many strings you’d pulled for me. I only found out later, after the pardon
came through, when I was in France. I’m grateful, of course,” he says as the old man’s face sets into a look of irritation, almost anger. “But I don’t know why you went to so much trouble.”

  “I don’t believe anybody should be jailed for crimes of opinion,” says Fausto stiffly, the stress falling, unflatteringly, on anybody.

  Giacomo smiles. “Well, that’s noble. But that isn’t why I was jailed.” He leans forward, abruptly serious, his hand once again on Fausto’s arm. “Don’t you remember? I was charged with conspiracy to murder. Possession of firearms. I was charged with having taken part in a bank raid during which two people died. They said I’d stolen a car that was used in a kneecapping episode. The irony is that none of it was true in material terms. What I mean to say is that I may have done these things, or similar things, on other occasions. But not on those occasions. I don’t know who it was who did it. But it wasn’t me.”

  “You didn’t say this at the trial.”

  “I didn’t say anything at the trial. I was a political prisoner, remember? None of us did. We were pledged to silence. How annoying we must have been.”

  “You were treated unjustly,” insists Fausto, red in the face, inexplicably furious.

  Giacomo nods. You aren’t going to tell me, he thinks. He watches the old man leave the hotel, then sits down again and thinks of Helen. He wants to call her, hear her voice, but something tells him to wait. She’ll call him when she needs him.

  Yvonne finds Giacomo in the hotel lounge, his feet on the low table in front of him, his shoes kicked off beside them. He is watching television. He has been alone for almost two hours, although she doesn’t know this and would be furious if she were told. He smiles at her and lifts a hand, as if he expects it to be kissed. What he actually intends to do is guide her down into the seat beside him, a gesture so cavalierly inappropriate, given her evident rage, that he lets the hand fall immediately. Taking his feet off the table, he slips on his shoes, then pats a plump little cushion beside his leg. He parodies the face of a child caught out in some mischief, pretending to be contrite, but Yvonne isn’t amused. She stands beside the overstuffed divan, her neat foot tapping the marble, until he speaks.

  “Calm down,” he says.

  “I’m perfectly calm. I’m leaving.”

  “Leaving what?” he says. He can’t help it, he loves a risk.

  “Don’t tempt me, Jacques.” She uses the French version of his name, which he hates, playing with the clasp on her bag, clicking it open, clicking it shut. “I’ve told the man at the desk to send someone to pick up my luggage and arrange for it to be taken to the airport. Now I expect you, or someone else, I don’t really care who does it, to change my flight.”

  “You can’t go now,” says Giacomo, grinning. “You’ll miss the reception. You know how much you want to press the flesh of Mr Bush. Besides, things are just beginning to get exciting.” He points towards the television screen. With obvious reluctance, Yvonne turns her head. What she sees is a woman dressed in black, in late middle age, screaming and waving her fist at the camera as it backs away. She wrinkles her nose with distaste.

  “You know who this is, don’t you?”

  “Some dreadful peasant,” sniffs Yvonne.

  “On the contrary, she’s the mother of Federico’s driver, the one that was shot. She’s accusing the government of his death. She says it was all a plot. Her son had already warned her something like this might happen. There’d been talk at the ministry. Voices in corridors, and car parks presumably.”

  “Only in Italy,” says Yvonne.

  “Well, naturally, a government as blameless as the one you have in France wouldn’t dirty its hands with anything as sordid and demeaning as murder.” He shudders.

  “France is civilised,” says Yvonne, incensed. “That may not seem much to you, Jacques, as an Italian, but those who are born and bred in France know how to appreciate it. It’s in the air we breathe.”

  “I don’t believe it.” Giacomo rubs his hands together in a parody of glee. “We seem to be about to have a political argument. Of a sort.”

  “You amuse yourself,” says Yvonne, with hauteur. “No one else.”

  The screaming woman has been replaced on the screen by a man with the melancholy face of a clown.

  “He’s one of the PM’s right-hand men,” says Giacomo. “Ex-communist, apparently. Priceless, isn’t it?”

  When Yvonne comes down with her case twenty minutes later, Giacomo is fast asleep on the same sofa. Someone has turned the sound off but the news is still on and she sees the face of her husband’s dead friend, his hair too long, at some meeting or other. She wonders what he saw in Helen. The taxi arrives before she has a chance to wake Giacomo and tell him what she thinks of him, which is probably just as well.

  8

  Helen has left her car in Via Giulia and is walking without any clear sense or purpose, walking in a way that is as close to running as she can manage without drawing attention to herself. She walks beneath her building, but doesn’t go in. No one in the street below is waiting, no journalists, no cameras, and this surprises her, but also leaves her with a sense of loss she can’t explain to herself without feeling uncomfortable, as though she needs the attention of the world to still have Federico belong to her. Without it, she’s on her own.

  She sees a group of teenagers tapping in text messages a dozen yards ahead of her as she strides across the square and down to the Lungotevere, sweating a little because the air is still warm this late in the evening and she is moving more quickly than she normally does alone; alone, she likes to dawdle, observe, eavesdrop. Sometimes she finds herself adjusting her step to that of a couple talking half a yard in front of her, to hear what they might be saying, almost unaware of what she is doing. She has heard extraordinary things like this, intimate things, and told them to Federico that same evening, amused to see his shock. “People don’t talk like that,” he’d said once when she’d told him about a conversation she’d overheard between lovers, about what they’d do to his wife, to her husband, if they had the chance, appalling forms of torture that sent the couple into fits of laughter until they became aware of Helen, staring into a shop window, her shoulder almost touching the shoulder of the man; aware that she too was laughing. “You’ve got no idea what people say,” she said. “You spend too much time at your desk.” Will she ever have that kind of conversation with Giacomo, she wonders. Whenever he enters her head, he comes in company; he comes with a sense of guilt she can’t shake off.

  She stands at the top of the steps that lead down to the river, hesitating. This is the walk she has taken with Federico a hundred times, heading west towards the sea as the river does, not only on summer evenings like this one, but whenever they needed to get out, when his work was going badly or she needed comfort for some disappointment: a friend’s disloyalty, a contract falling through. It was always empty at night, which was what he loved, the silence apart from the low rush of the water, the patches of darkness, the feel of the stone and short uncared-for grass underfoot. They would walk without talking until things fell back into place.

  Now though, alone, she has no desire to be alone. The papers are in her bag, but she can’t bear to look at them again, not yet; perhaps she never will be able to. She walks a hundred yards or so, then turns back towards the centre, down Via Arenula towards Largo Argentina. She is trying not to think, but can’t; trying only makes it worse. She can’t not think about what she has read, and what Federico meant. Because she is no longer sure of anything. When a police car goes past, its siren blazing, followed by a dark blue van and a second car, she finds herself on the brink of tears.

  At Largo Argentina, she waits for the traffic to let her through then stops beside the wall. She stares down into the brightly illuminated ruins to watch the cats preen and sleep, as close to the heat of the spotlights as they can get.

  “Hello.”

  Startled, defensive, ready to snub whoever has interrupted her thoughts, she
turns and sees Martin beside her, in his old cream suit and panama, for all the world like someone out of a film. He is with that friend of his, the bookseller. The one she calls the Sad Man.

  “Hello,” she says back, relieved. She leans forward to be kissed by Martin, then gives the other man her hand. He takes it, gives it a brief shake, looking uncomfortable. “I’m so sorry about your husband,” he says, then looks at Martin. “I’d better be off.” Before either of them has a chance to speak, he has gone.

  “He’s probably the last person I spoke to while Federico was still alive,” she says, watching him as he hurries away. She can’t get over the sense of fracture, the before and after of it all.

  “Should you be out like this?”

  “I’d go mad in the house.”

  “You haven’t been by yourself?”

  “Giacomo stayed,” she says. She will tell him what she has found, she decides, but not yet. First, she would like a drink. “You didn’t come round, did you? I thought you might.”

  Martin shakes his head.

  “Giulia found us in bed this morning,” she says. To her surprise, her voice comes out over-loud and on the edge of breaking. She doesn’t know whether she wants to giggle or cry. I’m hysterical, she notes. I can’t go on like this.

  “In bed?”

  “Together. We hadn’t done anything, honestly, but she doesn’t know that. Now she thinks I’m a whore, on top of everything else.”

  Martin takes her elbow. “You need a drink, my dear,” he says. His voice is slightly slurred, she wonders how long he’s been drinking. She realises she has just told Martin that she and Giacomo have slept together, and feels relief. Martin is her oldest friend in Rome, which makes him her oldest friend in the world apart from Giacomo, and friend’s not the word for what Giacomo is, though she can’t think of any other, whatever word Giulia might choose. She lets him lead her back towards the river, turning left into the road that will take her to her own house. More police – carabinieri, this time – are standing in a small group at the corner. She wants to point them out to Martin, to see if he’s also noticed how many armed men are out this evening. But almost at once he is guiding her into the back room of a bar she’s never used, where Martin is clearly known. They sit down at a table in the corner, Martin taking off his hat and placing it on the chair beside him, Helen wondering if he’ll be driving home to his place near Latina that night or staying in Rome. He’s in no condition to drive, she thinks, as he orders a bottle of prosecco for them both. Perhaps she should offer him a bed. Then Giulia can find her with another man.