She’s surprised, but doesn’t speak. He opens a drawer and pulls out an envelope.
“I’d like to show you something,” he says. “I hope you don’t mind.”
She doesn’t know how to react. She watches him open the envelope and take out a photograph. He looks at it for a moment, without expression, before handing it across to her.
She hasn’t seen this photograph for almost thirty years. She is sitting in the college room she had in her final year, laughing at something. It’s a sunny day and the light coming in through the window has created a sort of aureole around her. She looks illuminated, far prettier than she ever was, she’d thought then, although now she wonders if perhaps she had been that pretty all the time and had never really known. She’s wearing a T-shirt and jeans, her hair is longer than she normally wore it; despite this, she has a boyish look, but not androgynous; gamine is the word that comes to her now. She can’t remember who else was in the room with her, but she remembers the moment; she remembers, if that’s possible, her laughter. She’s never liked photographs of herself, she’s thrown them away when she’s had the chance; but this is one she loved. She flips it over and sees, in her handwriting, a dedication and a date: To my favourite student, May 1978.
“Where did you get this?”
“My father had it.”
“Your father was Eduardo?”
“Yes, Eduardo Cotugno.” The magistrate smiles. “You were his teacher in Turin.”
“I know that. I gave him this photograph just before he left. He asked me for one and this was my favourite. It was the only copy I had.”
“He didn’t know that, I don’t think. He’d have been more deeply touched than ever.”
“He didn’t?”
“Yes, he died two years ago.”
“Oh,” she says, shocked. “I’m so sorry.”
“He often spoke about you. He said you were the only person he trusted during his last few months in Italy. You gave him the strength to continue. My mother made it hard for him. He felt alone. You helped him cope.”
“I don’t know how,” she says. She is shaken, shaken and moved, to find herself thinking once more about Eduardo. She looks at the man opposite her, as if for the first time. “I remember him telling me he had two sons.”
“Yes, my brother stayed in South Africa. My father lived with his family for the last few years of his life, in Durban. He’s a doctor.”
“And you came back to Italy.”
“Yes, eventually.” He smiles. “My father thought I was mad.”
“He didn’t want to go away at all,” says Helen.
“Oh, he loved it there. He got himself into trouble almost immediately. You know what my father was like.” He laughs. “But when things changed, when apartheid came to an end, he was vindicated. He could never have come back to Italy after that.”
“Why not?”
“Because he was living in a place he’d fought for. And because the people who’d driven him out of Italy were running the country.” He looks at Helen. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to imply–”
“No,” she says, “don’t apologise, you’re quite right,” as memories of Eduardo rush back. Sitting there with his leg on a chair as they ran through the paradigms of irregular verbs before he persuaded her that what he needed was conversation, to talk about the world. Running his hands through his hair, which was like his son’s hair, she sees as she looks at the man before her. She remembers Eduardo as an older man, but he must have been ten years younger than she is now, in his early forties at the most. He’d thought his life was destroyed, but he’d been wrong. Lives can be remade, she thinks, with a little courage.
“Was he happy?” Before he can answer, she says, “I’m sorry, I can’t remember your first name.”
“Piero,” he says. “Oh yes, he was happy, most of the time. He was challenged, but he inspired great respect, great affection. It suited him; he’d have been stifled here. He spent his last years in the country, until my mother died – they had a farm – and then my brother took him in, as I said.”
Helen puts the photograph on the desk, face-down. “Did you bring me here to show me this?”
“Yes,” he says, with a sheepish grin. “I’ve brought you here under false pretences, but I thought you would want to know that you made a difference to someone’s life. He would have wanted you to know that. So often people don’t. It’s all we can do in the end, isn’t it? With any luck, for the better.”
They sit together for a moment, in silence. Eventually, when she can stand her thoughts no longer, Helen speaks.
“Do you know who killed my husband, Piero?”
“No,” he says. “Do you?”
“Knowing won’t bring him back,” she says.
She’s leaving his room when the site of the trolley case reminds her.
“Federico’s briefcase. He had it with him when he was shot. I don’t suppose I could have it, could I?”
“I don’t see why not,” he says. “I’ll see what I can do.” He’s picking up his phone when Helen’s mobile rings in her bag. It’s Martin.
She’s about to tell him she’ll call him back when she hears, not Martin, but a woman speaking. “Is that Helen? Am I speaking to Helen?”
“Yes. Who’s that?”
“I’m a friend of Martin’s. I’m calling from the hospital. I have some bad news for you.”
2
Helen keeps saying It’s my fault as she drives to the hospital across a city whose traffic, always chaotic, has been slowed down to a virtual halt, in preparation, she supposes, for the demonstration later in the day. It takes her forty minutes to reach the hospital gates. She is stopped by the sentry, who glances into the car in a bored, desultory way before waving her on. Frantic, already playing with the clasp of her safety belt, she drives into the grounds.
A thin blonde woman in evening dress, with a dark stain in the lap, is sitting in the corridor. She jumps up when Helen arrives.
“Where is he?” Helen says. “I want to see him.”
“He’s through there,” she says, pointing to a door. The woman steps across to open the door for Helen. Her eyes are dog-tired, ringed with black, she couldn’t be more than twenty-five. Helen walks past her, confused. “Why didn’t you call me sooner?” she says. What she wants to ask is who the woman is, but this isn’t the moment.
“I didn’t know who to call. I waited until Martin could tell me.”
“But if he’d died,” Helen says, her hand to her mouth. “I couldn’t have lived with that, I couldn’t have coped.”
“There’s no danger of that,” the woman says. She has switched to English, but Helen only realises this later, when she replays the scene in her head. “Not now. The doctors say he’ll pull through. He’ll feel the worse for wear for the next few weeks, that’s all.”
“He’s conscious?” says Helen, still standing at the door, abruptly afraid to go in. Who is this woman? she thinks.
“Yes. But they’ve told me to say that he can’t have visitors for long.”
They go into the ward. There is only one bed, near the window. Martin is lying down, the left side of his head shaved clean and criss-crossed by stitches along a jagged gash. His face is swollen and bruised, with ragged wounds on the cheek and forehead and the tip of his nose beginning to scab. A tube is attached to his nostrils by a flesh-coloured clip. Helen wouldn’t have recognised him. Other tubes dangle from the sheet, draped across some sort of tent to protect his legs, ending up in a bottle attached to the bed frame or rising in an arc to a flat plastic bag full of drip, dangling from a stand. Next to the bed, on a metal trolley, is a box with dials and flashing lights to which Martin has been wired up. Helen stands by the bed, while the young woman in her blood-stained dress smoothes the sheet on the far side with a calming, professional air. Helen sits down in a chair beside the bed, watching Martin’s eyes move round the room, to see who is there. He smiles when they rest on her. “Hello, my dear,”
he says. His voice is surprisingly strong, but distorted, as though he is holding something soft, a marshmallow, a ball of cotton wool, in his mouth. “The more the merrier,” he says. He winces when Helen kisses him. Pulling back, she sees that his lip has been cut and stitched. When he opens his mouth to speak again, she notices he’s lost two teeth.
“You’ve met Alina,” he says, raising a hand to indicate the other woman in the room. “She saved my life. She’s my guardian angel now.” He smiles. “I hope for some time to come.”
“Did you see who it was? Who did this?” says Helen, turning to Alina, who shakes her head.
“They were wearing helmets.” She spreads her hands in a gesture of helplessness. “They were men, two men, on a motorbike. In Piazza Barberini.”
“The number plate?” Helen says, insistent. “Did you get their number?”
“I looked, of course, but the number plate was covered. Maybe there wasn’t a number plate.”
Martin waves his hand impatiently.
“Not important,” he says. “I know who did it. I’ll come to that. Right now, I want to talk to both of you. I want you to know what I think. If we all know, we’ll be safe. I’ll be safe.”
“All right, Martin, all right,” says Helen, reaching for his hand and holding it. He tries to raise his head from the pillow, but the effort is too much for him and he lets it fall back with a sigh. “Bloody drugs,” he says, then smiles. “A good shot of whisky might do the trick. No chance of that, I suppose?”
“I’ll see what I can do,” says Alina, smiling, but Martin has started to speak in an urgent, breathless way.
“I know who did it, or I think I do. Not this,” he says, waving his hand impatiently towards his legs, “Federico. Who killed Federico. I spoke to one or two of my old friends, Helen; you knew that’s what I’d do, I didn’t need to tell you who. But they weren’t my friends at all. Or not only mine, at least. They were Giulia’s friends as well.” He looks at Helen, as if for confirmation. “That’s her name, isn’t it? Federico’s mother? Giulia?” She nods, and he stares at the ceiling, satisfied. “They were Giulia’s friends.” He stops to breathe, while Alina bathes his lips with a strip of dampened gauze. “She’s been phoning someone I used to know. That’s bloody odd, I thought, something fishy about that.” He laughs, as if to himself, then grimaces at the pain from his mouth. “She’s been calling him. She’s got a special SIM card for her phone. It’s all in the records. Check it, you’ll know someone who can check it. If you all know, you’ll be safe. We’ll all be safe. They can’t kill all of us.”
“He’s spoken enough,” says Alina. “We must leave him to sleep.” She stands up, ushering Helen out, but shows no signs of leaving herself.
Helen stands in the corridor, breathing deeply, in and out. Martin is delirious, she thinks, and she can’t understand why nothing he has said, his impossible accusation, has shocked, or even surprised, her. She waits until her heart has calmed, then takes her mobile from her bag and calls Giacomo. Please let him still be here in Rome, she says to herself as his phone rings out. He might have left for Paris already, after the way she dismissed him last night. Please God let him still be here. When he answers, she can barely talk for the relief.
“I have so much to tell you,” she says.
3
“But of course it’s possible,” said Helen. She is back at the flat, with Giacomo. “She’s capable of anything.” She’s been calling her in-laws’ flat for the past half hour, at first on her mobile from the car and now with the landline, but it’s constantly engaged. The more often she tries, the more frustrated and enraged she becomes. Right now, she’s half a mind to go round there and make a scene. But when she announces that this is what she plans to do, Giacomo dissuades her.
“No, not yet. We need to talk about this,” he says. “We mustn’t jump to conclusions. Because what you’re saying is insane, you do see that, don’t you? You’re saying she had her own son murdered.”
“She’d have done it herself,” says Helen. “With her own two hands if necessary. I know Giulia. I’ve known her for thirty years. I know what she’s capable of.”
“But why?” he says, although she’s explained half a dozen times.
“To stop him embarrassing her,” she says. “He was a loose cannon. He might have done anything. He might have killed someone.” She remembers what Federico wrote about the Juggernaut, riding roughshod over all in its path to save the world. That’s how he saw himself, she thinks. She imagines him standing there on the stage, with the cameras clicking beneath him, surrounded by the great and the less great, holding the briefcase that he’s had as long as she’s known him, each stitch along its seams his own work, the weight of the bomb. He’d have used his briefcase, she’s sure of that. No one would have questioned him. And Giacomo would have been beside him, ally to the last.
“Embarrassing her? I don’t believe it.” Giacomo is scornful. “In any case, Federico’s no murderer.”
“It wouldn’t have been so hard to believe thirty years ago.” Frustrated, infuriated by his tone, which seems to diminish her as Federico’s had so often in the past, Helen directs her anger at him. “You wouldn’t have had any problems with it. Neither of you. Not then. What about Moro? What about all the others? Don’t you see? The minute Federico knew he was going to die, it made perfect sense.”
“Things were different then,” he says.
“Things were the same, Giacomo, don’t you see? You were no different from Giulia. Giulia’s obsessed by the state. She talks about the constitution as though it were her child. Her constitution. We bled for it, that’s what she says. We gave our blood. She’s never talked like that about Federico. She must have thought, I don’t know, can you imagine what people would say about Italy if Federico really did do something stupid? Blow himself up and take half the world’s leaders with him? He wasn’t just anyone, was he?” She feels like striking Giacomo, slapping him across the face to make him listen. To make him see. “He wasn’t just a consultant at the ministry, although that’s bad enough. That’s scandal enough. He was her son. The only son of Giulia Paternò, the founding mother of modern Italy.” Her voice is ripe with sarcasm. “It would have destroyed her.”
Giacomo nods, but doesn’t speak. He looks uncomfortable. Helen doesn’t care. She wants him to look uncomfortable.
“Besides,” she says, feeling fully alive for the first time since Federico’s death, as though she’s been shaken into wakefulness, as though what she’s needed to do is think, “whatever he did would have played straight into the PM’s hands. She’d have known that. He’d have used it to declare a state of emergency, martial law, God knows what else.” Eduardo, her wonderful kneecapped student, comes into her head. He was right, she’s known that all this time, violence begets violence.
“But Federico would have thought of that, Helen.” Giacomo sounds defensive now, as if she were also accusing him.
“Federico was sick. Whatever he’d done thirty years ago, he’d never have contemplated killing anyone now if he hadn’t been, I don’t know…” – she searches for the words she needs – “…well, off his head.”
“And Giulia?”
“Giulia’s got what she wanted all the time. Her son is a martyr. She’s won.”
“Well, it’s a theory,” says Giacomo, perplexed. “Martin’s theory. Isn’t that what you’re saying? That this is what Martin thinks, after having been hit on the head by a motorbike?”
Exasperated and a little taken aback, because Giacomo doesn’t want to understand and she’s never seen him as obtuse, whatever else he might be, Helen changes the subject.
“Have you heard from Yvonne?”
Giacomo laughs briefly and waves his hand in the air.
“She’s back in Paris, I imagine.”
“She didn’t say?”
“Her sudden departure and subsequent silence are eloquent enough, I’d have thought.” He sips his coffee, grimaces, reaches for the sugar, p
ausing between the first and second spoonful. “I heard from Stefania. She wants to speak to you.”
“Stefania,” says Helen. “She must be so shocked.”
“She’s been waiting for something like this to happen to one of us. She thinks we got away with it all scot free. It isn’t fair. She forgets that some of us did time. And now she feels guilty, as though she’s brought this punishment down on Federico’s head herself.”
“Stefania has nothing to feel guilty about,” says Helen.
“She wants to know when the funeral will be,” he says.
“Yes.” Helen nods. “She should be here for that.” She’s restless. “I need to get out,” she says. “I’ve had enough of this place.”
She reaches for her bag, but something interrupts her, some thought of Federico leaning back in a chair, his legs stretched out, his hands behind his head, so young he’s no more than a lanky boy. He is laughing about something. And then, with a flash of recognition, she sees in her mind’s eye the photograph she was shown earlier this morning by Eduardo’s son, Piero Cotugno, magistrate, in which she is also laughing. She remembers that Federico had been there with her in that room in college, her final year, already in love with her, she was confident of that although they hadn’t made love at that point; they’d hardly been alone together before that day. It all comes back to her: the light, the warmth in the room, which was usually cold and damp like most of those old college rooms, the shirt he was wearing, which had worked out of the waistband and showed his navel when he stretched. She’d wanted to put her finger in it, she remembers, her tongue. He’d made some mistake in his English and she’d started to laugh, despite herself, because there is nothing worse than to have someone laugh at your mistakes, and he’d had a camera beside his chair. They’d spent the morning playing tourists. And he’d caught her laughing, he’d leaned forward in his chair with the camera in his hand and said, “I have made your photo. You will be mine forever.” Had he thought of what he’d said, this first declaration of love for her, when she gave the picture away to Eduardo? Had she hurt him? She’ll never know.
The View From the Tower Page 24