Thirty-eight
“Oh, God…” I whisper. My face is numb and my mouth no longer seems able to form words. I manage to mumble, “How long ago?”
Modesto swallows awkwardly. His gaze is fixed upon mine. His breathing sounds heavier than usual, as though he has been running. “I got here about an hour ago,” he says, “and…and Ilaria told me that she hadn’t seen them for at least another hour before that—”
A white-hot anger slices down through my belly at the thought of Ilaria’s unforgivable negligence. I remember the mulish expression on her face as Luca and I left for Mergellina…and the kisses my children blew toward me as we left. My hands are trembling as I look across at her, but she is staring resolutely at the ground, her face a dull, purplish red, her fingers twisting together. “Has anyone been up to San Tommaso to see if they’re there?” I say, in a voice that does not sound like my own.
Modesto says, “I went straight away. They weren’t there, so I came back here.”
“But they might have got there after you left.” Please let that be what has happened.
Luca takes my hand. I look up at him. What happened in Mergellina seems a thousand miles away. He squeezes my fingers, and says, “San Tommaso? Do you mean the Via San Tommaso d’Aquino?”
I nod. Luca clearly wants to know more, but I don’t know what to tell him. Hesitating, I glance across at Modesto, who says straight away, “She means my house, Signore. The little girls like coming to visit.”
Luca nods. “But is there anywhere else they might be—any favorite places? They’re most likely to be somewhere familiar.”
“The waterfront. They like the boats,” I say, trying to force back images of sodden little bodies floating face-down in dark water between berthed ships.
“We need to cover as much of the city as we can as quickly as possible. Someone should stay here, in case they come home. I’ll run down to the docks,” Luca says.
I nod. Luca’s voice sounds as though it is coming from the other side of a shut door. I say, in the same unfamiliar, flat whisper I managed just now, “I’ll go up to San Tommaso.”
“Are you happy to go there on your own?” Luca says. “Would you rather I—”
“No.” I interrupt him. “You go to the docks. You said—as much of the city as quickly as possible.”
I don’t want him anywhere near that house.
“I’ll go there now, then I’ll run home,” he says. “If Gianni and Carlo are there, they can help search.”
“Is there any point in telling the sbirri?” I say, knowing the answer already.
Modesto runs his hand through hair already standing up on end. “That bunch of useless degenerates? No, they’re worse than nothing—bloody vandals. We’ll have to manage ourselves. I’ll go up to Girolamini—to the market. They like it there. I’ve been twice already, but it’s so busy at the moment, I could easily have missed them.” He turns to Luca. “Signore—”
I hear him begin to explain where on the waterfront we like to take the twins. I see Luca nod, feel him put his arms briefly around me as Modesto stops talking. My head feels as though it has been wrapped in gauze; I can neither see nor hear the people around me clearly. Everything is moving too slowly and sounds no longer seem to be coming from expected directions.
Luca leaves with Modesto; I hear their footsteps running together, up the street toward the docks and the market. I turn to Ilaria before I go myself, jabbing toward her with my finger, and hear my own voice saying, “Don’t you leave this house, Ilaria—do you hear me? You have to be here in case they come back.”
She starts to say something in reply, but I have already left and do not listen. I begin to run, skirts clutched in both fists, feeling my chest swelling against the tight lacing of my bodice. The streets are busy, and people react indignantly as I push past them.
“Cazzo! Mind where you’re bloody going, woman—”
“What’s the hurry, mignotta?”
Checking frantically to right and left as I run—what if they are there, and I miss them?—I run through familiar streets as though I am a complete stranger in the city. I call and call. The girls’ names crack in my throat. The words thud out in painful pieces around my running footsteps. People turn round and stare, but nobody offers to help. I can’t remember how to blink. My eyes are stinging.
***
The front door of the house in the Via San Tommaso is open.
“Beata! Bella! Are you here?” A second’s desperate hope. “If you are in this house, you two, you come down here now, do you hear me?”
Silence.
My chest is heaving from the running, my throat is raw and my rasping breath is loud in my ears. But that’s all I can hear. They’re not here.
And then a door clicks open upstairs.
“Girls?” It comes out as a shriek. I run up the steps, two at a time, skirts bunched in my arms, to see the door to my bedchamber slowly opening.
It is not the twins.
Michele. He leans lazily against the edge of the door frame. “Good. I hoped I’d see you,” he says. “I’ve been here some time—reading your diaries. Very entertaining.”
I don’t understand. How…? Why is he here? “Have you seen my children?”
“Why? Should I have?”
“They’re missing—I have to find them.”
“Well, they’re not here.” Michele’s voice sounds scornful. Then he says, raising an eyebrow, one side of his mouth lifting in a smile, “Maybe Carlo has them—he said he might be able to—”
I interrupt him. “Carlo? Who’s Carlo?”
“A friend. I don’t think you know him—but I believe you’ve met his little brother. Gianni, I think his name is.”
Gianni? Then, yes, I have met Carlo. “This one here is Papa’s, Gian. Hands off, I’d suggest.”
“I don’t understand,” I say. “Why…why would this Carlo have my children?”
The expression on Michele’s face is frighteningly calm. He pushes out his lips in a moue of consideration. “Well. Let’s see now. You’ve upset quite a few people recently, cara—me included. This friend—Carlo…well, he lost quite a lot of money because of you, the other week—I think he’s hoping to find a way of making it back.”
“What…what do you mean?” I am struggling to breathe.
“Ooh, well now…very pretty little creatures, Carlo told me your girls are. And he said that a mutual friend of ours—a rather successful little privateer—told him the other day that little girls such as—”
“No!” I grab Michele’s doublet sleeves and shake him. “Where is he? Where has he taken them? You get them back!”
He flaps his elbows out sideways, knocking my hands away. Snatching at my wrists, he pulls my arms up in front of me. His twisted smile now quite gone, he holds me in close to his chest and says, “I’ve really no idea where they are—if he has them, that is. But perhaps…a little later on…I might be able to help you search.”
He dips his head forward, seeking a kiss.
“You bastard! Oh God, you bastard!” I turn my face away from him and try to wrench my arms out of his grip, but he is too strong for me. “Let go of me! Michele, let go! I have to go—I have to find my children—”
“No. Not yet.” He speaks through closed teeth.
“Vaffanculo!” I try kicking him, but my skirts are too thick and too heavy, and when Michele starts walking backward, back into my bedchamber, he pulls me with him with ease. Modesto’s voice sounds somewhere in the back of my mind—You’ve always just been too bloody proud to ask for help when you need it, he’ll go too far one day—but Michele has reached my bed and swung me around to lie across it; he holds me down with one knee and Modesto’s voice vanishes. I push hard at the heavy knee, and say, trying to sound irritated rather than frightened,
“Get off, Michele, stop it! Let me go! I told you I’ve stopped working. I’m not doing this anymore.”
Michele holds my chin tightly between finger and thumb and tips my head backward. Bending down to put his face close to mine, he says, “No, cara, that’s not quite true. You didn’t tell me that, actually. Your eunuch did. You did not have the courtesy to tell me anything, if you remember.”
It is hard to speak with my head pushed backward like this, but I manage to spit out, “Fuck off! I have to find the girls.”
“Not till I get what I want, troia. And this time, I’m having it gratis.”
“Get off!” I shove as hard as I can at his leg, and it slips off me, but before I can sit up, he reaches out and grabs at something that is sticking out of the bed head.
I freeze.
My head is a hollow sphere.
In his fist is the knife I took from him the other week. The silver one with the little round “ears.” The one I’ve been keeping in my box. Modesto said he would dispose of it for me, but I stopped him. Michele touches up under my chin with the very tip of the blade. It stings. The scar on my back twinges in sympathy.
“You’ll not tell me what I can and cannot afford this time, cara,” he says.
Air from the open casement blows cold on my legs. Then, as he tugs awkwardly at his breeches, one-handed, his right arm jerks and the blade snicks in a bit farther. A little noise of panic smothers itself somewhere inside my head. I cannot take my gaze from Michele’s. I cannot speak. I swallow, and feel the lump in my throat move the knifepoint sideways. He is too strong for me—and I can do nothing to stop him. The needle-point of the blade catches under my chin; where the point is digging in, it no longer stings—it is just achingly sore.
Detach my thoughts.
I have to block him out. Block Michele out. I can’t rid him from my body but I can force him out of my head. I’ve done it before. Think. Think of what? Luca. Think of Luca. Luca rowing. Luca’s hands on the oars and the sun on the water. Luca’s hands on my face. He says he wants to marry me. He has no idea who I am but he wants to marry me anyway. Marry me. Marry me, marry me. The rhythm of Michele’s assault becomes quicker, more insistent, and then, unthinking, his hand slips and a hot flash runs up from my throat, past my ear and up into my hair. I hear a sharp cry, which I think might have come from me. I press a hand to the side of my face. Michele seems not to notice. His eyes are unfocused and his mouth has twisted, almost as though he is in pain. But at last he pulls away from me, standing quickly, a strangely triumphant look of distaste distorting his face, as though he has just successfully accomplished a task he found entirely disgusting throughout.
“I’m going now,” he says. “Now I think about it, I don’t think I have time to start searching for any children now, but if I see my friend Carlo, I’ll tell him you want him.”
He strides to the door of the chamber. I have turned my head away from him, but I hear him pause in the doorway, and he adds, “By the way—as I was saying just now—I had a chance to read some choice extracts from your…” he pauses, and then says with a sneer, “… Book of Encounters while I was waiting for you this evening. You really are a grubby little bitch, aren’t you?”
I hear him spit onto the floor, then he leaves the room. His feet are loud on the stairs, and then the heavy latch on the front door clatters; there is a blurt of sound from the street outside, and then the door bangs shut again.
A silence.
I have to find the girls.
God knows how long I have been here. I can’t stay. Now he’s gone, I have to find them. It’s getting dark. A grubby bitch, he said. A bitch. Is that why they’ve taken my children?
I try to stand, but my knees are shaking, and as I slide off the edge of the bed, they crumple under my weight, and I am sitting on the floor. The side of my face hurts. I reach for the place with the tips of my fingers; it is warmly wet, and my own touch makes me feel sick.
“Get up…” I say aloud.
But I don’t seem to be able to get up.
There is a soft noise in my ears, a quiet hissing, like running water.
I lean against the side of the bed and close my eyes.
I suddenly feel very tired.
Thirty-nine
Gianni stopped and looked about him. The alley he was in was narrow and cramped—it was strewn with rubbish and smelled of salt and dirt and stale fish. An old woman peered out at him from a shutterless window—a lightless opening like a crack in a rock; she glared suspiciously at him for a second, her knobbed fingers gripping the broken sill, and then she drew her head back inside, muttering to herself.
“Where the bloody hell are you, Carlo, you bastard?” Gianni muttered aloud, looking around him. “Where have you gone?” Ducking down into a gap between two buildings on his left, he headed toward the docks.
Sunlight was dancing in sparkling fragments on the wavelets out in the bay, but between the berthed ships, the water moved more sluggishly—it was a slow-swelling, brackish brown, and as it shifted and lifted, sodden flotsam pushed up almost silently against the bellies of the ships and moved away again. A greasy-looking rat walked gingerly along a taut rope down toward a bollard. Eyeing Gianni for a second, it jumped down onto the cobbles and skittered away beneath a pile of broken boxes.
The dockside was quiet, almost empty, apart from a couple of nut-brown sailors, an elderly man in a filthy, salt-encrusted doublet, and a scrawny, pigtailed boy about his own age; the boy was sitting on an upturned barrel, wiping his eyes and nose on his sleeve.
Gianni ran up to the sailors.
“I’m sorry,” he said, breathlessly, “but have you seen a man—a young man about that tall?” He held up a horizontal hand. “He has light-brown hair, he’s wearing a doeskin doublet, and he’s with two little girls?”
One of the sailors shook his head, raised his hands apologetically, and said something incomprehensible in a language Gianni had never heard before. Gianni forced a smile of thanks, then strode across to where the old man in the dirty doublet was splicing the end of a fraying rope without looking at it.
He repeated his question. “He’s with two little girls. Have you seen them?”
The old man gazed up at Gianni with milky eyes and shook his head, frowning doubtfully. “I’m sorry, lad. He might have been here, but I’ve not been noticing.”
Gianni nodded, feeling sick, and ran down toward the boy on the barrel.
“Might have done,” the boy said in answer to Gianni’s question, swallowing what sounded like the tailend of a sob.
Gianni’s heart thudded. “Please—which way did they go?”
The boy wiped his nose again and stared down at his smeared hand. “Why do you want to know?” he said, looking back up at Gianni. His gaze raked Gianni from head to foot. “Interested in him, are you?”
Gianni frowned. “What? What do you mean? He’s my brother.”
The boy’s expression changed. “Your brother?” he said, now sounding surprised.
“Yes—does it matter? I just want to know where he is.”
“He told me he was going to the tavern round the corner,” the boy said, jerking his head in the direction of the entrance to another filthy little alley. “But from what he said, I don’t think he was planning on staying long.”
“Thank you,” Gianni said over his shoulder as he began to run again. “I’ll try there now. Thank you very much.”
***
Gianni grabbed the old tavern-keeper by the upper arms and shook him. “But don’t you understand? It’s urgent!” he said. “He’s my brother, and…and he’s…he’s in danger. I have to catch up with him and warn him.”
The lie seemed plausible enough.
“Someone told me he had come in here,” Gianni said, still gripping the tavern-keeper’s arms. “He was wi
th…our two nieces. Have you seen them? They don’t seem to be here. Could they have gone upstairs? Please—I have to find them! Do you know where they might have gone?”
The old man stood still, saying nothing but staring pointedly at Gianni’s hands on his sleeves—first the right, then the left. Gianni let go, stood back a step, and held his hands up, palms forward, as though in apology. The tavern-keeper shrugged and jerked with his chin toward the far end of the room.
“They went down there,” he said.
Gianni pushed his way through the busy tavern and saw, almost hidden behind a table, a steeply descending set of ladder-like steps. He scrambled down and opened the tiny door that stood at the bottom. The narrow corridor that led away from the door was long enough to disappear out of sight, and was entirely lightless.
“Oh, God!” he said with a lurch of his stomach. “He’s taken them into the sottosuolo.” His father’s voice, sharp with anxiety, rang in his ears from years before as he stared now into the blackness. “Don’t you ever let me catch you going in there, do you hear, Gianni? People get lost in the sottosuolo. Lost for good. People go exploring and never find their way out again. And some people actually live down there—wicked people running from justice.” People like Carlo, Gianni thought. Swallowing down a smothering feeling of panic, he hurried back up to the cramped back room of the tavern and squeezed his way through the crowded tables to where the old man was now standing with a pewter jug in his hand.
“Please,” Gianni said, trying to keep his voice calm. “Please—do you have any sort of lantern I could take?”
The old man put the jug on a nearby table, lifted down a thick torch from a wall-bracket, its end wrapped in flaming, pitch-soaked sacking, and handed it to Gianni. His face was quite expressionless as he said, “Mind you don’t let it go out. I doubt you’d find your way back in the dark.”
Gianni nodded, and, holding the torch above the heads of the many drinkers, pushed his way back to the steps.
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