The Italian Wife

by Kate Furnivall

  Isabella’s mouth was dry as dust. No words emerged. If she told the truth, she would be placing Roberto on this chair with these handcuffs biting into the strong bones of his wrists.

  ‘It is clear,’ the carabiniere continued, ‘that you knew what was about to happen and yet you warned no one. You were willing for Mussolini to die and that is treason.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You have shown undue attention and care to the daughter of a known traitor.’

  ‘That was because her mother —’

  ‘You were present on a farm when the tenant was revealed to be an instrument of deception.’

  ‘Instrument of deception?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Isabella’s mind was spinning. Something was clawing up her throat, trying to get out.

  ‘And,’ Sepe said, releasing his hands, palms up like a conjuror, ‘cracks have been appearing in a building in your charge. You are sabotaging the very construction of our town.’

  He sat back in his chair, the skin on his forehead so tight it looked as though it might split. His eyes narrowed, observing her, and there was a gleam of satisfaction in them. Was this revenge for last time, when she had stood in the way of his questioning of Rosa?

  ‘So, signora. What do you have to say for yourself?’

  ‘I am innocent.’

  He snorted his disgust. ‘The cracks?’

  Only one person could have told him about the cracks. ‘They are the result of cost-cutting during the construction process,’ she said. ‘Either the cement contains too much sand or the foundations were not dug deep enough. Neither of those is my responsibility.’

  He jotted something down on a lined pad in front of him. ‘The farmer?’

  ‘I was visiting him for the first time. I knew nothing about his farming skills.’

  ‘So why were you there?’

  She hesitated. A fatal error, she was aware. ‘To look at one of the homesteads from an architectural standpoint, now that they are occupied.’

  Were her words too thin? Too weightless? Was her breathing too fast?

  ‘And the girl called Rosa? I have seen for myself your attachment to that traitor’s child, so don’t deny it.’

  ‘Her mother gave her to me to look after.’

  ‘Why would she do that?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  I don’t know. I don’t know.

  This time the fleshless man in the dark uniform let a silence grow in the room, a silence that was as heavy and viscous as the mud in which her feet were trapped. They both knew what was coming next.

  ‘Why did you run from the rally?’

  This time she was ready for him.

  ‘I was feeling ill. I wanted to get away before I was sick.’

  ‘Liar!’

  ‘No, it’s true. I was —’

  ‘Liar!’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Signora, you left Il Duce and his loyal supporters to die on that field while you fled like the treacherous coward you are.’ Scorn and disgust rippled through his words. ‘Who told you about the plane?’

  ‘No one.’

  Colonnello Sepe stood up abruptly, knocking back his chair.

  ‘Who are you working with against Il Duce?’

  ‘No one. I am not —’

  ‘The truth, signora. I will have the truth.’

  ‘I am telling the truth.’

  Why did he not mention Roberto? Or Davide Francolini? If he knew so much about her, he must know she was with them on the rally field. She was breathing too fast, but she was aware of Sepe’s every tiny expression, each flick of an eyelid, each tightening of a muscle, the way his pitch-black pupils contracted and expanded as he breathed. She saw it coming, his need to strip away another layer of her defences, but there was nothing she could do to stop it.

  He walked forward until he was standing right next to her in her chair at the front of the desk. She could smell his aftershave, something spicy and sharp, and the cloying scent of his hair oil. It took all her willpower not to flinch away from him. Without comment he seized her right wrist and laid it flat on the desk, dragging the other hand with it in the handcuffs. His grip was like steel.

  ‘Now, signora, let us have the truth from you.’

  From his holster he withdrew his gun but held it by its muzzle, raising it in the air above her fingers like a hammer.

  ‘I imagine you need your hands to be very precise in your line of work, don’t you, signora?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So you need full use of your fingers?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Her fingers spasmed on the desk.

  ‘Who told you that the aeroplane was coming to crash into the platform?’

  ‘No one.’

  A sigh spilled out of him. A pretence. As if he didn’t enjoy his work.

  ‘One last time. Who told you?’

  ‘No one.’

  The gun came down.

  28

  ‘Get out of my car.’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Falco, damn you, get out of my car right now or I’ll have you thrown out.’ Two spots of livid colour appeared high on Chairman Grassi’s cheeks.

  They were seated in the rear of the chairman’s sleek black motor car, a long unmistakable Lancia Dilambda that cruised the streets of Bellina every Sunday morning to inspect progress in the town and assess the behaviour of the inhabitants, like a shark patrolling its waters. A muscular uniformed chauffeur sat up front in the driving seat, suitably separated from his passengers in the elegant limousine by a glass partition. Nonetheless, Roberto kept his voice low. He had waited on the street corner in the chill wind that whistled up Via San Michele and as soon as the chairman’s car slowed at the crossroads on its usual route, he had stepped into the road, pulled open the rear door and swung himself onto the seat before Grassi could voice his objection. They faced each other from opposite ends of the long leather seat, hackles raised.

  Roberto placed a photograph face down on the patch of cream leather between them.

  ‘What the hell is this? Grassi demanded. ‘What are you playing at?’

  ‘It’s not a game, chairman.’

  Grassi snatched up the photograph. He was a man used to dealing with surprises. Each day he handled unpleasantness and he was skilled at maintaining his composure, his slate-grey eyes revealing nothing. But his jaw dropped open. He scowled at the picture.

  ‘Where did you get this?’

  ‘I took it myself. That’s what you pay me for.’

  ‘It’s Marchini.’

  ‘Right first time.’

  Roberto saw the moment when the Fascist Party’s chairman let his anger trickle out through his rigid fingers and in its place seeped the realisation of what the photograph meant. Grassi started to chuckle, a thick unpleasant sound that rose to a roar of laughter. He reached over and slapped Roberto heavily on the knee.

  ‘Bene, bene,’ he said boisterously, ‘you’ve done well, Falco.’ But the deep grooves on each side of his mouth hardened and the laughter was cut off short. ‘This isn’t enough,’ he growled. ‘This proves nothing.’

  A smile that didn’t even attempt to reach Roberto’s eyes pinned itself to his face. ‘There are more.’

  Grassi nodded to himself, satisfied. ‘Alberto Marchini will regret this day, the perverted bastard.’ He flicked the photograph into Roberto’s lap with disgust.

  Signor Marchini was Chairman Grassi’s chief assistant in the Party headquarters and was extremely efficient at his job, industrious and painstaking. He was a slender man in his forties, tall and elegant, who wore finely styled suits and possessed a soft pink complexion that belied the sharpness of his mind. He had come up through the ranks with Grassi from the early Milan days, but the trouble with having an assistant who had been with you so many years was that he knew you too well. He’d seen your mistakes. Your weaknesses. He knew where the black corners were hidden in your heart. You were at his mercy and someone like G
rassi would writhe in the cold hours of the night at that thought.

  Roberto was relying on it.

  ‘Where did you take the picture?’

  ‘On one of his trips to Party headquarters in Rome.’

  The photograph showed Alberto Marchini wearing a brassiere on his naked chest. Not any old brassiere, nothing so banal. This one was a stripper’s brassiere of shimmering gold, with holes cut out. His nipples peeked through, painted some dark colour that didn’t show up in the black and white photograph, but which Roberto recalled all too well had been a shocking deep Chinese carmine. It had looked obscene. The man’s paper-white skin. The tawdry brassiere. His nipples glistening and coated in thick layers of red lipstick.

  ‘Who are they?’ Grassi jabbed a finger at the two young women with bottle-blonde hair and flesh spilling out of their tight clothes, one on each side of him, holding him up on his feet.

  ‘They were just cheap bar girls who worked the club. They had no idea who he was.’

  ‘Bene!’

  The photograph was taken in a narrow dark street at the back of a nightclub in one of Rome’s seedier districts. Roberto had needed to use a flash but Marchini was too drunk to notice and the girls didn’t care. His button flies hung open in the picture. It wouldn’t have mattered much, not really, if it had been anyone other than Marchini. But he, of all men, had set himself above what he vigorously condemned as degeneracy. He was an avid churchgoer, a self-proclaimed moral man with a wife and six offspring, whom he held up as moral examples for the rest of the town. Daily he cursed the depravity and debauchery of the modern Italian male and urged them on to the path of sobriety and piety. His face was blurred, as if it had somehow melted in the heat of his own debauchery.

  Roberto felt sorry for Marchini. Truly sorry. But nowhere near as sorry as he was feeling for Isabella right now.

  ‘There are more,’ he said again. ‘More revealing ones.’

  ‘Show me.’

  The church bells started to peal at that moment and if Roberto had believed in such things, he might have taken it as warning. But he didn’t. So he shook his head, as the car purred past the hospital where the wounded from the rally field fought for life, and he gave the chairman a level stare.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t be a fool, damn you. Give them to me.’

  But even as he held out a hand for them, Roberto could see understanding dawn in the distrustful grey eyes. The chairman slumped back against the cream leather with a snort of annoyance.

  ‘What is it you want, Falco?’

  ‘Isabella Berotti out of the police cell.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You ordered Colonnello Sepe to arrest her.’

  ‘What the police do is their affair, not mine.’

  Roberto leaned closer and could see the tiny muscle at the side of Grassi’s eye jump and twitch. Not a good sign. He didn’t waste time.

  ‘Release Signora Berotti and the rest of the photographs will be yours. You’ll be able to make Alberto Marchini jump to your tune for as long as you like.’

  Chairman Grassi stared out of the window, thinking hard, his teeth clamped together. After a full minute’s silence he turned his head.

  ‘So, Falco, you have become one of us. You are like Marchini. Feet of clay. No room for you on the moral heights any more.’ He gave Roberto a slow insinuating smile. ‘You use what you have to in order to get what you want.’ He laughed softly. ‘As dirty as the rest of us now.’

  ‘I’ve learned from an expert.’ Roberto nodded at Grassi.

  Abruptly the chairman sat up, straightened his camel overcoat and black felt trilby, patting a hand on his bulky chest as though to reassure himself of who he was.

  ‘That girl is a bloody nuisance to me, Falco.’

  Roberto held out his hand, hovering over the cream leather in invitation. ‘The photographs will be in your hands the moment she is released.’

  ‘To hell with you.’

  ‘Agreed?’

  ‘Yes. Agreed.’ He shook Roberto’s hand and it was all Roberto could do to stop himself slapping the soft clinging flesh away.

  ‘We use what we have to,’ Roberto said quietly.

  The chairman laughed loudly, goading him, but Roberto banged on the glass partition.

  ‘Stop here,’ he ordered.

  The car drifted to a halt outside the elegantly curved station building and Roberto opened the door, but instead of climbing out he swung round to Grassi.

  ‘Leave Signora Berotti out of this. She knows nothing about the man you are hunting. Don’t be a fool, don’t waste your time on her.’

  The chairman suddenly shuddered and dragged a hand slowly down over his face, as though trying to rearrange whatever thoughts were in his head.

  ‘Mussolini wants heads on a platter,’ he snapped. ‘He’s demanding bodies hanging in the streets. And if I don’t bring him the traitor who plotted this assassination attempt, he will make sure that mine will be one of those bodies.’

  Roberto slapped the photograph face down on the seat between them. ‘If you live by lies, Grassi, you die by lies. You should know that by now.’

  He stepped out of the car.

  ‘Falco!’

  He slammed the door.

  The window rolled down. ‘She’s involved, Falco. You know it and I know it. We’ll be watching her.’ He uttered a deep humourless chuckle. ‘Perhaps that pretty head of hers on a platter will satisfy Mussolini’s thirst for blood.’

  As Roberto strode away, the chairman’s voice chased after him. ‘Don’t forget the photographs, Falco.’

  As dirty as the rest of us now.

  29

  Isabella sat still. If she didn’t move, it didn’t hurt as much. Not her right hand which was cradled in her lap, but everything. Everything that ached inside her. She knew without a doubt that Colonnello Sepe intended to throw her to the dogs of war, to let her be torn limb from limb. Roberto was right. The town of Bellina was going to pay and the price was to be in blood.

  She threaded through her mind each of the questions that Sepe had asked and thought carefully about each answer she had given, and every time she came up against the same brick wall. Why had he not once mentioned Roberto?

  Why?

  There were witnesses. Others must have seen him racing her away from the rally. Davide Francolini certainly did. She felt the hairs on her neck rise at the thought of Davide. He had reported her. He had to be the one who implied that the cracks in the building were her fault. That was enough to lose her her job. At the very least.

  So why?

  Her thoughts shredded each other as they chased through her head and she could feel the pain in her damaged hand throbbing in time with them. But physical pain was an old familiar foe that she’d learned to vanquish years ago; it held no fears for her. It strutted through her nerve-endings on a daily basis and she knew how to shut it away in a special compartment of her brain. At night it could still sink its teeth in and catch her unawares, but at night she was alone and there was no one to see her face or look into her eyes.

  Finally she rose to her feet, her eyes too frightened to close because of what they might see in the darkness inside her head. Where once there had been the bright vista of a future and of boundless ambition, now there was nothing. An aching nothingness. Because there would be no future, no ambitions. It was all over. Here in this wretched cell, it all ended. A faint moan slithered around the tiled walls and it took her a full minute to realise it had come from her own mouth. She stepped up to the hefty metal door and pressed her burning cheek hard against its cold surface until it made her teeth ache.

  ‘Roberto,’ she murmured. ‘What are you doing? Did you put me here?’

  The second the words skimmed past her lips, she wanted to snatch them back, to deny them air to breathe. She hated the treacherous whisper and hated herself for the betrayal. Yet she came back to it again and again – why was she the only one arrested?

  It wa
s as she stood there moulded against the door that a sudden thought stabbed into her mind, as silent and as lethal as an assassin’s blade.

  What if he was arrested too?

  Visions of truncheons descending on his broad back and crashing down on his unprotected skull flared in her head and she felt her stomach turn. She vomited on to the white tiles of the floor, too late to reach the bucket, and felt as if her innards had been wrenched out by feral claws.