‘Why…?’ she began, wanting to ask him, Why here?, but then he led her into a back room with a row of booths in dark wood, narrow marble tables, and she could see why. It was quiet in here, and warm; perhaps this was where Sandro always came when he didn’t want to be overheard.
Her stomach churned; she wanted to know what kind of trouble to expect, but at the same time she desperately didn’t want to know. Did he bring people here? Informers? Luisa felt stupid, realizing that after twenty-five years married to a policeman all she knew of his work was gleaned from the television. She felt unaccountably nervous, and Sandro seemed to realize it; he slid the coffee across to her and put a hand on hers. His hand was warm, his police-issue leather gauntlets resting on the table beside the coffee cups. She wondered why he wasn’t wearing his uniform ski-jacket in weather like this, and tried to stop her mind wandering to such things, petty detail, food and clothes. She stared at his hand over hers on the marble.
‘I haven’t got much time,’ said Sandro. ‘I’m supposed to be back at the station already, we were on our way back.’ He turned her hand over in his. ‘I just wanted to see you.’
‘Why?’ whispered Luisa, and her heart contracted in her chest. ‘They’re not – you’re not…?’ She didn’t even know what she was going to ask, all she could think of was that Sandro was saying goodbye to her.
‘I just wanted to see you,’ he said, and put out a hand to stroke her cheek. ‘Don’t worry’
Luisa looked down at her hands and swallowed. She closed her eyes and willed herself back to calm; he needed her to be calm, didn’t he? ‘So where…?’ Her voice croaked. ‘Where had you been? This morning?’ Sandro compressed his lips, looking away; the barman came over to the table with two more little cups of coffee and Sandro gave him a tiny nod, waiting until he had gone.
‘We went to Bartolo’s house,’ he said briefly. He put his head in his hands. ‘I don’t know what we were expecting, I don’t know. Some sign of a struggle, perhaps, or a suicide note, that’s what they were looking for.’
‘And you?’ said Luisa gently. ‘What were you looking for?’ He looked up at her, and there were tears from the cold in his eyes.
‘It wasn’t there,’ he said. ‘Whatever I thought I might find, it wasn’t there. Something concrete, pictures, a computer with porn on it, children’s toys – you don’t want to know what. You don’t want to know what they have, how we know what they do. They take trophies, some of them, make the children write things for them… His voice was clogged with loathing, and he stopped. Luisa held on to his hand. He was right, she didn’t want to know, but the thought of all this locked inside him frightened her more.
‘But it wasn’t there.’
He shook his head. ‘Funny thing,’ he said grimly. ‘The old place is a dump from the outside, no plaster left on the bricks, paint all gone from the window frames But you go through the door, and it’s clean as a whistle. As though his mother had been in and cleaned for him that very morning, everything vacuumed, bins emptied, surfaces empty. Door locked.’
‘She’s…’ Luisa frowned, trying to calculate the time passed.
‘Just – a figure of speech. She’s dead, oh, a year since.’ He paused, and Luisa wondered how he knew, and she realized that the man Bartolo had not been out of his thoughts for fifteen years. It was almost as though the man and his mother were some terrible, shameful family members Sandro kept hidden, family he visited in secret.
‘I guess she taught him to tidy up after himself though,’ Sandro went on. His face was grim. ‘It was terrible, being back there.’
‘You were there all that time.’ Luisa thought of Sandro slipping out of the house before dawn to go to Galluzzo in the bitter cold, to the dead man’s decaying farmhouse, its kitchen gardens untended, stranded on waste ground between the river and the motorway and the housing blocks.
Sandro looked into her eyes and she thought he was going to say something else, but then he looked away, and following the movement of his head she saw the time on the clock above the bar. ‘I’ve got to go,’ she said reluctantly, and he nodded. ‘I’ll see you tonight?’ She heard the tenderness in her own voice with a kind of alarm. ‘When will you be back?’
‘As early as I can,’ Sandro said, but his voice was dull. ‘God knows, I hope this is over soon. There’s nothing I want more.’
Beate had wandered up to an artists’ supplies shop in the shadow of the cathedral, down an alley. It had been here for ever; it had certainly been here when she arrived in Florence as a nineteen-year-old, to study painting at the Accadèmia. She directed those of her clients who liked to dabble in art to this shop, telling them it was the best, although she hadn’t bought anything here for herself in twenty years or more. The window was unchanged, though, still pleasantly cluttered with easels and canvases, jointed wooden models and boxes of watercolours.
Inside the smell was still of new wood and oil paints. A row of old glass jars filled with powdered colours and labelled in gold script – cobalt, umber, Naples yellow – were still ranged over the counter, and behind it the shop’s owner stood in his eternal grubby white cotton overall, only a little more wizened. He peered at her over his glasses and nodded. ‘Ben tornata,’ he said mildly. Welcome back, after twenty years; Beate had had to smile.
On the Lungarno between the Ponte Vecchio and the Ponte Santa Trinità a broad stone buttress jutted on to the pavement, the perfect vantage point. In the summer it invariably held half a dozen art students sketching the Ponte Vecchio but today, with the white sky heavy with snow and a bitter wind coming off the river, it was empty. Beate sat down and unpacked her modest purchases – a ring-bound sketchbook, pencils, a box of charcoal – and muffled in her velvet coat, with a board propped on her knee, she began to draw.
Beate began with the bones of her beloved city; the architecture. She drew the shallow curves of the Ponte Santa Trinità and the patchwork rear of San Jacopo sull’ Arno, the neat dome of the Cestello and the parapets of the Palazzo Corsini in the distance. She tried the skyline next, a ridge of cypress out to the east in San Niccolò, a distant bell-tower, and then an old woman came to rest on the parapet opposite her and fished out a bag of stale bread and she had a new subject. A knotted scarf and a bulky coat, a kindly, wattled chin, and the woman was there on the page; Beate began to enjoy herself. Two middle-aged women arm in arm, in padded coats, stopped to look down at something in the water. Her cheeks pink with the cold, on her face an expression of peaceful concentration, Beate drew, and drew, and drew.
When Lucas Marsh came down the receptionist handed him the message Mrs Marsh had left for him, looked down at the ledger in front of him to make a note, and when he looked back up the man had disappeared.
One of the reasons Lucas had got on in life – aside from the thing so many people lack, the clarity of purpose sometimes called a killer instinct – was this self-effacing quality, a kind of camouflage. Although in business he could make his presence felt in a second if he chose, a moment before you might not have given him a second look. Not dangerous, not powerful, neither dark nor fair, a man from nowhere. Lucas Marsh had made most of his money, although very few people were aware of it, buying property in Europe on behalf of a syndicate of Russian businessmen who wanted to settle their funds outside the former Soviet Union, to spread their risks. They liked the fact that he was quiet; they distrusted the flashy types, property developers with signet rings and shiny brochures. There was an oil billionaire, a couple of steel magnates and another the source of whose funds remained obscure even to Lucas Marsh. He worked hard for them.
As he slipped back out through the lobby of the Regale, the great glass doors eased open in front of Lucas Marsh and he stepped into the icy, gusting air. His face was drawn above the dark coat, its collar blown up against his pale cheek. He crossed the piazza in the cold; it was grey and almost empty, and there was something desolate about the cheap handbags and model domes swinging on the handful of souvenir stalls. Withou
t a glance Lucas Marsh walked past the pink, blue and gold carousel that was deposited in the piazza for excited children in the runup to Christmas. It stood there silent and still, the owner huddled in his booth reading a newspaper.
Lucas left the square and was swallowed up in the gloom beneath the Victorian arcades, his steps measured and purposeful, heavy leather on polished marble. Beggar-women sat here, out of the wind, panhandlers, a man abased himself, face to the marble, with only a handprinted sign on cardboard asking for pity, and coppers. A woman emaciated to the point of extinction drew her bony knees up as he passed; she might have been any age, her skin furred with malnutrition. She looked up at him, but Lucas didn’t look down. If he had he might have recognized her, but then again he might not. Fifteen years was a long time.
Lucas Marsh walked not towards the shop where his wife had told him she and Celia would be but instead wound his way back into the medieval alleys that led down to the river. He walked past tiny, secret churches and subterranean bars, slipping between trash cans and tradesmen’s entrances as though he knew the place like the back of his hand. At last he emerged from a narrow passage barely wider than his shoulders on to the river front, crossed through the traffic with barely a glance and stopped there, leaning on the parapet. He was breathing hard, and his hands in the dark, costly leather gloves trembled as they rested on the stone, palm down. The river flowed fast beneath him, swirling and eddying, brown and choked with debris washed down in the winter rains. For a long time he stood there in the freezing wind, looking over into the cloudy water; even after it began to snow he stayed there, and looked.
Eventually, at the far end of the embankment, a huddle of figures hunched in cheap jackets appeared, Eastern European tourists, perhaps, or something lower down the food chain, ill-dressed for the cold. There were three of them and they moved down along the river; when they reached Lucas Marsh they stopped, one on either side and one behind him.
Lucas looked at them, his face impassive in the wind and very white against the dark coat. The tallest of the men, broad-shouldered and with a shaven head under his woollen cap, faced him, holding out a huge, raw-knuckled hand. ‘Mr Marsh,’ he said. His voice was so thick and guttural that the syllables sounded brutal, like an insult. The snow fell thick around them, and for a long moment no one moved, no one spoke.
Emma and Celia paused in the cold, looking up at the mannequins, haughty and white-shouldered in tulle and satin and staring down into the street through their sightless eyes. At the mannequins’ feet shoes were scattered in a froth of pale silk as though discarded after a riotous night’s partying; jewelled shoes, velvet saturated with colour, steel-blue, silver, a glitter of green. At Celia’s side Emma Marsh was silent, looking in at the display, and Celia wondered what she was thinking, wondered what it must be like to be pregnant. All that future no longer vague and delicious with possibilities, with the prospect of parties and skiing trips and summer holidays, but filling up instead with pressing and unfamiliar detail. Prams and sleepless nights and nappies, the weight of a child on your shoulder wherever you go.
Emma looked at her. ‘Shoes,’ she said, and smiled palely, the smile firming with an effort. ‘I can always wear shoes.’ And then she nodded up at the green silk dress, the same one that had made Celia stop to look in the window two days earlier. ‘And I’d like to see you in that. With your colouring.’ Celia felt her cheeks burn. ‘Look upon it as part of the job,’ said Emma kindly. ‘If I’m going to squeeze into anything myself, I’ll need moral support.’
It was very quiet inside, and they hesitated. A woman sat behind the cash-desk reading a magazine, stiff-haired and lip-lined, but when she raised her head to greet them her smile seemed genuine enough under the make-up. She put her magazine aside but then there was a small commotion at the door and the saleswoman Celia recognized, the one she’d seen in the bar yesterday morning – What was her name? Celia knew it, had heard it called across the shop, Lucia? Sofia? – came in, rubbing her arms and stamping her feet. She looked up at them apologetically, swiftly extracting herself from her coat, sliding it on to a hook behind the cash-desk and transforming herself suddenly into a figure of authority, ready to serve them. Luisa.
Celia held out her hand; it seemed only polite. ‘It’s Luisa, isn’t it? I have been in so many times, I should know. Celia Donnelly.’ Luisa took her hand and shook it. ‘Of course, yes. Luisa.’ Her hand felt icy to Celia’s warm one.
Beside them Emma pulled off her leather gloves and sat down on a dark leather cube. She stretched out a foot, her calf curved, the ankle narrow.
‘I’d like to try everything you have in my size,’ she said, smiling engagingly. She spoke in slow, careful Italian, schoolgirl-accented although, Celia reminded herself with dawning respect, she was not likely to have learned it in school, so must have applied herself to a phrase book in preparation for this trip. As though Emma’s was an entirely usual request, Luisa inclined her head with a half-smile.
‘Thirty-six?’ said Luisa, assessing the small, white foot with a professional eye, and Emma nodded, dimpling. They were two of a kind, Emma and Luisa, thought Celia out of the blue as she saw the look of shared appreciation pass between them. And there was something different about the saleswoman, Celia thought, something that drew out the comparison with Emma. When Celia had seen Luisa yesterday in the bar she had been pale, as though the life had been drained from her by something, a bad night, perhaps; this morning she had a flush, a warmth to her.
Luisa seemed to catch Celia’s eye on her, and turned away quickly. ‘Everything in a thirty-six,’ she said, and disappeared down a narrow, padded stairwell in the corner of the room. At the cash-desk the other woman was absorbed once again in her magazine, and a quiet fell in the pale room. Emma looked down at her small hands, her stockinged feet stretched out in front of her and turned inwards, a child’s feet.
‘Don’t say, will you?’ she said quickly. ‘Don’t tell Lucas I told you all that. About how we met. And about him having another life? I’m just being silly’
‘No, no,’ said Celia. ‘I mean, I don’t know why I would.’ You’re going home tomorrow, aren’t you? she thought with an odd kind of pang; she’d almost forgotten – for a moment she’d somehow imagined Emma Marsh would still be there. There was a tug she sometimes felt at the thought that her clients came and went, some she liked and never saw again, some she never wanted to see again, but they were all there one day, gone the next, as if they’d never been. It wasn’t that this time, though, it was not for herself but for Emma she felt the pang, the thought of her going back to grey London and some big white stucco house full of expensive furnishings, Persian rugs, cherrywood floors, pregnant and, Celia suddenly saw, alone. Lucas Marsh was barely there, was he? She tried to erase any trace of pity from her returning smile.
‘No,’ she said again, more briskly. ‘Of course not.’
Emma nodded, as though the subject was closed. What about that dress, then?’ she said with sudden ga:ety, a change of mood, nodding towards the window display. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Celia in dismay, feeling exposed, the spotlit room chilly suddenly at the prospect of removing any of her clothes. Her coat, she realized, was still buttoned to the neck.
‘Let me have my fun,’ said Emma, chiding. ‘Go on.’ Behind her Luisa appeared, a stack of shoeboxes in her arms.
‘My friend would like to try the dress in the window,’ Emma enunciated carefully, and Celia thought, My friend. And then her heart sank; once the dress was on, how would she manage not to buy it? She thought of the dismal condition of her bank account and tried to calculate, rent out after Christmas, presents still to buy and send for Kate’s two. Gas, electricity, water. She tried to remember how much the dress had cost, knowing it was too much.
‘No, no,’ she said, protesting, hunching her shoulders in the coat.
Luisa looked up at the two women from the soft pale carpet where she was extracting a pair of bronze sequinned slippers from a tissue-
lined box, and saw the balance between them. One with money, one without, of course, but underneath the brightness, the cherry-red coat, the shiny black hair, she thought the well-heeled one was somehow lost, adrift. Luisa transferred her scrutiny to the other, the one she knew, sort of, Celia Donnelly who she’d seen stealing a glance at this very dress two days ago. Luisa knew the whole story there, and it reminded her of herself, looking in at that emerald necklace on the Ponte Vecchio; a girl with more taste than money and a secret longing for a knight in shining armour. You never thought the knight might turn out to look like Sandro, did you? Short, bad-tempered, loving. When you gave him the chance.
Luisa laid the bronze slipper at her customer’s little foot. She looked quickly across at Celia and saw that her coat was still fastened up to her chin.
‘No harm in trying it on, Signorina,’ she said quietly, addressing herself not to the pretty little Biancaneve with her foot extended for the slipper, but to her companion. ‘We’re hardly rushed off our feet, are we?’ She gestured at the empty shop. ‘Just for fun, eh?’
The girl’s inward look refocused then, from whatever it was that was preoccupying her, the cost of Christmas maybe, and looked across at Luisa with a look half of reluctance, half of gratitude.
‘Just one moment,’ said Luisa, getting to her feet with care, smoothing her skirt where it had creased. ‘I think I can guess your size.’
By the time she returned Celia’s coat was off and she was watching as her companion walked up and down in front of the long mirrored wall of the shop in her little red dress, looking down to admire her feet. She walked like a model, a trained walk, the bell-skirt swinging around her hips. Luisa could see the dress was made to measure, could see the tiny hand-stitching at the cuff, the darts at the breast to fit the bodice like a second skin; she could also see that it was just beginning to get tight at the waist, a hook and eye left undone, a seam straining. A little curve of stomach pushing out the fine wool of the skirt.
A Florentine Revenge Page 15