A Florentine Revenge

by Christobel Kent

  ‘I’m so sorry.’ Beate turned to him immediately, an old man in a hat, apologizing profusely and charming permission from him. ‘I’m not stopping, just saying hello, just a word with my friend.’ And she turned back to Celia, alive with a kind of exuberance Celia hadn’t seen in her for a long time. ‘My dear friend.’

  ‘Had a good morning?’ said Celia, laughing.

  ‘Oh, heavenly,’ said Beate, holding a hand to Celia’s cheek. ‘Feel!’ Her fingers were icy. ‘I’ve been drawing all morning,’ she said. ‘It’s wonderful. I can’t understand why I stopped, such laziness.’

  The ring-binder of a small sketchbook stuck out of Beate’s overstuffed tapestry bag, and Celia pulled it out. ‘Can I look?’ she asked.

  Beate pulled a face. ‘Oh, well – go on,’ she said. ‘As long as you don’t look too hard. I’m a bit rusty.’

  Celia opened the little book, saw a bell-tower that looked like the one she was beginning to think of as hers. ‘Lunch break?’ asked Beate, looking around the crowded bar.

  ‘Actually,’ said Celia absently, turning a page, ‘I’m here with my clients. Lucas and Emma. Over there.’ She nodded vaguely towards their table, without looking. ‘These are really good, Beate. Really good.’

  ‘You are kind,’ said Beate. ‘Oh, I see her, that red coat. Very pretty. I liked her, and I meant to say, although of course I couldn’t with her there. Sorry, I meant to say sorry properly. All that ranting about him, rich men, you know. I’d had too much to drink, this birthday of mine to deal with, you got me at a cross moment. I’m sure Lucas Marsh is perfectly – he’s – but where – oh!’

  Celia looked up then at the surprise in Beate’s voice. ‘It’s him,’ said Beate, turning from Lucas, who was looking across at them over Emma’s shoulder, back to Celia. ‘You do know him, then?’ asked Celia.

  ‘No,’ said Beate, and she leaned across and turned another page of the sketchbook. ‘But I saw him this morning. I drew him.’ She lifted the book and there was Lucas leaning on a parapet beside the river, unmistakable, the fine hair high on his forehead, the sharp-shouldered, expensive coat, even the clouded, distant eyes.

  There was someone else in the drawing too, although he was turned obliquely away from view. ‘I thought they made an interesting composition,’ said Beate thoughtfully, studying her drawing. ‘An unlikely pair.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Celia, uneasy. The other man Beate had drawn leaning on the parapet and turned away from Lucas reminded her of someone, or something, she’d seen not long ago. He had a knitted cap pulled down, and an earring; his shoulders had the hulking breadth of a manual labourer’s and the ungloved hand she could see resting on the wall was big-knuckled.

  ‘I don’t know what they were talking about,’ said Beate, ‘I didn’t hear. Perhaps he was being panhandled.’ Celia nodded. ‘Perhaps,’ she said. Slowly she turned the page, caught a glimpse of the same broad-shouldered man but with a woman this time, towering over her.

  ‘Signorina?’ The baker’s voice broke in on them, and Celia realized with a start that she had come to the head of the queue. She closed the book hurriedly and thrust it back into Beate’s bag, feeling oddly as though she’d been spying.

  ‘I’ll run, darling,’ said Beate. ‘You’re working. And I don’t want to look like a queue-jumper.’ She bestowed her sweetest smile on the old man in his hat, and squeezed Celia’s hand. ‘I’m meeting Marco off the plane,’ she said. ‘I’ll call you in the morning.’

  The baker’s voice was impatient now. ‘Please, Signorina. I haven’t got all day.’ And Beate waved, and was gone. Thoughtfully Celia ordered slices of pizza with buffalo mozzarella and slices of ham, two more slices with capers and anchovies. Emma had looked very hungry. She stacked them on a tray and collected bottles of water, glasses, a half-bottle of the Cantinetta’s own wine.

  ‘Oh, oh,’ said Emma when she saw the food. That looks good.’ Her cheeks blazed with colour now in the heat from the oven and the massed bodies and she had taken off her coat. Celia set down the food. Lucas Marsh took one slice, and when he’d eaten that sat and watched his wife; she seemed ravenous, eating quickly and neatly, trying everything.

  ‘Wine?’ asked Celia. ‘Not me,’ said Emma with wry regret. ‘Better be good. Save myself for tonight.’ Celia held the bottle out to Lucas Marsh, and he frowned at it. ‘No, I – oh, well, why not?’ he said, pouring himself a tumblerful. ‘Darling,’ said Emma, surprised. ‘Not like you, a drink at lunchtime. Has it been so stressful?’

  Celia studied him. He looked pale, but no paler than usual; distracted, perhaps, but then he’d been like that since that first morning in the Regale. Had the man in Beate’s drawing been panhandling him, hassling him? An occupational hazard for the tourist, and it might well have annoyed Lucas. It struck Celia that the river was not on Lucas’s route from the Regale to meet them at Frollini; in fact it was in quite the other direction.

  ‘No,’ he said quickly in answer, ‘not at all. Just – why not? We’re on holiday’

  ‘You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to get Lucas to relax,’ said Emma, emboldened by the smile he gave her, even though to Celia it looked somehow stiff, anxious. Actually, thought Celia, I would believe. ‘We really almost never go on holiday, not really. There’s always a business meeting, Lucas has to go and see some development or other for clients – do you remember that time in Nice?’

  Lucas nodded, looking down into his tumbler. It was already empty, and he refilled it with a kind of determination as though taking medicine. Dutch courage, Celia found herself thinking absently. A spot of colour had appeared on each of his pale cheeks. ‘Excuse me a moment,’ he said abruptly, and stood up. He took a few steps away from them and stopped, looking down the bar and into the street outside, his glass in his hand.

  Emma seemed not to notice. ‘Of course,’ she said, confiding, ‘I shouldn’t have been here, on this trip. But I’ve always wanted to see Florence.’ Her voice was dreamy. ‘It’s even lovelier than I expected.’ She transferred her gaze to Celia but it was distant. You’re very lucky to live here all the time. Or perhaps you just get used to it, you take it for granted?’

  ‘No,’ said Celia, ‘it’s always beautiful.’ Without thinking she said, ‘What do you mean, you shouldn’t have been here?’

  ‘Oh – I…’ Emma seemed flustered suddenly. ‘Nothing, not really’ She darted a glance at her husband; he was within earshot, just about, but he didn’t appear to be listening. She lowered her voice. ‘It was a business trip, Lucas didn’t even tell me about it.’ Her voice grew quiet, became indistinct. ‘I think he’d even forgotten it was my birthday. He – he was busy, it was understandable.’ Emma looked up. ‘But they sent the ticket to the house by mistake, not the office, and I opened the envelope.’ Celia imagined Emma’s downcast face as she looked at the ticket, and she wondered if that was when Lucas Marsh had decided to phone Celia. Thousands of pounds on a weekend for his wife’s birthday, the full works; how much in love he must be. That was what she’d thought; now she realized that the older she grew the more ignorant she felt about it. Love. She watched Emma now; she had her head on one side, a distant smile on her face, but she seemed to grow uncomfortable as she spoke. ‘Lucas said he didn’t think I’d be interested!’

  Her voice was louder now, and artificially bright; she tried a laugh, and at the sound Lucas Marsh turned, and in two steps he was back at the table, offering no explanation for either his departure or his return. ‘But then he laid on all this,’ Emma said, sweeping a hand around the crowded room, then, realizing that perhaps a packed and steamy baker’s was not what Lucas had had in mind, went on, ‘What I mean is, arranging for you, and the dinner this evening, and the hotel – oh, everything. He’s made it wonderful, something for me to do every minute!’ She smiled radiantly, but at the corner of each eye Celia saw the gleam of a tear squeezed back and heard a kind of despair in her voice. Emma must have wanted something else from this holiday, Celia thought, and glanced surre
ptitiously at Lucas. His face was softened, made defenceless by the wine, and he was looking at his wife with an odd, conflicted expression, a mixture of longing and impatience and almost, she thought, of desperation. Then he turned to Celia, and the look was gone.

  ‘So,’ he said abruptly. ‘This afternoon. Will we be able to get into the chapel early? I’m sorry to mess the schedule about.’ He stopped abruptly, as though unused to apologizing, and Celia found herself wondering for the first time if there was some strategy behind all this, some reason for Lucas Marsh’s behaviour, ducking into doorways, hiding in crowds, changing plans at a moment’s notice.

  ‘Yes,’ she said mildly, deciding that getting them where they wanted to go was her business, not where Lucas chose to go for a solitary walk, or who he stopped to talk to on the way. ‘There shouldn’t be any difficulty.’ Early afternoon was never the busiest time at the Medici Chapel, tourists prizing their lunch-hour above all things, and besides, it was very quiet. She took a sip of her wine and felt it warm her stomach, thought with wonder of the cold, snowy streets, the sudden hush and emptiness of the city outside. ‘And we can always go to the library first, the Michelangelo staircase…’ She tailed off as the image of the great library was summoned up, the deep and forbidding gloom of its vestibule, and suddenly she wondered if it was a good idea after all. But it was too late.

  ‘All right, then,’ said Lucas Marsh, on his feet and pulling on gloves. ‘Let’s go.’

  Out on the plain towards the sea the snow had fallen thick and silent for hours on to frozen ground, and there were drifts along the riverbank, up against the shanty towns and trailer parks, the rows of blank white factory units. The police car was parked outside a broken wooden fence; inside the snow was trodden into dirty mush between the caravans and corrugated iron lean-tos. The two policemen were standing behind a camper out of sight of the dirt road with a third man, one with three-day stubble and bundled in layers of greasy coats. Otherwise the place seemed deserted, a plastic chair thickly furred with the morning’s snowfall sat out under the blank, louring sky, and the caravans looked dark and empty.

  Of course during the day their occupants would be working, if you could call it that – selling drugs at the station, begging outside the cathedral, picking pockets in the market – but still the place looked abandoned. Not much of a place to call home; you could see that in the policeman’s eyes as he kicked at a patch of frozen snow, his expression an uncomfortable mixture of disgust and pity.

  ‘You haven’t seen them – for two days, then?’ The man’s hands were jammed into his pockets – They never had gloves, thought Sandro with disbelief, do they think they’ve come to the Promised Land, perpetual summer? You would have thought they could lift a pair of gloves if they can steal handbags, silver, sunglasses – and, hunched against the cold, he shrugged his shoulders even higher. The man frowned, his stubbled double chin wrinkling as he buried it in his mangy scarf.

  ‘Yeah, whatever,’ he said in his guttural, alien Italian. ‘Packed up, off and out of it, Friday morning early, three, four. Pots, pans, girlfriend and all.’

  ‘And that’s all you know?’ The man shrugged again.

  ‘Where you from?’ asked Pietro with mild curiosity. The man looked alarmed.

  ‘Romania,’ he muttered, his voice hoarse as he pronounced it. Pietro nodded, kicked out idly at the plastic chair, and a chunk of snow slid off the arm, revealing the dirty plastic underneath. ‘Refugee, is it?’ he said.

  ‘That’s it,’ said the man hopefully.

  ‘Wouldn’t do you any harm to be a bit more cooperative, would it?’ said Pietro, his tone still mild. Then he kicked the chair again, hard this time, and it skittered across the frozen ground, one leg hanging off. The Romanian’s face set hard with anger and fear.

  ‘Where are they from?’ said Sandro. ‘Ukraine?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said the Romanian, sneering. ‘Chernobyl country. That’s Russia, isn’t it?’

  ‘Not any more,’ said Sandro, his head on one side.

  ‘I’d have called them Russians. Sounded like Russians, acted like ‘em. Nasty. Kicked the girl about.’

  ‘What game were they in?’ asked Sandro, thinking of the girlfriend. ‘Whores? Drugs?’ As he waited for an answer he leaned down and picked up something from the ground where the chair had been, a wedge of paper used maybe to prop a table, folded tight. Idly he began to unfold it: a typed sheet, times, places blurred by damp, in a corner a photocopied face, some kind of certification. A woman’s face, the city’s official stamp beside it, Guida di Firenze. He frowned down at it for a moment, then slowly he folded it back up and put it into his pocket. Watching him, the Romanian shifted from one foot to another uncomfortably; it wasn’t just the cold, either, the look on his face wished him out of there, wished he’d been somewhere else when the police car had bumped slowly along the dirt track by the river. He pulled a crumpled pack of nazionali from his pocket, pulled one out and lit it; it took him some time in the icy wind, hiding his face in his cupped hands.

  ‘Don’t know, really,’ he said slowly once he’d got the cigarette lit, pulling on it hard. The tobacco reeked acrid and sour, dirtying the clean smell of snow. ‘Not whores; they wouldn’t have got much for that piece. Drugs, mostly, but whatever they could get. A bit of burglary…’ He darted a glance at them, not wanting to give the impression that he himself could be considered an associate. ‘Hired muscle, bully boys. Drifters. Came down about a month ago. I thought they had to be a building crew, site labour, but they had no kit, no tools, no overalls. And they never went anywhere for more than an hour or so, just hung about. Like they were waiting for something.’ He looked around after this uncharacteristically long speech as though to see if he might have been overheard. ‘Can I go now? I’ve – I’ve got my shift starting in half an hour.’

  Sandro ignored him. He looked at Pietro, his face impassive. ‘The guy was found Thursday morning.’ He turned back to the Romanian.

  ‘Shift work?’ he said.

  ‘In a bakery,’ said the Romanian. ‘Pays pennies, not worth your while. Someone’s got to do it, haven’t they?’ His face was sullen.

  Sandro nodded noncommittally, not letting him off the hook. ‘Before they disappeared,’ he said slowly, ‘just before, say Wednesday, Thursday. Was there anything different? You know what I mean?’

  The Romanian looked up at the sky and in the blank grey light Sandro saw that his eyes were a funny colour, blue-green. He stayed like that for a while, looking up at the sky with his luminous eyes and thinking, the snow falling on his unshaven cheeks. For a mad moment Sandro wondered if he was looking for heaven up there, like you do when you’re a child.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said eventually. ‘They had a fight, early Thursday morning. A lot of noise. Might have been about the girl, that was what I thought at the time, screaming like dogs fighting over a bitch. I went out – to the baker’s…’ He glanced at them for a reaction but there was none. ‘By the time I got back, eight or nine that night, they’d calmed down, you’d never have known there’d been any trouble, the place was neat.’ He frowned. ‘I guess they’d packed everything up ready to go, though I didn’t know that then. And then they sat up all night, playing cards and watching the planes land, one after the other. Every time one landed they’d stop, and look up.’

  ‘You don’t know their names, do you?’ said Sandro, without much hope. ‘Of course you don’t.’

  The Romanian shrugged. ‘No surnames, no. The main man, the boss, they called him Jonas. Big bloke, shaved his head. Don’t know about the others. Not the kind of guys you’d want to be caught eavesdropping on.’

  ‘The girl?’

  The Romanian gave a sour laugh. ‘They don’t have names, girls like that. A stray dog. You don’t give a stray a name, do you? She looked sick.’

  ‘And you’ve no idea where they’ve gone,’ said Pietro.

  The man shook his head. ‘No. The car’s a heap of junk, though, wouldn’t get them to Ses
to Florentino, let alone back to Russia.’ Pietro looked at him, head on one side.

  ‘An Opel coupé about fifteen years old, bronze, Modena plates, dented offside wing, no rear fender,’ muttered the Romanian quickly, looking away, as though he might be overheard. He turned back. ‘If they wanted to go back to Russia, which I doubt. Ask me, they still had business around here, don’t know why, just a feeling. Something going on in the city, something to do with one of those planes landing.’ He eyed the policemen with sudden recklessness, then ground the stub of his cheap cigarette on the ground. ‘I’m going,’ he said.

  The two policemen just nodded as if they were no longer even thinking about him, and unable to believe his luck, the Romanian turned and headed for the gats.

  ‘Hold up,’ called Sandro. ‘Just a minute.’ The man stopped.

  ‘Just the one woman?’ he said. ‘Between them?’

  The man shrugged. ‘She didn’t arrive with them,’ he said. ‘Just turned up one day, hung around. They ignored her; she cooked for them, that was about it.’

  Sandro nodded, frowning. ‘So she wasn’t Russian?’

  The Romanian shook his head. ‘Italian,’ he said. ‘Skinny as hell. Drugs, maybe.’ He waited a bit, but they seemed to have forgotten about him, and he took his chance. This time no one called after him; as he pulled his coat up around his ears and hurried past the police car towards the main road and the bus stop he risked a glance back at them. There they stood, saying nothing. He thought of the Russians, and his next thought was, I’m gone.