Although it was no later than four the lights had come on outside, blurred and twinkling in the snow that still fell, soft as feathers, in the grey street. Luisa gazed out over the woman’s shoulder, trying to make herself focus; she felt a leaden tiredness as though she hadn’t slept for days. She’d been having the dreams again, of Course, although when she woke all she knew was that she still felt tired. She’d get started straight away, register, Sandro’s gone to work, make the coffee, getting on with the real world, but the dreams were there. They glided under her daytime consciousness like fish, darting away when she tried to fix on them. She dreamed she was pregnant, she walked through the streets and people stared and whispered, Unnatural, at her age. Or she’d had a baby and someone had taken it and drowned it, like a kitten. It’d be all this business stirred up again, that would be it; like Sandro she thought, I’ll be glad when it’s all over. That was what he’d said.
Carefully Luisa pressed the pins back into the pad at her waist, and waited for the customer’s instruction. She thought of the flat misery in Sandro’s voice; she heard despair. With a shock she realized he was almost at the end of his tether, that sometimes all he wanted was to lie down and never wake up again. She thought of Lucas Marsh with a kind of bitterness: Why is he here? But of course she knew why he was here. It couldn’t be a coincidence.
‘Yes,’ said the customer without turning around, without looking at Luisa, only at herself. ‘By Monday, please, I have the opera on Tuesday, that charity thing on Thursday.’
She spoke as though Luisa should know her diary inside out, but today Luisa didn’t care about this woman one bit, didn’t want to advise her on shoes, on her hair, on how to keep her shoulders warm and her dignity intact between the car and the opera terrace.
‘Of course,’ was all Luisa said. She took the slippery handful of fabric the customer handed out to her from the changing room and with automatic respect for the garment if not the customer she shook out the creases. It was only as she was packing it for the dressmaker that she remembered the boxes she had to take over to the Regale by six. Mrs Emma Marsh, the honeymoon suite. The note was there, in his neat handwriting; they had been very polite, apologetic about it.
‘We have some walking to do,’ the girl had explained, the guide, Celia. A pretty name, a modest girl, the way she had pulled the dress off in a rush of embarrassment at being caught in the dressing-up box, desperate to be back in her sober clothes. So they were here just for an innocent weekend, the wife’s birthday; she’d heard him say, ‘Happy birthday, darling.’
The man had looked uncomfortable, to do him justice. Why had he brought her here, now, for her birthday? What had possessed him? All she could think was, it must have been a mistake; Luisa had looked at his wife, and felt a hard, wrenching pity for her. Hard enough to be a second wife, but in such circumstances – how could it work? And all at once Luisa realized Emma Marsh didn’t know, had never been told, what had happened to her predecessor, Lucas Marsh’s first wife. She didn’t know what had happened to his child. So had he brought her here as cover, and pregnant, too? What kind of man would do that? She thought of what Sandro had said on the phone, the wind hissing behind him out there on the plains.
‘I didn’t know he was coming,’ he’d said down the line, pleading with her, and she knew he was rehearsing for what they’d say when they found out. How bad would it look, for him, if he had known Lucas Marsh was coming? He’d spent fifteen years feeding the man’s grief, passing on privileged information, unconfirmed material, rumour from unnamed sources. Never letting him forget. And now it would look as though he’d been Lucas Marsh’s hit man, a cat that catches a mouse and lays it on his master’s pillow. The way Sandro had been these past few years, no one got close enough to him to be able to say, Never him. Straight as a die. Not Sandro. Not even Luisa could swear to that.
Sandro had sighed, the sound swallowed by the wind. ‘He only called me yesterday, soon after he arrived but we didn’t talk, not more than the minimum. He was with his wife, can you believe it? On some little guided tour. Had to ring off.’ He paused. ‘I went to find him today. At the hotel.
‘He’s got himself in a lot of trouble, Lucas Marsh. Somewhere, through his work, I don’t know how, he’s got himself a bunch of Ukrainian hardmen who’ll do anything for a couple of thousand euros, who would cut a paedophile’s throat without stopping to take a breath. And they’ll say anything, tried telling him they didn’t kill him, the guy must have cut his own throat, but Marsh knows better, because he’s seen the papers. He’s talked to me; he knows Bartolo was murdered. And that’s not what he wanted.’ And there was a grunt that had something of respect, Luisa thought, and something of disbelief.
‘He didn’t want Bartolo dead?’ She had looked around her as she said that, hearing herself sounding like a Mafia wife, shocked at the words coming from her mouth. And what, wondered Luisa, had he wanted with the man if he didn’t want him dead? The alternatives, somehow, frightened her more.
‘God knows what he wanted,’ Sandro said. ‘God knows. When that happens to you—’ And he stopped short, his voice turning ragged. Luisa thought of what she’d want to do to the man who’d killed her child and found herself without words. Sandro spoke for her. ‘What could make it better?’
There had been a pause, then Sandro sighed. ‘He tried to explain it to me. He said, he just wanted to have the man in front of him, and he knew we’d never have allowed that. A moment alone with him.’
‘Yes,’ said Luisa. I can understand that. Sandro went on, ‘He said, the worst thing was not knowing. He said, you spend years imagining. Was she afraid? You want to stop imagining, you want to know, and if he had Bartolo there in front of him, just the two of them, then he’d know. So he got this guy, Jonas, to track Bartolo down, so that it could be over.’
Luisa thought of the new beginnning Lucas Marsh might have if it was allowed him, that baby growing in his new wife’s belly. And fervently, she hoped that all he wanted was to start all over again, that it wasn’t that he had paid for the man to be killed and now he was having second thoughts. And it occurred to her that sooner or later the police would have to know Marsh was here, sooner or later they’d have to talk to him, and what would happen to Sandro then?
Sandro went on, ‘To be honest, I don’t think he had any idea what these guys are capable of. I told him how we’d found Bartolo, bound, gagged, his throat cut in a swimming pool. He looked like I’d hit him, like he couldn’t breathe.’ Sandro sounded in despair, and he sighed again.
‘So I went to see him this morning. I had to; he doesn’t know it, but he needs help. But of course, there’s nothing I can do, not any more. All I could do was to tell him, just pay them, this guy Jonas, and he’ll go away. Because if you don’t – I tried to tell him what happened if you don’t pay these people, that there’s no one can help you, not the police, not anyone. But he wouldn’t listen, would he? He went all English on me, his face – he went all cold, he stood up straight like he was in court or something and looked out of the window, he wouldn’t look at me.’
Sandro sounded almost grief-stricken and Luisa wondered what they could possibly have made of each other, Sandro and this stiff Englishman, face to face after fifteen years of terrible intimacy a thousand miles apart.
She murmured something automatically, something meaningless like, ‘I’m sorry’ Sandro didn’t seem to have even heard it.
‘He said, “I’m not a murderer.” ’And Sandro had sighed again, and he sounded so tired, so shamed, so hopeless that Luisa didn’t know what to say any more. ‘ “I won’t be a party to it. I’m not a murderer.”’
And now in the fading light Luisa had to wipe her eyes to see, as she sealed up the package for the dressmaker’s and carefully wrote out instructions while the woman beside her nattered on to Gianna about her husband, how much he earned, how he took her to the theatre at least once a week, she never had to lift a finger at home, treated her like a queen. And as Lui
sa tried not to listen, as she followed the neat and tidy course that had kept her going all her life, through everything, she felt rage rising up in her against the indolent complacency of the woman standing there, no more trouble in her life than in a baby’s. She raged against the unfairness of it all, and with a sense of revelation saw that what it was, was a mess. She saw how something that by sheer chance had gone so badly wrong fifteen years ago – in her life, as well as in Lucas Marsh’s – had gone on going wrong since. Like cancer, like some toxic chemical that ran its unstoppable course through the system, mutating and disfiguring and distorting until every cell was damaged. He couldn’t help himself. How far might he have gone? Luisa thought of that fixed, distant look on Lucas Marsh’s face and she knew if it was her, she would be capable of anything. What a mess.
‘I’m off,’ she said to Gianna, making her mind up there and then. ‘I’ll take this along to the dressmaker, and I’ve those bags to deliver to the hotel. To the Regale.’ Gianna stopped talking and stared at her, mouth open, but Luisa looked away, leaning behind her for her coat and the ribboned bags. She turned back, reached across Gianna and opened the till, easing out the cotton sack with the day’s cash takings they kept stashed at the back.
‘I’ll bank these, too, while I’m at it,’ she said, feeling the bag’s bulk; not such a bad day after all. ‘Just remember to set the alarm.’ She turned back at the door. ‘Thanks, sweetheart,’ she said, and that did it, she saw Gianna almost recoil at the word. She thinks I’m crazy, Luisa realized. But she didn’t feel crazy; she felt alive.
19
For a moment even the light in the vestibule seemed to change and darken, and the situation seemed to be about to turn into a nightmare of a kind even Celia had never imagined. She’d sat in casualty with clients with ear infections and sprained ankles, dealt with sudden vertigo in bell-towers, food poisoning; she’d been harangued for bad choices, interrogated about her qualifications, argued with; she had been ignored by bad-tempered teenagers and treated as invisible by their parents. But through it all she had always been able to fix her eyes on something beyond them, the detail of a painting or a piece of stone worn soft by centuries, and tell herself, Well, they’ll be gone in the morning, and this will all still be here. I’ll still be here. Now she looked at Emma and Lucas Marsh and was overcome by the sudden thought that she was bound to them, somehow, that this was all going to get worse before it got better. A lot worse.
There was an astounded expression on Lucas Marsh’s face, a look of profound and private astonishment, as though something quite extraordinary and unexpected was happening to him. And as the three of them stood there in a space becoming more intolerably claustrophobic by the minute and stared at one another, for a hallucinatory, panic-filled moment Celia thought he was going to have a heart attack. He was going to die in front of her, and in front of his wife. He would never see his child. Celia was startled by how much, in that moment in extremis, she felt she knew about these two. And then the colour began to come back.
‘Darling?’ said Emma, and Celia was surprised by the gentleness in her voice. She realized she would have expected Emma Marsh to panic. Lucas Marsh turned to his wife, his eyes unfocused, as though he had been looking at something far away, was returning from a distant place.
‘Yes?’ he said, and he frowned a little, politely, as though trying to remember a name at a party. She put a hand on his arm and suddenly he was himself again.
‘Sorry, darling,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what – the windows…’ He looked around at them, walled-up, blind and dark, and back at Emma. ‘Take a deep breath,’ she said, looking into his face. The door opened, and Celia felt her heart thump in her chest.
It was the attendant, blustering and gesticulating with outrage. He seemed very annoyed, but all Celia could feel was a kind of hysterical relief at his arrival and the sight through the open door of the world outside, the orange tree and the bright snow. Immediately she began to apologize for their unauthorized entry.
‘Yes, yes,’ the attendant said impatiently when she began to explain that there had been no one at the door. ‘I was called away, I was needed in the cappella, at this time of year there’s only one—’ At the mention of the chapel Celia leaped in. ‘There was someone trying to get in?’ she said. ‘We heard something—’ She saw Lucas Marsh look up, and she remembered he spoke Italian.
‘Yes, some Albanese.’ Celia assumed the attendant was using the term loosely, as was common, to indicate an Eastern European. ‘Some idiot.’ He was trying to sound dismissive but Celia heard puzzlement in his voice, too. ‘Trying it on.’ He glanced at her, assessing her; to the curators and museum attendants the guides could be looked upon as troublesome, foreign interlopers, but if they were lucky they might be counted as one of them, fellow professionals, guardians of the artistic legacy. The attendant seemed to come down on Celia’s side. He shrugged. ‘They say, it’s a place of God, they should be allowed free entry.’ He shook his head. ‘Crying sanctuary, so they can come in and pick a few pockets in the dark.’
‘Has he gone now?’ said Celia.
‘Yes,’ said the man slowly, musing. ‘We got rid of him. Suddenly seemed to lose interest.’ He paused, frowning as he mulled it over. ‘They’re usually women, though, the ones that try it on like that. And they don’t usually come to the chapel – it’s a mausoleum, really, they don’t like that, it’s hard to pull the place of worship card. Plus, they’re a superstitious bunch.’ He seemed to recollect himself then, and drew himself up.
‘So,’ he said, switching to a more official tone. ‘Will you be wanting to see the library? It’s not open at the moment, but I can allow you a look.’
‘I don’t think…’ Celia hesitated, looking over at Lucas Marsh; the attendant followed her gaze.
‘Is he all right?’ he asked curiously, nodding in Marsh’s direction. It hadn’t just been her imagination then; although the colour had begun to return his eyes still held something of the astonishment she’d seen in them earlier. A kind of curiosity, the look a man not used to being afraid might have, when he thinks his time has come.
Emma seemed to bridle a little at their discussing Lucas without addressing him. ‘Fine, thank you,’ she said, but she looked anxious to Celia. ‘Just a – I don’t know, claustrophobia. He’s been having—’
Lucas Marsh interrupted her. ‘Mild claustrophobic reaction, that was what the doctor said. Time of life, or something.’ He spoke casually but he seemed uncomfortable, looking away from both of them towards the open door. ‘Perhaps I should have warned you.’
‘It’s quite common, in fact,’ said the attendant earnestly, his irritation evaporating. He gestured around at the oversized architectural detailing, the slippery grey stone of the great serpentine staircase. Even with the door now open to the courtyard and the fresh, cold air that smelled of snow, the heavy grandeur of the space felt vaguely threatening. ‘In here, it can have that effect. And of course, you should never go to the top of the cupola.’ He shook his head at the thought, and with a qualm Celia imagined the cramped, tilting space between the inner and outer skins of the dome. Why hadn’t he warned her? Something about Lucas Marsh’s explanation didn’t strike her as convincing.
‘I think we should be going now,’ she said apologetically to the attendant who had had his dignity restored now that he had been of use, and was smiling and a Table. She turned to Lucas and Emma; it was barely ten minutes’ walk to the Regale from here but they looked drained. ‘Shouldn’t you…?’ she began, wondering whether she should suggest she take Lucas Marsh to the hospital, but something in his expression stopped her. Don’t be silly, it said. She’ll only worry. And thinking of the wait in casualty, she weakened, and conspired with him in silence. In her pocket Celia’s mobile bleeped cheerfully.
It was a text message from Gabriele. ‘Tutto ok?’ She smiled, wondering if he could read her mind; she couldn’t remember what she’d said about her timetable today.
�
��I’ll sort us out a lift,’ she said, turning to Lucas and Emma, and they just nodded. They seemed exhausted into silence, docile as children.
Gabriele answered in two rings. ‘I’m on my way,’ he said immediately. ‘Ten minutes.’ He had just got home, he said; Celia realized that she’d never seen his apartment, down in the suburbs. And as she visualized him there, his parking space, his neat apartment block somewhere in Galluzzo, she realized that the suburbs no longer seemed like home to her, they seemed strange, alien. The dirty, noisy city, the child that cried at night, the man who cleaned the courtyard at two in the morning: that was home now.
They waited for him in the cloister, behind the gate, Celia watching out for the car through the bars. The attendant had closed it, presumably for security. Emma had her arm through Lucas’s; he stood stiffly beside her, watchful. It was still snowing heavily, the air thick with it, and the broad stone pavement that skirted the church had a covering of virgin snow already a couple of inches deep. Immediately outside the gate, though, it was trodden into dirty slush, and the marks of several footprints were visible.
‘Were you worried about that man?’ said Emma to Lucas suddenly, as though Celia wasn’t there. Lucas glanced over at her, and Celia realized Emma somehow wanted her as a witness to his reply. Like a woman worn out with convincing herself her husband is telling her the truth when he denies an affair; they want someone to watch and say, Yes, he’s lying.
‘Yes,’ said Lucas, and his voice was weary. ‘Yes, I was.’ He hesitated, looked away, fixed his gaze on the dome of the chapel that looked down into the cloister. ‘He was Russian – Ukrainian actually. I heard his voice.’ He fell silent, as if that was enough of an explanation. Emma looked at him, waiting; her eyes were round. When he turned back to her and spoke again his tone was lighter, and to Celia, evasive. ‘If you deal with the Russians,’ he shrugged, ‘you have a certain reaction to that tone. Towns like Moscow, Kiev… they’re not like Florence. They’re… like frontier towns.’ He smiled a little, distant.
A Florentine Revenge Page 19