In the city traffic was slowing almost to a standstill as the snow continued to fall, thick and soft and silent in the dark. Down to the south of the city the snowploughs had been through already and things were beginning to move. Great mounds of dirty snow lined the road that wound below the hilltop villas and ancient estates on the edge of the city, the Poggio Imperiale and the Certosa, Bottai and Impruneta and Galluzzo, and on the spattered, slushy tarmac cars made their way home. Where the roads to Rome and Siena met the ring road around Florence, miraculously the traffic was moving: slowly, but it was moving all the same, around the roundabouts and link roads.
Between the ring road and a nice, clean housing development, neat balconies and pale stucco and fresh paint, sat the crumbling concrete of the Olympia Club, an eyesore and an embarrassment. It had always been a squat, ugly building, built of reinforced concrete with a grandiose circular bar set on top of the gym complex and changing rooms, pretentious and ill-proportioned. The curved windows of the bar were all smashed now, inside the dark interior the concrete floor was littered with broken glass and the rusted steel of the building’s reinforcements showed through the grey like dirty bones. Snow drifted against the wire link fence of the tennis courts; the weeds that had long since forced their way up through the tarmac were blanketed with it.
The pools were still there, even after all this time, a long oblong and a small, shallow, round pool for babies and children, in summer a dismal sight, overgrown with weeds and rye grass and filled with pine needles and litter. Inside the building the indoor pool yawned horribly, falling away like a landslip, like some cavernous burial chamber waiting to be filled. For fifteen years no one had been able to decide what to do with them, but this evening outside at least the shabby disgrace of their cracked and mildewed tiles was softened and obscured, like everything else, by the snow.
Behind the Olympia Club the decaying farmhouse where Cesare Bartolo had lived sat squat and dark and empty, its grounds overgrown and neglected. The perimeter wall seemed the only part of the property to which attention had been paid. Close on two metres high, originally of brick, it ran along the side of the quadrilateral that touched the outside world and had been patched and extended with concrete and misshapen stone and breeze blocks to seal every gap. It was surmounted with some rusty link fence and irregularly stuck with broken glass that could be seen protruding lethally even through the six inches of snow that had fallen since dusk. Beyond the wall was a strip of narrow pavement, a dead-end of a road, two sulphur-yellow streetlamps and across the way the Bartolos’ nearest neighbour, a villa with striped awnings, trimmed hedge and shuttered windows.
Outside the neighbours’ house a car was parked. Even from what was visible under the snow – a rear-end sagging so low it scraped the road, one headlight smashed and a deep, rusted dent in the offside wing – it seemed unlikely that this car belonged to the neat little house, which anyway had its own garage. It might have belonged to Cesare Bartolo, except that he had never learned to drive; his mother hadn’t thought it a good idea.
The car was an Opel, perhaps fifteen years old and without the ghost of a chance of an MOT, the kind of car driven by those to whom the need for tax and insurance was theoretical only: a car for the lawless. It was an uncertain brown or bronze in the yellow light, and it had Modena plates.
This backwater of Galluzzo was very empty, and aside from the perpetual, unvarying roar of the motorway on its elevated section beyond the river, on this snowy night it possessed a kind of unnatural quiet. The neat rows of housing blocks beyond the Olympia Club turned away from the Bartolo house, and the families who lived there told their children not to go near it. They didn’t all obey, of course; the girls tended to give it a wide berth, but boys on the verge of adolescence would loiter below the wall to throw stones, and they got on one another’s backs and ripped the wire link fencing to peer inside. They scrawled graffiti on the crumbling render along the wall. Pedofilo. At the end of the wall where the word tailed away a man was leaning.
An overgrown lad in an expensive-looking waxed motorbike jacket, his short hair spiked and gleaming with gel, he had the appearance of a petty criminal or market trader; there was something cocky about his stance, something too new about his jeans. He was eyeing up the car. Slowly he pushed himself off the wall, thrust his hands deep in his pockets and walked up to it, knelt down quickly and flicked the dusting of snow from the licence plate. He rocked back on his heels for a minute and nodded, then he took out a mobile phone and punched in the number. ‘Dottore?’ he said. ‘Sandro? It’s Fausto. I’ve found it.’
Looking up and down the street, the boy spoke into the phone for a few moments in a quick, businesslike way, describing the street, the dent in the car’s wing, the missing fender, the numberplate. When he’d finished he paused, then said curiously, ‘So I got there before the police’s fancy computer, did I? What’s it all about, Dottore? Not like you to call in favours.’ There was no audible response and after a moment the overgrown boy shrugged. ‘You’re the boss,’ he said. ‘You coming over to check it out, then? But you watch yourself. They’re not polite like us homegrown lads, Russians aren’t.’ He clicked the phone shut, walked to the end of the wall into the shadows, and vanished into the night. Job done.
The shops were still open but on the slushy pavements people were walking home, cheerful in the snow; it hardly ever snowed in Florence and although it had taken most of them by surprise and their feet were wet, the weather seemed to have lifted everyone’s spirits. They walked arm in arm, making impromptu arrangements for a Saturday night meal, talking about what they’d do at Christmas.
Up the warm, carpeted stairs in the honeymoon suite of the Regale, Emma Marsh still sat at the great square table in the centre of the ballroom-sized drawing room that surely must have been daunting for the most deliriously happy of honeymoon couples. Only two of them in all this space, their voices echoing hollow under the high ceilings. There was something about the room that said two was not enough, and the claustrophobia of romance hung like pollution in the air.
Emma must have left the table since Luisa closed the door behind her, because she was undressed, but it was as though she had started to perform some ritual of bathing and preparation but had not been able to continue. The dresses she had showed Luisa still hung, untouched, from the bedroom door; the red shoes sat bright and expectant on the rug where she had left them. Her heavy black hair fell to her pale, bare shoulders, and with one hand she held a towel tight across her breast; the other hand was pressed across her mouth. She was staring down at the newspaper, where the photograph of a small girl with a chipped front tooth smiled back at her against a backdrop of impossible, perpetual blue. Outside on the balcony Lucas stood in the snow and stared into the dark, no more than an outline against the lit red roofs of the city that rose and fell beyond him.
Outside the Palazzo Ferrigno, where light blazed from the huge, unshuttered windows into the street below, there was a ceaseless passage now of shoppers on their way home. But the brazier where they might have warmed their hands, which might have been expected to be enjoying brisk trade, had been shoved half into an alley, its coals grey and dead. A handful of chestnuts still sat on the perforated tray but they were dusty with ash and there was no one there to offer them to passers-by. Jonas had gone.
Celia had showered at least when the buzzer sounded; she glanced at the clock as she headed for the door, dripping and impatient at the interruption, and saw that it was six o’clock. With a sigh she picked up the entryphone. It struck her as ironic that she had spent months in lonely isolation here, seeing only clients, glimpsing Bea:e or Gabriele in the street without the time even to wave, and now that there were any number of people turning up on her doorstep she just wanted to be left alone, She didn’t want to see Gabriele, or Dan, or Jo Starling, she just wanted to get through tonight. She wanted her part in Lucas and Emma Marsh’s exotic, dangerous lives to be over. Just a few more hours, and she would be back her
e, Celia told herself, but she wondered. She understood that she had been drawn into something she didn’t understand, a dark and tangled story, and she didn’t know yet how it was going to end.
‘Hello?’ She spoke warily, uncharacteristically apprehensive. This was the effect, she realized, of coming up close to violent death; you realized that the well-lit comfort of your home was no more than an illusion of security. A child had been killed, a hole punched in a happy family. Someone might come to your door one night, and it would all be over.
The voice on the street below crackled, obscured by the wasp-whine of a passing motorino.
‘Hello?’ At first Celia recognized neither the voice nor the name and struggled with an impulse to hang up, to slide the bolts shut and refuse to answer. She repeated the name to herself in bemusement and then she understood: Luisa, from the shop. She could not imagine what the woman was doing here, she didn’t have time for this, she wasn’t even dressed; she felt her nerves jangle, impatience and panic combining. But out of an ineradicable reluctance to be rude, Celia wearily buzzed Luisa inside. She reached into the hall to turn on the stair light, and left the door ajar while she ran for a dressing gown.
Out of breath on her return, Celia pulled the door open and came face to face with Luisa at the top of the stairs, holding out a white paper carrier bag with the shop’s name looped across it in silver. Dumbly she took it: This is some kind of a delivery, then, or did I leave something in the shop? Celia stepped back instinctively.
‘Please,’ she said, standing aside and gesturing to Luisa to enter. With the automatic ‘Permesso?’ no Italian can cross a threshold without uttering, Luisa tentatively came inside. In the hall she pulled off a mitten, took Celia’s hand and gave it a quick, half-embarrassed little shake; it was not an Italian gesture, and it took Celia by surprise. They went into the small sitting room and sat, the bag between them, on the neat, comfortable little sofa.
‘So,’ said Celia with an awkward little laugh. ‘What’s this?’ She pulled the bag towards her, curious. Luisa watched her, slowly pulling a small backpack from her shoulders which she set beside her on the sofa.
‘Mrs Marsh – she asked me to bring it to you.’ She paused as if to reconsider, frowned a little as in an effort at scrupulous accuracy. ‘In fact, she didn’t say I had to bring it, I could have sent it over in a taxi, but I wanted – well. I needed some fresh air. Please.’
She gave the bag a little push and Celia set it upright, unpeeled the silver sticker that held it together, pulled out something folded in white paper. ‘Oh,’ she said, as the emerald-green tulle and silk unfurled in her hands, ribbons slithered cool across her knees and hung to the floor. She held it up. ‘Oh! This.’ She didn’t know what to say; she felt ridiculously overwhelmed, brought to the point of tears by Emma Marsh’s gesture. ‘Oh.’ Spontaneously she held it against her chest and a faint waft of the shop’s smell rose from it. Luisa smiled, but the smile didn’t reach as far as her eyes; her thoughts were elsewhere.
‘I think she wanted you to wear it for this evening,’ she said, shaking her head a little as though in wonder, or despair. ‘Signora Marsh. She is – she’s very young.’ Celia looked up at the sadness in Luisa’s voice, at the oddness of the words.
‘Yes?’ she said.
Luisa shrugged. ‘You know, when you’re young you think it can be that easy. Dress up, go out, forget all your troubles.’ The thought seemed to make her sad.
Celia put down the dress; in some sense, they were in this together, she and Luisa, trying to understand clients. ‘You’ve just come from the hotel,’ she said. She hesitated. ‘Can I ask you – what – how did they seem to you?’ Luisa looked at her for a long moment without saying anything, then she spoke.
‘Look,’ she said. ‘That man—’ She broke off.
‘Mr Marsh?’ said Celia softly.
‘He wasn’t called that then,’ said Luisa slowly. ‘You’re too young to remember. It was a long time ago.’
‘I’d just arrived here,’ said Celia, and she held Luisa’s gaze. ‘It’s a bit more than fifteen years. His daughter had disappeared. Then they found her.’
‘I think Mr Marsh is in a lot of trouble,’ said Luisa. ‘He might even be in danger, that’s what my husband thinks.’ And Celia thought of the day they’d had; she saw Lucas’s face again as he fought for breath in the window-less space between the Medici library and its snowy cloister, and she nodded.
Luisa put a hand into the pocket of her padded coat and pulled out two sheets of paper, one stained with the marks of having been folded many times, one clean and smooth. Carefully she unfolded them and set them side by side in front of Celia.
‘This is you?’ she said. ‘These are their plans?’ Celia frowned down at the page and nodded. Someone knows where we are, she thought. Knows where we’re going.
‘Where did you get these?’ she asked slowly, and she knew that the answer would not be simple.
‘Let me tell you from the beginning,’ said Luisa. ‘Let me tell you about my husband.’ She saw Celia glance anxiously at the clock. ‘You have time, before you go.’
Luisa hadn’t meant to say anything, she had intended to hand over the pretty green dress and leave. But when she held it out to Celia Donnelly on the threshold of her warm little flat, she realized there was nowhere to go except back outside into the cold. Nothing to do but walk and walk until she was exhausted, with all of this going round and round in her head. Then the girl had invited her inside, and the flat seemed so clean and bright and empty compared with her own great dark, suffocating mausoleum of a place that she’d sat down. And when Celia had looked at Luisa and asked, straight out, about Lucas and Emma Marsh, she understood that the poor child was involved with this too, she had to go back in there and get through an evening with them. She needed to know. And Luisa had laid it all out, everything Sandro had told her, everything that had happened all those years ago, everything that had happened since. The relief was so great she found herself speaking faster and faster, words tumbling over themselves in their eagerness to be spoken.
‘It seems a mess,’ Celia had said slowly, speaking carefully and precisely and, to Luisa’s great relief, not hysterical, not doubting. ‘It’s not just your husband who’s in trouble, though, is it? Lucas Marsh is, too. Do the police know he’s here?’
Luisa had shaken her head. ‘I don’t think so. Only Sandro.’
‘And the men he came to see, to pay off for…’ Celia had hesitated. ‘For whatever – whatever they’ve dons for him.’
Luisa had nodded, looking at the girl intently, watching her calculate, saw her conquer the incredulity she felt, as Luisa did, at the thought of being immersed in this alien world of hitmen and torturers. ‘Except he didn’t pay them. It’s not the police he’s running away from, hiding from.’
‘No,’ said Celia, and she put a hand to her mouth. ‘They’re going to want the money, aren’t they? Your husband – Sandro – he knows that.’ She was pale, her blue-green eyes dark against her English skin. ‘And Lucas Marsh goes home tomorrow.’ She looked down then at the tattered piece of paper in her lap that spelled it out; where to find him and when. Her photograph on it, too.
‘Where did he get this?’ She stared at the image of herself. ‘Your husband?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Luisa simply. The grimy paper looked sinister suddenly; Luisa wondered how many hands it might have passed through, and she was fearful.
They both fell silent then, and suddenly Luisa felt sure of something at last: it became clear to her what Sandro would be thinking.
‘I think Sandro will be there,’ she said simply. ‘I think he’ll be wherever Lucas Marsh is. Because he got him into this – this mess, and he has to get him out of it.’
‘You’ve got to tell the police,’ said Celia suddenly. ‘Give them this.’ She thrust the piece of paper back at Luisa as though it was dangerous, an unexploded bomb.
‘Yes,’ Luisa said slowly, taking the page. �
��I know. I – I will tell them.’ But not yet. She’d stood up then, to go, and Celia had got to her feet too, the dress in her hands. ‘Thank you for coming,’ she’d said distantly, and Luisa had wondered if she was in shock. ‘I hope you find your husband.’
‘Here’s my number,’ said Luisa, uneasy at leaving her like this, and she scribbled it on an old receipt from her pocket. ‘And here’s Sandro’s. You know, in case.’ Celia had just nodded absently, as though her thoughts were already somewhere else.
At the foot of Celia Donnelly’s building Luisa stood on the snowy pavement and breathed in the crystalline air. Around her the city sounded different, muffled, slow, and briefly the fresh, cold smell of the snow took her back to her childhood, to a cleaner world. Across the street a solid, handsome man was standing beside a big, shiny dark car and smoking a cigarette in a meditative sort of way; he watched as she pulled the door shut behind her. Luisa recognized him, one of the city’s drivers, chauffeur to the wealthy; he gave her a brief nod and she returned it.
Walking away, thinking hard, Luisa took out the mobile but it told her there was no signal; here in the tight warren of streets at the foot of the hill that led up to San Miniato there was too much stone, ancient and impenetrable, walling her in. She needed height, and not just for the mobile signal; she needed to be able to look around herself, to get a clear view. Luisa made for the great stone gate that stood in the city wall just across from Celia Donnelly’s flat, its crenellations iced with snow against the inky night sky, and headed up the hill.
Doggedly Luisa climbed the Costa dei Magnoli, the Via Monte alle Croci, crossed the Viale Michelangelo where the cars hissed past in the slush; she didn’t pause for breath until she had reached the church itself and then, with its cool pale green and white facade at her back she turned and looked. Below her the great city was spread out, glittering in the darkness; a full moon shone from a clear black sky, and the lovely floating dome of the cathedral gleamed with an unearthly luminosity under its dusting of snow. The sight lifted Luisa for a moment and she even found herself thinking, I must do this more often. And then she heard the distant sound of a siren wailing in the tangle of dark streets below her, and she felt a tightness in her chest like a stone. She took out the mobile and dialled Sandro’s number again. Answer, she pleaded silently into the cold night air as she listened to the ring: mindless, mechanical, it sounded in virtual space, nowhere. Sandro was nowhere. But then she heard his voice.
A Florentine Revenge Page 23