A Florentine Revenge

by Christobel Kent

  Caprese looked down at her watch, changing the subject. ‘Are you early?’ she asked. ‘No. You are not. But where are your – your clients? Our clients?’

  ‘It’s only five past,’ said Celia quickly, on the defensive. Why hadn’t she insisted she should arrange transport? They might be anywhere; for a brief, mad moment she succumbed to the ridiculous fears that had been pressing in on her since she found out who Lucas Marsh really was and pictured them lost, hijacked, dead. She forced the picture out of her mind: They’re just five minutes late. She smiled as brightly as she could manage at Paola Caprese. ‘I’m sorry. Is there some leeway, with the timing of the dinner? Ten minutes here or there?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Paola Caprese, but she sounded faintly disgusted, and Celia was surprised. In her experience of the very wealthy, and she imagined Paola Caprese’s wasn’t very different, they weren’t unduly disturbed by punctuality. Part of the job was standing around waiting for the client, wasn’t it? Suppressing any feelings of irritation at time wasted, rising above the small humiliation of it. That’s all it is, she told herself again, they’ve no conception of the time, it’s our job to wait for them. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and turned away from Paola Caprese to look out through the glass, willing them to arrive.

  In the concierge’s booth the television screen still flickered; she could see a row of smaller, CCTV screens ranged on the wall above the portable, but even if the man’s attention hadn’t been elsewhere only one of them seemed to be functioning. The grainy black and white image of a broad, galleried landing showed no movement. Celia turned to Paola Caprese on impulse, remembering that Marsh had asked not once but twice about the security of the Palazzo Ferrigno. Of course it’s safe here, she told herself robustly, with a vanload of cara-binieri just two minutes’ walk away outside the British Consulate, police cars wailing past every five minutes, a thousand witnesses in the streets. But all the same, what might Lucas Marsh say when he saw the concierge with his feet up on his desk? She had done no more than make eye contact with the administrator, though, she hadn’t even opened her mouth to articulate her misgiving and it was already too late. They were here.

  Jonas didn’t even think, That was close, as he pushed open the door of the small cupboard at the foot of the service staircase and closed it behind him on the industrial vacuum cleaner, the brooms and mop bucket and ten different kinds of feather duster among which he had stood, as effortlessly still as marble, and waited for the steps to fade away. He had the perfect poise and certainty of a genius, a brain surgeon, a master criminal. The confidence of a fixed-up heroin addict. He listened on the stairs and it seemed to him he could hear everything, every creak and whisper in the building, and he thought, four, maybe five people, in a thousand square metres of corridors and salons and ballrooms. And, of course, he’d counted them in and counted them out, he’d watched them trudge home out of the gatehouse in the snow, there was no substitute for thorough preparation.

  In Jonas’s pocket was the stubby knife he’d pressed against Giulietta’s throat, a throat as stringy as a plucked chicken’s. Leave me alone. She’d leave him alone now, that was for sure. He wasn’t her knight in shining armour any more. Jonas moved his head slowly from side to side, trying to get her face out of his mind because it was spoiling things. The sharp bones of her jaw, deep, bruised eye sockets, her skin grey as a starved child’s. Her forearms furred with fine hair, like an animal, like something feral; it gave him the creeps. She’d been useful to them at first, sitting there in a booth in the bar while he bought her sweet drinks, apricot nectar, amaretto, she’d told Jonas all her secrets once he’d put an arm around her waist and whispered promises in her ear. Yes, he did this, he did that, I saw him. He called to the little girl, and she went to him. He saw me watching. Shame the police didn’t try that fifteen years ago when they were interviewing her, although you never knew, she might have turned on them. She might have bitten.

  But she’d got Bartolo out of the house where she told them he kept the doors triple-locked, with homemade booby traps at the doors, sticks whittled to a point, buckets of slurry to trip intruders. She lured him out to Le Cascine for them, which had been very useful; Jonas didn’t know what she’d said to get him there. Blackmail? She wasn’t Bartolo’s type any more, after all, although she could hardly be called a grown woman either, more an assembly of bones and string, titless, an ugly doll. She’d spoken to Bartolo in a little girl’s voice that had made Jonas sick. How was he to know they’d never be able to get rid of her, afterwards?

  On the stairs Jonas paused for a moment and breathed deeply, in and out, imagining all the stone and wood around him, a maze, or a tomb. She’s gone now, isn’t she? I taught her a lesson. A rich smell of cooking food came up from somewhere down below him. Venison, wild boar, pasta; with vague disgust he imagined an oily stew of vegetables and herbs. It slowed you down, all that food; Jonas didn’t have time for food, but let them stupefy themselves with it, all the better. He moved on up the cramped stairwell: You’re mine, now, he thought, addressing the great house. He felt like a king.

  23

  She sat there for a long time in the dark. There was a long stone bench under the trees along the busy ring road and she sat down and gazed out over the cold, glittering city. Lights were strung across its breadth like diamonds, except out to the east, where Le Cascine lay in darkness, absorbing light, giving out none. At first her thoughts were dull and aimless: only misery and a sense that her life was over.

  Gradually it dawned on Luisa that the last time she had felt like this was when she’d been twenty, and Sandro hadn’t called her after their first date; sitting there, Luisa made a little derisive sound when she realized. He hung up on you. Poor little thing. And although all she wanted was simply to fall asleep in the cold and not wake up, suddenly she couldn’t. It niggled at her like a stone in her shoe. It scolded her like a mother for never having grown up. As though she was in her own bed at home and trying to sleep, those odd, tangential, obscure thoughts found their way into the counting of sheep and roused her. The insistent sound of recorded church bells, trucks thundering through slush. Luisa sat up. She knew that tinny peal of bells, the ugly spire of a modern church just off the Via Senese. Galluzzo. What had Sandro said, before he interrupted himself? Of all the places. He was out in Galluzzo, where the swimming pool had been, what was it called? The Olympia Club. Where the child had disappeared; where Bartolo lived. Of all the places.

  The bus lurched and swung, agonizingly slow; a man’s heavy body pressed against her shoulder and at every stop Luisa fought the desire to jump up and push through the crowded gangway until she found herself out in the cold air. She gripped the pole more tightly and with her spare hand groped for the rucksack on her back. Through the nylon she felt the compact wad of banknotes rolled tight in their thick elastic bands and felt oddly unmoved by the thought that she was a thief, after a lifetime’s honest loyalty to her employer. If Sandro needed the money, if he needed to get away. They could go together. Luisa almost smiled. Start a new life on one day’s takings? Hardly. She realized she didn’t care about the money, it was just money; it was a sign. A sign that Sandro was more important.

  Outside the windows the houses thinned as they reached the edge of the city. They passed the orchards of Impruneta, a row of gas stations planted along the main road, a yard full of terracotta pots under the snow. The bus swayed along in the dark, all lit up inside, its cargo of passengers blank-faced in expectation of their arrival home. Luisa looked out of the window and saw that they were nearly there. The river appeared on the right, winding up to the road and then veering away to where it passed behind Bartolo’s farmhouse and the Olympia Club. She stood up.

  As she watched the lit bus move away from her in the darkness Luisa felt a moment of panic. She was standing on a verge covered in dirty slush under a row of tall, leafless trees, their load of snow dripping silently in the dark. The nearest streetlight was a couple of hundred metres away, t
here was no pavement, and as she stood and wondered what to do next a truck came past so close she could have touched it, then another. She turned and listened to the rhythmic blare as each one passed and receded, the hiss of tyres.

  Had he been here? Had Sandro been standing here? Luisa circled to get her bearings, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the dark. Opposite her there was a bar, closed up for the season, and behind it a straggle of houses up the slope; as she got used to the dark she saw the uplit outline of the modern church spire beyond them. It was ugly, too narrow, too pointed. To her right the road led back to a snarl of motorway junctions she knew well, the roads to Siena and Rome, and to her right, where the street-lamp shed its yellow light, stood an arrangement of apartment blocks, on the edge of the darkness. She stopped and looked. There, she thought.

  It was better once she was moving; as she trudged along the verge Luisa was able to subdue the dread that lay like a stone in her stomach. She turned down the well-lit access road and looked up briefly at the apartment blocks; she saw the silhouette of a woman at a sink, or a stove. She supposed it was suppertime and felt a moment’s longing to be in a warm kitchen herself, laying a table. Sandro reading the evening paper. What had once seemed like dull reality seemed an impossible fantasy now, that scene she had taken for granted all her married life.

  Along the foot of the nearest apartment block cars were parked neatly; on her right, in the dark, was a new car park for the overspill, and beyond it the dark. That was where he was, somewhere in there. She turned across the car lot; I can’t do it, she thought, as the shape of the Olympia Club’s high circular bar took shape in the shadows, its smashed windows blank and sinister. She faltered in the yellow half-light and leaned for support on the nearest car, a little Fiat wedged between two taller vehicles; her face felt clammy and she pulled off a glove and put her palm to her cheek.

  What if he’s not here? What if he was here, but he’s gone back to wherever Lucas Marsh is, and I’m out here in the dark, on my own? The glove slipped from her hand and she bent to retrieve it; straightening, she registered the car’s dented front bumper with the chrome pitted and flaking, the colour, battleship grey, which was once the colour of almost all these little cars. The colour of their car, Sandro’s and hers. She squinted at the licence plate of the car and there it was, confirmation that she had been right after all. He was here.

  Beyond the cars where the narrow access road led to the old pool complex it was dark, a dense blackness full of half-decipherable shapes; the snow-covered ground gave off an unearthly, low-level gleam of white. Where was the moon? Luisa stumbled on through the snow towards the sullen, looming shape of the Olympia; beyond it she heard the constant hum of traffic on the motorway behind its screen of trees. The road surface had been poorly maintained and the soft blanket of snow concealed potholes and stones; at the edge of the complex Luisa turned her ankle on one and let out an exclamation. Her voice was loud in the darkness and she stopped, her hand on the fence around the Olympia. It occurred to her that if Sandro was here, then whoever it was he was looking for might be here too. Could they hear her? Beyond the fence there was no sound.

  Luisa felt in her pocket; she wanted to take out the little mobile and call Sandro, she needed to hear his voice. She took out the phone. But what if he was watching someone, and the phone rang in his pocket? She’d be responsible. Luisa put the phone away and took hold of the cold iron of the railings, scanning the dark on the other side. The house must be there, somewhere. Luisa closed her eyes and told herself, in the daylight this is just a patch of abandoned ground; she peopled it, imagined buildings, trees, the Olympia’s tennis courts. But when she opened her eyes the dark was still there, dense and alive, and what it contained was still hidden from her. Somewhere in there, whatever had happened here one scalding long-ago August was still hanging in the air. Between here and Bartolo’s house and the river where her body was found, somewhere in this triangle a child’s life was ended, seven years old. And suddenly it seemed to Luisa that there was nothing for her to be afraid of, by comparison.

  Behind a door in the dark Jonas listened to doors closing and opening as they moved through the building, He’d heard them pass him on the landing, and even felt the displacement of air, but he heard no laughter, nor even what you’d call conversation. Not much of a party, this, he thought with grim satisfaction. Jonas didn’t care about grief, or loss; these things happened routinely where he came from. Here they lived under the dangerous illusion their money and their police and their hospitals bought, that the world was a safe place and that their children could be protected, and so when it happens they’re not ready. When what they call evil sees its chance and jumps out from the dark to take away the thing they love they’re not prepared. But in the end it’s so easy to kill. It only takes a moment, a gunshot, a well-placed punch, cancer, and it’s all over. They’d do well to understand that. In his pocket he turned the knife over, and the feel of the knotted surface of its handle in his palm comforted him.

  For a split second as Celia had stared out through the glass into the gateway she thought that Emma hadn’t come. There stood Lucas Marsh, pale and impeccable in a dinner suit as far removed from a cheap hire outfit as a Titian was from a greetings card. He stood very erect, as though he was bracing himself against something, and to Celia as she pushed her way through the glass door to greet them, he seemed dazed. Then Lucas looked over his shoulder and she appeared beside him, and for a ridiculous moment Celia stopped short, imagining that he had had to find a substitute, this wasn’t Emma. But of course it was.

  Dressed in a close-fitting black dress with long sleeves, her gleaming hair coiled tight at the nape of her neck, Emma looked older but if anything more beautiful for it, the bones of her face more refined. She wasn’t smiling: Is that it? thought Celia, realizing that since their first meeting, even when things had gone wrong and her expression had clouded, the smile would return, sooner or later, her fallback position. That ability seemed to have deserted her now, and with it some kind of innocence, and Celia knew that Lucas must have told her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Emma had said, holding out a hand to Paola Caprese. ‘We’re a bit late.’ She smiled now, but it was nothing more than a reflex, and her eyes were somewhere else. A girl in a white lace apron materialized at the foot of the great staircase and took their coats off somewhere behind it. As Emma removed hers Celia saw that her pregnancy was clearly outlined by the smooth line of the long black dress, and to Celia it appeared vulnerable and exposed. As she took off her own coat she remembered what she was wearing with a flush of self-consciousness, and who had given it to her. Emma was looking at her with a frown as though she was trying to remember something herself.

  ‘Oh – you, I’m sorry, I should have said before – thank you,’ Celia said, faltering. She started again, looking down at the green tulle, and pulling the thin satin of her mother’s jacket around her. ‘You really shouldn’t have.’ It sounded formal and ungracious, and impulsively she put her arms around Emma. ‘It’s lovely. It’s a dream.’

  ‘Oh, the dress,’ said Emma, and she sounded forlorn suddenly. ‘You looked so pretty in it, didn’t you? I just thought – it was going to be such a party. Anyway.’ She turned away. ‘Let’s get on with it, shall we?’ She spoke brightly to Lucas but to Celia she still sounded lost. And briskly Paola Caprese had led them across the baronial hall to the great staircase, and their last evening together, it seemed, had begun.

  They paused on the magnificent landing, under a cupola that gave on to the black night sky. It was warm inside, a luxurious tide of heat rolling out from great iron radiators, but the palace seemed very quiet and they saw no one as they walked on past doors open on to dark and empty staterooms. They turned into the ante-room Celia remembered, between the dining room and the terrace; she looked through the long windows and saw that outside drifts of snow had been cleared away and the braziers lit. There was a tray of something on a table, glasses and a wine bucket; besi
de it long wax tapers were guttering in an evening gust and beyond them, across the river, rose the dark silhouette of the Strozzi Gardens. For a moment, looking at the flickering light on the stuccoed walls and considering the silent, secret agency of servants that populated the building, Celia felt as though she had walked into a gothic fairytale, something lovely and full of menace. But there’d been nothing beautiful about stories Luisa and Dan had told her, they’d been about a real child with a name and a mother and father, a little girl they’d let out of their sight for a moment and had only been returned to them broken and dead. This was real, and it wasn’t over yet; somehow Lucas and Emma had to get through it.

  Beside her Emma stopped at the window and looked, too, her hand up at the glass.

  ‘How pretty,’ she said, her voice light and unsteady.

  Paola Caprese turned to consider Emma, and it was as though she was seeing her for the first time. Emma looked right here in this mysterious palace, thought Celia, she was the virgin bride, the beautiful serving girl turned princess. It was Lucas who looked out of place in this story as he stood stiffly beside his wife but, it seemed, didn’t dare to touch her. He appeared exhausted; his face was very white and even his lips seemed bloodless, almost bluish.

  Paola Caprese’s gaze settled on Emma’s belly but her face remained impassive. Does she have children? Celia thought that perhaps pregnancy became less extraordinary once you’d been through it; for herself, she could not help a stir of envy at the thought of the cells multiplying like magic, behind that firm curve of flesh. Whatever it was the administrator was wondering, she suppressed it, because all she said was, ‘Perhaps a drink first? Really it is too cold, but you are English…’ When this heavy attempt at familiarity drew no response, she changed course swiftly and began to talk to Lucas about the statuary outside as she pushed open the long doors.