A Florentine Revenge

by Christobel Kent

  Luisa stood at the entrance to the Olympia Club in the dank, freezing dark beneath a slab of concrete awning, pillars to either side of her. Mindlessly she rehearsed what she could see of the detail of her surroundings, as though to persuade herself that she wasn’t standing here in the dark alone, pretending she knew what was out there. But the truth was she could hardly see a thing. She stood and waited for her eyes to adjust; to her left was a decaying piece of plywood half concealing the smashed glass of a lobby door. As she moved, yellow light gleamed off it, the same sliver of light repeated in a fan of shards, but she couldn’t see what was behind it. Involuntarily she stepped back. She didn’t want to go inside.

  There was a wall. Groping her way, Luisa followed it around the side of the building. A kind of tunnel yawned in front of her, empty doorways on either side of it, and set in the wall to the left of the tunnel’s entrance was a rectangular hole. Luisa stopped and tried to make sense of it. It was like archaeology, like entering a place walled up for centuries. With a surge of relief she remembered the torch and pulled the rucksack off her back; as she did so she thought she heard a scuffle somewhere off to her right, in the dark. Luisa stopped moving and listened, hardly daring to breathe, but she heard nothing more. All the same, she didn’t want to draw attention to hers elf by flashing a light around right now; she removed the small but reassuringly heavy torch from the bag, slipped it into her pocket and carefully slid her arms back into the rucksack’s straps. Cautiously, reluctantly, she took a step, then another, towards the rectangular window-space, set her hands on the low sill and leaned inside.

  This was as far as she was going to go, Luisa told herself, and this was already too far. She could see nothing, but she could smell it: chlorine and stale, damp clothes, old socks and urine. And behind it all the river, she could smell the river even in here, cold and sluggish, where a child’s body had drifted and circled, sunk and rose, for almost a week, and suddenly it wasn’t just the smell of an old pool. She felt it choke her, this fog of something old and stinking and horrible, and fumbling, she reached for the torch. She shone it into the corners of the cramped space behind the low window. This is where you hand in your ticket, they give you a wire basket for your clothes. A rail to hang the baskets from, a dirt-crusted floor of dimpled tiles with a couple of baskets still lying there, discarded. Below the sill a stool for the girl to sit on. The girl who takes your ticket. That girl.

  The torch flickered and went out, and as though something had reached for her out of the darkness to take her by the throat, Luisa pulled back hastily out of the window space and pressed her back into the wall. Her heart bumped so hard and loud she could feel it at the base of her throat. And then she heard the sound again, over the thudding in her chest, over her ragged breath, a careful footstep crunching in the snow, and then another.

  Paola knew instantly what was coming when she saw him step through the door, and somehow it all came together; perhaps this is always how it ends. Her nemesis, like a sixteenth-century assassin, seemed to fit in better than any of them here, making his stealthy way between the enfilade of staterooms with a knife. We’re no more than squatters, she thought, play-acting, but he’s for real. Deliberately Paola stepped to place her back to the Madonna of the Lilies, protecting her. At her side the black-haired wife of the English millionaire had gone very pale and Paola put out a hand to calm her, a gesture that would not under normal circumstances have come naturally to her. She thought of her children, and lifted her chin. They’re grown now, they’ll live. She faced him. ‘What do you think you’re doing here?’ she said bravely. He laughed.

  They stood in the cold beside the brazier. Lucas still hadn’t said anything, and Celia hadn’t known where else to take him. Was this it, she wondered, was this what she had feared would happen? Or was there worse to come? She held on to Lucas’s arm; he seemed unsteady. She looked around for a chair: beyond the brazier there were some padded wooden seats around a table under white damask and she led him to them. He sat down heavily. On the table was a tray with glasses and a champagne bucket; brandy would have been better, she supposed, as she poured a glass; she saw that her hand trembled as she held it out to him. But this was supposed to have been a celebratory drink; it seemed so long ago that she’d arranged it all, the champagne, the dinner menu. Lucas looked at the glass as though he didn’t know what it was.

  ‘Go on,’ she said gently. ‘Have a sip, at least.’ Lucas took the glass from her hand, looked at it for a moment, then knocked it back with a kind of recklessness. He set the glass on the table and sat back heavily in his chair, staring at Celia; he didn’t look any better but his eyes seemed to have gained focus. Where is everybody? Celia thought with indignation, and for a second the professional in her decided she’d never book the Ferrigno again, it was obviously a shoestring operation, they weren’t supposed to be out here yet. But just then the girl who’d taken their coats appeared in her apron at the long French doors, seeming agitated. Lucas didn’t seem to register her arrival; he was still looking at Celia, and it made her nervous.

  ‘You know, don’t you?’ he said suddenly. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I – I—’ Celia was flustered. There was no point in denying it, but she was afraid of the emotion she heard in his voice. If it was me, she thought, I’d hate that, being other people’s property, the subject of other people’s whispered conversations. Poor thing. How must she be feeling? ‘ I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I heard. You were recognized.’ Almost involuntarily she looked away, and saw the waitress a couple of yards away hanging back. Celia turned back to Lucas; he was looking at her hungrily, as though she had something he wanted. It occurred to her that he had not had anyone to talk about this to in fifteen years since his wife died, or perhaps even before. She took a deep breath.

  ‘It was – a terrible thing,’ she said. Cowardly, she didn’t want to name it more precisely. ‘A lot of people here were affected by it. They still remember it, I suppose they remember you.’ Lucas just nodded grimly. Where is Emma? Celia thought desperately, with an awful stirring of dread, she should be here. Out of the corner of her eye Celia saw a waitress take a step towards them. Damn them, thought Celia, and she no longer cared about holding anyone up, no longer cared what any of them thought about this catastrophic mess of an evening. Lucas Marsh had paid, after all. She held up a hand to stop the girl coming any closer.

  Perhaps it was the girl’s presence, or Celia’s gesture, but Lucas’s look had changed by the time she turned back to him, as though a shutter had come down. ‘It’s none of your business,’ he said bitterly. ‘It’s nothing to do with – with anyone but me, now. My wife died, I suppose you knew that? My first wife. Everyone wanted to know how we felt. Not that they really want to know, do they? They’re just glad it’s not them. Let it happen to him.’ His anger seemed to be exhausting him; his handsome face looked grey and ill. Celia just gazed at him, frozen with shame. He was right, of course. Not her business. But she couldn’t keep silent.

  ‘But what about Emma?’ she said. ‘You should have told her.’

  He looked away then. ‘Emma,’ he said, repeating her name to himself. ‘Oh. Emma. Yes. I couldn’t.’ His voice was flat and cold. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. How could I tell her? You have no idea.’ He looked away. ‘It’s like a black hole. It drags everything down with it, swallows it up.’

  ‘She knows now, though,’ said Celia. He said nothing, just gazed away from her into the darkness across the river, the reflection of the lights along the embankment glittering in his eyes. On impulse she tightened her grip on his icy hand, in defiance of his hostility. ‘But that doesn’t mean it’s too late,’ she insisted. She leaned forward, wanting him to believe her, even though she didn’t believe it herself.

  ‘No,’ said Lucas. His voice was a dry whisper. ‘You don’t know what I’ve done.’ The waitress darted forward, seeing her chance.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said to Celia. ‘Please. There is someone who needs to speak wi
th you downstairs. His name is Strickland? He is waiting at the gate.’ She stared curiously at Lucas. ‘Is all right? Signore?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Celia, ‘we just need a moment, please.’ She felt for her mobile and realized she’d left it in her coat. Had Dan been trying to get hold of her?

  At the edge of her vision she caught a movement; one of the French doors swung open as though another door had been opened somewhere else in the building and it banged, shockingly loud, back against the wall. The waitress exclaimed something under her breath and hurried away from them, towards the sound. She disappeared inside and they watched her go.

  ‘I’m getting cold,’ said Celia after a moment, wondering again, What does Dan want? He’d been following her all day, stalking her, and this evening Gabriele had seen him talking to a woman who’d been beaten up. Or said he had. Celia wasn’t sure she wanted to see him, to see either of them for that matter. Dan would have to wait.

  ‘Shall we go back in now? Let’s go back,’ she said. They had to put this all back together, somehow. Start again. It seemed a remote possibility, for all of them; out here in the raw night, as a wind got up off the river, the terrace seemed a bleak and inhospitable place. The damask tablecloth fluttered in the wind; hunched in his chair, Lucas looked half-frozen.

  Slowly, stiffly, he got to his feet, but before they could take a step after the waitress they heard a phenomenal crash, as though not just a trayful but a whole cupboard of glass and china had toppled to the floor. And then came a high-pitched sound, a long, wailing scream that hung in the icy air. Lucas took a step towards the door; blindly he groped with a hand and Celia seized it. ‘It’s Emma,’ he said. ‘Isn’t it? It’s Emma.’

  Down at the gatehouse Dan Strickland, who was still standing in front of the concierge’s window with his arms folded, saw something on the monitor behind the man’s head. He took a step closer, peered up at it, and reflexively the concierge stood up to block his view. He wagged a finger. ‘Oh no you don’t,’ he said. ‘You just keep your distance.’

  ‘What the hell’s going on here?’ said Strickland. ‘Look, sciemo. You idiot. Look up there.’ And in spite of the man’s failure of respect there was something in his voice that made the concierge turn his head. ‘Porca miseria,’ he whispered with dawning horror, and now all his authority was gone. ‘Shit. Oh, shit.’

  He came out of the darkness from where Luisa had imagined Bartolo’s farmhouse must lie and for a moment she thought it was him, thought that she would see the filthy old man coming out of the dark towards her with his throat cut. And then he whispered her name, hoarse and disbelieving. ‘Luisa?’

  Blindly she stumbled across the snow towards the sound of his voice and threw herself at him, sobbing. She could hear the noise she was making but she couldn’t help herself. It was Sandro.

  ‘Darling, darling,’ she said over and over again, and she held on for dear life while he stood there, solid and immovable and warm. The endearment was unfamiliar on her lips but it was the only word she could find and it seemed to be the right one. She patted his arms, his shoulders, put her mittened hands on his cheeks, needing to reassure herself of his reality, and then she looked into his face, half-laughing, half-crying. ‘It’s you,’ she said; she should have been scolding him for frightening her and deceiving her, but she couldn’t find it in herself.

  Gently Sandro propelled her in front of him to the shelter of the wall. She moved away instinctively from the empty window where the girl who took the tickets had sat; it yawned beside them, dank and empty.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he said roughly, but she could tell he wasn’t angry. ‘How on earth did you think to come out here? You shouldn’t be here.’

  ‘It was something you said,’ said Luisa, distracted by her relief and by the warm pressure of his hands on her shoulders, ‘and I heard the bells in the background. I had to find you, didn’t I, before, before—’ She stopped, not wanting to think about what might be going to happen to Sandro next. Would they arrest him? ‘You should have told me,’ she said. ‘All the trouble you were in. I had to find out from Pietro.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I should,’ said Sandro. ‘You’re right, but I haven’t got time for all that now, don’t you see?’ He kept both his hands on her shoulders as though she might make a break for it, looking into her face. ‘I haven’t got time now. The car was here, I had this idea he was hiding out in Bartolo’s place, but there’s no sign of him, and the damned car’s gone. At first I thought I’d got the wrong street, but it’s gone and I’ve wasted too much time already. We’ve got to go back, don’t you see? To wherever Lucas Marsh is, damn it, I had the blasted itinerary—’ He broke off, his face in his hands. ‘It’s all falling apart. I’ve got to get him before he—’ Then he broke off again in frustration at the effort of explaining.

  ‘It’s all right, I know,’ said Luisa. ‘I’ve got the piece of paper, the what’s-it-called, itinerary. It was at home, you must have dropped it.’

  ‘You – oh damn,’ he said, passing a hand over his face, desperately calculating. ‘But – all right, all right, let’s think. And that’s where she is now, at that whatever it is, dinner at the Ferrigno? They’re there?’ Luisa nodded.

  He looked at his watch. ‘Eight,’ he said. ‘We’ve got time, they’ll be inside, eating, he’ll wait until they leave. We’ve got to go back.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Luisa slowly; she knew she was stalling and could feel his impatience. But this had been the right place to come, she knew it instinctively, the answer was here. With reluctance she thought again of that foul-smelling, dismal hole she’d looked into and had seen something, smelled something. If they went back into the city, to home ground, she’d lose track of it. She remembered how Sandro had described the interior of Bartolo’s house: clean as a whistle. But next door, in the Olympia, what was there, among all the putrid rubbish?

  But Sandro was already two, three metres away from her, heading for the light and the car. ‘Wait,’ said Luisa, stumbling after him in the dark, losing faith even as she spoke. She could see him slipping out of her grasp; was that why she wanted him to stay?

  Breathless, she caught up with him at the car. ‘Get in, I’ll drop you at a bus stop,’ he said distractedly, fumbling with the ignition. ‘It’s too dangerous for you to come with me.’ Luisa climbed in, her face wooden with disappointment, apprehension at what Sandro might be planning to do without her beginning to coil in her stomach. Sandro turned the key, and the car coughed and fell silent. He tried again, but this time there was no sound at all. The car was dead.

  *

  Service staircase, thought Jonas, the escape route he’d planned illuminated inside his head like an underground map. He had a photographic memory, always had had, in school he could have read a page of telephone numbers back to you, just like that, not that it had got him anywhere. Out on the landing and along the gallery, quick down the back staircase, double back at the bottom and the door straight ahead opens on the little stinking courtyard where they keep the bins. Double wooden doors with a padlock but eaten away from the ground up with worm and rain, just kick them down. The wood splintered with a soft, rotten sound and he was out in the alley between the Ferrigno and a market trader’s lock-up, an alley no more than one man wide and hardly visible from the Lungarno, where the traffic hummed and twinkled in the streetlights. Somewhere down there a siren wailed and he cocked an ear. Ambulance, not police. Is that for her? Jonas hefted his unresisting burden in front of him and headed away from the river. You’re too late.

  Celia went first, out of some instinct to protect Lucas, but to begin with as she pulled the tall French door back she couldn’t make sense of what she saw; she rubbed eyes made bleary by the icy wind. Beside the door that led into the dining room the waitress was pressed against the wall as if some invisible force held her there. She stared at them with glazed, wide eyes as they came in and tried to speak but she made no sense, the words seeming to choke one another in her throat. Her f
ace was red, like that of a child who’d screamed herself into hysterics. Beside her the door was ajar.

  Celia stopped; she knew she had to walk on, push open the door into the dining room and find out what had happened but her legs resisted, leaden with fear. The door moved a little, as though in a draught, and then suddenly she was terrified, inside her head she screamed, There’s someone else here. From behind her she heard Lucas say, ‘Emma,’ and in his voice she heard an awful, dull certainty. Was this something he had expected? Did he think he deserved this?

  ‘No,’ she whispered, ‘You don’t know.’ Move, she thought, and with stupid slowness she took a step then, but Lucas shoved past her and half-falling, half-stumbling, he hurled himself towards the door. Beside it the waitress shook her head, No, no, no.

  The table was on its side in its own debris, cloth, overturned chairs, smashed glass and shards of crockery, cutlery scattered across the stone floor. Lucas had stopped in the doorway, apparently unable to go on, and Celia couldn’t get a clear view. Where were they? Then she saw Paola Caprese, pressed small against the wall next to the painting, her shoulders hunched and her hands pressed into her stomach. There was a lot of blood; her shirt was bright with it.

  ‘What on earth…?’ said Celia, astonished. ‘Call an ambulance,’ she said urgently over her shoulder to Lucas, but he didn’t move. She shouted in Italian and then crossed the room at a run; Paola Caprese just stared at her, then down at the blood dripping between her fingers. The girl appeared in the doorway. ‘Go and call an ambulance, now, please,’ Celia said, forcing herself to speak slowly and loudly, and the waitress ran from the room like a terrified rabbit.

  ‘Where’s Emma?’ said Celia. ‘For God’s sake. Where’s Emma?’ Nobody answered; only Paola Caprese made a small, startled sound, her lips moving but unable, somehow, to form words.