A Florentine Revenge

by Christobel Kent

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I screwed it up, didn’t I? What did I think I was doing, coming out here like the bloody Lone Ranger?’ He passed a hand over his face. ‘I’ll call Pietro again, tell them where we are. They’ll come out and get me, and finish the job.’ He took the mobile phone from his pocket and looked at it, but he didn’t dial.

  Luisa looked at him. ‘It sounds as though they’ve got enough to do at the moment,’ she said, and frowned, thinking hard. ‘Will they find her?’ Sandro looked at her, and she saw no hope in his eyes. ‘I don’t think you were wrong, coming here,’ she said finally, feeling it was urgent, there was something they could still do, something to be found here. ‘The car was here. Did you tell them that? Did you tell Pietro that? And Sarto’s from Galluzzo, isn’t she?’ Sandro looked at Luisa, frowning, but he said nothing and suddenly the dark outside the little car seemed palpable, full of ghosts.

  ‘I’ve spent fifteen years,’ said Sandro suddenly, out of the blue, ‘going over and over the detail, a scratch, a bruise, time of death; we couldn’t let it go, together we kept this going, me and Marsh, and this is where it’s ended up. Was it the right thing to do?’ He shook his head. ‘Because the facts aren’t everything, sometimes they get in the way. The post-mortem – you see, it doesn’t tell the truth, not the whole truth. It doesn’t say, this girl woke at six-thirty every morning and climbed into bed with her parents, she liked dogs, or cats, or chocolate ice-cream. I should have been helping him put it behind him, how she died, not sending him post-mortem pictures.’ Sandro passed a big hand over his eyes.

  Luisa stared ahead, out through the windscreen, and thought of her own baby. She imagined something drifting away from her like one of those balloons blown loose from a fairground. Beside her Sandro had pulled something out of his pocket; she turned to him and he held it out to her. It was something cut from a postcard, dogeared; Luisa held it up to the window and found herself looking into her own face, or what she had been once, nearly forty years earlier, standing outside a jeweller’s window on the Ponte Vecchio.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Sandro. ‘I’m sorry it hasn’t – I haven’t – been what you wanted.’ Luisa shook her head, unable to speak; she took his hand and looked away, out of the window. ‘It’s all right, now,’ she whispered at last. And it seemed to her that it was. She looked away, and gently Sandro took the picture from her and put it back in his wallet. She heard him clear his throat.

  Dazed, Luisa looked out of the window, wondering what would happen now. She could see a line of cars moving slowly past them along the highway, and a long bus, all lit up, like the bus she’d ridden out here. She could see the outline of an old lady hunched against the window, a bunch of standing figures clustered at the folding doors, a long arm strap-hanging as the bus lurched and swayed to a stop under the snow-laden trees. Luisa stared but she wasn’t really seeing anything; she only barely registered the spidery outline of a passenger detaching itself from the bus where she herself had got off. She heard the hiss of the pneumatic doors and then she picked up the figure and followed it as, with painful slowness, it moved down the access road towards them.

  A drunk, thought Luisa, a Christmas drunk rolling home, as she saw how unsteadily the figure progressed. It staggered a little and came to a stop beneath a street-lamp, leaning against the concrete pillar for support. A face came into the light, and Luisa saw that this was a woman, just. The hair was long but as fine and wispy as candyfloss, the jaw was fleshless and prominent and the eye sockets were deep shadows in the yellow glare. Luisa sat up in the passenger seat and groped for Sandro’s shoulder.

  ‘Look,’ she said. ‘Look.’

  Suddenly alert, Sandro followed her gaze; he held up a hand to keep Luisa still, a finger telling her to stay in the car. They watched as she pushed herself up again off the pillar and walked on, as fragile as a matchstick figure. A puppet, she seemed to Luisa; it seemed barely possible that body had enough reserves of energy to propel itself. How do you get like that? And she knew, deep down, something terrible had happened to that girl, something terrible enough to turn her into a walking skeleton. Something that had frightened her out of her wits.

  ‘Had he done it before?’ she whispered, and Sandro turned his head a fraction. ‘Bartolo. Had he done it to her?’ Sandro shook his head a little, his eyes on the woman outside, past the car park now and edging along the darkness. She reached the Olympia’s front gate and leaned down behind it, reaching for something. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t know.’ And she was inside.

  It came back to Celia in a rush; she should have known the moment she saw his face in the Medici library, this wasn’t a panic attack, a mild claustrophobic reaction, the story he’d given them. There was nothing mild about this; she shouldn’t have swallowed his explanation, she was responsible. The way his left arm stiffened and his shoulders drew together; the awful blue lips. She thought of her father standing up at the breakfast table, his chair falling back and that precise look of astonishment on his face she’d seen pass over Lucas Marsh’s, and then, like Lucas, he’d gone down.

  But Lucas was still alive. The paramedics had been on him without a second’s pause while the rest of them sat back, shocked into silence by the violence of it, Lucas’s body manhandled, his clothing torn back and the ambulanceman’s hands, one folded over the other and thumping down into his chest as he counted. One, two three.

  ‘Who’s coming with him?’ the paramedic had called back over his shoulder as they stretchered him down the great staircase with a perspex mask obscuring his face. ‘Lei é la moglie?’

  Celia shook her head, No, I’m not the wife, but looking around her she realized with desperation that there was no one else. ‘Dan?’ she said.

  ‘I’ve got to talk to the police,’ he said helplessly ‘I’ll be there when I can.’

  And after that everything seemed to happen at a run. Celia snatched her coat from the rail, more for the mobile in its pocket than for warmth, and then folded herself into a corner in the back of the ambulance, her thin shoes soaked, the gorgeous green dress streaked and crumpled as she tried to keep out of the way. It was a grim interior, plastic seating, dials and metal instruments and tubing that swayed as they set off, and the paramedics spoke brusquely to each other in a language she didn’t understand, a vocabulary of pressure ratios and drug volumes and beats per minute. They asked her if he had a history of heart trouble, and all she could do was shrug helplessly, she thought perhaps he did. And his wife’s been snatched, she’s pregnant and she’s somewhere out there in the cold with a man with a shaven head, she could be dead, she wanted to say, but what could they do?

  Inside the hospital they were still running. Clutching her coat around her, Celia followed the gurney at an awkward jog; they went through a heavy plastic door into the pronto soccorso. She held on to the metal rail around the gurney, and stared at the clouded mask that covered Lucas’s face as they ran through the grey corridors of the hospital. This is where people come when life has crashed in on them, when the worst happens, the car accident, the stroke, the heart attack. Where’s Emma?

  They were slowing now and Celia caught her breath; she felt as though she’d been holding it since she climbed into the ambulance. The paramedics and a white-coated doctor who’d joined the procession steered the gurney around a corner and into a room with a door. The doctor exchanged a few words with the paramedics, quite calmly, as he fixed some kind of monitor to Lucas’s chest; Celia saw Lucas’s pale smooth skin, a dusting of chest hair, exposed and vulnerable. You have no control in the end, she thought. You have to be ready for that. All the planning, all the looking forward, and suddenly it’s in someone else’s hands. In a foreign bed, strangers taking hold of you and speaking their language around you.

  A nurse came in and the paramedics left, nodding to Celia; they looked grim and exhausted, and she wondered where they would be going next, or if they could go home now. They’d just saved a life, temporarily at least. The
doctor leaned up to switch on the screen on the wall; a green line appeared on it; it jumped and hiccuped across the screen, then seemed to settle. He turned to Celia then, and as he seemed to register her for the first time, he frowned. He was a handsome man in late middle age, spare, with silver hair that stood up from his forehead. Aware suddenly in the clean room of her party dress and bloodstained hands, she pulled her coat around herself defensively.

  ‘Are you hurt?’ he asked, distracted by the blood from whatever it was he had been about to say. She shook her head.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s not my blood.’ She saw him glance towards Lucas. The nurse was deftly easing off a sleeve, the expensive dinner suit, the shirt ripped where the paramedic had torn it open to pound on his chest.

  He began again, ‘Your husband,’ and she shook her head a little; the doctor shrugged and went on, marital circumstances being nothing to do with him either. ‘Signore,’ he began again, consulting the chart he held in his hand, ‘Signore Marsh. Lucas. He has suffered a heart attack.’ He spoke slowly, in Italian, and she nodded to show that she understood. ‘He was very fortunate that the paramedics were exactly there; although this would not certainly have been fatal, it might have been. And with the heart, prompt action makes a very great difference, to survival but also to long-term effects. Brain damage, for example.’ Again Celia nodded, the coat wrapped tightly around her.

  ‘So – will he recover? Can he – can he talk?’ What would she say to him, if he could answer? The doctor put his head on one side.

  ‘We have given him a sedative,’ he said, and Celia wondered which of the many needles she had seen filled had sedated him. As if he could see what she was thinking the doctor said, ‘And some drugs to make it easier for his heart. Aspirin, to thin the blood, for example. And soon we will have to do some tests to assess the damage to the heart and the treatment. But when the seclative wears off he should be able to speak, yes.’

  Celia felt the hairs rise on the back of her neck as the full horror of the situation rushed at her, like an express train. If they didn’t find Emma soon, Lucas Marsh might as well have died on the floor of the Palazzo Ferrigno. If he lost her, and with her this new child, he would never recover.

  ‘So,’ said the doctor, looking at her curiously, ‘you will stay?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Celia. ‘I’ll stay.’

  The doctor said something to the nurse and she left the room, returning with a hard-backed chair, which she set down beside the bed. Then she retrieved something from the chipped bedside cabinet and held it out to Celia.

  ‘From his pockets,’ she said. ‘His things. Personal effects. For safekeeping.’ Her expression, proud and guarded, spoke of late-night conversations with relatives complaining of missing valuables, accusations fielded across the still bodies of the dead and dying. ‘I – all right,’ said Celia, and she took the bag, which was surprisingly heavy, with reluctance. The same accusations, after all, might be levelled at her: what right had she to Lucas Marsh’s personal effects? It seemed an intrusion, presumptuous, she thought he would hate it. She thought of her father, stretchered away with a zip over his face after the doctor had come. Suddenly overcome by a sense of weakness, she sat down abruptly on the chair, the clear plastic bag on her lap.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said faintly, and the nurse turned away. After one last, curious look at Celia the doctor nodded brusquely and left. The nurse moved around the room, checked a gauge on the monitor, flicked a tube feeding something into Lucas’s arm, and after a while she left too.

  Celia sat there for a long time, watching Lucas’s chest rise and fall; his hand lay, clean and pale, beside his body. After a while she put out her own hand and rested it on his.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  26

  ‘That was her,’ Luisa said at last. ‘That was Giulietta Sarto. She went in – she went—’ She couldn’t finish the sentence, trying to imagine what she could want in there, in the dark.

  Sandro, who seemed to have been struck dumb, nodded. When eventually he spoke, his voice was flat with self-disgust. ‘She’s come back home,’ he said. ‘Was she here all the time? I thought she was dead, overdosed in some travellers’ shitty caravan years ago. Why? Because I didn’t like her, maybe. Because I thought that was all she deserved. Because she made my skin crawl. But all the time she’d come back here.’

  He fell silent then, and Luisa saw that he was thinking, trying not to be side-tracked by his own failure. When he spoke again his voice was dogged, the voice of a policeman with not much imagination but a great deal of persistence.

  ‘This must have been where they came when they left the airport,’ he said slowly, ‘both of them. This was where the car was. Sarto came home to Galluzzo, and she brought Jonas back with her. He must have come here before anyway, looking for Bartolo; Galluzzo must have been where he picked Sarto up in the first place, trawling for information. Maybe he thought this was as good a place as any to hide.’

  ‘What shall we do?’ said Luisa. ‘What if – what if Jonas comes back here?’ But she knew what Sandro was going to do. ‘Please, Sandro. Call the others. Call Pietro, you can’t do this on your own.’

  Bitterly he turned to her. ‘I’ve got to,’ he said. ‘I’ve screwed this up all the way down the line, don’t you see? Giulietta Sarto knew something, all along. Why didn’t I nail her before she disappeared? Why couldn’t I make her tell me what she really saw? I – I just couldn’t.’

  Luisa shook her head slowly. ‘You don’t know what happened to her,’ she said. ‘To make her like that. Think of how much willpower it takes not to eat, to starve yourself. Just not telling might be easy by comparison, if you were angry enough.’

  ‘I could have stopped all this, fifteen years ago,’ said Sandro.

  ‘You don’t know that,’ said Luisa, but he was already out of the car.

  ‘I’m going in there,’ he said, ‘and I’m going to make her talk this time. Wait here.’ But she was after him before the door closed.

  ‘Absolutely not,’ she said. You’re not leaving me here.’

  ‘Luisa,’ he said sadly. ‘This isn’t a game. It’s not safe.’

  ‘I know that,’ said Luisa; she had no intention of telling him how afraid she was of going in there. ‘Don’t you think I know that? I’m not stupid, I won’t go barging in shouting the odds. But – if you go – you’re all I’ve got.’ She shut up then; she didn’t want him to think she was getting sentimental.

  ‘Come on, then,’ was all he said.

  Inside the dark was absolute, the air soft and rotten like mould; the stale, putrid smell of chlorine and damp was almost palpable. Wet and suffocating, the walls seemed to close in on Luisa and she blundered into something. Blindly she put her hands out to keep the walls away, and encountered a wooden partition, slimy with mildew, and then it gave under her hand and swung away. Just as a whimper she couldn’t suppress rose in her throat, groping in the dark she felt Sandro’s hand; firmly he took hold of her and at last she felt as though she could breathe, felt something lifesaving, like oxygen, enter her system, and took a lungful. Sandro held her still for a moment, by the wrist; he was listening.

  It was quiet but not silent; around them Luisa imagined chambers like in a heart, pulsing and echoing. Some way off something dripped, the sound magnified as though it was falling into a great space. Where they were standing the sound was different, though; their footsteps didn’t echo, they were muffled by some interior structure. Luisa thought of the slimy board that had given way under her hand and realized they must be in the changing rooms, and what she had pushed was a swing door. She might have felt triumph at her deduction, but instead she felt her claustrophobia intensify at the thought of the cubicles around her like a labyrinth, behind every door a deadend, or something dead. She scrabbled in her backpack and got out the torch, pressing it into Sandro’s hand.

  ‘We can’t do this in the dark,’ she whispered, her mouth at his ear
, and at the sound of her voice something scuttled in a corner. Luisa grabbed for the torch and turned it on.

  She’d been right, they were standing at one end of a row of changing cubicles, their melamine doors spotted with mould and scrawled with obscenities and endearments, I love, I want to, call me, some hanging from their hinges, a couple missing altogether. The floor was thick with a kind of scabrous grime and the plaster on the walls was pitted and crumbling. Luisa shone the torch along the row of doors to see how to get through and tentatively Sandro followed the light; as the beam hit the corner of the room something low down on the ground moved, horribly fast. A pair of tiny eyes gleamed red in the torch’s beam and it was gone, under a partition; Luisa clamped a hand to her mouth to stifle her own noise.

  ‘Here,’ said Sandro in a whisper, and pulled her after him, through a door. Luisa held her breath. Of course, Sandro must know this place like the back of his hand, she thought, remembering that first day when he came home after twelve hours here sealing off areas, interviewing, searching. And had gone back, and back, dozens of visits she knew about, and no doubt others she didn’t. Luisa felt something soft and wet under her feet, dragging her, and with revulsion she swung the beam down to see she’d trodden in a discarded towel, wet and filthy. An old beach towel with the long eyelashes of a faded and coquettish Minnie Mouse blinking up at her out of its sodden folds; how long had that been here? Luisa felt a sudden rage overcome her; when were they going to bulldoze this place, grind all this into landfill, burn it clean? Sandro pulled her behind him through a shower stall and they were in the great hall that held the indoor pool.

  It was not, after all, quite dark. The moon had come out beyond the high, mildewed skylights and a thin light filtered down into the drained pool. It seemed huge, a great, empty space as big as a football pitch and deep, and on its edge Luisa felt as though she was somewhere high up, and afraid of falling. In the sudden silence as they stopped she heard something. A distant, stifled sound, and human. Luisa listened, her head cocked. She took Sandro’s arm and pointed, up, and he nodded.