A Florentine Revenge

by Christobel Kent

  ‘Have you got her?’ said Celia. ‘Is she all right?’ She’d gone back to Lucas before they left the hospital. ‘I won’t go,’ she’d said to Dan at the door to his room, thinking the worst once she’d hung up from talking to the police, thinking, She’ll be dead, someone will have to tell him, when he wakes up. Dan had let her go in alone; he’d stood at the door as she went to the bed and took hold of Lucas’s hand. The line on the screen held steady, and gazing at it she’d realized she had to know, now. ‘Come on,’ Dan had said gently from the doorway, as if he’d read her mind. ‘We’ll come straight back.’

  Now the policeman looked at her consideringly. ‘The Englishwoman?’ he asked, and in an agony of impatience now Celia wondered, Who else? ‘Yes, we’ve got her,’ he said. ‘She’s all right. They’re bringing her out.’ And as he spoke from behind him Celia heard voices, saw movement through the overgrown laurels behind the fence, then Emma was there, wrapped in a dun-coloured blanket, pale and weary but upright.

  ‘Emma,’ said Celia tentatively, and perhaps at the sound of an English voice, because she hadn’t spoken loudly, Emma looked across at her. ‘He’s okay,’ said Celia. ‘Lucas is okay. I told him he’d see you soon.’ And seeing Emma sway, she broke away from Dan and crossed over to her at a run. ‘Really,’ she said, her face pressed against Emma’s, ‘he’s going to be all right?’ She held on tight and whispered, ‘It’s going to be all right.’

  ‘They’re going to take me there now,’ said Emma. ‘To make sure everything’s – to make sure the baby—’ Celia thought of the tiny, fuzzy photograph in Lucas’s wallet. ‘It’s not—’ she said, feeling her throat closing, preventing her from finishing the sentence. ‘No,’ said Emma, and at last she smiled. ‘No. We’re fine. We’re all fine.’ At her side the paramedic said, ‘Signora. Please.’

  As Celia watched the two yellow-coated ambulancemen help Emma gingerly into the back of their vehicle she suddenly felt very tired. ‘I want to go home now,’ she said to Dan. ‘Is that all right?’

  They retraced their steps to Dan’s car, which they’d left in the shadow of the handsome new apartment block; as they crossed the crowded parking lot towards it Celia became aware of someone standing on the steps at the entrance of the building, watching them. He took a step forward into the light, and as she saw that it was Gabriele it came to Celia that this was where he lived. She stopped, and Dan stopped too; she half lifted a hand to wave. Gabriele stood there for a moment, looking from her to Dan, then abruptly he raised his own hand in an awkward response. ‘Thanks, Gabriele,’ Celia called. ‘No problem,’ he said, ‘I’ll see you.’ And he turned and went inside.

  As they passed through the great sombre gate of the Porta Romana and entered the narrow streets of the city that had grown quiet at last, suddenly Celia knew where she wanted to be, and who she wanted to be with.

  ‘I’m going home for Christmas,’ she said, looking straight ahead and feeling a great bubble of pride and certainty buoy her up. ‘To see my sister. She’s having a baby, you know.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Dan, equably, shooting her a sidelong glance. As long as you come back.’

  Epilogue

  Sandro took early retirement, it turned out to be as easy as that. And just as well, because Luisa needed him.

  Giulietta Sarto spent eighteen months in a big new psychiatric unit outside Bologna, and Luisa visited her twice a week. It was nothing like the old lunatic asylums of Luisa’s imagination; it was in a modern building of glass and pietra serena, grey and calm and very quiet. There was a vegetable plot, and a walled rose garden where Luisa was allowed to sit with Giulietta. Over the weeks she filled out, put on perhaps twenty kilos, and one day Luisa noticed that the dark fuzz of hair on her arms had gone. To begin with, Giulietta hadn’t talked at all, only Luisa. She’d tell her what she was planning to cook for dinner, how the train had been up from Florence. Even when Giulietta began to answer, to tell her about the doctor who treated her and about the weather and the work she did in the vegetable garden, they didn’t talk about what had happened. They didn’t need to; Luisa knew already, from Sandro, who knew from Pietro. And Giulietta knew she knew.

  Pietro had called Sandro up one hot June evening when the psychiatrist’s report came in and said, come for a drink. They sat on a bench in the park outside Pietro’s apartment block and Pietro told him everything, and when he got home Sandro told Luisa at the kitchen table, with the windows wide open and the scent of jasmine coming in from outside.

  ‘From the age of seven to the age of thirteen, when she stopped eating,’ Sandro had told her, ‘Giulietta Sarto was abused by Bartolo. Her mother, who was an addict and a prostitute, took money from him.’ He’d shaken his head slowly to and fro, and Luisa was glad he was out of it, glad he didn’t have to hear such stories any more.

  ‘Sarto remembers it all,’ Sandro had said. ‘Like she’d locked it away, every detail, in a little box until it was time to get it out again. The psychiatrist said it could happen that way, a result of trauma, or guilt, or both.’ He’d sighed. ‘That day, she was working in the changing rooms as usual; it was a summer job, the only one she could get, and it was better than doing what her mother did, even if she did have to sit five metres from Bartolo’s house. It’s a small place, Galluzzo; she couldn’t avoid him.’ Luisa tried to imagine how it would have felt. Had it felt like revenge, to sit there and show him what he’d turned her into? Deep down, was she still afraid of him as he went about his business behind the fence, as monstrous and brutal as he had been to her as a seven-year-old?

  ‘That day she saw Bartolo leaning against the fence; she turned away, she said, she read her magazine to show him she didn’t care. He hadn’t touched her since she got thin, and she said she made herself sit there, pretending she wasn’t still afraid of him. She heard him talking to someone at the side entrance to the changing rooms, the emergency exit they leave open when it’s very hot, she said, but she didn’t look up. She didn’t want to look at him, she said.’ Sandro had cleared his throat, a painful sound.

  ‘About fifteen minutes later, maybe twenty, she heard the mother, in the changing rooms, come to look for her daughter, calling. She went on reading her magazine, she said it had made her angry, the sound of the woman calling, on and on. No one had ever come looking for her when she got lost, you see, no one had ever called her name like that. The manager came round, saying, have you seen a little girl come through here, and she said, no, which was true. She said she really didn’t understand, then, what had happened, didn’t connect it with Bartolo. It was forty-five minutes before they called the police.

  ‘We interviewed about eighty people, but none of them had seen anything useful. It was very crowded, and very hot. There was a young officer talked to Sarto. By then we’d been round to Bartolo’s house, but we didn’t have a warrant, and his mother was there in the kitchen, shouting at us to leave her son alone, he’d been with her all afternoon. But we knew, even then, what kind of a man he was. So this young officer asked Giulietta Sarto if she knew who Bartolo was. She said yes. He asked if she’d seen him that day, and she said she wasn’t sure, which he took to mean yes, and then we thought, nail her, pin her down. She told the psychiatrist she just felt scared then, in a panic, terrified of Bartolo, scared of the police in case they blamed her for letting him talk to the girl. Like it could be her fault.’ He’d sighed then, a long, sad, weary sigh.

  ‘So they asked me to talk to her, and in I went, saying, if you saw him you’ve got to tell us, think of that little girl’s parents, think what they’re going through. The psychiatrist says Sarto thought, when I said that…’ He paused, swallowed, and Luisa had been able to see that it was beyond him to understand. He started again. ‘She thought, it’s not fair. No one looked out for me, no one cared about me. And that’s when she looked at me and said, No, I didn’t see him, I was confused. Not today, I didn’t see him today. And the more I went on about the parents, the more stubborn she got. I said I didn’t se
e him.’ Luisa had nodded, cold with the horror of it. ‘And then, it was too late.’ He had to get it out of his system, she could see that. Doggedly he had gone on, looking Luisa in the eye.

  ‘It would have been too late, anyway,’ he said, picking at the timing of it. ‘The girl was almost certainly dead before we’d even arrived at the Olympia Club. But after that Giulietta Sarto spent fifteen years trying her best to die, taking drugs, starving herself. But she didn’t die, did she? And eventually…’ He paused. ‘Eventually, when Jonas Godorov came along looking for Bartolo, it was as though someone had come along to rescue her. She got him out to Le Cascine for them, and they got him to confess, and then it came to her, what she had to do. They went off to find a beer to celebrate; they didn’t notice she wasn’t there any more, because they didn’t give a damn about her, did they? She went back to where they’d left him, and she cut his throat.’

  In the scented rose garden Luisa sat beside Giulietta and took her hand. The roses were out and the air was full of their scent; it was July, and she’d been here more than a year. The psychiatrists had delivered their report, and there would be no trial.

  ‘I thought, when you come out,’ said Luisa, ‘you could come home with us, for a bit.’ Giulietta said nothing. ‘It’s all right with Sandro,’ said Luisa. They looked at the flowers, the buds bursting with colour in the sunshine. ‘Okay,’ said Giulietta. ‘If you like.’

  Celia walked along the Arno in the spring sun, the Ponte Vecchio behind her, with its burden of tourists, moving to and fro as they did every day of the year, but for a while, she thought, they were no business of hers. Next year, maybe, she and Beate would go into partnership doing painting tours that would only take them, they’d agreed, to the secret corners of the city, cloisters and rose gardens. That was the plan. But for a while, Celia would have other things to occupy her.

  She looked ahead, along the river at the blue Casentino hills, and the swallows soaring against a great smoky thunderhead of cloud. She thought of Emma Marsh, who that morning had emailed her a photograph of their son; he looked just like Lucas, on whose knee he had been sitting, although Lucas himself had been barely recognizable as the pale, stern figure she had last seen. His hair had grown down almost to his collar, and seemed somehow darker; his eyes were creased with happiness. ‘He’s stopped work,’ Emma had written. ‘We’ve moved to the country. I want another baby.’

  And then Celia thought of her own news, the piece of paper she’d just collected from the laboratory up at Santa Croce, the crowded little clinic full of people anxiously awaiting blood-test results. And, although she already knew because she’d done her own test, the white plastic baton with its blue line, her doctor had insisted that this was how it was done here, you had to have the official test too. And hers was positive.

  Beside her a swallow rose up above the parapet until it was level with Celia’s face, then it rose and her heart rose with it. She walked on, back to the flat that no longer belonged to the Venezuelan because her name was on the lease now, official; the flat where Dan was waiting for her, and her news.