Luisa puffed out her cheeks. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Try and get him to see it the same way. Failing that, tranquillizer dart? Or just keep him out of the way.’ Was this the right advice? In the pit of her stomach Luisa felt unease stir. But what else could they do?
‘I’ll talk to Sandro,’ she said. Clinging to straws. ‘OK?’
Hesitant, Gloria clutched her bag. They stood, facing each other: it didn’t feel as though anything had been resolved. Just move forward, one step ahead: it was Luisa’s only strategy.
They crossed the shopfloor. ‘Will you do it?’ said Gloria, her hand on the door.
‘Do what?’
Pale-faced, Gloria nodded down at the careful folds of Luisa’s silk blouse. ‘The breast,’ she said. ‘Do you want it back?’
And Luisa opened her mouth, fully intending to say, robustly, ‘No, no, I’m fine as I am, all fine,’ but the way Gloria had phrased it meant she found she couldn’t say anything at all.
Chapter Six
ON THE CROWDED TERRACE of the restaurant Sandro prodded despondently at his salad.
Luisa had her mind on something else, too. ‘Why did you order it then?’ she said with distracted impatience. ‘You hate salad.’
Sandro forked it into his mouth. Insalata Fantasia was what they’d called it: it had lumps of rubbery cheese and maize kernels in it, and he chewed with stolid disgust. He had wanted pici with hare sauce and some beans in oil followed by a slice of cake, but had decided that he needed to look after his health. He put the fork down, pushed the big gaudy bowl away and stared into the soft warm dark of the Piazza del Carmine.
This square, the breadth of it, still as untidy and car-choked as it had been when he’d been a boy, the grand palazzi along one side with their ornate balconies, faded and crumbling, the big church with its jewel of a chapel: he loved it, if pushed to admit it. But the restaurant was a mistake. It had been a favourite once upon a time, an old-fashioned place with excellent food, but it had embarked on a half-baked programme of modernization that involved uncomfortable aluminium seating and neon and loud music. The menu was now too long, the quality of the food too patchy.
This was the problem with eating in restaurants, he thought gloomily as he forked a piece of cheese into his mouth – worrying about the cost. Their few weeks in Castiglioncello, it seemed to Sandro now, had only lulled them into a false sense of carefree security, persuaded them that they were the kind of couple who could do things spontaneously. Or perhaps it was just the day he’d had.
It had been Luisa’s idea: she’d called that afternoon and said perhaps they could go out to eat. He’d had the impression then that she had an agenda: his head full of Niccolò Rosselli and what his mother had said in that strange, dark untidy lawyer’s office, he’d thought, why not?
A distraction. The whole situation was a mess, all right: he didn’t hold out a whole lot of hope for the Frazione Verde, not since this afternoon and Maria Rosselli’s revelation.
Had he known what she was going to say? An inkling, just like Giuli said she’d had when Niccolò Rosselli had stopped talking and swayed on the stage. From the moment the door opened there’d been an unusual dynamic between the two people, the lawyer and the fierce old woman, that had made Sandro stop and observe and wonder. Giuli had looked at them, bewildered by the strange, crackling energy Maria Rosselli brought into the room with her. Of course, thought Sandro to begin with, the old woman’s known this lawyer since he was a kid, coming round to play with her son, of course there’s a lack of respect, of course she still sees him as the overweight, bumbling child struggling to keep up with her odd, sharp, determined Niccolò.
He didn’t even know where these thoughts came from. He could be quite wrong about all sorts of things, and Carlo Bastone might have been a skinny child. But there was something else, too, something else consuming the woman; he could see that right from the beginning, and it infected their host. Carlo Bastone had looked from his new visitor to Sandro in a pleading panic.
‘You know each other?’ he’d said as Sandro had got formally to his feet and, despite – or perhaps because of – Maria Rosselli’s hostility, had deliberately held out his hand.
‘My wife,’ he had repeated to her. ‘You know my wife.’
‘Luisa Venturelli.’ The old woman’s hard-set mouth had moved, using his wife’s maiden name quite deliberately, but did not soften in a smile. ‘Yes. Of course.’ Then she had turned to Bastone and had spoken as though Sandro was an irrelevance.
And now Luisa sat, staring into the darkness away from him, and whatever she might have wanted to say remained unsaid. Sandro wished he could put Niccolò Rosselli’s mother in a room with Luisa and see which of them came off worst: like getting blood from a stone, getting anything out of either of them.
He looked at his wife’s stubborn profile, still beautiful to him, as she stared away. She knew he was looking, he could tell from the set of her jaw.
‘Carlo Bastone,’ she said without turning. ‘Yes. Old family: old money. Plenty of fancy palazzi but no cash. I knew that mother too.’ Sandro shook his head.
‘It’s nobody’s business but his,’ was what Maria Rosselli had snapped at the lawyer as though they were alone in the room, but Sandro and Giuli had both at once moved forwards in their chairs, listening. The lawyer had immediately begun to fiddle anxiously with something, head down. Signora Rosselli leaned both big-knuckled hands on the table in front of him. ‘Why would it be? It’s nothing to do with his work.’ Bastone had darted a nervous look at Sandro, and the old woman had turned on the visitors.
‘What are you still doing here?’ she’d said.
‘I – they – we—’ Bastone had seemed quite helpless.
‘We had an appointment.’ Sandro had stared: Giuli had spoken with quiet courtesy. She had got to her feet and stood facing the terrifying old woman. ‘I am Giulietta Sarto,’ she’d said, her hands at her sides. ‘My fiancé Enzo works for the Frazione. We came to see if there was anything we could do to help.’
‘Giuli was great today,’ said Sandro, without thinking, and at last something in Luisa unbent and she turned towards him.
‘Yes?’
And he told her. As she sat and listened, nodding, she was still looking faraway, that same look he’d seen on Liliana’s face, and the old nun’s. Trying to fit the story into a bigger scheme: perhaps it was what women did.
‘It was Giuli’s thing, of course, her case. If it is a case. But she took the responsibility. She faced down Niccolò Rosselli’s mother.’
‘Well,’ said Luisa, ‘that takes some doing, too.’
Sandro nodded. ‘You’re telling me. And in that lawyer’s office? We could have gone on for days, trying to find out anything. She’s a tough nut, that old woman.’
‘Are you getting paid for this?’ Luisa said abruptly, leaning forward across the restaurant table. ‘This Rosselli investigation, whatever it turns out to be?’
Sandro grimaced. ‘Well, that’s the weirdest part of it,’ he said slowly. ‘You know what? We might even get paid.’
That had been strange: the old woman abruptly deciding to trust them had been startling enough, and then the offer of money. He’d have said she’d be the last person to offer hard cash to a private detective.
Not that he’d had the impression that Maria Rosselli had given in: she’d looked at Giuli, at Sandro, at the lawyer, and had made a calculation. Sandro imagined that it was hard for her to admit that she needed help, but she was too clever not to.
‘All right,’ was what Maria Rosselli had said, addressing Sandro directly as she treated the lawyer’s room as though it were her own, jaw still set hard as iron. ‘All right. She’s left him. That stupid girl has left him. Beh! Not even the excuse of being a girl … at her age, it’s ridiculous. I tell him, it makes no difference, we can manage without her. She hardly knew what she was doing with the child anyway.’
Giuli and Sandro had been openly staring at her at this
point. Sandro had found himself wondering how this woman had earned a living, brought up her only child on her own. He imagined there wasn’t much that Maria Rosselli wouldn’t be capable of, if she wanted it badly enough. Her certainty was frightening.
‘You mean his – his wife?’ Maria Rosselli had turned her deepset dark eyes on Giuli when she’d spoken, assessing her all over again. Giuli had raised her chin and bravely continued. ‘Niccolò’s – your son’s wife has left him?’
‘They were never married,’ the mother-in-law had said with blunt contempt. ‘She has no rights. I said that to him.’
Sandro had turned his head to ease the stiffness he’d felt building up as he’d tried to take in what Maria Rosselli was saying. ‘The selfishness,’ she’d said coldly. ‘The neglect of duty, the weakness. It’s unforgivable. You can see what it’s done to him. He can’t sleep, he doesn’t eat. The child cries.’
The child cries. In the dim, dusty room the words had hung in the air, changing things.
Sandro felt a chill now as he felt Luisa’s eyes on him: gave himself a little shake. In the wide Piazza del Carmine something was going on, over beyond the church. Banners bobbing up and down in the soft darkness, and a groundswell of voices.
‘She left the child behind,’ said Luisa slowly, and Sandro saw something in her face he didn’t want to see. The conclusion he didn’t want to draw, about the only thing that would keep a mother from her child.
Their waiter – a slightly stooped, elderly man with shiny patches on his ancient black trousers – was circulating between the tables on the crowded terrace; abruptly Luisa nodded to him, and he shuffled over in a parody of haste. Luisa brought that out in people.
‘Coffee,’ she said, in response to his ingratiating recital of desserts. ‘And the bill.’ The sound of the demonstrators in the square was getting louder; they were singing the ‘Internazionale’, to Sandro’s astonishment.
‘How old is the child?’ Luisa said when the waiter had gone.
‘Young,’ said Sandro, suddenly unwilling to think about Niccolò Rosselli’s situation, and unwilling also to evoke the nearly newborn for Luisa, who for years – more than a decade after her own child died – had not been able to look at babies. But clearly in this case the presence of a newborn was the key: the unanswered question. ‘A – a baby.’ Luisa turned her hard stare on him. ‘Six weeks,’ he said obediently.
‘Six weeks.’ Her face was calm, immobile. ‘That’s a dangerous time.’ He looked at her. ‘Isn’t it supposed to be? A difficult time for a woman, they can behave uncharacteristically. Become violent, all sorts of things. For those first weeks after a baby’s born.’
Sandro hardly dared speak: after their daughter had been born, with a syndrome that had meant she lived a bare thirty-six hours, Luisa had descended into a state of bleak, impenetrable withdrawal from which he had feared she would never emerge. For some time he had thought that his vivid, energetic, sharp-tongued wife might sit with dull eyes at the kitchen table for the rest of their life together. He still marvelled at her recovery, one spring morning, when she’d got out of bed, put on lipstick and gone back in to work.
Calmly, she went on. ‘Post-partum psychosis, isn’t that what they call it? You should get Giuli to talk to the woman’s midwife, the people at the Centre.’
‘I don’t know if she was treated at the Centre,’ he mumbled. ‘I’d have to find out.’
Luisa nodded, apparently still serene. Could it be that she no longer connected that phrase – post-partum – with herself? She spoke.
‘Giusy – in the shop. She knew he had a baby, a wife. She was at school with Rosselli. Can you imagine that?’
‘They were never married,’ said Sandro. ‘Rosselli’s mother seemed to think that was significant.’
‘More significant than the child? They’d been together how long?’ He was surprised by her calmness, her tolerance; for some reason he had thought Luisa approved of the institution of marriage as much as Maria Rosselli seemed to. But then he was regularly prepared to believe that he could assume nothing at all about his wife of thirty-odd years.
She smiled at him. ‘If you ask me, I don’t think Maria Rosselli ever wanted them to get married. No one could be good enough for her Niccolò.’
‘It sounds like they’ve been together more than twenty years,’ said Sandro. ‘That must have been tough.’ Remembering the curl of Maria Rosselli’s lip, as though twenty years might still count as an aberration. As though she’d spent all that time waiting for her son to extricate himself from an unsuitable relationship.
‘Yes,’ said Luisa.
The coffee was set down in front of her just as the untidy rabble of demonstrators came alongside the restaurant terrace, chanting cheerfully now. Most of the diners smiled back: it was all very amicable. Sandro tried to see what it said on the posters: LEAVE SCANDIGCI ALONE. NO TO MORE ROADS. Hardly contentious stuff. The banners had the crude insignia of the Frazione Verde pasted to their corners, a green lightning bolt across a representation of the Duomo’s cupola. He smiled to himself: the protesters all looked so young, so disorganized, they could hardly even chant in time. Had they just assembled themselves, in the absence of Niccolò Rosselli, their figurehead? How long ago had this little march been organized? He wanted to take one or two of them by the elbow and ask about the Frazione, what it meant to them. But it wasn’t part of the case: the case, now, was finding Rosselli’s wife, and never mind his political activity.
‘She’s obviously taking charge,’ said Luisa. ‘The mother. She’s the one who’s paying? For you to track the wife down.’
Sandro shifted anxiously. ‘We need to talk about it,’ he said. ‘I don’t even know – she hasn’t even talked to her son about it yet. She seemed just to decide, on the spur of the moment.’
Out of spite: he’d seen the look Maria Rosselli gave Carlo Bastone as she made the announcement. ‘Get her back,’ she’d said, drawing herself up under the high, dark, coffered ceiling of the lawyer’s office, looking down at them as though they were all pygmies. Focusing on Sandro. ‘Find her and bring her back to face the music. I won’t have her treat him like this. I’ll pay.’
‘That could be tricky.’ Luisa spoke thoughtfully.
‘She said, come round tomorrow morning,’ Sandro said, his eye drawn back to the square as the demonstrators moved on. ‘She said I could talk to him then.’
‘Better make sure she’s out of the way first.’
‘Hmmm,’ Sandro said, evading the issue. He couldn’t imagine how one would go about telling Maria Rosselli what to do. ‘I might need you for that,’ he said vaguely.
‘And what about the insurance claim?’ Luisa said, eyeing him with exasperation. ‘When are you going to fit that in, a bit of proper paid work?’
Sandro passed a hand over his forehead and found it moist: the evening was still warm. She was right, of course. ‘I’ll fit it in,’ he said. He’d probably only need to clap eyes on the man to know if he was scamming them. You could tell trauma, real trauma. Talk to the neighbours. ‘First thing maybe, get the lie of the land.’
Luisa made a sceptical sound, and he looked out into the darkness, avoiding her eye. An army vehicle was following the demonstrators slowly around the wide piazza, between the parked cars. A tiny thing, the soldiers inside it seemed to fill it right up, heads knocking on the roof, the driver hunched awkwardly over the wheel, like something out of the Keystone Cops. Not in their brief surely, though Sandro vaguely remembered something Bastone had said about Rosselli lobbying them over road permissions: he must have got their goat. Watching it all come to a halt, the procession and the vehicle in its wake, Sandro wondered: if the military had turned up here, who else could be keeping tabs on the Frazione Verde … the carabinieri?… the Polizia di Stato?
A movement along the terrace alerted him, he couldn’t have said why. A big man was sitting there smoking: he’d raised his hand for the waiter. On the little table in front of him, next to an un
touched glass of grappa, lay an open notebook. A journalist? Did reporters still use pen and paper? The waiter was leaning down to him now, they were exchanging a joke, the tall man gesturing with his cigarette at the crowd. Sandro wondered if this man had written the article on Rosselli’s collapse that he’d read this morning, had been responsible for the amused, sly tone of the piece. The man seemed to detect the interest from their direction, and Sandro looked back at the soldiers.
When he had been a police officer they’d kept files on certain extremists, mostly right-wingers but once a communist who had a record for arson. It could only be justified if there were evidence of any criminal activity, in theory. As for AISI – Agenzia Informazioni e Sicurezza Interna, the secret service – well, they were a law unto themselves. Would they bother with a little bunch of Oltrarno hippy agitators? You never knew. If they thought those same hippies were in danger of actually getting something done, they might.
The door of the army vehicle opened and its occupants emerged untidily, crumpled by their confinement, adjusting their caps … three, four. One of them lit up a cigarette, holding it discreetly under his palm as he leaned against the car. Sandro couldn’t remember if that was allowed these days. He got to his feet, stretched.
‘Where are you going?’ asked Luisa, sitting back in her seat.
‘Nowhere,’ he said. ‘Just due passi, a little wander. I want to see what this is about. Hang on.’ He stepped down off the terrace.
There was an air of lazy ease about the small group of soldiers as he approached them: the procession seemed to have diffused into something harmlessly amateurish and had in fact stopped proceeding anywhere. Sandro felt a stab of pity for Giuli and all her passion. Roads had to be built, didn’t they? He assumed that the tallest soldier, turning at his approach, would be the senior officer, and so it turned out: he recognized the badge of a colonel. The man looked at him with that air of stern seriousness he knew well, cultivated in the army, city hall, even the police, to disguise the fact that one’s time was largely spent doing not very much at all.
A Darkness Descending Page 6