She was drinking Coca-Cola: the fridge was full of it. She had wondered if he thought she was a child, to be given sweet, fizzy drinks, but he drank it too. He liked two sugars in his coffee.
Perhaps it was the same in the little mini-market as it was in the laundry; did they know who she was, and who he bought the Coca-Cola for? They looked at her strangely there, too.
She remembered Luisa’s face, as if from a hundred years ago, the anxiety in her dark eyes just glimpsed across the market as Chiara had stood there talking to Giancarlo, the panic. Chiara knew that face almost as well as she knew her own; could picture Luisa’s dark head next to her mother’s red curls, leaning down towards her, encouraging her to walk. Or sitting at a restaurant table with Luisa and Sandro and her mum and dad, trying to be good, all of them talking to her at once. Eat up, wipe your chin, no Coca-Cola, no.
Luisa would have seen the truth, straight away: You’re out of your depth, my girl. And then Chiara was seized with panic, wanting to call out in the darkness, Babbo, I’m here! Here in that bit of town, a suburb we might have driven through a hundred times, off to the seaside, remember that? Not daring to name it, because he’d said not to.
What was she doing here?
She was waiting for something. He’d promised her, tomorrow. He would finish work early, he’d be home early, she should wear that slip he liked. You wait, it’ll be worth it, it’ll be something special. That was part of this love affair too, he’d told her, it had to be a surprise because you didn’t always know you wanted something, till you got it.
The darkness beyond the balcony was warm and soft. She was waiting.
*
It was close to two in the morning and Sandro was out on the street, staring at something written on a wall.
From the Piazza Santa Croce came a peal of loosened female laughter, followed by the murmur of male voices. A set of footsteps not far off in the shadowy streets, wandering like a drunk’s, another set more distant but sharper: the click of steel tips, or high heels. The city was a different place in the dark, an echoing labyrinth, its canyon streets full of hiding places. Sandro put a hand to the powdery stucco, wondering.
He’d been to bed once already.
‘You’re dog tired,’ Luisa had said, the minute the door had closed behind Enzo. ‘This can wait till morning. It’ll make more sense then.’
They’d listened to Enzo’s reluctant steps on the stairs: it had sounded as though he was hanging back deliberately rather than trying to catch Giuli up.
So he’d obeyed, they’d gone to bed and he’d listened to Luisa’s breathing ease and slow as she fell asleep. She hadn’t told him whatever it was that was bothering her. Then it had all started to go round and round for Sandro: Enzo’s frightened face, Giuli’s closed one, Luisa’s distraction. The baby without its mother, the Frazione’s followers dispersing, just another leaderless rabble now, all mixing with that insurance claim he should be filing a report on. The traumatized claimant chain-smoking in silence on his balcony, who turned briefly into Pietro who’d never smoked. A man with a tattoo on his hand, in two places at once, something written – something written on someone else’s hand? Who’d said that? Sandro must have lain there three hours with it whirling like a snowstorm in his exhausted brain: had he slept at all? Had he even closed his eyes?
By one o’clock he’d given up and found himself sitting under the light at the kitchen table, trying to read his own scrawled notes.
Earlier, Sandro had taken his turn to give his account of the day – close to two days, as a matter of fact – after Giuli had arrived.
He’d thought, somehow, from her excited face when she’d come into the apartment, that there’d be more to it than this dream. The friend of Flavia had obviously been interesting. He’d supposed it was Wanda the maths teacher who read Freud, or whoever: interesting but quite likely cracked. Quite likely half in love with Flavia herself, although some warning glance from Giuli had stopped him from voicing that particular theory.
Flavia Matteo had seemed ill, was the gist of it: she’d lost weight, seemed withdrawn – or more withdrawn than usual, retreating from her friends. He’d caught Luisa’s eye then, remembering the way she’d looked at her own body when the cancer diagnosis and the chemo had robbed her of her appetite for most of a year. Disbelieving: she’d always thought she could do with losing a pound or two, but the only time she’d cried throughout the whole cancer thing was on coming out of the bathroom one night, having seen her thin bare arms in the mirror. Thin as a drug addict, thin as a camp survivor, thin as a cancer sufferer. No longer herself.
Was that how Flavia Matteo had seen herself, too, wasting away? Stress could do it. So the weight loss, followed by the pregnancy. An affair might have been the explanation if it wasn’t Flavia Matteo they were talking about, and besides, the child was Rosselli’s. A showdown with her husband? A series of rows over whether to have a baby? The mother-in-law no doubt sticking her oar in as well. Happy families.
‘What about the addiction thing?’ he’d said to Giuli with a frown because that was the hot trail she’d been following when he’d spoken to her from the seaside hotel, it wasn’t his imagination. It was written down in big letters, too, on the notes he’d been making; he’d gone over it a few times until it stood out. But Giuli had shaken her head.
‘It’s a tricky one. Patient confidentiality,’ she’d said, and her face closed. ‘I’m waiting to hear.’
So at one Sandro had found himself sitting there in his undershirt and looking at what he’d written, to see if it made any more sense.
It would be so easy to agree with the general perception: Flavia Matteo had never been happy, she was a woman who’d denied herself, who repressed her emotions. The birth of a child was a vast thing, an earthquake in anyone’s life let alone this shy, withdrawn woman’s. So why was it so hard to believe that she’d get post-natal depression?
The truth was, it remained the logical explanation. And it was looking like the least harmful one, too, so shouldn’t they just let it lie, like they’d suggested at the Centre?
But Niccolò Rosselli wanted the certainty: he wanted it laid bare, he wanted the hard facts and not the rumour. Rosselli, Sandro had to admit, was a brave man: he hadn’t faltered at the news of the break-in last night, nor at the police raid; he wasn’t frightened. Perhaps he should be.
Sandro had got dressed, and come out into the ghostly streets, and here he was with half his brain listening to the footsteps, the wandering set falling silent behind the bang of a door, the clicking feet moving in parallel to him, to the north. With the other half of his mind he was visualizing those notes made under the kitchen light, their shared thoughts.
Giovanni Bastone: a wealthy man, a landowner. Sandro had told them what the soldier had said. ‘Look to the business interests.’
Chiara: he’d written down her name absently, listening to Luisa fret about her, crossed it out.
Pietro: his name had been in the notes too. You could call Pietro, Giuli had said, and he’d dutifully written it down, unable to admit that if he were to call his old friend, Pietro might not answer, he’d been so unlike himself lately. A line through it, when Giuli wasn’t looking.
He’d written down the dream, too, had felt his hand cramped with the concentration of it, the murderer chasing Flavia, the faceless man who would hack her to pieces. The assassin. There had been no assassin scaling the balcony at the Stella Maris. But the bare bones of that dream haunted him now, in the street – the slashing arm, the dismemembered victims, the shadowy corridors of the luxurious palace.
He’d told them – Luisa, Giuli, Enzo, all looking back at him gravely – about the Stella Maris: for some reason found himself needing to describe it in detail. Not a palace with long corridors, he’d said: only a shabby, sunlit hotel.
And Calzaghe. Luisa’s eyes had narrowed when he’d described the man. Sandro had shaken his head reluctantly. ‘I don’t know about him,’ he’d said. ‘I don�
��t think he had anything to do with it.’
‘He would have had pass keys,’ Luisa had said. Sandro had thought of that, of course. The hotel proprietor could have let himself into that room any time he liked – or he could have given the keys to someone else for a backhander; the place looked like it had been losing money for years.
‘I mentioned that,’ he’d said to Luisa, and she’d almost smiled.
‘Vesna keeps the keys,’ Calzaghe had in fact said, frightened. ‘Isn’t that so, Vesna?’ She’d shrugged in confirmation, watching him closely.
‘And Vesna’s here every night, not me.’ He’d watched Sandro intently, fearfully.
After he’d made his notes their will to go on had petered out, around that table: they all seemed to shut down, out of weariness or anxiety. Giuli had been the first to leave, abruptly, looking only at Luisa. ‘I’m on the motorino,’ she’d said. ‘Better get going.’ And over her shoulder to Enzo, hurried, evasive: ‘See you there, caro.’
Stifling a yawn now, Sandro turned into the Via dei Malcontenti, which led down along the bare flank of Santa Croce. The street was dark save for the occasional lit window but there were lamps in the piazza, and their illumination filtered down the narrow, blindsided street. The road of the malcontents: plenty of those. Absently he rubbed his fingertips together, feeling the oil and dirt on them from the plaster wall.
Frazione = Azione, the stencil had said. Someone had crossed out Gandhi and put in instead, Niccolò è nostro re. Niccolò is our king. From saint to king, raised higher and higher. It would not end well, was all Sandro could think.
On the threshold of the long expanse of the piazza, the statue of Dante at his shoulder, Sandro stopped. Over the three neatly spaced palaces at the far end, the narrow streets fanning out between them off the piazza like a clever experiment in perspective, rose the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, illuminated against the night sky. Closer, on a bench halfway down the square, sat a girl, legs stretched out in front of her, a boy at her feet, another standing behind her affecting nonchalance, hands in his pockets, and a litre-bottle of wine on the stone beside them.
In Sandro’s pocket something jumped and buzzed: his mobile. He hadn’t known it was in there. It occurred to him as he pulled it out that he didn’t even know if he had his house-key.
It was a message from Giuli.
Need to look over Niccolò’s apartment, it said. Soon aspossible. Will he be OK with that?
So Giuli was awake: she wouldn’t have assumed he was, though. This message was intended to reach him in the morning. He looked down, weighing the phone in his hand, itching to reply: What are you looking for?
But if she’d wanted to tell him that, she would have. And it was late, he wanted to sleep, and he wanted Giuli to sleep. In the square the boy at the girl’s feet was on his knees, upright before her as if he was in church. Slowly the girl leaned down and kissed him, and behind her the standing boy thrust his hands further down in his pockets, shoulders hunched. Turning to leave, Sandro thought, Just wait. She’ll get bored with the kneeling boy and she’ll come to you and by then there’ll be someone else.
But for a moment, re-entering the shadows of the Via dei Malcontenti, Sandro found that he could recall exactly the furious power of that raging moment, when the girl won’t answer your call or you watch as she kisses someone else and you don’t know what to do with yourself. When the hormones rise in you and you could do anything, hurl a stone, break all your knuckles throwing a reckless punch, or jump off a motorway bridge. A pulse of gladness, not to be young any more, was swiftly followed by unease. Giuli wasn’t young, was she? And love seemed to be doing for her. Perhaps there was no safe age after all: if he thought he might lose Luisa to another man – or to whatever, he couldn’t even name the alternatives – that raging moment would be upon him before he could blink, and he’d be lost.
Doggedly Sandro retraced his steps, working these thoughts out of his system. Thinking with determination of his bed and the need for some sleep at least. By way of distraction listening out for those other feet, the brisk clicking heels: only there was nothing. By the time he got to the corner of the Via dei Macci he’d cleared it. They were rational creatures, he and Giuli and Luisa; their little unit would survive. He stopped.
He could smell the fresh spray paint before he even got there, acrid and chemical in the night air that should have smelled of flowers. Someone had been there, in the shadows, around the corner, no more than a hundred metres behind him.
Frazione = Perversione, it read now. And where five minutes earlier he’d read that Niccolò was their king, a brutish angry scribble had been drawn obliterating the words completely. Above it now, in huge black letters, Rosselli è pedofilo.
Frazione = Perversion. Rosselli is a paedophile.
And there he’d been, thinking that he might even get a good night’s sleep.
Chapter Twenty-Two
SOMETIMES YOU JUST KNEW.
Luisa knew, before she opened her eyes, in that moment between sleep and waking she’d always been half afraid of because it whispered to you things you didn’t want to hear. A dangerous moment, your dreams still hovering, your fears unrationalized. This fear had dug in, it sat under the skin like a tick.
She’d known about her lump in exactly the same way: the morning of the first appointment with the breast doctor. Sandro was beside her just as he was this morning, tangled in sheets after a restless night and snoring. She’d lain in bed, listening to the November rain, and quite calmly she had understood that this was not going to be good news and it would have to be dealt with.
No rain this morning but the air had cooled, she could almost feel the sky thickening with the approach of autumn. Luisa opened her eyes.
This wasn’t anything as concrete as a tumour, but the fear was there. There was something wrong, something badly wrong. This is not good, were the words in her head. And this time it wasn’t Luisa who needed help. You’re in trouble, aren’t you? She felt it from across the city. Somewhere out there, in her pale high-heeled shoes, in her floating pretty dress, Chiara was drowning.
Luisa’s appointment at Careggi was at eleven-thirty. No point saying anything: Sandro would only worry unnecessarily. It was just routine anyway, it was the check-up and the reconstruction talk. She’d cancel it, of course. There were more urgent things. There was Chiara.
Uneasily she turned over in bed, unconsciously setting her back against Sandro. She needed to talk to him, just not yet: about Chiara. There would have to be a strategy for the whole Pietro thing. That was madness, it was out of control. But it came to her that it wasn’t just Sandro’s old stubborn streak, his touchiness, his paranoid reticence where his former partner was concerned. Pietro had been behaving strangely. There was something he wasn’t telling them: in the cool, sharp early light it became quite clear to Luisa. He’d been funny with her yesterday, his eyes constantly darting away from hers.
Beside her Sandro shifted, but didn’t wake. What time had he come in? Two, perhaps three: he’d have had no more than five hours’ sleep. Luisa sat up: carefully she eased out of the bed. She shivered.
In slippers and dressing gown she padded into the kitchen and began to dismantle the coffee pot.
He came up behind her, his breath sour from sleeplessness but his arms warm: she relaxed back fractionally against him, the coffee pot still in pieces in her hands.
He cleared his throat. ‘So when’s your appointment again?’ he said.
*
A woman stood outside the taped door of the Frazione Verde’s offices in the grimy alley and looked at the handwritten sign. Another came up beside her. They were both middle-aged, with weathered faces: one had wiry grey hair and the other dyed black, with a squared-off fringe. They were wrapped up in layers of clean, warm, unfashionable clothing, and their noses wrinkled against the alley’s smell of urine and garbage.
‘It’s a shame,’ said the dark woman, frowning hard. A man, a little older, wandered up be
hind them, neatly dressed in a waxed jacket and carrying some shopping from the market. He peered at the sign.
‘Thank you for your continued support, friends,’ it read. ‘The closure of our offices is temporary, due to police intervention: we will soon be opening a new centre of operations where all will again be welcome. Please refer to our website for details.’
‘It’s more than that,’ said the grey-haired woman grimly. At the end of the alley some teenagers appeared, thumbs flicking over their mobiles: three girls, two boys, late-teens, closer to twenty. They lifted their heads as they approached and stood for a moment in front of the sign, mobiles now abandoned.
‘OK,’ said the tallest of the girls, lanky in jeans. Cheerful. ‘So. What’s the plan?’
*
Perhaps this was how it worked, thought Giuli, standing at the ugly little bar around the corner from the Women’s Centre and waiting for her coffee. You pretended nothing was the matter and hoped for the best.
Had he been unable to meet her eye, as he left? Swinging his USB keys nervously. ‘I’m going into work,’ he’d said. ‘I want to monitor the Frazione website, people will want to know what’s going on. They’ll be posting stuff.’
Or had she been unable to meet his?
‘Sounds good,’ she’d said. ‘I’ll call you.’
It was eight o’clock: the Addictions clinic opened at half-past, and she’d arranged to see Barbara in here. Best for both of them to stay away from the Centre for this chat.
The barman yawned as he set her coffee down, showing tobacco-stained teeth. Another reason to give up: just not today, thought Giuli. She smiled her thanks warily.
Say nothing, don’t rock the boat. The alternative was impossible: she couldn’t ask him. Enzo, do you know anything about what the vice squad were looking for? Was it you?
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