A Darkness Descending

by Christobel Kent

  Breathe. Think.

  Who knew Sandro and Giuli were investigating Flavia’s death? Bastone, Wanda Terni, Clelia, Barbara. Farmiga knew, so no doubt her good-looking boyfriend knew too. Did the police know? Did the undercover guys, AISI? The army, the press? That journalist who was everywhere, he’d know, he’d seen Sandro and Giuli going in to Niccolò’s apartment.

  Breathe.

  Paranoia, that’s how Sandro would have described it a mere three days ago: conspiracy theories were just that, theories. But things were different now. With a trembling hand Giuli reached to close the shutters; she lowered herself on to Sandro’s chair. Don’t touch anything. She reached into her bag and took out her phone.

  For a moment she stared at it and didn’t understand: this was not her mobile. Then she remembered: this was Flavia and Niccolò’s phone. Gingerly she laid it down on the desk in front of her: she opened her grubby canvas bag and withdrew the notebook Wanda Terni had allowed her to take away, and laid it next to the phone. Only then did she locate her own mobile.

  The names came up in her call history, Sandro, before that Enzo.

  Her guys for an emergency: Sandro, she told herself, would be still in with Rosselli. She clicked down on to Enzo’s name, dialling, it told her and even as she heard it ring she knew he’d make everything all right. Knew she shouldn’t have doubted her man, not for one minute.

  ‘Cara? He sounded different. Hyped, excited, afraid. ‘Sweetheart. I was just about to ring you. Something’s happened.’

  ‘We’ve been broken into,’ said Giuli, and she heard her voice shake. ‘I mean, at the office.’

  ‘I’m coming,’ he said. He hung up before she could say, There’s all sorts going down in the street.

  Sitting on the chair, Giuli found that she couldn’t move. She could see that the open filing cabinet still contained the same paltry few pieces of paper: the insurance documents for the office and the business, the certification from the trade association. Nothing was kept on paper these days. It was all on computer. She shouldn’t move, either, should she? There might be evidence.

  Then again, the police might not be on their side. They hadn’t been on the Frazione’s side, had they? After that burglary. She looked down at the notebook. This was about Flavia, wasn’t it? And as she stared, she knew this was what they were after. Slowly she peeled off the rubber band.

  Lesson plans, notes. She stopped, frowned, thought. Turned to the back pages and there it was.

  I just wanted to say hello.

  There was a date: August last year, the first entry. Botanico, a tiny sidebar in red.

  The Botanic Gardens?

  She flipped through the pages without looking, at first, working backwards through the notebook, wanting to see how much there was. Page after page after page, covered with tiny dense writing in fine black ink, running on and on and on. Times and dates, his messages, her responses, in tiny neat handwriting, the writing of a teacher.

  The writing of someone trying to compress something huge into a small space.

  Words sprang out at her from the tight-packed sentences: Love. Beautiful. Philosophers were named, poets.

  The parts of the body.

  She noticed that there was no entry for the first Saturday in September, but another little sidebar told her she was right. Sea, it said. The messages started again, the following day.

  She turned back to the first page and began to read.

  By the time Enzo came through the door, saying something about the traffic in an incredulous voice, his laptop under his arm, she’d read it all, twice. Her heart felt like lead in her body; it was as though she was Flavia herself, and as though she had cut her own wrists in that bathtub.

  She looked up at him, amazed that her eyes were dry as she should have been weeping.

  ‘I’m only surprised she didn’t do it sooner,’ she said.

  The phone rang: it was Sandro.

  *

  The university might as well have been on the moon, not the other side of the city; Chiara just couldn’t see herself ever going there again.

  She’d put on jeans but the disobedience frightened her and she’d pulled them off in a sweat and stuffed them at the back of the drawer. She’d put on a skirt, a neat blouse, looked down, trying to see herself through his eyes.

  Dressed, then, and ready but somehow unable to open the front door, Chiara thought of the university courtyard, the old cloister off the Piazza San Marco, the road leading up to the Botanic Gardens and the barracks. She didn’t really belong there any more, it seemed to her: it was kids’ stuff to sit and gaze adoringly at some bearded lecturer or other. To jostle into the crowded bar and talk political theory, to go up to the Biblioteca delle Oblate with the others, to sit writing their assignments together on their laptops with the red dome of the cathedral filling the skyline. Chiara felt a twinge of loss. This was her home now. The suburbs, the green canopy of trees outside the window, her balcony, her man.

  She set down her college bag on the ugly console in the hall and gazed through the doorway into the kitchen. It was a shame it was all so shabby, but it couldn’t be helped. The thought that he might have found them somewhere more suited to a couple starting their life together was one that had come to her early on, but she’d dismissed it. It was childish, it was superficial, decor didn’t matter.

  Anyway, she’d only just have had time to get to the lecture and back, if he was going to be home at lunchtime. And wanted her there. She walked into the bedroom, the big, smooth bed, the old-fashioned walnut headboard and the painting over it, a kitschy oil painting of a child with big eyes.

  The huge mirrored wardrobe that covered one whole wall. It faced the bed.

  Chiara stood facing the wardrobe for a long time. She removed her clothes and looked at herself in the mirror, then she looked up. Something looked back at her.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  ‘THERE’S A RALLY,’ SAID Bastone, breathless in the doorway. ‘Someone’s leaked something on to the internet about the police raid, and they’re gathering. In the Piazza del Carmine.’

  Sandro’s mobile chirruped: a message. And then another. Surreptitiously he reached a hand into his pocket. The message was from Giuli: Found her messages, it said. She was targeted. She was groomed. He turned it off, the words still glowing behind his eyes. Groomed. He knew what that meant, but he couldn’t make it fit, not with this woman. Not with these men, Bastone and Rosselli: they didn’t inhabit a world where cold-blooded strategy was employed to lure the vulnerable into a trap, where images were collated and disseminated. Rosselli hadn’t even had a mobile phone of his own.

  Niccolò Rosselli got to his feet. Sandro could see the effort required for him to stand firm, one hand extended just a little towards the sofa where his son slept, as if monitoring him through the air between them. He looked gaunter than ever, but his gaze was steady as it fixed on Bastone’s pouchy, anxious face.

  ‘What do they say on the internet?’ he said quietly.

  ‘It’s that journalist,’ the lawyer said eagerly. ‘I’m sure of it. He started a blog, just for the purpose of bringing you down. It calls itself Vigilante. He’s at every meeting, he wrote the initial report of your collapse, I know his style.’ His voice was breathless, hoping against hope, Sandro could see, that Flavia would not be mentioned.

  ‘And the blogger, this Vigilante, he says what?’

  ‘Well, it’s just inference, he talks about the seizure of illegal material. But it’s obvious he’s putting the worst possible interpretation on it. We can stop him – legally, if we can get his identity. Prove he’s behind it.’

  ‘They’re calling me a pornographer.’ Rosselli’s voice was flat. ‘It’s too late to stop him. A paedophile. I’ve seen it … I’ve seen it written on the walls.’ His gaze flickered sideways, to the sleeping child, then back to Bastone. ‘Free speech,’ he said. ‘You can’t only believe in it if you have nothing to fear.’ The apartment door was still open and as Sand
ro stepped to close it he heard the click of the front door below, and paused.

  ‘It’s not free speech if they hide behind anonymity,’ said Bastone, pale but determined. Sandro looked at him, startled by signs, at last, of a lawyer’s acuteness. ‘They say anything they like and aren’t accountable.’

  Rosselli didn’t seem to hear. ‘So it’s a lynch mob,’ he said. ‘I’ll go and talk to them.’

  There were footsteps on the stairs and Sandro saw Niccolò Rosselli’s expression deaden as he recognized them.

  ‘No,’ said Bastone, earnestly, ‘you don’t understand. It’s the Frazione, they’re rallying for you.’ He took a breath. ‘They’re behind you.’

  ‘It has to be faced, Carlo,’ said Rosselli, as if he hadn’t heard Bastone. ‘You can’t leave things to fester. That’s how we got here, how this country got here. It’s been buried alive and it has to be torn up, out of the ground.’ Something kindled and caught behind the man’s eyes. ‘Things buried have to be brought up to the air. We need to breathe.’

  Sandro almost stepped back at the tone of his voice, the rage hardly contained, the conviction like the blast of heat from an oven. In that second he saw that such certainty could go either way: a man like Rosselli might murder, might shame a woman into suicide, might turn fanatic and lay waste to his country. Or might be the only one to save it.

  ‘So are you going to tell him, Carlo?’

  Maria Rosselli was in the doorway and the voice was hers, level and poisonous. At the sound of it, on the sofa, the sleeping baby started, let out a whimper. Her big bony hand was on Bastone’s crumpled sleeve: he looked down at it as if a snake had laid itself over him.

  She hissed, ‘I think you’d better tell him.’

  On the divan the child had not settled back to sleep: he twisted and arched, as if in pain. The three – mother, son, lawyer – seemed locked in a horrible silent struggle, like dogs unable to detach from hostility. Sandro went to the sofa, bent over the child. He glanced back at the trio in the open doorway: too late, he supposed, to worry about what the neighbours might think.

  ‘What does she mean?’ Niccolò Rosselli asked, suddenly quieter and looking into his childhood friend’s eyes.

  ‘I loved her,’ blurted Carlo. ‘I did. There’s no crime in that.’

  ‘I know you loved her,’ said Rosselli, almost impatient. ‘Do you think I’m a fool?’

  ‘I could never have taken her from you,’ said the lawyer, miserably. The child arched his back on the sofa and Sandro smelled a sweetness off him released by the movement, of talcum powder, of clean sweat. He put out a hand and felt the warmth of the small body under the rough towelling fabric. ‘Shh,’ he murmured.

  Maria Rosselli made a sound of contempt and Carlo Bastone turned to her, briefly dignified. ‘I couldn’t. I loved her, but she didn’t love me. She didn’t even need to say it. And you had your child together, it was proof she loved you only. How could I have harmed you?’ Looking at Rosselli. ‘What harm was in it?’ The man was almost crying.

  ‘Did you send her messages?’ Sandro asked from beside the child. Bastone looked bewildered, blank. ‘Messages?’ he said. ‘What do you mean? I saw her every day. Letters, you mean? I didn’t write to her.’

  ‘I saw you,’ said Maria Rosselli. ‘I saw you looking at something two, maybe three weeks ago, some photographs. I saw you put them in a drawer quickly when I came in. At the offices of the Frazione, you put them in a drawer, in a folder.’ Bastone’s face was suddenly grey. She leaned into his face. ‘I opened the folder, when you’d gone. I know what you were looking at.’

  Niccolò Rosselli said nothing: Bastone turned to him beseechingly.

  ‘I – they – I never—’

  ‘Dirty pictures,’ said Maria Rosselli with relish. ‘You were looking at dirty pictures of her. Whose bed was she on?’

  The child beside him let out a cry, startlingly loud, like a cry of pain. ‘Shh,’ said Sandro helplessly. What was he supposed to do now? He had no idea. He slid a hand around the child’s small warm torso, put another at the back of his neck, he’d seen that done. He picked the baby up and placed him against his chest. Was his shirt clean enough? He stood, joggled: the child snuffled and was quiet. He was warm, heavy as a sandbag, and still.

  ‘Photographs of Flavia,’ said Niccolò, and his voice was hollow.

  ‘Someone sent them,’ said Bastone. ‘They were sent to the Frazione, to me. I opened the envelope. Then they emailed them, too. I burned them. I burned the copies.’

  ‘Not straight away,’ said Maria Rosselli. A furious flush spread up Bastone’s neck.

  ‘I didn’t know what to do with them,’ he said, in agony. ‘She she looked – she didn’t look as though she was enjoying it. She looked—’ He covered his face with his hands and what he said was muffled. ‘I thought they might be evidence of some – some wrongdoing. Then I couldn’t bear it – if they were still there, you might see them, she might see them. I thought I should talk to you – talk to her—’

  ‘Did you talk to her?’ The hollowness was gone, there was something else now in Rosselli’s voice: an awful, stifled kind of pain. Grief. Bastone shook his head, his face still covered. ‘I burned them. Only that was when an email arrived with them attached. I hid it on the computer. I left it there in a folder labelled Expenses, just for a week. I didn’t know what the right thing to do was, and then I deleted them from there too. But they seemed less dangerous on the computer.’ The hands left his face.

  ‘Only of course it’s more dangerous,’ said Rosselli. ‘Things can be recovered from them. Or they can be planted. Perhaps those photographs are what the police are looking at now. Pictures of my wife.’

  ‘You never married her,’ spat Maria Rosselli.

  Niccolò Rosselli turned his head very slowly and looked at his mother as if he could have struck her down, there and then, in a single blow. ‘She was my wife,’ he said. ‘I loved her, and she was my wife and my soul.’

  Maria Rosselli, at last, was silent: her jaw set heavy, she looked as though she’d been turned to stone.

  ‘They’re gone, then,’ said Sandro. ‘The photographs? The evidence.’

  And slowly Bastone nodded. ‘They’re gone.’

  ‘Someone else knew,’ said Sandro. ‘The same person who sent the photos. Who broke into the offices. Who tipped off the police.’

  Who pursued Flavia Matteo, who forced love or some version of it into her straitened life. Who opened her and broke her. Groomed was a small word for what had been done here.

  Suddenly feeling useless, Sandro shook his head and held out the sleeping baby to Niccolò Rosselli. Maria Rosselli didn’t move. Once he was in his father’s arms the child’s eyes opened. They were dark, almost black, and they fixed unwaveringly on the face above them.

  Uneasy, Sandro looked away: looked down at his phone, which was switched off. He turned it on.

  Two missed calls. One from Luisa. And Pietro Cavallaro, another missed call. An instinct throbbed, not for nothing had this man been his working partner for decades; was it Chiara? Not only. It was Chiara, and it was Rosselli, and it was the Frazione: they were connected, he knew it, and Pietro knew it too.

  His oldest friend: it looked like Pietro did need him, after all.

  *

  ‘My God,’ said Gloria, to herself as much as to Luisa. The Piazza del Carmine was packed to its edges: people stood wedged between the parked cars, against the barred windows of the yellow stucco palaces and on the steps of the great church of Santa Maria del Carmine. Overhead the sky was a hard, brilliant September blue.

  After their encounter with Giancarlo, Gloria had been all for driving over to the Isolotto and up and down those quiet streets of apartments until they saw Chiara, coming out of a shop perhaps or on a balcony, hanging out washing. Instead, Luisa had called the office when Sandro’s mobile went to answerphone, and had got Giuli.

  ‘I’ll keep trying him,’ Giuli had said. ‘He’s in with Rosselli.
There’s something here he’s got to see, though.’ There’d been such a dull emptiness to her voice that Luisa had had to ask. ‘You’ve found out what happened? To Flavia?’ It wasn’t that she’d forgotten Flavia, it was only that the woman was dead, and Chiara was the one who needed their help now.

  ‘I know why she killed herself.’

  Gloria had been too distracted to listen to what Luisa was saying, which was just as well. They’d abandoned the Cavallaros’ little red car in the Borgo San Frediano, up on a pavement, unable to move any further.

  ‘Who are they?’ Gloria asked now, bewildered. ‘Who are all these people?’

  Dreadlocked youngsters in patchwork coats occupied the terrace of the Dolce Vita: the proprietor had ceased his attempts to shoo them off and stood beside them, watching proceedings. Fierce old women shouted, bearded boys, respectable types. A brigade of schoolchildren, barely more than sixteen, in formation like Roman soldiers and pushing cheerfully to and fro in the middle of the throng.

  ‘This is the Frazione,’ said Luisa. ‘This is Giuli’s lot. Chiara’s lot. The young people’s party.’ Gloria scanned the faces more urgently, but even supposing Chiara had been among them, it would have been like finding a needle in a haystack.

  NIC. CO. LO!

  On the steps of the church someone had a loudhailer, and a banner that Luisa was not close enough to read. He was calling through his megaphone and the crowd answered him.

  Behind him and inside the great church the frescoes stood quiet in their chapel, telling that old story, thought Luisa as she surveyed the scene, of sin and temptation. Adam and Eve, the fallen woman covering her face with her hands as she runs from the Garden of Eden, her mouth gaping in a howl of horror and shame.

  Flavia Matteo.

  Giuli’s voice had been ragged as she told Luisa on the phone, as though she were the woman betrayed and abandoned. ‘A man came after her. She fell in love with him, with the way he spoke to her, through his messages. He – he seduced her, and she was helpless. She’d never been in love before, not like that.’