A Darkness Descending

by Christobel Kent

  Even a modern woman, it seemed, even a woman who didn’t believe in the snake and the apple, could fall: could run out of the garden and die of shame.

  Luisa didn’t find it surprising, not for a minute. Didn’t it lie in wait for all of them, the most virtuous woman and the most sophisticated alike?

  She spied an opening, round to the side, that would lead them to the Via del Leone. Did Giuli know all this was going on, five hundred metres from the office?

  NIC. CO. LO!

  The crowd swayed and roared. Luisa quailed at the thought of what would happen when he came.

  *

  They sat, side by side, the notebook open on the desk in front of them. Enzo’s laptop sat beside it, humming into life.

  ‘Don’t look,’ said Giuli. ‘Don’t read it. No one should read it.’

  She felt as though in that small book was everything any woman had ever had to be ashamed of. The longings and the weakness and the need – all of it.

  ‘I don’t want to,’ said Enzo, and he took Giuli’s hand. He’d turned his head slightly away from her as he did so, and Giuli understood, with a small pulse of pity and love mixed, that he couldn’t look at her in case she should see he was talking about something precious to him; that he was also too fearful it wasn’t precious to her to be able to look her in the eye.

  She just shook her head, mute.

  ‘How did it start?’ On Enzo’s face she saw pity fighting with disgust.

  ‘Don’t judge her,’ she said quietly, and he darted her a quick look. ‘She was walking in the Botanic Gardens. She tripped or something, and he helped her. He asked for her mobile number because he was worried about her, he said. And that night he sent her a message, to ask if she was all right.’ Giuli found she couldn’t actually bear to talk about it. She wished Luisa would come.

  His last message to Flavia, two weeks after the child was born. The phone sitting on the shelf beside the baby monitor.

  Dai, finiamo. Non mi diverto più.

  Come on, let’s finish it. I’m not having fun any more.

  He’d kept it going more than a year. That showed stamina. Had it been strategic? Had he been waiting for something to happen before he pulled the plug on her? He had: there’d been a number of things he’d been waiting for.

  She’d got pregnant with her husband’s child, that must have slowed things down for him. Flavia had hoped it would cure her, but it hadn’t.

  And she’d hung on a month after that last message. She must have looked at that little screen a thousand times a day, waiting. She would have done anything to have that feeling back but it had left her, as a chemical left the body, leaving only its toxic residue. Giuli blinked something back.

  ‘What’s going on out there?’ she asked. ‘Was that what you were going to tell me? About the demo?’

  ‘They want Niccolò,’ Enzo said. ‘I was all morning on the computer –’ he flushed ‘– I was supposed to be servicing the computers at a textile warehouse but I got a tweet. Someone said there was going to be a flash rally, down here, in support of the Frazione. It went viral: the kids are really on to it, you know? The technology.’ There was the briefest inflection of pride, before he sobered. ‘I had to bring up the Frazione’s website on my laptop to monitor activity.’ His flush deepened. ‘The site was crashing every few seconds under the weight of it, so people were tweeting instead.’

  He gazed through the window, marvelling. ‘So many people. Some journalist had been stirring it online, gloating over the police raid, and people just flipped.’ He shook his head. ‘They’re sick of being manipulated. By the authorities: the army, the carabinieri, the police, the press – everyone. We’re being watched everywhere. Let them watch us now.’ He was almost on his feet.

  ‘This was what you were going to tell me?’ Giuli asked.

  Enzo sat back down, his face suddenly pale. Slowly he shook his head again.

  ‘Flavia was groomed?’ he said. ‘That’s what you think? She was targeted.’

  ‘I think,’ Giuli concentrated on keeping her voice steady, on not letting the rage she felt contaminate her argument, ‘that he watched her in the gardens. She walked every day in the Strozzi, or the Boboli, or the Orto Botanico.’ She frowned. The Orto Botanico was near the university, wasn’t it? Where Chiara studied … ‘He might have seen her in any one of those places: everyone knew who she was, he might have tracked her in all of them. I think he waited for his opportunity. He might have waited a long time before he got his opening.’ She looked at Enzo. ‘She must have been a sitting duck. All that emotion, kept in check all those years. Just a question of pressing the right buttons. A technique some men have.’

  ‘She slept with him.’ Enzo’s voice was flat with disillusion.

  Slowly, Giuli shook her head. ‘We don’t know for sure.’ She couldn’t repeat those parts to him, the hotel room by the sea. And later, when he’d taken her to an empty apartment.

  ‘He was playing a long game,’ she explained. ‘He took her to the seaside to make her fall in love with him, once and for all. To show her he wasn’t only about sex.’ She blinked. What had Sandro said? The man who saw her come out of that hotel said Flavia had looked like she’d died and gone to heaven.

  ‘And he wasn’t. He was all about power.’

  Enzo opened his mouth, hesitated. On the desk the telephone rang. Giuli stared at it, startled that it should still exist, nearly obsolete technology, untouched by the break-in. She picked up the receiver.

  The voice was peremptory, the bad temper of a provincial official begrudgingly giving in to pressure. ‘I’ve received permission from the next-of-kin, and the police have authorized it, God knows why.’

  It was the coroner in Viareggio, wanting to double-check the agency’s email address before he sent the image of Flavia’s wrist.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said, thinking furiously as she looked at the empty desk, Damn, damn. ‘Look. Our computers are – are down. You’re going to have to send it to a different address. I’m Sandro’s assistant.’

  ‘This is irregular,’ he said, and she heard the twitchiness in his voice. ‘I don’t want these autopsy pictures getting into the wrong hands. For obvious reasons.’ He wouldn’t want much of an excuse to change his mind, permission or no permission.

  ‘It’s a number,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it? I was standing next to Sandro when you talked to him. Look, call him if you want.’ Silence. ‘It’s so important,’ she said, because it suddenly seemed that it was, that she couldn’t wait one moment longer to nail this thing. And it might have been that the official heard the anguish in her voice but he let out an impatient sigh and said brusquely, ‘All right. All right then. Give me the address.’

  ‘Photographs?’ Enzo said, after she’d hung up.

  ‘One autopsy photograph,’ she said. He was even paler. ‘There was something written on Flavia’s hand,’ she said. ‘A number.’

  Nervously Enzo clicked on his email, send and receive. Nothing.

  ‘So what were you going to tell me?’

  He clicked again, and the message began to load. ‘High resolution, I expect,’ he said, still fidgeting.

  She just looked at him.

  ‘I found some photographs,’ he said, shame-faced. ‘On – on my memory stick.’

  ‘Ah,’ she said.

  The message was through: Enzo opened the attachment, and there it was.

  A blown-up image of Flavia Matteo’s dead hand filled the screen, the fingers curled inwards, the flesh bloodless white, puffed from water immersion. What drew the eye was the wound, on the lower edge of the frame; a razor had done it because the edges were clean, gaping across the wrist, scored to the bone, tendon freed. And the faded remains of a line of numbers, written across the creases of her palm. Enzo leaned down, enlarged the image, zoomed. He tipped his head on one side. He pulled a piece of paper towards him and wrote the numbers down: five numbers visible: it looked as though they were the last five. He looked back at Giuli.


  ‘Give me the phone,’ he said. ‘You said you’d got her phone?’ She handed it to him and he opened it. ‘If this is the number she was calling,’ he said, ‘if she left the number in her address book on the mobile, with five out of ten numbers, we can match it. You want to know the odds?’

  ‘First show me your photographs,’ she said.

  They were looking at them, shoulder to shoulder, when Luisa walked through the door with Gloria.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  SANDRO DIDN’T HAVE TO ask, why here? He knew his friend was ready to talk.

  Out of uniform, Pietro looked smaller somehow, less visible; he was standing in the porch of the church of San Marco, in the big square where all the buses converged. Beside him the austere façade of the monastery hid its treasure, the monks’ cells, each with its glowing fresco, and fleetingly Sandro thought, maybe there’s something in it. A little white cell, daily observances, brotherhood. Maybe that’s what we should have opted for, Pietro and I, no fretting over wives or children. Mortification of the flesh, and communion with God, though: they might have been tricky.

  On the adjacent side of the square stretched the deep umber stucco of the university buildings with their long, handsome windows, a gaggle of students in the doorway. Pietro was watching them as Sandro approached.

  ‘This way,’ his friend said without turning his head, and heading north out of the square they fell into step. The crowds fell away behind them. They walked in silence as far as the bar opposite the Botanic Gardens, then they were inside, behind the ornate gilded façade.

  The place was close to empty, only one khaki-clad soldier propping up the bar today, though it was almost lunchtime. Silent as the grave. Sandro looked around, then he thought of the chaos around Santo Spirito and wondered. Would the army have been called in? Had it got that rough? Then something else came to him, the detail he’d been trying to recover, on and off, since Luisa had told him about the man she’d seen Pietro talking to in the street … the detail he’d confused with Flavia Matteo’s autopsy and the number written on her hand.

  The lad with a tattoo on his wrist: he’d seen a man in this very bar, raising a coffee to his lips and his sleeve falling back to expose a blue-black snake tattoo. Pietro wouldn’t have chosen this bar by coincidence, would he?

  ‘I couldn’t tell you,’ said Pietro, pushing the coffee cup across to Sandro. ‘You understand that?’ They were seated in the dim recesses of the back of the bar: opposite them the wide window was filled with a view of the green jungle of foliage behind the garden’s high railings.

  ‘But you can now?’ Sandro asked quietly. ‘Has there been an edict from above? Have you asked permission?’ He didn’t say, You couldn’t tell me what? Pietro looked at him, his eyes turning hard and angry, and then the look was gone. He exhaled.

  ‘Start from the beginning,’ said Sandro.

  ‘An arson attack,’ said Pietro. ‘That was the start. A routine investigation: an arson attack on the house of a Frazione supporter. A police matter: only then a man from AISI came calling. He was waiting in my office at eight the following day. Sitting at my desk.’

  The secret service. Sandro listened, admiring, fearful, almost envious. Almost. If he’d been a younger man, still in the service, might he have refused? An undercover operation, they’d have used all the buzzwords. Inter-disciplinary co-operation, a merging of skill sets, cross-fertilization. Plus, of course, you didn’t get a choice.

  ‘There’s an agenda,’ said Pietro. ‘There’s always an agenda. You know that, I know that. You think, are they really looking for these people, this right-wing cabal, or am I just a patsy? Have they picked me because I’m the cleverest cop they could find, or the dumbest? Or just because I happened to be the investigating officer on the arson attack, and they want to put me off the track?’

  Sandro remembered it, dimly. A petrol bomb had been lobbed into the garage of some teacher from a left-wing liceo who’d been vocal in his support of the Frazione.

  ‘And so you just have to make the best of it, because orders are orders. It came at a bad time, too: it wasn’t long after they approached me that Chiara started going out with this guy.’ As he said it, Pietro’s expression tightened, closed, warning against Sandro’s questions. ‘And I was distracted. Bad-tempered. Just when I should have been talking to her, I cut her off: it didn’t help that she’d got involved with the Frazione too. What was I supposed to do? Every time I tried to hint that she should be careful, she thought I was coming on as heavy-handed fascist dad.’

  ‘So the guy Luisa saw you with—’

  Pietro rubbed the back of his neck uneasily. In front of them their coffee cups were long empty. ‘Matterazzi. Informant turned undercover operative. Used to be a soldier.’

  ‘I saw him in here.’

  ‘You would have done.’ Pietro’s mouth clamped shut.

  Sandro felt suddenly weary. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to force anything out of you.’ In his pocket he gripped the phone. ‘But this is turning nasty for me. This morning the office got broken into and this time my computer’s gone. It’s one thing when politicians steal and spy and all the rest amongst themselves – but I’m just trying to make a living here.’

  ‘They broke into the Via del Leone?’ Pietro’s face was grim.

  Sandro leaned across the Formica towards him. At the bar the soldier was taking his time drinking the coffee. The barman was wiping a glass for the umpteenth time very slowly.

  ‘Why did you bring me here?’ he asked. ‘And to tell me what?’

  ‘What did you find out about Flavia Matteo’s death?’ Pietro asked softly in return. Sandro straightened.

  ‘She killed herself,’ he said, and he felt the sorrow that had sat inside him since he entered that awful shuttered bathroom harden and fuse with something more like anger. ‘That was clear to me. But I think – we think – she was targeted. Almost certainly her suicide was incidental, although it probably will have served someone’s purpose well enough. Someone who wanted to bring Niccolò Rosselli down. To dirty that shining armour of his.’

  ‘Targeted?’

  ‘Groomed. Someone thought she’d be ripe for a sex scandal and they went after her.’ He swallowed, not wanting to say it, not even to his oldest and most trusted friend, because once it was out, it was out. ‘Niccolò Rosselli, paedophile. Flavia Matteo, whore. It’d be graffitied on a hundred walls, whatever Bastone thought.

  ‘Have you told him?’ Pietro spoke quietly. ‘Rosselli?’

  ‘He knows,’ said Sandro wearily. He’d seen it in Rosselli’s eyes, in his answer to Bastone, to his mother. ‘I told him some of it – enough. He knows his wife. He knows this is two things. That this is someone using his wife to get to him. That this is his wife being human, not wicked.’

  Pietro swallowed, nodded.

  ‘There were photographs: of Flavia Matteo. Dirty pictures. That’s what they planted on those computers, that was the “illegal material” the vice squad were tipped off about. If Flavia knew about them, that would have been enough to drive her to suicide, don’t you think? A woman like that, who’d led a blameless life, a nun’s life until then.’ He took a deep breath. ‘And that’s what you need to tell me. Who they are.’

  Pietro stared at him, mesmerized. At the bar the soldier was taking his time to pay, but when he saw himself observed, he turned sharply on his heel and was through the door. The barman turned away.

  Sandro spoke again.

  ‘And what I most want to know is, who he is? The man who did this to her. All this they – that’s how they do it, they do evil and they hide behind they. But when it comes down to it, it was one man, talking to one woman.’ He looked into his old friend’s grim face, and waited.

  There was a silence: an ambulance passed, its siren wailing. Pietro nodded once, twice, as if giving himself a signal.

  ‘They,’ he said slowly. ‘Yes. They exist. They don’t have a name, though one of them writes a blog call
ed Vigilante. An extreme right-wing group, a coalition as loose as the Frazione, but everywhere. Everywhere. In the press, in the civil service, in the police.’ He looked at the barman. ‘In the law, in the army. Their most pressing objective seems to be to bring the Frazione down.’ He blew out. ‘I signed the secrecy forms. What do you think they’ll do if they know I’ve told you?’

  Sandro didn’t answer. ‘In the army,’ he repeated, thinking of the surly, handsome soldier chatting across his reception desk while Sandro waited patiently for his attention. What had been the name on that badge? He couldn’t remember.

  ‘The call came from here.’ Pietro spoke so softly Sandro could hardly hear. He nodded towards the ancient payphone booth in the corner. ‘Sloppy, that, or perhaps they didn’t care about being traced to a bar opposite a barracks?’ He spoke with resignation. ‘Come to think of it, they almost certainly have someone in the vice squad.’

  ‘The tip-off,’ said Sandro. ‘It came from here.’

  He slid off the barstool, on his feet, a nameless fear rising in him. ‘Why do I get the feeling we’re in the wrong place? Why’s it so bloody quiet?’

  And as if on cue from Sandro’s pocket his phone shrilled.

  *

  It was clear to Luisa that Giuli hadn’t known what to do when they’d walked through the door. She’d put a hand to the laptop screen as though to shut the lid, but the expression on their faces, as she looked back over her shoulder at Luisa and Gloria standing in the doorway, seemed to freeze her.

  Outside, the noise levels were rising steadily: it was like a sea, like the rhythmic crash and suck of waves in a rising sea.

  All Luisa could think was, it’s not Eve who covers her face, is it? As she runs out of Eden, Eve covers her body: it’s the man who covers his face. Adam.

  Giuli had spread herself to cover the screen, but it had been too late. In the picture Luisa had seen, Flavia Matteo covered neither body nor face, though her face seemed to plead silently to become invisible. The three women had stared together: Enzo had shoved back his chair, clutching something. A piece of paper, a mobile phone: he had looked like he wanted to run, too.