by Joseph Hone
‘Pity he’s dead. Could have picked him up. Was he married, had a family?’
‘Married, but no children. His wife is still alive, very old. Lives in an old people’s home, run by the nuns, just outside Carrara.’
‘Maybe I could talk to her. She might tell me something.’
The phone rang. He came back from the window, spoke for a minute, then said. ‘Yes, there is a woman up in her room at the hotel, a Signorina Bergen.’
‘That’s her.’
‘Unwell apparently, being looked after by a man who comes down and brings her food up.’
‘That’s him. The minder. But how can you get her out? He’ll be armed.’
‘Have to see.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Lunchtime. Maybe take him when he comes downstairs to get her food.’
‘Thanks, Chief Superintendent. You believe me now.’
‘Yes. Apart from anything else, what you told me fits exactly with Battaglia’s sudden wealth. Right, let’s see about your friend at the hotel.’ We moved to the door. He stopped. ‘You might go and see Battaglia’s wife. She must have known your father, may have something to add to it all, which she wouldn’t tell me. Signora Emelia Battaglia – she lives just outside town, top of the hill.’
We were halfway out of the door before I stopped abruptly.
‘Signora Emelia Battaglia?’
‘Yes. Why?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Emelia-Amedeo-Amore’. The inscription hidden on the turnover of the Modigliani painting.
The chief, out of his uniform, was casually dressed. There were four or five other carabinieri in plain clothes in the hotel lobby – by the reception desk, at the small bar having coffee, in the breakfast room or interesting themselves in magazines at a table beside the lift and the stairs, where we expected the minder to emerge to pick up food for the two of them upstairs. The minder would have recognized me, so I was hidden in the manager’s office, to the side of the reception desk, where, with a mirror on a pillar opposite the lift door, I had a view over part of the lobby. Carlo, the manager, was at the reception desk, fiddling with accounts, chewing his wet cheroot, head down as if nothing interesting was afoot. He was a good actor.
Waiting. It was after one o’clock, a quarter past, twenty past. The reception phone went. Carlo spoke for a half a minute, put the phone down, spoke to the chief.
‘Ordered two pizzas and a beer. Said he’d pick the food up in ten minutes.’
‘What floor is he on?’
‘Fourth floor, number 42.’
‘He’ll come down in the lift then?’
‘Yes. Almost certainly.’
‘We’ll take him getting out of the lift as the door opens.’ The chief moved away, directing two of his men flat against the wall to either side of the lift door. Ten minutes later we heard the rumble of the lift coming down. The two men braced themselves, ready to pounce. The door slid open and in the hall mirror I saw Elsa and the minder behind her – with a gun in her back.
They stood where they were, the lift door open. ‘Move!’ he said, in harsh Italian. ‘The two of you hiding either outside the lift. Move, or this’ll be the end of the woman.’ He put the gun to Elsa’s head. The chief, over the far side of the lobby, gestured to the two men, and they moved away from the lift.
‘And the rest of you,’ the minder continued, ‘get over there, by the bar. All of you.’ He pushed Elsa out of the lift, holding her with her wrist twisted behind her back, gesturing with his gun to the others as they moved to the bar. I’d ducked down behind the reception desk, so that the minder wouldn’t see me. I heard him speak to Carlo. ‘And you as well. Out of there and over to the bar.’ Carlo left the reception office. I was on my own. And then, beneath the reception desk, I saw the hotel fire alarm panel, a lot of bedroom numbers, switches – and a big red button, with the word TEST above it.
I stabbed it. Immediately a high-pitched siren, an ear-piercing wail, like the torments of the damned, flooded the lobby.
I put my head up over the reception desk. The minder, on his way out of the hotel but stunned now by the noise, had stopped with Elsa in the middle of the lobby, looking wildly around him, his back towards me. I was up and out of the reception office and running for him. He heard me, turning with his gun before I crashed into him with one of my old rugby tackles. At the same moment there was a sharp crack, and I felt a painless thud on the fleshy part of my bicep, and then a stinging pain as I landed on top of him on the floor.
The chief and the other carabinieri by the bar were on us in a flash, pinning the minder down. I reached a hand up to my shoulder, and saw the blood seeping through my fingers. And I saw Elsa above me in her T-shirt and shorts, silhouetted against the bright sunlight from the lobby window, the light illuminating the fine hair on her legs.
I said, ‘Great legs. I really want to paint you.’ I looked at my left arm, dripping with blood. ‘Right arm’s okay. I can paint you.’ My eyes clouded, closed and my head lolled back into darkness.
I lay on the hospital bed. The bullet had gone through the inside edge of my bicep. Blood loss; shock. Shoulder and upper arm bandaged, the forearm held in a sling. Elsa sat on a chair beside the bed.
‘What else was I to do?’ I asked.
‘Where that bullet went, you were just a few inches from dying, you idiot.’
‘We’ve been a few inches from that quite often this last month or so.’
‘Why did you do it?’
‘Had to. A bit of lateral thinking, to get us out of that mess. It wasn’t just for your great legs.’
That evening we were back in the Michelangelo. Carlo had moved us to one of the suites reserved for visiting Saudis, and had sent a vase of flowers, a bottle of Asti Gancia in an ice bucket, grapes, chocolates and some antipasti titbits. Most of the traditional bedside trimmings for the ill. Propped up, lying out on the big double bed, I realized I actually was a bit poorly and needed attention. How nice.
And there was the Modi nude on a chair by the window, with Katie’s journal beneath it. I looked at the nude, the peachy flesh colours, the yellows, shadows of lemon on her thighs, the darker ochre of the curtain behind her, the attempted privacy, a hand crossed over her breasts, the lowered face of a woman who had loved and lost.
But she was mine again now and I loved her once more. And the hell with Katie’s journal. I didn’t need it. I had Emelia. And better still, I had Elsa. My arm stung sharply and I groaned. The painkiller was wearing off.
‘Oh dear me,’ I gasped, holding my arm.
Elsa came and sat by the bed, took my good arm and held my hand. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I know what you’re thinking. But I’m not going to run away.’
‘No.’
‘And when you’re better you can paint me. I’ll come back with you to your Cotswold barn before I go on to New York.’
‘And the meal?’ I said eagerly. ‘Let me cook us the meal I asked you to cook. Let me do it. There’s a Tesco beyond Stow, on the Fosseway: they’ve got everything. Even good meat, not the wrapped stuff, but cut for you off the carcass at the butchery. Fillet steak. Or I could even do that Irish stew.’
‘Dear Ben, stop wittering!’ She drew back, looking at me, still holding my hand. ‘Just get us a hunk of warm bread, with olives and anchovies. And a half-litre of white.’
‘Right – we’ll do that.’
She looked at me intently. ‘You know, don’t you?’ Still holding my hand. ‘What I feel for you. I can’t quite say it, but I do.’
‘Don’t have to say it. I do too.’
She got up and poured us both a glass of the Italian fizz. I raised my glass. ‘Thank you.’ And then I raised my glass to the Modi nude. ‘And to you, too, Emelia. “Emelia-Amedeo-Amore”.’ And then I told Elsa what the chief had said to me that morning, about an elderly lady who lived in an old people’s home on top of the hill just outside town. Signora Emelia Battaglia.
She tried to hide her sudden unease. ‘You really think
she’s …’
‘I don’t know, but the bone structure of a face doesn’t change much, and the eyes never do. I think I could tell if I saw her.’
‘Well, you go ahead. No point in my coming.’
Elsa was retreating once more. She feared something in this unknown woman. I was tempted by her.
They dressed my wound again next morning, and the day after, and said it was beginning to heal. I sent innocent picture postcards home, to my family and the Phillips’ at the end of my lane, and Elsa and I found quiet things to do in our room, reading, or talking of things that didn’t matter, and eating one-handed at the Roma. I was fitter and thought it better not to talk of the future with Elsa, and not to warn Emelia. I’d take my chances. Next morning I took a taxi up the hill. The Modi nude was the other passenger.
Past the covered market, over the frothy river, across a piazza and through an arched gateway – ‘Domus Deo Fecit’ inscribed in heavy black letters on the arch. A winding drive up the steep hill, thickly wooded with ilex, cypress and laurel. Clearly a large private estate years before, with the expected ox-blood baroque palazzo on top of the hill. But there wasn’t. It was a rambling, run-down late-nineteenth-century villa, white-stuccoed, red-tiled, paint peeling.
The taxi left and I turned on the steps of a porch, shading my eyes with my one good hand – a huge view south and west over the old town and the sea in the distance, but veiled in the morning heat haze. The glass hall doors were open. A thin tabby cat appeared at the doorway, tail aloft when it saw me, coming down the steps, rubbing itself against my legs, purring.
The long hall was empty. Cool white marble tiles, terracotta pots of rubber plants, a large urn filled with sticks and umbrellas, old prints of popes and other divines along the walls, a plaster statue of a dolorous virgin at the far end. A smell of pomodoro cooking somewhere, wafting through the still hallway. I went to the end, two corridors leading away to either side. An elderly nun in a white habit walked towards me along one of them.
‘Good morning, Sister.’ I gave my name and asked if it might see Signora Battaglia.
‘Are you family?’ A low voice, meek, hands clasped together.
‘No. My father, Signor Luchino Contini knew Signora Battaglia years ago here. I’m just visiting Carrara.’
‘She will be pleased to see you. She has few visitors.’
‘She must be old.’
‘Yes, she is ninety-five – so she says.’
‘You don’t believe her?’
‘Sometimes we wonder.’
‘Not right in her mind, you mean?’
‘Oh, no. Just … we think she likes to tell stories.’
‘Imaginative?’
‘Yes, imaginative.’
The cat had followed us in, rubbing its flank against my legs again. She looked down at it. ‘Hungry,’ she said. ‘And she knows we eat early, at midday. There are so few of us here now, and the cook has to get away early. Soon we will all have to leave. Even you, little White Paws.’ She bent down and stroked the cat. ‘We don’t own the villa or the land, you see. They are going to sell it, develop it. Apartment blocks.’ She looked at my bandaged arm. ‘You have been hurt, I see.’
‘No, it was nothing. I was careless. I slipped up in the mountains.’ She looked at the parcel under my other arm, and curiosity getting the better of her, she said ‘You have brought something for the Signora?’
‘Yes, a painting.’
‘She will like that, I’m sure. I will take you to her. She is out on the terrace.’
I followed her back along the corridor. We passed an open doorway to a large gloomy room. Elderly people were slumped in old leather chairs, asleep, or vacant-eyed, one tapping her stick repeatedly on the floor.
‘Signora Battaglia prefers to be outdoors.’
We went out onto a wide marble terrace with a balustrade, vines growing wild, looking over the steep hill and the cypress trees to the distant sea. Some cracked marble tables, chairs, but only one person, a small white-haired woman, in dark glasses, sitting in a wheelchair beneath a parasol.
The nun introduced me. ‘A Signor Contini has come to see you, Signora.’
The nun left. I introduced myself. ‘I’m Benjamin Contini. Just visiting Carrara, so I thought I’d come and see you, since I believe you knew my father, Signor Luchino Contini?’
The old woman looked up. At once an impression of sharpness, the tracings of a bohemian girl. Wearing a shift of layered cheesecloth, slippers, delicate feet propped up on the leg rest. A thin, wasted figure, but still perfect in its proportions. The face deeply lined, angular, the high brow running down past high cheekbones to a pointed chin. White sparse hair pulled back tightly over her head and held with a tortoiseshell comb at the back. Decay was making its final advances in the tightly stretched skin, the dappled brown age marks, the drooping ear lobes, the thin bloodless lips.
‘Benjamin Contini?’ She took off her dark glasses as if to confirm this. ‘Indeed you are.’ Now I saw her eyes, which were astonishing – large, oval, young and blue. And the look of alarm in them now was that of youth, the fear of a young woman confronted by a lover who had long abandoned her but had suddenly returned. And I knew at once that this was the Emelia of the painting. The same woman, seventy-five years older.
‘Why have you come here? To tell the police about Luchino?’ she went on. Her voice was dry, but firm.
‘No, why …?’
She cleared her throat, turned and took a sip of something from a glass beside her. Then she said, in precisely enunciated Italian, ‘It doesn’t matter now.’ Silence.
‘What doesn’t matter?’
‘My son Luchino is dead. He wrote to me, last year, just before he died, from Ireland.’
‘My son? You mean my father.’
‘Both. My son and your father. You are indeed Benjamin Contini. If I didn’t know about you, I could see it clearly in your face. You are my grandson.’
Standing over her, outside the shade of her tattered parasol, I blinked in the bright light, beads of sweat trickling down my brow. ‘I see,’ I said casually. This must be one of her fictions the nun had spoken about. ‘The only problem is that my grandmother died in Auschwitz, along with my grandfather, uncles, aunts and cousins. All my family in Italy are dead.’
‘I’m not exactly your family though – but you are my grandson, I assure you.’
‘Yes,’ I said, to humour her. Then I thought – well, there’s one certain thing – the woman in the Modi nude and this old woman, they were the same person. I was sure of that. I could establish something firm about her with the portrait. I unwrapped it, propped it up on a chair in front of her. She looked at it, surprise and alarm in her face. With the same certainty as she had told me I was her grandson, I said, ‘This is you.’
Silence. She gazed at it, frowning. ‘Yes, your father always kept that with him in Ireland. Never with all the other paintings.’
‘The other paintings?’
‘All the other paintings …’ She stopped. ‘But that was special to him. Of me, his mother.’
‘A wonderful painting. Modigliani. You must have known him.’ I showed her the inscription behind the canvas. “Emelia-Amedeo-Amore”,’ I said. ‘You must have known him well.’
‘Yes, I did.’ Her face was quite still as she looked at the inscription.
I said, ‘Well, if you’re my grandmother, one of my Contini family, my grandfather I suppose, must have … you and he must have produced my father, but without being married?’
‘Oh, no, nothing like that. Amedeo and I produced your father.’
This surely was a fiction. I said, ‘But that would make me Modigliani’s grandson.’
‘Exactly.’
‘I was seventeen when I met him,’ she told me later, ‘when he came back to Livorno, briefly during the war, summer of 1915. My family in Livorno, the Montecchios, a big shipping family were as bourgeois as his, except his were Jewish. I was an innocent and he wasn’t. He
was sketching at the Café Metropole early one evening, I was there with my brother at the next table. He started sketching me, came over with the drawing, and that was how it began. We met secretly in Livorno that summer. I fell in love with him. First love, mad love, all that – so I followed him to Paris that autumn, lived with him at the Bateau Lavoir, a tumbledown atelier he and Soutine and some other crazy painters shared up in Montmartre. And he painted me and we loved each other, and he painted me again, and nothing mattered for several months, until winter came and it was cold, no heat and no money and little food in the war, and the rows started – other girls, models, when he was out every night with them, or sketching for his supper, and always drinking with his friends, and coming back drunk next morning. It became impossible. I went back to Livorno carrying that picture – and your father.’
‘Born in Livorno?’
‘No. In Pisa. My parents were horrified – a good bourgeois family with a pregnant unmarried daughter. My God! – a fate worse than death. They disowned me and farmed me out with the Contini family in Pisa. My father knew the boss, Mario Contini, very well. He shipped his marble out from the Contini quarries in Pisa and Carrara. And Mario had a younger son, Marcello Contini – late thirties, but still unmarried. A marriage was arranged with him, with a handsome financial settlement from my father. Or rather it was forced on me. It was marrying Marcello or being out on the street. So I became a Contini, and your father was born in Pisa, Marcello pretending he was our child.’
‘All that must have been very difficult for you.’
‘Could have been worse. Marcello was a dull but kind man who wanted a quiet life. We had our own house in Pisa, down by the river. We didn’t have any children ourselves. Couldn’t face him that way after the first few times. Marcello didn’t mind, went to the local brothels quite happily.’