Secrecy

by Rupert Thomson

  A sudden roar. The football match in Santa Croce.

  We slid from the bench to the ground. She lay on her back, and I faced her, my cock against her hip. I reached under her skirts. Her breath caught on her teeth, and her eyelids lowered, her dark lashes resting lightly on the lavender skin beneath her eyes. I was seeing her in minute detail, as if through a magnifying glass. I ran my finger slowly from her perineum to her clitoris. I was hardly touching her at all, but the liquid inside her rose to meet my fingertip, her cunt a cup full to the brim. I could delay no longer. Her cries, though uttered next to my ear, sounded as faint and distant as birds flying high up in the air, birds not visible to the naked eye. Afterwards, we lay side by side, and stared up into a sky that seemed limitless.

  ‘That wasn’t the first time, was it?’ I said.

  ‘Yes. Well, no –’

  I looked at her.

  ‘I was attacked once,’ she said. ‘When I was fourteen.’

  There was a shifty-looking man who came through Torremagna every few months with a mule-drawn cart and a grindstone. He would always blow the same three haunting notes on his flute to let people know that he had arrived.

  ‘A knife-sharpener,’ I said.

  Faustina nodded. ‘He didn’t used to stop at our house. Ginevra didn’t trust him.’

  One day she was south of the village, in the hollow where the mill house was, when she heard him coming. He lifted his flute to his lips as he approached and played a set of notes she didn’t recognize. She asked him why the tune had changed. He would show her why, he said, and seized her by the wrist. He would cut her throat if she didn’t let him show her. He was grinning. His teeth were brown, but his shoulder-length hair was oddly clean and shiny. He pinned her to the back of his cart, her head jammed against the grindstone, and stuck his thing in her. Before he could finish, though, he cried out and dropped to the ground. Vespi stood behind him, wielding an axe-handle.

  ‘I didn’t know he was capable of something like that,’ she said.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I shouldn’t have asked.’

  ‘He was so upset. I think he suffered more than I did.’

  Darker now, almost black, the sky appeared to have a surface to it, like water. It was deep too, and for a few giddy moments I felt I was falling upwards, and that the stars would bounce off me as I passed, no heavier than hail-stones, and that I could fall like that for ever.

  ‘He would have been a good father to you,’ I said.

  ‘You think so? I never thought of it like that.’ She leaned on one elbow and looked down at me with a sudden earnestness. ‘If I asked you to take me away from here, would you do it?’

  ‘From Florence?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But my work is here,’ I said, ‘and I’m being paid so well.’

  ‘What if I said I was in danger?’

  ‘What kind of danger?’

  She lay back. ‘It’s all right. It was just an idea.’

  ‘No, really. Tell me.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have brought it up. We hardly know each other –’

  The flatness in her voice told me I had missed a chance to prove something to her, and just then, as I looked at her, I would have promised her anything – anything at all.

  ‘Where would we go?’

  I was desperately trying to regain the ground I had occupied only seconds earlier. It was like the moment in her story where she ran up the track with a head full of frantic, fractured prayers. But there was no way back. There never is. I realized that what she had called ‘an idea’ meant something incalculable to her. It had cost her an effort to put the question, and she had done so against her better judgement. My lukewarm response had disappointed her all the more because she had, at some deep level, predicted it. It was too late now to talk of Genoa or Paris.

  ‘I love you,’ I said.

  ‘Do you?’ She looked startled, and no wonder: I had surprised myself. I suddenly felt younger than she was, even though I was almost twice her age.

  ‘It’s true,’ I said stubbornly. ‘One day you’ll realize.’

  A clock tolled the hour. The air was motionless. The sky seemed lower than before, and heavier.

  She rose to her feet and looked around. ‘I should be going.’

  Walking home, I went over some of what she had told me in the weeks since I had met her. Mimmo’s friendship, Vespi’s courtship – both had foundered, come to nothing. These weren’t stories she had dredged up at random. No, they illustrated something fundamental, something she believed – or feared – might be true. How had she put it? Love lost out – as always … Had she turned to me, hoping that I would prove her wrong? Had I squandered the only opportunity I would ever be given?

  Back in my lodgings, I was overtaken by a gloom such as I hadn’t known since the early days in Naples, when I received that letter from Ornella. After everything she had said, how could she possibly have fallen for Jacopo? And yet, at the same time, I knew how insistent and bloody-minded he could be. I sat down on my bed. A sinister new reading of the events had just occurred to me. Since I had worked closely with Ornella’s father, he would have been implicated in the charges brought against me. What if Jacopo had cast the Maltese surgeon in the role of my accomplice, and had then blackmailed him? Give me your daughter’s hand in marriage or I’ll ruin you. Was that how the wedding had come about? A sourness around my heart, I lay on my side and sank into a troubled sleep.

  I was woken some time later by a constant banging. The wind had got up, and a loose shutter on the building opposite was being blown repeatedly against a wall. I could stay in my room no longer. Thinking I might pay another visit to the dingy tavern in San Frediano, I threw on my coat and hurried downstairs.

  As I stepped out on to Via del Corno, a boy seemed to detach himself from the wall.

  ‘Signore?’

  The boy’s face was pale and dogged, but he looked respectable enough, in a serge jacket and a pair of sturdy leather shoes.

  ‘Dr Pampolini sent me,’ he said. ‘He wants to see you.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Oh, yes. It’s urgent.’ His hands twitched. ‘It’s very urgent.’

  I looked past him, towards the river. There was no one around, only the clammy, windswept canyon of the street, and the scuttle of leaves and vermin.

  ‘Why didn’t you try the door?’ I said.

  ‘I was about to.’ He sensed my disbelief. ‘I was. Honest.’

  If somebody was dispatched to put an end to me, this, surely, was how it would feel – an innocent face, a few words intended to reassure, a short walk in the dark …

  ‘Don’t you recognize me, sir?’ The boy went and stood on the street corner, beneath a lit image of the Virgin. ‘I work with Dr Pampolini. My name’s Earhole.’ He shot me a rueful grin. ‘That’s what he calls me, anyway.’

  I saw the livid, ragged fringe of skin where his right ear used to be. Earhole. I nodded slowly.

  ‘I remember.’

  My sudden plunge into sleep had muddled me; I felt only loosely connected to my surroundings.

  ‘Please hurry,’ the boy said. ‘The doctor said it couldn’t wait.’

  He led me north, through streets that were pinched between high walls. It was a short cut to the hospital, he told me.

  I asked him how old he was.

  ‘My mother thinks I’m probably about twelve,’ he said.

  Though he wasn’t tall, he walked with long strides, his upper body turning constantly to check that I was keeping up.

  ‘She’s not entirely sure,’ he said. ‘She drinks, you see.’

  We passed a candle factory, the stench of boiling cow fat left over from the day. To the west, I glimpsed the Duomo, which hung above the rooftops like an upended cauldron. There was a distant, shimmery peal of bells, but the sound was blown to pieces by a gust of wind.

  The boy leaned forwards from the waist, as if straining at a leash. ‘I hope Dr Pampolini isn’t angry. I said
I’d –’

  A shout stopped his sentence short, and dark shapes sprang from beneath an archway. My knife was out before I knew it. I lunged, and felt the blade sink in. There was a kind of yelp. My hand jarred; I must have hit a bone. The nearest shadow crumpled. The others fled.

  I knelt on my assailant’s chest and held my knife to his throat. An awful reek lifted off him. Old sweat, raw garlic. Dried sperm. He looked to be a man of about thirty, with more hair on his cheeks than on his head.

  ‘Who are you?’ I bent down, into the smell, but kept my blade against his gullet. ‘Who sent you?’

  His head moved from side to side, as if he were trying to lull himself to sleep. What he was doing didn’t seem to relate to my questions, but to some internal matter that he found far weightier and more pressing. The wind dropped. I thought I heard the blood leak out of him.

  ‘Did you hear me? Who sent you?’

  ‘I’m hungry …’ The man’s cracked lips drew back on his teeth.

  ‘He’s dying,’ the boy said.

  I glanced over my shoulder. ‘What do you know about this?’

  His pale face hung before me. He had a pained expression. ‘It can happen to anyone, being set upon. This isn’t –’

  ‘You’re not answering my question.’

  ‘I thought you trusted me.’ He peered off down the street. ‘I thought we were getting on –’

  ‘Dio ladro!’ I shouted. ‘This isn’t about getting on.’

  He flinched.

  I turned back to the stinking javel who lay beneath me and pushed the point of my knife into the thin skin below his ear. His teeth showed like bits of stained mosaic. He began to mutter. Something about the water. A black cloak. Then the word naked. None of it made any sense.

  ‘I do trust you, Earhole,’ I said. ‘I have no choice but to trust you.’

  ‘Those sentences mean two different things.’

  ‘Was it Pampolini who taught you to argue every single fucking point?’ I looked round at him again. His arms were dangling by his sides, his hands had fallen still. ‘All right. I trust you. Happy now?’

  He nodded, but only after seeming to consider my words, and not without a certain reluctance.

  I tilted my face to the brown sky, and the wind lifted again, freighted with drizzle. ‘Gesù maiale, it was me who was attacked.’

  ‘They would have killed me too, just for the symmetry of it.’ Once again, his hands shook in the air, as if they were wet and he was drying them. ‘You were quick with that knife, though. I don’t think they’ll be back.’

  I looked down at the piece of steel, which was dark with blood, its sickly aroma more metallic than the knife itself. I wiped the blade clean on the stranger’s tunic, then stood up.

  ‘All the same,’ I said, ‘I think it might be best if we took the less deserted streets.’

  Pampolini had fallen asleep at his desk, his face turned sideways on his arm, drool blackening his cuff. His blond wig hung on the wall behind him like the pelt of some exotic animal.

  Earhole bent over his master and spoke gently to him. Pampolini lifted his head. His eyes had a veiled, milky cast, and the folds and creases in his sleeve were faithfully recorded on his forehead and his cheek.

  ‘Zummo,’ he said.

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘My arm’s gone numb.’ He gave Earhole a reprimanding look. ‘You took your time.’

  ‘It wasn’t his fault,’ I said. ‘We were attacked.’

  I explained what had happened in that dark, dank alley near the candle factory.

  ‘He fairly skewered one of the bastards,’ Earhole said, hands twitching frenetically. ‘Blood everywhere.’

  Pampolini stared at me. ‘You’re shaking.’

  ‘Yes, well. I’ve never killed anyone before.’

  ‘You’re all right, though?’

  I nodded.

  He yawned, then rose to his feet and led me down a dimly lit passageway. ‘Busy night,’ he said, rubbing some life back into his arm. ‘Sixteen injured in that football game.’ He paused outside a metal door; his top lip glistened. ‘I think we’ve got something here that might interest you.’

  I followed him into a long, cold room. Lying on a marble-topped table was the naked body of a girl, her skin mauve-white and damp-looking. Her hips and ribs were streaked with mud, and weeds had wrapped themselves around her legs. Her hair was an autumnal colour, not brown or red or gold, but somewhere in-between, and a few coiling ringlets had spilled over the edge of the slab and hung halfway to the floor. A small black pool of water had formed below. Every now and then the stillness of the pool was shattered by another tiny drop.

  ‘A beauty, isn’t she?’ Pampolini said.

  Earhole slipped past me and occupied himself at the far end of the room.

  ‘What do you know about her?’ I said.

  ‘Not much.’

  A dredger had brought her in. He had been working his way along the river-bank, collecting sand. As the light faded, he had drifted towards Sardigna. The smell of rotting carcasses was so pungent that he had to tie a rag over his nose and mouth. For that reason, perhaps, he had been alone on the water. The girl’s body was lying next to the remains of a dead mule. She was still warm when he knelt beside her. That frightened him. He felt the person who had done it might be close by, watching. He hadn’t seen anyone, though. He took the body straight to the hospital, where Pampolini had given him a few coins for his trouble. Pampolini had told him to forget everything that had taken place that evening. The dredger shrugged; you got used to all sorts, working on the river. Before he left, he admitted that the grazes on the girl’s body had happened when he heaved her into the boat. He regretted his clumsiness, he said, then he disappeared into the night.

  ‘That was quick thinking,’ I said, ‘to buy his silence.’

  Pampolini chuckled. ‘I even surprise myself sometimes.’

  ‘Sardigna, though. What a terrible place to end up.’

  ‘You know it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He walked round the table. ‘We don’t have any idea who she is, or how she died. She might have been murdered – that’s what the dredger thought – but there’s no evidence of violence. She might have killed herself. It might even have been an accident – though there’s the small matter of the missing clothes …

  ‘It’s a shame about the clothes, actually. They would have told us a lot.’

  ‘Maybe that’s why they were taken,’ I said.

  ‘In any case, no one’s enquired about her yet.’ He bent down and studied the fingers of her right hand. ‘I have the feeling she’s a foreigner. I’m not sure why.’

  ‘But apart from the grazes, there are no marks on her?’

  ‘Now you come to mention it …’ Pampolini turned the girl’s body on to its side, and I saw patches of indigo across her thighs and the small of the back where the blood had pooled. ‘Lift the hair away from her neck.’

  I did as he asked. Her hair was unusually heavy, perhaps because it was still wet. It felt eerie in my fingers.

  ‘See it?’ Pampolini said.

  At the top of the girl’s spine, above the first cervical, the head of a dog had been carved into her skin. Judging by the pointed muzzle and the jagged rows of teeth, the person responsible had had a particular breed in mind.

  ‘It’s not an injury, is it?’ I said. ‘I mean, it doesn’t look like something that happened accidentally.’

  ‘No,’ Pampolini said.

  ‘Can you tell how long it’s been there?’

  ‘The wound’s still bleeding, and there’s no sign of inflammation. It looks recent.’

  ‘So it could have been done after she was dead?’

  Pampolini looked at me. ‘Or just before.’

  In that moment, a revelation flashed across the inside of my brain. Ever since that drink with Jack Towne, I had been aware of the need to build something ambiguous into the commission. I’d had no idea how to go about it, though
. Now, for the first time, I thought I saw a way forwards. If I were to incorporate the dog’s head, I would be creating a piece of work which, depending on what Towne called one’s ‘angle of approach’, could be viewed on at least two different levels.

  ‘Have you ever seen anything like this before?’ I was trying to keep the excitement out of my voice.

  Pampolini shook his head.

  I let go of the girl’s hair and walked away from the table. ‘A dog …’

  There was a sudden retching sound. Turning, I saw Earhole bent over a stone sink at the back of the room. I looked at Pampolini. ‘He’s not squeamish, is he?’

  ‘It’s not that,’ Pampolini said. ‘He was mauled by a dog when he was a baby. That’s how he lost his ear.’

  He lowered the body on to the slab and stood back, rubbing the palm of one hand slowly against the other, then he fetched a bottle and two glasses, poured large measures, and handed one of the glasses to me. I downed the contents in a single gulp. An oily fire spread through my belly.

  ‘Quite fitting, really,’ Pampolini said. ‘It was an omen of the plague, wasn’t it, the constellation of the dog?’

  ‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘There’s no evidence of disease, though, is there?’

  ‘None.’ He looked down into his empty glass. ‘So – are you interested?’

  ‘How long’s she been dead?’

  ‘I told you what the dredger said. She was warm when he found her. And there’s no stiffening in the eyelids yet, or in the fingers. I don’t think she’s been dead for more than about three hours.’

  ‘All the same, there’s no time to lose.’

  He said he could have the body delivered to my workshop immediately.

  ‘On this occasion, though,’ he added, ‘since these aren’t what you might call normal circumstances, I might need a little reimbursement.’

  I looked at him steadily. ‘How much?’

  He mentioned a price.

  ‘That’s a bit steep,’ I said.

  He yawned, his jawbone cracking. ‘But then again, she’s exactly what you’re looking for, isn’t she? Just think how thrilled your client is going to be.’