The Viper

by Christobel Kent

  ‘What about a man called Lotti?’ he said carefully. The name of the second victim had not appeared in the preliminary newspaper reports and Gorgone looked blank. ‘The other body,’ he said and Gorgone paled. He went on. ‘A butcher from the village, sixty-something, would have been in his twenties back then.’

  Gorgone shook his head. ‘I’m a lifelong vegetarian,’ he said. A vegetarian whose money comes from pig-farming, thought Sandro. ‘At La Vipera we practised veganism for the most part – Johanna was ahead of her time in that. We had nothing to do with any butcher.’

  Sandro sat back at the memory of Johanna Nielsson’s pallor, her otherworldliness, the sort of gossamer transparency of her, and he felt something ebb, at last, after so many years. An early proponent of veganism was what it amounted to. ‘I see,’ he said. A cliché, all gone to dust. ‘I was told you were away the first two weeks of August?’

  ‘On business,’ said Gorgone, very prompt. Unruffled. ‘Aspen, Palm Springs, Miami.’

  Damn, thought Sandro. Damn, damn, damn. He suddenly wanted it to be this pampered airhead. ‘When did you get back?’

  ‘Last Sunday,’ said Gorgone, and then he leaned forward over his desk and lowered his voice. ‘She’s really dead? You’re sure it’s her?’

  Sandro hesitated. ‘There was a tattoo,’ he said, raising his wrist and tapping on the tendons inside it. ‘We’re waiting on tests but, yes, it’s her.’

  And to his surprise, as he watched, the man’s face crumpled at last, and he brought his hands up to cover it. After a moment’s hesitation, Sandro rose from his seat and came round the desk to rest a hand on the man’s shoulder. Gorgone raised his head to look at him and his face seemed washed clean, somehow, the pomposity gone.

  ‘I never thought she’d die,’ he said. ‘We all thought we’d live forever.’

  Chapter Seven

  BY THE TIME GIULI GOT HOME it was dark, and Enzo had cooked polpettone: she knew before she got up the stairs to the door of their apartment. The intense savoury fragrance of meat cooking with herbs. Wine and fennel, sizzling pork fat, she could even smell nutmeg and pepper.

  It was madness. Giuli had never in her life had any interest in food. Getting older was bizarre.

  She paused, her key in the lock, trying to work it out from bits and pieces of medical information gleaned over the years. Could it be her thyroid? Again the flutter of anxiety, followed by an excess of impatience with herself. She wasn’t going to google her symptoms – she was well aware that that way lay full-blown hypochondria and panic attacks. She couldn’t ask Luisa: although Luisa’s breast cancer was now five years in the past and they were entering safer territory, Luisa had enough on her plate.

  Besides, she knew what Luisa would say. Stop it, Giuli, you’re just hungry.

  She turned the key and there was Enzo waiting, beaming at her with his apron on. He was looking even dafter than usual with a smudge of flour on one cheek and a wooden spoon in his hand.

  ‘Darling,’ she said fondly and he folded her in his arms. She looked over his shoulder into their home – lamps on in the living room, pictures on the walls – still every night a surprise to her that she had one.

  They had bought this apartment – a little modern box with a tiny balcony in whose compact, orderly dullness Giuli absolutely delighted – when they married, the year before. In a small development on the southern edge of the city, overlooking a corner of an olive grove across a stretch of busy road, it had been the first place, at forty-three, that Giulietta Sarto had been able to call her own. Giuli had grown up in a succession of the squats and monolocali her mother – junkie, hooker, painter of little pictures, arranger of flowers in jam jars, teller of sad little stories – had dragged her to, then, when her mother had died, mostly the streets. And worse than the streets, but that was another story, an old story that had only begun to come to an end when Sandro had arrested her and had been swept away when Luisa had dragged her under their wing.

  A funny old family history. Enzo never seemed to make remark on that; he never made her feel like she was any different, that their stories – his growing up in absolute safety as the child of simple country people, helping his father with their travelling porchetta van, working in his father’s hardware store – might in any way be incompatible. He had faith. He had – without a religious bone in his body – absolute faith in Giuli and in his love for her. As for Giuli, who resolutely did not believe in love, if you asked her, or faith either, for that matter, she had been converted to both by the simple fact of his steadfastness.

  He released her, beaming, and Giuli went into the tiny bedroom to change. It had been a long day.

  Neither Sandro nor Luisa had called back.

  Hanging up her coat, Giuli mused on that. It wasn’t like them.

  Sandro was on a job, he was in the station with Pietro on some old case – but Luisa? Luisa had given up work the year before. Of course a woman like Luisa was never going to be idle. She did house-to-house collecting for the women’s centre, for example; she was on a rota to empty the used-clothes depository; and there were at least two very elderly and bad-tempered ladies she took to the supermarket twice a week. But somehow Giuli didn’t think it had been any of those errands that had made Luisa breathless and hurried.

  She’d call later.

  In the office, she’d left it till after lunch and then she’d called the number back again, her unease mounting as she found herself inhabiting that child a little too much. If they’d had a landline in any of the places she’d lived with her own mother she’d have been calling the police once a week at least, but as it was she’d had to sit tight and let the crises pass, one after another. Her mother refusing to wake up, that had happened more than once. One or other of her mother’s boyfriends battering on the door, ditto.

  She’d heard no background noise when the child had called, no TV, no raised voices. A preschool child? Or just truanting?

  The anxiety had had an odd effect on her: her appetite gone, her stomach queasy with worry. At lunchtime Giuli had lain her head down on the desk and slept.

  ‘Tesora?’

  ‘Coming,’ she called back, tugging off the jeans that had been driving her crazy all day, nothing about them comfortable.

  They ate.

  ‘So how was your day?’ he asked. He was happier now she’d stopped working at the women’s centre. She remembered about the blood tests tomorrow: she hadn’t cancelled. Too late to phone tonight.

  Giuli hesitated. Her instinct generally was to protect Enzo from the detail of her day. She always thought he’d find it either boring or upsetting, although in the event he usually seemed happier to know. ‘It was weird. A little girl phoned, asking for help, then hung up.’

  ‘She wanted Sandro?’

  Her mouth full, Giuli shook her head. Chewed carefully: this appetite business. ‘That was what I thought straight off – I mean, he would be the guy to call, right?’ Sandro who had rescued her. ‘But then I thought maybe she was looking up private detectives and chose him at random. It could have been a game, or it could have been just punching in any old number.’ Her appetite gone again, as suddenly as it had come, she set down the knife and fork.

  ‘So you called back?’ Enzo was eating stolidly, but his eyes didn’t leave her.

  ‘More or less straight away,’ said Giuli. ‘It was a landline, a Florence number. But there was no answer.’ She was sitting quite still now and his hand went out to touch hers. She gave him a quick look. ‘I phoned again after lunch.’

  ‘And?’ said Enzo.

  ‘The grandmother answered,’ she said, her shoulders dropping. The woman had sounded nervous, apologetic. ‘Gigi just learned to read and she’s full of it,’ she’d said, anxious. ‘My daughter’s out at work, and I’m not so quick on my feet these days. I’m so sorry to have bothered you. Did she actually say anything?’

  ‘I told her the child asked for help,’ Giuli said to Enzo. ‘And then she went silent for a bit. E
ventually – she sounded ashamed, I was ashamed of myself for asking – she told me her daughter’s husband had left them six months before, they were struggling for money, she’d had to stop work, the state nursery nearby had closed down. She thought maybe the child, Gigi, wanted us to find the husband –’ Giuli broke off, shaking her head wearily.

  Enzo still had her hand. He patted it.

  ‘I asked her,’ said Giuli, ‘if that was what Gigi’s mother wanted, and the old lady said it was the last thing they wanted, even if she had the money.’

  Enzo released her hand, smiling now. ‘Sounds like you managed to help a bit, then.’

  ‘I told her to call me if there was anything I could do. She said she would.’ Giuli felt curiously happy at the thought. Maybe Enzo was right.

  He got up and began to clear the plates. It came to her muffled, over his shoulder as he bent at the dishwasher, but still she was alerted by a note of wariness in his voice. ‘Is it true,’ he said, ‘that Sandro’s got something to do with this business at La Vipera?’

  *

  Luisa lay under the covers, unable to get warm although they’d been in bed hours, and Sandro was flat on his back and snoring beside her.

  They’d tried everything with the snoring, nose-clips and no wine with dinner and no pasta after six and her nudging him on his side. Nothing worked. Luisa had learned long since to sleep through it. Sometimes she thought she wouldn’t be able to sleep without that sound, and it certainly wasn’t what was keeping her awake tonight.

  He had come in late and dog-tired: she’d had a dish of beans and sausage covered on the stove for him but he’d waved it away, already walking past her into the bedroom, dropping down on the bed to pull off his boots and sitting there a moment as though he had forgotten what to do next. He wouldn’t have noticed the long scratch on her leg even if she hadn’t carefully hidden it beneath her best silk pyjamas. He didn’t notice the pyjamas, either.

  Now she stirred under the sheets, feeling the silk against her legs, an unfamiliar sensual luxury. She had bought them years ago. Five years, to cover herself after the operation, and Sandro always noticed when she wore them, although he rarely said anything.

  What would have happened if Sandro had surrendered to the fascination of Johanna Nielsson forty years ago? Luisa and he would have gone their separate ways. She’d have married someone else? Probably. She’d have got pregnant with a different child, a baby that might have survived, unlike their own. She might have had many children. The thought stirred an ancient, indelible anguish. It didn’t, though – and this came as a surprise to Luisa – make her want to go back and try a different path. To start again. The thought of all those years, all yet to be got through. And she and Sandro were grown together now, like the ivy circling those spindly trees she’d walked through this afternoon with a stranger.

  For certain, Sandro would not have ended up with Johanna Nielsson.

  It had taken Bartolini five minutes’ uphill walking to ask again how Luisa had known Johanna Nielsson. She told herself she would have been surprised if he hadn’t asked, and there’d been something about his manner – pleasant, educated, unassuming – that had by then made her relax. Persuaded her to consider this an almostnatural situation, the man being polite to a visitor to their little backwater. It seemed safest to assume the best in that moment.

  They had just paused on the quiet road, where there was a rusting gate and beyond it an overgrown path. ‘Well –’ and Luisa had hesitated, deciding on an approximation of the truth. To hell with it, shameful or not. The woman was dead. ‘Actually, my husband knew her better than I did.’ Was it her imagination or was that a nod of recognition? ‘It was a long time ago. But I was jealous of her.’ Bartolini had cleared his throat, then, and stepped forward to open the gate for her.

  ‘You’re not married?’ she asked, an innocent question that sounded the opposite when it popped out of her mouth.

  He stopped, his hand on the gate, and regarded her for long enough to prompt a blush. He shook his head gravely. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I never married.’

  It was then it occurred to her that she didn’t know this man and she was alone with him, out of earshot of the road or any building but La Vipera. Then that she faltered, because perhaps that was how the worst was allowed to happen: when you hoped for the best, assumed people were decent.

  At any rate, the worst that had happened that afternoon was she had lost her footing and fallen against some old fencing.

  ‘Well, if it’s any consolation,’ Bartolini had said, head down, ‘I don’t think your husband was the only one to have strong feelings about Johanna Nielsson. I gather she was – very charismatic.’

  ‘That’s one word for it,’ said Luisa, before she could stop herself. ‘You didn’t know her yourself?’ She stopped then to give him a quick glance, which confirmed her first assumption that he was more or less her own age. Late sixties.

  With a sigh, Bartolini shook his head. ‘I didn’t know her,’ he said. ‘The two years they were here – the Vipera cult – I’d been packed off to Milan by the family. I was up there trying to make my fortune.’ He grinned cheerfully. ‘Or not, as it turned out.’ He took his hand from the gate and turned to look down the hill. ‘Maria Clara has always been my informant,’ he said with a smile. ‘We might look like an odd couple –’ and catching Luisa’s expression ‘– not that kind of couple. Friends. We were kids together, and my mother never liked me playing with her.’ He shrugged. ‘So of course that was what I wanted to do. She was always a tomboy.’

  They were on the path now, and it was not quite wide enough for two to walk abreast, but nonetheless that was how they progressed. His arm brushed hers but he seemed unaware of their proximity. He had smiled, cheerful. Warm.

  In bed now, Luisa raised her hands to her face, softly, at the memory. Would Sandro have accused her of flirting with Bartolini? She had not been. It had felt like walking a tightrope: the dangerous intimacy of confiding in him, of trying to get information from him, and placing herself in his hands to do it. Perhaps that was how the other kind of intimacy started. Sandro had gone to La Vipera, after all, in search of information too.

  Once he’d removed his boots, Luisa had made Sandro drink a tisane, lime flower tea, if only to postpone the moment at which he would fall like a log into bed and to allow him a little window in which to unpack the day, to share it with her.

  He’d drunk the brew in silence, without even his usual grimace, and only as he’d handed the cup back to her had said, abruptly, ‘She’d been back in Italy since the spring, it seems. No more than a couple of hours from here.’

  And then, without another word to mitigate or explain, he was under the covers, eyes closed. And the one fact he had retained from the day’s journeying had been that for the last months of her life Johanna Nielsson had been within his reach.

  Charismatic. Well, you could say that again.

  Was it a cult?’ she’d asked, breathless, catching up with Bartolini as he paused above her at a fork in the path, looking away from her. ‘And look – I haven’t – I need to get home. Is it much further?’

  She looked around. There were so many trees, all very tall and spindly, clogged with ivy here and there, as far as the eye could see. It was quiet but not silent – there were tiny sounds, dripping, a rustle, her own breath as she panted – and the light between the trees was blurred to a haze with fine foliage and insect activity. Up above them was the shape of a low shack or shepherd’s hut. Something flickered under the trees and was gone. Bartolini turned back to her.

  ‘Were you here when she – found the body?’ she blurted. ‘Mrs Martinelli?’

  He looked at her, a long judicious moment, then shook his head. ‘I was – away. With my sister, as a matter of fact.’

  She found herself wrong-footed and said nothing. He was watching her.

  ‘It’s not far,’ he said. He didn’t seem out of breath in the slightest and Luisa felt a twinge of shame, at her
slowness, at the solidity of her small frame. She could walk for hours in the city but here – here was different. She didn’t seem able to catch her breath. ‘I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking. We could have gone on along the road a little further but from here –’ He reached down to her, holding out his hand, and after a moment’s hesitation she took it. He pulled her gently up to stand beside him and she saw that the fork in the path was where another track joined it, coming up from just around the hillside.

  ‘As for it being a cult,’ he shrugged, ‘you tell me. You met her. Did you meet any of the others?’

  She thought of the little group beside the Loggia dei Lanzi: the small blonde girl, the dark Italian, the man. The man had been Gorgone. Each face turned up to Nielsson, the laying on of her hand in dismissal or blessing. ‘Not exactly, although I saw her with a group of them once.’ She considered. ‘Yes. There was something – sort of religious about it. If that’s what’s meant by a cult. But the local people – Mrs Martinelli for example – they would know better. What does she say?’

  ‘Oh, Maria Clara, she’s … she’s a little more broadminded than the rest, or more complicated at least. She’s hardly a conventional person herself.’ He was smiling again. ‘It’s why we get on. Of course there are plenty of others who thought at the time that they were Satanists or the place was a brothel or a drug den.’

  ‘The police were called at one point, weren’t they?’ she ventured timidly. ‘An anonymous call?’

  He shrugged again. ‘Like I say,’ he said, ‘I was in Milan most of the time. I just heard bits and pieces from my mother, although she always pretended she was too grand for gossip.’ Luisa found herself smiling at that and then with a shock she realised something. ‘But your mother –’ she said. ‘Your name’s Bartolini?’

  ‘My mother is the Princess Salieri,’ he said. ‘I was the product of her first marriage. My late father was not quite so noble.’

  ‘Your sister –’ Luisa broke off, confusedly. ‘I helped with a wedding, a few years after –’