The Viper

by Christobel Kent

  ‘Look,’ Sandro said, stopping. ‘Is everything all right?’

  Pietro stiffened. ‘Yes,’ he said guardedly.

  ‘What did the boss want to talk to you about this morning?’

  Pietro sighed. They were at the car, and Sandro got the key out, waiting.

  ‘She’d been digging around,’ Pietro said. ‘She came across something in the original case files.’

  ‘Something?’

  ‘A sarky comment Baratti made about you in the files.’

  ‘That old bastard,’ said Sandro, feeling his jaw clench.

  ‘Listen, Sandro,’ he said. ‘It’s a bit rich, you joshing me about the housekeeper – and there was nothing – she’s not a bad-looking woman, yes, I may have flirted a bit …’

  Sandro stared at him. ‘It was a joke,’ he said eventually. ‘What do you mean, a bit rich?’

  ‘You never said,’ said Pietro, dogged, still flushing. ‘You never mentioned that there was something between you and her. Nielsson. You should have said.’

  ‘There wasn’t anything between us,’ said Sandro quietly.

  ‘Nothing?’ said Pietro flatly. ‘Sandro,’ and there was a warning note in his voice, ‘how long have we known each other?’

  Sandro felt choked, suddenly, words sticking in his throat. ‘Nothing happened,’ he said.

  ‘No – intimacy?’ And Pietro was looking at him full on now, the flush gone from his face, and the interior of the car seemed very cramped. They were at a deadlock. Fucking Baratti, thought Sandro again. Dirty-minded Baratti. He felt sick.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Get in and I’ll tell you. I should have told you before, but I’ll tell you now.’

  Chapter Twelve

  AFTER SIX YEARS working at the publicly funded women’s centre in the dingy Piazza Tasso, the reception area of the Labo X was a revelation to Giuli. No rough sleepers, no buggies, no druggies. Designer chairs and glossy magazines and a huge TV, and frosted windows onto the Via Verdi behind which the silhouettes of passersby were visible.

  Giuli, who was ten minutes early after all that, found herself a corner as out of sight as she could manage. She felt out of place here, as though she might be ejected at any moment, although the receptionist had confirmed she had an appointment. Even the receptionist had a manicure: if she’d known, Giuli would have washed her hair.

  She sat down with a form to fill in and a pot to pee in. She peed first. The washrooms were sparkling, the size of a bedroom, and the towels folded by the sink felt warm.

  Date of birth, medical conditions. Have you ever been treated for the following: cancer; diabetes; a sexually transmitted disease?

  And suddenly Giuli didn’t feel like joking any more. She wanted to run away.

  With a life like hers she’d been lucky, or perhaps her death wish hadn’t been what she thought it was. Young enough to know all about HIV in time, even if she’d told herself she didn’t care often enough back then. She’d injected drugs only for a very brief period; she’d used condoms. All the same, it was a long time since she’d been tested. She focused on the page and answered truthfully. As truthfully as she could.

  They called her three minutes early. The room was blindingly white, with modern art on the walls, and the nurse – Cinzia Messi, phlebotomist, it said on her lapel – wore lipstick and gold earrings with her white lab coat. She looked down at the form Giuli had filled out, then up again, and smiled. They would be about the same age, although only one of them had taken proper care of herself for forty-five years. The smile seemed real, though, and Giuli knew the difference.

  ‘I see your husband has sent you along,’ said the nurse. Cinzia. Phelobotomist, not nurse. ‘Yes,’ said Giuli wearily. She took the pee pot out of her pocket and slid it embarrassedly on to the desk between them where a kidney-shaped cardboard dish sat containing a syringe, vials, plastic bags. ‘I’ve been feeling … under the weather. He bullied me into it.’

  ‘Under the weather?’

  Giuli listed the symptoms. ‘Mostly tiredness,’ she said. ‘Mostly like I could just go to sleep and not wake up. I feel hungry then I feel sick. Nasty taste in my mouth.’

  ‘Obviously, we need your agreement,’ said Cinzia gently, ‘for these tests, blood and urine. We’ll look for anaemia, white blood cell count, cholesterol, glucose, fertility levels –’ She broke off. ‘You know we’re doing this all the wrong way round? You should have visited your physician first. Doctor – what is it? – Hartmann.’

  Giuli, who couldn’t have said what sex her doctor even was, looked down at her hands, guilty.

  ‘I’m guessing you’re not really a regular at the doctor’s?’

  Giuli shook her head. ‘Not really,’ she mumbled. ‘I’ve – I never really looked after myself, if you know what I mean. I haven’t always been … careful.’ She hoped desperately that the woman, Cinzia, would not frown at her, or edge away, or, worse, ask her what exactly she meant.

  She did none of those things: she took Giuli’s nearest hand in both of hers. ‘But you’re being careful now,’ she said. ‘And your husband –’

  ‘He’s so good,’ said Giuli desperately. ‘He’s such a sweetheart. I can’t bear for –’ and she broke off. She couldn’t bear to think of him on his own. Until she met Enzo, life had been something she could take or leave. Even with Sandro and Luisa in her life, she had just been waiting, she could see now, for it all to end. But Enzo had changed the game. Enzo with his daft fringe and his shyness and his kindness and the way he looked at her.

  ‘The best thing,’ said Cinzia carefully, still holding Giuli’s hand between hers, ‘the very best thing is to know what your situation is, don’t you think, and proceed from there? I think,’ still gentle, ‘under the circumstances, we can include an HIV test and a hepatitis C test. I can look into getting help to pay for them if that’s out of your budget – and there are other test centres, too, you know? Free ones. ’

  ‘No,’ said Giuli quickly, looking down at her hand, still in Cinzia’s, and holding back something that felt dangerously like tears. ‘I worked at the women’s centre in Piazza Tasso. I know all about what’s out there.’ Guilt added into the mix – after all, what had Giuli ever done to deserve private testing? ‘We can afford it,’ she said.

  And then the woman let her hand go. Reached up to touch her gold earrings, as if for luck, then pulled the little cardboard tray of equipment towards her.

  *

  Giuli walked back out into the reception area in a daze, one hand pressed absently still to the inside of her elbow where the blood had been drawn. One vial after another, dark red. Not as bad as she thought – in some ways. It was done. But the worst bit was waiting for the results, wasn’t it? The worst bit was always waiting.

  ‘You need to visit your doctor too,’ Cinzia had said as she stood to say goodbye. ‘I mean, that goes without saying, right? You need a full check-up, just to be on the safe side. We’ll send the results on to him, but if there’s anything to worry about, if there’s anything urgent, we’ll call you. All right?’ Looking into her face. ‘Promise me you’ll make the appointment?’

  Giuli had promised. She walked through the airy white space, focused on the frosted glass doors that would let her back out into the real world. The smells and the noise and the people, the grey pavements, the blue-grey hills in the distance, clouds white and fluffy above them. She was almost there when she heard her name.

  She wouldn’t have recognised him. It was thirty years – he shouldn’t have recognised her. She was a different person. She didn’t know his voice, low and hoarse: on instinct, she kept walking, she didn’t turn to look at him.

  And then she was on the pavement, dizzy in the bright day, a horn blaring as she stepped blindly off the kerb. Someone held her: someone pulled her back and she turned and saw him.

  He’d always been a big man, but something had shrunk him. He’d always been big enough to floor her mother with the back of his hand, big enough to hold Giuli down
. He wasn’t wearing greasy jeans any more, though; his hair wasn’t lank to his shoulders. He wore an expensive waxed leather jacket, shiny shoes. She calculated he would be about sixty-five years old.

  ‘Giulietta?’ His voice pleaded with her.

  He wasn’t well. Why else would he be there? She looked down at his hand on her arm.

  Don’t you know I’m a different person?

  Roberto Ragno. His hair slicked down, dyed, she’d have said, but expensively done. Roberto Ragno who had been her mother’s pimp during her early childhood, when they’d lived in the bedsit on the Via Pisana where Giuli had slept on a mattress on the floor. He used to walk through the door and kick the mattress, whether she was lying on it or not. By the time her mother overdosed in the bedsit one summer day while Giuli was at school, Ragno was long gone.

  She shook his hand off, feeling her face frozen, all of her frozen. His clothes were expensive but he looked old and sick. His face was yellow. The whites of his eyes were yellow.

  ‘You must have come into some money, Roberto,’ she said, contemptuous, gesturing at his shiny shoes. ‘Look at you.’ And she felt it seethe and rise up her gullet, the hatred like bile. The memory of hatred. It occurred to her that bile was what was wrong with him: the liver malfunctioning, that’s what made you yellow, and she could feel her rage acting on her like that, toxic in her body. She stood her ground.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ she said.

  ‘I’m dying,’ he said, and she heard self-pity. ‘I need to – I need to –’

  ‘You need to what? To say sorry?’ His lip trembled at the scorn in her voice and she saw she’d hit home. ‘What, found God, is it, or Buddha or whoever?’ He still had the big gold signet ring on his pinky finger, the one that had left a dent in Giuli’s forehead one time. ‘If you’ve got to get to everyone you’ve ever shat on, Roberto, you’ll be a while doing that.’ He stepped back. ‘Where did the money come from?’ His mouth moved. ‘Don’t bother,’ she said. ‘I know.’

  It came from other women’s shitty lives. After he left her mother he’d gone back to running the girls who stood by the country roads to the south of the city. Giuli’s mother had told her as much in one of her long, rambling, recriminating rants. Foreign girls, mostly, from all over, from Africa to Russia, anyone hopeless enough. Women standing shivering in some disgusting lay-by, servicing van drivers behind the trees among used condoms and needles. Her mother dissing the girls because only the desperate would do that, because even she had to feel superior to someone. Let no one tell you misery made you strong or noble. It made you into a scavenger and a thief. Something sparked among the memories, something stirred. Those girls on the road beyond Certosa, winding on up into the hills.

  But Ragno was speaking. ‘Let me – let me help you,’ he said, beseeching. ‘You need money?’ He looked at her more closely with his yellow eyes, looking her up and down, uncertain. The last time he’d have seen Giuli the only calories she got came from cheap wine. She’d been dressed out of charity dumpsters and sleeping against a fence in Osmannoro under the airport flight path. He looked like he was trying to work out what had happened to her, how come she was wearing a suit and a wedding ring and looked like she ate real food, off plates. With the thought, Giuli felt saliva come into her mouth, and she didn’t know if it meant sickness or hunger but she wanted to get out of there before she threw up on him.

  ‘I don’t need money,’ she said and was about to say, and I don’t believe in forgiveness, but something stopped her – an urge to do her bit for this case that seemed to burden Sandro a little too much.

  ‘You worked the girls down near Sant’Anna, didn’t you?’ She made her voice quiet, not conciliatory exactly but not angry any more. He mumbled something she couldn’t hear, taking a step back from her. His yellow hands were shaking: she thought of Cinzia Messi taking hers. ‘Didn’t you?’

  When he didn’t answer, only staring with that mixture of craftiness and stupidity that came back to her down the years, keeping her patience, Giuli said, ‘You wanted to help me, right?’ He nodded. ‘Before – mum,’ keeping her voice level, ‘before – you worked the girls down there. In the seventies?’ Ragno stared still. ‘You remember that place? That house where the foreigners had the commune?’

  ‘I had nothing to do with them,’ he said quickly, too quickly, with a sudden step that brought him up against the wall.

  ‘La Vipera, it was called,’ she said, examining him coolly. His mouth opened and closed but he said nothing. The yellow of his skin had turned greyish.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ she said. ‘I mean, what are you dying of?’

  ‘Liver cancer,’ he said through cracked lips and Giuli nodded without comment. ‘They can’t – I asked about a transplant but they said it’s spread anyway,’ his voice holding a sob, ready to break.

  She told herself, have no pity. ‘Well,’ she said, and from her upper pocket she took one of her cards, holding it between thumb and forefinger until he looked at it. ‘If you change your mind about helping me.’ And she held it out, printed side up. Giulietta Sarto, Private Investigator.

  For a long second they both looked at it, and then reluctantly, as reluctantly as though the card might harbour poison, the yellow fingers came out and he took it from her.

  *

  The Piazza Repubblica was noisy and chaotic as the day faded to grey. Luisa thought she had glimpsed Giuli on her motorino, zipping and swaying between cars, on the way over and had raised a hand, but if it had been Giuli her mind had been elsewhere.

  Luisa picked her way across carefully: she hadn’t worn heels in a while. She shouldn’t have worn them this evening, really, nor should she have taken any care at all with her make-up, but she knew how Enrico Frollini’s face would fall if she turned up in trousers and boots and a bobble hat. Enrico was of the generation that believed women should be beautiful: he had built a career on the belief, and Luisa had worked in one of his large, luxurious shops for more or less her whole life, so on went the heels.

  The sky overhead was clear and pale and luminous, and a nice cool was descending. Luisa skirted the carousel that had been in this square since she’d been a child herself. Increasingly it surprised her, with all the entertainments available to kids, that they still pleaded with their parents for a ticket, two euros to clamber on to a painted horse and be whirled in the dusk, among the sparkle and mirrors. Soon, Luisa found herself thinking as she came into the golden light that fell through Paskowski’s window, they’ll start dying, all my generation. Things will be forgotten.

  ‘Luisa!’ Frollini was hurrying forward in his camel coat, the one with the fur collar, both hands outstretched to seize her by the elbows. ‘Carissima!’ She allowed him to envelop her in a lingering embrace. He would never have called her darling when she had been his employee. Stepping back, she saw his shrewd eyes taking her in.

  Some business with the bar’s owner to remind her that he knew everyone who was anyone, and Enrico had them escorted to seats in the cosiest corner of the dining room, standing behind Luisa to take her coat with scented ceremony. The terrace had gone modern, with uncomfortable hard white sofas, but inside it was the same old Paskowski’s: walnut panelling and Murano chandeliers that shed a pearly soft light and deeply upholstered banquettes.

  ‘What a treat –’ he began, taking off the camel coat and hanging it carefully on a polished brass hook.

  But Luisa cut him short. ‘I want to pick your brains, Enrico.’ Pulling off her gloves. He looked crestfallen, but you had to be firm with Enrico Frollini. Gossip was like a swamp: it could swallow you right up if you didn’t choose your route through it carefully. ‘It’s about the Salieri family.’

  He sighed. ‘Can’t we at least order first?’ Controlling her impatience, Luisa sat back and ordered a Negroni. Frollini twinkled. ‘So,’ he said, passing a hand over his thick silvery hair. ‘What about Margherita Salieri? You know she has … whatever they call it nowadays. Alzheimer?�
� His old tortoise eyes widened and for a moment she saw genuine anxiety. ‘Sometimes I think we’re all going to get it, Luisa.’

  ‘Not you, Enrico,’ she said, breaking a promise to herself and patting him on the hand. He brightened. ‘When did you actually last see her?’

  He sighed. ‘Two or three years ago. She remembered me eventually but at first’ – outraged – ‘she thought I was her father!’ Luisa suppressed a smile. ‘She can’t have looked in a mirror in a while,’ he said, ‘if she thinks she could be my daughter.’

  ‘Maybe she doesn’t recognise herself in the mirror,’ said Luisa, at which Frollini simply looked depressed. ‘Anyway,’ she went on, ‘I don’t want to know about her, not really. It’s the others.’

  ‘Well,’ said Enrico, sipping his malt whisky, grimacing. He drank it because he thought it sophisticated, she knew, but he had as sweet a tooth as she did. ‘The prince died, oh, years ago now,’ he said warily. ‘Old Alberto. He was – it was never – he wasn’t quite –’

  ‘Come along, Enrico,’ said Luisa, choosing her next stepping stone through the gossip swamp. ‘Not as other men?’ It dawned on her that she’d always half-known that. ‘Theirs was a marriage of convenience, dynastic.’ When he looked wary, she spelt it out. ‘Alberto was gay.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Enrico, slightly miffed. ‘You knew.’ She thought of Alberto Salieri at the window of that old house, looking down. He would have been looking at La Vipera.

  ‘Well, I suppose I must have guessed,’ she said. ‘I’m certainly not surprised. Was it top secret?’ Frollini shrugged helplessly. ‘He must have had lovers,’ she probed. ‘Not all of them can have been discreet.’

  ‘Margherita didn’t much mind,’ said Enrico. ‘She had the house, the beautiful daughter, the money.’ He shrugged. ‘And she quite liked him, you know. Marriage,’ he shot her a glance, ‘it has to be a flexible thing.’

  ‘I’m sure yours has had to be, Enrico,’ she said. ‘I’m quite happy with mine as it is.’

  He sighed, not visibly put out. But was it true? Was she happy? Luisa had forgiven Sandro things, he had forgiven her. They had learned when to bend. But there were limits: didn’t there have to be? She had never slept with Enrico Frollini, although there had been a time when he’d wanted her to. She had never slept with anyone but Sandro.