‘Up north? Where?’
‘Trentino.’
‘Trentino? You’re going to the mountains?’
‘A place called Serenita, if you can believe that. A – spa.’ Drily.
‘No way you’re going to be back tonight,’ she said, exasperated.
‘We’re taking Pietro’s Alfa,’ he blustered, then sighed. ‘Maybe not.’ There was a pause, then he said, as stubborn as Luisa had been, ‘You’re sure she’s okay?’
He knew something. He knew Luisa wasn’t telling him something.
‘Just talk to her,’ said Giuli. And she hung up.
With difficulty, Giuli threaded her way across the flow of crowds on the Por Santa Maria, down the side of the Borsa Merci and into the respite of the secret space behind it, quiet and empty and cool in the shade. Overhead the cloud had thickened: they said storms were coming. Maybe tonight.
Maybe it was a good thing Sandro was going to be safely out of the way today. Giuli could at least tell Luisa he wasn’t going to Sant’Anna. At the thought of the place, she suddenly shivered.
Sandro and Pietro, talking in the office, forgetting she was there: talking about men making use of women for sex, about tight-mouthed villagers and secrets and grudges, old hatred. About the old farmhouse, and no one knew what went on inside. Sant’Anna, Sant’Anna. She’d seen it, too, in Ragno’s yellow eyes, the terrible old pimp, leaning on death’s door; you’d have thought he’d seen everything, but he looked away when she asked him about that place.
So it was good Sandro was going in the opposite direction, but there then came a tingle of something at the thought of the two of them separated. Luisa alone in the dark in their apartment with God knew what going round in her head, Sandro roaring up the motorway with Pietro, two lads in a big car. She would have felt safer at the thought of Sandro in his little old tortoise of a Fiat.
She sighed and got out her phone to call Luisa back. Just because you didn’t want to know things, they didn’t go away.
There was the missed call from the unknown number. There was a message waiting. Hesitating, Giuli punched in the number of the answerphone and listened, a woman’s voice, listened to the end. Deleted the message and then, considering, deleted the number from the call list.
She dialled Luisa’s number: Luisa picked up straight away.
‘He’s sent me a text,’ she said before Giuli could say anything. She sounded angry. ‘Didn’t even bother to speak to me. He’s going to be away a night.’
The dread settled. Why couldn’t they make it up? It wasn’t just Luisa. Sandro wasn’t talking either. What was going on?
‘Which means,’ said Giuli, pushing the thought away, ‘that he couldn’t get you on the phone. And besides, do you think he can have a conversation with you while he’s in the car with Pietro? What did the text say?’
She couldn’t tell Luisa about Enzo’s mum. Not now.
‘It said he probably wouldn’t be back tonight – he was with Pietro going to some spa in Trentino. Spa? All right for some.’ Sulkily. ‘And some other stuff.’
‘Other stuff?’
‘Oh, stuff. Nonsense about missing me.’ The sulk turning softer, reluctant.
‘Right,’ said Giuli. ‘So it means you have time to calm down, to go over whatever it is you’re panicking about, to talk to me. You need to eat, yes? Lunch. Maybe we can sort this mess out between us.’
A silence for dignity to be restored. Giuli knew Luisa. When she spoke, she sounded mollified, even grateful. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘All right, Giuli. What would I do without you, eh?’
‘I’ll call you,’ said Giuli.
Things don’t go away just because you don’t want to think about them. She could have said that to Luisa, but she hadn’t, Giuli reflected as she turned down the Via Porta Rossa towards the Via del Parioncino. The old bootmender should have put his sign out by now. She could bring him a coffee from the bar to butter him up. Her phone sat in her pocket.
Ms Sarto, this is Cinzia, Cinzia Messi, from Labo X. We have some preliminary results.
They’d call back, in time. She knew enough about medical information to know they couldn’t go behind her back and contact Enzo. He’d know from his card statement that she’d been for the appointment, which was all he cared about.
She could only postpone it, though. Eventually they’d catch up with her.
If you could call me back at your earliest convenience? These results can’t really wait.
Delete, delete, delete. Giuli kept walking. One foot in front of the other had got her this far, and all she could do was keep going.
Chapter Sixteen
BARTOLINI AND MARTINELLI there at the bar. Just a couple of locals, having a morning drink. The memory of that kept returning to Luisa, the particular atmosphere in the place, the vibration between those two. Childhood friends, he’d said, hadn’t he? Despite the old princess’s snobbery. She needed to talk to Sandro – but that would mean telling him she’d lied.
Sandro thought the answer to the murders lay in the house, in those who had been there, that was why he was haring round the country tracking them down. Luisa thought it was still there in the village, in the autumn air, in the forest.
She would confess. She just couldn’t do it if he wasn’t there, dammit. She got her things together, closed the shutters: she had an idea.
She might be in the centre of Florence but Sant’Anna was there, in the corner of her eye, just out of sight. The curving road through trees turning rusty, leading up, up to nowhere and the three points: the Salieri house on the ridge; Martinelli’s smallholding scattered under mangy trees; La Vipera. She knew, Luisa knew, she would go back there. She saw herself plodding up the potholed road in the dusk.
No dinner to prepare, no man to wait for: she was free.
If she had dwelt on the idea of living in solitude, it was not her but Sandro she imagined. How he would survive without her, if he would marry again: it was one of the patterns of thought the cancer had set scurrying, round and round. You could only discipline yourself: no more than once a week may that prospect be considered. She had never – and this was possibly the single advantage of a cancer diagnosis and one that she had not considered up to this point – thought about how she would survive without him. Luisa descended the stairs with the thought, suddenly uncertain of her balance: she had to put out a hand to the wall either side a second.
And then she was down and out into the noisy street, fragrant with the smell of bread from the corner bakery and some pale late blossom overhanging the rails of the little public garden between her and Santa Croce.
Sandro was a little overweight. He complained now and again of aches and pains. He had been to the doctor perhaps three times in his life. Sandro would be fine. Was it just mortality? You went from twenty to thirty in a fever of hard work, trying to get somewhere. Thirty to forty hoping, waiting for children that didn’t come. Then before you know it fifty’s there; sixty arrives even quicker but you’re still moving, still up and out every morning. Something else sits there on the horizon, though. Waiting.
She’d read and re-read the message he’d sent her. I’m sorry, darling. We’ve got to head up to Trentino to talk to some people. Might have to stay over.
And sometimes it comes before you see it. Johanna Nielsson didn’t see it coming. Johanna Nielsson never thought she would die.
She’d laughed when Luisa had said, forty years ago, stay away from him. Stay away or I swear I’ll kill you. Laughed and laughed until the barman had turned round from his coffee machine and stared at her.
Luisa wasn’t surprised someone had killed her. But who? And after all this time – what had tipped the balance?
‘I’ve got the secret,’ she’d said leaning towards Luisa, the smell of her in the air between them, a musty smell of damp old cellars that hadn’t at all made Luisa think of life but rather of a tomb. ‘The secret, you see. Of eternal life.’ And she’d held out her wrist, turned upwards as if o
ffering it to be dabbed with scent, but it was meant to show Luisa something. The tiny tattoo, snatched out of reach.
Eternal life? Well, she’d been wrong about that.
Pausing by the drifts of browning blossom in the gutter, Luisa adjusted her bag and let out a sigh, involuntary, that would have had him turning sharply to her and saying, what? What’s wrong?
Luisa supposed – very reluctantly, she supposed – that if she found herself alone, for whatever reason, Giuli would bear the burden. Poor childless Giuli and Enzo, and he had parents of his own to fret over. She’d look forward to a coffee with Giuli all week; like today, a lunch now and again; they’d take her out into the country once a month. She’d go home to a quiet, dark house and eat soup and sit on the divan with the telly on, not really watching, just for the noise.
Where had this all come from? It came from a sudden uncertainty, from the past stirred up murky as mud in a pond, about what went on in Sandro’s head – and then on its heels came a sudden, uncontrollable, foolish surge of love for him. Because she knew there had been moments – when a child died on his watch, and when their own child died while they sat hopeless in a hospital room – when he had not wanted to go on, and all that had stopped him had been the thought of her, alone. He didn’t think of himself. Never thought of himself. Only her, or Giuli, or Enzo even.
Giuli. There was another worry, despite the pep talk, the firm hand she’d taken with Luisa on the phone, that something was up with the girl. Luisa sighed. Lunch was still a way off. She got out her phone and there it was, Sandro’s text. I’m sorry. I miss you. Let’s talk later: I’ll tell you when. I love you.
She turned north, towards the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, and put the phone away. He wouldn’t expect an answer. But why did one keep silent when one should speak? She got out the phone, where Sandro’s message still sat, and tapped in, I love you too. And sent it before she could change her mind.
The long rectangle of the hospital forecourt – three sides porticoed, one of them dusty with old frescoes – was busy. Four ambulances were parked up in the sunshine and Luisa had to skip hurriedly sideways to avoid a stretcher that emerged from one of them without warning. Not the place, she reflected, to visit if you had started the morning dwelling on mortality, but too late now. She asked at reception and was sent to the emergency admissions, where she waited in a long queue. It seemed to her that half the people waiting on the plastic chairs had been there the last time she came.
‘Benedetta Salieri? She was being brought in when I was here yesterday, a – an accidental –’ She stopped because an elderly man with his arm in a makeshift sling was staring at her with extreme curiosity. And she didn’t know, after all, why Benedetta Salieri had been brought in.
The woman behind the admissions desk peered at her. ‘And you are?’
‘Luisa Cellini,’ she said, hearing the intercom’s crackle, seeing them through the glass turn to look at her from the far end. ‘A friend.’
There was a lot of sighing and conferring behind a screenedoff area but eventually Luisa was directed two floors up, to a ward designated Short Stay Acute. There was an intercom beside locked double doors and she gave her name again and Benedetta’s. She checked herself – she didn’t know Benedetta’s married name. The shifty little Swiss Italian bridegroom pacing up and down with his nicotine-stained fingers all those years ago – he had, beyond those details, been quite forgettable and his actual name was long gone. Salieri would have to do. And abruptly she wanted very much to talk to Benedetta. Or just to see her, to hold her poor hand, the liver-spotted hand that had hung down beside the stretcher, to hold it and say, life, eh? Life, Benedetta. They’d both lost a child.
The doors had small windows of grubby reinforced glass. Peering through, she could see nurses moving, and out of the dim past Luisa remembered she had wanted to be a nurse once. It occurred to her that she might not have been too bad at it. Bossy enough. And on cue a voice bellowed at her through the intercom.
A sentence emerged from static noise, barking, ‘Visiting hours two till six. Relatives only.’
Luisa peered back through the dirty little window and saw the nurse conferring with someone, a short figure in a coat, hat pulled down – she couldn’t tell if it was male or female – and they turned to look at the door. Luisa leaned back against the wall, quite certain they had been talking about her. And weighing it up. She didn’t want to get into trouble, did she? She peeped back again in time to see the small person turning, beginning to walk down the curtained ward towards her.
A woman. Blue eyes, northern complexion. Luisa stepped back in a hurry with only these impressions and looked about her. There was a door a metre or so back down the corridor: a toilet. She hurried there and pushed it inwards, stepping inside with her breath held, quickly turning to keep the door a crack open. Feeling foolish, handbag dangling, her breath too quick – who did she think she was, James Bond? – but she wanted to see that woman. The woman who’d been talking to the nurses about her. She heard the swish of the weighted doors and widened the crack. She could see the woman’s back, a gleam of fair hair, grey or blonde. She was turning, looking to see where Luisa had gone.
A woman of Luisa’s age. No more than a glimpse of features, fair ageing skin, a second’s doubt – did she know this woman? – and then she had turned again and was gone, out of the frame, so quickly that Luisa started back, thinking the door would be tugged open and she would be exposed.
It didn’t happen. Luisa heard steps receding, waited a second, another, and then gingerly she opened the toilet door and stepped out into the empty corridor. She stood in the corridor a second with her head lifted to catch it, a flowery sweetness on the air.
And then she heard the footsteps, brisk, coming back. Two sets. Too brisk for Luisa to escape this time and she stood there, pressed against the wall and suddenly unable to move or to compose herself. The owners of the feet rounded the corner at the end of the corridor and she resigned herself to being interrogated, reprimanded, frozen there and waiting for her fate.
Two men, one young, one old, in white coats. Doctors talking to each other, the younger an eager student gazing up at his professor, and they walked straight past her, as if she didn’t exist, and buzzed themselves into the ward. Of course: men didn’t bother themselves with unimportant matters like confused-looking old ladies.
And before she could even think about what she was doing, Luisa found that she had moved up behind them, clutching her handbag, into their slipstream, through the door and – her heart pounding – halfway to the nurses’ station on their white coat tails before they turned in to a cubicle and were gone, and she was alone. There seemed to be a lull in that moment: the ward was hushed, quiet. At the far end a nurse in green scrubs emerged from curtains pushing a drugs trolley and disappeared again.
She fully intended to explain herself. To say she knew Benedetta, had known her for forty years, had been in the emergency room when she was admitted. We’ve both lost a child, she wanted to say to someone.
But in that moment the nurses’ station was deserted. She even waited: she could see a woman’s head through the halfglass of a door behind the station, nodding slowly, but the woman didn’t turn; voices murmured through the door. A trolley trundled at the bottom of the corridor. Luisa looked, peered over the desk for some clue, and then she registered a whiteboard on the facing wall, written up in a grid. The patients’ names, bed numbers, attending doctors. No Salieri.
Had they given her the wrong ward number, after all that? Ten beds. She scanned the names again, Marzocco, C, Feltro, D – that was it. The initials. There was only one B – bed seven. Emboldened now, Luisa moved off.
Bed seven was in a good position, by the window. It had a view. Luisa stood and looked.
There was a broad strip of golden ornamented plaster frontage that was the top floor of the Medici palace; there were red roofs and chimneys, steam rising from their pots. There were balconies with bicycles and
air-con units and clotheslines; there was a tiny loggia perched precariously above it all, and a woman on it watering a gardenia as big as herself in a pot. There was the world.
In the foreground, between Luisa and the view, Benedetta Salieri – Luisa had instantly forgotten her married name again – lay still under a white cotton cover, as motionless as a figure on a tomb. Luisa took a step forward and peered at her. It was Benedetta, and Luisa felt a prickle at her scalp, not of fear exactly but of sadness, grief almost, at the years that had passed for both of them. Luisa could remember her standing in that great high-ceilinged room among the statues, as still as if she’d been one herself, a small, plump-cheeked infanta. The walls had been hung with some kind of cloth as they were in the Pitti palace, a golden damask, the great long windows and Benedetta’s father looking down at La Vipera.
Not classically elegant then, and her father’s sighing sort of look at her from the window underlined that, the old man with his hooded eyes and fine straight nose: his faint disappointment. Her lovely rounded face had been a child’s still, if Luisa thought about it – at the time, Luisa not much more than a child herself, Benedetta had seemed aloof and dignified to her, a princess from a painting, allowing them to move around her easing the dress. The dress had certainly needed room at the waist. She could have asked Bartolini, couldn’t she? Or perhaps not, not in the waiting room to the casualty department. Did your sister get married because she was pregnant? When, exactly, did she lose the baby? Up on a hillside out walking with him perhaps – he had given the impression of such ease and carelessness that he would have answered even those questions.
He’d been away in Milan. Had nothing to do with La Vipera.
And then she felt a different kind of shiver and she didn’t know if it was remembering the smell of the hillside in that moment, dead leaves and damp in the air, or his hand on her arm to stop her falling, or the sudden memory of the side of La Vipera below them half-covered with ivy and that strange swirl of a drawing on it.
The Viper Page 17