‘I’ve never seen a child come into this building,’ she said. ‘But up there, in that room with the old lady – with Signora Ticino – I’ve heard her.’
‘You’ve heard her?’
‘I’ve heard her crying.’
*
Luisa was halfway home when finally Sandro got hold of her. She was at the foot of the steps that led up to the loggia of the Ospedale degli Innocenti, where a stone bench presented itself. She climbed the steps and gingerly lowered herself to sit.
She was still reeling from the look Luca Bartolini had given her when he saw her at the bedside, Benedetta beside her struggling upright in adoration when she heard his voice, her beloved half-brother, her protector. Contempt? Was that it? Irritation. The kind of look an aristocratic employer gives a clumsy servant. She’d been right: he’d played her. She’d got up in a hurry, apologetic – although what had she to apologise for?
‘Luisa?’ Sandro’s voice crackled.
‘Darling,’ she said.
Sandro sounded a long way away. How rarely, it occurred to her, were they separated, and the distance doubled, tripled, by the weight of what she wanted to say and couldn’t. He was busy. He was out there in the world: he had no time for nonsense of that sort, for jealous imaginings.
She let him speak first.
This tangled mess.
He told her that a woman who’d lived at La Vipera had killed herself up at some hotel, months ago, early in the summer. Before all this. One of those women. Her name had been Lucia Grenzi.
Luisa remembered again standing in the loggia of the Lanzi watching the people from La Vipera approach, all that time ago. A very different loggia to this one: the Innocenti, where she stood now, had been a foundling hospital. Where the desperate left their unwanted babies, setting them in a wheel to turn and be drawn inside to the sisters who would feed them and clothe them and neither the nuns nor the infants would ever know what their mother had looked like.
She would take a child, even now, if it came to her in the night, she would take another woman’s child from that wheel and hold it, a baby – Luisa tightened her grip on her handbag. Stop that.
The loggia of the Lanzi was where the bodyguards of the Medici would stand and wait and watch. Luisa forty years ago had stood there among the statues and the milling tourists with their big cameras slung around their necks, no mobiles back then so you had to look, and look hard. She had watched Nielsson, listened to the voices; she had determined that one of the women was Italian, the stocky dark one with the Roman nose and the accent of the Po valley.
Another had been blonde.
Something shifted with that memory, a tiny tingle of recognition.
‘I think she saw Nielsson up here,’ he was saying now. ‘She had a camper-van. Martine Kaufmann, the one with a studio in the Oltrarno, came across her in Liguria. She was in the camper.’
A thought occurred to her about that day: had Johanna Nielsson told them all who she was meeting under the Loggia dei Lanzi, and why? Gorgone, Grenzi, Kaufmann. The idle, loafing man, hands in his pockets. Nielsson upright – a blonde, a smaller dark woman. Had she laughed with them about Luisa, this silly little Italian girl with her uptight ideas, with her family and her cooking and her little job selling dresses to the bourgeoisie, at the thought that she might be there to threaten them?
The girlfriend of the policeman. Something crept at the back of her neck, the thought that she was tied to this horrible murder case as tight as Sandro was. She thought of the nurse turning to look at her down the corridor, with Benedetta’s visitor beside her, as she said her name.
Sandro was talking. ‘The lifeguard said someone else was swimming there that day, a woman who’d taken a swimming ticket to the spa. Not a local, a foreigner. Hair too long for her age, he said, grey hair and –’ he hesitated ‘– Nielsson had long hair. Long white hair.’
The reason Sandro knew Nielsson’s hair had been white and still long was because he’d seen photographs of her decomposing corpse. She was dead, and Luisa’s spite looked pathetic.
‘So Grenzi saw Nielsson – and then she killed herself?’
There was a hesitation. ‘Trouble is, no one actually saw them talking. The lifeguard said they didn’t speak. Grenzi rushed off to her lunch and the other, let’s assume Nielsson, took forever drying her hair and didn’t use the restaurant. But yes. But – maybe.’
‘Have you spoken to the man? Gorgone? I thought you said he ran a chain of wellness centres, spas?’
‘Pietro spoke to him,’ said Sandro. ‘It’s not one of his places, although he did say he knew it. I think there was something he wasn’t telling us.’
‘About Nielsson?’
‘Maybe,’ said Sandro. ‘He said the only one he kept in contact with was Martine Kaufmann. He couldn’t remember Grenzi’s name, even – that seemed convincing enough.’
She saw them again, in her mind’s eye, even though she was in the wide empty piazza and not the throng of the Piazza Signoria. ‘I spoke to Benedetta,’ she said. ‘In the hospital. I think she’s involved, somehow.’
Sandro didn’t seem to be listening. ‘We’ve been trying to trace the camper Nielsson was travelling in.’ His voice seemed to fade in and out, hesitant.
‘Are there things you aren’t telling me?’ said Luisa.
‘Where would you hide a camper-van?’ he said, his voice suddenly clear. ‘Not a caravan site, you have to check in, give documentation. If you wanted it to just – disappear?’
It came to her straight away. ‘In one of those places, you know. Van parks. Where people keep their campers when they aren’t using them. There’s about five of them down on the ring road, near Firenze Sud.’
A silence. Then Sandro said reverently, ‘You little genius. You little sainted genius.’
‘Darling –’ she began, not knowing how to start on the phone like this. To tell him she knew about his feelings for Johanna Nielsson. To say it was all right. To confess she had hidden things from him. ‘Darling –’ But she broke off.
‘Tomorrow – tomorrow. I’ll be back tomorrow.’ He thought she was saying she missed him. His voice faded, faltered, uncertain.
Luisa cleared her throat. ‘Did you get my message?’ she said. ‘About the maid from the Salieri villa at the hospital? Visiting Benedetta?’
‘Yes,’ he said distractedly. ‘I couldn’t work out what you were saying. The maid visited her employer’s daughter – well, that’s not too strange?’
‘It’s not that,’ said Luisa. ‘There was something about her – when she heard my name. I don’t know if she recognised me or something. She came rushing out to look for me when I asked to be admitted to the ward and I –’ She broke off. ‘There was a scent – she smelled of –’
‘Gingerbread,’ said Sandro and she stopped in her tracks.
‘Gingerbread?’ She wasn’t sure if he was winding her up.
Sandro was energised. ‘Marte? Why would she know you? I’d never seen her before in my life. She was a funny woman, very Austrian-looking. I don’t think she knew what she’d got into, associating with Lotti. Although –’ He stopped.
‘What?’ said Luisa.
‘She sort of admitted she’d told Lotti that he’d find truffles on that hillside, though God knows where she’d have got that information from.’ He was thoughtful. ‘She pretended she couldn’t remember. You had the idea maybe she had messed about with the life support?’
‘Something had certainly happened,’ said Luisa. ‘There were all sorts of alarms and the woman, Marte, was nowhere to be found. Benedetta said she’d done it herself, got tangled up in the wires …’
Should she tell him? And then it spilled out anyway. ‘Sandro – Benedetta was talking about a child,’ she said. ‘A baby, a lost baby alone in the dark.’
There was a silence, and she heard his unease. They didn’t talk about lost children, never had.
She swerved, abruptly. ‘In any case, she seems to be on the mend. The
y think she’ll be well enough to be discharged. They’re taking her back to Sant’Anna. Her, her half-brother is. So he must trust Marte to look after her.’
Before the curtain had been pulled back she had heard him saying that to the nurses: something about her being safer in the country.
Something else. But Sandro was off the phone, talking to Pietro.
‘Look, I’d better go, the masseuse is free.’
‘What? You’re getting a massage?’ In that instant she simply wanted to scream.
‘No, I need to talk to her. She was the last person to talk to Grenzi.’
‘Okay,’ she said hastily. ‘Sorry, but it seemed important. There’s this thing –’ she hesitated ‘– it’s Benedetta.’ Don’t mention the baby again. Don’t. ‘She had this thing, this, like a sort of homemade tattoo on her wrist. And didn’t you say, didn’t you mention –’ for a panicked second she couldn’t remember if he had said ‘– she had, Nielsson had, a tattoo, on her wrist? Like a –’ she might as well bluff it out, now, skate over how she knew ‘– like a spiral sort of thing, a curly snail shell thing?’
And he was listening. No, wait, she heard him say to Pietro. Hold on.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘And there’s a drawing like that on the side of the house,’ she said. ‘La Vipera?’
‘Yes,’ said Sandro slowly and she could hear him wondering how she knew. ‘Yes, it’s all covered up with ivy, some kind of symbol. Like a – a rune or something. Concentric circles, or a spiral.’
‘I think Benedetta has the same tattoo, or tried to make it herself. Funny thing is, it didn’t look like a snail, the one she did, hers had a sort of –’
More noise behind him then, and Sandro said quickly, ‘Can we talk again, darling? Can we? I need to see you, I miss you, can’t we – I’ve got to go.’ And he was gone.
‘Hers had a sort of – a sort of face,’ she murmured, to no one.
Opposite her in the pale autumn sunshine a crocodile of tiny children was being led diagonally across the big square, past the equestrian statue, to the great pillars of the church, the Santissima Annunziata. The most Holy Annunciation. Only occasionally did Luisa look at the great buildings of the city and wonder about their meaning: they were so much the fabric of her life, her childhood, her workday wanderings.
A church dedicated to the annunciation of the birth of Christ, an angel coming to the virgin to tell her she was pregnant. The children trailing across the square from where Luisa sat, under the loggia of a hospital for the care and protection of the newborn. The blue majolica medallions along the arches depicting the swaddled child. What did it mean, without a child? What did life mean?
The coil traced blue on the inside of Benedetta’s wrist had a face. It was the curl of a child, a foetus. Luisa closed her eyes and saw the circles half-exposed on the flank of La Vipera and knew that was what they meant, too, their significance perhaps more disguised, but Benedetta was beyond hiding her meaning, Benedetta’s pain was all on the surface, it needed to be subdued. Who knew about it? Who subdued it? Her half-brother? Her mother?
In the soft dark of her closed eyes she saw Benedetta, saw her wandering in that effort to ease something, to subdue it, from hospital to seaside resort to sanatorium. That was what they used to be called, now they were wellness centres. Her eyes sprang open on the bleached space of the wide piazza: the children were gone. No, though. No, she was getting confused. It was Grenzi at the wellness centre, it was Nielsson.
The loss of her child? But the loss contained a mystery, a darkness that Luisa couldn’t quite make out; it was as coiled and convoluted as the symbol on the wall of the farmhouse. Was it possible that Benedetta had lost a child before her marriage – that the thickness around her middle, her catatonic blankness at the dress fitting had been as a result of a pregnancy not ongoing but recently miscarried? And what of her departure to Switzerland with that husband, that temporary person, that stop-gap – had he been the father? Could he shed more light on this than Bartolini had? Luisa struggled to think of his name after all these years. What name had been on the admissions board at the hospital Luisa had just left?
Hurriedly she got to her feet, unsteady, half in shadow, half in light, her eyes still adjusting, and a nun in pale grey was there beside her, steadying her, and for a panicked second she thought she’d forgotten the antibiotics and then she remembered, yes, she’d taken one this morning. She needed to get home and take another.
But when Luisa did get home, up the dim stairs, into the quiet, shadowy apartment, she didn’t go straight to the kitchen for the packet of pills that stood beside the sink but to her bedroom. The bed was made; the room was neat in the striped light that fell through the shutters, where she and Sandro had slept side by side for forty years. Where had she kept it?
Her underwear drawer, silk things never worn, bras neatly folded. She’d never had a reconstruction since the mastectomy but wore nice bras anyway, carefully rolling a cashmere sock to replace the missing breast. At the bottom of the drawer were treasures, treasures Sandro had never seen.
Luisa hadn’t been invited to so many society weddings that she would throw it away, a card turning soft with age, printed in silver with a silver tassel, and there it still was. Next to a small tin that had once contained violet-flavoured pastilles and had a picture of violets on the front but had for twenty-seven years – twenty-seven! – held a curl of dark hair. She had asked the nurse to cut it from their baby’s head when Sandro was gone, to work or somewhere, sent unwilling to buy a coffee in the hospital cafeteria, and she had placed it inside her bra, taken it home when the baby stayed, their daughter stayed, to be prepared for burial. Luisa had taken it home and she had placed it in that tin and had never looked at it again. Her fingers touched the tin lightly and moved on.
The invitation was in a small pile of similar relics, a party at the Palazzo Corsini, the presentation of a medal to Sandro for some forgotten accomplishment, a handful of newspaper cuttings.
The Prince and Princess Salieri invite you to celebrate …
Of course Luisa hadn’t been invited. Hovering, nervous, in the anteroom to the palace’s chapel after the guests had all filed out in case she might be needed still to tweak Benedetta’s dress, she had picked the card up from a plastered niche where it had been carelessly discarded by a young woman who doubtless attended a dozen such celebrations a year and found them dull.
The light was better in the kitchen. Setting the invitation down on the table, Luisa went to the sink, filled a glass, dutifully popped one of the pills from its blisterpack and swallowed it.
There would be a bus out there. Her heart quailed at the thought of them, the Salieri up on the hill, the nurse, the brother, the two women on their separate sickbeds. But that was where the answer lay. In the coiled tattoo, in the crumbling house, in the undergrowth of the hillside.
She picked the invitation up again, the silk tassel soft as thistledown against her hand. The wedding of their daughter Benedetta Fiamma to Arturo Ticino.
Could she track him down, ask him, the husband, Arturo Ticino? There was Facebook, there was Google. Ask him what had happened to Benedetta to turn her from a sturdy girl into a frail and trembling old woman? But perhaps he wouldn’t care, or wouldn’t remember, or perhaps part of the deal had been that he keep his mouth shut. Perhaps there were a hundred Arturo Ticinos.
The Salieri would tell her nothing. She knew that from the expression on Bartolini’s face. They closed ranks.
In the pocket of her coat her mobile hummed, electric against her side, and she took it out. It was Giuli.
‘Luisa? Luisa?’ In the background, voices squabbling, a shrill female and a man’s murmur, and Luisa felt a great despair overcome her at these distances between her and those she loved, these interruptions, these unwelcome spectators.
‘Giuli?’ Even to her, her voice sounded dead. It was the tiny tin with its violets; it was the past, rising like a mist from a valley.
/> A pause, only the voices in the background. ‘Are you all right, Luisa?’
Luisa cleared her throat. ‘I’m fine.’
‘I need you,’ said Giuli, and the mist swirled and was gone.
Chapter Twenty-One
THE MASSAGE SUITE was in the basement.
Before they descended, Sandro had called Panayotis with Luisa’s suggestion about looking for the camper-van among the camper parks. ‘One of those, you know, rundown ones, where no one pays much attention to comings and goings, would be my guess.’
Panayotis had agreed eagerly. That boy, he thought wryly, would go far. The rest of what Luisa had told him had had a strange ring to it. Gianna Marte in the hospital, hovering over Benedetta Salieri: he didn’t like the sound of that. And Marte had been the one to tell Lotti about the truffles, she’d admitted that. It was all fishy. All of it. The idea of Chinese whispers occurred to him: the Sant’Anna whispers.
And then there was a baby. Benedetta Salieri rambling about her lost child.
The therapy suite was a long, dim, warm room, scented with something bracing, like eucalpytus. Sandro was surprised to see two curtained cubicles, a little like a small ward in a luxurious private hospital.
‘Temporary,’ said the masseuse with a touch of defensiveness as she saw them look around. ‘Mind you, it’s been temporary for nine months now. We have a whole massage studio, but the drains collapsed underneath it last Christmas.’
Eleonora Castrozzi was a tiny woman in a pale-grey tunic with white trim. She had very short black hair and corded muscles in her forearms and gave the impression of having nothing wasted about her, no spare anything, all compact and useful energy.
‘This is where you treated Lucia Grenzi,’ he said, ‘the afternoon of May 21st this year?’
‘The afternoon before she died,’ said Castrozzi. ‘I gave her a massage every day when she was here. It was the third massage of that stay.’ And with an abrupt movement she rubbed her eyes, leaving her face softer, weary. She pulled back the curtain to reveal the massage bed and two chairs. She perched on the bed and gestured to the men to sit down.
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