Shit, thought Giuli, and she felt the sweat break again, her body going wrong, and there was nothing she could do about it.
‘Do it for Enzo,’ said Luisa, and she turned away, pulling out her little fold-up mac from the tote, stashing the address book in her pocket. The door closed behind her.
Hands trembling, Giuli took out her mobile and dialled. She walked towards the front of the building, into the little lobby where clients sat, when there were clients, which was not often. At random, all their dilemmas, their obstacles, their difficulties swarmed into Giuli’s head, other people’s lives. Unfaithful wife. Dishonest business partner. Missing child.
An automated message came and she almost hung up, but it wasn’t telling her the place was closed: it was offering her options. If you know the extension …
I’m the missing child, thought Giuli, lost, AWOL, adrift.
To speak to one of our operatives, continue to hold.
She continued to hold. Down in the street she could see Luisa, hunched over the mobile, shaking her head. She looked down the Via del Leone, listening to the tinny music in her ear, and she could see the trees in the Piazza Tasso stirring in the wind, and beyond it, in the large garden of the Villa Strozzi that stretched up the hill, the leaf canopy rippled silvery like water. Her gaze came down again and she saw him appear, Roberto Ragno, in a waxed jacket held close at the neck, walking towards Luisa. The two of them facing each other as though it was high noon.
‘Good afternoon, Labo X. How may I help you?’ The receptionist – soothing, kind, complacent even at the ragged sound of Giuli’s voice, put her through.
‘Miss Sarto, Giulietta, I’m so glad you called.’ She did sound glad, thought Giuli, and how mad was that?
If I stare down, if I stare down into the street, if I escape from my body and put myself down there on the pavement in the rain, in the real world, none of this is happening.
What did she think? That she could stop time? Giuli knew that didn’t happen. She had learned to look at herself in the mirror and accept what was there. You had to take the consequences. Step out of your own life, and that way madness lay. That way you were Benedetta Salieri in her bedroom on the floor, filling in scrapbooks and talking in a child’s voice.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. She had heard the word peri-menopausal. ‘Could you say all that again?’ She hadn’t heard HIV or hepatitis or cirrhosis or stomach cancer or further tests. Perhaps that would come. Be brave. ‘Please?’ She didn’t know if it was in her head but she thought she heard the woman chuckle. Really? Really? Was it a joke?
Down in the street Luisa had hung up. She didn’t know Ragno from Adam so she had turned to push her way through the door and he had stopped, hanging back. He was going to change his mind. Giuli lifted her hand, knuckles clenched, ready to bang.
But her hand never got there. And then she was listening. Then she was really listening. She turned her back to the window, to the world outside. She went hot, then cold: her hand went to her mouth and then it went to her belly.
Luisa had come up the stairs and was in the doorway, saying something about Benedetta’s baby, the missing child, and Giuli felt her own insides contract, and then the buzzer was sounding. And everything went black.
*
Luisa got there just in time to stop her head hitting the floor. The buzzer was still going. Giuli’s head flopped, then jerked upright. ‘Get the door,’ she mumbled, heavy in Luisa’s hands, ‘or he’ll leave.’
Gently Luisa laid Giuli down then ran to the intercom, pressed the buzzer, long and hard. Listened for the click of the door but there was nothing, and then ran, ungainly, dripping still in her raincoat, through the lobby to the front window and shoved it open. ‘Hey!’ she shouted. He was five metres away, going back the way he came. He turned and looked up at her: a man older than her, thinning hair plastered over a yellowed face. For a moment they just stared and Luisa had no idea what she needed to say to persuade him, but then his shoulders dropped and he began to walk back towards the door. Luisa opened the inner door, pressed the intercom again, went back to Giuli.
She was sitting up in the office chair, colour returning to her cheeks.
‘What were you saying?’ Giuli mumbled. ‘About the baby?’
Luisa examined her face, little Giuli’s face. Saw something. The softness in her cheek. She put up a finger and stroked. ‘You’re not sick,’ she said, wondering, ‘are you?’
‘You were saying Benedetta had a baby,’ said Giuli, pale as a ghost and searching her face, and Luisa wanted to hold her tight as the revelation, after all these years, came to her, it’s you. All this time she had only been able to think of the three-day-old girl she and Sandro had had, the tiny red feet, the face wrapped tight before they gave her away to be buried. And Giuli had been there all along, waiting.
‘Benedetta never slept with her husband,’ Luisa said. ‘He told me. There was no child of that marriage. If there was a child –’ she hesitated ‘– if – it was before. It was why they married her off. He was paid to marry her. To cover up the fact that her dad took her down to La Vipera on one of his trawling expeditions and she got pregnant. Family scandal, in spades. And then the baby –’ She paused. ‘I don’t know what happened to the baby.’
Ticino’s sour old voice when eventually he answered. ‘She’s died, has she?’ She’d told him, no. He hung up. She called again. He let it ring a long time but she didn’t give up, and eventually she heard him bark into the phone. ‘Who are you?’ She had told him she was a friend, and Benedetta was in hospital. ‘We were married five minutes,’ he said angrily. ‘I can barely remember the woman.’
She’d asked him had he heard about the murders in Sant’Anna, and then there’d been a long silence. In three sentences, four, he’d laid out Benedetta’s marriage. Three years of sobbing, locked in her room: once he’d touched her, and no more than touched her, and she flew at him, biting and scratching, then never again. ‘I tried,’ he said roughly. ‘Believe it or not, I felt sorry for her.’ She could hear forty years of cigarettes in the rasp of his voice and remembered him pacing outside the Salieri villa. She wanted to ask him more but he hung up. When she tried again, it went to answerphone.
Up in the office, they’d heard footsteps on the stairs, but no one had appeared. Giuli finished tucking in her shirt where it had come loose when she fell. ‘Where is he?’ she said. They both looked at the door from the lobby and on cue it swung open.
Luisa took charge, standing up. ‘Mr Ragno,’ she said stiffly.
‘Who are you?’ he said, looking cornered, panicky, then to Giuli, nodding towards Luisa, ‘Who’s she?’
‘I’m a colleague,’ said Luisa, softening her tone, her hand on Giuli’s shoulder. She could see he wouldn’t talk to her if she stood in judgement over him. A pimp, though.
‘You all right?’ he said to Giuli, frowning, ignoring Luisa.
Giuli got up from the chair. ‘I’m fine,’ she said, gesturing. ‘Please, Roberto. Sit down.’
And Giuli looked fine, suddenly. She looked as though ten years had fallen away. Her eyes, never anything but watchful since Luisa had known her, were wide, wondering, her face smoothed. Hesitantly Ragno sat. Luisa stole a glance at her watch. It was 5.54.
Ragno sat there, in his good clothes, hands knotted humbly in his lap. Standing at his shoulder, Luisa could see how skinny his legs were. ‘Luisa,’ said Giuli, closing the laptop that sat on the desk and pushing it towards her. ‘I think you’ve got a conference call, haven’t you?’
Luisa took the computer, helpless. ‘But I –’
‘It’s pretty straightforward,’ said Giuli firmly. ‘Just click on the icon at the bottom of the screen. Why don’t you take it next door? You need to – I think Sandro would benefit from a one-to-one to start with, don’t you?’ She spoke brightly, but fixed Luisa with a meaningful look. Ragno just sat there docilely. Giuli said, pale but smiling, ‘Password’s Luisa1975.’
Feeling herself flu
sh, Luisa took the laptop and retreated into the lobby. As the door closed behind her a murmur set up beyond it. The man was dying, Giuli had told her. What could he know? His voice was hesitant, low: she couldn’t hear what he was saying. But in any case her thoughts were too hurried, scattered: she had the sense of something looming, something huge. She looked at her watch again. It was 5.58. In a hurry, she sat on the small hard chair by the window in the lobby and opened the computer, balancing it on the sill. She typed in the password: her name and the year they met. Outside, the wind rattled the window in its frame.
The screen opened: she saw the icon immediately and tapped on it. Nothing happened for a while. The clock in the corner of the screen ticked down; six came and went and next door the murmuring continued. And then a sound came from the computer, an unearthly sound like a sonar echo, and a face appeared. The icon of Pietro’s face in a tiny circle.
She clicked Answer. If Pietro’s there, I don’t have to say – but it was Sandro’s face that filled the screen. His mouth moved jerkily, the image swam and pixellated.
‘Hello? Hello?’ The screen settled, and the jerky mouth smiled.
‘Darling,’ she said, flooded with relief, and it came out like a sob. She averted her eyes from her own image, framed in a corner of the screen. It was dark behind him. She went to put up a hand to the screen then stopped. He was still smiling, as if he hadn’t seen her in days, weeks. His mouth was muffled but recognisable. ‘Where are you?’ she said and he turned to look around himself.
‘In Pietro’s car,’ he said, ‘in the car park of a service station near Verona.’ She could see the car’s interior now. His smile was still there but his eyes looked tired. Sad. ‘Where’s my Juliet?’ He leaned closer to the screen, and his face loomed, pale, unshaven.
‘Are you staying there the night?’ she said. ‘The weather’s awful here. Who’s driving?’
Small talk. ‘Pietro’s driving,’ he said, ‘but he’s pretty tired. I think he’ll be persuaded to let me have a go. We’re going to try and make it back tonight. The forecast’s,’ he hesitated, ‘the forecast’s not too bad.’ A silence: she didn’t know what to say. How to begin. She searched his face and caught a glimpse of her own, strained and guilty. ‘Pietro’s gone inside to get himself something to eat,’ Sandro said. ‘We’ve had … something of a breakthrough. He’s celebrating.’
‘A breakthrough?’ Overhead, as she said the word, there was a rumble then the crack and roll of thunder.
He hesitated again, looking from side to side. ‘A couple of things,’ he said. ‘Most importantly, they’ve tracked down the camper-van – it’s in Galluzzo in a camper park, just like you said.’ A quick beam of gratitude. ‘That’s where we’re headed first, all being well. Traffic’s pretty sticky, but –’ he moved, pushing himself back a little, and the screen pixellated ‘– I don’t want to talk about the case. I wanted to talk to you alone.’
‘Yes,’ she said, her hand still up close to the screen, and as she watched his fingers appeared to meet it, over-exposed. She had the strangest, most desolate feeling, as if they had entered a new universe where this was all their communication, as if she’d never see him in the flesh again. She pulled her hand back a little.
From not far off she heard thunder, felt it roll around the bowl that held the city, coming closer.
‘I’ve got something to tell you –’
‘I need to –’
They both spoke at the same time and then both laughed, miserably. ‘You first,’ said Sandro roughly.
‘I went up to Sant’Anna two, three days ago,’ she said. ‘I saw Maria Clara Martinelli and Luca Bartolini, thick as thieves in the bar.’ She saw his face change and before he could speak she said, ‘I knew her, you see. I knew Johanna Nielsson too.’ Then she told him all of it, going back forty years. She didn’t dare watch his face as she said it. She saw her own, foreshortened and fuzzy in the tiny frame, her white parting as she bowed her head.
From next door she could hear the murmuring still going, monotonous, insistent; she didn’t know if it was Giuli or Ragno.
And finished, ‘So I told her I’d kill her if she went on tormenting you.’ Sat back, drained. A silence. ‘So, you know. Want to investigate me for her murder?’
His face was still, watching her. There was something in it she averted her eyes from.
‘Thick as thieves,’ she said, because in that moment it appeared to her the crucial thing, the missing piece of the puzzle, ‘in that village bar. It was like, right then, I thought, they know, they know just what’s happened and between them they’re covering it up. Between them, don’t you see?’
But when he spoke he didn’t seem to see, he didn’t even seem to have heard. ‘All these years,’ and his voice was so low she could hardly hear it. ‘What would we have done,’ he said slowly, and he searched her face, ‘if she’d come back into our lives? She was going around checking in with everyone she could track down who’d been there, at La Vipera, all those years ago. She wanted to expiate her sins, or find closure or peace, for –’ and he hesitated ‘– for God knows what. She had five minutes in a campsite with Kaufmann, Gorgone ran away to America rather than meet her, Lucia Grenzi killed herself when they’d spoken. So who’s left?’
‘For the record,’ said Luisa, ‘I haven’t seen her since then. Not for forty years.’ And it came nearer, like a dark, cold mist, the thought that Johanna Nielsson might have tracked her down. ‘But it wasn’t just those who’d lived at La Vipera she was after, was it?’ And she didn’t want to tell him, suddenly. Her heart seemed to swell in her chest at the memory of Benedetta’s thin liver-spotted hand, her sister in grief.
‘No,’ said Sandro. ‘There was Lotti, Lotti who came to La Vipera for sex. She called him, too.’ His face seemed to shift, his eyes evading her.
‘But I thought you’d ruled out –?’
‘We have,’ said Sandro. ‘Lotti didn’t kill her and commit suicide,’ and his face was watchful. ‘I think he told someone he knew she was coming, and that signed his death warrant. Maybe the killer tried to make it look like Lotti was the murderer, killed himself out of remorse over the body of his victim. Two birds with one stone. And someone else told Nielsson she’d kill her. Someone she’d damaged beyond hope of a normal life.’
‘But Benedetta was locked up when Lotti died,’ she burst out, and he sat back. She tried to cover up, to save Benedetta. ‘And who would he have told? He spoke to no one, you said. No one except for –’ She broke off.
‘Except for Gianna Marte,’ said Sandro. ‘Who told Lotti where the truffles were. Who had a soft spot for her boss. Maybe –’
Luisa interrupted him. ‘Maybe she thought he was the heir,’ she said wildly, because suddenly she had a powerful sense of this woman, this woman she’d glimpsed in the hospital corridor, this greedy, conniving woman. ‘But he isn’t, you know,’ said Luisa. ‘Benedetta is, she’s her father’s heir, and her mother’s only her tenant, Bartolini too. She’s a rich woman but it’s brought her no happiness. I don’t think she even knows.’
Her head ached, and suddenly the fuzzy image on the screen, Sandro but not Sandro, made her feel strange and sick, combining with the thought of Benedetta on a bed, Gianna Marte pacing the corridors.
Sandro’s face moved closer. ‘But still,’ he said, ‘why was she killed? What has Benedetta’s inheritance to do with –?’ and she saw that pixellation again as he shifted his face away a second. ‘We still don’t know for sure what they did, back at La Vipera, what Johanna Nielsson wanted forgiveness for.’
And then it swirled, it took shape. The coil on the wall, the tattoos on the wrists, the photographs in the book.
‘We found something,’ she said, and her face filled the small frame as she came closer to him. ‘We found something, Giuli and I. In Benedetta’s flat there was a scrapbook she’d had since she was a child. She had been pasting in photographs.’ She hesitated. ‘Babies. For years and years. And then the last week – cu
ttings from the newspaper. About the murders. I spoke to the ex-husband and he said there was no child, they had no child, no miscarriage. But I fitted her –’ she paused, thinking of Sandro and what he might think of her citing female intuition, steady, cynical Luisa ‘– I fitted her for her wedding dress and I felt …’
What had she felt? Under her fingers a softness at the waist of an otherwise slender child, and more: she had felt a chill in Benedetta’s stillness, her silence on her wedding day. ‘I think,’ she said, ‘I think the tattoo they have is of a foetus, and I think Benedetta had a child before her marriage. I don’t know what happened to it.’
It was out. It was out, in a voice she hardly recognised as her own. Luisa felt a darkness open inside her, a cleft in the hillside, black and cold.
What was Sandro saying? Was he saying, ‘I know. I know’?
If one needed a reason to kill Johanna Nielsson, even forty years on –
She tried desperately to cling to what she knew. ‘The concierge in Benedetta’s building said there was woman who came round, who said she was the housekeeper. A do-gooder type, churchy type, German or Germanic –’ but she broke off at the sight of Sandro.
His face seemed to pale, to waver; he was silent and then, imperceptibly, he nodded. She couldn’t read his expression. She didn’t dare lift her fingers to the screen again, for fear his wouldn’t come to meet them. And then he spoke. ‘All these years,’ he said, and his voice was so heavy with sadness.
‘I know,’ she said. The thunder rolled again, and the window lit blue-white, almost immediately afterwards. The image froze.
‘I never –’ His mouth was moving. And then he was gone.
Chapter Twenty-Five
‘AH, SHIT,’ said Sandro to himself, staring at the screen, a drumming in his ears. He’d heard a crack, the rumble of thunder, he knew what must have happened – the electrics had been blown – but all he could think was she was gone. He’d never see her again. And then the sound changed and he realised it was Pietro, knocking on the window, a cardboard tray of coffees in one hand and a greasy paper bag in the other. He leaned over and shoved the door open, and Pietro climbed in, handing him the bag.
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