The Viper
Page 32
Sullen, Kaufmann said nothing.
‘When Benedetta confessed,’ said Sandro, his eyes on the head against Bartolini’s shoulder, ‘did she perhaps say she couldn’t even remember doing it? Maybe she woke up covered in blood, a knife in her hands, in the hut?’
‘She came to me,’ Bartolini mumbled, not quite understanding. ‘And I went to Maria Clara. We worked it out between us, the ruse with the truffles. I sent him there to die. I couldn’t let him drag Benedetta into this again.’ And then his eyes widened. ‘You mean, she didn’t kill Nielsson? Benedetta didn’t kill her?’
‘I’d bet my life on it,’ said Sandro quietly. And in his arms Martine Kaufmann began to struggle and spit.
And then Maria Clara Martinelli took a step away from her and, standing her ground, confessed, stout and unashamed, to Giancarlo Lotti’s murder, there in the old farmhouse while they waited for the sirens to reach them.
*
The chapel on the hill was tiny, the filmy-eyed priest old enough to understand that God’s children did not always come in conventional shapes – they sometimes, indeed, had never before been in a church in their lives. But a child was a child, and a baptism, in Father Francesco’s tired old soul, was no more or less than an expression of hope for that child.
His congregation sat obedient in the small cool space. Two middle-aged policemen – the older walking with a pronounced limp – and their wives, one dark, one with hair of faded red. In through the door behind them walked the happy parents, of whom the father, Enzo, the old priest had himself baptised forty-seven years ago – and Rosetta Luisa, their daughter, their first child, wrapped tight in a knitted blanket of a lacy fineness he had not seen in thirty years.
And behind Enzo came his father, moving slowly, leaning heavily on the wheelchair he pushed. And in the wheelchair sat Enzo’s mother, Rosetta, no bigger than a bird, but her eyes brighter, her face more radiant than any bride’s. There would be a funeral, too, in the days or weeks to come, but for the moment all were living, all were present: all bore witness.
Afterwards on the doorstep in the soft spring sunshine, the almond blossom spilling down the hill towards the marvellous red canopy of Florence’s rooftops, the old priest stood back from them a little. He heard the quiet murmurings of their love for each other and he saw, standing humble above the great city where all of them had been born, that small unorthodox family in a kind of golden daze, and in that moment it seemed to him, after a lifetime of service to God in cold churches, an expression of everything that was holy.
*
It was late, so late – neither of them could sleep and, after long accommodation of nights like this between them, they both knew it. There was a baby now, and in both their heads that thought prompted a circling of emotions from anxiety to fear to joy and back again. Evenings fretting over school and doctors and friends and every fever, every tear, stretched ahead of them. And a broad open future where she danced and ran in sunshine.
Luisa pressed her cheek against Sandro’s broad back that was turned to her in the bed and she heard his sigh, expressing all of that. Her hand crept to his side and his came to meet it.
‘I know she hurt you,’ she whispered. ‘It’s all right, I know.’
‘I never –’ said Sandro.
‘I know,’ said Luisa.