A Darkness Descending (10 page)

Vesna didn’t need to be doing number five. She’d done the others already, but as she’d finished up in number nine, the third-floor room immediately above, and had paused, mid-hum, as she made a last pass with her glasscloth over the bathroom mirror and listened to the near-perfect silence, something had chilled her. Vesna was neither prone to the sixth sense nor a believer in it but she’d had a grandmother who read the Tarot and could feel disaster coming. Had known, for example, when her youngest son, Vesna’s uncle Maciej, was no more than fifteen minutes late for Sunday dinner that he was dead under his motorbike beside a motorway bridge. They’d all known he was reckless, and motorbikes weren’t safe and the bridge was the least safe part of the journey, that was how they’d explained it to themselves. But the fact remained:
I saw it
, her grandmother had said.
The wheels spinning.

‘Hello?’ Hesitantly Vesna rattled the doorknob, the morning sun on her back. A sweat broke under her arms in the heat. ‘Signora?’ She couldn’t even remember the woman’s name. Had they bothered with the passport? She thought not: it came to her by the same gift of – what? Foresight, hindsight, or just call it intuition – that this woman hadn’t used her real name, anyway. This woman was not on a late holiday, recharging the batteries with a few days by the sea. She hadn’t been out of her room since Monday.

Louder, Vesna called again, rattled harder. From downstairs she heard Calzaghe’s voice raised in disgruntlement.
What on earth are you up to
?

Vesna felt in her pocket for the pass key. One last time she called, pleading now.
‘Signora.’
She fitted the key in the lock, and the light flooded in from behind her.

*

Parked in the mild early morning outside the anonymous apartment block to the north of the city, it took Sandro less than an hour’s surveillance to conclude that, for once, he was right and Luisa was wrong. At least about post-traumatic stress, and in this specific instance.

Of course, he’d have to come back, he’d have to have something to put down on paper, but he’d seen the man’s face, while he was coming out on to his concrete balcony and lighting a cigarette, and that had been enough. Sandro, never usually satisfied, might almost have been pleased with himself, only it wasn’t that kind of outcome.

And it was mostly down to luck. He’d arrived at eight in the battered Fiat, dusty with fallen leaves and sticky with whatever lime trees gave off, had stepped out of it just as a young woman was leaving the apartment block, jaunty with her new autumn wardrobe and a job to go to, scooter helmet hanging from her braceleted wrist. She had been in a good mood, or pitied the state of his car, or Sandro must have chosen the right form of words when he approached her or had the right expression on his face, because she dimpled back at him obligingly, and answered willingly.

‘Yeah, poor guy,’ she’d said, lowering her voice, transferring the scooter helmet to her other hand while she got out her keys. ‘Up there.’ And she’d indicated the balcony on the first floor. ‘It really did do something weird to him, you know? Not that I knew him well. But they row, him and his wife, and they never did before. I thought I heard him crying once.’ And she stared briefly into Sandra’s face at the uncomfortable thought of that, a middle-aged man crying, before briskly turning on her heel.

He’d climbed back into the car, pausing briefly to register that it could go either way, this benign neglect of his vehicle: either it was so filthy it had become invisible and therefore perfect for surveillance, or else someone would register a complaint about it.

Window wound down, he had sat back in the driving seat and looked up. A middle-aged man crying: to Sandro it seemed the most unsurprising thing in the world. Failure, disappointment, age, boredom: never mind trauma. Plenty to cry about, even if he’d never done so himself, trained out of it in the pointlessly busy corridors of the police station, just fill in another form instead. And then the man had come out on to the balcony, a woman’s voice calling querulously from behind him. He’d patted the pocket of his dressing gown and got out the almost empty pack of cigarettes, leaned heavily on the parapet and lit up. His face as fallen as a bloodhound’s, unshaven, the man would have been looking straight into Sandra’s face that was staring back at him from the car’s open window, if he hadn’t been so utterly unfocused, so completely lost to the world around him.

How could it do that to you? The woman had died two cars behind him – not even his fault, or had it been? Sandro had got out the file, and looked at the details of the accident again. He studied the traffic-analysis diagrams: a familiar enough story. Witnesses: police had been quick on the scene and they’d managed to get a few statements. The claimant had braked late and hard when a car had hit the crash barrier in front of him, and the car behind had gone into him and the one behind that had been crushed by a truck, a big shunt. Tricky to disentangle who’d been at fault: the coroner’s court certainly hadn’t managed it.

But the man would have lain in bed afterwards trying to sleep with the details of the dead woman’s family circling in his head, their faces in the paper, at the inquest, the schools her children attended, her colleagues at the travel agency where she’d worked. He would have gone over what he had done, what he had seen, how it had felt as the first car impacted. What he might have done differently.

Up on the balcony, the man lit another cigarette from the stub of the first. Sandro put the files away and started the engine: two storeys up, the man didn’t register any of it, continued smoking with a hand whose tremor was visible even from the pavement below.

The wife would have made him claim, or some lawyer friend, thinking they were helping.

Indicating carefully, Sandro drew on to the expressway that would lead him to the Viadotto dell’Indiano, and back south to the Oltrarno.

Some people were able to sidestep a death as if with a practised movement – nothing to do with them, they were alive. But for most it stood in their path a long time, like a beggar with his hand out. And when they managed to edge past death, even if they never turned around they knew that it would still be there, watching.

The trees below the old flyover were still green but turning just slightly seedier, the bamboo and rushes along the Arno still flattened after a late-August storm. They’d experienced the same storm in Castiglioncello, at the seaside: he and Luisa had holed up in the old lady’s musty front room among her heavy old Mussoliniera furniture and watched the wind whip the bright sea into a grey lather.

Sandro’s phone rang and he answered, tucking it under his chin as he negotiated his descent from the viaduct.

‘I’m taking her out.’ It was Luisa’s voice. ‘Maria Rosselli. I told her you should talk to her son alone, and would she come and have coffee with me? He’s expecting you at eleven.’

His head still filled with the insurance claimant’s hopeless face and the memory of the seaside storm they’d watched in silence, Sandro took a moment to make sense of what Luisa was saying. Eleven: he could just fit in a half-hour with the colonel first. ‘Yes,’ he said, swinging on to the roundabout and the four lanes that would lead him through the Isolotto and to the bridge leading north across the river.

It clamoured at him: fit it all in. ‘Thanks – I—’ He shifted the phone. Ridiculous, he thought, sliding between lanes, grappling for the gearstick as another car cut across him, horn blaring. The phone fell to the floor of the car, Sandro pulled in to the side of the road and felt his heart pounding. Luisa’s voice squawked up at him from the footwell. A mixer truck thundered past, jolting deafeningly in a pothole.

Breathe. Sandro leaned down and picked up the phone. An ominous silence.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I was driving.’

Luisa exhaled, but still said nothing;
I’ve told you over and over, switch it off when you get in the car.
‘I’m parked up now,’ he offered. Still silence.

He was on the edge of the Isolotto, a green residential rectangle between the Via Pisana and the Arno. It was a quiet, respectable neighbourhood. He had parked in the lee of a big development of apartment buildings, a row of shops set in below the living accommodation, bakery, laundry, electrical supplies. Nothing more innocuous, but after his slide across the traffic and Luisa’s grim silence, he felt jittery, ill-at-ease: the big trees between the apartment blocks, the balcony screens and expensive shutters could be hiding anything. Strung-out trauma cases like the one he’d seen this morning, for example.

‘I went up to check on the insurance claimant,’ he ventured.

‘Yes?’ said Luisa tersely, unwilling to let him off the hook.

‘Useful,’ he said, figuring now was not the time to tell her she’d been wrong about him. As if there was ever a right time for that conversation with Luisa. ‘I saw the guy, and a neighbour. It’s a start anyway.’ He breathed out. ‘Thanks for calling the old lady. That’s going to make things an awful lot easier.’

They hadn’t even discussed it this morning, he and Luisa. But she was someone who always liked to have things straight in her head, to get right to the point. If something needed doing, then don’t talk about it, just do it.

It had been a fretful night for both of them. Sandro had lain awake a long time: beside him he’d heard Luisa turning over, and back, and back again. Pietro, of course, had been foremost in Sandro’s mind, and never mind the Rossellis or the post-traumatic stress case.

‘Should I call Pietro?’ he’d asked Luisa anxiously as they’d left the restaurant, brushing through the demonstrators and paying them no attention now. ‘What d’you think?’

‘He’s your friend,’ Luisa had said. ‘Don’t ask me.’ Then she relented. ‘Leave it for tonight,’ she’d said. ‘It might blow over. They might have met the boyfriend, Chiara might have changed her mind about moving out – just leave it a night.’

As a result breakfast had been a hurried, silent affair, both of them preoccupied. They hadn’t even bothered to turn the light on in the kitchen but had each drunk a cup of coffee hastily in the early-morning gloom and then Sandro had left.

‘And Giuli called,’ Luisa said now. Outside the car window a woman was arriving to open up the laundry: as Sandro watched she pulled up the shutters with a loud rattle. ‘Lavanderia Verna’, read the sign. ‘Right,’ he said.

‘She’s in the Women’s Centre this morning anyway, she said, and she’ll ask around. About Flavia – Rosselli’s wife. About the post-natal care.’

There was something in her voice, or perhaps in the abruptness with which she fell silent, that stopped them both. A woman had disappeared, leaving her baby behind, and now they all circled anxiously, each with their separate reasons for wanting her back. The husband, pacing his apartment with a crying baby, Giuli, who would probably never have a child, he and Luisa, who’d had one and lost her.
Come back
, Sandro heard the words in his own head. Come back and everything will be fine, the world will settle back on its axis, the child will stop crying.

And if she didn’t come back?

*

Shouldering her way through the swing doors of the Women’s Centre at eight-thirty, Giuli’s heart sank. You couldn’t even see the reception desk for the rabble – queue was too orderly a word for it – that had already clustered around the sign informing them to take a ticket, sit and wait their turn, to leave dogs outside, not to eat or drink or use mobile phones in the lobby. Giuli could see at least one dog.

Three generations of a Roma family, with a girl who looked to be about eleven and was visibly pregnant, were hanging off the desk itself, claiming their place in the queue. They were talking fiercely amongst themselves in their language, of which Giuli didn’t understand more than a word or two, and she couldn’t tell if they were having a furious argument or this was just normal. Behind them an overweight, defeated-looking woman leaned on a vast all-terrain buggy so dirty it might have come out of a skip and probably had, with a grubby baby in it, eating a doughnut, and a toddler hanging off either side. Backed up against the wall, a skinny girl who looked like she’d been crying was standing next to an acnescarred boy, moving from one foot to another as if desperate to run, anywhere but here. Just when I need the place to be quiet, thought Giuli. More chaotic, noisier, more hopeless than ever.

As she edged past the buggy, the baby threw the doughnut on the floor and began to scream and thrash about. Sighing, Giuli lifted the hatch that allowed her behind the reception desk, and became officially responsible.

They all began to jabber at once, the Roma family crushing themselves against the counter and reaching out their hands to her.

‘Right,’ she said, one arm still in her jacket, the other tapping on the computer keyboard to boot up the system. ‘Who’s first?’

It turned out that the young gypsy girl was thirteen not eleven, and not only pregnant but in early labour. The woman with the buggy wanted surgical sterilization
and
was pregnant again; the skinny girl had symptomatic gonorrhea but her boyfriend didn’t. Yet. It took Giuli forty-five minutes to process them and by that time there were others. And then miraculously, abruptly and certainly very temporarily, the reception area was empty, only the lingering smell of dirty nappies and unwashed clothes in the overheated air.

The noise, however, had merely moved on further inside the old building, where the patients were dispersed among the various clinics: contraception, STD, maternity. The Roma girl had gone in an ambulance to the Meyer – the children’s hospital, the mother-to-be being still a child herself.

Peering through the glass doors that led out on to the dusty trees and swings of the Piazza Tasso and seeing the outside world bright and for the moment empty of new customers, Giuli lifted the counter hatch and came out. As she did so, little Maria the cleaner came around the corner, leaning on her wide soft broom to push it ahead of her. Maria looked ancient – she had only two remaining teeth and was as wrinkled as a walnut – but she spent all day in motion and had all her marbles, even if you couldn’t always understand what she was saying. No one knew how old she actually was.