A Darkness Descending (12 page)

Taking it all in – the sink, the toothbrush, the chemist’s paper folded, the open packet, the white palm of the woman’s hand marked like a schoolchild’s – Vesna wondered if she would ever be able to erase it now, like the pink stain to the tub. How would you go about cleaning blood from marble? And then with that thought in her head she had dashed for the bath, plunged her arms in and grappled for the body – the woman – felt her bob and slip under her hands, grabbed and pulled and hauled until the woman’s weight shifted abruptly, up and flopping across the bath’s edge and on top of Vesna. She still felt the spongy flesh between her fingers.

‘I’m going to be sick,’ she said to Calzaghe, turned aside and vomited into the laurels, just as the ambulance pulled up at the rusting gate.

‘For the love of God,’ he said with disgust. ‘Jesus.’

And, head down between her knees, the sour smell of her own stomach contents in her nostrils and something wet on her cheek, Vesna felt a different hand on her shoulder, a gentle touch.

There’s a baby, she thought, head down. The
linea nigra
means a baby. Where’s her baby?

‘All right, kid,’ a woman’s gruff, comforting voice said. Still crouched Vesna turned her head just a little and saw the sleeve of a paramedic’s uniform. ‘It’s all right now, sweetheart.’ And Vesna put her own hand to her cheek and found that she really was crying.

*

Damn, damn. Parking up illegally behind the Botanic Gardens, Sandro was late, and sweating like a menopausal woman. What was he even doing here, now they knew it was …? Well, domestic. Messy, miserable, relationship stuff, no conspiracy after all. Sandro couldn’t have said, except there’d been something about the soldiers last night that had interested him. And maybe after all he was trying to wrest it back, to prove to the monstrous Maria Rosselli that there might be bigger forces at work here.

Opposite the army barracks he passed an old-fashioned bar, and glanced up at the original signage in tarnished gilt; the Bar dell’Orto was just the kind of place that would have tempted him in if he’d had time or excuse. Standing in the window a lad in camouflage fatigues, raising a glass to his lips with a tattooed hand, gave him a look; a couple of men in the dark berets and sand-coloured uniform of the higher ranks watched the new arrival curiously. Ten-past ten, and he had to be back down in Santo Spirito by eleven.

And when you were pushed for time, everything else slowed down. Somewhere in the bowels of the ancient shabby building, someone took an age to respond to the intercom that Sandro pressed repeatedly. The vast heavy doors took an impossible time to open electronically and then, once he’d found his way inside the converted convent that housed the logistics unit, to the gloomy little reception area, he encountered only obstructiveness. An attitude so guarded and obtuse it amounted to naked hostility.

It was the thing he hated more than any other. Having himself been a part of an organization like this, Sandro knew the mentality: keep close, give nothing away. And now he was on the wrong side of the glass screen, it made him want to commit murder.

A male and a female soldier in camouflage fatigues behind the armoured glass – who were they afraid of? A new Red Brigade targeting a sub-section of the administration of the smallest standing army in Europe? – went on chatting for a good two minutes before the seated man turned and eyed Sandro.

‘Yes?’ He was about thirty-five and exceptionally good-looking, which for some reason annoyed Sandro even further. That and the fatigues, irresistible to women, no doubt. A certain kind of woman, anyway: he tried to picture the expression on Luisa’s face if she saw the man. A name displayed on the desk – in a concession to the age of openness and accountability – read Canova. In theory Sandro could complain about his rudeness. Practice was a different matter.

Sandro didn’t even know if it was worth opening his mouth. Why hadn’t he taken the colonel’s name?

‘I spoke to one of your officers last night,’ he said, without much hope. ‘This is the Regional Command? Tall guy. Colonel. He said to come and see him if I wanted.’ Reluctantly he fished out his card and slid it under the glass screen. ‘It’s – about the Frazione Verde.’ The soldier took the card and turned his back on Sandro again. He said something to the female soldier, and her expression, lip curled, gave Sandro a good idea of what it was.

‘It is concerning?’ Sandro saw that the woman’s eyes never left Canova: he imagined there were rules about relationships that in this case, and probably plenty of others, were being ignored.

‘To do with roads,’ Sandro offered, leaning closer to the glass again. The soldier didn’t turn back for a good thirty seconds, but when he did Sandro, mastering himself, smiled.

‘Stupid of me not to take his name. I didn’t want to detain him, you see.’

‘Yes,’ said the soldier. Next to him on the reception desk was a newspaper. Reading upside down Sandro saw a headline: ‘ONE DEAD, ONE INJURED IN AFGHANISTAN’. That made it easier to control his impatience somehow: they were just boys, out there. This one might be a bastard, but … ‘Sorry,’ he said again.

The soldier looked athim, expressionless. ‘It would be Colonello Arturo,’ he said, with an exhalation of impatience. Slowly – still slowly – he lifted a telephone. Sandro stole a glance at his watch, and had to suppress a groan. Ten-twenty.

By the time the female soldier left him, having led him in ungracious silence to the man’s office in a high and distant corner of the old convent, it was ten-twenty-five. Sandro guessed that he had perhaps twenty minutes. What a waste of time. He knocked.

Arturo’s office was surprisingly small and dingy; he sat behind a wide desk covered with scratched imitation leather, surmounted by a computer and a small wire document tray into which, on Sandro’s arrival, he deposited a folded newspaper. Legs stretched languidly to one side of the desk, the tall officer, raising his head to examine Sandro in the doorway, seemed out of proportion to his surroundings, his limbs too long, attitude too relaxed. On the wall above his head was a crowded shelf of books and a small plaster bust.

‘
Permesso?’
said Sandro awkwardly.

‘Ah,’ the colonel said, stretching. ‘It’s you. Mr Private Eye.’ He gestured to a chair against the wall. ‘Pull up a seat.’

As labyrinthine Italian bureaucracies went, Sandro reflected while he sat, the army probably had to be the weirdest. Forbidden by the constitution actually to go to war, sporadically dumped in some war zone or other under NATO’s aegis, to be shot at or, as now, blown up by the Taliban, most soldiers seemed to Sandro to spend their time either taking potshots on rifle ranges by the seaside, in endless convoy on the motorways, or else holed up in offices like these, twiddling their thumbs. Heirs to the Roman legionaries.

‘You said I could come,’ began Sandro tentatively. ‘It was about the Frazione Verde.’

Arturo looked at him as if working out whether there’d be any amusement in it for him. He smiled lazily.

‘D’you think they’ll last?’ he said, leaning abruptly over the desk towards Sandro and taking him by surprise, his long legs folding up like a grasshopper’s. He was bored stiff, Sandro realized: might well say more than he intended to, just out of ennui. How old was he … fifty? Ten years off retirement. There was a photograph of him on the shelf, in full dress uniform, hand on the pommel of a sword.

The soldier pursed his lips. ‘The party, I mean? It’s interesting, I can see. But after the other night, when Rosselli passed out on stage …’ He gave a little exhalation of contempt. ‘Who’s paying you?’

Sandro shifted uncomfortably. ‘Ah – it’s complicated,’ he said. Because he could hardly say ‘the vengeful mother-in-law’. He improvised. ‘The party’s administration realize that things are at a delicate stage. They want to clean up their act – that is, get more organized. Make sure there’s nobody inside working against them, that kind of thing.’

‘Or outside the party?’ Arturo set his fingers together as if in prayer, regarding Sandro over the top of them with the same mild amusement.

‘Well, yes,’ he said, startled. ‘I suppose. Do you know anything about that?’

‘You mean us?’ The lazy smile. ‘We’re keeping an eye on them,’ he said, ‘no more than that. You have to admit, they’re a whole arsenal of loose cannon. What do they believe in? Sabotaging power stations? Stopping the functioning of the city, obstructing progress?’

Sandro recognized an uneasy kinship between him and this man: a shared weariness at the thought of idealism, at its disconnection from the practicalities.

‘Well, there’s the road on the edge of Scandicci,’ he said, reluctantly. ‘The new shopping mall. I happen to know that there are obscure permissions to be obtained from the army for road-building. It may be how things work in Italy, but do we really need that? Aren’t they entitled to raise their objections? Don’t they have – a democratic right to do so?’

‘Of course,’ said Arturo, who seemed to be enjoying himself. ‘They have rights. Just as we – the bureaucracies they so object to – have duties. We gave permission for the road because all the technicalities had been observed, the signatures obtained, the fees paid. It didn’t happen overnight, it’s taken five years. You can’t just deny on a whim a business consortium the right to the lawful exercise of commerce.’ He smiled. ‘And as I’m sure you’re aware, we aren’t so important; it’s just a formality, the army’s permission for roads. One of those things.’

Sandro did know. The colonel seemed completely relaxed: he was in the right, after all. They were going to be so delighted, thought Sandro, the lot of them: the
Berlusconiani
, the
comune
, the vested interests, when they found out. The road would go through and they wouldn’t have to lift a finger to finish off the Frazione. The sudden disappearance of a post-natally depressed woman, the partner of the movement’s leader, would do their work for them.

Still Sandro persisted, Maria Rosselli’s grim, triumphant face haunting him. He realized he’d agreed to take this on to defend poor Flavia Matteo, not to hunt her down.

‘But even if Rosselli doesn’t get to parliament,’ said Sandro. ‘If he becomes – let’s say –
assessors
for roads in the
comune
? Wouldn’t that put a spoke in it for you lot? He could cause trouble.’

Arturo just shook his head a little. ‘We’re used to that,’ he said. ‘It keeps us busy.’ He smiled again. ‘Keeps us out of Afghanistan. Some of us.’

Sandro felt his shoulders sag, and despite himself he let out a sigh. He gazed despondently at Arturo’s bookshelf. Russian literature. He squinted at the name on the bust: Aristotle. Sandro wanted not to like this man, but it was difficult.

‘Look,’ said Arturo then, almost kindly. ‘It seems to me that if anyone’s got a reason to have a go at the Frazione, it’d be some business interest or other, wouldn’t it? Or at a pinch, the secret service boys. But to be honest, the amount of time I’ve spent watching the Frazione Verde mill around aimlessly at one rally or another, they’re just not a threat to anyone. They don’t need – what? Sabotaging?’ He laughed. ‘They’re going to fizzle out of their own accord.’

And with that he straightened up and glanced at his watch.

Damn, thought Sandro, checking his own. He’s right, isn’t he? And I’ve got to go.

*

Luisa hadn’t expected it. Why not? What else was the woman to do with her grandchild? It was the practical solution, not to mention better for Sandro: he could talk to Niccolò Rosselli without interruption.

‘You brought the child,’ she said blankly.

Maria Rosselli, stern as some kind of governess rather than a blood relative, stood at the door holding the baby, swaddled to a stiff cocoon, in her arms with a faint air of dislike. It – he – was asleep, upright, his plump face flushed pink, with a small spike of hair protruding from under a woollen hat. Round and rosy and healthy, he did not, thought Luisa, look like his father.

Irrationally, Luisa hadn’t expected the baby only because babies did not feature in her life. No children of her own, no nieces, no nephews, no grandchildren. Cousins had children, but Luisa had stayed out of their orbit, consciously or otherwise, in the thirty years since losing her own. She leaned towards the baby, saw his mouth work at an invisible milk source in his sleep.

‘I left the perambulator downstairs.’

Perambulator. It would be the huge old thing Maria Rosselli had gone to Milan to buy when Niccolò was born, fifty-odd years ago. Where could you keep such a thing, in this day and age?

‘He’s put on weight since she went,’ said Maria Rosselli coolly. ‘It’s the formula milk. It’s marvellous, these days. All there is for mothers, now.’ But there was still that expression of distaste. Although it was warm the old woman was wearing an ancient winter coat of very good quality, and a hat.

Luisa found she wanted to offer to take the child from her but she did not. ‘Come in,’ she said, and stepped back to allow the old woman into the apartment.

She’d taken the morning off work at Frollini: Beppe had, as always, been laidback about it but Giusy had moaned. Luisa almost never took time off. ‘I’ll be in at midday,’ she said when Giusy had finished. ‘That’s precisely an hour and a half.’

With a heavy sigh that indicated she was here very much against her will, Maria Rosselli deigned to enter. She looked around as she passed through the hall, right to left, for something to disapprove of, a big plasma screen perhaps, or a marital bed with satin and flounces and cushions, but she found nothing and remained silent, reserving judgement. Luisa ushered her into the
salotto
, the big sitting room with its small, ancient television, where they spent almost no time at all. But she didn’t want Maria Rosselli in her safe cosy kitchen, silently criticizing her spice rack and the contents of her draining board, and putting her on edge.

‘Here,’ she said, and suddenly she could stand it no longer; seeing the old woman holding the child as though he might be a bomb or a hostage, she took the baby with one quick movement before Maria Rosselli could say anything, and set him down on the sofa. Like some sort of chrysalis, he didn’t stir in his swaddling. ‘Coffee?’ she said.