A Darkness Descending (21 page)

‘No,’ said Rosselli sharply. ‘First. Before. When my mother encountered you, you were in Carlo’s office, yes? Asking him questions.’

They were facing each other in a kind of stand-off, an island parting the stream of the
passeggiata
, some of the evening boardwalk-strollers already giving the two men curious glances. Sandro raised both palms, in a conciliatory gesture. ‘Giuli – you know Giuli? – asked me to help,’ he said. ‘Her boyfriend Enzo got her involved with the Frazione.’ Rosselli unbent a little at that, giving a slight inclination of his head at Enzo’s name.

Emboldened, Sandro went on. ‘You’re their great white hope, if that’s not the wrong expression. She was worried about – about, well, she had all sorts of ideas, after you collapsed at the rally. Assassination attempt foremost among them. Sabotage. Poisoned umbrella. That kind of thing.’

He tried a smile: Giuli’s conspiracy theories had been off the mark, after all. Nonetheless, he recalled the rally he and Luisa had seen in the Piazza del Carmine, and the comedy uniforms in their little military vehicle, his own musings about the secret service. Before Flavia Matteo’s body had been found: before everything changed. The world of men and their roadbuilding and machinations and bureaucracy somehow seemed tissue-thin by comparison with what that woman’s pale corpse represented. Grief.

Rosselli frowned at Sandro’s tentative smile. ‘And you think she was wrong?’

Sandro stared at him, bewildered. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said helplessly. ‘You – what do you mean? You think – you were poisoned?’ He grappled with the absurdity of the suggestion.

‘I wasn’t poisoned,’ said Rosselli, and he seemed to collapse a little as he spoke. ‘No. I hadn’t eaten for days, I was under stress. As a matter of fact, the doctors in the hospital did all sorts of toxicological tests, and there was nothing.’

‘But you were – you thought it was a possibility?’

‘I don’t know what I thought,’ said Rosselli, looking grey with tiredness. ‘Carlo – Awocato Bastone – had been very jumpy. The bigger the party grew, the more he kept saying we needed to stay small, not to attract too much attention. To bide our time – but how does one do that? If the people come, then they come. Perhaps you don’t – perhaps you aren’t in sympathy with our cause. But this country needs us to stand up, that man – our prime minister—’ He broke off.

Sandro didn’t know whether to agree with him, to state his support, Yes, the country’s going to the dogs. But a lifetime’s vehement distrust of politics and politicians – even politicians like this one – kept him silent. Like the rest.

Rosselli was still talking. ‘And then I was – very anxious, about Flavia’s going, about the child, being alone with the child, about the rally. I hadn’t slept, I hadn’t eaten, and the
awocato
saying – well, I wasn’t thinking very intelligently.’ He frowned hard. ‘It all came at once. Anything seemed possible, there seemed to be danger everywhere.’ The look he gave Sandro beseeched him to understand. ‘I don’t know.’

There was a moment’s silence, the two men looking at each other in a kind of truce.

‘You need a square meal,’ said Sandro, and thought, you sound like Luisa. ‘That’s the first thing you need, if you’re going to get past this.’

‘Food,’ said Rosselli vaguely; for a moment Sandro tried to imagine him ever eating, even as a child, the only offspring of a single mother, her hand extended grimly with a loaded spoon in it. Perhaps to him food wasn’t the source of comfort it was to those with easier childhoods.

Over Rosselli’s head, mounted above the boardwalk, there was a brown state sign announcing the hotels in the vicinity, one-star, two-star, the graphic of a bed – always a single bed. Among them the Stella Maris, three-star. If the man turned and saw it, he would be back at square one, there’d be no evening meal, no semblance of normality, he’d have Sandro standing outside the hotel where his wife had died and recreating every terrible detail in his imagination.

‘A square meal and a good night’s sleep,’ said Sandro, and firmly he took Rosselli by the elbow and steered him past the sign. He could call Giuli later, and Luisa; he could wait for the man to sleep, but just now Rosselli was too close to the edge, he had to be the priority.

‘Everything else can be dealt with tomorrow.’

*

In the small, square room, too hot, not dark enough, the whine of a mosquito approaching and receding despite the plug-in and the spirals and the roll-on, Giuli couldn’t sleep.

Beside her Enzo was dead to the world: intimacy had that effect on him. Not just the verbal kind, although there’d been some of that and it did wear him out – but what women’s magazines called intimacy. By which they meant sex. She had worried about it, at the beginning of the relationship – she worried about it still, if truth be told, the weight of her experience against his innocence. There’d been something about Enzo that made even virginity a possibility, but she hadn’t needed to worry about that, in the end. He’d waited a long time – months of patient, constant waiting while she backed off and then returned – and in the event it had been Giuli who’d felt like the ignorant one. Never having been in love before, she had not known what to do at first.

She turned over, wide awake: intimacy had the opposite effect on her, it seemed to activate a particularly acute wakefulness full of restlessness and regrets. It prodded her, saying, ‘A whole life lived before you got to this? All your youth, all those pointless men, all that blundering cruelty and stupidity.’ So intimacy kept her awake, that and a day too full of bad news.

On this side, facing Enzo, she could at least breathe in the healthy smell of him and feel the steady warmth radiating off his solid, motionless presence, flat on his back. If she could just stop fidgeting. If she could just stop thinking about Flavia Matteo.

Flavia wasn’t on drugs. No. Giuli wouldn’t believe it – couldn’t believe it. Actually, in the airless room, with the harsh light of the street filtering through the blinds, as her head sifted and cleared, she
didn’t
believe it. Giuli had been an addict, she’d lived most of her youth among addicts, and she knew that they came in all shapes and sizes, all classes. They weren’t always toothless hookers or vagrants, there were playboys and businessmen among them – there were doctors, and lawyers, and mothers. Giuli pulled her hands up and laid them flat on top of each other, between her chin and the pillow. But Flavia Matteo’s child had been born plump and healthy, Clelia Schmidt had been adamant on the subject, she’d have known if the mother had been using drugs. It had to be – had to be something else, she’d said, fervently. Wanting to believe it. It was why she hadn’t wanted to-say anything at first.

It had been a while ago that Clelia had seen Flavia in the – the other clinic. Before the baby.

What other kinds of addiction were there? As many kinds as there were human beings, as many as there were fetishes. Gambling, exercise, online chat, clothes. Love; money; pornography. To each his own: was there anyone, Giuli wondered, with no weakness, no chink, no wound whereby the craving might enter the bloodstream? And what had been Flavia’s?

Behind her on the bedside table Giuli’s mobile hummed, set to silent, in receipt of a text message. Swiftly and silently she turned over and reached for it. Sandro.

Despite herself, Giuli smiled. Sandro would never be a master of the text. He went on too long, rambling: he wouldn’t use abbreviations, but he was even in this cramped form fully himself. Bad-tempered, despairing, kind, persistent. Worrying at this problem she’d got him into like a dog with a bone, seeking out the marrow, working into the crevices. Lying awake, like her.

He’d forwarded her a list of names, friends, or at least ex-colleagues, from the Scuola Agnesi where Flavia had worked: she’d stopped work at Easter, and the baby had been born in July.

She’d had friends … that was interesting. Of course, most people did: Giuli was the exception, too wary, too much of an outsider, and although she supposed that Luisa and Sandro counted, she thought of them more as family. Of course Flavia Matteo had had friends. Still, Giuli frowned at the word in the text, unable quite to picture the nervous woman she’d known among a group.
Go to the school tomorrow, maybe
, said Sandro. The text stopped short: he’d overrun his limit, or had sent it by mistake. As she held the little phone between her hands, intent, another text came in.

He was, he said almost as an afterthought, still at the seaside with Niccolò Rosselli, staying overnight: suicide confirmed, identity confirmed. Giuli’s eyes widened at the thought. Then –
Rosselli wants me to look into her death.
She could hear the despondency in it as if Sandro had spoken the words aloud.
Why me
? it seemed to say. Giuli clicked the mobile phone shut and lay on her back with it clasped to her chest between her folded hands like a talisman.

Because you’re clever, she thought as she fell asleep, at last. Because you’re the best. Because you’ve got a heart.

*

As her head shifted restlessly on the pillow, the memory of the look Chiara had given her across the emptying market weighed on Luisa’s chest like a stone. Should she have called Gloria and told her she’d seen her daughter? Gloria’s first question, of course, would be, How did she look? Did she look all right? And the honest answers respectively would have been,
Beautiful
, and, No.
She didn’t look all right to me.
Questions needed to be asked: tomorrow, in that market, Louisa would ask them. Someone must know that man Chiara was with.

Luisa reached with both arms across the empty space to where Sandro should be and left them extended there. When he got back, they’d – they’d do what they always did when he got back, and everything would be fine. His broad fingers wouldn’t falter as they passed over the place where the breast had been, they’d be as warm and certain as they always were, his skin would smell the same. Sandro would come back to her, even if their friends’ daughter had disappeared, even if another man’s wife was dead. He was the one who’d come back.

*

A kilometre from Giuli, four kilometres from Luisa and six from the apartment in which she’d grown up, Chiara lay wide-eyed in the dark in the double bed, thought about the man who had lain beside her, and then thought, there are some things you can’t tell your parents.

Tonight, he’d told her, he would have to go, he couldn’t stay. Where did he go? She knew her mother would ask the question, her friends – were they still her friends? – would ask it, but Chiara didn’t ask. She knew it was part of a game he was playing, a test he was setting her: a woman, he seemed to say as he got up from the bed, a real woman doesn’t have to ask. Men go about in the world and they don’t have to account for themselves. And she knew, he said, she knew he’d always be back. Because he said so.

He’d shown her photographs, of things men and women did. He said, ‘You need to be ready, of course. We’ll wait.’ She had had to control a reflex of disgust. No, she’d thought, never, that’s not love – but after a half-hour of his long fingers on her calf, stroking, she’d just thought, perhaps it could be love. Yes, it is. And then he’d said, But you’re not ready yet. And he had got up, and gone, and left her with the hairs still on end, where he’d touched her.

Chapter Fourteen

T
HE NEEDLE-SHARP LIGHT SHONE
early through the slats of the unfamiliar room’s shutters, but Sandro had no need to remind himself where he was. He felt as if he hadn’t slept more than an hour the whole night.

Carlo Bastone had called at two a.m., when Niccolò Rosselli, under the influence of the sleeping tablets Sandro had given him, had been snoring the deep, harsh snore of the heavily medicated, an untidy sprawl on his bed. On the other bed, Sandro had been dozing, no more than that. He’d texted Giuli, he’d called Luisa, later than she’d have liked but she was glad to hear his voice, she said. He smiled now in the pale early sun at the memory of his wife’s impatient
Yes.

Dozing at most – but enough to befuddle him when he’d heard an unfamiliar ring tone and only realized too late that it was Rosselli’s mobile. Retrieving it – eventually – from the jacket pocket into which he’d slipped it, Sandro had seen it still had a good charge on it. These old phones had a lot to be said for them: what he called the ‘magic phone’ Giuli and Luisa had talked him into, with its touchscreen and 3G and whatnot, died after an hour on the road. You had to carry any number of chargers around with you.

Missed call, Avv
, it had said on the screen. He had frowned at that, then his own phone had begun to ring and when he’d answered it, and heard Carlo Bastone’s voice, he made the connection. Sitting up, he’d cleared his throat.

Avv
for Avvocato.

Niccolò was still snoring now, his face grey as marble. Sandro’s phone told him it was six-twenty-two. On impulse he swung his legs over the bed and pulled on his trousers.

Looking fresh and spruce at the front desk with the sun flooding into his foyer, Salvatore smiled at Sandro as he emerged from the lift, as though it was the most normal thing in the world for a guest to go out for a stroll, unshaven and looking like death, at half-past six in the morning.

‘All right, sir?’ he said, raising his eyes from another paper – the early edition of the local rag, by the look of it.
Il Tirreno
, the holiday newspaper, full of complaints about the beach disco and cuts in ferry services. There’d be nothing in there about it.

‘All right,’ said Sandro warily, his eyes scanning the front page.

‘You’re here about the girl, aren’t you?’ said Salvatore. ‘If you don’t mind my asking.’

It was there on the front page. ‘WOMAN FOUND DEAD IN HOTEL BATH’. A large photograph of a hotel frontage; a smaller one beside it, a headshot.

‘Girl?’ In death Flavia Matteo receded from them, the middle-aged men who would grow older and more hangdog, the red-headed woman still beautiful, the young mother. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You mean Flavia Matteo. Yes. I’m here with her husband.’