A Darkness Descending (35 page)

No rain this morning but the air had cooled, she could almost feel the sky thickening with the approach of autumn. Luisa opened her eyes.

This wasn’t anything as concrete as a tumour, but the fear was there. There was something wrong, something badly wrong.
This is not good
, were the words in her head. And this time it wasn’t Luisa who needed help.
You’re in trouble, aren’t you
? She felt it from across the city. Somewhere out there, in her pale high-heeled shoes, in her floating pretty dress, Chiara was drowning.

Luisa’s appointment at Careggi was at eleven-thirty. No point saying anything: Sandro would only worry unnecessarily. It was just routine anyway, it was the check-up and the reconstruction talk. She’d cancel it, of course. There were more urgent things. There was Chiara.

Uneasily she turned over in bed, unconsciously setting her back against Sandro. She needed to talk to him, just not yet: about Chiara. There would have to be a strategy for the whole Pietro thing. That was madness, it was out of control. But it came to her that it wasn’t just Sandro’s old stubborn streak, his touchiness, his paranoid reticence where his former partner was concerned. Pietro
had been
behaving strangely. There
was
something he wasn’t telling them: in the cool, sharp early light it became quite clear to Luisa. He’d been funny with her yesterday, his eyes constantly darting away from hers.

Beside her Sandro shifted, but didn’t wake. What time had he come in? Two, perhaps three: he’d have had no more than five hours’ sleep. Luisa sat up: carefully she eased out of the bed. She shivered.

In slippers and dressing gown she padded into the kitchen and began to dismantle the coffee pot.

He came up behind her, his breath sour from sleeplessness but his arms warm: she relaxed back fractionally against him, the coffee pot still in pieces in her hands.

He cleared his throat. ‘So when’s your appointment again?’ he said.

*

A woman stood outside the taped door of the Frazione Verde’s offices in the grimy alley and looked at the handwritten sign. Another came up beside her. They were both middle-aged, with weathered faces: one had wiry grey hair and the other dyed black, with a squared-off fringe. They were wrapped up in layers of clean, warm, unfashionable clothing, and their noses wrinkled against the alley’s smell of urine and garbage.

‘It’s a shame,’ said the dark woman, frowning hard. A man, a little older, wandered up behind them, neatly dressed in a waxed jacket and carrying some shopping from the market. He peered at the sign.

‘
Thank you for your continued support, friends,’
it read. ‘
The closure of our offices is temporary, due to police intervention: we will soon be opening a new centre of operations where all will again be welcome. Please refer to our website for details.’

‘It’s more than that,’ said the grey-haired woman grimly. At the end of the alley some teenagers appeared, thumbs flicking over their mobiles: three girls, two boys, late-teens, closer to twenty. They lifted their heads as they approached and stood for a moment in front of the sign, mobiles now abandoned.

‘OK,’ said the tallest of the girls, lanky in jeans. Cheerful. ‘So. What’s the plan?’

*

Perhaps this was how it worked, thought Giuli, standing at the ugly little bar around the corner from the Women’s Centre and waiting for her coffee. You pretended nothing was the matter and hoped for the best.

Had he been unable to meet her eye, as he left? Swinging his USB keys nervously. ‘I’m going into work,’ he’d said. ‘I want to monitor the Frazione website, people will want to know what’s going on. They’ll be posting stuff.’

Or had she been unable to meet his?

‘Sounds good,’ she’d said. ‘I’ll call you.’

It was eight o’clock: the Addictions clinic opened at half-past, and she’d arranged to see Barbara in here. Best for both of them to stay away from the Centre for this chat.

The barman yawned as he set her coffee down, showing tobacco-stained teeth. Another reason to give up: just not today, thought Giuli. She smiled her thanks warily.

Say nothing, don’t rock the boat. The alternative was impossible: she couldn’t
ask
him. Enzo, do you know anything about what the vice squad were looking for?
Was it you
?

She knew it had to be arrived at rationally. Pulling the coffee towards her, Giuli thought without hope of Sandro’s diligence, the way he could just shift the irrelevant and the unreasoned out of the way, and focus. Trouble was, she didn’t feel rational, she felt like there was nothing in her body that was fixed, no ticking brain, no bone or muscle, only a jelly of hormones and panic – soft, frightened girl stuff.

She’d watched Enzo pack his briefcase with his back to her, transferring the USB keys from his pocket to the case as though they were the keys to Fort Knox. Zipping carefully, something deliberate about the way he wasn’t turning round. ‘I’m going to be a bit tied up this morning,’ he’d said, as he left, turning away too quickly on the stairs. ‘I’ll call you.’

She spooned some of the froth on her cappuccino into her mouth.

Of course it wasn’t him: he knew too much about computers, he’d have been able to hide it if it had been him. Plus, she knew him. This was Enzo, he didn’t have a bad bone in his body.

That wasn’t logic, that was emotion. That was love. Back to rational, OK? Look at his behaviour. Was he acting guilty? Some people might see guilt: he’d been horrified and panicky, he hadn’t been able to meet her eye.

Or had that been her, not meeting his? She took a sip, tasted the creaminess with gratitude, felt the kick of the caffeine.

He wasn’t acting nonchalant, that was for sure, and that would be worse; that would be cast-iron evidence of guilt.

The barman’s head lifted: Barbara stood in the doorway. From the look of her, Giuli thought the nurse might turn on her heel at the slightest provocation so she turned back to the barman, asked for two more coffees and took them, without a word, to the furthest corner of the small space.

‘Best to meet here,’ said Giuli warily as she approached. ‘Farmiga had a go yesterday. I don’t know what her problem is.’

‘Her problem is, she’s a bitch,’ said Barbara, and a flush appeared on her cheeks. She pulled at her collar and lifted the cup. ‘She hates the lot of us. Her latest man’s supposed to be giving her trouble, but she doesn’t need an excuse. I don’t know what she’s doing working at the Centre at all.’ Her smile was pinched. ‘Unless she’s a plant.’

Now it was Giuli’s turn to flush. Did Barbara think she was some sort of conspiracy theorist? It seemed to her that it was like everything evil in the world; if you were lucky, you could go through life not seeing it – the babies with cigarette burns, the abused nine year olds, the family men trawling the internet for sex, the bent policemen, the government working against the people. But once you saw it, you saw it everywhere. What
was
Farmiga doing working at the Centre?

‘Who’d have her?’ she said almost reflexively, although she knew plenty of them would. A woman like Farmiga was good news for a particular sort of man: he could treat her how he liked, she wouldn’t flinch. Did people see Giuli like that? She was tough enough.

‘Some good-looking Nazi,’ said Barbara. ‘Some tall handsome bastard full of testosterone.’ And laughed drily. ‘Who’d want one of those?’

Not me
, thought Giuli, looking up startled because it was true, and because she hadn’t thought that someone like Barbara would want one either. Or Chiara. And for one tiny, warm second Enzo’s face appeared before her, frowning, serious, kind. True. Not rationally, but in her gut, she knew it: he was true.

She lifted her coffee to her lips and, suddenly queasy, set it down again untasted. Barbara’s face was pale and set.

‘It’s all right,’ Giuli said. ‘You don’t even have to tell me, not right out.’

‘I don’t?’

‘I think I know. I know why Flavia came to talk to you, I know what her – addiction was. I don’t know who – who else was involved, I don’t know how it started – but I know what she couldn’t give up.’

Barbara stared.

‘Same old, same old, wasn’t it?’ said Giuli. ‘It was love.’

*

If anything, Giovanni Bastone’s office seemed dustier, dimmer and more cluttered than when Sandro had first seen it. Remembering with surprise how deftly Giuli had taken control then, he wished she were with him this time, too.

The lawyer sat behind his heaped desk under the high coffered ceiling: all those ancestors, all that wealth, reduced to this dishevelled hulk of a man in his grand but decaying apartments. ‘Niccolò’ll be here – ah, soon,’ he said helplessly. ‘I don’t know where Enzo is. I’ve called him but his phone’s switched off or something.’ He looked grey.

‘He’s been a help, I imagine,’ said Sandro, still standing. ‘I’m sure he’ll be in touch, and we’ve an arrangement to go and see Niccolò. But it’s you I wanted to talk to.’

In fact, he’d said to Luisa, ‘I can talk to Bastone later, I’m coming with you.’

He’d known from the way she stiffened as he mentioned the hospital appointment that she hadn’t been going to say anything: he wouldn’t have put it past her not to turn up at all.

‘No way,’ she’d said firmly, turning in his arms. ‘It’s just routine, I don’t need you there. I
don’t, caro
, darling, sweetheart, I don’t. I can manage.’

‘On your own? On the bus?’ He didn’t set her free.

There’d been a fractional hesitation. ‘Gloria’s coming,’ she’d said. ‘I asked her the other day. She – she’ll drive me.’

And that had been that. Had she been lying? It wasn’t a question you could ask Luisa: in any marriage it was the question you waited longest to ask.

‘They won’t let us back into the Frazione’s offices,’ said Bastone now, and he seemed close to tears. Had this man ever practised as a lawyer? It came to Sandro that the qualification, the beautiful consulting rooms, the books and the panelling and the view of the piazza were all a distraction, a rich man’s toys.

And the money was why he’d come to Bastone. It all came down to sex or money: if anyone wanted to pull the Frazione down, it had to be because of money. ‘Some business interest or other,’ like Colonello Arturo had said. And was that why he couldn’t get the soldier’s face out of his head?

If it hadn’t been for the computer raid, it might not have occurred to Sandro. But who had access to those computers, real access? Rosselli, Enzo, Bastone. Would Rosselli want to bring down his own party? Drive his own wife to suicide? And Enzo? However much he liked the boy, had learned to trust him, Enzo was still an unknown quantity, Sandro had to remind himself of that. Enzo had the expertise.

But Bastone … He had known Flavia Matteo as long as she’d known Rosselli. Luisa had told him what Maria Rosselli had said about Bastone, and his family: tightwads, misers – not vulgar, though, heaven forbid. The old school of Florentine landowning semi-nobility: incapable of earning a decent living, selling off bits of land, cranking rents out of failing
contadini.

So if what Pietro had turned up at the land registry was accurate, it looked like Bastone – or his family – had a financial stake in the Frazione’s downfall.
Should it come about
, and Sandro almost muttered the words superstitiously. He found himself hoping fervently that by some miracle this shambolic little unit, this ragtag mob of hippies and do-gooders and eco-recyclers, would survive to fight another day. Not for him, but for Giuli, and Enzo, and Chiara.

Chiara. The girl’s face appeared to him, fresh, dark-eyed, eager: when had he last seen her? When she’d thanked him for the iPod, a year ago? Children grow up, we have to get used to that. He thought of Luisa’s shoulders set stiff in his embrace this morning as she had told him:
I woke up certain she was in trouble, I mean real trouble.

The Frazione was in trouble too.

Then Giuli had called, the phone ringing even as he unclasped his arms from around Luisa, to say that she would meet him in the piazza at eleven. She was on the trail of something: he had known better than to interrupt her with questions. The message had been the same as last night’s: he had to sort it with Niccolò Rosselli for them to go over the apartment with a fine toothcomb; Giuli still hadn’t said what it was they were looking for – and Sandro hadn’t asked. So Bastone would have to be dealt with first.

And if the lawyering was a kind of smokescreen for the fact that Bastone was so wealthy he didn’t have to work, where had the politics come into it? To assuage his conscience? A young man’s indulgence? Only now Giovanni Bastone was no longer young.

Sandro had called Niccolò straight after hanging up on Giuli. He had sensed Luisa listening from the kitchen.

Rosselli had agreed to the request without hesitation.

‘We would try not to – cause too much disruption,’ Sandro had said, taken aback. Could this man really have so little to hide? Or nothing left to lose.

‘Eleven’s fine,’ Niccolò had said. ‘My mother – my mother will take care of the child. Do you want me there, too?’

‘I – um – sure,’ Sandro had said, improvising. ‘I’m sure we’ll need your help, at least initially. It’s your apartment, after all, she was your wife. But if it becomes distressing—’

Like Sandro, Rosselli hadn’t asked what it was they’d be looking for. Which was just as well.

Now Bastone was looking at him with undisguised panic, getting to his feet from behind the desk. He looked as though he hadn’t shaved or slept in a week.

‘You want to talk to
me
?’ he said.

‘Sit down,’ said Sandro gently, although it was not his place. Obediently, however, Bastone sat.

Sandro remained standing, his hands on the back of a beautiful polished wooden chair. ‘Do you practise much?’ he asked, almost by way of polite conversation. ‘What kind of law is your speciality?

‘Land law and tenancy agreements,’ said Bastone, looking bewildered. ‘But I – no – well. My mother isn’t so keen on – I’m taken up a great deal with the Frazione. With helping Niccolò.’