A Darkness Descending (38 page)

‘Not long,’ said Gloria. ‘I’ve been going over and over it in my head, and I don’t think it’s that long. She started going to the Frazione meetings months ago, but she was still my same girl. Then maybe – six weeks back? If anything, she eased off on the political arguments with Pietro, more – clammed up over it. Stopped – being my loving little girl, stopped with the messages, didn’t call in at work and say hello. But evenings she seemed always to be off in some corner talking to someone else. Him, I suppose.’

‘Talking?’

‘On the mobile. Texting, talking. It’s a different world, Luisa.’

‘Luisa Cellini?’

She knew the middle-aged nurse who called her name, looking around the room over her hornrims. She had a severe manner but her hands were always gentle. Luisa stood up.

‘You want me to come in with you?’ Gloria was getting to her feet.

‘Wait,’ said Luisa. ‘Just wait here.’

In the end she barely noticed what they said to her because as Luisa got to her feet she saw him across the room. Giancarlo, Chiara’s gay friend, reading a dog-eared magazine in the other section of the Portakabin. The sight of him immediately alarmed her. Was he ill? Was he waiting for someone?

Perhaps he was waiting for her. He hadn’t looked up when they said her name – but then maybe he wouldn’t have remembered it.

Oncologist first, a flying visit, head round the door with her notes in his hand. Didn’t even sit down, just smiled and dropped the notes on the desk for the breast surgeon.

‘Are you taking this all in, Signora Cellini?’ The surgeon turned out to be a woman. ‘It’s sometimes better to have someone with you for these consultations, you know. Doesn’t have to be your husband. To make sure all the information is – ah – on board?’

‘I know what’s involved,’ Luisa heard herself saying. ‘I’ve done a bit of looking into it.’

‘So we’ll pencil you in for a reconstruction just before Christmas?’

She nodded: it seemed she’d made her decision.

Walking back out into the waiting room she looked for Giancarlo but she couldn’t see him.

No sign of any recurrence. The scan is clear.
Had the oncologist said that? He must have said that, calculated Luisa, otherwise they wouldn’t have scheduled the reconstruction. The brain was a peculiar mechanism: she’d waited for those words all year it seemed, and at the moment at which they were delivered, she’d managed to absent herself.

‘Luisa?’ Gloria was breathless, on her feet. ‘You’re so pale. What did they say?’

‘Everything’s fine,’ she managed to say. ‘I’m going to be reconstructed.’ She tried a smile. ‘Let’s just sit here for five minutes. Is that OK?’

Gloria bustled about, rearranging them. ‘Of course. It’s a big decision – oh, that’s great, Luisa, that’s such a relief!’

Was it? Luisa decided she would think about it later.

‘There’s someone—’

She stopped. Someone I want you to meet? There were tears in Gloria’s eyes: she’d always been an emotional woman. There was nothing wrong with emotion, decided Luisa, wanting to put her arms around her friend, whose tears, she knew, were of gratitude for Luisa’s results.

‘I saw Pietro yesterday,’ she said, trying to make it sound casual. ‘Did he tell you?’

Gloria flushed. ‘He did.’

‘I suppose he said I was trying to pump him for information. Or gossip, or something.’

Gloria frowned furiously. ‘No, he – no.’ So he had.

‘I don’t like it either, you know,’ said Luisa, abruptly impatient with all this pussyfooting around. ‘I knew there were things he wasn’t telling me, I’m not stupid.’

Gloria just shook her head tightly. Luisa leaned in towards her.

‘Since when did we all stop being proper friends, friends who trust each other, help each other? Is it to do with Sandro’s job? Sandro’s petrified of overstepping the mark with Pietro, you know that? Their friendship’s more to him than anything.’

Gloria seemed to collapse in front of her, pink with agitation.

‘It’s the job,’ she said, rubbing at her eyes. ‘It’s this job he’s on – he isn’t even supposed to tell
me
about it. It’s to do with the Frazione – he’s been seconded to – to another squad. Now he thinks that’s why it’s all gone wrong with Chiara, why they both stopped being able to talk to each other. Because he got so het up over her becoming involved politically, and especially with the Frazione – because he was worried something might happen to her.’

‘He wasn’t supposed to tell you about it?’ said Luisa slowly. ‘This job?’ Hush-hush. ‘But he did?’

Gloria’s wide eyes pleaded with her.

‘He’s looking into the Frazione Verde’s activities?’

‘Not exactly,’ said Gloria, fidgeting in her seat. ‘It’s connected. Or it may be connected. There’s a group – right-wing people – they’re acting unlawfully—’ She put one hand to her mouth.

Luisa seized the other hand in hers. ‘Do you know what?’ she said. ‘I think you’re right to be worried about Chiara. I think – I wanted to say, relax and it’ll all be fine. I wanted to say, It’s just growing up. But I think there
is
something not right about it all, and this – this politics. They think it’s all fresh and new, it’s all about good intentions and justice – but it doesn’t stay new for long. It’s dangerous: this country, politics here is dirty stuff.’

The colour had gone from Gloria’s face. ‘You think Pietro’s work – has something to do with it?’

Luisa threw up her hands in exasperation. ‘If he doesn’t say what he’s working on, this top-secret project, how can we know? Something’s wrong, though, and I just don’t know what we do about it. I don’t know how we find her.’

‘How we find her,’ repeated Gloria, trembling. ‘You think – do you think something’s happened to her?’

The door to the diabetes consulting room opened, and Giancarlo came out.

Luisa stood up, straight as a totem.

‘I think we need to find her,’ she said.

*

Sandro exploded. ‘Oh, for God’s sake! You didn’t think it was worth mentioning?’

The seaside pathologist’s telephone manner had reverted to icy formality. ‘In my opinion – my humble opinion – it did not constitute evidence of any useful kind. However, once the images are available I shall certainly email them to you. With police approval and the permission of the next-of-kin, naturally.’

It took all Sandro’s reserves for him to thank the man civilly.

‘Anyway,’ said the pathologist carelessly, ‘the body’ll be coming back to you for burial within twenty-four hours. Unless he wants that done here. Burial or cremation, or whatever. We’re done with it.’

Burial: not there. It’d be in the city, the big, dirty city.

Niccolò Rosselli’s wife had been involved with another man: she had been away with him, she had been to Viareggio with him. To a hotel by the seaside, the first weekend of last September.

They didn’t have the man yet.

A pneumatic drill set up and instinctively Sandro put his hands to his ears: what in the name of Christ were they doing now? He swung around, looking at the wire fencing, a digger languidly raising its bucket while below it a man in earmuffs was jerked by the drill. The eddying marketgoers being channelled this way and that, this great democratic space cramped and cordoned off. The carabiniere still lounged against his car, indifferent, infuriating, as if satisfied with the chaos.

The drill stopped and for a moment Sandro thought there was a kind of after-echo in the air but it was something else. A loudhailer, someone shouting through a loudhailer a block or two away, and calls in response.

On the phone the pathologist was shouting, ‘Hello? Hello?’

‘Sorry,’ said Sandro, without sincerity. ‘It’s the city. Noisy here.’ He took the man’s email address and gave his own, and hung up. Giuli was looking at him expectantly: for all he knew Maria Rosselli probably was, too, from the window above. It was eleven-thirty, and they were late.

Luisa would have seen the doctor by now.

Niccolò Rosselli and his mother would have to wait just five minutes longer.

‘Vesna,’ Sandro said. He sighed. ‘The Bosnian maid who found Flavia’s body. What the police would call a good witness, and fortunately for us, she seems to have something like a conscience.’

‘Right,’ said Giuli.

‘She was talking to – a guy. Dustbin man, as it happens.’

Giuli raised her eyebrows.

‘The kind of guy you don’t notice in the street, I suppose, but he notices everything. A bit sweet on the girl, I thought. I met him, he gave me directions, a decent bloke. Anyway, this guy had seen Flavia in the town before, last year. The first Sunday in September, he seemed precise on that point because it was some festival or other the night before.’

There’d been one in Castiglioncello when he and Luisa had been there this summer, seemed like a lifetime ago. Men in robes carrying banners on long poles along the esplanade, chanting. He’d got impatient with it, a lot of mumbo-jumbo, but there’d been fireworks afterwards.

‘He was sure it was her? One hundred per cent?’ Giuli’s voice was urgent.

Vesna had put the man on to Sandro: he’d been able to hear the hiss of the coffee machine behind their voices and remembered that bar, the blinding white seaside light and the woman’s candyfloss hair. Cristina.

He’d repeated it, and Sandro had believed him. ‘She looked different, but it was her. She looked so happy.’

Vesna had taken the phone back. ‘What he said to me was, she looked like an angel. Trans … whatever the word is. Gone up to God and made new.’ Her voice had grown gruff then, perhaps embarrassed at the flight of fantasy. Perhaps sad for the joy gone, ended in a cold bathtub.

Ecstasy on Flavia’s face as she walked out of a hotel lobby into the September sunshine. Who had she left upstairs in the room?

He’d thanked her, earnestly: had heard her soften. ‘You’re off, then,’ he’d said.

‘You’ve got my number now,’ she’d said, hesitating. ‘But there’s something else before you go.’

Before she had even said it, the image had been waiting in his head, that fragment he’d been too impatient to hear to the end when she’d been trying to tell him, in the Stella Maris’s bare kitchen.

The image of something scribbled in haste on the body, like a tattoo.

‘There were some numbers written on the palm of her hand. Like – a phone number.’

Because Flavia hadn’t taken her phone with her, where the number would have been stored.

‘I don’t suppose – you don’t—’ And he hadn’t even finished the sentence because unless Vesna was some kind of savant, she wouldn’t remember a number glimpsed in the dim bathroom, a dead woman sodden in her arms.

‘It was mostly worn away,’ she’d said. ‘I don’t know, I can’t remember the numbers, but I think only two or three – the middle numbers in the row – were visible.’ She had sounded bothered by the memory.

‘It’s all right,’ Sandro had said. And taking a breath, had added quickly, ‘She was lucky she had you. To find her. To care about her – enough.’

Giuli had clamoured to be told, there and then, what was going on, but he’d made her wait. While he had obtained the number of the pathology lab and spoken to them, and then it had been twenty-five minutes of name-checking and obstructiveness before he’d got anywhere.

‘A telephone number?’ said Giuli now. ‘Well. That figures. She made herself leave her mobile behind, the number would have been on it. But she couldn’t quite – couldn’t quite make the break. Wrote the number on her hand – maybe she tried to scrub it off?’

‘Maybe,’ said Sandro slowly. ‘Maybe she deleted it from the phone she left behind, too.’

‘Or maybe she didn’t,’ said Giuli, glancing up. ‘Like Barbara said, it’s human not to be able to let go. She said, it’s human to want to salvage something, to remember, to record. We hate the idea of obliteration.’

Sandro stared at her, because quite suddenly the statement seemed startlingly, unavoidably true. Obliteration. Suicide was an attempt to obliterate, wasn’t it? But something was always left behind: the dead body, the traumatized maid, the baby. And Sandro and Giuli were trying to rescue Flavia from those traces.

‘Let’s go up,’ said Sandro. ‘Time to face the music.’

When Niccolò opened the door to them, he was holding the baby on one shoulder. Sandro could see Maria Rosselli behind him at the window with her arms folded across her body and it seemed to him that there’d been some kind of a shift here, between these people, inside these four walls. Something had changed.

Rosselli’s hand sat lightly on the child’s slumbering back: he moved gingerly to one side to let them pass.

‘Niccolò,’ said Sandro. ‘If I may …’

‘You need to have a look around,’ said Rosselli, his face quite calm behind the thick glasses. ‘That’s fine.’

At the window his mother let out a small snort of contempt.

‘Mother,’ he said mildly, but Sandro heard the warning note in his voice.

‘There’ve been journalists, do you know that?’ she said. ‘Ringing our bell. Why don’t the police do something about that?’ She glared at Sandro. ‘Why don’t you?’

‘Perhaps we should leave you alone to look around, after all,’ Rosselli said quietly. ‘Mother and I.’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Maria Rosselli, shifting herself heavily away from her position at the window. ‘I’ll go out. Give me the child.’

‘No,’ said Rosselli. The word hung coolly between them. ‘You’ve done enough,’ he said, as the silence lengthened, and the ambivalence of the phrase wasn’t lost on any of them. ‘Thank you, Mother. He’s asleep, anyway. I can manage.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Maria Rosselli bitterly, ‘I suppose you think you can.’

‘We’ll be fine, Signora Rosselli,’ said Giuli. ‘I can take him out in his – his pram. If he wakes up.’

With a furious movement Maria Rosselli swept past Giuli without answering or looking at her. At the door she stopped, face to face with her son.

‘You had better tell them,’ she said, almost spitting. ‘Or I will.’

‘They may already know,’ said Niccolò Rosselli, still quite calm. On his shoulder the child slept on.

‘Know what?’ said Giuli, before Sandro could say anything.

‘That
that woman
was a whore,’ said Maria Rosselli. ‘I could see it in her when she was twenty, coming from where she came from, from the people she came from. Look at how long she strung him along … years! The only surprise is it took her so long.’ And she was past her son, out on the landing and the door slammed behind her. Under Rosselli’s hand, against his shoulder, the baby gave a start but did not wake.