A Darkness Descending (40 page)

Gloria made an awful choked noise in the back of her throat, and Giancarlo abruptly brought his head back down and looked at her.

‘She wouldn’t tell me where she was living,’ he said. ‘My impression is, he told her not to say, not to anyone. But there was something she let slip – about the Via Pisana, the road to the seaside, about being near the river too.’

They were all three on their feet now, but it was Gloria who spoke.

‘And?’

‘I think she’s in the Isolotto,’ said Giancarlo.

*

By the time she got to the Via del Leone, Giuli was sweating. What in God’s name was going on? Traffic stationary up and down the Via dei Serragli, the Via Romana, access blocked. There was noise everywhere, chanting from towards the Cestello, the lazy siren of a police car stuck on the Via Mazzetta, and a van full of soldiers jeering at her as she hurried by.

‘A demo,’ said a big woman standing outside the ambulance post in the Via Mazzetta. ‘In the Piazza del Carmine. They’re all lying down in the street, apparently, corner of Santa Monaca, Porta Romana, and nothing’s moving.’ A smile of deep satisfaction appeared on her face. ‘Police can’t get there, too idle to get out of their cars and walk.’

In other circumstances, Giuli might have stopped to argue that not all policemen were lazy. Sandro never was. Or Pietro. But she’d been to see Wanda Terni, and in her pocket she held her prize. She let herself in, out of the midday heat of the street and into the cool hall, looking forward to the shuttered peace of the office.

It had all suddenly fallen into place at Niccolò Rosselli’s apartment. The mobile phone, the baby monitor, the shelf – the books. Wanda had mentioned them the first time she and Giuli had met – the books Flavia had returned just last week even though Wanda couldn’t remember lending them to her. What if Flavia had wanted to hide the evidence of something, but she couldn’t bring herself to destroy it? And what if she had known she wasn’t coming home – she’d not have wanted Niccolò to find that something, would she?

Giuli had waited in the corridor, listening to the lesson inside, interpreting the sounds. It had been nearly lunchtime and the kids were restless: you could hear the shuffle of feet, the rising level of backchat. Wanda Term’s tired, hopeful voice. Then a bell had shrilled tinnily in the recesses of the building and there’d been the thunderous scraping of a classful of chairs being pushed back, and they had streamed out of the door.

‘I think so,’ Wanda had said uncertainly in response to Giuli’s question. To her surprise, the teacher had visibly brightened at the sight of her in the doorway.

‘Yes.’ She had sounded more certain now. ‘Where did I put them?’ She had begun to pull open drawers: Giuli had seen the disarray on her desk, breathed the stale air heavy with the smell of kids and their unwashed socks and half-eaten breaktime
merende.
Giuli had never been sent to school with a snack; most days her mother had been comatose till late in the afternoon.

And there they had been: Wanda Terni had emerged triumphant and dusty from her bottom drawer with a small stack of books.
Primary Mathematics, Child Psychology for Teachers. A
copy of a Russian novel:
Anna Karenina. A
battered black notebook fastened with an elastic band.

Giuli could tell something was wrong even before she began to climb the stairs to the office, something about the light. As she rounded the stairwell she saw that the door was off its hinges and the sunlight streamed through.

It could have been worse. Nothing had been scrawled on the walls or smeared on the desk. It was almost orderly, only all the drawers in the filing cabinet stood open, and the computer was gone from the desk.

In her chest, though, Giuli’s heart thudded as though it might break through: she felt it in her throat as if it might choke her. They’d been here. They’d been here too.

They
? Who were they? The same people that had broken into the Frazione’s offices, and tipped off the police there was porn on the computer? It was as though the city was contracting, drawing tight like a net around her and Sandro and poor lost Chiara, and she couldn’t breathe.
They
– were they everywhere?

Breathe. Think.

Who knew Sandro and Giuli were investigating Flavia’s death? Bastone, Wanda Terni, Clelia, Barbara. Farmiga knew, so no doubt her good-looking boyfriend knew too. Did the police know? Did the undercover guys, AISI? The army, the press? That journalist who was everywhere, he’d know, he’d seen Sandro and Giuli going in to Niccolò’s apartment.

Breathe.

Paranoia, that’s how Sandro would have described it a mere three days ago: conspiracy theories were just that, theories. But things were different now. With a trembling hand Giuli reached to close the shutters; she lowered herself on to Sandro’s chair. Don’t touch anything. She reached into her bag and took out her phone.

For a moment she stared at it and didn’t understand: this was not her mobile. Then she remembered: this was Flavia and Niccolò’s phone. Gingerly she laid it down on the desk in front of her: she opened her grubby canvas bag and withdrew the notebook Wanda Terni had allowed her to take away, and laid it next to the phone. Only then did she locate her own mobile.

The names came up in her call history, Sandro, before that Enzo.

Her guys for an emergency: Sandro, she told herself, would be still in with Rosselli. She clicked down on to Enzo’s name,
dialling
, it told her and even as she heard it ring she knew he’d make everything all right. Knew she shouldn’t have doubted her man, not for one minute.

‘Cara
? He sounded different. Hyped, excited, afraid. ‘Sweetheart. I was just about to ring you. Something’s happened.’

‘We’ve been broken into,’ said Giuli, and she heard her voice shake. ‘I mean, at the office.’

‘I’m coming,’ he said. He hung up before she could say, There’s all sorts going down in the street.

Sitting on the chair, Giuli found that she couldn’t move. She could see that the open filing cabinet still contained the same paltry few pieces of paper: the insurance documents for the office and the business, the certification from the trade association. Nothing was kept on paper these days. It was all on computer. She
shouldn’t
move, either, should she? There might be evidence.

Then again, the police might not be on their side. They hadn’t been on the Frazione’s side, had they? After that burglary. She looked down at the notebook. This was about Flavia, wasn’t it? And as she stared, she knew this was what they were after. Slowly she peeled off the rubber band.

Lesson plans, notes. She stopped, frowned, thought. Turned to the back pages and there it was.

I just wanted to say hello.

There was a date: August last year, the first entry.
Botanico
, a tiny sidebar in red.

The Botanic Gardens?

She flipped through the pages without looking, at first, working backwards through the notebook, wanting to see how much there was. Page after page after page, covered with tiny dense writing in fine black ink, running on and on and on. Times and dates, his messages, her responses, in tiny neat handwriting, the writing of a teacher.

The writing of someone trying to compress something huge into a small space.

Words sprang out at her from the tight-packed sentences: Love. Beautiful. Philosophers were named, poets.

The parts of the body.

She noticed that there was no entry for the first Saturday in September, but another little sidebar told her she was right.
Sea
, it said. The messages started again, the following day.

She turned back to the first page and began to read.

By the time Enzo came through the door, saying something about the traffic in an incredulous voice, his laptop under his arm, she’d read it all, twice. Her heart felt like lead in her body; it was as though she was Flavia herself, and as though she had cut her own wrists in that bathtub.

She looked up at him, amazed that her eyes were dry as she should have been weeping.

‘I’m only surprised she didn’t do it sooner,’ she said.

The phone rang: it was Sandro.

*

The university might as well have been on the moon, not the other side of the city; Chiara just couldn’t see herself ever going there again.

She’d put on jeans but the disobedience frightened her and she’d pulled them off in a sweat and stuffed them at the back of the drawer. She’d put on a skirt, a neat blouse, looked down, trying to see herself through his eyes.

Dressed, then, and ready but somehow unable to open the front door, Chiara thought of the university courtyard, the old cloister off the Piazza San Marco, the road leading up to the Botanic Gardens and the barracks. She didn’t really belong there any more, it seemed to her: it was kids’ stuff to sit and gaze adoringly at some bearded lecturer or other. To jostle into the crowded bar and talk political theory, to go up to the Biblioteca delle Oblate with the others, to sit writing their assignments together on their laptops with the red dome of the cathedral filling the skyline. Chiara felt a twinge of loss. This was her home now. The suburbs, the green canopy of trees outside the window, her balcony, her man.

She set down her college bag on the ugly console in the hall and gazed through the doorway into the kitchen. It was a shame it was all so shabby, but it couldn’t be helped. The thought that he might have found them somewhere more suited to a couple starting their life together was one that had come to her early on, but she’d dismissed it. It was childish, it was superficial, decor didn’t matter.

Anyway, she’d only just have had time to get to the lecture and back, if he was going to be home at lunchtime. And wanted her there. She walked into the bedroom, the big, smooth bed, the old-fashioned walnut headboard and the painting over it, a kitschy oil painting of a child with big eyes.

The huge mirrored wardrobe that covered one whole wall. It faced the bed.

Chiara stood facing the wardrobe for a long time. She removed her clothes and looked at herself in the mirror, then she looked up. Something looked back at her.

Chapter Twenty-Six

‘T
HERE
’
S A RALLY
,’
SAID
Bastone, breathless in the doorway. ‘Someone’s leaked something on to the internet about the police raid, and they’re gathering. In the Piazza del Carmine.’

Sandro’s mobile chirruped: a message. And then another. Surreptitiously he reached a hand into his pocket. The message was from Giuli:
Found her messages
, it said.
She was targeted. She was groomed.
He turned it off, the words still glowing behind his eyes. Groomed. He knew what that meant, but he couldn’t make it fit, not with this woman. Not with these men, Bastone and Rosselli: they didn’t inhabit a world where cold-blooded strategy was employed to lure the vulnerable into a trap, where images were collated and disseminated. Rosselli hadn’t even had a mobile phone of his own.

Niccolò Rosselli got to his feet. Sandro could see the effort required for him to stand firm, one hand extended just a little towards the sofa where his son slept, as if monitoring him through the air between them. He looked gaunter than ever, but his gaze was steady as it fixed on Bastone’s pouchy, anxious face.

‘What do they say on the internet?’ he said quietly.

‘It’s that journalist,’ the lawyer said eagerly. ‘I’m sure of it. He started a blog, just for the purpose of bringing you down. It calls itself
Vigilante.
He’s at every meeting, he wrote the initial report of your collapse, I know his style.’ His voice was breathless, hoping against hope, Sandro could see, that Flavia would not be mentioned.

‘And the blogger, this
Vigilante
, he says what?’

‘Well, it’s just inference, he talks about the seizure of illegal material. But it’s obvious he’s putting the worst possible interpretation on it. We can stop him – legally, if we can get his identity. Prove he’s behind it.’

‘They’re calling me a pornographer.’ Rosselli’s voice was flat. ‘It’s too late to stop him. A paedophile. I’ve seen it … I’ve seen it written on the walls.’ His gaze flickered sideways, to the sleeping child, then back to Bastone. ‘Free speech,’ he said. ‘You can’t only believe in it if you have nothing to fear.’ The apartment door was still open and as Sandro stepped to close it he heard the click of the front door below, and paused.

‘It’s not free speech if they hide behind anonymity,’ said Bastone, pale but determined. Sandro looked at him, startled by signs, at last, of a lawyer’s acuteness. ‘They say anything they like and aren’t accountable.’

Rosselli didn’t seem to hear. ‘So it’s a lynch mob,’ he said. ‘I’ll go and talk to them.’

There were footsteps on the stairs and Sandro saw Niccolò Rosselli’s expression deaden as he recognized them.

‘No,’ said Bastone, earnestly, ‘you don’t understand. It’s the Frazione, they’re rallying for you.’ He took a breath. ‘They’re behind you.’

‘It has to be faced, Carlo,’ said Rosselli, as if he hadn’t heard Bastone. ‘You can’t leave things to fester. That’s how we got here, how this country got here. It’s been buried alive and it has to be torn up, out of the ground.’ Something kindled and caught behind the man’s eyes. ‘Things buried have to be brought up to the air. We need to breathe.’

Sandro almost stepped back at the tone of his voice, the rage hardly contained, the conviction like the blast of heat from an oven. In that second he saw that such certainty could go either way: a man like Rosselli might murder, might shame a woman into suicide, might turn fanatic and lay waste to his country. Or might be the only one to save it.

‘So are you going to tell him, Carlo?’

Maria Rosselli was in the doorway and the voice was hers, level and poisonous. At the sound of it, on the sofa, the sleeping baby started, let out a whimper. Her big bony hand was on Bastone’s crumpled sleeve: he looked down at it as if a snake had laid itself over him.

She hissed, ‘I think you’d better tell him.’

On the divan the child had not settled back to sleep: he twisted and arched, as if in pain. The three – mother, son, lawyer – seemed locked in a horrible silent struggle, like dogs unable to detach from hostility. Sandro went to the sofa, bent over the child. He glanced back at the trio in the open doorway: too late, he supposed, to worry about what the neighbours might think.