A Darkness Descending (5 page)

Luisa knew the precious child in the handknitted bonnet had grown up, of course she did, she knew that he had become a teacher, then an agitator, she was aware that this Frazione Verde had something to do with him. She looked at the photograph of the ill-shaven man in thick glasses staring off the page: he had been taken to the Pronto Soccorso of Santa Maria Nuova, she read, but released after tests. Luisa thought of his mother pacing the corridors of the hospital, haranguing nurses; she had always been a forceful woman. She must be seventy-five now. At least.

But there was a wife, wasn’t there? Or partner, was that the term? She frowned back down at the small print, holding it at arm’s length so as to focus. Luisa had glasses but didn’t like to wear them. No mention of a wife: enough. Enough gossip, enough idle speculation. Folding the newspaper, she laid it down with a slap and turned to leave. The barman lifted his head to follow her progress across the small, crowded space, and she inclined her head just a little in acknowledgement.

The woman who had talked about drugs Luisa did not acknowledge, although her face was less than twenty centimetres from Luisa’s and staring openly as she turned. Luisa let her eyes slide over the woman’s handsome, arrogant features – younger than me, she registered, and stupid – and without bothering to look at the woman’s interlocutor, she turned her back.

She stepped out through the door into the fresh, cool, September morning that smelled of woodsmoke and chrysanthemums from the flower stalls, took a deep breath and held it.

One problem at a time: and she had the uncomfortable feeling that here was another.

Chapter Four

T
HE MARKET STALLS WERE
crowded around the southern end of the Piazza Santo Spirito, and under the statue of Cosimo Ridolfi was slumped the emaciated figure of Stefano the resident drunk, oblivious as always to Ridolfi’s agrarian reforms or his sad, resigned gaze into the middle distance. Stefano raised his head and mumbled as they passed: the words were indistinguishable but from the way his faded eyes brightened as they lit on her, he knew Giuli. Sandro took her arm.

‘It’s all right,’ said Giuli, wriggling in his grasp. They came past trestles laden with second-hand clothes, off which rose the stale smell of closeted apartments, mothballs and unwashed bodies. The customers were a surprising mix: scavengers picking through the stuff and grumbling to each other, some old women but men too, and a girl with dyed orange hair.

‘So the lawyer’s a Santo Spirito type too, is he?’ said Sandro, for something to say. He wasn’t looking forward to this encounter: perhaps it was his years in the police, perhaps it was being Italian, or just human, but he’d never met a lawyer he liked. Two years back he’d been employed by one, a so-called human rights lawyer who turned out to be one of the least moral men Sandro had ever encountered. And Sandro’s whole working life had been spent among criminals.

Giuli nodded to the far end of the square, where the soft pale stucco of the church rose, undefiled and lovely in spite of it all, to meet them. ‘Just round the corner,’ she said. ‘Off the Via Maggio.’ They escaped the stalls and walked around under the steep and beautiful façade of the Palazzo Guadagni, under restoration and not before time.

There was Liliana on the vegetable stall, arms folded across her sweatshirt, chatting to a nun in the grey habit of the Franciscan mission in the Piazza del Carmine. Married for thirty years to a useless drunken husband but silently heartbroken all the same when he died, standing in the marketplace six hours a days, six days a week, all year round, Liliana couldn’t in theory have much in common with an eighty-year-old nun who’d spent her life cloistered away from men and the world. But to Sandro there was something almost identical in their faces, although he couldn’t identify it. Not happiness, exactly, not resignation: their eyes as they talked, peaceably exchanging opinions on who knew what, seemed separately to be fixed somewhere far off, contemplating something invisible. Perhaps God, for the nun, or heaven.

Did Liliana believe in heaven? Did he?

‘Liliana was backing Niccolò,’ said Giuli out of the blue, watching him. He stopped.

‘Really?’ So Liliana wasn’t waiting for the afterlife for justice, then. ‘She was at the meeting?’

Giuli nodded, a guardedness in her expression that he couldn’t quite identify. For a moment Sandro felt a twinge of something, almost guilt, mixed with envy. Everyone who was anyone, it seemed, had been at this meeting.

‘Well, Liliana’s no fool.’ He mused on this fact. Giuli folded her arms across her chest. She did seem better: outside was always better, with Giuli. She was still sometimes like a feral cat, turning around and around in any confined space, looking for an exit.

‘Were they all right about it, at the Women’s Centre?’ he ventured cautiously.

She eyed him. ‘They understood,’ she said. ‘They’re behind him, all the way. The Centre’s funding’s been slashed, you know that? Half of us are volunteers, they’re even asking the doctors to work free a day a week.’

Sandro, who had not known, nodded. He was perturbed by the news. They were a bunch of tough cookies at the Women’s Centre and no mistake; ballbreaking, chainsmoking women doctors, most of the auxiliary staff ex-cons on community service, he always felt they were somehow eyeing him up for the chop – redundant as a man, as a useful member of society – every time he went in there to pay a call on Giuli, but there was something about the place nevertheless. He’d seen them sitting on the plastic chairs, pacing the corridors, women turning up there ready to top themselves because they were pregnant again or sick again or had been punched unconscious by a punter again. The doctors with their nicotine-stained fingers patched them up and got them back out there again. Short-term measures, maybe – but Sandro knew, and Giuli better than most, that for some people, short term was all there was. Better than no term at all.

It was beginning to dawn on him, how much was vested in this man.

‘They live over there,’ said Giuli, breaking in on his thoughts. ‘Rosselli lives over there.’

He followed the nod of her head across the square through the feathery canopy of elm leaves: the western side was the humblest: three- and four-storey houses, plain, modestly pretty stucco frontages, no cut-stone corners or window surrounds, shallow eaves. ‘That one,’ she said. ‘Next to the restaurant on the corner.’

The shutters to the apartment she was indicating were all closed.

They could just knock on the door, they both knew that. But they both knew, too, that even if it was the thing the journalists or the lobbyists or even the police might do, they couldn’t do it themselves. They knew too well how it would be behind those closed shutters, the distress, the anxiety, the dark.

Back in the office, without thinking too hard about it, Sandro had asked Giuli if she knew where Rosselli lived. His unspoken thought had been that they could just go round and ask – what? How things were? What was wrong? Could they help? Because all that had happened as far as they knew was the poor man had been taken ill. But even as Sandro had found himself frowning at the white-faced, tight-lipped little shake of the head Giuli had given him in response, he’d understood that it wasn’t going to be that easy. And Rosselli hadn’t collapsed at home, but in front of an audience, at a crucial point in a controversial career. It had given Sandro a chill to think that Giuli’s unease about the whole situation might be well founded: could it really be a coincidence? Could it be so easy to bring a man down?

Feeling Giuli’s eyes on him, he stroked his chin. ‘If you know where he lives,’ he began, thoughtfully, ‘how many other people know?’

‘A fair few, I suppose,’ she said guardedly. ‘I mean, he’s known in the
quartiere.’

‘No one’s knocking at his door,’ said Sandro. ‘You’d think – there’d be a newspaper guy or two.’

Giuli glanced around quickly. ‘There are journalists hanging about, but – there’s a lot of respect for him. If they started doorstepping him – well, people would intervene.’

Sandro’s gaze wandered over the stallholders, the drunk. ‘I see,’ he said. So the press were only biding their time, staying away out of pragmatism not respect. He puffed out his cheeks. ‘I’m sure they’ll turn up, eventually,’ he said.

And they would: sooner or later there’d be a camera crew on the doorstep and all hell would break loose. He scanned the foot of the palazzo on the far side of the square, Rosselli’s building, the one next to it, further along to where the carabiniere post stood. There was a little gaggle now, three men looking down at something between them, notes passed from one hand to another. Was it them? Had there been enemies at that meeting last night? Despite himself, Sandro was beginning to understand Giuli’s paranoia, and Luisa’s too. Politics was a dangerous game.

And it was time to talk to that lawyer.

Sandro turned his back on the piazza. ‘Let’s go,’ he said.

*

The shop was busy all morning, and Luisa didn’t get to eat until after two.
Orario continuato
, non-stop shopping, the curse of the modern age. The old two hours for lunch gone for ever, thanks to the hypermarkets. It wasn’t civilized.

Sandro phoned at one, full of something, wanting to talk but she couldn’t because a tour guide had just ushered inside three well-dressed German women in search of wedding suits, and Luisa, apparently, was the only saleswoman who would do. They had been told about her.

An hour later Luisa wondered if she wasn’t getting too old for this as she showed an exquisite Japanese girl – a quarter of her age, half of her size and resembling a cartoon with her pink hair and long black socks – handbags costing the average month’s salary. Her stomach complained: the Japanese girl gave her a politely blank look as its grumbling became audible, and Luisa looked down at the handbags.

Black French calf with silver studs, leather soft as cashmere, made in Italy; a velvet one,
testa di moro
, with distressed leather handles and brass fastenings. The girl indicated, in a kind of semaphore Luisa had long learned to understand but which did not contain one discernible word of Italian, that she would like them both. It was only when Luisa had wrapped and tied and processed the credit-card transaction – finding herself gazing into the girl’s smooth, wide, placid face and wondering how it could seem so calm when its owner was spending so much, wondering at the life so distant from her own – that she was free to escape. The newspaper tucked under her arm, Luisa hurried down to the
magazzino
to remove her carefully wrapped sandwich from the fridge, pull out a stepstool and sit down among the boxes and plastic-filmed party dresses.

As she ate Luisa could see herself in the same mirror she’d stood in front of half-dressed that morning. She averted her eyes, and thinking of Sandro’s call she got out her mobile and contemplated it. There was never much of a signal down here, she thought, knowing that she was postponing something. The newspaper sat on her knees, a copy of
La Repubblica
she had bought for herself to find out their take on Niccolò Rosselli’s collapse. The sandwich had already left an oily mark on it.

There was a clomping on the stairs and Giusy peered around the corner.

‘All right?’ she said, hurrying on down. ‘Gone quiet up there now, and Beppe said he could manage. I’m starved.’

Luisa put the mobile back in her pocket.

There was a bell that went if anyone came into the shop upstairs, and a CCTV monitor, but they couldn’t both stay down here long. Luisa sighed. So much for the lunchbreak. Her head in the fridge, Giusy kept talking, self-absorbed as ever. In spite of it, Luisa was fond of the girl – or no longer a girl, though Luisa had known her since she was nineteen. Close to fifty now and looking it, liplined and deeply tanned after a lifetime’s summers staked out on one beach or another. She’d been to the Maldives this year; she and her husband had no children, and enjoyed their leisure. Good for them, was the conclusion Luisa had eventually come to. Live and let live, though Sandro would laugh if he heard that.

Pulling up another stepstool, Giusy opened her tub of salad. ‘No carbohydrates,’ she’d announced proudly to a customer that very morning, on being congratulated on her figure. And the cigarettes, thought Luisa. To her eye Giusy could do with a bit more weight on her: after a lifetime of frowning over her own tight waistbands, when she’d lost close to fifteen kilos herself on the chemo, Luisa had lost the taste for skinny. Giusy was poking around in the tub with dissatisfaction. Luisa put her crusts in the bin and unfolded the paper.

La Repubblica
had it on page five, hardly front-page news for them. Luisa frowned at the picture of a fuzzy Via Sant’Agostino under street lighting, and the same mugshot, only smaller. Dimly the thought of what else she had to worry about chimed and faded as she concentrated on the story about Rosselli. The hospital was running tests: what did that mean? If she had an only son, and they were running tests on him … even the thought of it made her stomach contract as it never had when she’d been the one being tested. What if it were Sandro? Luisa straightened abruptly, startled at the thought, one which had never really occurred to her before, that he might predecease her. Giusy raised her head from her salad bowl at the movement.

Looking from Luisa’s preoccupied expression to the page open on her lap, Giusy’s face cleared. ‘Oh, right,’ she said, and from her tone Luisa knew what was coming next. ‘Communists, aren’t they?’ With disinterested contempt. ‘A rabble, that’s what Antonio says. No backbone. Catch the
cavaliere
keeling over in front of an audience.’

At the reference to their great leader Silvio Berlusconi, Luisa opened her mouth, then shut it. Berlusconi might not have passed out in front of his public, but he’d humiliated them in the eyes of the world, that was her view. She hadn’t voted, and had incurred a penalty as a result: she had a nasty suspicion that Sandro, in a weak moment, might have voted for the man, though she’d never asked him outright. He was occasionally to be heard saying, ‘Well, he gets things done,’ in a gloomy sort of way.