The Drowning River (21 page)

‘No,’ said Sandro, ‘but they’re something. They’re going to help us.’ He held the keys up, one by one. A Yale key, for a street door; a front door key, E-shaped; a small key, such as for the small padlock often used for a letterbox. A standard set of keys, just like Sandro’s own; just like any Florentine’s.

Weighing them in his hand, Sandro looked across at the desk; he could tell from the particular kind of mess Lucia Gentileschi had left there that she had begun her search methodically, then had lost control.

‘We begin again,’ he’d said gently.

‘You,’ Lucia said. ‘Could you do it?’

There was nothing personal in the desk; nothing at all. There were insurance policies – on the apartment, on both their lives – pension documents, one relating to employment in Verona, another in Milan; the pensions were tiny. That stopped Sandro short; how could anyone live on such a pittance?

Lucia arrived with tea.

It was very far from his usual thimble of heart-jolting coffee, but Sandro took the cup anyway, a wide, shallow bowl-shaped cup. She moved a small table in front of the low sofa and set down another cup for herself and he could see that it caused her pain, the sight of two cups.

Sandro took a sip and set it down, went back to the desk. He looked at the piles he had made, looked back inside the rolltop.

‘Nice desk,’ he said, thinking.

‘Claudio made it,’ said Lucia. ‘Out of elm. The only thing he ever made, ten years ago or so.’

‘Really?’ said Sandro, awestruck, ‘
Mamma mia
.’ He put a hand to the curved wood, the joints, leaned down and looked inside. Ten years ago, he mused, and then he saw it, in the back, a marquetry square of coloured woods that might have been just decoration, but why put it there? Inside, at the back, where no one could see it? He put his head inside the desk.

‘It took him a year to make,’ said Lucia behind him. Sandro contorted his heavy shoulders to get his hand inside and ran his fingers over the marquetry, different coloured prism shapes; pressed it. It gave, and clicked back against his hand; the panel moved. It opened. Sandro jerked his head back.

‘What was that?’ said Lucia quietly.

‘It’s a. . .’ Sandro cleared his throat, ‘there seems to be something else. Hidden. A secret compartment – these desks, perhaps. . .’

Lucia nodded, minutely. ‘Please look,’ she said.

He reached in. The compartment was about the size of a folded newspaper but no more than a couple of centimetres deep; it contained a brown envelope. Sandro looked at Lucia.

‘Please,’ she said.

In the envelope was a passbook for a bank account. A deposit account in the name of Claudio Gentileschi, opened in 1997 with an initial payment of 1,500 euros, in cash. Sandro flipped to the last page; the most recent payment had been at the end of August, for 1,000 euros. But what stopped Sandro in his tracks was the total, with interest, at the
end of August 2006: 800,000 euros. Sandro stared at the figure. Mutely, he held it out to Lucia.

She stared, shaking her head. ‘No,’ she said, ‘no, no, no. That’s not ours. That’s not our money.’

‘You didn’t know about it?’

‘We are not rich,’ said Lucia. ‘We live on Claudio’s pension, we get by.’

Despite himself Sandro shook his head, thinking of the tiny sums the pensions yielded.

‘Where did it come from?’ she asked. ‘How did he get it?’ Sandro shook his head, not really answering her, looking through the pages. Payments every two, three months, always in cash, always about the same sum. No outgoings, but it was a high-interest account, there would be a penalty for withdrawals, and standing orders not allowed. He would have had to have the bills paid from the regular current account.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. He closed the book, looked at the front; not the same bank as the current account, the Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze, but the Banca Toscana. Opened the front page again; a branch in San Frediano, in fact, the one on the corner of the Via del Leone and the Piazza Tasso.

Had Claudio been blackmailing somebody?

‘There wasn’t anything – any compensation?’ he asked. ‘After the war? I know there were some reparations. . .’ He paused, ‘Anyone – from then? From the war, who might have wanted to help him?’

‘No,’ said Lucia, ‘no reparations to us, but Claudio wouldn’t have taken the money if there had been. He would never – never – never have –’

And as he looked into her fierce pale face, the wild thoughts Sandro had been entertaining about the Holocaust, lurid stories of blackmail and ex-Nazis, suddenly seemed silly and melodramatic, much too easy. And in the silence that followed Sandro heard the rain start up again, soft at first but growing, a rush of wind. Raindrops slapped with sudden violence against the wide expanse of glass that Claudio must have envisioned full of light, and Lucia turned towards him.

‘He was killed,’ she said simply. ‘Claudio was killed because of this money.’

Sandro felt suddenly very cold, as if he would not get warm, would never be warm again. Regular payments, a bank account, as though Claudio had a job, behind his wife’s back. But what kind of a job would he have to hide from his wife?

‘You’re shivering,’ said Lucia, and she put a hand to his cheek; he flinched at the cold of her fingertips.

‘I’m fine,’ he said.

‘You have a fever,’ she said. She put a hand to his jacket and squeezed the fabric, ‘You’re soaked,’ she said. ‘Why didn’t you say? You could have – could have borrowed –’

‘I’m fine,’ Sandro repeated, as if all other words had suddenly deserted him. He made an effort. ‘Leave this with me,’ he said, holding up the bank book. ‘If you can give me the keys, too?’

With compressed lips Lucia plucked the keys from the table and held them up to him.

‘It can wait until tomorrow,’ she said. ‘My husband is dead; it’s too late for him. I won’t be responsible for making your wife into a widow, too.’

Sandro tried to laugh, an exaggeration. ‘You do have a wife?’ she said, smiling, and he managed a smile back.

‘I’ll call a cab,’ he said, to placate her. ‘OK?’

Outside on the street Sandro stood in a borrowed raincoat three sizes too large for him, and waited for a cab. Claudio Gentileschi had been a big man, and as he pulled the coat around him an image of that broad back rolling in the grey water came back to Sandro with a shiver that was partly fever, and partly the horrors.

The horrors had come on with full force after his first dead body, when he’d been twenty-four and attending the scene of a traffic accident in the Borgo degli Albizzi. Nothing lurid; a boy knocked down by a
motorino,
struck his head on the kerb and was dead within ten minutes. The life had just gone out of him, without a sound, and that
night Sandro, who had been first on the scene, had lain in his bed rigid with the effort of not seeing, all over again, the pallor that had come over the boy’s face, the horrible slackness in his limbs. And how the boy’s mother had come running, still in her apron, awkwardly down the street.

He’d had to learn that there was a trick to dealing with the dead – with dead bodies, at least – that was learned gradually, with repeated exposure. One had to be methodical, and at all costs to consider the corpse as just another kind of matter, no longer animate. Respect was important, however; he’d seen men jeer at corpses – policemen and others, and once a woman, kicking the body of her dead, violent husband as she was being handcuffed – and such people, in his experience, never returned to full humanity. Cells died off, and could not be replaced. Sandro had instead developed a kind of impassivity, the mask of a stolid, imperturbable officer who could keep going when the younger ones had to go outside to vomit.

Luisa used to say to him, long ago, ‘I can’t talk to you when you’ve got that face on.’ He hadn’t really understood what she meant; he’d thought, then, that it was exactly what was required; they weren’t paid to have feelings.

But it wasn’t some sort of technique, it was a trick, all along, an illusion; the girl’s death fifteen years ago had proved that. Doggedly Sandro had passed information to her father, collating, photocopying, posting as efficiently as a machine, and all the time a connection had been loose, fizzing away. The feelings hadn’t gone away; out of sight, they’d mutated into something altogether harder to manage. The horrors. In the rain Sandro pulled the coat tighter, binding himself to stop the shivering. He realized that he wasn’t sure what to do next.

Something bleeped in his pocket: a new message. Although Serena Hutton didn’t grace him with any kind of message at all, in fact, only the name, Iris March, and a complicated mobile number with a foreign prefix. His heart sank at the thought of calling this English girl; not even twenty, probably, no Italian, she’d be immature, hopeless, idiotic. He pressed dial, and held the phone to his ear. It rang three, five, seven,
times; he was just about to hang up when it clicked and he heard an English voice say, nervously,
‘Pronto?’

His taxi was now approaching down the narrow street; holding the phone against his ear with his shoulder, Sandro held up a hand. He climbed in, at the same time introducing himself, and hoped he didn’t sound too out of it. All he wanted was a nice warm office and a secretary to connect him, but it wasn’t going to happen, was it?

He put a hand over the receiver; ‘Piazza Tasso,’ he said to the driver. He’d promised Lucia Gentileschi he would go straight home. Sorry, Lucia, he thought, then took his hand off the receiver.

‘Should I speak in English?’ he said, with dread. He didn’t know if he was up to it.

‘It’s all right. Italian is all right.’

Iris March sounded jumpy, on edge; he remembered that the carabiniere had called her hysterical. Sandro could hear background noise, men’s voices talking, traffic sounds. Was she with some gang of friends, off out on the town?

This was useless, he thought; afterwards he was terrified by how close he had come to hanging up, and not hearing what Iris March had to say. But then she said, ‘I’m so glad you called, I didn’t know what to do.’

There was something in her voice that spoke to him – humility, directness, desperation – and the image he’d had of this girl fell away. Poor kid, he thought, and then it all came tumbling out, half in Italian, half in English, something about the missing girl’s boyfriend, about a plan to leave the city, and then he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He wondered if he was more addled than he’d thought.

He made her repeat it twice; the name, twice.

‘He’s called Claudio, we think,’ she said down the crackling line. ‘An old man called Claudio.’ And a fit of shivering almost took him at that moment, a shock reaction. He pressed his lips together while she spoke. ‘We tried the number Jackson had for him, but there was no answer. There was that message you get,
in questo momento non e raggiungibile –’

‘A mobile number?’ asked Sandro, and waited while she turned and said something to another person. In the background he heard a radio
and he understood immediately that she was in a taxi too. He thought of their two taxis hissing through the wet night streets, towards their separate destinations, and he felt the fever rising in him.

She was back. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘a mobile.’ There was another pause, then she read out the number to him. It would be dead as a doornail, wouldn’t it, Claudio’s mobile; Sandro wondered where it was, because it hadn’t been on his body. She went on. ‘He – this guy could have been the last person to see her, couldn’t he?’

‘And you have no idea where they were meeting?’ Sandro felt a desperate longing for witnesses, sightings. Let it be far away from the Boboli, let someone have seen Claudio shake her hand and wave her goodbye, alive and well.

‘I’m not even sure – well, no,’ she said, sounding downcast. ‘It’s just – a kind of hunch, you know? Do you think we can find him, this Claudio?’

‘Listen,’ Sandro said carefully, ‘I think it would be a good idea to have a meeting.’

This girl was the only person he had encountered so far who seemed to be worried about Veronica Hutton’s disappearance; why did she also have to be the only one to make the connection between Veronica Hutton and Claudio Gentileschi?

‘Maybe you’re busy tonight?’ he said, but even as he said it he knew it would be a mistake to do anything but go home and sleep; he was almost grateful when she said, after a long pause, ‘Um, well, tomorrow morning would be better.’

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I’ll call you. In the morning.’ Suddenly, the morning seemed a long way off.

He gave her his number, concentrating hard on not letting his teeth chatter. He fished in his top pocket for the
tachipirina
he always kept there for headaches and dry-swallowed a couple. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, keeping his voice gentle. ‘We’ll find her.’ And he heard her swallow a sob.

He fell back on the worn leather seat of the cab, ridiculously exhausted by the mere effort of the conversation. The car rolled on through the streets that gleamed in the sheeting rain; when eventually they drew up
on the corner of the Piazza Tasso and the Via del Leone where Claudio Gentileschi’s bank stood, it was coming down so relentlessly and with such force that it bounced back up off the flagstones, like hail.

The bank was a hundred metres from Sandro’s office: if he’d set up there a month earlier, he might himself have seen Claudio Gentileschi going in and out. It was closed; wearily Sandro looked at his watch; six-thirty now, of course it was bloody closed, what did he expect? He realized that he had had some idea of standing on the pavement outside it and watching, waiting for the gut instinct that had always served him well to tell him which passer-by might recognize the crumpled photograph of Claudio Gentileschi he had in his wallet.

But the streets were deserted in the rain, and slumped, feverish, in the back of the cab Sandro felt as if every skill he’d learned as a policeman, every instinct he’d developed over thirty years, had deserted him.

‘This it?’ said the cab driver over his shoulder, startling him back to himself.

‘Ah, could you,’ Sandro grappled with the situation, ‘give me a minute?’ Then added, ‘Wait there.’ The driver shrugged, tapped the meter. ‘Fine by me,’ he said. ‘Take your time.’