The Drowning River (3 page)

‘Hi, Giulietta,’ he said warily. ‘What are you up to?’ Standing in the lobby, she didn’t look bad at all, as it happened. She was wearing a dark
suit, cheap but it fitted her. Hair thin from malnutrition but brown instead of the rainbow of red and rust and greenish blonde. Wrists still as thin as chicken bones, but fuller in the face.

‘How did I track you down, you mean?’ she said with rough good cheer. She took out a pack of cigarettes, turned it over in her hands, put it away. ‘Have a guess.’

He nodded. Luisa. ‘She think I need keeping an eye on, does she?’

He saw Giulietta survey the room from the doorway without answering, lips pursed. ‘Bit quiet,’ she commented, and he shrugged, helpless.

She eyed him. ‘Don’t need a receptionist yet, then?’ She must have seen the alarm in his eyes because she burst out laughing then, her rusty, smoker’s laugh. ‘Don’t worry, Commissario –’ And when he flinched, she looked apologetic, started again. ‘Don’t worry, Signore Cellini, I’m not offering. I don’t need a job, as it happens.’ She eyed him for signs of surprise and, seeing none, went on proudly, ‘I’m working at the Women’s Centre. On the Piazza Tasso.’

Bit close to home, Sandro thought, guiltily. He wasn’t sure he needed to be worrying about Giulietta Sarto on top of everything else. ‘Sit down,’ he said, pulling out one of the plastic chairs.

‘Two mornings a week and all day Saturday to begin with,’ she said quickly, as if she knew what he was thinking. ‘Only, when I bumped into Luisa at the baker’s she told me you’d got yourself a little office here. Said I could pop my head around the door.’

Sandro relaxed. What else was he doing, anyway?

‘Thanks,’ he said, smiling for the first time. ‘Maybe you could drum up some business for me, down at the Women’s Centre.’

They both laughed reluctantly at that. The Centre provided emergency contraception, advice for battered wives, rape crisis telephone lines. Halfway house for women like Giulietta, not a
centesimo
to rub between the clientele.

‘You’ll be all right,’ she said, cautiously. Then, becoming more thoughtful, ‘Seriously, though. I will say. If anyone – not, like, liabilities, I can see you can do without that, but anyone serious, decent – wants a bit of help, I’ll recommend you.’ Sandro had been her arresting officer,
two years ago. She looked puzzled at the turnabout in their relationship the offer entailed.

Sandro sighed, the irony weighing a little heavier on him than on her. ‘Thanks,’ he said again. There was a silence during which she fiddled with her mobile phone and he wondered if he should offer to buy her a coffee. But before he could say anything she stuffed the phone into her bag and leapt up.

‘Oh, God,’ she said, panicky and apologetic all at once. ‘It’s ten o’clock. I can’t be late, it’s only my third day!’ And she was off, as abruptly as she’d arrived.

Six hours and four coffees later, the desk drawers now stocked with stationery,
La Pulce
folded and unfolded a dozen times so he could stare uncomfortably at the ad he’d placed last week (‘Ex-officer from the Polizia dello Stato offers thirty years’ investigative experience and discreet and conscientious service. No job too small.’), Sandro wished he’d asked her to come back for a spot of lunch. Found himself feeling envious of her two mornings a week of being needed.

That night, Luisa chattered on about the day at the shop. A
marchesa
had been caught shoplifting. Seventy if she was a day, she rattled around in a vast, freezing nineteenth-century pile on the hill up towards Fiesole and had given an Uccello to the Uffizi, but the Americans who used to rent her
piano nobile
for cash in hand must have got cold feet, what with all the terrorism, because she was clearly broke. Broke, but refusing to admit it. She’d swanned through the shop being gracious to all of them then put a handbag under her ancestral fur coat. The alarms had gone off when she’d tried to leave.

‘Are you listening?’ said Luisa. ‘I thought you’d be interested.’

‘Sorry,’ said Sandro. He’d been wondering how long he should sit there in the Via del Leone, before calling it quits. ‘Shoplifting?’ He wondered if she was about to suggest he should look for some work as a store detective, or private security standing by the cashpoints or the jewellers’ shops on the Ponte Vecchio in a toytown uniform. He’d have to hide whenever a real uniform turned up.

She looked at him. ‘You’re not going to give up, are you.’ It wasn’t a question.

As it turned out, Sandro nearly missed his first client. He had advertised his hours of business on the plate he’d had made at the door as well as in the small ads, as eight-thirty until twelve, two until seven. On the doorstep at eight twenty-five on day four, Friday, his key in the lock, he thought, to hell with it. Who turns up at eight-thirty? Not in the crime stories, they didn’t, in the
gialle
of Rex Stout and Raymond Chandler, they turned up around whisky time, beautiful hard-boiled women with long legs. He should have known, after thirty years, that trouble gets people up early in the morning. People lie awake in the early hours, waiting for it to get light. And private detectives often found themselves drinking whisky by ten, even in the
gialle.

But, getting slack already, Sandro had put the key back in his pocket and turned away from the door, from the thought of all those hours to kill. He took a step towards the square, where on the way home yesterday he’d noticed a nicer-looking bar than the grubby one on the corner of the Via Santa Monaca. It was a big, bright place with a marble counter frequented by the market stallholders; he could almost see it from where he stood, full of real life. You could stand there and watch the little kids playing on the slides, the mothers with their bags full of vegetables. He’d had enough of his view of half an inch of Santa Maria dell’Carmine and eighty square metres of orange plastic tubing. He’d had enough of silence and solitude; he was going to the bar.

But something made him turn around. An apologetic cough, a small sigh, ten metres behind him, at his own front door. He turned without thinking, and there she was, a copy of yesterday’s
La Pulce
in her hand.

Iris March Burrowed Under the duvet and listened. She could hear the drone of morning traffic in the street the other side of the three-foot-thick walls, but the big, dark apartment was as quiet as a tomb, and as cold.

Iris wanted a cup of tea. Her nose was cold; her feet were cold; the apartment was colder than anywhere she’d ever been in her life, and it was a long way across uncarpeted stone to the kitchen. It was colder than school in England, where the windows rattled and the radiators were never more than tepid, and you sat pressed hopelessly against them turning mottled under your uniform without ever getting warm. The apartment was also colder than home, the terrible mildewed glass house built in the only cold, damp, north-facing site in the whole of the Ventoux by an experimental architect Ma had been having an affair with when she’d dropped out to paint – well, mess about – in the South of France, at nineteen, which happened to be exactly Iris’s age.

A pov, they called her at school, in her discreetly hand-me-down uniform. If you hadn’t sent me there, she used to say to Ma, we could have rebuilt the house. Or put in proper central heating. Iris remembered falls of snow that killed olive trees, and hunters going
out on New Year’s Day in hard frosts, blasting away with guns on the hillside below them. Then, feeling herself getting all homesick, she forced herself to remember the days and days of rain, too, the water seeping under the cracked concrete floor of the terrible house. He was fairly famous, now, the architect, though Ma’s house was one of his projects that never got photographed for magazines. He had a shock of white hair and a wrecked red face, and he’d made a pass at Iris, once. She turned over in disgust at the memory, pulling the inadequate duvet over her head.

Made a pass, that was one of Ma’s phrases, always delivered gaily, fondly. ‘Oh, lovey, David Bailey? Twenty years older than me and made a pass before he even knew my name.’ There would have been very little point in blowing the whistle on the architect, even if he had been something like forty-five years older than Iris.

Ronnie’s mother had found the flat. Ronnie was short for Veronica. Being called Iris was bad enough, but she couldn’t imagine how anyone could come up with a name like Veronica for a girl born in 1988; Iris supposed that under the circumstances Ronnie was all right. Ronnie’s mother had racing stables outside Newmarket and a new boyfriend, and wanted Ronnie, mooching around at home between school and whatever was going to be next, out of the way.

‘Bitch,’ Ronnie had said as they unpacked their bags. ‘Why does it have to be stinking, boring Florence?’

Ronnie throwing silk underwear around, chucking expensive boots on the floor.
And why,
Iris had thought as she looked at her own favourite dress, dark red rayon with a ruffle that was suddenly looking cheap,
do I have to come with you, Ronnie?

They’d been default friends at school, and had exchanged emails since, Iris dutiful, nostalgic even, after coming home to France to do the International Baccalaureate because Ma had run out of money for school fees. Ronnie’s emails had been easy, boastful, condescending; Iris had the idea Ronnie’s mother, Serena, was telling her to write them. Serena had a thing about creative people and, Iris being from a creative family, she wanted Ronnie there for some screwy, snobbish reason to do with that. If you only knew, Iris wanted to say. The life of the artist.
Ma illustrating children’s books for a pittance. Selling watercolours of Mont Ventoux in a crappy gallery in Aix, at the rate of one a month.

But of course when it came to it, Ronnie
didn’t
want Iris to come with her to Florence, not much; it had not been her idea at all. It had been Serena’s, of course, and Ronnie didn’t try very hard to disguise the fact. Iris was going to be the sensible one who’d keep Ronnie out of trouble, and the creative one who encouraged her to keep up the classes. And most of all Iris was the one whose mother was so broke the offer of a course in life-drawing and free accommodation in Florence for three months would be snatched off the table.

‘Do I have to, Ma?’ Iris had said sulkily, then, hearing how graceless she sounded, pleading, ‘I hardly know her, these days.’

‘But it’s in Florence, sweetheart,’ Ma had said, a dreamy, faraway look in her eyes. Iris assumed from the look that passes had been made in Florence, too, and sighed.

Ma’s focus had returned to Iris then. ‘And you’ve got talent,’ she’d said, with a determination that unnerved Iris. Ma didn’t have a determined bone in her body, or so Iris had always thought.

‘Ma,’ Iris had muttered, looking down at her feet. ‘Don’t.’ Because Ma would say that, wouldn’t she? Her only child had to have talent, at something. It was no joking matter. She sighed.

‘Darling,’ Ma had said, and Iris heard the worry in her voice. ‘You’ve got to decide on something. You can’t stay here all your life, working in the bar.’ Why not? Iris had thought stubbornly, still looking at the floor. You did. She heard Ma clear her throat. ‘There’s always London.’

Shocked, Iris had looked up then. By London, she knew, Ma meant Iris’s father; she meant that she’d move heaven and earth to get Iris into Camberwell or Chelsea or Goldsmith’s or any other London art school, and she would live with her father and his new family, in Dulwich. With the baby and the four-year-old and the ten-year-old twins and the second wife she’d never met, and her father. Her father whom she barely knew, who had taken absolutely zero interest in his first, grown child. Not now, not ever.

‘Ma,’ she’d said, alarmed, and it was Ma’s turn to look away. This was serious. Grow up, Iris told herself urgently. What does it matter if we
don’t get on? Florence might be stuffy and gloomy, but Italy was Italy, right? Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci and coffee and sunshine. Even in November. And three months’ proper grown-up life-drawing. It’d be all right.

What it was, was lonely. Resignedly Iris sat up in bed in the dark, sniffing in the cold air. High-ceilinged, north-facing, the room was full of the outlines of things in the gloom; every morning, it seemed, she still woke up wondering where on earth she was. There was a colossal wardrobe on one wall with something like an eagle carved on top of it, and big dusty curtains hung in heavy swags over the shuttered window. She pulled back the duvet. It was warmer outside than in this place, even in November. She crossed the smooth, icy tiles in bare feet, stubbed her toe on some great huge bit of furniture, an oak chest or uncomfortable armchair. ‘Ow. Bugger, bugger, bugger.’ She sat down on the scratchy stuffed seat, rubbing her toe.

Around her the apartment was still quiet; only the ticking of the ancient heating cranking up – or it could be cranking down, for all Iris knew. It never actually seemed to get warm. Iris stood up, opened the shutters and looked out.

Now that she’d got to know the city a little better, Iris sometimes thought she would have lived anywhere but Piazza d’Azeglio. A vast, gloomy nineteenth-century square just to the north of the centre, it was too grown-up, too big, too ugly, too much of a hike from the drawing school on the other side of the river. The massive buildings flanking the dull square of grass and trees were either owned by banks or, like this one, by ancient families who couldn’t afford to keep them up and let little apartments stuffed with hideous old family furniture to foreigners like Ronnie and Iris. They saw her coming, Iris reflected on Ronnie’s mum; had she even seen the place before she handed over the deposit?

The view out of the back was odd; it wasn’t the Florence she’d imagined. The smallish garden, with bits of statues in it and lots of black ivy, and the synagogue, although she hadn’t known that when they moved in. It looked like something from South Kensington, a green copper dome and mottled beige stonework, Victorian. Iris softened;
on a morning like this, with muffled sunlight trying to get through the mist, the view was nice. The roofs, some far-off hills just about visible to the south. Iris pushed open the window on impulse, leaned out on the cold stone of the window ledge. It was warmer outside. There was a smell of smoke and the air was mild.