The Drowning River (30 page)

He fished in his overcoat pockets and found a plastic bag. He put the books inside carefully.

Luisa looked at him, aghast. ‘Can you do that?’ she said.

He shrugged, beyond caring. ‘I’m going to give them to his wife,’ he said, shortly.

There was nothing else in the sideboard. ‘So if he’s been holed up here painting and drawing for ten years,’ said Giulietta suddenly, ‘where’s all the stuff? Because we’ve only seen those sketchbooks so far, and they’re sixty-five years old.’

She was right, too. Sandro looked around but there was nowhere else to store anything but the sideboard. It had two wide drawers above the cupboard; the first one he opened contained two boxes of paints, a wooden one containing tubes of oils and a tin of watercolours, a box of charcoal, a bunch of sharpened pencils held together by a rubber band. He noted that the paints came from the same shop as Veronica Hutton’s pristine box of watercolours. What did that mean? It might mean only that Zecchi was the best place to buy paints.

The second drawer contained a stack of Zecchi sketch pads; all apparently unused, some with their pages even uncut. But when Sandro lifted out the last one he saw that underneath it was a small pile of loose sheets. They were all versions of the drawing he’d found loose on the floor, only these were different; they looked old. Ancient, in fact, even older than Claudio’s wartime sketchbooks, their paper soft and brown with age. He held them up.

‘Still,’ said Luisa, taking the drawings and inspecting them, ‘ten years’ work? And these don’t even look like he could have done them. They look, I don’t know, like Michelangelo or something. Could someone have come and cleared the place out? Some landlord?’

Distracted by Giulietta, who as Luisa spoke had crossed to the window to peer inside the cheap melamine cabinet that hung lopsided over the sink, Sandro did not immediately consider what she had said.

‘Say that again?’ he said, absently.

‘What’s this mean, then?’ said Giulietta, interrupting at just the wrong moment. She had pulled off the dayglo pink Post-it note and was holding it up. ‘It says, KH, 11.30, 1 nov.’

‘KH?’ said Luisa. ‘Her surname begins with H, doesn’t it? And K’s got to be foreign, we don’t have the K.’

‘Hutton,’ said Sandro distractedly. ‘But she’s not K, she’s V, Veronica, Ronnie for short.’

Luisa was looking at Giulietta. ‘He was going to the Boboli to meet her,’ she said suddenly. ‘KH, Kaffeehaus; the Kaffeehaus at the top where we were this afternoon. He’ll have put it up there to remind him, especially if he was, you know, getting forgetful. He’ll have come here at ten, just like he did every morning, pottered about, she phoned him, he put that there to remind himself.’ She pointed down, and on the floor Sandro saw an ancient Bakelite phone. Claudio didn’t have a mobile, did he? If only he hadn’t been here when she’d called.

Giulietta had put her oar in now. ‘So why hadn’t they seen him, or the girl for that matter? At the Kaffeehaus?’

Luisa thought a moment, screwing up her face as she did when she was making an effort to remember something, and the sight of it made Sandro stop fretting over whatever it was he’d wanted to ask her, and just look at her.

‘Maybe she never turned up?’ she said, dubiously. ‘Or maybe – well, I did think. . .’ She hesitated. ‘Something did occur to me when we were up there – ’ And she stopped, and illumination spread across her features. ‘The umbrellas,’ she said triumphantly, ‘the terrace. Tuesday was a beautiful day, they would have had customers out on the terrace. They’d have had extra staff, for the terrace, might have been laid off when the rain started. Wouldn’t have known about any of this.’

‘Right,’ said Sandro, holding up a hand. ‘That’s good, that’s something, they met on the terrace, we knew they had to meet somewhere. We can get hold of that waiter – tell you what, you two can get hold of that waiter, but please, before you say anything else can you tell me again?’

He had Luisa’s attention at least, although she was looking at him as though he was mad.

‘Can you please repeat to me,’ said Sandro, trying to sound as calm as he could, ‘what you said before? About his work.’

‘That they were – that they looked too old, the drawings looked too old for him to have done them? That the landlord might have cleaned the place out? That’s what it looks like to me.’

Sandro held the sheaf of papers up to the pale, grey light. ‘Too old,’ he murmured to himself; rubbed a finger along the foxed edge of the vellum.

‘You don’t think – they’re stolen? Could they be valuable?’ Luisa was peering over his shoulder at the drawings, and he could feel the warmth of her breast against the back of his arm.

Slowly Sandro shook his head, thinking of the money. Regular payments into that bank account. ‘Not stolen, at least not exactly,’ he said.

‘Then what?’

‘You’d have to take them to an expert to be sure,’ he said cautiously, ‘But. . .’ And he passed the flat of his hand over the worn surface of the paper, held it up close to his face, the reddish sepia of the faded ink, the worn edges. ‘But I think they’re faked. I think they’re high-quality, beautiful, almost undetectable fakes.’ Sorry, Claudio, he added silently, even though there was a part of him in awe of the skill. They were beautiful.

‘And his wife never knew a thing,’ said Luisa.

‘He couldn’t have told her,’ he said, thinking of Lucia Gentileschi’s small, upright figure, hands folded in her lap. ‘Maybe he wanted to make sure she had enough, after he was gone.’

What was she going to say, when he told her? He ducked his head, not wanting to meet Luisa’s clear, outraged gaze, as if he was Claudio himself, found out, and she Lucia.

But before she could speak his phone rang; Sandro pulled it out, promising Luisa with his eyes that whoever it was, he’d get rid of them. Only it was Pietro, ranting.

‘Why the hell’s Alitalia faxing me passenger lists on a Sunday lunchtime? Sort yourself out, Sandro, get yourself a secretary, and a badge, for the love of God.’

Sandro let him simmer down. There were six or seven no-shows on the outward-bound flight to Sicily, and of those names one also cancelled his flight back to Florence on the Friday.

‘My God,’ said Sandro, when he heard the name. ‘So it was him.’

He had seen them go into the house, Claudio’s house. He had been on the swing. The swing in Piazza Tasso was better than the ones on
Lungarno Santa Rosa, it was new and wide with a rubber seat made out of an old car tyre; on Santa Rosa they were narrow and hard. And mostly broken.

Even though he was getting wetter and wetter, Tomi felt comfortable on his swing, and his mother let him out even if it did mean he came in wet because it made the day go more smoothly, that was what she said. He had tried to explain that to the skinny woman he liked, last night, when she tried to get him to go home.

His name was Tomi – for Tomasso – although he knew that they called him Comic-book Boy. He wasn’t any good at remembering names himself so Comic-book Boy seemed good enough.

Tomi preferred it when it wasn’t raining, obviously, even if he was having difficulty remembering a time when it hadn’t been raining. But it had been sunny when he had seen Claudio go down into the water, hadn’t it?

They’d been in there twenty-eight minutes by the underwater diving watch his mother had given him for Christmas last year. Claudio was dead, Tomi knew that much. He wasn’t stupid, but he just didn’t want to think about it. Tomi had been going to wait for them to come out again but he decided he would go over to Santa Rosa, anyway. His mother had said that if he took his long raincoat with the hood he could stay out until Nonna came over, which would be at four-thirty. And he wanted to check on the dog. If it
was
a dog: he hadn’t even seen it yet.

He got off the swing. Lupo Alberto had to be rolled in a plastic bag and stowed in his pocket; Tomi had a hundred and thirty-five books of the adventures of Lupo Alberto, that hapless farmyard wolf, and he kept them in a plastic box beside his bed. Even Lupo Alberto seemed to make his mother angry, sometimes, or at least it made her angry when he laughed too loudly on the bus with her, while he was reading.

It was Sunday, so the bar was not open. During the week Tomi went in there to buy small tins of sweets at the till, and the barman was almost always nice to him. Once what he had thought was a euro was a foreign coin but the barman took it anyway. It took Tomi a long time to get across the road because there was traffic; a fire engine with the siren going went past and splashed his trousers below the raincoat; it was
going out towards the Viadotto dell’Indiano. Tomi stared after it on the embankment where he stood beside the Circolo Rondinella, looking for smoke, but perhaps it wasn’t a fire, perhaps nothing stayed on fire in this rain. On the TV his mother had been watching fire engines rescue people from a mudslide.

There was no noise from the dog any more. Had someone come to take it away? Claudio never had a dog himself, not that Tomi knew about; Tomi wondered if he’d mind about this one being kept in his special place. If Claudio had had a dog, Tomi would have certainly asked if he could take it for a walk sometimes. The dog he had heard yesterday, and the day before, was not being walked. Tomi supposed it might be a different kind of animal; it had been dark when it was put there, late on Wednesday night, bundled out of a car in the dark, and the sounds it had made were not familiar to him. Toto and Patak had drunk so much they were asleep, each on his own bench, and so he’d gone to the swing under the trees, looking at the branches being swept downstream in the dark. He’d seen a car pull up, and he’d kept very still.

It was getting dark now although it wasn’t four-thirty yet; the lights were coming on all down the river along the embankments, flickering yellow. Yesterday the lights had come on just after lunchtime because of the rain, it had been so dark; yesterday he’d heard whatever animal it was, if it wasn’t a dog, banging against the side of the shack. You couldn’t hear it just walking along the river, you had to know where to look.

Tomi leaned over the embankment wall beyond the Circolo Rondinella to get a better view, and he got a shock. The water was so high it had covered all the grass where Claudio had gone down. In his wallet Tomi still had the card that the man had given him, Cellini Sandro; he wondered if Cellini Sandro would be interested in the dog? Often, when he tried to tell people things, they ended up walking away, and his mother told him he’d gone on too long, they weren’t interested.

The lower shacks were completely submerged, and he could see a plastic sack bulging to get out where boards had been splintered by the river pressing against them. Tomi thought about the animal inside
and jerked his head back. I’d like to go home, he repeated to himself. It was what Mama had told him to say, if he got into trouble. I’d like to go home now, please.

Their Faces, Really, Staring at her, expecting something of her, had sent Iris out of there. Hiroko’s calm, symmetrical features, on which Iris could never discern even the ghost of emotion, and Sophia’s prettiness blurred with crying and the onset of a monumental sulk.

‘You’re going where?’ she’d said. ‘You’re going to see
him
?’

Outside, the sound of the rain seemed to have been turned up, a dozen different kinds of percussion, pinging and clattering and rushing as it streamed down relentlessly. Iris had felt as if she was drowning in the big, dimly lit rooms of Hiroko’s apartment, as if she was underwater. And she needed to have it out with Jackson.

‘There’s something I need to ask him,’ she’d said.

And there was a question she had for Jackson, but the guilty truth was that even as they all sat there talking about Ronnie’s watercolours and that small but blinding moment of revelation about Ronnie came to her, part of Iris knew she could use it as a way of going forward with him. Getting in a room with him, shouting, accusing, looking him in the eye, at least so she could know for once and for all whether she could believe a word Jackson said.

She wanted to see him, simple as that. Was this what it was like,
then, this boyfriend, girlfriend thing? It felt more like a big steel trap; a great heavy thing Iris had to drag around with her, or else gnaw her own leg off to escape it. Like Ronnie’s bag, weighted with useless ironmongery, hurled into the undergrowth.

‘On the north side of the piazza,’ said Sophia reluctantly, ‘seventeenth century, or so Jackson says.’ This contemptuously. ‘His flat’s on the first floor, got a big balcony overlooking the Neptune statue. There’s a restaurant on the ground floor called Medusa, or something.’

Even in the downpour, its flagstones running with water, the piazza held tourists under a sea of black umbrellas; a queue stretching out from the massive stone stronghold that was the Palazzo Vecchio, a gaggle of them looking at the plaque where Savonarola had burned at the stake. Not much chance of burning anyone today, thought Iris. The sky was charcoal grey overhead, and low like a great tin lid. In the distance there were sirens.

Following Hiroko into the kitchen to say goodbye, Iris had been feeling obscurely guilty about having accepted her hospitality when she’d needed it, only to turn her back on the girl now she needed to be alone. In the corner of the room was a small television tuned to a news channel, turned down low; there’d been a camera lens blurred with water and footage of a mudslide somewhere in the Alps. Hiroko had turned away from Iris to turn the sound up, which Iris had at first taken as the cold shoulder, but then she realized Hiroko wanted to hear what they were saying.

‘They’re talking about it being another 1966,’ said Hiroko. ‘Do you know? The flood, when all the cellars filled up, all the archives were destroyed. Art students came from all over the world to help clean up.’

Standing now facing the long grey porticoes of the Uffizi, Iris imagined she could almost hear it above the distant sirens, the rushing of the river. There was something biblical about the quantity of it. What had Anna Massi said? Like the end of the world? ‘O
dio,’
she’d said. ‘Like the apocalypse.’