The Drowning River (36 page)

Fiamma DiTommaso’s place, unsurprisingly, was one of these. It was at the foot of the Costa Scarpuccia, which made sense; the wild triangle of garden supported by its crumbling wall was home, Luisa knew, to another colony of cats; you couldn’t walk up the Costa Scarpuccia without tripping over a dish encrusted with rotting food.

It wasn’t that Luisa didn’t like cats, she told herself. She had nothing against them, even if they did make her sneeze; she could see that a nice well-fed animal curled up on an old lady’s balcony could be a source
of comfort in old age or widowhood. But en masse, the itinerant packs of half-wild ones, slipping through the shadows of the Boboli, shying from human contact, all shades of camouflage, grey and tabby and tortoiseshell? Downright spooky, and unhygienic to boot.

But, then, she realized, even before Fiamma DiTommaso finally allowed them entry to her own den, there was something half-feral about the woman herself.

They rang the doorbell, and predictably enough there was no answer. They stood in silence, watching the facade; on the first floor the shutters were so warped that they curled outwards from the wall like a stale sandwich. There was someone behind them, watching.

‘Please, Signora DiTommaso,’ Luisa called. ‘It’s either talk to us, or to the police, isn’t it? Give us a chance?’ Behind her on the pavement a woman in her car, stuck with engine idling, put her head out of the driver window and gave them a curious look. Behind the shutters there was a shifting of light and then, abruptly, the front door opened.

‘Inside,’ hissed Fiamma DiTommaso. Even in the hallway there was the overpowering reek of cat. Luisa sneezed.

It was two rooms on the first floor, one leading off another. There was a sink at the back beside an ancient electric cooker, and a crude cupboard in one corner that must, Luisa deduced, constitute Fiamma DiTommaso’s facilities. No cats were actually in evidence, although the blanket that had been thrown over a small sofa was thick with silvered hairs.

Fiamma DiTommaso was wearing thick-soled sandals, despite the season, from which thin, bare, sun-spattered legs protruded, voluminous, gathered cotton trousers, and a faded sweatshirt. A thin scarf was wound around her head. DiTommaso was a name as old as Massi or Badigliani but this woman had taken a decidedly different route in life – no lipstick, no handbag to match the shoes: no greed. Despite a distaste born of the decades she had spent striving for elegance, to her surprise Luisa found herself admiring the woman.

It was impossible to say how old Fiamma DiTommaso was. Perhaps fifty, perhaps sixty; not far off Luisa’s own age.

‘Sit down,’ she said, and gestured towards the hairy sofa. Luisa sat,
and even before her behind came into contact with the blanket she could feel her nose and throat swell in response to the allergens.

Gingerly Giulietta sat down beside her; if anything she seemed more uneasy than Luisa. Looking around the sparse, dismal flat – one of the walls was in fact bare of plaster and showed exposed brick – Luisa realized that it probably resembled more or less every miserable, condemned squat and prostitute’s walk-up in which Giuli had spent her formative years. There were small touches of home – a framed photograph over the sink, a can of coffee, a small Buddha in front of a cheap mirror.

Fiamma DiTommaso had her arms folded tightly across her grey-sweatshirted chest; she was thin, under all that voluminous cotton, Luisa saw. ‘Just ask what you want to ask,’ she said, her voice rusty, as if she didn’t use it much.

The flat was dark, the shutters closed. A single lamp was lit, with a dim bulb, beside the sofa. Luisa kept her voice gentle.

‘It’s about the girl,’ she said, surprising herself by beginning that way, but it was true, wasn’t it? ‘The girl you saw, the girl who threw her bag away.’

‘Who says I saw her?’

‘When did you find the bag, Fiamma?’ asked Luisa.

‘Evening time,’ said Fiamma DiTommaso, a little too quickly. ‘Handed it straight in, didn’t I? Took it to the pigs at the Carabiniere station, though I got no thanks for it.’

Pigs; the woman was an old radical, that was it. ‘How did you find it?’ Luisa asked, patiently.

‘Just lying there,’ she said stubbornly.

‘It must have been dark,’ said Luisa.

‘Closes at four,’ Giulietta butted in, ‘the park. Not usually there that late, are you?’ Luisa looked at her, looked back at DiTommaso; there were similarities, weren’t there? For a second it seemed to Luisa that DiTommaso might be Giuli’s mother, if Giuli’s mother weren’t dead. She let Giuli go on. Good cop, bad cop, was that the phrase?

‘You found it at midday, didn’t you?’ said Giulietta, as calm as if she’d thought this all out beforehand. Perhaps she had. ‘You took it home, thinking you might take the money, because you’re not exactly
loaded, are you? And it wasn’t as if you’d stolen it. Finders keepers.’

DiTommaso stared back at her sullenly, and said nothing.

‘What made you bring it back?’ said Luisa gently. ‘It’s all right, we’re not the police, are we? Not going to tell them, either, if we can help it. But the girl – the girl’s gone missing. Did you know that? We don’t know if she’s alive or dead.’ There was a silence. ‘What made you bring it back? Did you start to think? Was there something you saw, or heard?’

‘You could help us find her,’ said Giulietta. ‘You could save her.’

‘I didn’t see anything,’ said DiTommaso, at last. ‘I only heard, I heard them shouting.’ Her jaw set, mulish, like a child’s. ‘I didn’t take the money, did I? I brought it all back. I was going to tell ’em, the pigs, the bloody police, only they treated me like – like I was dirty.’

Luisa nodded; she felt ashamed. ‘I understand,’ she said. ‘You’re not dirty. You can tell me, can’t you?’

For a moment she didn’t know which way it was going to go, but then DiTommaso sank down on to the sofa and made a soft clucking noise. From nowhere a huge tomcat appeared and leapt silently on to her knee. ‘All right,’ she said roughly. ‘I’ll tell you.’

Sandro Didn’t Know What he was going to say until he said it, although at least he had the instinct to say nothing at all until they’d let him through the door.

Massi had clearly brought Antonella Scarpa along as back-up; typical, Sandro thought, as they busied themselves nervously around the lock. Hiding behind a woman. The security shutter was a wire mesh, he noticed; was this because they intended the place to be a showroom, a kind of advertisement? No point in hiding the wares from the public.

Massi was complaining about the traffic; Sandro kept the information that the bridges were going to be closed to himself. He had turned up, at least, the great Direttore; Sandro’s ineradicable instinct for fear told him the man was very nervous: what had changed? Sandro had forced him out of his comfort zone, was that it? But this was his gallery.

‘It’s kind of you,’ was all Sandro said. ‘I don’t think this will take long.’ When he had made this arrangement, he marvelled, he had had no idea, none at all. But now he was here, now he could smell the air in this place, he knew he was on to something.

A row of lights flicked on, downlighting the dark-coloured walls, which were a kind of deep maroon. It was very cold. It occurred
to him that they were practically underground, set back into the hillside, the great cold weight of earth and rock above them.

Buying a little time, Sandro walked along the row of framed work, some ink drawings of architectural detail, charcoal, a couple of oils that seemed to him to be poorly executed, but what did he know? A drawing of a girl lying on her back, reading a book; he stopped in front of the picture.

He turned.

‘You know a man called Claudio Gentileschi,’ he said. It was not a question; they both gaped at him under the sepulchral lighting. He focussed on Paolo Massi.

‘You met him a little more than ten years ago, at a reception at the synagogue, to which you were invited because your father was considered a friend of the Florentine Jewish community.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Paolo Massi seemed belatedly to recover his tongue. ‘Ten years ago? I – I – I have no idea what this has to do with, with your investigation.’

‘Claudio Gentileschi died on the same day that Veronica Hutton disappeared.’

That would have to do; it seemed to have the effect of relaxing Massi, just fractionally. He inclined his head; it occurred to Sandro with the weight of inevitability that Paolo Massi was very happy for him to draw the obvious conclusions from that simple fact.

‘Ten years is a long time,’ he said with an attempt at a smile. ‘But the name is familiar, yes.’

‘Gentileschi’s widow says your wife called on her,’ said Sandro. ‘To pay her respects. On Friday night.’

Massi’s smile was a little fixed. ‘My wife is very proper in these matters,’ he said.

‘But there had been a continued connection, obviously,’ said Sandro. ‘Between your family and theirs?’

Massi opened his mouth, and closed it again.

Reaching up to a hook beside the door to hang up her coat, it was Antonella Scarpa who spoke, over her shoulder, as if casually.

‘Claudio Gentileschi has sold the occasional piece of work through us, Paolo. Don’t you remember? He is rather a good artist, some beautiful drawings.’

Slowly Sandro turned to focus on her; he didn’t believe a word of it. She slotted her arms into the sleeves of another of her white work-coats, her uniform. She was prepared.

‘His own work?’

‘What do you mean?’ said Antonella Scarpa, and he saw through her in that moment, standing there looking severely at him, hands in her pockets, trying to bamboozle him.

You’re good, he thought, you’re good; is it love, or is it business, that makes you so good at lying for him? Across her shoulder he saw, through the window and out across the dark street, Gabi silhouetted in the window of her own shop, staring at them.

‘What I mean, Signorina Scarpa,’ he said, extemporizing, ‘is that I have information to the effect that for ten years Claudio Gentileschi has not merely been supplying you with the odd beautiful piece of his own work, as you put it. He has been a one-man production line of high-quality faked drawings, for you to sell on to your international customers. Your Germans, your Americans, your Russian billionaires with Riviera properties to furnish and money to launder – you must have been very happy indeed with the fall of communism, no?’

‘You’re talking nonsense,’ said Antonella Scarpa, calmly. ‘This is pure fantasy.’

Sandro held her gaze. ‘You thought you could put anything over on them, ignorant Russian peasants, did you? Well, let me tell you, when they find out that you’ve been cheating them, you’ll find out there are certain things those Russian peasant oligarchs are very good at indeed.’ He withdrew the flimsy cardboard folder from his bag and took out one of the drawings he’d lifted from Claudio’s studio.

‘You weren’t scared of the Guardia di Finanza, were you? Bet you were pleased with yourselves when you saw them off. Scared now?’

‘They found nothing,’ said Massi, faintly. ‘There was no evidence of any – of any impropriety.’ Scarpa shot him a glance, and he fell silent.

‘He was a good man,’ said Sandro, surprised by the fervour in his own voice, as he defended Claudio. ‘How did you talk him into it?’

Paolo Massi looked back at him, his jaw slack and weak, no longer the great patron of the arts, the Svengali to any susceptible, pretty student. No, thought Sandro, we haven’t even got to that yet, have we? The girls. First things first. He stayed calm.

‘I expect you used your father’s name, didn’t you? The old printing presses kept running through the war, the Jewish connection. With perhaps a hint of how he needed to make sure his wife, who was so much younger, would be taken care of after he’d gone?’

Helplessly Massi put out a hand for the drawing but Sandro pulled it back. ‘Even if we can’t trace all the Renaissance drawings you’ve sold over the past few years, one or two should be enough, don’t you think?’

Sandro moved on. ‘Are they out at the back?’ It felt as though he might almost have been speaking in tongues; it all came tumbling out, guesswork, improvisation, but even as he said it he knew it made sense.

‘Is that what you’re keeping there, the work you cleared out of Claudio’s studio, before anyone else knew he was dead? Pity to waste that investment you’ve been making in him all these years, and where are you going to get work of this quality?’ He held up the faded sepia drawing, Claudio’s life’s work. ‘A pity to waste it.’

And how did they get in? To Claudio’s studio? Could Claudio have given them a key from the beginning, proud, private Claudio? Wouldn’t that have seemed like they owned him?

But as the inconvenient questions posed themselves he noticed that Antonella Scarpa had moved to position herself between him and the door at the back of the gallery, down under the security light that he had watched from Gabi’s shop. He flicked a look back across the road towards her, his only ally, but the shop was dark now. Gabi had gone home.

‘I’d like a look in there,’ he said, easily. ‘If you don’t mind?’

‘And if we do?’ said Antonella Scarpa. He almost admired her; she had guts, at least. The fierce little
Sarda
in her white coat.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’m sure the police could persuade you, couldn’t they?’

‘I think they’re busy just now,’ said Massi, sneering; Sandro observed him try to puff himself up, like some creature trying to make itself appear larger when threatened.

And with the two of them motionless and blocking him in in the near-dark, Sandro was just beginning to wonder what he would actually do if Luisa and Giuli didn’t turn up – or even if they did, would they be a match for these two? – when Massi’s telephone rang. And everything changed.

‘No way,’ said Sophia, her eyes wide. ‘Oh, my, God. No way, Jackson.’

Too chastened to feel more than a tiny twinge of satisfaction, Jackson just nodded. At least this was an improvement; as they’d walked to the bar Sophia’s eyes had been fixed on him, switching from silent reproach to sullen anger and back again. Couldn’t blame her, could he?
Sorry, Sophia;
he tried it out in his head, but it sounded pathetic. So he said nothing at all until they were out of the rain, and then he told them.