Authors: Christobel Kent
‘He was gay,’ said Sandro, almost in an aside. ‘So Falco – the
carabiniere
– says.’
‘Gay?’ There were voices beyond the door. Luisa didn’t know why the fact should astonish her, but it did. ‘Sandro? I’d better
go. We’ll be back this afternoon. Perhaps, well, maybe a bit earlier than we thought.’
Luisa hung up. With the Filipina still giving her that look, she put the phone away and entered one of the stalls, just because that, nominally, was what she was here for. She heard the heavy outer door open and hiss closed: footsteps. Heels. She closed the lid and sat down. Staring at the expensive fake-Roman marble tiling, Luisa found herself suddenly overwhelmed by the claustrophobic awfulness of the place.
‘It can hardly have been a surprise. Vito had it coming.’
The voice was Magda Scardino’s; she spoke with lazy indifference. ‘That man? Knowing what he was like? I could see what he wanted from the beginning.’
Luisa closed her eyes: if she was going to make her presence known she should do it now. She didn’t move. They were speaking in English – if the worst came to the worst she could just play the stupid Italian, and feign ignorance. But she understood it all.
‘She’s not much more than a child.’ It was Juliet Fleming.
‘Therese? She’s certainly behaving like one. She wants the attention. If you ask me, she never had the purse. I certainly didn’t see it.’ A silence. ‘She’s been alone most of the morning, she could have done anything with it.’
‘It’s a possibility.’ Juliet Fleming pondered it judiciously.
The door opened with a creak.
‘Marjorie.’ Magda Scardino’s voice was flat. ‘You haven’t left Therese on her own?’
The tap ran. They, at least, were not pretending to be in there for any reason other than privacy for their conversation. And unlike Luisa, they were practised at ignoring the staff.
‘You shouldn’t be so hard on her,’ said Marjorie Cameron, braver than Luisa had expected.
‘You,’ said Magda with disdain. ‘Always damned well mothering, even when it’s not expected of you any more. What a waste of time. Let Therese stand on her own two feet, and deal with what’s coming to her.’
‘What’s that?’ said Juliet Fleming quietly.
‘Oh, we all know what they were up to, the three of them. Their little threesomes. It’ll come out, now Giancarlo’s dead.’
‘I expect all sorts of things will come out,’ said Juliet Fleming.
‘What do you mean? What do you mean?’ Marjorie Cameron had become agitated.
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Marjorie. It was your own husband turned him in. Got him sacked. You know exactly what I’m talking about.’ Magda Scardino drew breath. ‘I expect Giancarlo wanted money, and someone didn’t want to pay.’
Magda certainly seemed to know what she was talking about, Luisa reflected from inside her cubicle. Was she talking about herself?
‘It all comes down to money, in the end, does it?’ said Juliet Fleming softly. ‘You don’t think he wanted anything more?’
Such as? wondered Luisa. Juliet Fleming knew something.
But Magda Scardino wasn’t listening. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘People are so . . . snobbish about it. I know what they think of us – of me. But take Athene.’ There was an indrawn breath, soft. ‘You think Athene would appear so marvellous to them all if she were living in an old people’s home in some miserable little English town? A wealthy ex-lover is a useful thing.’
A silence. The attendant murmured something and there was a chink of coins.
Luisa simply couldn’t do it any more. She stood, flushed, waited the obligatory three seconds, came out. She didn’t even have to make eye contact with the women: for them she might as well not have existed. She washed her hands and left.
Chapter Eighteen
I
T WAS ALMOST AS
though the Professor was blocking Sandro’s path. He stood in the foyer where the corridor led down to the library, and to Alessandra Cornell’s office. The room smelled of flowers: a big vase of lilies had replaced the orchid and the scent was overpowering.
On his way to Cornell’s office Sandro had been looking down at his phone, because he’d just had a message from Pietro.
They’re saying seventy-two hours, more or less
. He had looked up, calculating, and there was Scardino. John Carlsson had been dead three days: last seen here three days ago. Who had he come to see?
Sandro pocketed his phone.
‘We haven’t properly met,’ Scardino said, holding out a hand with an odd stiffness.
It wasn’t as though Sandro wanted to have that conversation with Alessandra Cornell; he was dreading it. He felt sure that for some obscure reason she would blame him for the discovery of another body connected with the Palazzo San Giorgio.
He took Scardino’s hand. ‘And I gather you’re off tomorrow?’ he said.
The Professor’s pale grey eyes grew amused. ‘You have sharp ears, Mr Cellini,’ he said. ‘Indeed. We’re off to Cairo, my wife and I.’ A pause. ‘Shall we?’
He gestured towards the garden doors, and Lino obediently stepped forward, poised to open them. Sandro hesitated. He might not want to talk to Alessandra Cornell, but Athene Morris was another matter. He looked up instinctively, imagining the old lady moving slowly through the pale padded corridors above them, peering in at doors.
But Athene Morris might have come down to the garden by now: it was almost one, and warm.
‘Why not,’ he said.
On the upper terrace the canvas chairs had been set out again, but there was no sign of the old Englishwoman. Scardino looked pale in the sunlight, and insubstantial; he sat down with care, as if something might break.
Standing, Sandro breathed in the fresh scent of rain and earth and early jasmine and looked back up at the façade. Made for one great man, not half a dozen wealthy couples; no Medici would have let himself be squeezed into a luxury apartment. But power took a different shape these days. It bounced between mobile phone masts and satellites, down oil pipelines, virtual money on computer screens transferred at the touch of a pad. Somewhere were there still bank vaults stacked with gold, gleaming underground? Almost certainly there were.
‘You were talking to my colleague last night,’ said Scardino, breaking into his thoughts.
‘I was?’ Sandro sat, warily.
The maid Alice appeared, fingering that crucifix nervously. ‘Coffee,’ said Scardino, without asking Sandro.
‘Lauren. Dottoressa Tassi,’ Scardino said, when she’d gone. ‘Nice girl. Clever.’ There was a question in his voice.
Sandro grimaced. ‘Truth is, I can’t remember what we talked about. I’m not used to these evenings. Cocktails.’ He rubbed his head.
‘Ah.’ Did Scardino sound relieved?
‘I think the Dottoressa might have woken up with a similar kind of head this morning,’ said Sandro. ‘Neither of us will have been making much sense.’ Something occurred to him. ‘She might have mentioned your work?’ he tried.
Scardino smiled, relaxing. ‘Enough to send you to sleep without the cocktails,’ he said. ‘Practically garbage disposal, hardly glamorous. I’m researching biofuels. Generating ethanol from various substances. Algae, for example.’
‘Oh.’ Sandro was obscurely disappointed: had he hoped for viruses, or nuclear warheads? And if he had been worried about what Tassi might have said to him, it wasn’t to do with his research.
The coffee arrived. Sandro tried to catch the girl’s eye but she hurried off before he could say anything. He turned back to see Professor Scardino lifting the cup to his lips; oddly, he held it with both hands, and even then seemed to be having difficulty getting it to his lips.
Scardino saw the look. ‘Parkinson’s,’ he said. ‘Medication hasn’t kicked in yet.’
The calculation that had been silently going on in the back of Sandro’s mind shifted, a piece of the puzzle moving into a new
place. Fact: Scardino couldn’t have lifted that suitcase, couldn’t even have got it as far as a waiting taxi.
‘It’s all right,’ Scardino said. ‘I’m in a privileged position. I have access to the best medication. They’re talking about new treatments, ultrasound deep-brain stimulation. And if that doesn’t work, well . . . my job doesn’t require manual dexterity these days.’ He set the cup down. The city stretched out below them, hazy in the spring sun.
‘A lot of travel, though,’ said Sandro. ‘So you’re not retired, after all.’
‘My wife wouldn’t let me retire,’ the Professor said drily. ‘Besides, they say I’ve got at least another ten years’ useful life.’ It didn’t sound like much to Sandro, said like that.
‘Are you going with the Flemings, to Cairo? Or did I get that wrong?’
‘You got that wrong,’ said Scardino. ‘Lady Fleming has to be in London for some . . . procedure or other, they’re off tomorrow too.’ He paused. ‘We’re all getting old, bits going wrong. It’s not that we don’t trust the Italian doctors, you understand.’
Scardino with Parkinson’s, and Fleming’s wife. Marina Artusi had said to Luisa,
They call it a disease
. It came to him that they were both dying, perhaps slowly, perhaps not. He felt the need of a superstitious gesture to ward something off.
Watching him, the Professor smiled again, and Sandro saw calculation. ‘What are they saying about Giancarlo, do you know? Are the police keeping you informed?’
A door opened further along the façade.
Was this what he’d been brought out here for? Sandro grimaced apologetically. ‘Not much news, I’m afraid. They’re
talking to his neighbours, a man was seen leaving his apartment late at night, that’s all I know.’
‘A man,’ Scardino murmured. ‘They’re sure?’
Sandro shrugged. ‘The Carabinieri are always sure, especially when they’re wrong,’ he said, and was rewarded with a smile. ‘Did . . . did you ever meet a journalist called John Carlsson?’ he asked, casually.
Sandro deliberately looked away as he asked the question, down the terraced garden, to where the soft tumble of blue flowers marked the boundary. He could just about see the old neighbour on her balcony below, a sketchy figure in a pale overall standing in her doorway.
Scardino sat up a little and raised a hand to shade his eyes, and Sandro looked back at him. The man’s hand was steady now: the medication must have kicked in.
‘Carlsson? Yes, of course. He’s often here. I don’t much like talking to journalists.’ He paused. ‘Especially those who consider themselves to be experts on the environment. But he’s a sharp guy. Worth talking to – even if you’re not quite sure what he’s after. But that’s journalists for you.’ His smile seemed quite untroubled. And he’d used the present tense throughout.
‘Recently back from a trip down south, Lady Fleming said.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Scardino readily. ‘That would figure. He once told me he spent a couple of months down there last year, on a story. Very beautiful, I believe. Bari.’ He sat up in the canvas chair, looking over Sandro’s shoulder.
Turning, Sandro saw Bottai, with Brett Van Vleet. He got awkwardly to his feet.
Bari.
‘The ladies are on their way back,’ Bottai said, talking past him to Scardino, who frowned down at his watch. ‘So we’d better look busy, wouldn’t you say?’
Sandro saw that beside him Brett Van Vleet had the stance of a truculent schoolboy. He held an envelope in one hand, with the Palazzo’s crest in one corner, his name handwritten on it. When he saw Sandro looking, he moved his hands behind him and straightened like a soldier. Bottai had moved away, distancing himself. He was sitting now, beside Scardino.
The long doors to the foyer opened and Lino appeared, an old ghost exposed to the sun. He was holding something in his hand. He hesitated a moment, then approached.
I found this,’ Lino said nervously, holding it out to Van Vleet. It was a slim black wallet, expensive-looking. ‘It was in the foyer. It had fallen behind the table.’
‘Van Vleet took it from him roughly. ‘Oh, yes?’ he said. ‘Found it?’
‘It’s your wife’s,’ said Lino, lowering his eyes.
‘I know that,’ the American snapped, and immediately opened it, in front of the doorman. It was obvious that he was checking to see if anything was missing. Over his shoulder Sandro could see a substantial number of banknotes, undisturbed.
Humiliation rose in the doorman’s face. ‘I haven’t looked inside,’ he said stiffly.
Sandro looked at Van Vleet’s flushed cheeks, his big-knuckled hands going through his wife’s purse. His dirty magazines, his threesomes, that crested envelope Bottai had handed him, the man seen leaving Vito’s house late the night he died.
‘Mr Van Vleet,’ he said. ‘I wonder if I might—’
But then there was a kind of muted commotion and Alessandra Cornell was there, hurrying along the palace’s façade under the bougainvillea. Beside her was the shambling figure of Danilo Lludic, and the maid Alice in their wake. There was something in the way they approached, ungainly in their hurry, that sounded an alarm in the quiet garden.
Cornell came up in front of them, breathless.
‘It’s Athene,’ she said. ‘Can you come?’
The rash on her neck had spread.
*
Giuli stood in a doorway on the Piazza Tasso, watching. The cigarette in her hand, the second of the day, was half smoked: she’d lit it from one the hairdresser’s girl had held up to her wordlessly as she emerged from the office.
Giuli knew that she should call Elena Giovese and tell her that her boyfriend
was
dead, after all. No one else would, would they? She just couldn’t quite think of how you would say it, and desperately she rebelled. Not fair. Thirty years ago she’d sat there listening to the school janitor telling her her mother had been found, dead of an overdose in a doorway. Why should she be the one to do it? She’d ask Sandro. Later.
The wide glazed doors of the Women’s Centre had swung open to admit or release the clients – as they’d been taught to call them – half a dozen times since she’d stood there, and still Giuli hadn’t seen what she wanted. She didn’t know what – or more to the point,
who
– she was waiting for yet, but she had
an instinct. Whoever it was that had bullied Rosina into lying about Giuli would reveal herself.
The slightest touch, maybe not even that, maybe only a breath at her shoulder, and she jumped, turning.