Authors: Christobel Kent
‘You think . . . you think . . .’ Luisa felt a lurch at the image that appeared in her head of Therese Van Vleet’s numb, pale face. Perhaps she should have kept quiet.
‘I want you to do something for me,’ he said. She waited.
‘I want you to go there for me. To Vito’s house.’ Luisa stared at him, and he looked back at her, his face set. ‘The address must be on his CV.’
‘I know where he lived,’ she said slowly, and it was Sandro’s turn to stare.
*
Athene Morris had come up to bed, had sat reading with a nightcap. There had been nothing at that writing table, no pen or paper, no letter of denunciation, no last will and testament. She’d have gone to close her shutters, felt faint, perhaps from standing too quickly, the chair had gone over. She might not have been able to bend to right it, at her age, it might have
seemed too much for her, woozy and late at night. She’d gone to lie down: she would do it in the morning.
Was that how it had gone? The overturned chair haunted Sandro. Now it was no longer morning, the day had stretched out to afternoon. Athene Morris should be up and dressed in her linens and shawls and sitting on the terrace in the soft light. Perhaps she wouldn’t see another morning.
He hadn’t wanted to say goodbye to Luisa. Had he been right to send her there, to Vito’s house?
‘There’s a landlady,’ he had said.
‘I know that, too,’ she’d answered him.
He’d pleaded. ‘Try to see the flat. Talk to her. Anything you can find out. About Vito, about the night he died, about what kind of guy he was. Gay, straight, happy, sad – what made him tick.’
‘Made him tick.’ Luisa had made an exasperated noise.
He’d fallen back on, ‘You know what I mean.’ And then, because it was true, ‘You’re better at that kind of thing than I am.’ Luisa was used to listening. A woman could get in where a man couldn’t. And he was stuck here.
She’d given him that sigh, then the one that meant yes, and then she’d said, out of the blue, ‘Would you marry again, if I died?’ And that was when he’d hung on to her hand.
‘You’re not going to die,’ he said, in a panic.
And Danilo Lludic had come out then, out through the glass doors with a great explosive sigh. He’d hardly given them a glance, standing there on the pavement, but Sandro had let Luisa go. He had watched her walk up towards the low shiny car, straight-backed, a little thicker at the waist than when they’d first met, but otherwise unchanged.
He’d turned away from the sight of the limousine bouncing, stupidly long and low-slung, on the steep stone street, taking his prize back down into the city. Across the way, Lludic had been peering in at the workshop, tapping on the window.
Sandro stepped out through the French doors on to the terrace.
‘Whatever next, eh?’ There was no mistaking the pompous boom in that voice, even if it hadn’t been preceded by a strong whiff of cigar smoke. Gastone Bottai had been out at the back, on the terrace smoking in the sunshine, as Athene Morris was loaded into the ambulance.
‘Still, at that age. . .’ He turned away; he wasn’t even talking to Sandro, not properly. Gastone Bottai was one of those men who didn’t need a reply too often. ‘It’s hardly premature death.’ She’s not dead, Sandro wanted to say. ‘She takes it all to heart too much.’
‘Who?’
Bottai looked at him in surprise. ‘Alessandra, of course,’ he said urbanely, making sure Sandro understood that they were on first-name terms, and Sandro was still Cellini.
Bottai turned away from Sandro to look down at the river. ‘This is a business,’ he said. ‘Not a charity. And besides, these are foreigners, the Anglo-Saxons don’t like interference. It’s all about independence and privacy. They don’t want us behaving like old peasant women, poking our noses into their ailments, their affairs. Sticking our heads round their doors asking if everything is all right.’ He puffed out his chest.
‘Miss Cornell is worried,’ said Sandro, eyeing him. ‘She thinks something is going on here. People have died.’
Bottai sucked on his cigar, eyes narrowed. ‘Nonsense,’ he said. ‘She was ancient.’
‘Giancarlo Vito wasn’t old, was he? I understand he was your appointment,’ said Sandro. ‘It must have been a shock. Having to fire him, then his . . . murder.’ Bottai’s face was thunderous. Yes! thought Sandro. He went on. ‘And then there’s John Carlsson. The journalist?’
‘Who?’ A lie: Bottai knew who Carlsson was. The cigar was back in his mouth, and there was a cloud of smoke between them. ‘Here today, gone tomorrow, that’s journalists for you,’ he said. ‘Can’t be expected to remember them all.’
Sandro thought of that desecrated body, the tendons severed at the joints, and he couldn’t help himself, he wanted a reaction. ‘People have talked about the room they uncovered, being bad luck. In the cellar. What it might have been used for.’
Bottai turned, squinting through the smoke. ‘Don’t be stupid,’ he said sharply. ‘Superstition.’
‘It is still there, though, isn’t it?’ said Sandro. ‘Down there somewhere? By the steam room? Or did they let you brick it back up?’
Bottai gave him a long, murderous stare. ‘I’m sure there’s something you can be getting on with, Cellini,’ he said, and walked away.
In the foyer Lino was standing stiff, back at his post. ‘Never mind,’ said Sandro, pausing. ‘Some of these foreigners don’t know how to behave, is all. They don’t know an honest man when they see one.’
Too proud to relax his pose even fractionally, Lino gave a little nod. ‘I remembered,’ he said. ‘She was standing there by the
table, looking in her bag, while they waited for the limousine. I saw her close the bag up. No way it could have fallen out by accident.’
Sandro rested a hand on his arm a second, absorbing the information.
The library was empty save for Mauro, behind the bar. He was reading on his stool, so absorbed he didn’t notice Sandro until he leaned across the marble. He set the book down.
Sandro read the flattened paperback’s title. Machiavelli,
The Prince
. ‘Useful?’ he asked.
Mauro smiled. ‘Sir Martin recommended it to me,’ he said. ‘When he found out I’d worked at an embassy. He said it should be required reading.’
‘And what have you learned?’ said Sandro
‘He says men are driven by love or fear,’ said the barman.
‘And women?’ said Sandro.
Mauro just smiled. ‘And then he says, better for a ruler to be feared than loved.’
‘Sounds like my Luisa,’ said Sandro. Mauro got out another glass to polish: Sandro admired a man who didn’t like to be idle. ‘There was a journalist, a regular in here, I’ve heard,’ he said casually. ‘Carlsson? Nice guy?’
Mauro set the glass down, and was still. ‘Yeah,’ he said slowly. ‘Nice guy, up to a point. He seems to be one of the favoured ones. Cornell likes him: her tame journalist, or so she thinks.’
‘You disagree?’
‘They’re like dogs, aren’t they? Never quite tame. He was in a few days ago. Chatting to Mr Van Vleet, if that’s what you want to know.’
Sandro just nodded, and turned to look into the room. ‘Where is everyone?’
‘They don’t seem to feel much like socialising,’ said Mauro, pouring Sandro an inch of gassy water. ‘It’s probably Miss Morris. They might even be upset.’
‘You don’t know who might have visited her last night, do you?’ Sandro spoke softly.
Mauro looked at him, head tilted. ‘If anyone . . . they’d have said, wouldn’t they?’
Sandro pursed his lips. ‘Of course you’re right,’ he said.
‘Lludic is next door to her,’ the barman said slowly. ‘He was up late, entertaining visitors of his own.’ Sandro remembered: the girl across the way. ‘Maybe he saw something.’ Mauro rubbed his chin thoughtfully. ‘She wanders, when everyone’s in bed. Lady Fleming told me that.’ Sandro nodded. Mauro went on. ‘A free spirit. And keeps her door unlocked, too, I know that. For fear of just this, comes to us all.’
‘Fear of what?’
‘Of dying alone,’ the barman said quietly. ‘Lying there for days.’
Sandro stared at him, absorbing this. Athene Morris habitually left her door unlocked – so anyone could have walked in, in the night. She was more afraid of dying alone than of an intruder.
It had been locked at one, when Sandro had knocked. And there had been no key in the lock, or he wouldn’t have been able to use the passkey. He hadn’t looked for it.
Far off in the great building above them came a sound, distant but unsettling. They both looked up, wondering if they
had really heard it. The sound ebbed, but it was still there, in the air. A woman’s scream.
They waited a long moment, holding their breath. There were footsteps in the corridor, and Brett Van Vleet, his ruddy face paler than Sandro had seen it, came into the library. He staggered a little.
‘You,’ he said, staring at Sandro, gesturing. ‘We need you.’
Chapter Twenty-One
I
N THE DOORWAY OF
an artists’ suppliers opposite the English-language bookshop, Giuli was waiting. The shop was on the corner of the Via delle Oche and the Via dello Studio, an alleyway in the shadow of the Duomo. At the end of the street the great green-and-white-striped façade loomed, its dome filling the sky, as out of scale as an alien spaceship: maybe, Giuli thought, surprising herself, that had been the intention. Those builders and priests getting together a thousand years ago to scare the living daylights out of us.
Behind Giuli the door opened with a clang and a leggy foreign girl pushed past her with a big canvas, making an annoyed sound.
In the workshop on the Costa San Giorgio, Elena Giovese hadn’t been at her bench. Giuli had peered in at the window, shading her eyes. An anglepoise had been left on at the back of the workshop, illuminating a gilded mirror, but the door was locked, and no one answered when she rang. The bell-pull was an old-fashioned iron ring in the wall, and it had set off a clang somewhere inside.
The chair at the bench had been pushed back, as if she had planned to be gone only a minute. In the corner of the window was a little card, handwritten:
If we are away from the shop
, and then a mobile number. Giuli tapped it into her phone, and called. It went straight to answerphone. Her uncle was in the hospital, Elena had said, perhaps that was where she was. Giuli didn’t leave a message, because her voice would have betrayed her. If she was going to tell Elena her boyfriend had been murdered, it would have to be face to face.
Across the street the skinny old guy who manned the door at the Palazzo had raised a hand to her. Sandro was in there, and Giuli had to resist the temptation to run in and ask him for help. She had climbed back on her
motorino
instead, and headed for the Via delle Oche.
Now the long-legged art student was giving Giuli a dirty look over her shoulder. Giuli stepped out of the shop’s doorway and into the yellow gleam of the streetlights blinking on in the dusk. At her till inside the bookshop, Vera looked up.
Giuli pushed open the door, and it set a bell ringing. She stood and waited until the noise died down, watching Vera’s expression. She’d alternated shifts on reception at the Centre with this woman for three years: she’d grown used to her bad temper and her hostility. Something to do with the menopause, something to do with having burned her boats and moved to Italy when she was twenty-five and pretty, only to find the shine on Italian romance wore off at around five months pregnant. Something to do with her idle, seedy husband, a plumber for whom she worked as part-time secretary along with her other jobs.
Vera: yes.
‘I’ve talked to Rosina,’ Giuli said, and watched the woman’s eyes flicker in her pouchy, expressionless face. English coldness allied with the Italian wife’s habit of denial. ‘She wouldn’t tell me who got her to lie.’
‘I’m working,’ the Englishwoman said. ‘You’re harassing me. I’ll have to report this.’
‘There’s no one here but us,’ said Giuli softly.
Vera looked over her shoulder into the shop: bookshelves receded into the depths of the building. ‘I have customers,’ she said, but there was no one to be seen.
Giuli moved up to the desk. ‘You made a mistake sending that email,’ she said quietly. ‘I suppose you counted on my not recognising the address? Not knowing how to find out whose it was? Or maybe you thought I’d be so freaked or ashamed I’d delete it without looking?’ Which was exactly what she had done, of course. Only Enzo had got it back.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Again Vera looked over her shoulder into the ranked shelves.
‘
[email protected]
?’ Idro for
idraulico
, plumber. ‘All you have to do is type it in to the internet search engine and guess who pops up? Your husband’s work email, isn’t it?’
Again Vera’s eyes flickered. She hunched behind the till, small and bitter. The bookshop was cavernous and chilly, despite the warmth outside.
Giuli remembered the day she’d come in to work with Enzo’s ring on her finger and they’d gathered around: Barbara from the Addictions Clinic, old Maria the cleaner, even a client, a regular, a mother of six worn down and exhausted and pregnant again. They’d cooed and smiled down at the modest stone on her thin
hand, the haggard, tired faces. You’d have thought they’d be long past getting excited over a ring on a forty-four-year-old’s finger. Vera had just stood there, hunched in the coat she’d got on because Giuli’s arrival had signified the end of her shift. Giuli had thought nothing of it at the time.
The English
, maybe, if she’d thought anything.
Without a word Vera had turned and left them there with their compliments and exclamations, even though her husband had not turned up to collect her yet and she’d had to stand there on the pavement in full view of the reception desk through the glass doors. Giuli had looked up and seen her, and then someone had asked if they could try the ring on and when she looked back Vera was climbing on the
motorino
.
Had Giuli recognised the man then, or this morning, or years before? Had she said to herself, there’s no point looking back, how could you possibly be sure, when there had been so many men and you were out of it half the time anyway?