Authors: Christobel Kent
Van Vleet let out a noise, a terrible noise, almost a sob. He put both hands to his face.
‘Brett,’ said Therese Van Vleet, and her arms came up, hugging herself on the bed, terrified. ‘Brett, you didn’t.’
‘I didn’t,’ he said, through his hands. ‘I didn’t.’
The hands came down. As Sandro looked at the man’s face he recognised the expression he’d seen earlier, not of guilt, not merely shock, but incomprehension. And he felt it, not that he hadn’t already known it was coming: the great deflating rush that laid it all flat. Heavily he sat.
‘I didn’t,’ said Brett Van Vleet again.
*
At a dainty table under Gilli’s coffered wooden ceilings Giuli was sitting taking tea with Marjorie Cameron. What a pair, she thought, the odd couple, and she saw the thought reflected in the waiter’s eyes as he laid down the apparatus of this foreign ritual. Dishes and jugs and muslin and hinged strainers, an ex-junkie and a menopausal expatriate carrying on a strained roundabout conversation as they sipped and poured. His not to reason why.
‘Is it Miss Sarto?’
Giuli had exited the shop in a hurry and with flaming cheeks, at the thought that her conversation with Vera had been overheard, but Marjorie Cameron had followed her out. The wife of that man who built the bridges: the photograph had come back to her on the doorstep, the blind parapets of an endless bridge under a desert sky.
She was clearly upset, and not by the scene she might or might not have witnessed between Giuli and Vera. She barely spoke a word of Italian.
‘Mrs Cameron?’ She had taken the woman’s hand firmly,
hoping it was the right way to behave, under the circumstances. ‘How nice to meet you again.’
‘I came . . . I came . . .’
The engineer’s wife had seemed unable to finish the sentence; her faded hazel eyes looked beseechingly into Giuli’s.
‘For something to read?’ Giuli helped her out.
Marjorie Cameron had stared at her, then turned back to look in the bookshop’s window, plastered with historical novels, travel guides showing cypresses and domes. ‘My husband told— suggested I come here,’ she said. ‘Something to read, yes.’ She hesitated. ‘Culture. He doesn’t like me to waste my time. He’s in a meeting.’
‘A meeting?’ Giuli had thought they were all more or less on holiday. But then she remembered the engineer saying something about having to go back out – wherever it was. To the Middle East.
‘Oh, lawyers,’ Marjorie said vaguely, waving a hand. She gazed at Giuli with her pale eyes like water. ‘Letters. But there’s been another – did you know? Poor Athene.’ And Marjorie Cameron’s eyes filled, threatened to overflow. It was then that Giuli had taken her arm, and steered her towards Gilli.
‘You’re not all right, are you?’ said Giuli. She’d ordered tea out of desperation: eight euros each, and she’d never get the money back. Marjorie Cameron put her thin hands in her lap, like a child, and told her what had happened at the Palazzo San Giorgio.
So the big-boned old lady from last night was in hospital – no more than five hundred metres, in fact, from where they sat, because she’d been taken to the big old central hospital of
Santa Maria Nuova just the other side of the Duomo. Athene Morris: the one among them all that Giuli had liked; Athene Morris who had talked to her about love, and independence. It seemed to have upset Marjorie Cameron a great deal.
‘Have you come from there?’ she asked, and Cameron gave a quick shake of the head, putting a tissue to her pink nose.
‘She is very old,’ Giuli said tentatively, as the waiter departed. She couldn’t get the old woman’s face out of her head, though, that look when Giuli had excused herself abruptly. Athene Morris’s strong face crumpling just enough to reveal her shameful secret: she was lonely. Afraid of being alone. Me too, Giuli thought, only then with a small pulse of comfort another thought surprised her: but I have Enzo.
‘Oh, yes,’ said Marjorie Cameron. ‘I shouldn’t be sentimental, Ian hates sentiment.’ She dabbed at her eyes. ‘When we got the news about Giancarlo he said, why pretend?’ She turned the big pale eyes on Giuli. ‘My husband got him fired, you see.’ And dabbed again, while Giuli pondered the kind of person that loses another person their job.
‘I didn’t think I’d miss the children,’ Marjorie Cameron said, leaning back against the padded banquette.
‘How old are they?’
They were twenty-eight, thirty-one, thirty-three: one in Brisbane, the other two in London.
‘I had them young,’ she said. ‘People don’t say that any more, how young I must have been; you get old quite suddenly, you know? They’re not surprised. I was twenty when I had Charles. Here is better than Sydney, London’s nearer, even if Brisbane isn’t. I have three grandchildren in London.’
Giuli let her talk, the colour returning to her pale cheeks. Outside, the light was fading. The waiter hovered: Giuli poured the tea, not sure if she was doing it right, waiting for a moment, and the waiter retreated.
Marjorie Cameron looked down into her empty cup, tipping it. ‘My mother used to tell fortunes from tea leaves,’ she said. ‘Do you do that here? Irish, my mother. Not Scots. She said I should never have married a Scotsman.’ Her head bent. ‘Perhaps I never should have married anyone.’
‘Like Miss Morris,’ said Giuli. And Marjorie Cameron looked at her, holding her secret, wondering whether to tell.
‘They said she had a stroke.’ She turned to Giuli. ‘She was alone, and she had a stroke. That’s what they said. But why did no one notice, until this afternoon? No one said. She must have been ill last night.’
‘I talked to her last night,’ said Giuli.
Marjorie Cameron’s head turned slowly. ‘You did?’
‘At the unveiling,’ said Giuli. She thought of Athene Morris’s stricken face as she had left her: had the old lady been ill, even then? ‘She seemed . . . she didn’t seem ill.’
Marjorie Cameron’s face cleared a little. ‘Oh, yes. But that was before. I meant later. After she’d gone to bed. Perhaps you could find out,’ she said slowly, almost to herself. ‘That’s your job, isn’t it? You and Mr Cellini?’
‘Find out what?’ Giuli said patiently.
‘They said it was a stroke,’ said Marjorie Cameron, ‘but he was in her room last night, I’m sure of it.’ She leaned down. ‘I heard him, you see, very late. Someone must have known she was ill. Or . . .’
‘Or what?’ Leaning forward, Giuli could feel the thump of her heart. ‘Who did you hear in her room?’
But Marjorie Cameron only shook her head.
*
‘I used to come up here when I was a kid,’ said Elena, looking out through the tiny window. They were in one of the turrets of the Forte di Belvedere, just up the hill from the Palazzo San Giorgio and officially closed for repairs, and it was almost dark.
It was too late to wonder if it had been a mistake, the way she’d started up from her workbench when he’d peered in at the window, now that she and Danilo Lludic were in a space so confined she could smell the chemicals he worked with on his clothes. She could smell his skin beneath them.
‘This is what it’s really all about, though,’ he said, and she could hear the suppressed excitement in his voice in the dark. There were other smells – fusty, stale, the smells of earlier occupation – in the little brick cage that held them suspended over the fort’s battlements. ‘Can you imagine? The place of power, never mind that puny little palace we’re all crammed into. Men dying in battle, dying to defend the greatest city on earth.’
The great fortress looked so peaceful now, grassed over, flowering weeds sprouting from its brickwork. Had it been her idea? She’d let him into the workshop, like a big bear in her space, and he’d begun pacing the room, roaming the walls, inspecting her tools as he talked – small-talk, grumbling, fretful – until she wondered if there might be something wrong with him,
attention deficit. She’d asked about the ambulance eventually, and he’d stopped moving about then.
‘I must go over there,’ he’d said, his mind turning on something she couldn’t see. ‘To the hospital. If she wakes up . . .’ He’d stopped. ‘She looked terrible. Do you think she’ll die?’ He asked the question like a child. Attention deficit – or one of those other syndromes, where you couldn’t empathise.
‘She’s very old,’ Elena had said, her heart sinking, but he’d put his face in his hands then.
‘Don’t say that,’ he said, fiercely. She’d prised his hands away. ‘It’s that place,’ he said. ‘That bloody place. Eats you alive, being stuck in there; all that money, all that chattering behind closed doors. I don’t know what I’ll do without her. We were alike. Crazy old bird.’
She’d said, on impulse, ‘Let’s get out of here.’ And once on the steep slope of the hill, she hadn’t wanted to go down, back into the city. ‘You want to see something secret?’ They’d looked at each other then, and it had seemed to her that she was a child again, with this big childlike man in tow.
A heap of rubble half-covered by a tarpaulin and a builders’ lorry with an upended wheelbarrow in the dusk meant nothing: the workers left them there just as a sign of their presence. ‘They’ve got funding and a five-year contract to erect the safety equipment,’ said Elena as they’d stepped around it. ‘So what’s the guessing they’ll make it last five years?’
Scrubby grass, soft brick walls, a single umbrella pine leaning gently against the yellow villa around which the fort had been built. A few irises planted at random, and a view.
Elena had led him past the link fencing, avoiding the great
door with its Medici escutcheon, the five balls in white marble against grey stone tilted to look down, forbidding them. They’d skirted the massive sloping wall until they located the side entrance, the old route inside, blocked half-heartedly by more building materials and a rusting digger, up a brick-paved ramp and there it was. The view. The sun was going down and the row of statuary along the roofline of the little summer house at the top of the Boboli was silhouetted against the purple sky.
It was just as Elena remembered it: whatever she might have implied to Danilo Lludic, it was years since she’d been up here. The shaded outlines of trees, the blue hills, a distant tower, and laid over it all a soft light refracted through every droplet of moisture seeded in the warm air.
A bleached and battered bunch of artificial flowers sat askew against the low wall. ‘Someone fell,’ she’d said, when Lludic pointed.
A girl had fallen from the parapets, and the fort had had to be closed. It was easy to see how it had happened: she wouldn’t even have needed to be drunk. The walls were no more than knee-high, and the iron rail surmounting them didn’t run the full perimeter of the structure. The tops of what Elena knew to be trees, but the girl had taken to be bushes, were just visible, extending up the wall where it abutted the Boboli gardens. She’d simply jumped or climbed over, fallen ten metres and broken her neck.
‘Did you know the man that died?’ Elena said, at the sight of the dismal little rain-soaked bouquet, and Lludic’s head turned sharply.
‘What man?’ he said, scanning her face. ‘You mean Giancarlo?’
She nodded, curious now.
‘He was a piece of work,’ said Lludic, looking away. ‘A nasty little fascist piece of work.’
‘Fascist?’ Was that just the insult of choice, a word for anyone embedded in the system that artists like Lludic used?
But he had only shrugged in answer and there in front of them had stood the little turret.
Inside it now, Lludic seemed to become aware quite suddenly of her lack of response, and stopped, mid flow. ‘Men still like battle, then,’ she said, to fill the silence. He took a step towards her, bringing with him the heat of his conversation, and of his big body.
One hand took hers, and she brought the other up instinctively, in defence. John was gone, she was alone, the future had melted away in front of her. But at least this was excitement.
‘Do you think I’m going to hurt you?’ he said, his voice reasonable, and she held her breath.
‘I don’t know,’ she said, but what she meant was,
I don’t care
.
She could only see the gleam of his eyes in the dark as abruptly he dropped her hands, but his voice was ragged when he spoke. ‘I have to go,’ he said. ‘She might wake up.’
Chapter Twenty-Three
A
S SHE RECEIVED HIM
in her office, Alessandra Cornell looked shattered. A single lamp was on on her desk, throwing light upwards onto the peachy limbs of the frescoed cherubs. Sandro spoke to her mechanically, grateful for the fact that she wouldn’t be able to see in his eyes the near-catastrophe of his encounter with Brett Van Vleet upstairs.
‘“They’ll keep us informed”,’ he repeated. Beyond the big windows it was twilight. Upstairs he had left Brett Van Vleet packing a bag, his wife standing at the window looking out. ‘That’s what I’m to say if anyone asks how Miss Morris is doing. I understand.’
Athene Morris would probably die.
Cornell was speaking. ‘I tried to tell them at the hospital that she’s tough. The English . . .’ And as she faltered, Sandro saw that she was struggling with something unfamiliar. Grief? She’d gone on, a frown creasing that perfect face, the line still there when she looked up at him. Alessandra Cornell was becoming a human being. ‘But they only said, there’s a chance, of course. But at her age. . .’
The next few hours would be crucial. She was already on the phone in search of Athene Morris’s next of kin when he let himself out.
In the foyer down the corridor Sandro could hear Lino’s voice, courteous but circumspect as he blocked some visitor’s enquiry. On impulse he headed the other way, passing through the library but not even pausing to acknowledge Martin Fleming turning from a conversation with Mauro at the bar, and out into the courtyard where Lludic’s sculpture stood. Below him the terraced garden was in velvety darkness, and beyond it the city spread out, twinkling. He stepped to the edge of the courtyard and looked along the terrace beneath Cornell’s window, an old instinct, to make sure he was alone. It was empty.
He’d known when he’d seen Van Vleet’s face: not the whole story, naturally. But Van Vleet hadn’t killed anyone, that much was plain. And nor, unless she was capable of dragging a grown man in a suitcase half across the city, had his wife.