Authors: Christobel Kent
Mauro moved first, with certainty. Of course, thought Lino afterwards, it’s his place, his territory, he must have known all along. The cellar.
*
Christ, thought Sandro in the taxi. Christ, for a squad car and a blue light.
Close to halfway back, staring at the meter in the gridlocked Piazzale Donatello, he’d realised that he didn’t have any cash left on him. He muttered and pleaded under his breath, sweating, until the taxi driver turned to look at him, and he had to keep quiet or risk being turfed out into the traffic.
Before they even came to a halt outside the Palazzo San Giorgio he had thrown open the door and bolted; the taxi driver had no time to grab him. ‘A minute,’ he managed over his shoulder, anything to slow the man’s pursuit, anything to get in there, anything to find her,
please God
, he begged, and then he was inside.
He heard them before he saw them, voices clamouring in unmistakable panic. Around him the luxurious space with its stairways and high ceilings echoed and taunted him. He ran, down the wide corridor’s incline, the books of the library ahead of him. Someone was screaming. Someone was crying. They were clustered in the door at the far end, Giuli with her hands to her face and two men standing, one with his arms tight
around someone, another kneeling, a woman on the floor, he could see her feet. Her bare feet, turned in like a child’s. He blundered, knocking his knee against a chair, he almost fell. Behind him someone shouted but he stumbled back upright and kept moving, trying to decipher the configuration of bodies.
The woman on the floor was not dead, the big kneeling man was holding her hands across her body to keep her still and talking into her face – but the woman who wasn’t dead wasn’t Luisa, either, he’d known even from the bare feet, not her. Sandro slowed, his eyes travelled up, and there was Lino, there was the doorman in his ill-fitting suit and it was his arms around her. A strand of black hair was across her cheek and between her body and Lino’s, one arm was folded against the breast. Luisa turned and saw him, and the space narrowed to a tunnel between them. As if in slow motion he righted the chair and went for her.
Behind them the taxi driver was shouting about calling the police.
Epilogue
‘W
HO’D HAVE THOUGHT HE’D
have so many friends,’ said Pietro in wonderment. At the back of the small square they sat in the shade on plastic chairs. On a precarious-looking stage, on the other side of several rows of trestles, four scruffy musicians were playing something deafening.
They looked at Enzo. Giuli’s husband of six hours was sitting beside the remains of the wedding meal – a
porchetta
roasted by his father, of which only the pig’s golden head remained, on its side like a drunken uncle, and the teetering fruit and meringue shambles of the
torta nuziale
. The bridegroom was leaning forward with his elbows on his knees in earnest conversation with six or seven cheerfully sweating men in suits. There’d been close to seventy guests at the height of the evening: the hardcore remained, those who’d hung the streamers and the photographs of the happy couple on every telegraph pole and lamppost between here and the town hall at Monte San Savino where they’d been married.
‘Yes,’ said Sandro. ‘From school, apparently.’ Which was a good sign – not that he’d had any real doubts about Enzo, not for some time. The shyness and the dodgy haircut disguised determination. And Giuli had had the clippers to him: his shorn forehead looked naked and new and pleasantly surprised.
Even at close to eight in the evening, even up here in the shade of Monte Amiata, it was hot and the men had removed their ties. Sandro mopped at his forehead, and looked around for Luisa. The square wasn’t square, and it wasn’t a city
piazza
: it more closely resembled a farmyard below a belltower, with one side occupied by an open barn filled to the corrugated roof with straw, and it was among the rolled bales that he spotted her, talking to the girl Elena who was Giuli’s friend from school. The only one – but one was something. They might have been mother and daughter themselves, both dark, both compact and prickly, though tonight in the summer dusk Luisa’s expression was anything but fierce.
‘Any consolation that you left Falco with a nice mess to sort out?’ said Pietro, looking sidelong.
Sandro grunted, still watching Luisa. ‘Ah, they’ll cover it up,’ he said. ‘They’ll say he went rogue.’ Brushed his hands together in a motion of dismissal. ‘Sleeping around’s not against the law. Not yet. And crimes of passion . . . well. It might turn out to be a pretty useful smokescreen.’
Gingerly he adjusted his waistband; even after the gargantuan feast of meat he felt pretty comfortable. Luisa had had him on fruit for breakfast for a month. She’d made it up with Frollini and had returned to work, two days a week and the best two at that, Thursday and Friday. It left her with time on her hands to keep tabs on his diet.
‘If it ever gets to court. I don’t suppose anyone in the service is enjoying the press coverage, though.’
It could be worse. Marjorie Cameron was not young and if she’d once been pretty, the photographs of her now, wild-eyed and dishevelled as she was hustled in and out of one hearing room after another, showed no evidence of it. It was being spun as menopausal madness, possibly even fantasy.
‘She seems to want to be put away, though,’ he went on, ruminatively. ‘Luisa says, with a husband like that, she’s not surprised. She thinks she’s . . . well, not enjoying it exactly. But Ian Cameron’s on the hook, all right. He’s back in Australia, keeping his head down, but it’s not just a matter of embarrassment. The Gulf Arabs don’t like this kind of scandal, and it must be keeping attention on his collapsed bridge, too.’ He didn’t like Cameron, but did he deserve this? Just for being a cold bastard. Forty years of loveless marriage. Luisa thought he did.
‘It’s a pretty good mess,’ said Pietro. ‘Try to untangle the justice of it, even if Falco knows what justice is, which I doubt. Vipers, the lot of them, rich foreigners plus security services. Lock them all up in that killing room and throw away the key.’
‘Falco’s not so bad,’ said Sandro, wearily.
‘Vito must have been nuts,’ said Pietro ruminatively. ‘Maybe it’s something they don’t teach you in the army – or the secret service for that matter. Not to mess about with women of a certain age.’
Despite himself, Sandro smiled. ‘Falco’s learned that lesson, too,’ he said. ‘We could have covered it up ourselves, you know? Luisa and me. I didn’t want Marjorie Cameron put away. She hardly knew what she was doing.’ Uneasily he passed the
handkerchief over his forehead again and sat up, scenting coffee. A stout woman emerged from the small restaurant beside the barn, carrying a tray.
‘Locking the door on Athene Morris was something else, though.’ He took the coffee and leaned back, sobered. ‘She had to answer for that.’
‘Just like someone has to answer for Carlsson,’ said Pietro grimly. ‘Or not, as the case may be. They’ll hand that one on.’ Falco was holding on to the gay secret life theory for grim death: the security services so far had not been mentioned in the media.
Sandro grunted. ‘If they keep going with him being a promiscuous homosexual they’re going to have trouble when Elena comes forward as a witness. Convincing the magistrates Marjorie Cameron is delusional is one thing, but Carlsson didn’t even have a gay high-school crush to his name.’
He drained his coffee and stood: seeking Giuli. The band had quietened down; dimly he might even have recognised what they were playing, and people were moving forward to dance. Enzo was on his feet too, and looking, and there she was, coming shyly around the side of the stage. Afterwards, when people asked curiously, knowing Giuli, about her dress, all he could say helplessly was, it was sort of white.
*
When she saw Giuli was going to speak, Luisa’s heart was in her mouth. At her side under the barn roof, Elena – Giuli’s old, new, only friend – turned towards the stage too, a hand to her cheek. The music stopped.
The microphone gave out an amplified rustle and suddenly everyone was still. Giuli turned from one side to the other. ‘I . . .’ she said. ‘I . . .’ Holding the microphone in both hands, small in white as if she was at the first communion she’d never in a million years have had, and Luisa held her breath. Don’t say too much, she found herself thinking, don’t . . . don’t. Her own wedding to Sandro swam behind her eyes. Her parents fussing and fretting; an awful stiff dress of nylon lace. Sandro doggedly determined: never one minute of hesitation. Never one single minute of doubt in forty years.
Across the crowd she saw his head turn and he was looking at her and it seemed to Luisa that something like her real wedding had taken place only that morning as she’d stood, tears in her eyes, in front of the mirror in her bedroom in her slip and her outfit waiting on the bed. ‘You were lovely then, and you’re lovely now,’ he’d said, and taking the strap on the right side down over her shoulder, he’d leaned and put his lips to it, scars and all, and made it hers.
The crowd stirred, expectant, and Giuli spoke.
‘I love him,’ she said, tears in her voice that no one in the crowd would have recognised because Giuli never cried. And then the microphone dropped and Enzo was there at her side, gently leaning to retrieve it. The clapping and cheering and calling out drowned what he had to say when he lifted it and spoke, but it didn’t matter because they all knew, anyway.
Across the heads Luisa looked at her husband, and he looked back at her, and nearly forty years narrowed to a long warm afternoon, under a belltower and a barn.