“I know you are sorry, Helen. It must be strange to you, this violence, this armed struggle.” The last two words were said with irony. His English had improved since the attack.
“It ought to be strange to everyone,” she said. There was an embarrassed silence. Helen wasn’t used to individual lessons, and she was too fond of Eduardo, and too unsettled by what had happened to him, to know how to start. It didn’t seem right to begin with the usual routine about what they’d both been doing since they’d last seen each other. She’d lived her normal life, while Eduardo had been shot, had been taken to hospital, had convalesced, had lived in fear of what might happen next. There were no words for this.
Finally, because nothing else came to her, she asked him what he thought he would need to know in South Africa. He said he would need to learn to brake his tongue. In English, she told him, the expression is “hold your tongue”. He sighed, shaking his head. “How can I live in South Africa? I despise apartheid,” he said.
“Do you have to go?” Helen said. “Why don’t you change your job? You could go to another city, surely?” He looked at her, with pity, or worse, contempt, as though she had chosen to be foolish.
“I have a family,” he said. “A wife, two sons at university, one of them your age. Here in Italy I’m a marked man. In any case, in my business, Turin is the only city. No one else makes cars in Italy.”
“But you represent the union. I thought you were fighting to defend the workers,” she blurted out. “I can’t understand why they should want to hurt you.”
“They?” he said. “Who do you think
they
are?”
“What do you mean?”
“You make it seem simple, Helen, when you say ‘they’. You make it seem that the lines are made clean with a knife between one person and the other, one idea and the other. It isn’t simple. I might move over these lines and be shot, or shoot. I have been shot, this time. But I don’t know who ‘they’ are. Who do you think they are?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know what they’re fighting for.” She looked at him. “You would know, wouldn’t you? If you shot someone?”
He shrugged, then winced, pressing his hand to his knee.
“I have a family,” he said. “I would shoot for them. I would shoot to kill. And now I must live as a white man in a racist state for them. I think I would prefer to shoot, but that is not possible.” He grinned, his face lit up; he looked like a boy. He was old enough to be her father. Opening his hands, he held them out in an unexpected gesture, less of resignation than acceptance. I love you, she thought, although that wasn’t what she meant. It was just that, at that moment, she would have given her life to spend it beside this small neat man, with his large hands and bristly cropped grey-black hair. He seemed to be the only man she knew.
“And now you must teach me the words I will need to explain to the people I will work beside, all these white people, why I am not a racist and cannot share their view.”
That evening she listened to Giacomo argue with Federico, when they had finished dinner and both men assumed she would clear the table, as she generally did. She listened to their talk of hegemony and autonomy, workers’ control and the ethics of auto-reduction, by which they seemed to mean evading tram fares and stealing food from supermarkets. All at once they stopped arguing and began to laugh about a professor they both despised at the department, where Giacomo was also working, although not, as far as Helen could tell, being paid.
She was the only wage-earner in the flat; Federico’s research grant was still tied up in some bureaucratic way she didn’t understand. They were living on pasta and beans, vegetables and round bread rolls with a crusty little nipple at the top that Helen always broke off and nibbled first. And local red Barbera, bought by the litre from a local
vineria
. Giacomo was putting on weight. He had barely trimmed his hair and beard. That was the evening she said he looked like one of the Red Brigades leaders, who’d been arrested the year before and was still in jail, awaiting trial. She found herself comparing Giacomo and Federico with Eduardo. Beside that small heroic man, his wounded leg propped on the stool, they seemed like untested boys to her; she wondered how she’d translate the word “callow” into Italian while they mopped up the last dregs of sauce with their bread.
The following morning Giacomo’s beard was gone. That afternoon he went to the barber’s and had his hair cut short. That evening he came home for dinner in plain grey trousers and a v-necked sweater over a nylon shirt. They barely recognised him.
“You look as though you’re in disguise,” she said, not sure whether to laugh or be disturbed. “You’ve cast off all your bourgeois intellectual trappings,” teased Federico. “You’ll have to be careful though. They might not let you into the department looking like that.” Helen thought the new Giacomo was like some character from Turgenev, a pale inconspicuous anarchist biding his time in an office until the moment came. He looked more dangerous, not less. She couldn’t take her eyes off him. She wondered what Miriam would make of him.
She still saw Miriam once or twice a week. They’d eat a roll together for lunch in one of the bars in the centre, or meet up in one of the English pubs for a drink. Miriam had guessed that Helen had a man, but didn’t press for information. “We girls have to make do with what’s available,” she’d said. Miriam introduced her to all the other girls from her Highland village, au pairs to some of the richest families in Turin. It was odd to see them together, over-dressed, drunk and raucous, their make-up smeared by tears of laughter and sweat, and imagine them the following morning in the Liberty villas of their employers, preparing their charges for their private schools, while drivers waited below in expensive cars, armed against kidnappers. They had their days free, and seemed to spend them in beauty salons. Helen had sometimes wondered what happened in such places, but turned down their offers to take her with a nervous smile. One of them, usually Miriam, would drive her home, then watch her until she was safely in the building. They worried she had no money and needed new clothes. Everyone wants to mother me, she thought, except Federico. She wasn’t sure how much she liked it.
She didn’t tell Giacomo about Eduardo; Federico did. She’d heard enough of Giacomo’s views by then to know what he would think, and she was right. He said it was sentimental of her to suppose that Eduardo’s disgust and acceptance and anger were more important than anyone else’s, to which she said that of course no single person was worth more than any other single person, she knew that, although she wasn’t sure she believed it. She told him that it was
through
Eduardo that she understood the others. That’s what she said, but she heard herself speaking and wondered what she meant. Was she afraid to say what she really thought, that none of this violence made sense to her? She’d heard Giacomo use the word “injury” to describe kneecapping. It seemed so bland, so anaemic, as though being shot in the leg were a sort of accident, like falling off a kerb. It might have been no more than a blip in his otherwise perfect English to use the word in this way, but she didn’t think so. She thought it reflected his state of mind.
She couldn’t be sure how Federico felt. When she told him about the extra lessons, and the reason for them, he listened with what looked like sympathy. He didn’t seem to be jealous any longer, which puzzled and upset her, though she couldn’t have explained why. He asked her questions she couldn’t answer about Eduardo’s union work, about how it was seen within management. Was he seen as a collaborator? he wanted to know. What effect had his kneecapping had on morale? he asked her, as though that mattered. He wanted the best for everyone, she said, he’s a good man, although she couldn’t know this; it was just what she felt. Federico listened and nodded, silent. The idea that she was missing something, some larger sense, stayed with her and made her uncomfortable.
6
At the top end of Via del Tritone, with helicopters circling above his head, Martin strides out. He’s had a brief siesta and now he’s sweating slightly in the late-afternoon heat, marvelling at the tawdry bazaar-like feel of the tourist shops, their amateurish window fronts, the dark unwelcoming bars, handwritten signs in broken English and Japanese, the
démodé
displays of ties and bags and gloves. It’s odd the way this side of Rome has survived, he thinks, as though people still came to the city for its leatherwork and silk, expecting bargains. He pauses just before reaching the
Messaggero
building, wondering if snipers have their rifles trained on him, because there are always snipers on days like this, days of parades and state festivities, dotted like urns above the gutters of the buildings, visible to one another and the hovering pilots. A helicopter’s shadow skims above him like a cloud. He glances up, tempted to wave, catching his hat as it slides off. When the impulse passes and he looks ahead, he sees Adriano Testa standing beside the newspaper kiosk in a pale blue polo shirt and linen trousers, and is pleased to find him both balder and more out of shape than Martin is. With a bound of contentment, his hand outstretched, he walks across.
“No joy with this damn thing,” Adriano says, waving his mobile in the air. “It’s these fucking helicopters everywhere.”
A gun-grey copter obligingly appears above their heads. Martin sighs and nods. “It’s the price we pay for our security,” he says.
Adriano looks at him warily, unsure of Martin’s tone. Martin opens his hands and holds them out in the classic gesture of someone with nothing to conceal. “Joke,” he says.
Adriano shrugs. “I’ve got a place round the corner,” he says. “We’ll go there.”
Martin follows him as he slouches off ahead, into shadow. Five minutes later they are sitting opposite each other at a small square wooden table, the kind used in
trattorie
, in a barely furnished flat. “Bolt hole,” says Adriano. “Can’t be expected to get home every night.” He grins. “Things pop up.”
“I’m sure they do,” says Martin.
“Come on then,” says Adriano. “Spill the beans. I haven’t heard from you for years and now you’d ‘like a chat’. What’s up?”
“I don’t have any beans to spill,” says Martin. “I was hoping you did.”
“About what?”
“I read your piece this morning.”
Adriano gives a shifty grin.
“And?”
“You must have had it waiting for some time.”
“Everything comes to he who waits.”
“I imagine so.”
“So, you’re interested in Mura?”
Martin shakes his head. “No, not Mura. He’s just a poseur in the end. The one I’m interested in is Di Stasi.”
“The man of the moment.” Adriano makes a low whistle. To Martin’s surprise a cat appears from somewhere in the flat and presses itself against his leg.
“Not mine,” says Adriano. “Comes in through the window. Lives on the roof. It’s a mystery who feeds it.”
“You knew him too.” Martin says this slowly, as if to caution Adriano that pretending otherwise will serve no purpose. He did his homework before leaving his flat. He knows that Adriano went to school with Federico, before being separated by military service and university. And then the tidal wave of the struggle, the
lotta armata
, had swept Federico up but left Adriano behind, apparently, although Martin isn’t convinced of this. Adriano has subsequently re-emerged as an expert on the secret services, often quoted, rarely contradicted. He’s teased Martin a couple of times in the past about episodes Martin would rather forget, as though he knows more than he lets on.
“Did I?” says Adriano, then nods his head. “I suppose I did. Though he didn’t exactly seek me out these past few years. I suppose he had bigger fish to fry.”
“Is that why he’s dead?”
“Don’t ask me. Big fish, big pond,” says Adriano. He stands up and crosses the kitchen to the fridge, coming back with two cans of beer. Martin opens his can, then reaches down to stroke the cat. It leaps onto the table, brushing against the hand that holds the beer.
Adriano drinks from his can, looking round as if for something misplaced, then opens the top three buttons of his shirt.
“I suppose you’re wondering who killed him,” he says.
Martin nods. “That had crossed my mind.”
“You’re not the only one.”
“Really?”
Adriano scratches his chest. “These damned mosquitoes. They’re eating me to death. Don’t they bite you?”
Martin shakes his head. “My blood doesn’t seem to appeal to them. It must be too refined.”
Adriano ignores this. “There’s something wrong about it. Seriously wrong.” He finishes the beer, his head tilted back, his gullet working, then fetches another can while Martin strokes the cat, now settled on his lap. “Remember the Porcu business, what was it? Three years ago. Shot on his way to the office. Didn’t have an escort, of course. That all came later. They still don’t know
exactly
who did it, the hand on the gun, I mean, but that’s not the point. There was never any doubt about where the bullet came from, if you follow me. Everyone knew damn well it was one of the last half-dozen Trots left in Europe.” He drinks and pulls a face, surprised, as though the beer has suddenly gone off, or he’s lost his taste for it. “This time, though, there’s something extremely bad-smelling about the whole thing. It doesn’t tie up with anything. Nobody’s taken responsibility for it.”
“I thought–?”
Adriano snorts. “Come on, Frame. You weren’t born yesterday. A splinter group no one’s ever heard of? That communiqué? It stinks to high heaven. Killing someone with an escort? That hasn’t been done since Moro. It’s just not worth the trouble. Killing the escort as well. Leaving one of them alive to tell the tale. The whole scenario’s wrong. I’d say it was an inside job if it made any sense, but Di Stasi wasn’t that important. Now, if there’d been an election coming up in the next week or two–”