“So?”
“So.” Adriano slaps his forearm. “Shit. Missed the fucker.”
Martin senses that something remains to be said. That all he has to do is wait. “Does it have a name?” he says.
“What?”
“The cat.”
Adriano ignores this too. “You work with Di Stasi’s wife. Well, widow now, I suppose.”
“Yes.”
“That’s Rome for you. Everyone knows everyone. That’s what makes it so fucking sticky,” says Adriano. “Everyone’s fucking face in everyone else’s fucking mess.”
The cat jumps down from his lap and runs to the door. A moment later, they hear a key turn in the lock. A woman comes in with a bag of shopping. She looks at Martin and then, with surprise and a trace of annoyance, at Adriano, while the cat twists round her feet.
“You don’t know Alina,” Adriano says.
Alina puts the bag down on the table between them.
“I thought you were supposed to be calling me today,” she says, ignoring Martin, who moves his otherwise untouched can of beer away from the bag as it slumps and empties its contents onto the table. A smell of fresh bread fills the room, and meat. Mortadella, maybe,
prosciutto crudo
. Unexpectedly hungry, he wonders if they will ask him to stay for dinner and what he will say if they do; he has no other plans. He looks at the woman, sizing her up. She’s young enough to be Adriano’s daughter. Perhaps she is, although he doubts it. She is pale and thin, with breasts too large for her frame. Her T-shirt, mauve and sequinned, has sweat stains under the arms. She reminds him a little of Helen, of Helen reduced and compromised. He breathes in unobtrusively to see if he can pick up the scent of her on the air. What did Adriano say? Things pop up.
“No signal. Honestly. I’ve got a witness,” says Adriano, and it’s hard to tell if the explanation is required or merely demonstrative. He takes his mobile from his pocket and points it at Martin, who ducks his head slightly in an affirmative bow and hazards a wry smile to distance himself from Adriano.
“Yes, right,” she says. She gathers her blonde hair behind her neck with one hand, reaches in the pocket of her skirt with the other for what turns out to be an elastic band, which she uses to tie the hair back.
“Martin’s just going,” says Adriano. Leaning in her direction, still not standing up, he pulls her in towards him until her hip is against the hollow of his shoulder. She isn’t relaxed, Martin can see that. He’s noticed an accent that isn’t Italian. Polish? East European? She is looking at him in an odd way, as though she expects something from him but hasn’t decided what. She’s like Helen in that as well, he thinks, you never know where you stand with her. He realises that he is staring at her, and turns away
“I’d better be off then,” he says. “You know where to find me if you think of anything that might be of any use.” He’s sounding like a TV detective. He fumbles in his pocket and puts a business card on the table, for Alina’s benefit. He’ll ask himself what possessed him later, when he has forgotten the presence of her, and the effect it had on him. “Just in case,” he says, holding out his hand to her. “Alina. It’s been a pleasure.”
She looks down at the card and then at his face, as if estimating the likelihood of his playing a trick on her, springing some trap, the way she might look at a client she doesn’t trust, because Martin is convinced by now that she is on the game, and both wants her and wants it not to be true, for him at least.
She takes it and gives him a cautious, knowing smile. “The pleasure’s mine,” she says.
Back at home some hours later, with most of a bottle of wine already drunk and nothing left on his plate but a crust of cheese and some olive stones, Martin is thinking about Federico and the last time they spent an evening together. Helen had gone to bed early, and he and Federico had stayed at the table, finishing the wine and opening another bottle, and finishing that. Martin had drunk most of it, but Federico had had far more than usual and was turned towards Martin, both elbows on the table, his voice slightly slurred, loquacious in an untypically confidential way. Normally they would speak about Federico’s work, in the wider sense, issues rather than personalities, inner-circle gossip of a sort but with a sense of probity that rescued it from vulgarity, Martin thought, with occasional passing regret; a peck of insider dirt never goes amiss. He’d enjoyed it though, this sense of being Federico’s interlocutor, an elder, more experienced operator in the world of policy and political expediency; he’d enjoyed living up to this role that Federico had assigned him, adopting a laconic, avuncular manner, offering advice when it was called for as a representative of the press, an intimate outsider, a foreigner in the know. More in the know than Federico ever guessed.
But that last evening, leaning towards Martin, his shirt cuff brushing the trace of sauce left on his plate, Federico had lowered his voice and asked Martin if Helen seemed strange to him, if there was anything odd he’d noticed about her. Martin said, No, why? thinking, Dear God, don’t let her be ill with anything. Don’t let her die. I think she’s having an affair, Federico said, his voice resigned, even relieved, because he had said the words, Martin decided later. But at the time it had seemed that it wasn’t the words being said but the idea of it that had given Federico relief. Embarrassed, also relieved, Martin said, A what? An affair? What on earth makes you think that? I can’t imagine it somehow. Not Helen. Federico wiped the sauce from his cuff with a napkin, shrugged in that characteristic Italian way, elbows pressed into his sides. She’s different. It’s as though she has some sort of, I don’t know, outside interest. She’s doing this degree, Martin said. Federico shook his head, apparently amused. She’s behaving like someone in love, he said. She’s in love with you, said Martin. She always has been. I know that, Federico said, impatient, as if what Martin had said were so obvious as to be insulting. I’m not suggesting she doesn’t love me, Martin. But she’s distracted. I don’t know. Her head’s in the clouds. He lowered his voice again, leant forward, this time avoiding the plate. She’s better in bed, he said, more energetic, as though she’s been charged up somewhere else and needs to wind down with me. Aren’t they the signs of an affair? Martin didn’t speak; he hadn’t known what to say. Embarrassed, head low, he glanced towards the shelf in the kitchen where the wine was kept and was on the point of fetching a bottle across, but Federico grabbed his arm and held him down and began to talk again. I don’t suppose it’s more than an infatuation, what’s that word you use? A throw? A fling, said Martin with a smile. Whatever it is, Federico said, his fingers gripping Martin’s bare flesh. I’ve seen no change, said Martin, already asking himself if this was true. Was Helen really the same as usual? The notion that she might be having an affair struck Martin as brutally unreasonable, though less to Federico than to himself, who had often tested the ground with her, with infinite delicacy and tact, perhaps too much. Perhaps she had never even noticed his attempts to woo her –
woo
was precisely the word, he recognised this, his discretion like something from the previous century. But I
am
from the previous century, thought Martin, that’s where I was made and grew old. I might have died before the start of this one, this brave new millennium, the odds were in favour of death after all, my heart, my drinking history, cigarettes, the paraphernalia of the hard-boiled, hard-nosed journalist; it’s a miracle I’m still alive. But I’m thinking about myself again, I’m letting myself get in the way as usual. I’m supposed to be thinking about Helen. Is Helen the same or different? he had asked himself. And he’d wondered, with a shiver of unexpected, inappropriate pleasure, if Federico had thought for even one moment that he, Martin, might once have been the secret life, the fling, and was asking him these questions merely to see what his reaction might be. Federico’s last words had been
I wouldn’t mind, you see. I wouldn’t mind if she was. It’s just that I’d like to know
. Was that some kind of absolution addressed to Martin?
And now, as though it were the most logical step in the world, he finds himself thinking about the woman he has met this afternoon, in Adriano’s flat. Alina, who has his card. If he had some way of making contact with her at this very moment, he’d use it.
7
Giacomo watches Helen fill a pan with water and place it on the stove, then stare at the small bone-handled knife in her hand as if on the point of speaking, before thinking better of it, taking a clove of garlic from the head, to peel and chop, taking another, her head bowed as if she is trying to avoid his eyes.
“You’re doing pasta,” he says, to remind her that he is here.
“With what there is, which isn’t an awful lot, I’m afraid. I was supposed to have shopped.” She pauses. “Thank you for staying,” she says, slitting open a chilli pepper to empty out its seeds. “I can’t bear the thought of being alone here.”
Giacomo grates cheese into a small deep bowl, green with a thin white slip of glaze applied to it that, held to the light, appears to shimmer. He sees her bite her lip as she pours olive oil from an unlabelled bottle into a small copper pan and he says, “Do you know, I’ve never seen you cook before? In all these years,” the words slipping out before it occurs to him how cruel this is, to remind her so brusquely of Federico. She nods, looks at him properly for the first time since he phoned Yvonne to tell her she would have to eat alone. “It’s odd,” she says, “but that’s just what I was thinking,” her voice unnaturally calm as she scrapes the garlic and chilli from the chopping board into the pan. “Do you remember this knife? He had it in Turin.”
And then, to his surprise, Helen puts down what she is doing and walks across to hug him in a clumsy ungainly way, bending over him as he half rises from the chair, half tries to turn towards her in order to embrace her back. But she has trapped both his arms in hers, he would have to wriggle or break her grip to escape and that would be unforgivable, he thinks, as she begins to take deep breaths against his scalp, harsh retching gulps of air, and so he lets himself be held and waits for her to cry as one waits for rain.
But Helen doesn’t want to cry. Eventually, her breathing calms.
“I can’t forgive him,” she says, her soft mouth warm against Giacomo’s ear. “I’ve been trying all day, but I can’t. It was so
selfish
of him to put himself at risk like that.” Her lips have never been this close to him, he feels, although she has kissed him a thousand times, kisses of circumstance and passion, kisses that have had nothing to do with this intimacy, this inclusion at the cost of others. “I’ve been telling myself that it wasn’t his fault, it was just the job he was doing.” And now she pulls away. “But he
chose
the job, Giacomo. He knew how dangerous it was, how easily something like this might happen, and he just went straight ahead. He didn’t think about me at all, about what I’d do if he died.” She stares at Giacomo, her eyes damp, but she’s too angry to cry. “I thought I’d be safe with him, you know that, don’t you? I thought he was the sensible one.” She thumps Giacomo on the chest, lightly at first and then with more force. “I thought you’d be the one to end up dead, not him.” He grabs her wrists, holds her off before she hurts him. “I got it all wrong. All wrong, right from the start. He’s lying dead in the morgue,” she says, pulling away from him, her face accusing. “And you’re alive. You’re safe, in Paris, everything rolls off you.” She stares at him, as if waiting for him to answer, defend himself, before speaking again, in a voice he barely recognises it’s so laden with anger and accusation. “Why couldn’t he have been like you?”
“I’m sorry,” he says, and means it. At this moment, in his heart, he would rather it had been him. He’s never felt so worthless. “What can I do?”
“Do? I don’t know. What can you do?”
“To help you, I mean.”
“I’m just so furious with him,” she says, and now her tone is softer, almost pensive, as though she is thinking aloud and Giacomo isn’t even here. “I can’t stop remembering all the times I’ve felt left out, neglected. As though I’d just been tagged on to his valuable life. You don’t know how often I’ve thought of leaving him.” She glances at Giacomo. “Not just for you, though I’ve thought of that too.” Before he can respond to this, she continues. “But I’ve always changed my mind, it’s never lasted long. I’ve wished him dead sometimes, God help me, so that I wouldn’t have to decide. Not wished his death, Giacomo – wished his absence.” She looks around the room. “It’s odd, isn’t it? Normally, when I’m with you, it’s as though Fede doesn’t exist – that’s a terrible thing to say, isn’t it? But it’s true, you block him out somehow. And now he doesn’t exist any longer, now he’s dead, I can’t get away from him. I’ve never been so aware of his presence. Never. He’s everywhere I look, his books, his pans, his little knife. His best friend. He’s here between us, and I can’t see round him.” She holds out a hand for Giacomo to take. After a moment’s hesitation, he does so, leads her to the table. They sit together. “And now it’s just the two of us,” she says, “and I can’t bear it.”
An acrid smell, of burning, comes from the stove. Giacomo stands up and hurries across, whipping the pan of chilli and garlic from the heat. The pan with the water must have been boiling for some time, but he hasn’t noticed. He doesn’t know what to do. He’s never loved Helen as unreservedly as he does now, at this moment.
“I’m hungry,” she says. She walks across to where he’s standing and puts her arms around his waist, from behind. He feels her rest her head against his shoulder. “I’ve barely eaten since Monday evening.” She slides some pasta into what’s left of the boiling water and takes two bowls from a shelf. She shakes the garlic, burnt to a crisp, and chilli in the pan, then tips them into the sink. “It’s time to start again,” she says, then smiles to herself.
“I’ll open some wine,” says Giacomo.