Which reminds him; he must tell Helen that Stefania called yesterday morning. She’d just got back from one of her field trips in Africa and only just heard of the murder. She was crying dreadfully, she couldn’t stop. He waited until she’d cried herself out. She wanted to come to the funeral. What funeral? he said. No plans have been made yet. It’s up to Helen. Helen, she said, and started to cry all over again. I’ll call her, she said, you must give me her number. The shock will be like this for a while, he thought then, like waves moving over the surface. Just as one person gets used to the loss of Federico, another will begin the process of understanding it. How long will that process take, he wonders, looking inside himself as Helen sighs and sits beside him on the edge of the bath, holding his hand in both of hers, her head bowed. He thinks she’s about to cry. He’s ready for that. He welcomes the chance to comfort her.
And after Stefania, whose turn will it be?
3
It’s years since Martin last played this kind of cloak and dagger nonsense. He can’t quite believe he is sitting in his car, the windows up, outside the abandoned acres of the old Mercati Generali, waiting for someone he doesn’t know from Adam. When the metallic blue Fiat Brava draws up beside him, he glances across and sees a young man, overweight or over-muscled, it’s hard to tell, his head shaven smooth like everyone else’s these days, the loveliest people in Europe transformed into a race of skinhead thugs. He is wearing a high-collared white shirt, tight round the biceps, and those wraparound sunglasses that look like the eyes of a fly, with mirrored orange glass. In any normal world, thinks Martin, he’d stick out like a sore thumb.
The man nods and pulls away, along Via Ostiense in the direction of St Paul’s. Martin follows. He expects to be taken out towards Ostia and, sure enough, the car in front turns right onto Viale Marconi and right again onto Via del Mare. Martin has always avoided this road on the odd occasions he’s had to go to Ostia these past few years. He’s hardly a sun-worshipper, his skin comes out in livid blotches at the least exposure. Via del Mare is said to be the most dangerous road in Italy, hard though it is to believe, this sun-dappled avenue of maritime pines, straight as a die, the ruins of Ostia Antica appearing on the right as they leave the city behind them, pass under the ring road, clogged as usual with traffic.
The man in front is maintaining a healthy speed, at the upper limit of what’s allowed, and Martin is amused to see how often they’re both overtaken. There’s a line from a Dylan song he’s always liked, that you have to be honest to live outside the law. How true that is, he thinks, his eye on the speedometer, the needle just kissing seventy. Invisibility is the best revenge. He is leaving enough space for one car to squeeze between them, but no more. It isn’t the first time he’s followed, or been followed for that matter, and, as usual, he’s enjoying himself. He’s always enjoyed what he thinks of as the game and it strikes him as strange that in the last fifteen years he hasn’t missed it more.
The car turns off to the left before they reach Ostia, and into the pine woods that run parallel to the coast from where they are now, all the way down to the president’s estate between Ostia and Torvaianica. Martin continues to follow it down a dirt track, increasingly amused by this subterfuge, a simple phone call, a simple request for information, has to lead to this. It’s the way we’re wired, he thinks, he recognises it in himself. Why make it simple when you can play the game?
The car is twenty yards in front of him when it drives into a picnic area, a dozen wooden tables with benches attached, and almost stops. This is the signal. Martin pulls over and watches the Escort drive off and it is only now that he notices the appropriateness of the model chosen.
He winces as he climbs from the car, arthritis in the hips and knees, he doesn’t need to be told he’s overweight, but what other pleasures are left to him? His sex life, such as it is, has dwindled to nothing since his doctor put him on medication for high blood pressure. Now, there’s an irony, he thinks. High pressure everywhere but where it counts. He thinks of Alina. Perhaps she has special techniques for men like him, he thinks, then feels ashamed.
He pulls his linen trousers away from the crotch and tucks his shirt back in, letting his stomach rest for a moment on his hand. The June sun is directly above his head and he realises that he shouldn’t have worried so much about looking conspicuous and brought his panama – the real McCoy, an old man’s whim – to protect his scalp. It will itch tonight, that low-level constant itch that stops him sleeping without sufficient alcohol, and even then he wakes up in the early hours of the morning and has to swab it with some pink lotion the dermatologist has given him that sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. But these days hats draw attention to themselves so much.
Wiping his forehead on a handkerchief, he walks across to the nearest bench and sits down, his back to the table. He doesn’t look at his watch. He expected to have to wait, and here he is, alone in a derelict picnic area in the heart of the Ostia pine woods, waiting for someone he hasn’t seen for over a decade. A man, it occurs to him, he has never seen in places other than parks, and stations, and woods. Always in the open air, even in winter, always in places where no one is watching them or listening, although they can never be certain, they both know that.
What in God’s name am I playing at? he thinks abruptly and has to remind himself that he is here for Helen; here to help Helen understand why her husband is dead. “We can’t talk like this, on the phone,” Picotti had said when Martin asked him for help, intriguing Martin although he’d known it might have meant nothing at all, nothing more than the reflex of a stiff neglected muscle. And so the arrangements were made.
Picotti doesn’t arrive in a car. Or if he does, he’s left it some distance away so that Martin is startled when a pine cone bounces near his feet and a second one catches him on the shoulder. He jumps up, turns round sharply and there the man is, the same as ever, irritatingly bright and thin, his naturally bald head gleaming in the sun. Martin sucks in his stomach, sadly aware that it makes no significant difference, except that the pressure of the belt buckle on the flesh is momentarily reduced.
Picotti darts across the picnic area, his hand outstretched, his grin as curved and luminous as the new moon. He is dressed for holiday, those odd half-mast trousers with superfluous pockets round the knees and rubber toggles dangling off them, a style called
pinocchietto
, according to one of the younger men on the French desk, who’s actually worn a khaki pair to work. Little Pinocchio, Martin thought at the time, suppressing a grimace, whatever next? As though we have to dress for the outward bound course our lives have become. Picotti’s T-shirt says something in English, but he is still too far away for Martin to read it without his glasses. He thought the fashion this season was Spanish obscenities, but maybe he’s wrong. He generally is these days. His understanding of fashion, he’s discovered, was infinitely fallible. He’ll have to ask Jean-Paul.
He holds out his hand. Picotti takes it, squeezing harder than Martin likes, then slaps Martin’s stomach with the back of his own hand, a hard, almost vicious slap.
“Hey, Martino,” he says, “we let ourselves go a little these past years.”
“Your fault,” says Martin, forcing a smile.
“My fault?” Picotti feigns shock, falls back a step, hands rising to his chest. His grin flips down at the corners into clown-like tragedy.
“Plural, old chap.
Colpa vostra. La dolce vita
.” He wouldn’t choose to conduct their conversation in English, but he knows this isn’t up to him. It’s Picotti’s favour, Martin can’t set the rules of play. Even “Martino” has to be swallowed without flinching. It has always been Picotti’s way to reduce him to a state of impotent irritation before coughing up what is called for. Not that there is any guarantee of that, there never was. The cards played closest to the chest are all too often the ones that have nothing on them.
“Long time, no see,” Picotti says, waving a hand towards the bench. “We’re getting old and the world is more full of horse shit every day. It’s not our world any more, Martino, we’re two old men.” He shrugs, sits down, hitching his
pinocchietto
up almost to knee level, waiting for Martin to sit beside him. When Martin does, he puts a hard dark hand on his knee. Martin ignores the hand, observing Picotti’s face with as pleasant an expression on his own face as he can muster. He is close enough to see that the T-shirt bears two green feline eyes on a black background. “All Cats Are Leopards in the Dark” it says and, below that, “
Ethiopian proverb”
.
“The bambini are in charge, Martino. What’s that beautiful idiom you English say? The lunatics run the asylum.” Picotti starts to laugh, then coughs, squeezing the flesh above Martin’s knee with startling force until Martin, still forcing a smile, itches to brush him off. “English humour. Very nice. We don’t have your sense of humour here, you know that? We have to make do with being the best lovers in Europe, maybe in the world. It’s hard. But we make ourselves content.” Martin nods, relieved as the hand on his leg relaxes. “I’ve missed you, Martino,” Picotti says. Despite himself, Martin is touched by the sincerity of his tone.
“I’ve missed you too,” he says, but doesn’t quite mean it, not as much as Picotti seemed to. He’s forgotten the way the presence of Picotti fills him with a sense of unfocused shame. This is the second time he’s felt ashamed today.
Picotti leans back, his elbows on the table. “And now this stupid bloody war, I ask you, who needs it?” he says. He taps out a cigarette from its soft pack, offering it to Martin, who refuses. Picotti raises an eyebrow, then takes it himself. Still smoking MS, Martin notices.
Morte Sicura
.
He can see now that Picotti has aged at least as much as he has. His face is lined, the skin beneath the tan looks crêpey and tired. When he smiles, as he invariably does, his teeth seem larger, more widely spaced than ever, the menacing smile the sort a horse might make. Horses also lack a sense of humour, thinks Martin.
“Your friend Di Stasi agreed with me, right?”
Martin didn’t mention Federico when he phoned, and is both startled and alarmed. “Di Stasi?” he says, his tone deliberately bemused.
“Di Stasi, right. He didn’t want this fucking war. Who does?” Picotti watches his cigarette burn, then flicks the ash into his hand and blows it away, the way a woman might blow a kiss from her palm. “Oil and money. Money and oil. Good men are dying there.” He rubs the ash into the dirt with his sandal, a gleaming complicated affair of straps and buckles. His feet are brown, the toenails a little too long, the toes curved in after decades of over-tight shoes. “Like that,” he says. He looks at Martin. “Men like us.”
“People have always died in wars,” says Martin.
“What do you want to know?” says Picotti, suddenly impatient.
“Di Stasi,” says Martin slowly. “My friend. He was killed. Shot dead in the street for no apparent reason. I wondered if you might know who would want to do a thing like that. And why.”
Picotti throws back his head and laughs. “Martino,” he says. “You ask me a question like that, what can I do? What do you think I can do now?” He slits his throat with a finger. “You want blood?”
“I want help,” says Martin.
Picotti, serious now, looks up at the sky, where a helicopter is heading towards the coast. They watch it turn left, towards Castel Porziano and the presidential estate.
“It’s a busy time. Too many important people to look after. Too many lunatics. All the asylums are one now, you know? One big Yankee asylum. One big boss. I don’t have the stomach for it, that’s how you say, right? The stomach.” He smiles. “Not like you, Martino, not like you.”
He stands up, pushing the legs of his
pinocchietto
down to below his knees.
“I have a new young wife. You didn’t know that, did you? They keep you young, no?” He smiles more broadly. “Young clothes, I mean. Like this. She says it makes me look good, it makes me look sexy, but I’m not so sure. An old man, it’s too easy to take the piss. Don’t worry, Martino. I don’t ask you what you think.”
When Martin is standing beside him, wriggling his own trousers loose at the crotch, Picotti throws his arms around the larger man and pulls him close in a clumsy embrace that startles Martin, who stiffens, but immediately relaxes. If his own arms were free and not pinned to his sides, he thinks, he would hug Picotti back. He wants to ask him about his first wife, whom he has never met, but fears the answer, whatever it might be. He already knows it won’t be good news. Divorce or death. Acrimony, illness. He knows that whatever it is would be hard to stomach. Yes, that’s how we say it, Picotti. To have the stomach for it.
Picotti pulls away.
“That was my son, my
bambino
. The one who took you here. Big boy, eh? Tattoos, the lot.”
Martin nods. “You’re keeping it in the family. Wise man.”
“Hey, Martino. If you can’t trust family,” Picotti says. He slips his arm through Martin’s and steers him gently but firmly towards the car.
Martin has already opened the door and is about to slump down into the stifling heat inside, disappointed but not surprised that Picotti has offered no help, when Picotti gives him a slip of paper with a phone number scribbled on it.
“Leave it with me, Martin. I do what I can.”
4
Helen carries the pot over to the table and pours them both coffee, watching its glutinous trickle puddle and fill the cups.
“I can’t believe Giulia treated me like that,” she says.
“You were wonderful with her,” says Giacomo.
“I wasn’t. I was horrified. I think she’s gone mad. She wants to see her son carried home on his shield, that’s all she can see. She’ll do anything to get it. Her beloved republic. I just can’t bear the thought of Federico being used to bolster up something he hated.”