“But worked for?”
Helen shakes her head. “He didn’t, Giacomo. He worked against it. From within.”
“I’m not sure that can be done.”
“I’m not sure either. But Federico thought it could.”
Giacomo lays his hand on Helen’s. Helen looks down at their hands, then raises her head to smile. “I’m glad you’re here.”
“I’m glad I’m here as well.”
They are both silent. They haven’t eaten but Helen isn’t hungry and, in any case, there is nothing in the house. This can’t go on, she thinks. I’ll die in here if I let myself. Giacomo’s hand is warm and heavy on hers. For a second, she wants to pull it away. She can feel his eyes on her: cautious, anxious, almost oppressive. Is she glad he’s here, or not? She can’t tell. This is the first time in her life she’s been with Giacomo without betraying anyone. She imagines them leaving the building together, arm in arm, and walking towards the river. Is this what she wants? To lose one man and take on another? She eases her hand away. She’s restless, stifled.
“I suppose I’d better turn on my mobile,” she says. “Giulia’s right. I can’t just hide away like this.”
“They’ll expect you to answer it if you do.”
“I know that.” Helen stands up, turns on her mobile, stares blankly at the screen as she tries to recall her PIN, inserts it, sighs. “I don’t care. I’ll go and talk to him if I have to. Why shouldn’t I? I’m not afraid of him. It doesn’t mean I have to do what he says.”
Immediately, the mobile starts to ring. She answers without even looking to see who it is.
The first call is from a reporter, a woman she worked with once on a cultural insert for
L’Unità
. She’s freelance now, she says, her tone more desperate than she’d like. Of course, she knows how awful it must be for Helen, how inappropriate it is of her to call, but–. Well yes, interrupts Helen, it is. I do understand, the woman says. Thank you so much, murmurs Helen, I really can’t talk, not yet. Yes, yes, I do understand but, the woman says again as Helen hangs up. At once, the mobile makes the guttural sound that indicates the arrival of a text message or missed call. She sees that Martin has called once, but left no message. Another colleague, Martha Weinberg, has called, for the third or fourth time in the past few days. The mobile continues to cough in her hand. The other missed calls – all seven – are from numbers she doesn’t recognise. One of them has an England code, which intrigues her briefly, but not enough to call it back. There is nothing from Giulia but, of course, there won’t be. She’ll use the landline, now being vetted for Helen’s protection, thanks to Giulia. She’s surprised her mother-in-law still has the clout to engineer it, and shocked that someone should be intercepting calls on her private line. Federico has been saying for ages that their line is under surveillance. He said it went with the job. “But my calls don’t go with your job,” she told him, meaning: I don’t go with your job. “I know, I know,” he answered wearily, “I don’t like it any more than you do.” She’d felt guilty about insisting.
The second call is from Martin.
“I’ve only just turned it on,” says Helen, apologetic. “You called earlier.”
“Don’t worry, my dear. I just wanted to tell you that I’m working on your behalf.”
“On my behalf?”
“Asking questions.”
“Oh yes, of course,” she says. “I’m sorry, Martin, I’m only half here.”
“How are you coping?”
“Come round,” she says. “That’d be better. I hate the phone.”
“Are you alone?”
“No,” she says. “Giacomo’s here. But I’d love to see you.”
“Oh, that reminds me. I had a call from Martha Weinberg.”
“What did she want? She’s been calling me as well.”
“Yes, she said she had. She wants to talk to you about Federico.”
“She doesn’t know Federico.”
“Maybe you should give her a ring, see what she has to say.”
“I will,” she says. And does.
“Hello, Martha, it’s Helen.”
“Oh, my dear, how are you?”
“I’m fine,” says Helen, pulling a face, as if to say, How else can such a question be answered? “You’ve been trying to get in touch. I’m sorry. I’ve had my mobile off.”
“I’m not surprised. You must have had so many people pestering you after what’s happened. I wouldn’t have bothered you, but I felt I had to talk to you. It’s about your husband.”
“Yes, Martin told me,” says Helen. “That’s why I’m calling.”
“He didn’t tell you? That he’d been in touch with me?”
“No,” says Helen. “He’s been very busy these past few weeks.” Why am I making excuses for him? she thinks. “What did he want?”
“Well, he wanted information.”
“Information?” Helen is startled.
“Yes, he hummed and ha-ed a bit, then I got short with him and he said he wanted a contact address for this piece we’d done on the church and anti-globalisation.”
“And what did you say?”
Martha laughs, a hoarse, smoker’s laugh, then thinks better of it. “I said he should try using one of his own researchers, I mean, they came with the job, didn’t they? He thought that was funny. I told him to look at our website.”
“Was that it?”
“Well, no, it wasn’t. About two weeks later, so we’re talking about, what? less than a month ago, he called again. He wanted to meet me. I told him I didn’t have time.”
“He wanted to meet you?”
“Right. I didn’t believe it either. This man is redesigning the Italian labour market and he wants to meet me? I started to wonder if it was someone else, some sort of weird hoax. But I saw him on television a couple of days later and it was his voice sure enough.”
“A piece on the church, you said?”
“Yes.” Martha pauses, before saying, in a cautious voice: “Look, I don’t know if you’re ready for this.”
“For what?”
“He offered us money,” says Martha. “From his own pocket or somewhere else, he didn’t want to say, I don’t think. I didn’t ask.”
“Federico?” Helen is incredulous. “He offered you money, personally?”
“Huh-huh. Well, for the magazine, obviously. He wouldn’t give in.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’d keep calling. Three, four times a day. I asked him what he expected to get in return. I thought maybe he was trying to buy our silence, I don’t know. Nothing, he said.”
“And what did you say?”
“I said he could take out a subscription. We don’t do bribes.”
“And did he?”
“He sent me a cheque that day.”
“For how much?”
“Well, let’s just say he bought quite a few subscriptions.”
Helen is silent.
“Look,” says Martha, “I’m really sorry to have to tell you all this, but you know, I figured it might be important. I didn’t want you not to know now, and then find out.”
“No,” says Helen. “Thank you.” She’s about to hang up when Martha says something else that she doesn’t catch.
“What?”
“Saturday?” says Martha.
“What about Saturday?”
“The demonstration against the war? Iraq? I mean, I know this isn’t the right time to mention it but, well, I just thought. If you want to be on it, for Federico’s sake as well, we’d love if you could be with us. We’ll be gathering our forces at the office. You know where we are. Out by the gasometer. You don’t need to let me know. Just turn up. We’d be so proud.”
“I’ll think about it,” promises Helen, barely aware of what she is saying, and ends the call. Giacomo is sitting on a low chair in the corner of the room, tinkering with Federico’s laptop. He looks up, curious. The mobile rings again. A private number Helen doesn’t recognise. She lets it ring, then, when it’s too late, picks it up.
“Patience is a virtue,” she says. “You don’t say that in Italian, do you? Not like we do, I mean. As though we meant it.”
“Perhaps because we don’t think patience
is
a virtue.”
“What are you doing?”
He beckons her over. “Come and look at this,” he says. As she walks across to where he’s sitting she’s struck by how anomalous this is, this sense of normality, as though she and Giacomo had always been here, and of strangeness, the absence of Federico like a scent in the air. Why were you giving money to that woman? she wonders. She feels that there must be some way she can talk to him, and knows how insane that is, to still feel he’s available to her. Giacomo is sitting where Federico used to sit to tie his shoelaces, and check his briefcase before leaving the flat. With a stab of anguish, she thinks, his briefcase, where is it? I must ask that magistrate, he’ll know. He’ll help. He seemed to be someone she could trust. I can’t bear to think of it lying in some office. Oh Federico, she wants to say. Why did you lie to me? Who were you? It’s as if, within the great loss, there is a smaller, more focused, loss.
Giacomo is pointing at a window on the screen. “I thought I’d take a look at this Juggernaut file,” he says. “There’s still nothing there, of course, but look here.” He points, and she sees the words
Last printed
and a date and time beside them. Monday 1 June 2004 14.43.00.
“That’s impossible,” Helen says. “Fede was already dead.”
“It isn’t impossible. It just means Federico didn’t do it. You say that he left the laptop at his parents?”
“Yes.”
“Well, there must have been something to print. And look here.” He points again. “The last time it was modified was fifteen minutes later. That must have been when the contents were deleted.”
“All that stuff Giulia said about Fede being strange,” says Helen.
“Yes?”
“Martha Weinberg just told me something odd.”
“Who’s Martha Weinberg?”
“She edits a magazine called
Futuri Prossimi
. She’s American, she’s been here for years. She used to live down the road from here, on the other side of Piazza Farnese, but she was thrown out because she had too many cats. I don’t know her very well. Federico hated her magazine. He couldn’t stand these fringe people. He said they ruined everything, like spoilt children at parties trying to get all the adults’ attention.” She can hear herself speak. She thinks, I’m rambling. Concentrate, Helen.
“So what did she say?”
Helen tells him.
“Well, it makes sense in a way. I wasn’t going to mention it to you, not yet anyway, but he’s been sending me strange messages these past few weeks.” He hesitates; she can tell he’s wishing he hadn’t started. “New age sort of stuff. Not like Federico at all.”
“So, is that what Juggernaut’s all about, do you think?” she says, nodding towards the laptop.
“You should ask Giulia,” Giacomo says.
Helen laughs, without humour. “I suppose I should.” She pushes her hands through her hair. “I’m going to lie down for a while,” she says but doesn’t move.
“Do you want me to come with you?” he says, his tone hesitant, hopeful. She’s never seen him like this, unsure of himself with her. She doesn’t know how to deal with it.
“No,” she says. “You can answer the phone for me, though. Say I’m sleeping.” She pauses. “I think you should call Yvonne as well. I feel very bad about her.”
“I followed you once, you know,” says Helen an hour or so later, after she has slept more deeply than she’d expected or could have hoped. “When we were all living in Turin.”
“Really?”
“Yes. One afternoon. I was looking at shoes in a shop and I saw you come out of a bar a few yards away from me and walk off towards the station. I was going to call out to you when something stopped me, some impulse – I don’t know what it was, embarrassment? shame? curiosity, probably – and I thought, I’ll see where he’s going. It was quite exciting, actually. I remember thinking this must be one of the reasons people do it, the thrill of it. It seemed to justify itself. Then you met up with two other men. I followed you all into a part of Turin I didn’t really know, out towards the cemetery. There was no one else around but us. I was sure you’d turn round and see me and I wouldn’t know what to do. Then you went in through a gate. I waited to see if you came out, but you didn’t. After about twenty minutes I walked over to the gate and looked in. And that was it really. You’d disappeared. I didn’t wait any longer. By the time I got back to the flat I felt as though the whole thing hadn’t really happened.”
“Did you tell Federico?”
Helen shakes her head. “God, no. I’ve never told anyone. It was such a foolish thing to do really, but it didn’t seem to be then. It seemed almost normal. You were doing it, weren’t you? Following people around, suspecting people. It was that talk about patience that made me think of it, I suppose.”
She closes her eyes. “You don’t remember, do you? Federico wasn’t home when I got back, but you were in the kitchen. I must have shown how startled I felt, how caught out, because you took me by both hands and kissed me. It was the way you did it, the way you looked into my eyes. You saw me, I thought. You know exactly what I’ve done. ‘You look as though you’ve seen a ghost,’ you said.”
Helen doesn’t say what happened next. She doesn’t say that she was taking off her coat when Giacomo came up behind her to help, lifting it off her shoulders. She doesn’t say that she let herself flop back into him, be lifted until she felt his beard against her neck, and then his lips. That she turned round slowly, her coat sliding off to the floor, and kissed him, then pulled back while he raised an eyebrow and gave her a rueful smile, as if to say, Are you sure? and she nodded, also smiling, and kissed him again, pulling his head towards hers. His hands easing round to the zip of her jeans and pulling it down as she moved her hips away a little to give him room, not breaking the kiss, pushing her mouth against his, her arms around his neck, her hands behind him, groping the air like someone about to drown. He knew what he was doing, he’d done it before. She doesn’t remind Giacomo of the way she breathed in sharply, then bit the inside of his lower lip, not hard, as his fingers slipped down inside her panties and he pushed her against the wall and she fell away from him, her head thrown back as he slipped to his knees and started to tongue her, slow and hard. She doesn’t say that she clenched her fists in his hair and moved his head with them the way she liked it, the way she moved his head only two days ago, in the hotel room, with Federico dead. She doesn’t say that what she feels most strongly as this scene returns to her, other than a flush of sexual excitement she can hardly bear, is shame.