“So tell me about Yvonne,” she says.
He shrugs. “No, let’s not talk about Yvonne. You’ll meet her soon enough. You can make your own conclusions when you do.” He stubs out the barely smoked cigarette; Federico would be shocked by the waste, as though the fact of the cigarette itself weren’t wasteful enough, in a world of limited resources. But she isn’t here to think about Federico.
Leaning forward, Giacomo reaches across until he can touch her knees with both his hands. She has on her favourite linen dress, buttoning at the front; it has fallen open at the hem but she doesn’t want to pull it closed. He’d call her Anglo-Saxon if she did, as though nothing has changed since Jane Austen; as though he doesn’t know her better than that.
“The last time we were alone was almost three years ago,” he says, “in that wonderful convent you found for us.”
She nods. You don’t need to remind me, she thinks. Partly to avoid his eyes, she looks around the room, at the curtains with their heavy sashes and swags, the darkly reflecting surfaces of the framed reproductions of ancient Roman views.
“It wasn’t quite as luxurious as this, if I remember,” he says. She still can’t tell if he’s sneering, or enjoying the luxury. She’s never been able to tell with Giacomo. “Perhaps you prefer it here.”
“I’m not interested in luxury. You know that.”
He is silent for a moment, as if to acknowledge her reproof. “I almost didn’t come, you know. I still don’t understand why Fede invited me.”
How odd it is to hear him say
Fede
. Almost nobody does any longer, apart from her, and his parents; no one else is that close to him. She isn’t sure she likes it in Giacomo’s mouth, although it was what they both called him then, when they were a threesome, if that was the word. The three of them in Turin, setting the world to rights.
She wishes he’d straighten up. She can’t talk about conferences, or convents, with the dead weight of his hands on her legs. This isn’t the moment to tell him whose idea it was that he be invited. He’d be mortified if he knew how hard she’d had to work to bring Federico round.
“He thought you’d make an important contribution,” she says.
Giacomo snorts with laughter. “Only you could say something that absurd without even smiling a little.” He holds her knees, his thumbs working their inner sides in a leisurely, circular motion, quite independently of his voice and eyes.
“I’m not sure you should be doing that,” she says, but she doesn’t move her legs or push his hands away. She turns her head to avoid his gaze and sees through the window a surveillance helicopter, hovering like a soundless gnat, the sunlight picking it out. Behind it, blurred by heat and pollution, is a second, and a third. The American embassy is two hundred yards from the hotel, there must be dozens circling above their heads that she can’t hear. She’s about to make some comment about the hotel’s double-glazing, about the price one pays for silence, when Giacomo sinks to his knees before her and buries his head between her thighs. She can feel his breath on her skin, a fluttering heat, a beating wing; she has the sensation he’s trying to speak to her, to tell her something she needs to know. She wants to lift his head, not to stop him from doing what he’s doing, or not entirely, but to listen. To find out what he wants to say. But instead of that, she parts her legs a little, to let him in.
Here we are again, she thinks.
3
Helen can’t free her mind of Giacomo as she walks to Piazza Venezia and along the Corso. She takes her usual route, skirting the Trevi fountain and up the hill that leads to the Quirinale, where the crowds thin out as the road rises, dust-white in the heat. Federico’s office is just round the corner from the room in which she and her colleagues at the English desk are gathered, five tables squeezed into a room. He has calculated the distance as three, maybe four hundred yards and she sometimes imagines the walls are glass and they can watch each other at their business, Federico slouching behind his large dark desk, cluttered with papers and bulging pastel-coloured files as though the computer hasn’t been invented, Helen crouched over
her
computer in the nervous birdlike position she adopts to read from the screen, her glasses halfway down her nose. Normally, she finds it comforting, this sense that he is near, almost within reach. This morning, though, with the after-touch of Giacomo’s mouth still on her, the idea of Federico being so close to her is less welcome. All he would need is to see her and he’d understand at once what she’d been doing. She’d be caught out. How wonderful, though, to find herself with Giacomo like that, his need for her so obvious, without the slightest hint of flirtatiousness. Each time it happens, even when she’s planned it herself, she’s taken by surprise. And how hard it is to stop her mind shifting from one to the other the way it always does, from Federico to Giacomo and back, as if they are part and parcel of the same thing.
She stops in a bar for some water, holding the empty glass against her cheek to cool it. She’s five minutes late, but she isn’t worried. Martin will forgive her, she’s covered for him in the past, more than once. She walks through the arch, turns into the foyer and greets the receptionist, whose face changes when he sees her, as though he has seen a ghost. He stands up and walks across, placing his hand on her shoulder to guide her.
“Sit down,” he says, his voice unnaturally quiet. He leads her to one of the low soft chairs arranged along the wall, where visitors wait to be met. She sits down, shaken, not curious at all, because she already knows. He picks up the phone, his back to her, and she can’t hear what he is saying although she hears her own name quite distinctly, not once but twice. She doesn’t know how she knows, but she does; her blood knows.
Federico is dead.
ROME, Italy (CNN) – Shortly before 9:30am today, Federico Di Stasi, a consultant at the Ministry of Employment, was assassinated in the centre of Rome. According to initial investigations, two or three men on motorcycles shot him dead in Via Rasella, less than one hundred metres from the Quirinale, the official residence of the President. The driver of the car, Massimo Monesi, 28, also died in the attack. A third man, the bodyguard, is expected to be released from hospital in a matter of days. The attack is believed to have been carried out by internal terrorists, although no organisation has claimed responsibility for the attack. There is believed to be no connection with the Republic Day celebrations tomorrow, nor with the official visit of US President George W. Bush, scheduled for Thursday.
Di Stasi was most recently responsible for controversial plans intended to dismantle the few remaining state-owned enterprises and place them on the open market. Despite government pressure, he is believed to have insisted on the need to protect those currently employed by these enterprises, most of which are concentrated in the south, by establishing a series of government-financed “buffers”. These have been fiercely contested by members of the government as “hand-outs”. Di Stasi has also spoken out recently against military intervention in Iraq.
“It has all the hallmarks of a warning,” Attorney General Lorenzo Gaeta told reporters in Via Rasella shortly after the murder. “Even the choice of site is significant. Via Rasella was the street in which partisans killed 33 German soldiers during the last war.” When asked if he saw a link between this assassination and the murder three years ago of Davide Porcu, Home Office adviser, Gaeta refused to comment.
Government spokesmen are already talking of a fresh outbreak of terrorism, accusing the so-called no-global movement, as well as unions and parties on the left, of bearing at least part of the responsibility for the murder because of the recent intensification of protests against the government’s economic policies.
Federico Di Stasi was born in Rome in 1952 to the journalist Fausto Di Stasi and life senator Giulia Paternò, partisan and among the founders in 1948 of the Italian Constitution. After studying in the United States and Britain, he was briefly involved in extra-parliamentary activities during the late 1970s. He began collaborating with the Ministry in 1982 under the first centre-left administration. He leaves a wife and no children.
4
As soon as the police have finished with her, Martin Frame comes into the room and slumps into a spindly gilded chair in front of Helen. He takes her hands in his and holds them for a moment without speaking. He isn’t sure what to expect, what to do; he’s hopeless at moments like this. The last time he spoke to Federico they had talked about his chances of coming through the reform process alive, and Federico had said you had to live each day as if you were eternal, which is a wonderful sentiment, of course, as Martin remarked at the time, but offers little actual protection against attack. That kind of talk, thought Martin then, is one of the many ways we ward off the nastier business of reality; Federico had been involved in government long enough to know that. But none of this seems to matter now.
Martin’s still shaken, shaken and appalled to have lost a friend like this, in a morning. God only knows how Helen must be feeling. She’s not the type to cry, but still, how hard it must be to hold oneself together. She looks up and attempts a smile, then shakes her head, as if to say, Who would have expected this? He sighs. If it hadn’t been Federico, he thinks, it would have been someone else, although he won’t be saying this to Helen. Why on earth should Helen be interested in someone else?
He looks down at their hands: Helen’s, lightly tanned and delicate, engulfed in his own, large nicotine-stained, like the paws of some beast, nails bitten down to the quick as they have been for the past fifty years. He’s scared of how fragile she must be, as though a simple gesture might crush her. He feels he should speak, say something helpful to her, but doesn’t want to seem banal, or uncaring, and can’t think of anything to say that isn’t one or the other, or both.
“Oh, Martin,” she says finally, breaking the silence, the words little more than a sigh.
He moves and the chair creaks beneath him. For an awful moment, he imagines it breaking beneath his weight. He sees himself struggling to his feet, the chair in splinters beneath him; how unbearable that would be, how close to farce. Abruptly, he lets her go.
“One of us should be at the desk,” she says, her forehead suddenly creased with worry.
“You needn’t think about work, my dear. The desk is the last thing you need to worry about. I’ll take care of all that.” He lets her go.
“I’ll be back,” she says, her face set, oddly determined. “Just as soon as all this is sorted out.” He wonders what she thinks she means by “this”. The specific business of the police and everything that will have to be done? Or the infinite business of Federico’s death?
“I know you will,” he says. “I rely on you. You know that.”
“I just can’t believe this has happened.” She stares at the ceiling; he watches her throat as she breathes. “I know it’s what everyone says, Martin, but it’s true. I never knew. People talk to me and I feel as though they’re talking about someone else. They asked me all these questions and I kept wanting to tell them I wasn’t sure, I couldn’t remember, I’d have to check with Federico.” Her gaze moves down towards him, as if to beseech him for an answer he doesn’t have.
“You have to give yourself a chance.”
“To do what?”
“To take this on board,” he says. He wishes he had found something better than this tired phrase, then makes it worse by adding: “You’ll need all your strength.”
She looks away again, this time at the window, its weighted gauze curtains like a shroud. “They told me I’d be needed later, at the hospital.” She pauses, then shudders, clutching her elbow with her hands as if to shield herself against the cold. “I suppose what they meant was the morgue.”
They are in one of the rooms reserved for interviews; a long table, a score or so of brittle ornate chairs like the ones they are sitting in, over- and under-decorated at the same time. Martin is rarely obliged to attend events in here; his work is at the English desk. The walls are a pallid institutional green, the row of windows framed in swathes of heavy rust-coloured velvet, held back by gilded cord that would take the skin off a sailor’s back. Outside, beyond the filtering veils of gauze, is the side wall of the President’s palace. A shelf of television screens on the wall behind Helen’s head flicker green and black as the stories roll in, but he doesn’t read them. He can imagine what they’re saying. Stories and comments on stories and the whole self-feeding business of news, to which he contributes daily as a jobbing journalist; and now the business is turning on Helen for nourishment, as she must know. She hasn’t looked round to see what’s being said, not while he’s been here anyway, and he can’t blame her for that. The longer she goes without witnessing Federico’s death reported, the easier it will be for her to pretend it hasn’t happened. But he can’t help wondering what she’s thinking; she seems so distant.
“Were they difficult?” he says.
“Who? The police?” She shakes her head. “On the contrary. They treated me with kid gloves.” She shudders again. “The last time I was questioned by the police they treated me like shit.”
“That must have been some time ago,” he says cautiously.
“I’m sorry, Martin.” She opens her bag, her manner distracted and fidgety, then snaps it shut. “No, they were fine. They just asked me a lot of questions, that’s all.”
“What did they want to know?” he asks, on firmer ground now.
But she doesn’t seem to have heard. “You know what I’ve been thinking about?” she says. “Condole. The word, I mean. Is that how we say it in English? Only it sounds so strange when you say it out loud. Are you condoling me, Martin?”
“I’m trying to, my dear. Not very well, I’m afraid.”