Years later, when she thought about this episode, she wondered if Giacomo had ever taken Federico to the top of the tower, as he’d taken her, and tempted him, as she’d been tempted. And she wondered if it was true that Federico and Giacomo had never slept together, or fucked, or made love, because they had had the chance so often. Sometimes she’d come home from work and find them together in the kitchen, or Federico would be sitting at his desk with Giacomo sprawled on the bed,
their
bed, beside him, and there was an air in the room, a density, of something that wouldn’t be said, an air she’d chosen not to question. And then there was that flat they took together, that Federico didn’t tell her about. Later, when everything went wrong and Giacomo was arrested, she’d seen Federico so beaten down by it all, so lost. That was when she’d almost convinced herself that they really had been lovers, maybe not often but, still, there was that complicity between them. Once a philosopher, she’d thought.
9
Martin calls Helen on her landline and then on her mobile, but she isn’t there, or isn’t answering. He hasn’t planned to leave a message but finds himself telling her voicemail that he’d like to talk to her later that afternoon if she has a moment. He’s supposed to be going to the reception at the American embassy, one of the perks of the trade, and of his seniority, not to speak of favours done in earlier, less simple days. Against his better judgement he’s decided to go, although there is nothing he enjoys less than formal events and the kind of outfit he is obliged to wear for them. He’s had the full kit cleaned and pressed. It’s hanging, cadaver-like, from the back of the bedroom door in one of those flat nylon suitcases that open out into a long black sack. The case was a parting present, so not entirely well meant, from a woman who thought that all he really lacked to be smart, to have some respect for himself, as she insisted on saying, were the accoutrements of elegance. How wrong she was. What little respect he is capable of feeling would be wasted on himself. He glances down at his hands, then reaches into a drawer for some nail clippers, the size made for feet, and sets to work.
When he’s finished and is satisfied with the result, he tries Picotti’s number again, for the fourth time this afternoon. Martin knows he’s being foolish, more than foolish, foolhardy, but he doesn’t care. On the way back from meeting Corti, he bought a half-bottle of brandy at the Trevi supermarket and a couple of flabby sandwiches in cling film, one of which, half-eaten, is lying beside his phone on the table, the mayonnaise separating in the heat. The brandy is mostly drunk and he has the familiar dull throbbing in his left temple which tells him he has had too much. He has lost today’s battle. A scrap of Shakespeare comes to him. How does it go?
Tomorrow in the battle think of me.
Is that it? Well, he’ll do his best.
He’s using Picotti’s special number, the one he was given as they said goodbye. Perhaps it was part of the plan to throw me off, he thinks. He wanted to make me feel so privileged I’d keep my mouth shut. There is anger now as Martin presses the redial button and waits. This time his wait is rewarded.
“Martino.” Picotti’s voice is filled with reproach.
“What the hell’s going on?”
“What do you want from me, Martino?”
“The truth.”
Picotti begins to laugh, a sad exhausted laugh that ends in a fit of coughing. Martin waits for him to stop.
“I smoke too much,” says Picotti.
“We haven’t always been honest with each other,” says Martin. “I know that. It wasn’t possible. But I always thought we were on the same side.”
“The side of the good and true.”
“Not necessarily. Our side’s made mistakes.”
“Mistakes? Is that what you think, Martino
mio
? That we were two brave soldier boys fighting together, shoulder to shoulder, in defence of liberty and civilisation? And sometimes we made mistakes?”
“Di Stasi? Was he a mistake?”
“He’s dead, Martin.” People keep telling me this, thinks Martin, almost amused, as though they imagine the fact might have slipped my mind.
“And Di Stasi’s mother?” Martin says. “You know her, of course. You must do, surely? Wasn’t she on one of those commissions that looked into your goings-on once? Quite the busybody, wasn’t she? Until things went quiet. Still, I expect she’s past it by now. How old is she? Eighty? Eighty-five?”
Picotti doesn’t answer at once. When he does, his voice is cold and far away, as though he is calling across an empty space, calling some words of warning that Martin can’t quite catch, although the tone is clear enough. “You don’t need to do this,” he says. Another pause and the edge of disappointment, of regret that absolves Picotti of all responsibility, returns. “Oh Martino,
vecchio amico mio
. Why did you have to get involved in all this foolishness?”
Martin’s about to pour himself a final drink when the entry phone rings. At last, he thinks, I’d given up on you.
“Hello.”
He doesn’t recognise the voice so much as the trace of accent.
“Second floor,” he says.
Alina’s dressed for the occasion. A short white skirt, some sort of green satin top, bare legs, stilettos. She’s got one of those foolish little bags just large enough for lipstick and a packet of condoms, the money stuffed into the bottom, a mobile. She smiles, not coming in at once, not wanting to appear too brazen, and he steps back to invite her to enter. She sits on the sofa and slips off her shoes.
“They hurt.” She rubs her toes with her left hand. “Shoes like this aren’t made for human feet.” Her legs are thin and strong; her calves stand out as she flexes her feet, looking down at them the way a ballerina might, as tools of her trade. “I don’t know what they’re made for.”
“To make you suffer,” says Martin.
“You must be very sad,” she says, “about your friend.” She sounds concerned. Oh dear, thinks Martin, she’ll want to help me absorb the blow. And why not? He could do with some counselling.
“Not incurably,” he says. He walks across and sits on the sofa beside her. Now she’s here he doesn’t know what to do, nor what’s expected of him. He’s drunk, he knows that; she’s part of the reason. He tries a jocular approach. “Are you here to help me get over the shock?”
Alina nods, but doesn’t otherwise move. Martin strokes her hair back from her face, hooking it behind her ear. She has small ears, redder than the skin around them, as though chapped. His other hand rests a moment on her leg. She is staring straight ahead. Following her eyes, he sees what she sees, the two of them framed in the mirror on the opposite wall, his torso twisted, ungainly, his stomach showing white and flecked with hair beneath his untucked shirt, the woman’s pale face and neck and indifferent, slightly peeved expression, her heavy breasts loose behind the satin top, her narrow impoverished shoulders. There is no grace in this, he thinks. We both deserve more than this. She turns from their reflected faces to look into his eyes.
“Is everything all right?” he says, confused.
She laughs, a humourless impatient laugh, then parts her thighs with a brisk muscular jerk. His hand falls away.
“I didn’t come here for this,” she says.
“You didn’t come here for this?” He’s flushed with humiliation.
“I didn’t come here to have sex with you and be paid for it. That didn’t come into your head? That I might have had another reason?” She moves along the sofa until there is no contact between them. “You are all the same. Adriano thinks I stay with him because I have nowhere else to go.”
“Why do you?” Why else would anyone stay with Adriano, thinks Martin.
“Why do you suppose? Because I love his cat.” She laughs again. “I love all small defenceless creatures.”
Martin stands up.
“Is that what I am to you? A small defenceless creature?” This sounds flirtatious, but isn’t meant to. He asks because he wants to know what she thinks, how she sees him. He wants to know if anything can be redeemed.
“Oh yes,” she says, her tone engaging for the first time. “I think you are waiting to be rescued, to be given a home.”
These words strike Martin with the force of truth.
“I would like to be rescued very much,” he says, with a smile, “although I don’t know from what, other than my own clumsiness and stupidity.”
“I came because I wanted to tell you something.” Her voice is warmer now. “I wanted to warn you.” She opens her bag and takes out a piece of paper. “After you’d gone, Adriano called someone. He spoke about you.”
“And what did he say?”
“I wasn’t supposed to be listening, and so I didn’t, to begin with anyway,” she says. “But it was the way he spoke, I didn’t like it. Adriano’s nothing special, I know that, but he can be, I don’t know, angry? He can be cruel. Sometimes he forgets I’m there. Sometimes he doesn’t. My life isn’t easy.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
She smiles wryly. “Because I think you are a gentleman. Despite everything.”
Martin considers this for a moment, then asks her a second time, in a gentler voice: “What did he say?”
To his surprise, she blushes. “That you were breaking someone’s balls, I didn’t hear whose. That you needed to be taught a lesson.”
“I’ve behaved badly, Alina,” says Martin. “I’m so sorry. I misunderstood. If there’s anything I can do to make amends?” His first instinct is to offer her money, but he’s not stupid.
Alina stands up, adjusts her skirt, then walks over, still bare-footed, and takes his face in her hands. She rocks his head a little from side to side, her mouth reproving, motherly. “Treat people with respect, Mr Frame. Even if you think they don’t deserve it. Even if you think they can be bought. Do that for me. To make amends.”
“All right,” he says, filled with emotion. This wonderful woman, he thinks, her hands on my face like this. He wants to cry. He nods, and her hands nod with him.
“I will,” he says. “I promise.”
She is leaving the room when, on an impulse, he calls her back.
“Alina?”
“Yes?”
“Do you speak English?”
“Enough,” she says dryly. “Why?”
“Are you busy this evening? With Adriano?”
“No.”
“Can I ask an indiscreet question?”
She laughs. She has an attractive laugh, open and infectious, her head thrown back a little. “Haven’t you been indiscreet enough, Mr Frame?” she says in English.
He hangs his head. “I’ve been more than indiscreet,” he says. “I’ve behaved unforgivably.”
“So what is your question?”
“Are your papers in order?”
She’s surprised. “I didn’t expect you to ask me that,” she says; she sounds offended. “But, yes, Adriano has served for something. I have a permit to stay. I’m his chambermaid, I believe you say.”
Martin smiles. “Yes, we do say that.”
“Why should you want to know about my legal status here?” she says. “Do you plan to report me to the authorities?”
“Because I have an invitation for two people and, well, as you can see, I’m alone here. I’d be flattered if you would accompany me.”
“An invitation to what?” she says and he can see that she is both flattered and suspicious. “To do what?”
“To the American embassy. To meet the President of the United States.”
10
Helen is putting food on the table. Pizza bread, the cheese and meat still in their wrappers. She’s washed some rocket and sliced a handful of tomatoes. It all has the atmosphere of a picnic, improvised and yet with a sense of occasion, a treat. She’d opened a bottle of wine before Giacomo arrived.
“These are the ones from Massimo’s mother,” she says, moving the bread to one side to make room for a small bowl of dull green olives. “They don’t look much but they’re wonderful.”
Giacomo takes one. “I’m glad to be here,” he says.
“I had a visitor today,” says Helen, seeming – or pretending – not to have heard, absorbed by other thoughts. She sits down, fills both their glasses. “A priest called Don Giusini. Federico’s priest.”
Giacomo takes a second olive.
“He knew more about Federico than I did in the end,” Helen says. “Unnerving, isn’t it? All that time I thought Federico disliked the church as much as I did, and there he was, seeing a priest, doing all the confession business. I wonder where he got it from.”
“These are very good olives,” says Giacomo.
Helen picks one out of the bowl but doesn’t eat it. She rolls it between her fingers and thumb until the skin there is moist and greenish in the reflected light. She stares at the olive as if it were a jewel she has found, some precious mysterious stone, and then looks up, but not at Giacomo, at the blackboard. Giacomo follows her gaze and sees the word OLIVES. “I’ll have to rub that off,” she says, but doesn’t move. He thinks: She already knows she’ll not be able to rub it off. And then: I could have written that. We write the same, Federico and I, we have the same neat hand. “He told me Federico was going to die. He had a brain tumour.”
So he would have died anyway, thinks Giacomo, but a shock goes through him, as though someone has told him of his own death. “Do you believe him?”
“I have no reason not to. Federico might have lied to him, I suppose, there’s always that chance. But I don’t think he was lying to me.”
“Wasn’t there anything he could have done?”
“Apparently not. But that isn’t what he went to Don Giusini about. It wasn’t the tumour he wanted to talk about.” Helen puts down the olive with what looks like a grimace of distaste, as though she’s already tasted it and found it bad. “He’d decided to take advantage of the fact that he didn’t have more than a few weeks to live.”
“Take advantage?” So little time, thinks Giacomo.
“Yes. He wanted to do something dreadful. He said he was going to die anyway so his life had no value. He was set free to do something that might save thousands of other lives. I still can’t believe it.” She pauses for a moment. “Giacomo,” she says, and her voice is harsh and incredulous, as if she is repeating a vicious lie she had heard about herself. “He asked his secretary to arrange a meeting with the PM, with Bush if he could, with anyone she could rustle up, a meeting at the conference. And then when they were all together, all these important people, Federico was going to blow himself up and take them with him.”