“Blow himself up?”
“The tumour was affecting his brain, the way he thought, the way he behaved. He was afraid he wouldn’t be capable of anything if he waited too long. I think that’s what he was thinking about from the minute he started work on the conference. They’d all been invited. It was a photo opportunity, that’s what Federico’s secretary said. I spoke to her this afternoon, while I was waiting for you. Nobody misses a photo opportunity, she said. She sounded disappointed.”
Giacomo is imagining a tumour, its steady growth inside the brain, under the bone; the pressure of it, cancelling thought as it pushes for space, cancelling sense, identity, cancelling life itself. This is the proof that he was mad, thinks Giacomo, the notion that such a thing might be possible. No one of any weight would have come to his conference. He’d have been lucky to get a couple of under-secretaries. And then it occurs to him that Federico had wanted Giacomo to be there. At the kill.
“It wouldn’t have been the first time he’d been involved in murdering someone,” says Helen. “That was another surprise. He was part of that bank raid in Turin as well, when someone was killed, the one you were arrested for. Well, you’d know that, of course, wouldn’t you? You were there too. He never told me about it. He never told anyone, not until recently anyway. His father maybe, I don’t know. Maybe he told his father. And that’s not all. He thought that he should have gone to jail instead of you.” She looks at him, hard. “You knew, of course. You’ve always known.”
Giacomo is silent for a moment. “The priest told you this?”
“Fausto found out later, when Federico wanted his help to get your pardon. He always spoke to his father, you see. He trusted him in a way he’s never trusted me. I could never understand why it mattered so much to Fausto that you be released. But I do now.” Helen wipes her nose on her bare arm, then empties her glass. “I feel as though I’ve lost him all over again,” she says. “Actually, that’s not true. I feel as though I’ve never had him, as though it was all a lie, all these years. I feel betrayed, Giacomo. Isn’t that awful?” Her face is drawn, her eyes almost frighteningly wide. “When ten minutes after he’d been murdered I was with you.”
Helen leaves the room without saying anything more, coming back after a minute or two with a sheaf of papers. “He left me this, except that he didn’t really, not to me anyway. I don’t think I was supposed to see it.” She thumbs through the sheets until she has found what she wants.
“Read this,” she says.
I have never forgiven myself for what we did, killing a man in cold blood. At the time I thought he was nobody special. A bank guard. I found out later he was involved in the struggle himself, in his own way as much of an activist as I was, but that isn’t important. It doesn’t make him more deserving of life. I thought then that what I was doing was right, I thought I had learnt to swim, as Kafka said. I’d never told anyone before I told Don Giusini. I thought it might help but it hasn’t. It stays with you. What did Kafka say? I have a better memory than the others. I have not forgotten the former inability to swim... But since I have not forgotten it, being able to swim is of no help to me; and so, after all, I cannot swim.
Yet now, despite this, I am on the brink of killing again, because I think these deaths will solve something, will save the lives of others. This is why my repentance is worth nothing. Because I haven’t changed. I don’t expect anyone to understand but
“I didn’t know Federico thought like this,” says Giacomo. He remembers the bank raid, a cold day, drizzle, a wide road in the outskirts of Turin, three of them and the driver, as if it were yesterday, the excitement, the panic, the horror; but he’s never felt that Federico deserved to be arrested any more than he did. It was the luck of the draw. How strange that it should have worried him all these years, that he should have expected his father to pull strings for Giacomo. No wonder Fausto hated him and yet turned to him. If Giacomo hadn’t been arrested and needed help, Fausto would never have known what his son had done. What a curious notion of fairness in the end, when a man was dead.
“Neither did I,” says Helen.
“Where did you get this from?”
“His mother had it.”
“This is the file, isn’t it? The one on the computer?”
“Yes. Juggernaut. Ploughing roughshod over the lot of us.”
“How did you get it?”
“I broke into their flat yesterday. Well, not exactly broke into. I let myself in with a key, just as she did here. Federico had thought of everything, you see. She was the one who deleted the file as well, at least I think it was her. You were right. She doesn’t know how to do it properly, she just sort of empties it out like an old sack.” Helen shrugs. “There are other possibilities, of course. Federico might have given it to her, or to Fausto. It’s quite likely he’d mentioned the file to her, or to Fausto, and she’d wanted to take a look at it.” Her tone is bitter. “They were very close.”
Giacomo thumbs through the sheets of paper, reading the odd phrase. So much of it makes sense, but a skewed sense, seen through some crumbling prism of guilt and fervour. The man was genuinely, clinically mad, he thinks. Like mother, like son.
“You never told me you were innocent,” Helen says.
“I didn’t think I needed to,” he says. “I thought you understood. In any case, I wasn’t. None of us were innocent.”
“I always thought Federico was,” she says. “I haven’t understood anything, have I? The two of us, for example. All that time Federico was alive and we were seeing each other when we could, I never once felt that it was wrong. And now he’s dead, and we’re all each other has, I do. I think it’s wrong and I don’t know what to do about it.”
“Do you want me to go?”
“I don’t know.” She looks up at him. “Yes,” she says. “I think I do.”
There is another sheet of paper from Federico’s file she could have shown Giacomo, if only to prove his state of mind beyond all doubt, but she chose not to. It was too horrible, and too private. As soon as she is alone again, she goes into her bedroom to find it. She sits on the side of the bed, holding it in her hands, trembling as she reads.
a dream last night, which woke me. A black child, no more than five years old, the kind you see on charity ads during famines: big staring eyes, enormous round head on a stalk of a neck, his stomach distended. A man was using an office stapler to pin the child’s arms to the top of a wooden table, the arms so thin the staples contained them, three staples to each arm. My eyes in the dream moved down across the raised veins of the belly to where the man was moving the child’s legs out of the way, legs like hanks of chewed gristle, and pushing his penis into the child, who didn’t move, who lay there weeping in a puddle of his own blood and his own mucus.
What do I do with a dream like this? I know it’s the war that’s doing this to me, it must be, that’s pressing on my head like this and distorting it, but is that all? Am I that man? Do I deserve it in some way? Where do I begin to understand my complicity? I almost woke Helen, but didn’t. I felt ashamed. I lay there and looked at where her face must have been in the dark and wondered if she would blame me for having dreamed such an awful thing. And I didn’t know the answer.
So he did go to the top of the tower with Giacomo, she thinks. And she wonders who took whom.
11
Alina, in a dress Martin has bought for her, new shoes in the same colour, her hair freshly done – he’s still shocked at the sums of money he’s spent; he had no idea how much these things cost – is playing the part of the diplomatic wife with exemplary skill, shaking hands, smiling. He’s been shaken by her, he has to admit, shaken by what he can only call her self-respect. How do we manage that? he wonders. How do we manage to respect ourselves? Martin can’t remember the last time he’s had occasion to respect himself, nor to expect respect. Yet here she is, this woman, no more than twenty-five, who’s been taken from her home and bought and sold as a chattel as far as he can tell. They’ve been talking for hours, but in a way that old friends have, as though certain areas of trust and silence can be assumed. Her English, it turns out, is better than her Italian, which is already good. She has a natural charm that shines through her shyness. He’s keeping an eye on her, not because he’s worried she might let him down, but because she’s wonderful to watch. He feels like Pygmalion. Here she is, holding her glass with the elegance you’d expect from someone bred to these things, these dreadful false events that carry so much weight. The only time she seemed uncomfortable was when they were frisked before entering by the embassy’s men. They asked to see a document and he wondered, for an acutely embarrassing moment, if she’d been lying, before she produced an Italian identity card, glancing across at him with a smile as she handed it over to be checked. Afterwards, she took his arm and squeezed it. “Get me a drink,” she said. “I hate those moments too.” Once inside, she looked around her at the size of the ill-proportioned room, the over-bright lights, and smiled, a little pleased with him, intensely pleased at her own implausible presence in such a place. He’s glad he brought her. She’s a credit to him. He can’t remember the last time he enjoyed an evening like this. Even his hangover seems to have been smoothed away by the sparkling wine he’s been drinking since he arrived.
And now Alina has met George Bush, rather in the way that Martin once met Margaret Thatcher – a briefly stroked hand, not even pressed, in a line of hands, that piercing glassy stare she was known for, although clearly she’d no idea who he was, nor had she cared to know. But Alina, touchingly, blushed and even bobbed her head, and Georgie boy gave her a second glance, as though making a mental note. How odd these powerful people are, thinks Martin, taking a glass from a passing tray. How much they need us and despise us. They think we’re their slaves when, really, it’s quite the opposite. They’re ours. And now he really is drinking too much, he’d better slow down or eat something. The canapés are decent, the home culture winning out over that of its illustrious guest. He listens to Alina explain in her elegant English to a short man in an over-tight dinner jacket that the end of the USSR has changed so much in her country, so many things for the better, so many for the worse, and he wonders if she even remembers the Wall coming down. She’d have just started school, if that. He’s about to do the maths when he notices someone from the agency, one of his superiors.
“I’ll be back in a second,” he says and Alina, her face slightly flushed with wine, he supposes, and the glory of the occasion, smiles briefly and nods her permission.
After a few moments of awkward conversation with a woman whose name he can’t remember, who clearly wants to ask him who his partner is but doesn’t dare, Martin comes back to see Alina being led to the dance floor by a man he has never seen before, his plump hand in the small of Alina’s back. He has a twinge of jealousy, which he struggles to overcome. Perhaps I’ve changed her life, he thinks, perhaps she’ll find a man who deserves her. How sentimental I am. To think she came to tell me that I was in danger. And I’m doing
Pretty Woman
on her. He wonders if there might be something in it, he won’t deny Picotti has unnerved him, though it’s hard to imagine him counting for much. But neither does Adriano Testa count for much. And there is always danger, according to the statistics. Fear death by frying pan. He takes a glass from a passing tray and watches her dance. How beautiful she is. When she chose the dress, it looked nothing, he couldn’t believe how much a scrap of fabric like that could cost, but look at it now. A vision. He has an urgent need to piss. As he moves off to the bathroom, he sees her eyes seek him out. He makes a foolish little wave with his hand, mouths “I’ll be back,” and is gratified to see her nod her head and smile. The man she’s dancing with turns to stare at him as he wanders off.
Sometime later, Martin waits by the main door into the room for Alina to come back from the bathroom. He’s more than ready to leave but when she gets back she begs to be allowed to stay a little longer and he can’t deny her this one-off pleasure, watching the fag end of a diplomatic reception, the musicians leaving the rostrum, the speeches made, the waiters surreptitiously starting to clear away as the last dozen people wonder how much longer they’ll be served.
“I think it’s time we went,” he says when a waiter catches his eye.
Alina stands up, tucking her new bag under her arm, smoothing the creases from her brand new dress. “I’ve had a wonderful time,” she says. She kisses his cheek. “Thank you.”
Together, their arms linked, they walk towards Piazza Barberini. No decision has been made about where they will go, but Martin’s plan is to find a bar and talk about taxis; he doesn’t intend to make the same mistake twice. There’s no one about, the area directly around the embassy has been closed to traffic. Martin’s weaving slightly from side to side, surprised by the warmth of the air after the air-conditioned salons of the embassy.
They’re entering the square when a motorbike carrying two men in unlabelled leathers and full-face helmets swings in from the side street to the left and turns with a squeal of brakes in Martin’s direction. When the bike is almost beside him, the driver swerves up onto the pavement, the back wheel skidding as it judders and mounts the kerb, the driver revving and braking to keep control. Martin’s reactions are slow. Turning, stumbling slightly as the motorbike hits him, he’s caught at the hip and lifted, flung up by the handlebars, flopping like a doll across the crouched figure of the driver, landing with a thud. Alina starts to scream as the pillion rider, without leaving the bike, lifts what looks like a baseball bat and hits Martin twice with it, once on his legs and once on his head, the crack of bone quite audible each time.
“I’m here,” she says, reaching beneath him to open Martin’s collar, her hands smeared with his blood, bright black on the white of her skin, on the pale silk of her beautiful new dress, as she pulls her arms cautiously from underneath his chest to feel his legs and see what damage has been done. “I’m a nurse,” she whispers, then corrects herself. “I was a nurse. Before.”