“I’ve been here too long,” she says, and sighs. “I’m forgetting everything.”
Martin has known Helen since she first came to Rome, over twenty-five years ago. A call came through from reception one morning to say that a young woman wanted to speak to someone at the English desk. Send her up, said Martin. His latest intern, a newly-arrived English graduate who drank too much and fancied himself as a revolutionary, had walked out that morning after being ticked off about a piece he’d written. Perhaps she’ll be looking for a job, he thought, we could do with some fresh blood. When she came in, he was disappointed; she looked younger than he’d expected, and unconvinced, as though she didn’t expect much good to come from this. It didn’t take long for him to change his mind. She’d been teaching, she said, in Turin, but hated the work. She’d moved to Rome and wanted to write; she had some pieces she’d done with her and could leave them for him along with her CV. He asked her to try out the following day – he’d square it with management if she worked out, and if she didn’t, they’d pretend it hadn’t happened. How did that suit her? It made her smile, a smile that lit up her face; he remembered thinking, so it isn’t just a cliché, it actually happens. Smiles can light up faces. By the time she’d left he was infatuated. He stayed that way for almost two months, as she learnt the job and they shared the odd coffee break, not quite in love with her, but almost, toying with the idea of it as she toyed with her spoon and packet of sugar, before leaving it unopened. Until one evening she invited him round for dinner and introduced him to a serious, blond young man who might have been her brother, but was in fact her husband, the economist Federico Di Stasi, she’d said with unashamed pride, and Martin had shaken his hand and raised an eyebrow. Yes, Federico had said before anyone else could speak. My ill fame goes before me. I don’t think we say it like that, she’d said, and whisked Martin off into the small living room they had then, still filled with boxes and piles of books after what must have been months in the place. Federico will do the cooking, she said. He loves to cook.
“What was Federico doing?” Martin asks now.
“What do you mean?”
“Where it happened,” says Martin, unable to say
where he was shot
.
“He was buying some cheese,” she says. “For this evening.”
“I thought you normally did the shopping.”
“I do,” she says. Is she correcting him? It’s hard to tell. Perhaps she simply hasn’t realised, not fully. You can know something and not know it, Martin’s more than aware of that. Sometimes he thinks it’s the human condition.
“Cheese?” he says, prompting her. He’s on safer ground, somehow, with questions.
“Stilton. The shop he was going to imports it from a dairy near Leicester.” She looks at Martin, her face contorted by pain for the first time. “That’s the sort of thing Federico finds out. You know what he’s like. Everything has to be authentic.”
Martin reaches across and takes her hands again.
“We needed it for this evening.” With a sharp, unexpected gesture, she pulls her hands away. “I can’t do it,” she says, panic in her voice. “I can’t do dinner for people now. Not her, anyway.”
“Her?”
“Giacomo’s wife.”
“Giacomo?”
Helen nods. “You know him,” she says. “I’m sure you’ve met him, years ago. He’s an old friend of ours from Turin. He’s here for the conference.”
“You don’t mean Giacomo Mura?”
“Yes,” she says.
“Giacomo Mura’s here in Rome?”
“Yes.” She sighs, an odd resigned sigh, as if she’s just remembered something inconvenient that can’t be changed. “He adores Stilton, you see, he always has. That was the point.”
“Mura knew that Federico was getting Stilton in for this evening?”
She looks startled. “No,” she says. “It was meant to be a surprise.”
“So who did know?”
“The police asked me that as well,” she says.
They can’t have been ordinary policemen, thinks Martin, Federico was too near the centre of things for that; they must have been secret service, the branch that deals with terrorists. He saw them on their way out, two men and a young woman, attentive, polite, their jackets on, an almost embarrassing display of rectitude and concern, with the woman behaving in a hugging, sisterly fashion she must have been trained to adopt and Helen standing there, rigid in her arms like a mannequin being dressed. But for all their concern, they hadn’t seemed satisfied, Martin thought as he watched them pick up their papers and leave. Of course they asked her who else knew where Federico would be that morning. He’d like to know if she answered them, because she hasn’t answered him; but he doesn’t want to push. He’s never seen her this pale, almost grey beneath the early summer tan. He wonders now what else they must have asked her.
“Were they difficult?” he says again.
“No, I told you. They were very good with me. They just asked me about Federico, if he had any enemies. I didn’t know what to say. Of course he does. He travels with an armed guard, I said. I think I may have lost my temper with them a little. Isn’t that your job, I said, to know who his enemies are? And then they kept asking me about this morning, about what he normally did, what I normally did.” Her voice begins to tremble. “Oh God, Martin, it was awful.” She opens her bag again, closes it; he wonders what she’s looking for; a handkerchief, her mobile; or if this is some way of keeping busy, of distracting herself. “It was almost as though I couldn’t remember, as though everything had been wiped clean. I could see they weren’t happy.”
“That doesn’t matter,” he says, to comfort her. “What did you remember? Try and tell me. Perhaps it will help.”
She tells him about a cappuccino, the American library, walking through the market. “I saw that friend of yours,” she says at one point, “the bookseller. He’s bound to remember me,” and it sounds like a clumsy attempt to construct an alibi. She’s staring into his eyes as she speaks, as if she’s trying to convince him. In the end, her voice falters. “I just wandered round,” she says. “Window-shopping, I suppose. Looking at people.”
“Your phone was turned off?” he says.
“Yes,” she says, then corrects herself. “Well, not all the time.” She looks anxious. “They can check that sort of thing, can’t they?”
“When did Mura arrive?”
“Giacomo?” She rubs her eyes with her fingers. “I don’t know. Today, I think.”
He moves in his chair, cautious, feeling it give beneath his thighs. He can’t understand why she’s lying. He hopes that, whatever her reasons might be, she made a better job of it with the police. He decides to try one more time. But before he can ask her anything else, her face has puckered up like a slapped child’s and she’s fighting back tears.
“He didn’t die straight away, Martin,” she says. “He was still alive when they took him to hospital. If I’d had my mobile turned on, I might have been able to get there in time. He was conscious, they said, he wanted to know where I was.” Martin has found a clean handkerchief in his pocket and is holding it out to her, but she’s reached across the table to a box of tissues encased in the same dark velvet as the curtains, which are not so much rust-coloured, it occurs to Martin now, as the dark and powdery hue of the dried blood gardeners use on their roses. She pulls a tissue out. She wipes her eyes, then blows her nose with surprising vigour. “I’ll never forgive myself,” she says.
Before he can comfort her, she glances at the clock on the wall. He follows her eyes. A quarter to three. Siesta time for some, he thinks, but the police or their assistants will be talking to the people in the bar, her neighbours, the bookseller, perhaps, the library staff; checking the times they gave against her account. A reconstruction of her morning, an ordinary morning, a
normal
morning, perfect in every detail. A morning that led her, step by step, to a place in which Federico is dead and nothing will be normal any more. That must be what she’s thinking. When she closes her eyes again and leans her head back into the emptiness behind her, Martin wonders where she really was this morning and why she is lying. He would do anything he could to help, if she will only let him, because what she needs, at this moment, matters more to him that the truth. You foolish child, he thinks, anxious for her but also hurt that she should feel he can’t be told.
“I didn’t realise it was this late,” she says.
“You must be hungry.”
“Not at all.” She covers her mouth with her hand. “I’d be sick if I tried to eat anything.”
“Still, something to settle your stomach? A sandwich, perhaps? I could have one sent up.”
She shakes her head. “Thank you, Martin. I’m fine. But you go and get something to eat. I’ll be all right here for a little while.”
“I’ll leave you then? You want me to go?” Is this what she means? She’s trying to get rid of him?
“Yes. Leave me alone for a moment.”
“You’re sure that’s what you want? I can wait outside if you like. I don’t want to leave you like this, Helen.”
“No, please,” she says, almost sharply. “Just for half an hour.”
Martin heaves himself up, pushing his hair back from his forehead, smiling down at her in what he hopes is a reassuring way, not wanting her to see his resentment at being sent away like this.
He’s standing by the door, about to turn and ask her one final time if there is anything she would like, when he’s pushed to one side. A man a few inches shorter than he is, bulky, in a dark light-weight suit, is rushing across the room. Helen has half-risen from her chair, her arms reaching out. Martin can’t tell if she’s pleased to see the man, or shocked beyond measure, if she’s stepping away from the table and holding out her arms to welcome him or to fend him off.
“So, this is where you’ve been hidden,” the man cries, in an accent Martin can’t place. “I practically had to fight my way in. I’ve been searching all over Rome for you!” He wraps his arms around Helen and Martin feels a stab of jealousy as she softens against the man and allows herself to be comforted, as she might have allowed herself to be comforted by him if he’d only tried. He’s never been good at hugging; he’s never thought of Helen as the hugging type. Martin can hear the man whispering into her ear, as one hand strokes her hair away. “I can’t believe it,” he’s saying, “we have to be strong,” and then her name, without the “H”, as though she were Greek. When he lifts his face away from Helen’s hair for breath, Martin sees his face clearly for the first time and recognises Giacomo Mura, older but still indisputably the man Martin remembers, from his photographs at least. Martin’s gaze is returned, but Mura’s expression is one of curiosity and affront, as if to say, “What do you want here? Who do you think you are?” Martin feels once again that he’s being dismissed, and stands his ground, waiting for Helen to see him, acknowledge his leaving. Finally, she pulls away, her face flushed. She looks at Martin.
“I suppose I’m free to go?” she says.
5
Turin, 1977
Helen found their first place in Turin for them, while Federico sorted himself out at the faculty. Anywhere would be better than sleeping in a cheap hotel, she’d thought, after the second week in a third-floor place beneath the porticoes near the station, the corridors of which were filled with the constant whine and shudder of washing machines. It had taken her three days to realise that rooms in the Hotel Saturnia could be rented by the hour, and that the women in dressing gowns she occasionally bumped into as she headed for the stairs were prostitutes. But she’d changed her mind about anything being better when an agent showed her the only flat they could afford to take, a place beneath the roof with a shared squat toilet on the landing and a scurrying of insects as the door opened. At least the hotel sheets had been clean; if she left the room for ten minutes a flurry of maids would sweep in and change them.
It had taken her three weeks to find somewhere that would do, with a deposit small enough for them to afford. A second-floor flat in a block halfway between the station and the park: a windowless hall, two poky bedrooms overlooking the street, a bathroom, also windowless but with a deep white tub, a live-in kitchen whose narrow balcony would take some pots of herbs. The whole place smelt of something the owner called
candeggina
. “
Tutti i giorni, mi raccommando
,” the woman insisted, “
usi la candeggina
.” Helen looked it up in her pocket dictionary as soon as she had paid the single month’s deposit, had the keys in her hand and was standing alone in the semi-darkness of the empty flat.
Candeggina
. Bleach. She ran into the bedrooms and opened both shutters, then looked around her, wondering what Federico would think. He didn’t seem to mind where they lived. “You find something,” he’d said. “I trust you implicitly.” The walls were beige, the woodwork chocolate brown, the floor a sort of mottled marble, like one of those fatty salamis cut into slices and squared off into tiles. Helen decided to buy paint, but all she could find that afternoon was tubs of white the size of oil drums and little squeezy bottles with colour she could stir in until she had the shade she wanted. She couldn’t believe how many little bottles it took to impart the faintest tinge to the paint.
Everything seemed so primitive here; she couldn’t quite cope with it. She hadn’t imagined northern Italy to be so, well, post-war, she supposed, the way she remembered her childhood in the aftermath of rationing; she half expected to find bottles of sterilised orange juice in the shops beside the sparkling water and the long-life milk. And then, as if to taunt her, there was the odd glimpse of luxury, handmade chocolates in the bars along the porticoes of Via Roma and the women that bought them, their elaborate hair-dos and ankle-length fur coats, even in autumn; a luxury she couldn’t have and didn’t – she told herself – want.
Alone in the flat, painting the walls a paler azure than she’d have chosen while Federico went about his business, she’d stop, paintbrush in hand, and close her eyes and listen to her neighbours through the walls. A family of Neapolitans on one side, four children of school age, a father who worked on the shop floor at Fiat, a wife who shopped and cooked and hung out washing like something from a film by De Sica, her favourite director, an old woman she heard the voice of but never saw; on the other side three young men from Calabria, also Fiat workers, who argued incessantly about politics and football and were never to be found apart.