She cries, she is loud and messy, her saw-like gasping for breath, her face screwed up, her mouth down-turned and open like that of a tragic mask. Yvonne moves back from the door and stands behind her, one slim hand on her shoulder, the slightest possible physical contact required to indicate that she is not alone. Giacomo, slumped on the farther bed, seems incapable even of this.
Later, when she is calmer, Helen will wonder if Giacomo was constrained by the presence of Yvonne. She’s jealous of the woman, although she has no right to be, and knows it. Because all Helen wants is to be held by Giacomo, as she was held in the taxi, when they were alone. To be held and comforted by someone who knows her almost as well as she knows herself, someone with whom she need hide nothing. But this doesn’t happen. She cries until her throat begins to ache with the effort of it, retching sobs from deep within her that physically exhausts her. She cries until the tears run dry, and continues, tearless, her eyes staring blankly into the meaningless room of this luxury hotel Federico’s secretary has booked for Giacomo and Yvonne, seeing neither of them, seeing no one. Yvonne produces a small white handkerchief from her bag and Helen looks at it, now in her own hand, as if she’s been given some fabulous artefact from an alien culture, then crumples and drops it to the floor. Yvonne, with a barely audible whine of complaint, stoops to retrieve it.
“I’m so sorry,” Helen says.
Giacomo walks over and lifts Helen up from the chair to clasp her to him, a clumsy rather formal embrace. Yvonne strides to the door, aggrieved, then leaves the room. Helen resists the urge to push him away before easing herself from his grasp as gradually as she can. “I’m so sorry,” she says again.
“Don’t be sorry. You need to cry,” Giacomo says.
“Have you cried yet?” says Helen, not meaning to be cruel, although she realises as soon as she has spoken that what she is doing is measuring his loss against hers. “Did you cry when they told you?”
He shakes his head. “I can’t believe he’s dead. I haven’t seen him for what, three years? Since Corsica that summer, when Stefania was so unhappy. That dreadful dinner, do you remember? Except in the papers, of course, unavoidably. On the news. And once or twice in corridors in Brussels. The last time was maybe six months ago, but he was with these people, I don’t know, the usual hangers on, ministry people, they weren’t my type. I should have spoken to him then.”
“You weren’t to know,” says Helen. She reaches in her own bag for a tissue, hearing what she has just said, playing it back in her head. You weren’t to know. I wasn’t to know. We weren’t to know. These are the words they’re expected to use, words made for occasions like this. She wonders how many more times she’ll come out with them during the next few days. After crying so much, she feels curiously light, as though she could float off at any minute; light but without enough energy to walk unaided. She’d forgotten about Corsica.
“He’d stopped to buy Stilton, you know, for this evening. For you, really, he remembered how much you liked it. I said I’d do it, but he loves running errands like that, it distracts him from his work. And I think it was a way of showing that he was happy you were coming to the house after all this time. He wanted to buy it himself. He was outside the shop when they shot him. I wonder where it is.”
She looks at Giacomo, sitting on one of the hotel room’s single beds. Once again, she remembers Martin asking her if Giacomo might have known what Federico was doing that morning, and shivers at what this means. He is fiddling with his mobile now, the way they all do, men and children, the girls as bad as the boys. At first she thinks he’s sending a text to someone. But she can tell from the rhythm of his thumbs as they tap on the keys that he’s playing a game. The snake that eats itself. The mobile beeps. She waits for him to stop.
“Where what is?”
“The Stilton.” She stares down at his hands, large, strong, tufts of coarse hair between the knuckles; strong hands that have never, despite their strength, really worked. They are folded round the phone, which is small and metallic and looks like a toy. A rich man’s toy, because Giacomo will be rich by now, his books, his lecture tours will have seen to that. They are all rich, more or less. Only Federico has resisted – the trappings at least. “It must be somewhere. In a box. It’s probably an exhibit.”
“I suppose it is.” Once remembered, she can’t stop thinking about it. She could so easily have gone, she had nothing else to do this morning. She could so easily have said, as he climbed into the car and picked up his papers, No, I’ll get the cheese. And he might have said, yes. And he would still be alive. Now she has something new to feel guilty about.
“I’m sorry, Helen,” Giacomo says in a voice so low she barely hears him.
“But why should you be sorry?” Is he talking about what he did to me this morning, she wonders.
“You know what I mean,” he says. “I’m sorry, that’s all. For everything. For everything that’s happened. I loved him too, you know that. I know we’ve had problems recently, and in the past, but he was my oldest friend. My only friend, really. Apart from you.”
To Giacomo the past tense comes easily, she notices, the note of nostalgia and regret. Perhaps he’s had more practice; Federico isn’t the first person he’s lost, after all. His tone is filled with pity that strikes her as self-pity; Giacomo coming to terms with what has been lost as personal loss. Before he can say any more about friendship, about her, she changes the subject.
“Yvonne’s never been to Rome before?”
“Oh yes, dozens of times. She used to model. She’s planned a shopping trip. As though Paris doesn’t provide her with enough opportunity for it. I told her she didn’t have to come to the conference. She thought I’d gone mad.” He laughs wanly. “It hadn’t entered her head. I don’t think she’s heard of Iraq, never mind the war.”
“How old is she?”
He glances up at her from his mobile. “I know how much you like Stefania,” he says, “but things weren’t easy.” He looks sheepish and she remembers the two of them on a Corsican beach, she and Giacomo, no more than fifty yards from Stefania and Federico, lying between two beached pedalòs, fucking as though their lives depended on it.
She looks down at her watch.
“I have to go to the hospital. You will come with me?”
“Of course.”
“As though there were any doubt it’s Federico.” She stands up. “Apparently, it’s a formality. Which means it has to be done.” She pauses. “Perhaps they’ll have made a mistake. Perhaps it won’t be Federico at all.” She is torn between a nervous need to giggle at the horror of what awaits her and the return of tears, because she half believes what she has just said. That she might find a man she has never known.
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
More words she will need. This time she holds out her arms and Giacomo comes to her, as he should have done before; but this time they are alone. He folds her to him, his stomach and hips against hers, his chin on the side of her head; he bends a little to kiss her hair, comforting kisses, and she lets herself cry into his neck in a gentler, almost resigned way. They stand together, embracing for a minute or two, more like old friends than lovers, until she becomes aware that he is no longer kissing her, that his arms are stiff and posed. She breaks away.
“We have to go. They’re waiting.”
“I’ll need to tell Yvonne.”
“You can call her from the car. She’ll understand.”
“Oh yes,” he says. “She’ll understand.”
7
She hadn’t expected journalists, let alone a television troupe milling outside the hotel. She recognises the nearest interviewer from a national news channel just as he recognises her. In a jaw-snapping double-take that might have amused her in any other circumstance, he also recognises Giacomo. For a long indecisive moment, with an instinct for the larger story, he seems to consider holding the microphone out not to Helen Di Stasi, the grief-stricken widow, but to Giacomo Mura, the terrorist redeemed; but he pulls himself together as she walks towards the gaping door of the waiting car. He pushes the microphone into her face; behind him, as if attracted by the scent of her, people she thought were guests or passers-by also gather and she understands that she is about to be mobbed by reporters, a scene she has witnessed so often on TV but can barely believe is happening to her. The jostling begins as tape recorders are poked towards her, followed by questions she can’t quite catch. Federico always manages –
managed
– to avoid this somehow, she thinks, and she feels a wave of envy and loss so crippling she reaches out to steady herself against Giacomo. Enclosed by babble, the only question she clearly hears is asked by a woman she sat next to once at a dinner some months ago, whose high-pitched grating voice rises above the rest. She wants to know what it feels like to have lost one’s husband, a question so fatuous Helen finds it difficult not to burst into appalled laughter.
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Before she can speak, a microphone catches her on the side of the face, cutting her lip; she feels the sting and trickle of blood, with a rush of relief. Giacomo pushes the journalist away, the others falling back as he swears and hustles Helen into the car, sitting beside her a second later and pulling the door shut behind him. The camera swoops down to film them both as the car pulls off. She slumps back into the seat with a long sigh from deep in her lungs that surprises them both. The driver is apologetic.
“That’s torn it,” says Giacomo. “I’m hardly ideal company for you at the moment. In the eyes of the world, I mean.” He squeezes her hand and she feels herself relax. My skin remembers his, she thinks. I still have Giacomo. After a moment, gently, she pulls away.
“They were bound to find out you were here sooner or later. It’s not a state secret. You used to be Federico’s friend.”
“Still, the two of us together like this, today of all days.”
“You never used to be so discreet. You’ve become a politician.” She turns to look at him. “Unless you’re worried about Yvonne?”
“I’m worried about you.” He lights a cigarette but doesn’t offer her one. She never thinks about smoking these days. But she would accept a cigarette if she were offered. She turns away from Giacomo, watching Rome pass by the window of the car, people shopping, groups of tourists she might have seen but not noticed this morning, before she knew; a city about its usual business. It strikes her that the death of Federico has, in fact, changed nothing and she thinks for the first time – what a long time it has taken her! – of the people who have done this to him. Who have done this to her. She wonders who they could be, and what could have made them do it. Federico has meant nothing but good.
These thoughts are interrupted by sirens. Their driver pulls over to allow two police cars with an official blue car sandwiched between them to pass. She tries to see in, momentarily convinced against all sense that Federico is the passenger. But the windows reflect her own car. In their swiftly passing glass, she catches a glimpse of Giacomo’s profile and of her own face, shadowy and pale before it’s gone.
The sirens remind her of the sirens she heard that morning, no more than fifteen minutes after the shooting of Federico, and the death of Massimo. The world was already dealing with it all by then, as she made her way to Giacomo’s hotel, its mechanisms of defence already in full play. She had no idea. How is it possible not to know, she thinks, after almost thirty years, that your husband has been shot less than half a mile from where you are?
“Helen, I’ve been wondering about something.” Giacomo interrupts her thoughts. “The police must have asked you about this, obviously.”
“About what?”
“About the Stilton. They must have known he’d be stopping at that shop.”
“I don’t know. They might have been following him and realised it was a good moment. A back street. Not many people around.”
Giacomo shakes his head. “These things are planned in advance, down to the last detail. They must have known he’d stop there.”
“Yes, they did ask me.”
“And what did you say?”
“That
I
knew.”
“And? Who else?”
“No one, as far as I know. Apart from the shop. He’d called to make sure they had some Stilton in.”
“Do the police know that?”
“Yes. Although I wish they didn’t.”
“Why?”
“Because the shop couldn’t possibly be involved, Giacomo. It’s one of Federico’s favourites. He’s been going there for years. His mother goes there, for God’s sake.” As soon as these words are said she sees how ridiculous they are. “Oh, give me a cigarette. I think I’m going mad.”
She smokes rapidly, holding the smoke in her lungs as long as she can, her head immediately starting to spin. She’s eaten nothing since breakfast, having turned down lunch, and drunk too much coffee, more than she’s used to. Her stomach feels empty and queasy at the same time. He’s right, of course, but she doesn’t want to think about it. To break the mood, she utters a short, forced laugh.
“I did something foolish this morning,” she says.
Giacomo doesn’t answer at once. After a moment, he says, “You mustn’t think about that.”
“I wasn’t thinking about that.”
“I’m sorry. I’m thinking about myself.”
“I told the police a lie,” she says. “About us. Or rather, not about us.” She turns to him, then gives him her half-smoked cigarette, to dispose of. “When they asked me what I’d done this morning, I didn’t tell them I’d seen you. I don’t know why. I suppose I felt it would look bad.”
Turning away from her, he stubs out the cigarette, then sighs. “Silence looks worse. I think you’d better tell them the truth, Helen.” He sounds annoyed.
“What, all of it?” She is tense with him now. She wants him to tell her it doesn’t matter, although she knows it does. She wants him to take at least part of the blame for what she has done. “To Yvonne as well?”