A Florentine Revenge Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  A Florentine Revenge

  Christobel Kent was born in London in 1962 and now lives in Cambridge with her husband and five children; in between she has lived in Modena, in northern Italy, and in Florence. A Florentine Revenge is her fourth novel, following The Summer House, Late Season and A Party in San Niccolò, all published by Penguin.

  A Florentine Revenge

  CHRISTOBEL KENT

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  First published 2006

  5

  Copyright © Christobel Kent, 2006

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN-13: 978-0-141-01975-8

  In memory of Bruce Johnston, 1950–2005

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank Camilla Baines for allowing me to steal a little of her life as a hardworking, intuitive and enormously knowledgeable guide to Florence, as well as for nearly twenty years of loyal, generous, unstinting friendship.

  I have in this book tried to be as accurate as possible when describing Florence’s streets and palaces, but some locations, most significantly the Palazzo Ferrigno, the Olympia Club and the Hotel Regale, are entirely the products of my imagination.

  Prologue

  Across Europe it had been the hottest August for seventy years and in Florence the days were scalding, the city’s streets deserted until night fell. The visitors sought out air-conditioning, sitting in their expensively chilled hotel rooms looking out at the cloudless, blue-white sky, or wandering in the discount designer shopping malls on the outskirts of the city. Almost all the Florentines had gone, to the sea or the mountains if they could afford it, to relatives down south or closer to home, to the woods and waterfalls of the Casentino. Only the very old, the very poor or the frankly mad were on the streets, and even they could only be seen in the early morning, wandering slowly, stunned by the night’s heat.

  All month it never cooled down at all, not even at four in the morning, and the tally of deaths crept up, stealthy, ominous, inexorable: old people, babies, pregnant women. In the company of a handful of Italian drifters an American boy drank two litres of red wine on the steps of Santo Spirito one evening and the following morning was found dead between parked cars by the street sweepers. He had vomited, become fatally dehydrated and, his new-found friends having dispersed, suffered multiple organ failure before the sun even came up.

  In the suburbs of the city, Galluzzo and Sesto Fiorentino, Scandicci and the Isolotto, the villas breathed quietly in their green gardens, nestling among orange trees and feathery, tropical foliage, but there was no wind. The suburban swimming pools – and there were many of them slotted in alongside sports centres, motorways and housing projects; public and private, grubby or smart – were full. The bodies were packed tidily, this being Italy, but packed all the same, laid out under rows of umbrellas on a new season’s bright towels, side by side like sardines. In contrast to the baked, silent city the air here was cacophonous with splashing, whoops and screams and the hoarse shouts of teenage boys.

  In among the Italians at the Olympia Club at around two that long-ago afternoon, when no one without air-conditioning could bear to be inside any longer, there had been one or two foreigners, those who had been taken by surprise by the heat: campers, budget hotel guests. A handful of Germans, an orderly French family, and a young English couple with their small daughter. At their holiday villa the rented pool had cracked in the heat and drained dry and in desperation the owner had arranged temporary membership at the Olympia for them. It wasn’t an upmarket place, for all it styled itself a country club; the bare-chested barman spent most of his time leaning across the bar to chat up pretty foreigners, and the girl who handed out the baskets for their clothes was an anorexic seventeen-year-old who hardly looked up from her maggazine when they arrived.

  The English girl was seven years old, her fine brown hair bleached by the sun and her skin darkened just enough to show the outline of her miniature bikini. She ran between the bodies to get an ice-cream from the bar, and came back triumphant, her prize already melting in one hand and the change sticky in the other. She had been so pleased with herself, and this was Italy, after all, where no harm could ever come to a child, that when she said she needed to go inside, Need the loo, mummy, I know where it is, they had sent her off. Had they watched her go, smiling at her independence, her determination? Had they congratulated themselves on not wrapping her in cotton wool? These were questions no one could ask, and they gave no interviews afterwards, volunteered no information.

  What was clear, though, was that after no more than five minutes the girl’s mother, having felt some stirring of silly anxiety, some familiar, ridiculous misgiving, had got to her feet and carefully picked her way between the sunbathers to find her daughter. She had walked on the dimpled tiles past the drained indoor pool, huge and echoing and empty, beneath the dry showers, over slatted boards and into the silent changing rooms. She called the girl’s name and held her breath, always fearful, for the moment when she would hear the small voice call back and all would be well. But there was no reply.

  1

  A week later the child’s body was found in the river to the south, caught in an overhanging branch five miles out from the city where the river flowed clear and green between steep, wooded hills. A pretty spot, although for a long time afterwards no one went there, not for pleasure, not to admire the view. Celia Donnelly, twenty-one years old, had only just arrived in Italy, and it had been all over the local papers, a headline pasted outside every newspaper stand in the city when it happened; among the first words of the language she absorbed were those for abduction, murder, drowning. Across the half-empty city those left behind in the heat came out to mourn; flowers appeared at dusty shrines to the Madonna, begging for her intercession; there was a look of confusion, almost shame, on the faces of those who brought them. Suspects were called in, the first of them within hours of the girl’s disappearance, but no arrests were made, no charges filed. The case remained unsolved.

  Nearly fifteen years on, Celia lay awake in the darkness and listened. The child that cried every night somewhere along the street had not yet started up;
if she dropped off soon perhaps tonight she’d sleep through the sound. The crying always went on for a long time, more than an hour; Celia could not tell the child’s age, or sex; the sound was not verbal, as far as she could tell. She sometimes wondered if, like her, there were those who thought of the child abducted so long ago when they heard crying like that in the night, and it bothered her obscurely that she still barely knew her neighbours, wouldn’t know if she had seen the crying child in the street. After close to four months back in the city she still found herself wondering when she would begin to feel at home here.

  Outside for the moment the only sound was the rain falling softly on the terracotta roof over Celia’s head. It had been a long, damp, mild autumn that had lasted all through November, and well into December it was still raining. But they said the weather would change soon, perhaps tonight.

  It had been a busy week, and there was more to come. Only yesterday Celia had been up at Como, showing the Liberty villas to a group of peach-soft ladies from Charleston, listening to their sweet Southern accents exclaiming over the wet green lawns, the dark mountains shrouded in mist. It was always hard work when the weather was bad, although in the case of the Southern ladies it had turned out to be nothing a little shopping wouldn’t cure, and she’d sent them home with handblown glass, pigskin gloves and embroidered velvet handbags. And besides, Celia knew yesterday’s group already; they’d been in Italy a year earlier and at the airport in their pastel suits had fallen on her with little cries when they saw her again, pressing their soft, scented cheeks against hers, teasing her that she still wasn’t married. ‘How about that nice driver, what’s his name? He’d be my type, I can tell you, if I was twenty years younger.’ They were talking about Gabriele, the handsome, laid-back Roman coach driver; lazily he’d smiled at her when he heard them talking.

  It might be different, though, on Friday, a different thing altogether. She didn’t know them, did she? She knew almost nothing about them, except that they were rich, but then, most of Celia’s clients were. The usual long weekend in Florence to celebrate a birthday, just a matter of hotel bookings, some gallery visits, a guided walk, all booked. Friday and Saturday Celia would be guiding them, Sunday they’d have to themselves: Mr and Mrs Lucas Marsh. There was no point in going over it, Celia knew that from experience, no need to lie awake worrying over unforeseeable complications. Just a job, like any other. Leave it. Tomorrow was her day off, and there was no need to waste it wondering about a job. As long as the weather improved.

  The sound of the rain became lighter, softer, and it seemed to Celia that she could feel the temperature outside dropping even as she lay there, but she didn’t get up to close the window. In the summer, just after she’d moved in, there had been a gardenia in the courtyard below, and nicotiana spilling out of a big cracked terracotta pot, and their scent had found its way up to Celia’s high window. There was an engraver’s studio down there, and in the fine weather the students had laid their work out on trestles to dry under an awning between the pots. They needed the awning because you could never tell in Florence: even on summer nights great thunderheads could balloon up out of nowhere and open over the city like bombs, drenching the lush private gardens and lines of washing left out to dry.

  Could she adjust to being back here, among all this unadulterated life? Celia thought of the lime trees she’d seen in the little square between the tiny attic and the Arno, and high up under the roof she turned over in the darkness and thought of lime blossom. June, when the trees would be in flower, seemed a long way off now; the fresh December air smelled only of cold stone and water.

  The rain had stopped and the temperature was still falling, but still she didn’t close the window. Pulling the quilt up to her chin, Celia lay in the cooling air and listened to the sounds from outside. She could hear someone laying a table below her for a late supper, cheerful voices calling each other to the table. Celia reached up a hand and pushed the window to. Now she could only hear the small sounds inside the flat, the comforting flare of the geyser as it warmed the radiators, the tiny scrape of pigeons on the roof. Perhaps it is turning into my own place after all, she thought dreamily, perhaps this is where it begins to go right. She thought of tomorrow, a day to herself, the first for a long time. And she drifted, at last, into sleep.

  Out to the west along the river quite suddenly the grand facades of the city dwindled into nothing and anonymous apartment blocks and seedy parks fronted the Arno. The great dark band of Le Cascine, a pleasure garden from the nineteenth century whose tree-lined avenues might once have rivalled Hyde Park, lay along the river to the north, visible from every vantage point around the city, black and mysterious as a mythical forest. Close up it was less picturesque; Le Cascine wasn’t a pretty place on a night like this, its ranks of sodden black trees dripping in the rain, and it was hard to see who, other than those with an urgent need for privacy, would be tempted down its dank alleys and paths strewn with hypodermic needles.

  At the centre of the park was a squat, scruffy compound, a handful of low-lying buildings surrounded by a fence. This was Le Pavoniere, an open-air swimming pool whose fin-de-siècle pavilions were looking their age, all peeling paint and lopsided shutters, although the pool itself was a cracked relic of the Seventies. Le Pavoniere had a neglected air even in the summer but on a wet night in winter, lit only by the distant yellow gleam of the embankment lights, it was dismal. The dripping, dilapidated iron railings around the pool were crudely chained and a broken plastic sun-lounger lay on its side in the grass grown long and ragged after a wet autumn. There was a wind and the bare, drenched trees stirred and rattled. The pool itself was drained, although a couple of inches of green, brackish rainwater had collected at one enc and it was slimy with fallen leaves. At the centre of the drained pool the leaves seemed to have collected into a heap, a dark, humped shape that even in the flickering yellow light looked too oddly substantial to be just wet leaves.

  Sometime during the night a fight broke out between two homeless alcoholics lying in the lee of the pavilions in a hopeless attempt to shelter from the relentless rain. At one point the heavier man flung the other against the pool’s link fence, where a dim yellow security light that had flickered and fizzed all night flared briefly into bright white life. For a moment both of them stood there, blinking and cursing and mumbling in the glare. Then the big man grew still suddenly, shaking off the other, raising a hand and pointing through the fence. At the bottom of the pool was not a heap of wet leaves but the figure of a kneeling man of late middle age, hands behind him. Although he was bent forward over his knees the man’s head was flung back at an odd angle, a position that even a pair of sodden drunks could see was wrong. In the sodium glare the stain that spread across his farmer’s checkered shirt shone black, and his eyes stared sightlessly up into the overcast night sky.

  2

  Only twenty-one, barely out of university with her degree in English, some night classes in art history and half a year’s temping while she looked for a job, Celia had come to Italy, it seemed to her now, out of a kind of panic. There’d been a boyfriend who’d fizzled out after university, under the pressure of finding a job and somewhere to live, the anti-climax of the real world. And then Celia’s father died suddenly of a heart attack, fifty-five years, old, and her mother shut herself up in the house, saying she didn’t want to talk about it. With what seemed to Celia now like monumental self-absorption she’d taken her mother at her word and had left the country. At twenty-one, she thought as she looked back, you couldn’t stand still, you didn’t want to be held back by things like parents, or mortgage payments, or responsibility. It was almost a law of physics, something to do with momentum, or biology, perhaps.

  There’d been Kate to consider, too, of course, but she was just a worry to Kate, just an aimless younger sister who seemed unable to decide what to do with herself. Looking back, it seemed to Celia now that maybe it was Kate who’d been the odd one, with her life already mapped out bef
ore she’d got to twenty-five. Celia had arrived one morning in another strip-lit office and found herself thinking of her mother as she tried to fit her possessions in on the desk top among someone else’s, camping out, temporary. Her mother whose life seemed to be over already without ever having visited America, or India, or even Spain. She had stared at the blinking green cursor on the computer screen for a full ten minutes thinking, This can’t be all there is. Someone had asked her impatiently if she was all right, did she need anything, and without answering Celia had gathered her things together and walked out.

  So Celia blew her meagre savings on a course in English language teaching – a move everyone had sighed at, another change of career, money down the drain – and got a budget flight to Italy almost at random. She’d gone to a party where everyone was complaining about work, and someone had mentioned Jo Starling, the school rebel, who’d gone to Florence and never come back. Celia had never been further than windswept Calais on a school trip before then, but then, not many people had; Florence sounded distant and exotic, and she got hold of Jo Starling’s number.

  ‘Hey,’ Jo had said incuriously as she opened the door of her flat in Santa Croce to Celia six weeks later, as though she lived around the corner and had just popped in for a gossip. She had red lipstick on and an old silk scarf wound around her head; behind her the dim flat smelled musky, of scented lilies and coffee. Jo had had a touch of the Bohemian about her even at school, rising above the jeers of teenage boys directed at her homemade skirts, her hennaed hair; here, it seemed, she had found her element. ‘Come in, then,’ she said. And Celia had marvelled at how different things were here.

  That first sweltering August night on Jo’s uncomfortable sofa turned into a week, then two, but soon Celia realized that her presumption that it would be fine to camp out there indefinitely without a job or a prospect of one and a backpack full of unsuitable clothes had seen careless. It had lasted six weeks; the flat had been glcomy and stifling and too small for two women. Then Jo, who when Celia had arrived had been loudly proclaiming the bliss of living without a man, the heaven of not being in a relationship, grew bored with her freedom. She started seeing the young mechanic who’d fixed her scooter when a delivery truck reversed over it on the pavement, and Celia’s days in her flat were numbered.