A Florentine Revenge Read online

  This evening’s private dinner in the Titian room was nothing, of course, she told herself, not by comparison with sorting out canapés for 500 assorted dignitaries, but still, it was weighing on the administrator’s mind. Paola Caprese had been in the business thirty years, and she had a nose. That English girl, the guide who’d set the dinner up, had looked out of her depth, rather, trying to keep her end up but clearly floundering a bit, nervous. They were obviously a power couple these two, Mr and Mrs Lucas Marsh. Five thousand euros on a dinner for two, well, Paola inclined her head, thinking of the Titian behind its protective curtain. She supposed, grudgingly, that that was class.

  Paola turned to the side, looking along the building beyond the Piazza Goldoni. The men with their chestnut burner had stoked up quite a glow now. A gaunt woman, skeletal under a heavy, shabby coat, edged towards them along the wall to keep warm; that was the trouble, Paola thought vaguely, on a day like this they could attract the wrong sort, winos, junkies with their peripheral nervous systems shot, desperate for warmth. The thin woman looked up, almost straight into Paola’s window, and her starved face seemed lost, adrift in the busy street. Paola shifted her gaze away from those eyes; if she set her cheek against the glass she could see down along the river to where the skeleton trees of Le Cascine stood out against the pale blue sky.

  Of course dead bodies found with their throats cut in swimming pools didn’t help the city’s image, did they? The administrator was not a superstitious person but as she looked at the dark trees she felt a prickle at the back of her neck. It was a bit close for comfort; she thought of the drained pool at Le Pavoniere, enclosed by trees grown tall over a hundred years, like Sleeping Beauty’s castle. Reproaching herself for an overactive imagination, Paola looked away. All the same, she decided, perhaps it wouldn’t do any harm to go down and give the Titian room the once-over.

  The panelled room was cold, the temperature kept deliberately low of course to protect the paintings, but this was esaggerato. Too much. Paola made a mental note to adjust the temperature in good time and pulled back one of the heavy damask curtains at the window to let in a shard of thin, wintry sun. On the terrace she could see that the heaters were ready, and a heavy iron fire-basket stood stacked with wood between padded chairs.

  Leaving the window, Paola went to inspect the table. It was already laid, pewter candelabra, lilies, silver and glass, and Paola turned a knife over in her hand. Each piece of 300-year-old crystal and porcelain had to be washed by hand, dried with clean, dry linen, handled thereafter only with cotton-gloved, careful hands, but you couldn’t get the staff these days, and mistakes were made. So many extracommunitari, cutting corners. The knife was clean and she laid it back down. She stood back, surveying the scene; chairs, candles, light, imagining where fault might be found. Of course, she needed to see the painting. Carefully Paola leaned up and detached the curtain that covered it from the tiny hooks in the panelling and stepped back into the middle of the room, the faded red linen in her hands.

  The room was dim, as Paola had not drawn the curtains at the window back more than a crack, but it was enough. The painting glowed, red and gold, and Paola stepped closer. She saw the figure of the maidservant bending over a linen chest in a corner of the noblewoman’s bedchamber, coiffed and humbly dressed. That’s me, thought Paola, but without rancour. She saw the embroidered damask on the chaise where the mother sat, saw the lovely tilted oval of her face and the gleaming black head. The child’s fine, curly hair brushed the mother’s neck. To her surprise and annoyance, for she was a woman who had brought up her own children without sentiment, Paola felt a knot in her chest at the thought of the child’s death, only months after the painting was finished. With a frown she turned from the picture and behind her she heard someone outside the door.

  ‘Yes?’ she said, unaccountably annoyed. The door opened and she could see that it was one of the porters, or at least she supposed so in the dim light, a man in a worker’s long brown overall. ‘Have you come to do something about the heating?’ she said, before she realized that of course she had not yet issued that instruction. ‘Who’s sent you?’ she asked then, imagining that he must be in the wrong room, dressed as he was for furniture removal or some heavy work. He said nothing, but his eyes darted around the room, appraising, scrutinizing. For a moment Paola had the impression he was registering every detail of the room, the size of the windows, the angle of the dining table, for some obscure purpose, but then his gaze settled on her, mild, apologetic.

  ‘Yes?’ said Paola again, irritated. ‘Is it the telephone? Am I needed?’ The man took a step towards her into the pale light that fell through the half-curtained window and she saw that she did not recognize him at all. He was fair-haired, with pale blue eyes, but his skin was red with exposure to the cold and his chin was coarse with stubble. She thought, a casual worker, Polish perhaps. All at once she became aware of the crumpled curtain in her hands, the painting exposed on the wall behind her, and protectively she stepped back.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The heating.’ She saw that he held a tool bag; she searched his face again but still it was bland, empty, harmless. Pull yourself together, she thought.

  ‘The radiators need…’ He frowned ‘To be…’ He used a foreign word.

  ‘They need bleeding,’ said Paola briskly, turning away to disguise her lapse, her unaccountable nervousness in his presence. He was nothing, just a workman; what was this idiotic jittery behaviour – the change? She felt her cheeks burn at the thought and she gestured towards the door.

  ‘Yes, well,’ she said, ‘I can’t leave you in here, you know, not with the painting. It’s rules. You can start along the landing.’ Drawing herself up, she walked past him and held the door open; with a servile half-smile he turned and left the room. He stationed himself at the end of the long landing, illuminated by the cold wintry light that fell through the glass cupola, and knelt beside the heavy iron radiator. Paola locked the door twice, three times with the heavy key and walked slowly down the stairs.

  The concierge, curious about the package left for Mr Marsh by a man in a cheap suit at seven that morning, had asked for five minutes away from the front desk and taken it up to the honeymoon suite himself. He felt the small, heavy object through the cheap paper; he didn’t need to open it to know what it was, although it beat him why anyone that rich would buy a dodgy mobile off a Ukrainian. Marsh had been there on the threshold almost before the concierge had knocked, as though he had been waiting behind the door. In the couple of seconds it took Marsh to take the envelope and with brusque thanks hand a folded five-euro note in exchange through the barely opened door, the concierge had the impression of a man somehow caged, holed up, waiting for something or someone to release him. He was a pale man, Lucas Marsh, narrow, dressed with expensive, anonymous neatness, not what you would call muscular or powerfully built. But as the concierge took the money with a polite smile and for a brief fraction of a second they were connected through the door, he felt something, he could have sworn it, something like an electrical jolt from the pale, manicured fingers.

  Half an hour later, back at the front desk, the concierge called up to the honeymoon suite to announce a visitor for Lucas Marsh, and was instructed in meticulously polite Italian to send the man up. The concierge watched the visitor into the lift, wondering where he’d seen the man before. He was stocky, leather-jacketed, Italian through and through, nothing like the early-morning messenger, who had obviously been from Eastern Europe. You wouldn’t have put them on the same planet; there was a world of difference between a cheap-suited, shaken-headed thug probably living rough out by the motorway and a solid, middle-class citizen. He had the air of authority, of officialdom, a lawyer perhaps, a bureaucrat. A policeman. The concierge thought of the man upstairs, waiting for his visitor. Not the usual sort of honeymoon suite visitors, he thought. Something funny going on there.

  15

  It was fifteen years ago, near enough, but as Luisa stood in the bar a
nd stared at the picture of the little girl in the morning’s paper, it all came back, as sharp and clear as if it had happened yesterday. For almost all of those fifteen years, it seemed to Luisa now, she had persuaded herself it was over, gone, forgotten. What was the point in dwelling on frightful things, that was what she’d always thought, how could good come out of it? What lesson could you learn from the random murder of a child? That the world is a terrible place. The coffee came and Luisa drank it in a single mouthful, folded the paper small so that the girl’s chip-toothed smile was hidden, and headed back to the shop.

  The first thing that came back, she thought as she stepped into the busy street, was how the city had felt for that terrible, sweltering week. The August silence in the narrow streets that Luisa had once loved was changed, turned sour and heavy with foreboding. People crept out of their houses at dusk, when the temperature dropped a degree or two, to talk it over. But we all knew, thought Luisa, we knew how it would end. And she knew particularly, because she lived with Sandro.

  ‘The first twenty-four hours are crucial,’ he’d said at the kitchen table, in a dead voice on the morning of the second day. In the days when she dragged herself out of bed to be with him before he left for work. After that, there’s almost no possibility the child is still alive.’

  Luisa had thought about how he came to know these things. Case conferences, statistics. Photographs of dead and abused children. She felt herself turn to stone, hardly able to reach out a hand to him at the table for fear of what he knew.

  Every one of the nights of that long week before the girl’s body had been found Sandro had returned home with a greater burden, Luisa could see that now. The first night, when he’d come home at two in the morning, there had been hope. A sighting of a girl wrapped in a towel, chatting to an old lady in the street, the fantasy of a babe in the woods, kept warm by forest creatures, which they allowed themselves to believe in for one night. The following morning she would stumble out of some bamboo thicket or vineyard on the edge of Galluzzo with leaves in her hair. But the sighting turned out to have been invented by a pathological hoaxer, a misfit who wanted to get his name in the papers.

  Then they had a suspect, a definite. Bartolo, who was always hanging around at the perimeter fence, sometimes calling things to girls, asking them where they went to school. Nothing you could charge him with, but he made people uneasy. They got a warrant and searched his house, hyped on adrenaline as they battered at his front door. Sandro came home with a face black and set with rage, and told her. They had combed the house for evidence and found nothing, no clothing fibres, no bodily fluids, no photographs. There was the girl who worked in the changing rooms, but she was still refusing to alter her story. ‘I don’t know if she’s crazy, or stupid, or just stubborn,’ Sandro had said, white-lipped with fury. ‘I can’t get through to her.’ And Bartolo’s old fool of a mother just kept repeating, over and over again, that her son had been with her all afternoon, helping her scald tomatoes in the kitchen.

  ‘He’s such a good boy,’ she said, beaming at them apparently without comprehension, asking them to agree. And at her side Bartolo had grinned like a simpleton. They even brought her in and made her give a statement but they couldn’t fault her, she was sharp as a whip underneath the veneer of senility.

  ‘I’ll bet she’s trained herself up to this,’ Sandro had said, his voice ragged. ‘He’s done it before, maybe not killed anyone but pestered kids, messed about with them, and she protects him.’ Sandro’s helplessness and frustration turned him savage, and Luisa had stayed back, unable to think of the right thing to say. She thought of the old mother gazing at her terrible child and believing no ill of him, and her stomach churned.

  After four days they knew it was over, it was just a matter of time. They asked the parents, who had moved into a dive of a hotel by the station as though burying themselves, to give a press conference. ‘How – how are they?’ asked Luisa, terrified of the answer. Sandro had averted his eyes. ‘They won’t do a press conference,’ he said. ‘The mother’s finished.’ His voice was flat, emotionless. ‘She might as well be dead.’ He looked up at Luisa. ‘I can’t stand to look in her eyes,’ he said, and Luisa thought of the baby, of how she’d been after the baby. She felt stiff and cold with the horror of it but she just nodded.

  ‘And the father?’

  Sandro’s expression changed. ‘Can’t make him out,’ he said slowly. ‘Perhaps it’s because he’s English.’ He paused, and Luisa tried to picture the man; there’d been a snatched shot of the couple leaving the police station, their faces drained and hollow. ‘He just stares,’ said Sandro, ‘stares straight ahead, like he’s fixing on something far away He hardly talks, doesn’t cry, doesn’t break down. His wife sits there next to him falling apart, really, she can’t control anything, can hardly answer a question, and he’s nodding to himself. Sometimes he asks questions, in this cold, dry little voice. He’s… frightening, that’s what he is.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s not because he’s English. Perhaps it’s because he’s a man,’ Luisa had said then, before she could stop herself, and Sandro glanced at her quickly, then looked away.

  ‘Yes,’ he said hoarsely. ‘Perhaps.’ He hesitated, his eyes distant. ‘He thinks it’s his fault. Something he said at the beginning, before he clammed up, when his wife was saying it was her fault, crying that she shouldn’t have let the girl go on her own. He said no, that it was his fault they had to go to the public pool. It was his fault they couldn’t afford a decent villa where things didn’t go wrong.’ Sandro paused. ‘He didn’t provide for them, didn’t protect them, and now he’s thinking he should have been able to protect them, because that’s what fathers are for.’ He’d stood up with a start as though made self-conscious by what he’d said, and the chair grated against the tile of the floor with a hard, ugly sound.

  Luisa stopped short in the cold street as she remembered Sandro, all that time ago, turning away to hide his face as he spoke. A couple forced to separate to come around her as she stood there gave Luisa a funny look, but she was oblivious. She could see now why Sandro had fed the man information, had passed every scrap and clue and hint they’d found across Europe to him and closed his eyes to the consequences. That’s what he’d have wanted, if it had been him. There in the street she allowed herself to think, just for a second, of that maternity ward where she’d sat, her arms empty and her future gone, and Sandro incapable even of looking at her. There’d been nothing he’d been able to do to protect them.

  Luisa became aware of the bleep and flashing light of an approaching refuse truck and realized she was standing in the middle of the street. Shaking herself back to life, she pushed open the door of the shop and stashed her bag with the newspaper folded inside it behind the till. She felt Gianna’s eyes on her and carefully took off her coat. Her face felt as though it was frozen, inanimate, and she rubbed her cheeks to bring some life back.

  ‘Was I too long?’ she said, trying to seem normal, though she couldn’t remember what normal was for her just at the moment.

  ‘No,’ said Gianna, peering at her curiously. ‘It’s just – oh, nothing.’

  ‘Cold out there,’ said Luisa by way of explanation. Last night seemed a long time ago, wandering through the arcades arm in arm with Beppe and Gianna. Had it been one big mistake? ‘Bitter. And they say it’s going to snow’

  Gianna frowned a little, then shrugged and picked up the dog-eared copy of Gente she kept under the cash-desk. Luisa stepped back on to the shop floor.

  They’d asked for coffee to be brought up. By some instinct the waiter with his tray hesitated before knocking; perhaps it was the tone of the voice, level but furious, coming from behind the door. It was an English voice, but speaking Italian, so he understood everything.

  ‘This wasn’t supposed to happen,’ it said, each word emphasized with quiet force.

  The murmur that responded was harder to pick up, but the waiter heard it all the same; he was listening now.
>
  ‘It’s not safe,’ said the Italian. ‘Do you understand? You can’t mess about with these people, it’s not like some civilized conference in Geneva with a bunch of lawyers, this is the sharp end. This is a dangerous game, and if you don’t pay them what they’re owed they’ll come after you until they get it.’

  The waiter didn’t understand what the Englishman said next, although he spoke in Italian. It sounded technical, something you’d hear in a court of law. ‘I won’t be a party to it,’ he said, and turned away. ‘I’m not—’ And then the telephone began to ring. It rang and rang, but no one answered and eventually it stopped.

  The room-service waiter had been in the business of discretion for long enough to know he didn’t want to get involved. Briskly he knocked at the door, and when the Italian opened it, Lucas Marsh seated behind him and shielded by his bulk, he averted his eyes so the lawyer wouldn’t know he’d been listening. He didn’t wait for a tip.

  They’d started in the Via Tornabuoni, of course, the lovely, curving street where all the big names were, sleek black and silver windows set in the ancient, forbidding stone facades. Emma Marsh crossed each imposing threshold without a qualm, as though she owned the place, and the black-suited heavies behind the doors whisked them open in front of her, knowing money when they saw it. Together Celia and Emma Marsh wandered through the showrooms and corridors, up cantilevered staircases and through stone arches, their footsteps muffled by pale, close-cropped carpets. They looked into glass cases filled with handbags in exotic colours: dark red, magenta, green; passed rows of dresses, pressed and gleaming with newness, each hanging a regulation centimetre apart and each minutely adjusted outwards, to greet the browsing customer. The saleswomen, who usually in Celia’s experience were unable to resist close and suspicious questioning of each customer disguised as solicitude – ‘Are you looking for something in particular? If there’s anything I can help you with’ – hung back when Emma came through.