A Florentine Revenge Read online

  She stood there with her coat still on, slicing the long blue-black leaves of young cabbage and skinning the sausage, getting out bowls, boiling water. She fell into a rhythm but at the same time it was almost as though she was working in her sleep; the door opened behind her but she didn’t turn around. She could feel the cold air of the hall come into the room and she knew Sandro was taking off his cap and setting it on the sideboard. There was a clunk as he unbuttoned his heavy gun belt – empty, of course, the gun already signed in back at the station – and set it beside the cap. Next he would lay out the evening newspaper on the table and ask her for a beer; she heard the slap as the paper went down, the scrape of the chair, but he said nothing. There was a sound, but it was not articulate, a choked sort of noise, and then she turned.

  ‘Take off your coat,’ said Sandro; he often sounded like this, exasperated, but this time there was a despairing edge to his voice too. Luisa set down the knife and took off her coat. She lowered herself into a chair beside him. He pushed the paper across to her and leaned back to take the bottle of amaro from the sideboard, and a glass. Luisa frowned down at the headline; something about a body found in Le Cascine. She scanned the paragraph beneath it, squinting; she needed glasses. The body of a man aged between sixty-five and seventy, not yet formally identified. She looked across at Sandro, questioning. He didn’t look at her, just threw his head back and swallowed the viscous amber liquid. He poured another.

  ‘It’s Bartolo,’ he said, his voice rough with the alcohol, staring straight ahead. ‘Bartolo’s dead. Looks like he cut his own throat.’

  Luisa pushed her chair back. ‘Bartolo?’ she said wonderingly.

  ‘He did it in Le Pavoniere, would you believe it? In a swimming pool.’ And then Sandro laughed, a harsh, bitter sound.

  ‘Killed himself?’ Luisa couldn’t keep the disbelief out of her voice.

  Sandro looked directly at her then. He sighed. ‘They’d done another DNA test,’ he said with reluctance. ‘New technology, some new technique from Sweden to extract the stuff from degraded or incomplete samples.’ He looked away. ‘The papers got hold of that, they’re saying it must be to do with that, he knew the writing was on the wall so—’ he broke off, drew a thumb across his own throat.

  Dumbly Luisa nodded, listening to all this as though Sandro confided in her every night when in fact he never spoke a word. In reality Sandro had stopped talking to her about work or even any other thing that happened between his leaving the house and returning to it at night, somewhere around fourteen years since. She knew who Bartolo was, though, from all that time ago.

  A man with a smallholding on the edge of the city, a crumbling farmhouse and a handful of fruit trees sandwiched between a new housing development and the motorway, Bartolo’s scruffy patch also happened to adjoin the Olympia swimming pool complex. He’d been about fifty then, known as a loner; he would, mused Luisa, thinking of the article in the paper, pondering the passage of all that time, be sixty-five or so now. He had often been seen standing beside the link fence around the tennis courts, watching the girls play; he’d even been found wandering by the pool now and again, under the umbrella pines. The land on which the pool was built had belonged to his family when he was a boy, and they thought that must be why he kept coming back.

  Sandro had called the anorexic who manned the changing rooms half-witted, as though the lack of food had starved her brain. Luisa had seen her in some hurried news footage, standing on the edge of a group of shouting men, her eyes dark smudges on the screen, staring. She’d said at first she might have seen Bartolo that afternoon; Luisa remembered Sandro telling her that much; the statement had been retracted, though, so it was never made public. She’d turned obstinate all of a sudden, said she couldn’t be sure, it could have been yesterday morning. Luisa thought about her now, that girl; had Sandro bullied her, got her in a state so she didn’t know which way was up? He could be like that sometimes. She thought of the girl on the television screen and remembered she’d been no more than a kid herself, some skimpy crop-top hanging loose on her, mulish and sulky. It wasn’t fair. The heat and panic turned everyone’s brains to mush, she remembered Sandro saying with disgust; like getting a sullen child to learn, you felt like shaking them.

  So there’d been no proof, nothing but circumstantial stuff; they’d gathered samples of this and that, from his van, from his cantina, the lean-to against the link fence. Hair, skin scrapings, a tattered fragment of cloth that turned out to have come from his mother’s apron, caught on the fence.

  All this Luisa remembered even fifteen years on. She remembered Sandro coming home at two in the morning for the week the child was still officially just missing – but they all knew, didn’t they? A seven-year-old girl, gone a week – and pouring it all out, ranting at the table. How could no one have seen her? All those nice little houses out there in the suburbs, flowers in the gardens, everything new. Where are all the nosy neighbours when you need them? Luisa remembered it drying up too, the ranting, when the girl’s body was found. She remembered as though it was yesterday the vacant, evasive look in the anorexic’s eyes when she appeared on the television, dodging guilt. They’d all been doing that when it happened, that was how it had felt. And looking at Sandro now, at the table, feeling his silent rage in the confined space like electricity before a storm, it all came back to her with the force of revelation. Gingerly she put a hand out to Sandro’s shoulder, and he began to cry.

  At the Hotel Regale the heating generated by a bank of sleek German boilers in the basement blasted through the wide, carpeted corridors, warming every corner of the massive, nineteenth-century building. Two years earlier the hotel, standing at the centre of the city on the Piazza Repubblica, had been subject to complete and lavish renovation, every cornice and balustrade, every antiquated bathroom restored. In reception a gold-buttoned concierge frowned at his reservations book; two guests yet to arrive, on the late flight from London. Mr and Mrs Lucas Marsh, the honeymoon suite. It was almost midnight.

  The temperature was falling fast; in the dark hills around Florence snow was beginning to fall, dusting the dark Chianti hills with white, settling on the trees in the steep wooded valleys of the Casentino. Snow almost never fell in Florence itself, melting in the warm air that rose from the buildings before it reached the rooftops and turning to slush, but not far from the centre it was drifting down, in Scandicci and Sesto Fiorentino, the bleak suburbs on the Pisan plain. It was even falling at the airport where a single snowplough and de-icing trucks were slowly moving to and fro on the runways, and overhead a delayed flight from London circled, its winking lights illuminating the whirling flakes as it descended between the dark hills to the plain.

  Just east of the airport, between the reedy, garbage-clogged banks of the Arno and a half-built section of motorway, the snow fell on a ramshackle shanty town of rusted containers, corrugated iron shacks and tents. Under an awning of tattered tarpaulin a circle of hollow-eyed, dark-skinned men in heavy coats were playing cards at a folding table by the hissing blue light of a Tilley lamp as the snow fell softly in the darkness beyond them. A humped figure in a tattered sleeping bag leaned against the door of a caravan and watched them, a woman, although you’d have to look closely to be sure; her face was gaunt, almost all femininity stripped from it, though whether from poverty or age it was hard to tell. She gazed at the men with bleary eyes, bloodshot and dull. Overhead a plane roared, and the men looked up, all at once. One smiled and another grunted. It was difficult to say what they were thinking, whether they were dreaming of a passage home or thinking of the day they’d looked up as a plane screamed in to land and as its undercarriage came down they’d seen the stiff, frozen body of a stowaway fall to the tarmac.

  The plane was idling now along the runway in the floodlit distance, and the men returned to their game. They all knew the airport, a place stuffed with rich pickings, designer luggage circling on the conveyor belts and limousines waiting with their engines running at
arrivals. They knew the wealthy were blind, blinkered by luxury; they didn’t see beyond the bright lights of the airport concourse and the padded leather interior of the limousine. They couldn’t see out here, into the darkness further out where things moved, insidious and invisible, where deals were done and lives were bartered, sold as cheap as the corpse of the Somali stowaway.

  7

  The city stirred reluctantly awake in the cold, and as it rose the pale sun gave out little warmth in an ice-blue sky.

  Celia woke early; some internal clock had told her that today she needed time. There was no one else, after all, to wake her, and after more than a decade of early starts, collecting clients from airports and hotels, she had somehow trained herself to become an early riser. She needed to look right for the job, she’d learned that early; it was no use being a scruffy English girl with unwashed hair, no make-up and bad clothes. You had to arrive on a job and be sure that the clients knew straight away that you were the guide, that you had authority. And that meant you couldn’t just jump out of bed and into the clothes you’d left on the floor last night.

  Dressed, hair brushed, she paused, calculating. She’d have to book a taxi sometime, to get them from San Miniato to the restaurant at least. Then she had a thought, and dialled Gabriele’s number. Poor guy, she thought guiltily as she heard it ring. Taking advantage, this is called. But the thought of sweating it out waiting for a cab, when she might have someone she could rely on for moral support as well as a ride, had got the better of her conscience.

  Gabriele sounded sleepy. ‘Sorry, sweetheart,’ Celia said. ‘Did I wake you?’ It occurred to her that there weren’t many friends she could call up at this hour, but she never worried with Gabriele. She thought of the last trip they’d done together, to Fiesole, him rolling his eyes at the talk on the Roman arena he’d heard her give a hundred times before, trying to make her laugh with sidelong glances. ‘Just checking you’re okay for today?’

  As she left the warm flat Celia felt an icy draught coming up the dark stone stairwell from below; shoving open the heavy door on to the street, she felt the cold wrap itself around her, stinging her cheeks. Across the road the bar on the corner wasn’t open yet, and she turned in to the Via dei Bardi. It was a long, straight stretch that led her into town, dark and silent in the early morning, and as Celia passed between the massive stone walls of the old palaces they exhaled a deep, sepulchral chill. She had dressed with care in boots, neat wool trousers and a thick, soft, dark cardigan she’d saved for in last year’s sales and had been keeping for the right moment; for a bitter morning like this and an important appointment to keep. Soft black lined leather gloves from the Scuola del Cuoio, where she got a discount because she took clients there sometimes. But still she was cold.

  Celia thought of the day ahead; she had to meet the Marshes at the hotel, then a morning in San Miniato, afternoon in the Uffizi. She shouldered her bag, heavy with its daily load, the tools of her trade – a Blue Guide, notebook, mobile, water bottle – and kept walking. Her feet were freezing and she thought longingly of coffee.

  On the Lungarno in the bright, bitter morning the wind came off the river in gusts and Celia hunched her shoulders against it. She saw a handful of early-morning tourists coming off the Ponte Vecchio, their faces looking pinched in the wind with cold and disappointment. Italy was not after all the land of warmth and eternal sunshine. Celia hesitated on the corner beside the news-stand where the latest headlines were pasted up on a board: Le Cascine: body found. A man stood by the kiosk with a copy of La Nazione open, engrossed in the front-page story. Over his shoulder Celia glimpsed a photograph, police tents among some trees. She took a copy of La Repubblica, paid for it and looked at her watch; she had time for a quick one. She turned in to the Maoli.

  The bar was crowded; it was a cold morning and Celia wasn’t alone in needing fortification on the journey to work. She hoped Beate was having a lie-in; they had drunk two bottles of wine between them and as she stood waiting for her coffee Celia could feel the effects, a bit of a nagging ache behind her eyes.

  People stood around the bar talking, heavy wool coats smelling of dry-cleaning and mothballs taking up twice the usual amount of space, and all the tables were occupied. In a corner sat a woman Celia thought she recognized but couldn’t quite place; a solidly built, dark-haired woman in a navy-blue coat with a caffè latte on the table in front of her. She sat stiffly, as though trying to erase herself, handbag over her arm as if she had to be ready to leave at any moment although she’d found herself a seat. Her face was powdered and pale, but there were shadows under her black eyes. Distractedly, Pasquale pushed Celia’s pastry and cappuccino over the bar to her and she picked them up without really looking. She took out her paper, unfolded it and stared at the front page, but the gruesome headline repelled her: slaughtered like a beast, it said. Besides, she didn’t have time to get stuck into a news story now. She put the paper away again.

  At the movement the woman at the corner table looked up and Celia recognized her as the brisk, competent saleswoman from Frollini, the one who never forgot a face. Celia had observed her on her visits to the shop, had seen the notice she took of customers’ preferences and the regularity of their visits. It was odd, she looked quite different here, almost lost, and it occurred to Celia that that had been why she hadn’t recognized her immediately. She turned back to her coffee, downed it and with a nod to Pasquale turned to leave, and saw that the woman who worked at Frollini had already gone.

  The Por Santa Maria, the main shopping street and one section of the arterial route that led from the Pitti Palace on the south of the river up to the cathedral to the north, was already filling up with commuters and early-morning tourists, those with less hospitable hotels, uncomfortable beds and no breakfast perhaps. They walked arm in arm more for warmth than anything else, the budget travellers, teenage girls and Eastern Europeans, but as they passed Celia could see the dreaming city reflected in their eyes, the lovely stone facades and arched windows and the thin, pale light of the winter morning. She thought of Mr and Mrs Lucas Marsh waiting for her at the Regale and found herself wondering how they were seeing the city this morning, whether they would get what they had come for. A weekend away in a foreign city; they wanted romance, glamour, luxury, escape. Celia wondered if the Marshes had had the Italian papers delivered with their breakfast, if they knew a mutilated corpse had been found in what was sometimes called Florence’s equivalent of Hyde Park.

  As she walked on and Frollini came into view, Celia remembered the dark-eyed saleswoman she’d seen sitting in the corner of the Maoli and glanced in through the window, but it was dark behind the display and she walked on up the street to the massive, monumental space of the Piazza della Repubblica, and the Hotel Regale.

  If Celia had looked inside she wouldn’t have seen Luisa anyway in the dark interior of the shop. Luisa had let herself in with a hand that shook; as always, she had gone straight to the keypad behind the till to stop the alarm going off, but today it took her three attempts before she managed to key in the right code. When it was done she leaned against the door in a moment of weakness, taking deep breaths of the shop’s neutral air, feeling a sudden sweat bead on her forehead. She told herself there was nothing to be done yet, she could stay like this for a moment.

  Luisa hadn’t slept, that was part of it. The truth was, after fifteen years of grim silence between her and Sandro she’d adapted, grown a new skin. And now was it all going to change? She wasn’t sure, any more, of whether that was what she wanted, and what was more she didn’t know, by the look of him last night, if Sandro himself could hold up under the strain. What would happen if it all came out, everything he had been bottling up for fifteen years?

  There had been something in the way that girl had looked at her, too, that had brought this on; a look not accusing but penetrating, as though she had looked right inside Luisa’s head. She closed her eyes and wondered bleakly what it might have looked like to that girl, th
e knotted pathways in her brain laid down by fifteen years of evasion, compromise, silence. Luisa took another deep breath, trying to get it out of her mind, trying to restore the calm, she had, until today, always been able to count on once she was inside this door.

  After a moment or two she opened her eyes and saw a face at the glass; she started at the sight, then realized it was the first of the cleaners, tapping and nodding, trying to make herself understood through the barriers of language and plate glass. Wearily Luisa nodded back, pulling the door open, and in they came, filling up the room once again. Standing at the window, she let them get on with it behind her, grateful not to have to talk.

  Celia, still six minutes early and killing time in front of the Regale under the eye of the hatted and gloved doorman, watched the carabinieri leaning against their van in striped guardsmen’s trousers, smoking. Was it her imagination, or were they really everywhere these days? Never when you actually needed them, when Beate was threatened a week or so ago by a drug dealer on the corner of her street, a month back when Celia had been jostled by two dark men so her bag fell to the ground, papers, schedules everywhere, her wallet stripped. The carabinieri had bigger quarry these days; they spent less time idly preening, more watching in earnest. Celia had seen an abandoned backpack on the steps of the cathedral surrounded in minutes, prodded with electronic probes; they’d been on the point of a controlled explosion when its dozy owner stumbled back, almost in tears. She thought of the potted olive tree set behind the Uffizi in memory of those killed in the explosion there, however many years before. Twelve? Something like that. And the world hadn’t grown any safer since then.