The Drowning River Read online

  Something had happened to Ronnie; she knew it the moment she said the words to Hiroko. She was hurt; she’d lost her memory; she was lying in a ditch somewhere, beside a road, after being mugged or hit by a car. Or worse; of course, it could be worse. Iris thought of the look on the stocky policeman’s face; she didn’t know the statistics, but probably he did, and his expression had said it all.

  What had the story about going to the Hertfords’ been a cover for? That was the first thing. And how had her bag got into the Boboli gardens? Iris thought of the place, which she had visited only once but remembered vividly; the narrow dusty alleys between high hedges, the neglected patches of overgrown woodland where the sun hardly penetrated.

  A man, she thought; it had to be a man. Somewhere in the depths of her drawing satchel Iris’s mobile rang; finding herself beside a wide stone bench on the corner of the Via Cavour, she dumped the bag down and rooted through it, swearing. Serena, she thought; Ronnie’s mum, it’d have to be. But it wasn’t.

  ‘Iris?’ The voice sounded panicked, and she didn’t recognize it straight away; withheld, her phone said. ‘It’s me.’

  Jackson. ‘Is it true?’ he said. ‘About Ronnie?’

  ‘She’s gone missing,’ said Iris bluntly. ‘How did you hear?’ The bench was damp and cold underneath her, and on the narrow pavement a family of Sri Lankans carrying checked nylon holdalls were trying to squeeze past between her and the row of parked motorini. She hauled the bag back on her shoulder and set off again, the phone to her ear.

  ‘Someone in a bar,’ he said, sounding evasive. ‘This morning. Look – do you have time for a coffee?’ Iris sighed, audibly, then she thought, Don’t be nasty. It’s not his fault. And then she thought, I need to talk to him.

  ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Only – well – later. Give me an hour.’ She hesitated. ‘Jackson, do you have any idea about this? Where she is? Because if you do. . .’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Jackson, but for a moment he sounded scared.

  ‘OK,’ said Iris. ‘Come to the apartment. You’ve been there before, right?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, then, quickly, ‘I brought her back one time, so, yeah.’

  ‘The police are coming there,’ said Iris. ‘So maybe give it an hour and a half?’

  ‘Police?’ said Jackson. ‘Jesus. OK.’

  There was a pause. ‘They’ll probably want to talk to you,’ Iris said. ‘You know that?’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ said Jackson, uneasily. ‘What do they think? Do they, like, have a theory?’

  ‘Not really,’ said Iris. ‘I suppose there might have been. . . developments. I’ll find out, won’t I?’

  ‘Look,’ said Jackson, ‘I – do you mind if we meet somewhere else? I don’t really want to – I mean, I want to talk to you first. Before I talk to them.’ There was a pause. ‘The police kind of freak me out.’

  Iris sighed; she didn’t blame him. They kind of freaked her out, too; they seemed so alien, so dumb and dangerous in their uniforms, with their guns. ‘Sure,’ she said, ‘OK.’ She thought a moment, and something came to her.

  ‘Let’s meet at the Boboli,’ she said. Where they found her bag, though she didn’t say that to Jackson. ‘Two o’clock, at the Boboli. At the Annalena gate to the Boboli.’ The side gate; somehow she couldn’t face the great expanse of forecourt in front of the Pitti Palace. There was a silence.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘The Boboli.’ He didn’t ask why.

  The Via Cavour was a wide, busy road, buses whistling and thundering, mopeds whining, the heavy-fronted palaces black with exhaust; Iris walked up it in a daze, thinking about Jackson. He was rattled. In a way it was a credit to him. She’d only ever seen him cool, supercilious, unfazed, not even when Antonella Scarpa was tearing him off a strip for being lazy, not even when Paolo Massi talked to him in that quiet, dangerous voice after he’d been out drinking at lunch, not even after three hours of vodka and red wine on the town with Ronnie and answering her phone for her at midnight, when Iris called to find out where she was.

  She’d learned her lesson after that, never ask Ronnie where she is or when she’s coming back.

  ‘Jesus,’ she’d hissed, stumbling through the door an hour later and waking Iris up. Sitting on her bed, ‘Jesus, that was embarrassing. What am I, your kid?’ And she’d started to laugh.

  Down the narrow Via degli Alfani, left into the wide, quiet, lovely Piazza Annunziata, across the empty flagstones and right into the Via della Colonna where a gang of tall, noisy high-school kids were smoking among the bicycles, waiting resentfully to go into the big Scuola Superiore for Saturday morning classes. Iris came around them, musing. It couldn’t just be some guy, she thought; she’s never bothered with a cover story before.

  Is she dead? Iris stopped as the thought popped into her head, and a high-school girl in a violet cashmere sweater blew smoke in her face without even looking.

  No, thought Iris, moving off, glaring at the smoking girl, who ignored her. Assume she’s not dead. Assume there’s a point in all this. It began to rain.

  And soon Serena would call; soon Iris would have to talk to her.

  She let herself back in, through the big wrought-iron gate, into the cavernous lobby, around the jungle-green courtyard with its palm trees, into the rickety lift. As it drew her upstairs, she felt her stomach lurch. It had never bothered her before, coming back here alone, but today she was on edge, as if she didn’t know what she would find.

  This was no good, thought Sandro, trudging down the length of the Via dei Pilastri with leaden limbs. He felt as though Lucia Gentileschi’s grief – so pure, so palpable – had taken him over entirely, and he couldn’t let it immobilize him. In an attempt to reassert normality he took refuge in the first bar he saw. It was a deep, narrow place, dark and warm, smelling of sweet dough; Sandro picked up a paper abandoned on a table just inside the door and went to the bar. He asked the fat barman if he knew Claudio Gentileschi; the man shrugged. Showed him the little photograph, and the man shrugged again.

  ‘Seen him walk past,’ he said, a little sourly. ‘Maybe every day for the past twenty years. Doesn’t come in, though.’ He nodded towards the Duomo. ‘He doesn’t take his coffee around here.’

  Strange, thought Sandro. That Claudio Gentileschi took his coffee elsewhere. Even if this wasn’t the most salubrious bar in the city, the coffee was excellent, it was local and it was cheap. Strange, but, he supposed, not unknown. Perhaps he took his coffee at the Bellariva; Lucia Gentileschi had said that he used to leave for the swimming baths every morning at nine, sharp. Sandro frowned.

  ‘Which way was he going?’ he asked. The barman pulled his head back, perplexed. ‘Every day when he walked past,’ Sandro explained, patiently. ‘Which direction?’

  Again the barman nodded towards the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, and beyond it the Duomo. The Bellariva, by any map, would have been the other way.

  ‘See him coming back at all? Later in the day?’ The barman shook his head, his expression darkening perceptibly, perhaps at the waste of his time although there were no other customers in the place.

  Taking the hint, Sandro took his caffe lungo to the back of the bar. Before he got to a seat, his phone rang. It was Pietro, and his heart jumped at the familiar voice; the signal was uneven, buried away as he was in the back of the bar, tons of stone around him, and he moved back towards the light.

  ‘OK,’ said Pietro, and Sandro knew that if there had even been a hint of reticence or embarrassment in his former partner’s voice, he would have given up then and there. But it was the same old Pietro.

  ‘I can tell you what I could tell her, the widow,’ he said. ‘There was a full investigation, that is, Gianluca Scappatoio asked around, no one saw anything.’ There was a pause, as if Pietro was looking down at some notes. ‘They set up a sign asking for information, anyone who’d been along there, but there wasn’t much of a response. The fisherman who found the body had only just arrived there and set up his gear whe
n he saw it floating, by which time Gentileschi had been dead a couple of hours.’

  He heard Pietro blow out through his nostrils, his way of expressing disappointment. ‘Sorry, brother,’ he said.

  ‘Ah, never mind,’ said Sandro, but he didn’t hang up. It was like they were back in the car together, each thinking it through, each working through the evidence. Scappatoio, huh.

  He could hear Pietro thinking on the other end, then heard that click of the tongue that signalled a conclusion reached. ‘It’s a funny old bit of town,’ he said, thoughtfully. ‘The Lungarno Santa Rosa. It’s kind of. . . dead. A backwater; maybe he picked it for that very reason, so no one would see him, no one would try to stop him.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Sandro, feeling defensive. ‘Or maybe someone else picked it for him.’

  To his surprise, Pietro didn’t start to argue him out of that one.

  ‘Listen,’ was all he said. ‘I’ve got to get going. Let me know if – well, if I can help any more, OK?’

  ‘Well,’ said Sandro, and Pietro was gone.

  Feeling the chill of being alone again, Sandro got another coffee, sat down, opened the paper. La Nazione. ‘Girl Raped in the Uffizi,’ was the headline. Holy Mother of God, he thought, scanning the story. A cleaner, from Eastern Europe, raped by a builder from Naples working on the extension. Madonna. Outraged, he turned the page. Flood defences threatened, more rain forecast. But he wasn’t looking because there were no good-news stories, were there? He closed the paper again, on a photograph of a girl, and absently stowed it away, although for a second the after-image of the girl’s face – dark-haired, smiling – persisted as some part of his brain carried out a processing function. He needed to get his blood pressure checked, if things were going to go on this way. He paid for his coffee and set off to the east, and the Bellariva swimming pool.

  It was a long walk, and he wasn’t an eighty-one-year-old; Gentileschi must have been pretty fit, reflected Sandro ruefully, his own body creaking like an old house, a painful reminder of two years’ idleness. Down the gloomy, high-sided canyon of the Borgo Allegri, along the Via dei Malcontenti to the river where the viale hit it, cars roaring around the ring road, day and night. Not a picturesque walk, even if it was home turf to Sandro; not a walk to lift the spirits. Not the glorious red dome, not the golden cloisters of San Lorenzo, not the pale arcades of the Innocenti; this was another Florence. Following the footsteps of a melancholy sort twenty years older than himself, it was purgatorial.

  The Bellariva was pretty quiet in November; Sandro himself could barely swim, and certainly would not have been seen dead at a public swimming bath. He liked the seaside, for a month once a year, liked a green-shaded sunlounger at one of the nicer bathing stations in Versilia, liked to stand with his feet in lukewarm seawater and watch the old men with their grandchildren in the waves. The Bellariva’s ugly grey reception desk was another thing entirely, its discordant soundtrack of splashing and shouting, the dismal acoustics and the awful smell of bleach and stagnant water and old socks. Gloomily Sandro reflected that it would take a better man than him to endure this at nine o’clock every morning for the sake of his health. Only to develop Alzheimer’s.

  Sandro looked around himself incredulously, to try to understand; a woman of roughly Sandro’s own age with improbably coloured hair, gold trainers and a duffle bag walked inside and past, flashing her membership card. Ah, the membership card: the tessera, that would be the key. He should have asked Lucia Gentileschi for it. The woman behind the reception desk – dead-eyed, with hair hidden by a kind of plastic bath-cap – looked at him with suspicion. He stepped up to the counter.

  ‘I’m making enquiries,’ he began, suppressing the failure of nerve he felt start up at the lack of his uniform, his ID, a warrant. ‘Following the death of one of your members. . .’

  The woman stiffened visibly at this, and oddly it was only at that moment that Sandro thought how strange that a man who came swimming every day of his old age should choose to drown himself.

  ‘No, no,’ he hastened to reassure her. ‘Nothing to do with the club, simply. . . I am working on behalf of his widow, to trace – well. . .’ Running out of options, Sandro took the photograph from his pocket. ‘His name was Claudio Gentileschi; a member for many years.’

  She frowned down at the picture. ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Sandro patiently, ‘perhaps someone else – are you here every day? In the morning?’

  The woman’s mouth pursed; this was going against him, already. ‘Five mornings a week,’ she said. ‘Since 1987.’

  ‘And you don’t recognize him?’ said Sandro incredulously. Was she just being perverse? Five mornings a week in this place for twenty years, maybe she’d turned permanently nasty.

  The woman – Eva it said, on her lapel – set both hands on the counter. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said with heavy finality, ‘I don’t recognize this man. What did you say his name was?’

  He waited while she typed on a keyboard behind the counter, frowning at the computer. Tap. He saw the screen reflected in her eyes, data scrolling down. Tap.

  Eventually Eva said, ‘Via dei Pilastri?’

  ‘That’s him,’ said Sandro; at least there was a single concrete fact between them.

  She raised her eyes to his, curious at last. ‘Well, he was a member. Was. He took out membership. . .’ She leaned down to the screen, then back up. ‘In 1997.’

  ‘Right,’ said Sandro, energized, ‘so –’

  She interrupted him. ‘For one year only. It lapsed a year later. It doesn’t look as though he used it much.’

  ‘How much?’ said Sandro.

  ‘He came twice,’ said Eva. Her eyes shifted to look over his shoulder.

  Someone was behind him, a tall man with stringy hair and a beard waiting with his tessera held out for inspection. Sandro left.

  Outside on the lungarno the traffic roared and screeched; Sandro crossed the road to enter the dingy grey park that ran along the river for a bit of space to think. There was a mist of fine rain in the air; more rain. He walked through the park, around the empty children’s playground, to the parapet along the river, where he stopped. He leaned on the stone, looked up at the great hills of the Casentino for a glimpse of something other than grey and far off he saw it, a little cap of snow above the cloud.

  All right, he thought, so he didn’t go swimming every day at nine o’clock. Ten years ago or so, he took out membership, maybe intending to distract himself, do something useful, but he changed his mind.

  According to the barman on the Via dei Pilastri, he didn’t even come this way, and Sandro felt strangely reassured by this turn of events. He had hated the Bellariva and, besides, this wasn’t the part of town he’d have put a man like Claudio Gentileschi, the modern apartment blocks, the smoked-glass penthouses along the river rooftops, the grey park, the traffic. He looked the other way, towards the city; he couldn’t see the Duomo from here, but he could see the arches of the Ponte Vecchio, the cupola of Santo Spirito, the Cestello. That way, out of sight at the far end of the city and the far side of the river, was the Lungarno Santa Rosa, where Claudio Gentileschi had drowned three days earlier, the only other fixed point in his missing day.

  If he didn’t go swimming every day at nine o’clock, where did he go? What had happened, ten years ago, so that he needed to tell this lie, and where had he been going every morning since?

  Giving in to his aching knees after the discovery that the eighty-one-year-old Claudio Gentileschi had not, after all, spent every morning swimming for the sake of his health, Sandro took the bus. He crossed the river to the Piazza Ferrucci and the stop, which he knew because it was outside the best rosticceria in the city, of the little electric bus that would take him meandering all the way to the Lungarno Santa Rosa.

  Odd, thought Iris as she let herself in, how the place felt completely different. Twenty-four hours, and everything had changed. It even smelt different; she tried to catch Ronn
ie’s scent in some superstitious attempt to summon her up, but it was almost gone, overlaid by the smell of musty curtains, old wood and – what was it? Dead leaves, a smell come in from outside. She must have left a window open. She stood in the hall, feeling the draught; dropped her bag to the floor in the half-dark.

  ‘Hello?’ she said, feeling stupid even as she said it. ‘Anybody there?’

  Chapter Eight

  The Jaunty Orange Bus hummed and whined along the Lungarno Serristori, jolting through potholes, the rain off the river whipping at the windows. November rain, thought Sandro gloomily as he stared through the bleared glass, a whole five months of winter; something squeezed in his chest at the thought of the future. What will they say, he found himself thinking, caught somehow off balance, what will they say at the hospital? He closed his eyes briefly as too much detail flooded his mind – the consulting room, the bed, the monitors and drips and anxious faces. The doctor in green scrubs talking seriously as he and Luisa sat and listened.

  The bus stopped by the bridge where the jewellers’ windows were bright in the grey morning, a couple with umbrellas looking in. An elderly woman got on with difficulty, hauling a shopping trolley after her. Sandro got up to help her in, showed her to his seat. The buses were so tiny they were full after one stop; the woman shuffled past him and sat down, muttering something to herself. Another crazy one.

  Luisa’s mother had had breast cancer, but she had been old. Did that make any difference? And in addition it had not actually killed her, he remembered the doctor saying that to Luisa; it had been a sizeable tumour that she had never said anything about to anyone, as far as they could determine, but it had not spread. She must have been able to see it, the doctor had said gravely after her death from heart failure, kidney failure, everything failure, when had it been, ten years ago? Luisa’s mother had been eighty-three, which had been a good age for a lonely old woman who had struggled to live on for fifteen years after her husband without really wanting to. But there are two of us, he wanted to say; we aren’t lonely. What had Lucia Gentileschi said? It ends with us.