The Viper Page 8

  And then Giuli had phoned, walking to work, sounding tired, and Luisa had remembered, too late, that there’d been a missed call from her yesterday. ‘Angel,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry, I was – yesterday was a busy day.’ Giuli sounded tired. She had some story about a child calling the office and she’d been worried she was in danger, the child, and Giuli had called back and spoken to the grandmother.

  ‘So all’s well, right?’

  ‘But what if –?’

  ‘I think, look,’ and Luisa tried to make it lighthearted, ‘maybe it’s my age, but I think if it was just the mother, yes, you might worry that perhaps the mother was under stress, the child was at risk. But the child has a grandmother, too. That makes it safer, don’t you see?’

  There’d been a silence. ‘Yes,’ Giuli had spoken slowly, uncertain still, but Luisa could hear some of it had gone in.

  ‘You want to meet up later?’ Luisa said, but perhaps Giuli heard the equivocation in her voice because she just murmured something non-committal and was gone.

  Luisa wasn’t going to the homeless centre: she was going to the emergency room at the big central hospital of Santa Maria Nuova. When she’d looked at the gash under the light there had been an aureole of red around it, and it had felt hot to the touch. It added to her general discomfort: deceiving Sandro was on the same continuum. There was something bad in her system.

  And some secrets were noxious; they festered. Johanna Nielsson had been noxious. Luisa could have brought it out into the open all that time ago, with Sandro, but she had not. She could have given him an ultimatum, her or me. But she knew what he’d have said, I don’t know what you’re talking about, nothing has happened. He’d have lied and walked away – because that was what men did.

  The fact was, Luisa was proud and she hadn’t wanted to look jealous back then, and still now.

  The big forecourt to the old hospital, as wide and sunlit and grand as a piazza and arcaded on three sides, was busy with ambulances. An elderly woman was being unloaded, lying flat on her back with an oxygen mask over her face. Much older than me, thought Luisa, hobbling past in a fierce hurry suddenly. The emergency room was busy too, and a hubbub rose, of mostly foreign voices, the wail of a child. She should have got here earlier. She gave her details, took a ticket with a number on it and found a seat beside three Roma women, one holding a motionless baby. Their feet were brown and bare on the hospital linoleum.

  Nielsson had been barefoot when Luisa saw her kissing Sandro all those years ago in a side street near the Uffizi, barefoot in the city, not even a sandal between her and the stone.

  Back then, Luisa had stepped under the arcades of the gallery to hide and felt her heart pounding. She had felt sick, had hardly had time to think about what she’d seen, when the woman walked past her, tinkling somehow, scented with patchouli or one of those incense-smelling oriental perfumes that gave you a headache. Luisa hadn’t known straight away who she was – and then she had. Because he’d described her, only in a few words but in a wondering sort of way, lingering on her: long hair parted in the middle, hippy clothes. Barefoot in that kitchen. Johanna Nielsson.

  Head down, Luisa had seen the bare feet, long and brown, not pearly toed, like the Roma girl beside her now, but long, strange prehensile toes that you might imagine curling around a branch, dusty-soled monkey feet, and the source of the tinkling, an anklet of little bells in Indian silver.

  A name was called and Luisa looked up to see a green-smocked doctor standing there in weary blankness and then all hell broke loose. On the wall a red light began to flash and a trolley came around the corner with paramedics at each corner, one of them holding down a machine she recognised as a defibrillator. They barged through the heavy polythene doors and disappeared, everyone staring after them.

  As she watched the doors flap shut, suddenly Luisa felt odd. Unsteady in her seat. Too hot, her heart beating too fast. She had only been in this hospital once since the operation to remove her breast, a year after when she’d panicked over a rash along the scar line, and she felt those feelings surge back: extreme anxiety, a sense of having been removed from her own body as its heart clattered on. She felt lightheaded.

  In a hurry, Luisa got to her feet because she could not bear the idea, suddenly, of slumping to the ground among all these people. A hand to the wall, she went through the polythene curtain where the crash cart had disappeared to find it on its way back towards her at speed. One of the nurses sat astride the patient, pumping at its chest. Luisa pressed herself flat against the wall to allow them to pass, feeling sweat bead on her forehead. The patient was a woman: a slender liver-spotted hand hung down at the side of the gurney, heavy with rings. She registered that much and then the cart was gone again between the doors.

  Luisa stood there a long moment, struggling to get her breathing back to normal, and suddenly, fervently she wished not to die there. Anywhere, in the gutter, rather than here, out under the sky, rather than here. Then someone approached down the long corridor, between its long windows, a tall person, a lanky stride. A living healthy person. She looked up and in that split second she knew that she was hallucinating, because it was Luca Bartolini, frowning. He stared at her. ‘What on earth –?’

  Had she thought in that hallucinatory moment that he had been following her or that he had somehow – where her own husband had not – worked out that she was in trouble? He seemed genuinely surprised to see her. ‘I’m with – I came –’ He gestured towards the entrance to the emergency room. ‘I’ve got to get in there. It’s – Benedetta’s had one of her –’

  ‘That was Benedetta?’ said Luisa, not hearing the question. ‘I thought she was in – wasn’t it Switzerland?’ The paramedic kneeling astride her trying to get her back to life. Benedetta Salieri was Luisa’s age.

  ‘She’s been back home for twenty years,’ said Bartolini, glancing sideways at the door. ‘In Florence, that is. I’ve got to get in there – my mother’s fussing. Are you all right, is it –?’

  ‘Just the leg,’ she said, ‘the cut,’ in desperation. ‘Just go. Go on.’ The woman was dying. His half-sister. He went.

  Fussing.

  The door flapped. Bartolini was back.

  ‘Is she all right?’ said Luisa.

  He sighed, still pale. ‘They seem to think she will be,’ he said. ‘It’s her nerves. She really wasn’t well for a long time. She’s had a place of her own for ten years now, and for a while it looked as though she – she was getting better.’

  ‘We haven’t seen her in the shop,’ said Luisa, almost to herself. ‘Not in years.’ She wondered if Frollini, the old gossip, knew about all this.

  ‘She doesn’t really get out much,’ said Bartolini. ‘But we did think – she seemed to be making friends, she, well …’ He sighed. ‘She can’t do this many more times. Her heart won’t stand it.’

  ‘Do what?’

  Bartolini rubbed at his forehead, as if considering whether to answer. His other hand was on her elbow, steering her a little so her back was to the door and the waiting room behind it. ‘She –’ he hesitated ‘– took too much of her medication.’ He spoke stiffly, then sighed. ‘She’s had a hard time. She – there was a – she lost a child. Then divorce –’ He stopped, as if he’d said too much.

  Luisa’s hand was at her mouth, remembering. That wedding, and the husband, nervous, pacing up and down on the gravel with a cigarette in his hand as they came up the cypress-flanked drive to the great house. A sallow man, uncomfortable in his wedding clothes, but Luisa had thought nothing of it then. People were always nervous at weddings, weren’t they?

  Benedetta herself, a small upright figure, had been perfectly still and silent throughout the fitting. A seam had needed letting out a little: it was usually the other way around at weddings – the bride lost weight through nerves. She had said nothing all the time Luisa was there, not when Luisa asked her to breathe out or to raise an arm, not in response to her mother’s highly strung tirades about the florist
or uncivilised responses to the wedding invitations, nor to her father’s murmurings from the window.

  It had felt like a dream to Luisa, her first such occasion, first time in a grand house, walking through the echoing stone-floored hall then up a broad staircase to the damask-hung state rooms. She’d been in awe. Downstairs in the subterranean kitchens they’d been preparing the wedding breakfast and there was a smell of meat cooking. It had been drizzling outside, a mist hanging in the trees. October: an odd un-festive month for a wedding.

  ‘She lost a child?’ she asked now. ‘How long after – I mean, when?’ And flushed, knowing instantly that she had overstepped the mark

  Bartolini regarded her. ‘Not so long,’ he said, stiff again. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘it’s rather … private. You understand, I’m sure.’ Apologetic.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Luisa, staring down at her shoes. ‘Of course.’

  Had Benedetta been pregnant when she married, then? Another memory came to Luisa, of Benedetta’s father’s hand coming to rest tentatively on his daughter’s shoulder as she passed out through the door to the dressing room, and of Benedetta flinching minutely at the touch. Luisa could see it all now, in that small movement. Something had been wrong from the start, with the marriage, with Benedetta.

  Bartolini sighed. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘It’s just that for years her state of mind has been … a rollercoaster. She moved to Switzerland with her husband, but the marriage broke down very quickly. She returned to Florence eventually, some twenty years ago. She came home initially and then wanted to live independently – she seemed to find stability, friends. But recently it’s been impossible. Last week –’ he hesitated ‘– for most of the last two weeks she’s been in a specialist clinic, under sedation. I went with her. She came out three days ago. My mother –’ his handsome mouth turned down, disparaging ‘– my mother’s not really up to dealing with it any more.’ And abruptly he released her arm, his face resigned.

  ‘Did you get on with your stepfather?’ Luisa heard her own voice as if from a long way away and saw his eyebrows lift a little in surprise at the non sequitur, but she could see in his eyes that he had not liked Salieri. She could see contempt: she didn’t need to hear what he said, which was just as well as his voice seemed to come from underwater.

  And as his mouth opened and closed, abruptly it all reeled in her head, a carousel of new information: the face of the spotty boy who’d driven her up to Benedetta’s wedding turning to her as they passed La Vipera; Benedetta flinching to see Salieri look down at the place as she was being fitted for her dress. It occurred to her that Sandro needed to know these things. When this was done. She felt suddenly faint; her ears rang. The last thing she saw before she hit the floor was Bartolini’s face peering down, curious, ironical, almost amused, into hers.

  Chapter Nine

  ‘IDON’T UNDERSTAND.’

  Giuli stood over Luisa in the bright hospital corridor. She was being stubborn: with these two, you had to be sometimes. Particularly with Luisa, who wished never to admit to weakness of any kind.

  ‘You fainted and you just happened to be in the emergency room at the time?’ She frowned.

  There’d been a man with Luisa when Giuli arrived. She’d been seated with him standing beside her, tall, probably Luisa’s age, but good-looking for all that. Assured. The kind of guy Giuli was deeply suspicious of. Luisa, she thought, did not have enough experience of men. She only knew Sandro and that old goat Frollini, her employer, and she had been immune to his charms for years – she knew too much about him.

  The tall man had leaned down to say something into Luisa’s ear as Giuli hurried towards them down the corridor, then he’d disappeared through the swing door to the waiting room before Giuli was even within earshot.

  The call had come not long after Sandro and Pietro had left.

  Giuli had been just sitting there in the office, wired, waiting. When he’d heard her story, Pietro had frowned a moment, examined her face, then said he’d get straight on to it. He would trace the number, get a name, get an address. ‘It’s a five-minute job,’ he’d said, giving her a smile of reassurance at last. So someone thought she wasn’t a nutjob: she relaxed a fraction.

  Of course, once they’d disappeared Giuli couldn’t get on with anything else, although there was plenty. There was the agency’s licence renewal to deal with, for starters. Before all this she and Sandro had been talking about making it a partnership, her and him.

  And so when her mobile had begun to buzz it had made her jump. And Luisa’s voice at the other end of the line, not Pietro’s, her voice almost unrecognisable, wavering, weak. ‘I’m at Santa Maria Nuova, in the emergency room. I had a funny turn.’ A man’s voice echoing in some lofty space behind her, probably this corridor, probably the man who’d leaned down to whisper something before buggering off.

  ‘Who was that?’ It had been Giuli’s first question on arriving, ramming the motorino into a parking space and jumping off, running into the hospital with her helmet still on.

  Was it normal to get angry when someone you love gets hurt or ill? Giuli wasn’t angry. She was frightened. She’d got used to it, hadn’t she, so stupid, got used to the luxury of having someone between her and the world, the buffer, the grown-up, the wise ones. Not always wise, parents – not that Luisa was her mother, nor Sandro her father. They were more than that. They’d chosen her.

  So why now was she being rude and graceless? She could feel tears ready to fall, and pulled herself together.

  ‘Who was he? That man?’

  ‘He’s just – he was there when I fainted. He helped. He was here bringing his sister in –’ And Luisa had broken off, tormented-looking suddenly, and Giuli had relented. Folded her arms around Luisa, felt how much less of her there was these days.

  Giuli tried for kind, but it had come out stubborn. ‘And what were you doing here?’

  ‘Don’t fuss,’ said Luisa, confirming it, her hands agitated in her lap. She was very pale still.

  ‘Don’t fuss?’

  ‘They say there’s nothing wrong, I just – they won’t discharge you without someone to take you home.’

  Round in circles. It wasn’t until Luisa got to her feet and winced, putting a hand up, that Giuli got to the bottom of it. ‘It’s your leg?’

  ‘They gave me antibiotics,’ Luisa said weakly, sitting back down again. She pulled up her trouser-leg a little and Giuli saw a large dressing. An area of reddish skin extended beyond the bandage, tinged yellow with iodine, and the leg – Luisa’s slim calf, elegant from a lifetime in heels – seemed a little swollen to her. ‘I scraped it on some barbed wire.’

  ‘Right,’ said Giuli briskly. ‘You need something to eat and something warm to drink. No arguments. And I want to know what you’ve been up to.’

  *

  It took a coffee, a sandwich and finally a small brandy in the nearest bar to get the whole story out of her.

  ‘So you basically went up there to make sure the woman was really dead?’ Giuli couldn’t help laughing. Luisa looked sheepish and Giuli felt an odd pang, warm and sad and longing all at once, at the thought. That after all this time Luisa felt that for him, her man Sandro. And the thought of them so young, all those years ago.

  ‘There was something about her,’ said Luisa slowly, taking a tiny sip of the brandy. The colour had returned to her cheeks. ‘She was a witch.’ Giuli’s eyebrows went up, because Luisa had not a mystical bone in her body. ‘I’m not joking,’ said Luisa. ‘She had power over people.’

  ‘Over Sandro, you mean?’

  The pink deepened in Luisa’s cheeks. ‘Over him – a bit. Yes.’

  ‘Because she was beautiful? You mean it was a –’ Giuli hesitated, uneasy ‘– a sex sort of thing?’

  Luisa’s flush had ebbed. ‘I don’t know. She was … modern. Free love, all that, that was what they were all about and if you didn’t like the idea …’ She fidgeted. ‘I didn’t like the idea.’

&nbs
p; Giuli would have been sceptical about the idea of free love even if she hadn’t worked the streets for close to a decade. ‘It was the time of the Monster. He obviously didn’t think it would work out. He didn’t like foreign hippies one bit, did he? Or anyone having sex outside marriage.’

  Luisa was still frowning. ‘Well, old ways don’t disappear overnight.’ A pause. ‘Are you comparing me to a serial killer because I disapprove of free love? I don’t trust it, that’s all. And I didn’t trust her.’

  ‘Plus you were mad as hell and jealous,’ said Giuli. Luisa just shrugged a little and sipped the brandy again. ‘I can’t believe you wrote her a letter,’ Giuli went on, ‘demanded to meet her.’

  Luisa sighed. ‘There were no mobile phones in those days,’ she said. ‘I don’t think they even had electricity at La Vipera, let alone a landline.’

  Giuli had seen photographs in the newspaper, over Pietro’s shoulder on the tablet he’d set up on the desk in Via del Leone. A big old farmhouse, the roof half-fallen in, the tall trees right up close. ‘You went up there on the bus,’ she marvelled. ‘Had you seen the house before?’ Luisa shook her head stiffly. ‘So you went right up to where – did you see the place where they found the bodies?’

  Luisa’s expression was veiled. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It was stupid.’

  Giuli examined her. ‘You went up there with this, this neighbour guy, who you’d never met before. I’d say that was … reckless. Not like you.’

  ‘I know,’ she said quietly. ‘I thought if I went I’d understand something. About the place, La Vipera. Get it out of my system. Back then I used to dream about it, you know. Wondering what it was like – Sandro had told me bits and pieces. The dirty kitchen, the communal bedrooms. Indian things hanging up, the woods around it and wildflowers. He was fascinated by it. I could tell.’