The Drowning River Read online

  The bus turned away from the river, into the maze of the Oltrarno’s streets that remained obstinately foreign to Sandro, the damp alleys with their smell of overflowing drains, the workshops, the dusty bars. It buzzed across the front of the Palazzo Pitti, which stood bleak and grey in the rain, the big sloping forecourt empty of tourists. It turned down the Via Mazzetta and across the Piazza Santo Spirito where the junkies huddled on the stone bench around the base of the Biblioteca Machiavelli. It juddered to a halt at the end of a ramshackle line of traffic, a rubbish truck, a delivery van, the furgoni from the market reversing out with their loads of cheap clothes and trestle tables.

  The pavement was so narrow and the bus was canted so steeply into a pothole, he could have leaned out of the window to touch them, the junkies. They were pressed back, grubby hooded sweatshirts up against the rain, to get some shelter from the big eaves overhead. Grey-skinned, shivering, like rats forced up from underground; Sandro was glad he didn’t have to deal with them any more. The one on the end looked like Giulietta Sarto had looked, before she cleaned up. So thin you could see every bone in her face, and the eyes yellow with alcohol and sunken. Ahead the lights changed, the traffic shifted; he thought maybe he’d ask Giulietta if she fancied a bit of lunch when this was done.

  Sandro thought of Luisa’s mother not telling anyone about the tumour, because she didn’t want to be alone any more. She’d wanted to die. He thought of Lucia Gentileschi; would that happen to her? Was hiring him a delaying tactic, some kind of denial? Maybe it was, but he had the strong feeling Lucia Gentileschi would not be good at telling herself lies. And clearly there was an investigation to be carried out: Claudio Gentileschi’s life had not been what it seemed.

  The bus skirted the front of Santa Maria del Carmine, right into the Viale Ariosto and along the old wall. He got out at the Porta San Frediano and within two minutes could feel the drenching rain soaking his shoulders. Against his better instincts he bought an umbrella from a Nigerian in a baseball cap at the traffic lights, wondering as he handed over his five euros what kind of trade the poor guy thought he’d find out this way, miles from the centre. Soaked through, too, with the thin jacket he was wearing. But he was cursing the Nigerian soon enough, as the umbrella’s spokes buckled before he’d even got it up.

  The wind blew straight down from the river; walking towards it, Sandro could make out nothing but grey, the rain slanting horizontally towards him so he could hardly see across the bridge. There was another of those hoardings, commemorating the flood: this one showed the Uffizi’s long courtyard, drowned and empty and silent. November, 1966. There was more rain forecast for the next five days. Sandro peered over gingerly, looking down at the water, yellow with mud and swirling.

  The parapet along the river here was waist height, and Sandro walked along slowly, looking along towards the Lungarno Santa Rosa, looking down. On the far side the church of the Ognissanti shone white in the rain among the big hotels with their shutters closed, low season, and a little further on, the black, leafless trees of the Cascine. The police station was out there; it wouldn’t have taken them long to get down here and pull Claudio Gentileschi out of the water.

  They’d found him in the evening, and he’d been in the water a couple of hours. A fisherman setting up at dusk had seen his back, half-submerged. Sandro could picture it as Lucia Gentileschi told him, sounded almost wistful, like a seal, she said, his big back in the waterweed, rolling over in the dusk.

  Sandro wondered why he hadn’t been seen earlier. It had been a bright day on Tuesday, people might have been out walking in the afternoon sunlight. He thought back to Tuesday morning, when he’d been standing idly in his office – office! That was a joke. Looking out of the window, at girls. Claudio Gentileschi had been somewhere between there and here, somewhere between the Via dei Pilastri – the synagogue, the shop with its dusty menorah in the window and notice offering a Sabbath meal to Jewish visitors – and the quiet, anonymous streets of the Oltrarno.

  There had been stones in his shoes, Lucia Gentileschi had said, and she had produced a handful of gravel from a little lacquer box; I asked for it, she’d added with a puzzled look on her face as if she didn’t know why she’d asked, or indeed why her request had been granted. Just a handful; there’d been more. What had that idiot Scappatoio been thinking of, giving it to her? But Sandro realized that he might not have been able to say no either.

  White gravel, in a black lacquer box like a holy relic or a talisman. Not enough to keep a body down, though. Neither here nor there.

  Sandro walked along the parapet, looking for a way down. He came to the old wall; this was where they drew the line in the property freesheets, ‘San Frediano, Fuori Muro’ – inside or outside the wall. Outside was beyond the pale. Nestling under the mediaeval stone were the remnants of a church, a glassed-in shrine and part of an arch; jammed up next to it were the pergola and Portakabins of the Circolo Rondinella, a social club. A tattered, handwritten poster on a wire fence advertised a ballroom dancing evening.

  Pausing, Sandro looked through the link fence at the garden – more a yard than a garden – dripping plastic tables, the bare wire of the pergola; not enough room to swing a cat. He tried to imagine the couples turning slowly in here, the women in high-heeled dancing shoes. There was a meal and a drink included in the price, twelve euros; he caught himself wondering if Luisa would be up for it, and almost laughed. In the Portakabins behind the yard something moved, and then moved away.

  Sandro stepped back, looked up at the wall; Claudio Gentileschi had been found the other side; the Lungarno Santa Rosa was Fuori Muro. Wrong side of the tracks. He walked away from the little social club and the shrine with its plastic flowers, feeling an odd kind of reluctance. His old partner Pietro said – and he had never given it much credence before – that San Frediano was the real deal, the survival of everything that was ancient and original in the city, never mind that it contained no palazzi, a bare handful of notable churches. So what if it had the Circolo Rondinella?

  On the other side of the wall was a fenced stretch of sickly grass and stunted trees, then a children’s playground. Gingerly – because there was always something suspect about a grown man entering a playground on his own, but it was the only way he could see of approaching the river – he came through the gate. Was this where Claudio Gentileschi had come?

  It seemed monstrously unlikely; indeed it was laughable that Sandro had thought twice about coming in here himself. The whole place was surely so disgusting that no children would be tempted by it. The grass was scabby, no more than occasionally tufted mud, and it was marked by regular mounds of dogshit in various stages of decomposition; the slide was emblazoned with garish graffiti, the swings were broken. The weird rubber asphalt that surrounded each piece of play equipment was crumbling and eroded like an ancient carpet. Sandro crossed to the parapet; you couldn’t get down here, either, in theory; the low wall was surmounted by another stretch of chain-link fence. He walked along it, eyes flicking to the ground so as not to tread in anything, then down to the river. Maybe it was not so surprising after all that no one saw Gentileschi until later; who would come walking here? Even on a sunny winter afternoon.

  Behind him, back towards the wall where all he had seen had been the fenced-in trees, a ramshackle assortment of huts and sheds and sawn-off bits of old rusting containers clung to the slope, against gravity. They might have belonged to the social club; huts used by the fishermen to store their tackle, in theory, though God knew what else, maybe weedkiller and demijohns of cheap wine and tools and junk. It was pricey to own or rent a fondo – a garage or cellar – in Florence, so the city was full of these little accretions, like antheaps, testaments to man’s inability to get rid of his rubbish.

  Sandro looked back, down river to the traffic over the Ponte alla Vittoria, ceaselessly moving in the rain. The panorama took in the black trees of the Cascine and the distant misted flatlands out towards the Viadotto dell’Indiano. The city
’s hidden hinterland, a place of drainage ditches and shanty towns where illegals scavenged along the riverbanks and contadini scratched a living from a handful of olive trees and sheep that grazed between the airport runway and the superstrada. Not a pretty view.

  At the far side of the playground there was a small square of dark red asphalt with four benches and a good-sized holm oak. As he approached, Sandro saw three men sitting on the bench under the tree; although it was still in leaf, it did not seem to be providing them with much shelter. The youngest of the men – under thirty, anyway – was reading a comic book, holding the pages up close to his face, the drawstring around his hood pulled tight. He kept breaking off to look at his watch, as though someone was waiting for him somewhere. The other two had the darkened skin of rough sleepers, and through the thin plastic of a bag on the ground between them Sandro could see three one-litre cartons of red wine.

  You would come here to kill yourself, if it was out of shame, thought Sandro with dread; if you thought you deserved less than nothing.

  With reluctance Sandro approached the men. He began to speak, standing in front of them. He asked if they came here every day, if they had been here, for example, on Tuesday. If they knew this man. They gazed up at him with faces completely blank, though whether from drink or idiocy or something more like alienation, he could not have said. He held out the photograph of Claudio Gentileschi and the two drunks turned away quickly, mumbling insensibly, as if he were a mendicant himself, a beggar holding out one of those handwritten cards telling them he had no work and children to support.

  The man with the comic book – or boy, it seemed from this close, although that might be the result of retardation; it could leave a grown man’s features looking smoothed out like this – peered at the photograph, peered at his watch. He moved his head with a bobbing motion, then jerked it back and raised the soggy pages of his book even closer to his face, to blot Sandro out.

  Sandro gave it ten minutes, standing there in the rain, talking at first but then just waiting. They ignored him stolidly and eventually he didn’t know what else to do but turn away. He turned back. He fished a card out of his pocket and with a sense of futility held it out to the young man, the only one of the three offering him any hope as a witness. Without looking him in the eye, the boy snatched the card and carefully inserted it into an already stuffed wallet; as he did so, Sandro glimpsed perhaps thirty business cards: a pizza delivery service, a leather-goods shop, an optician’s. And his own; Sandro Cellini, Investigations.

  He walked on until he came to an opening where the wire had been torn back, and put his head through. Below the parapet was an uneven scramble down to a wide path that ran by the water’s edge. Claudio Gentileschi had been eighty-one, even if he’d been fit for his age; might he have fallen, might he have gone in? After the filth of the children’s playground the bank looked almost inviting; it was green with a mixture of grass and the invasive, alien plants that had colonized the edge of the water in the city, bamboo thickets and horsetail. Claudio Gentileschi could have fallen, Sandro supposed, but he would have had to roll a long way to end up in the water and the bank looked soft, with waterlogged red earth showing through the grass. It had happened here.

  He turned to look along the embankment at the windows; who else might have seen? In the city, there’s always someone who knows, who sees you.

  The other side of the playground there was a run-down ambulatorio, some dull modern apartment buildings with balconies, then a row of older houses overlooking the river; none of their occupants would have seen down to the bank. The housing was all low-rise, anonymous and modest; on the other side of the river, the grand baroque facades seemed to stare it down with contempt.

  It was the wrong time of year, anyway, for hanging out of your window and having a look at anything; certainly a good half of the shutters were closed today, close to lunchtime, as if it was just too grey, and the view of the river filling up with rain was just too dismal. Pietro had been right; this was a dead place.

  There was a bar, though, set among the older houses; there was always a bar. The Cestello, named after the church. It looked like it did some business, too; Sandro turned to inspect it from a distance, his back against the parapet. The two big windows were misted with activity, a couple of dozen heads inside at least. Out on the pavement was a planking deck for summer drinking, empty of chairs now and the wood slick with rain. The scalloped edge of the awning, rolled in against the facade, flapped forlornly.

  For a second Sandro felt again that shiver of reluctance at the thought of stepping up to the place and asking questions without the talisman of his badge to hold up ahead of him. It was at that moment that the rain, temporarily forgotten, chose to make its presence felt again; a gust blew the umbrella up and inside out, and it collapsed messily and irrevocably, a tangle of cheap metal and dripping fabric in his face.

  ‘Merda,’ muttered Sandro, because suddenly everything was wet, his shoulders, his thighs, even up his sleeve. With disgust he strode across the street, dumped the malign object in an already full litter bin and pushed open the door of the Caffe Il Cestello.

  It was so warm and marvellously stuffy inside that Sandro managed immediately to forget that he was here to ask questions; his nostrils filled with the mingling odours of warm pastries and coffee and lunch. He made his way to the bar, where a glass cabinet contained sandwiches, cold plates of ham and mozzarella and some long roasting tins heaped up with prepared pasta, all’amatriciana; with spinach; with capers and tuna. This was where he should have been coming to get his lunch; Sandro calculated the distance between the river and his office and decided it was just right for a midday constitutional. On a dry day.

  Clearly it was too busy to ask questions; the proprietor was running from one end of the long zinc bar to the other, arms raised to point at heads, to take the next order. Sandro waited his turn, ordered a plate of penne all’arrabbiata, and took it to a small table by the door that was miraculously empty. He looked around for a paper but there were none; only when he sat down did Sandro realize that he’d managed to abscond with the copy of La Nazione he’d started to look at in the bar in the Via dei Pilastri. Stuffed in his pocket, and damp but not actually disintegrating; things were looking up. With care he extracted the soggy newspaper from his jacket and unfolded it on the table.

  The penne were delicious, hot with just the right amount of chilli and garlic, a good, oily long-cooked tomato sauce, plenty of parsley chopped nice and fine and fresh. Sandro savoured the dish, turning the pages, passing the report of the Uffizi rape. They had the man, still working bold as brass, as if he hadn’t even thought he’d done anything wrong. Thought, maybe, that an immigrant girl, a Romanian or Latvian or whatever she was, would be too cowed to make a complaint. Hardly even thought of her as human, perhaps; that was common enough among psychopaths.

  As he chewed, the burn of the chilli in his mouth joining forces with a simmering outrage, Sandro reflected that people thought of psychopaths as big characters, Hannibal Lecter types, evil geniuses, but Sandro had seen enough of them to know different. They could be smart, but some could be very stupid indeed; they were characterized by a lack, by something missing in the whirring, complicated brain, a cog gone, a reservoir emptied. Disinhibition, lack of conscience, amorality, there were names for it. Sandro thought of the autopsia on Gentileschi. The lesions on the brain in that big domed head.

  He turned the page again, mechanically, and the picture jumped out at him, just like that. The girl.

  Mesmerized, Sandro stared; how could he be sure, people might say, but he was. She stared out at him from the page in some photo-booth picture, long dark hair parted in the middle and streaked blonde down one side, pale northern skin bleached paler by the flash. There was the ghost of an insolent smile on her face as she stared back at whatever authorities had required her to take the picture.

  He scanned the story, the headline, the secondary photograph of some personal effects, la
id out on an evidence table, handbag, wallet, women’s stuff. Girl student missing since – Tuesday. A student of the Scuola Massi in San Niccolò; at the school’s name something chimed, far off, in Sandro’s policeman’s memory, but was silenced by a more immediate piece of information he had on the girl in this picture.

  Because this was the girl he’d seen walking down the Via del Leone on Tuesday morning, which in turn was the same Tuesday that was the last day of Claudio Gentileschi’s life.

  Around him the bar seemed to have emptied suddenly.

  Gently Sandro laid the newspaper down and stared without seeing at the rain-spattered glass. Why should there be a link? There was no connection between Claudio Gentileschi and this girl, this Veronica Hutton. No connection. He turned the paper over, her face down.

  Of course there was no one there. Of course not.

  Iris dumped her bag in the dark, chilly hall and walked from room to room, turning on lights.

  The apartment’s lighting had always been as frustratingly unusable as the furniture; ancient standard lamps with frayed cloth-covered wire; huge, dusty chandeliers, half of them non-functioning, the other half fitted with low-wattage, energy-saving bulbs that barely illuminated anything. But as she moved through the place in that unnerving draught, this morning Iris found the dimness more than just annoying; it made her uneasy. Actually, it frightened her.

  As the clutter of the long salotto emerged in the half-light thrown by the only two functioning candle-bulbs on the chandelier – the prickly sofa with wooden arms, the console tables topped with black marble, the huge gilded mirror – Iris found where the draught was coming from. She must have left one of the long windows ajar; she opened it fully, pushed back the shutters to let more light in, then yanked the window tight closed on the inside. She stood there a moment, looking out, trying to work out what was different. Same synagogue, same black ivy, same statues. But something was different.