A Darkness Descending (2 page)

Giuli held her breath: she couldn’t move her eyes from him but she listened to the room around her, her heart in her mouth.

He raised his chin, and in the small movement issued a challenge. ‘So we do not falter. We fight without resting. That is our understanding.’

And, pausing, Rosselli watched, his narrow shoulders very still and only his eyes behind the glasses moved, counting them all in, and they were with him. Every heart in the overheated room was lifted; they rode a magic carpet with him. But there was something else. Giuli felt with a palpable prickle of dread that as he held their attention, while they were all looking his way, something else had crept into the room.

Niccolò Rosselli held up his hands, palms out. ‘You do this with me,’ he said, ‘and I will bring you your reward.’ And as it began, the response he demanded, the growling of approval that might at this early stage have been mistaken for dissent, it was then that Giuli saw it coming, saw as if in an instant of foresight. Because something happened.

A hand came out, from the big man beside him, and touched him on the elbow. Was it a warning? Or the anticipation of what was to come? And in response Giuli could not have said what it was in Rosselli – a slip, a faltering, or just a moment’s hesitation – but his whole stance changed, for a fraction of a second, the set of his shoulders, the turn of his head, as if he were bewildered by where he found himself, as if he were at a loss as to what to do next. And she was not the only one to see it: the roar the crowd wanted to deliver shifted like a wind, dying in their throats.

And then, as if he heard the warning note, because he knew the crowd better than he knew himself, Rosselli stiffened, stood straight. The hand on his elbow drew back. And the voices went up, the noise was suddenly deafening, a stamping and catcalling that must have been heard out in the piazza. Giuli gave in to it, eyes closed in relief for a moment before she opened them again.

Before them, swaying, on his face that habitual expression of fierce distress, of anguish, partly on behalf of his people, partly personal discomfort at the nakedness of their approbation and the loudness of their praise, Rosselli waited for quiet. And quiet came: they waited in turn. On tiptoe Giuli gazed at his face, willing him to speak, unable to breathe because she knew that the something wrong that she had seen, was still wrong. Behind the glasses his eyes looked to one side then another; his mouth moved, but no sound came out.

And then he fell.

Chapter Two

A
T HIS KITCHEN TABLE
, Sandro Cellini pushed the, newspaper aside with a sound of exasperation. There was a fuzzy photograph on the front page of people grouped beside a swimming pool; inset was a studio glamour shot of a seventeen-year-old girl – a dancer was what they called her. The story was about a man who allegedly arranged for women to entertain their prime minister, some of them under-age, all of them described as ‘beautiful’. He glanced over at his wife. Not a prude, nor a man of the world either, married thirty-five years and faithful – though there’d been moments of temptation, more than one – Sandro would have found it difficult to describe his response to the news story.
‘Bunga bunga’
was how the sex was described.

Unease, Sandro supposed, would be his predominant emotion, if emotion it was, closely followed by weary despondency: it went deep, this stuff. When the lawyers went after the head of state, ranks closed. The last time they’d spoken, even Pietro, Sandro’s old partner in the Polizia di Stato, had been tight-lipped on the subject. ‘He’s not the only one,’ had been all he would say. ‘There are ramifications.’

Something was happening, over his head, behind his back, in the force where once Sandro had been a brother-in-arms. Now he was exiled and it seemed that there really were no-go areas. Could he no longer talk politics with his old friend? He folded the newspaper so he could not see the photograph or the headline – ‘NEW ALLEGATIONS! LARIO SPEAKS!’ – then pulled the paperwork on his latest job towards him.

Gloomily Sandro stared at the typed page, details of a traffic accident from a medium-sized local insurance brokers. An ex-colleague had given them his name, a man neither he nor Pietro had ever had any time for, a not-very-bright police
commissario
who’d told Sandro about the recommendation with a gleam in his eye that said, You owe me one. So this was what Sandro had to look forward to as his main source of income; it seemed to him as he stared at the page to be all of a piece with the newspaper reports of men in high office booking prostitutes. There was something profoundly depressing about spying on claimants faking injury in car accidents: the insight into his fellow man, his brother Italian, the unease at representing the big company against the little guy. Even if the little guy was, in plain language, fraudulent.

It was eight in the morning, the sky was blue and the September air fresh through the open window; the gust of it that had come in with his wife Luisa from her dash to the market smelled of fallen leaves. She’d set a bag of bread and a butcher’s packet of something, stained pink, on the table. A small box of mushrooms, the yellow trumpet-shaped ones, with shreds of moss still clinging to them, and a plastic carton of green figs, the last of them, oozing sweeter than honey.

Now Sandro sat back in his chair, closed his eyes and allowed September to soothe him. August was over, that was something to celebrate in itself. They’d had a holiday this year: after last year’s terrible, suffocating month in the city, they’d made an unspoken agreement, never again. So this year they’d borrowed someone’s mother’s place in Castiglioncello, an old lady’s house smelling of mothballs and damp, and gone there for three weeks. Not an unalloyed success – neither Sandro nor Luisa was good at idle holiday pursuits, she would rather cook than be served at table, whiling away the hours playing cards seemed nothing but a waste of time – but five or six days into their confinement something had come over them, something almost like the holiday spirit had taken them by surprise.

They had found themselves going out for an
aperitivo
together at six, first one night, then the next, then every night as if it were the most natural thing in the world, rather than something they’d last managed more than a year before. They had gone to the little outdoor cinema tucked away in the old town between whitewashed walls, with weeds growing up through the cracked paving, and watched an ancient Fellini film with half a dozen other couples. They had walked along the beach in the cool early morning, watching the sun come up, not hand in hand because it wasn’t their way, Luisa a little in front and holding her hem out of the water.

Three old women in flowered housecoats had walked ahead of them in the pale dawn doing the same, slow, apparently aimless, talking around in circles about grandchildren and church and the baker’s wife’s affair. Apparently aimless but actually restoring order to the world … this was the revelation that had come to Sandro as he found himself slowing his pace, realizing that as he wasn’t actually heading anywhere, there was no point in going there fast. Holidays: perhaps there was something to them, after all.

They hadn’t worried about Giuli either, minding the office for them in the city after taking her own two weeks at the end of July, because she had someone of her own, now.

A neglected child, an abused adolescent, Giuli had ended up in prison for taking a violent revenge on her abuser. It had brought her into Sandro’s life – he’d been her arresting officer – and had indirectly led to his premature departure from the police force. Not disgraced, no one thought that any more, not for passing information on the abuser to a bereaved father, but rules were rules, always had been. Giuli had been released from prison more or less into Sandro and Luisa’s care. All parties being adults, no one had had to ask anyone’s permission or sign any papers, but it had been an unorthodox arrangement for the couple, childless and now too old to have children, to decide to love and protect Giuli, in so far as they were capable of doing so. And now after forty years and more of having to fight her own corner, Giuli had Enzo, too.

Reading her husband’s mind, Luisa called over her shoulder from the fridge where she was putting the meat:
involtini
stuffed with sage and ham, four sausages, only the two of them to feed.

‘You know we’re supposed to be eating with them Saturday night?’

Today was Tuesday. She hadn’t even needed to say who
they
were. Brushing herself down in an unconscious and familiar gesture that made Sandro smile and want to take hold of her, she ran her hands under the tap and sat down at the table with him.

‘Yes,’ he said mildly. God only knew what Giuli would cook: it wasn’t her forte. Her mother would never have made housewife of the year even if she’d lived to see Giuli hit fourteen. The girl had been fed on packet cakes and fizzy drinks then her mother had died and she’d stopped eating anything at all.

‘I said I’d bring something,’ Luisa said. Mind-reading again.

And he looked down once more at the letter from the insurance company. Fraudulent: it was a nasty word for something everyone did. ‘Who isn’t fraudulent?’ he said out loud.

‘Me,’ Luisa said. ‘I’m not fraudulent. Never took a piece of stock home, nor even a paperclip, never cheated my taxes.’

‘No,’ Sandro said. ‘Why is that?’ And she’d turned her back on him with the ghost of a smile.

‘He’s claiming post-traumatic stress stopped him working,’ Sandro added. Luisa made a sound of deep cynicism and he raised his head to monitor his wife, his infallible moral compass. Sometimes it was tricky, living with a moral compass that accurate.

‘Weren’t you ever even tempted?’ he asked. ‘To steal just one paperclip? Or something more appealing maybe. A pair of shoes … a pair of stockings … way back when.’

Way back when the store Luisa worked for, now a gleaming white and steel palace of fashion, had been principally an old-fashioned haberdasher’s with wooden drawers filled with stockings and cashmere and lawn nightdresses, hand-embroidered.

But he knew the answer. She didn’t even have to smile and shake her head: it was one of many differences between them. Sandro, like all his colleagues, would borrow stationery from the office, nip out on errands on police time, turn a blind eye. There were plenty worse than him, plenty. ‘So, why?’

She put her head on one side, thinking. ‘Because you don’t know where it would end,’ she said. ‘You have to have rules for yourself.’ And straightened, haughtily. ‘Where was post-traumatic stress after the war? In ‘sixty-six after the floods?’ And snorted.

‘Well, yes,’ he said. ‘I know. But it was an accident, not his fault, woman shunted him on the motorway. Someone in the car behind her died.’

Sobered slightly, Luisa had pursed her lips. ‘Still,’ she said.

‘He’s got psychiatric reports, and everything,’ Sandro said.

‘That in itself …’ Luisa said. ‘That’s not someone whose life has been knocked for six. Commissioning psychiatric reports? Looking for compensation.’

‘Catch-22,’ Sandro said, groping mentally for a faded image. He’d read the book, thirty years before. ‘Isn’t that the situation? If you’re really crazy, you wouldn’t be asking for the psychiatrist. Something like that.’

Luisa ignored the reference: she hadn’t read
Catch-22.
It would, Sandro realized, have annoyed her too much. ‘Still,’ she said, ‘I suppose that’s not your job. To make a judgement.’

‘Fortunately not,’ Sandro said. It hadn’t been his job to make judgements as a police officer either, not really: then, too, his job had been to gather the evidence and hand it on. Not that it had stopped him: taking judgement into his own hands had been what got him kicked out of the force.

He shuffled the papers into some kind of order, slid them into his briefcase. Checking this insurance claim was looking like the worst kind of job. Fiddly, small-scale, and already it seemed to be requiring him to examine his own conscience into the bargain.

‘It’s all money, though,’ Luisa commented, although he’d said nothing. ‘It’s all work.’ Sandro got to his feet, tempted to laugh at himself, or at her, for the precision with which she could read his expression. Extraordinary that she could still be bothered, after all these years, to make sense of him.

He smiled. ‘Giuli’s place on Saturday,’ he said, hefting the briefcase. Was he looking forward to it?

‘Their place, now,’ Luisa said.

‘He’s good for her, isn’t he?’ asked Sandro, feeling the need for confirmation. ‘Enzo, I mean?’ That was why they were going for dinner, to keep tabs. Giuli didn’t look vulnerable – in fact, she looked as far from it as was possible, with her fierce little face and her spiky dark hair and her cheerful recklessness on her battered army-grey
motorino
– but she was. Enzo had been around for more than a year now, but Luisa wasn’t going to let up.

That grudging nod was what he had expected, but Luisa’s expression was more complicated. ‘Yes,’ she said eventually.

Sandro was at the door before he responded to the note of doubt: wanting it not to be there. Wanting to get off to work leaving everything fine behind him.

‘What d’you mean?’ he asked, with reluctance, standing in the doorway.

‘Well …,’ said Luisa, standing motionless at the kitchen table, the September light falling on half her face. Frowning. ‘I’m not so sure about this political business. She – they – seem very caught up in it. I don’t understand this Frazione Verde. It seems – extreme to me.’

‘Oh, that,’ he said with relief. ‘Extreme? Aren’t they a bunch of hippy, green, Rainbow Coalition types? Very soft-centred, I’m sure. And it’ll just be a phase. Young people, you know.’ He clasped the briefcase to him in an unconscious gesture of protection, but of what or whom, he wasn’t sure.

‘She’s not young, Sandro,’ Luisa said. ‘None of us is young any more.’

The telephone rang.

*

Chiara Cavallaro, curly-headed, small for her age and slender – too slender, her mother had begun to fret, just lately – emerged from the great doorway to the Università degli Studi into the broad sunshine of the Piazza San Marco, weighed down with books. Worse than school, she’d grumbled to her mother on her return with the reading list, but she hadn’t meant it: the knapsack you carried to school represented something quite different. The pink backpack embellished with friends’ signatures, the childish exercise books, the
quaderni
with their doodles and their covers decorated with cartoon characters, filled with the diligently neat handwriting of a girl child, easy to please.