A Darkness Descending (30 page)

‘You said – there was something. Flavia told you something.’

Wanda stopped, and turned. Spread out in front of them was the red-roofed expanse of the city at high noon, the sun sparking off windows, the hazy air glittering with heat and exhaust fumes. The big red dome of the cathedral off to the right, the dark green double hill of Fiesole, all the façades of the city’s great churches turned towards the southern slopes, like sunflowers to the sun.

‘Yes,’ said Wanda, frowning. ‘I – well. The truth is, I’d forgotten it myself. Like you forget your own dreams, you know?’ Giuli didn’t understand what she meant. ‘You wake up and they’re so real for a bit, you think they really happened, then – pouf!’ She threw up her hands. ‘They’re gone.’

‘Right,’ said Giuli, still not understanding.

‘It was a dream she told me about,’ said Wanda patiently.

‘Oh.’ Giuli couldn’t disguise her disappointment.

‘Dreams have their own logic,’ Wanda said earnestly. ‘That’s why they seem real – aspects of them
are
real. They’re related to reality, they mean something.’

‘Right,’ said Giuli. All this way for a dream? She wiped her forehead with a sleeve.

Wanda persisted. ‘But obviously their logic doesn’t stand up in the real world, so they evaporate, they don’t leave a trace, except maybe in the subconscious. Unless you retell them, of course, then they become fixed. They’re stories, really. Stories our minds tell us to explain – the inexplicable. Or the unpalatable.’

‘I thought you taught maths?’ Giuli could hear herself say, the surly, boneheaded student, back of the class.

Wanda sighed. ‘Yes, among other things’ she said, deflated. ‘But I’ve read Jung. He’s interesting. Do you want to hear Flavia’s dream? Or do you think I’m wasting your time?’

With an effort Giuli relaxed. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It just makes me uncomfortable, this analytical stuff. So much bullshit, a lot of it.’ She picked at the chipped varnish on a fingernail. Wanda Terni didn’t need to know she’d had her share of mind-doctoring, and had resisted it all the way to the wire. Guili sighed. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘Dreams do mean something. So tell me.’

Without a word the teacher looked around and set off for a stone bench, tucked into the trees. They sat down, half hidden from the path: below them the park was empty now, the loping figure long gone.

‘In a way the most significant thing about it was that she told it to me at all. Of course, in our early days, when we first knew each other, she’d never have talked about such things.’ Wanda shrugged. ‘Perhaps she didn’t have a lot of dreams, or didn’t want to remember them, but if she did, she’d have kept them to herself. This one – well. It was like she had to get it out. Had to tell it.’

Giuli shifted, the stone cool under her backside.’ So it was when you were still talking – when everything was fine?’

Wanda bit her lip. ‘It was when I asked her if she was ill. She sort of blurted it out to me, but it was clear she regretted it straight away. It might have been one of the reasons she stopped talking to me.’ Wanda frowned. I think she must have been pregnant then, though she hadn’t told anyone yet.’

‘You’d forgotten this?’ Giuli was incredulous, and Wanda flushed.

‘Not exactly,’ she said. ‘It just seemed – so private. The subconscious, you know, so private you don’t even understand it yourself. I didn’t say because – well. It felt like I’d be betraying her.’

Giuli exhaled, exasperated. ‘Why do I get this from everyone?’ she said. ‘Flavia committed suicide … privacy doesn’t come into it. You were her only friend, it seems to me. Don’t you want to know what drove her to it?’

Wanda gazed at her. ‘I suppose you’re right,’ she said uncertainly.

‘I
am
right,’ said Giuli. ‘So tell me.’

The teacher took a deep breath. ‘I can’t remember all of it myself,’ she said slowly. ‘But it was extraordinary. It had everything. It was like the perfect dream. Symbols, emotion, danger, archetypes, revelation: the lot. You might have made it up, it was a perfect narrative.’

Wanda paused. ‘There was a palace,’ she said then, slowly.

Giuli sat quiet, mesmerized. It was just like a story. A ghost story, or a murder story. A big, dark palace – like the Pitti Palace, set up above a city like their own. A faceless man with a sword, hacking people to pieces and leaving them in bloody heaps, finds his way inside the palace. Flavia Matteo goes running through its corridors saying she has to find her baby before the killer does. Then there was something garbled about stockings and blue glass all over the ground stopping them catching the killer, but always, even in Wanda’s halting retelling of it, it was completely gripping. The chase, the terrible faceless man, then the revelation.

‘He got the baby?’ Giuli said. ‘He killed the baby? That’s pretty extreme.’

‘Dreams are extreme,’ said Wanda, with an effort. ‘Pregnancy hormones can do pretty extreme things too. Women dream of blood and destruction all the time. We’re not the gentle creatures people imagine us to be, are we?’

‘No,’ said Giuli, thinking of Flavia Matteo cutting her own wrists, thinking of the sinew and veins, of the deep breath you’d have to take before you made the first cut. Thinking of Sandro viewing the body. And Flavia dreaming of a baby cut to pieces.

Wanda was looking at her. ‘There was something else,’ she said.

‘What else?’ said Giuli, with dread.

‘She said, “He made me dance for him, to save the baby, and then I saw his face, before he killed the baby.” She said,
I knew him.’
Wanda Terni’s own face was pale and tense, her eyes wide.

‘And who was he?’ The teacher shook her head. ‘Flavia wouldn’t tell me that.’ She squeezed her eyes shut. ‘It was as though she had to get to the end, to tell me what had happened in the end, and only when she got there did she realize she might have given something away. She said, “No, I didn’t mean he was a real person, no, no.”’

‘But she was lying.’

Wanda nodded. ‘I think she was.’

‘You were here,’ said Giuli, ‘when she told you?’

Wanda nodded again and Giuli shivered suddenly. ‘There’s no palace here,’ she said. ‘Could she have been thinking of, I don’t know, the Quirinale, of government buildings, city hall? Of what would happen when – if – Niccolò got to power?’

‘There are palaces everywhere,’ Wanda said, frowning with concentration ‘This city’s like one big palace. Have you never thought the streets are like dark corridors? You never know who’s around the next corner.’

Giuli saw the raised hairs on her forearm. ‘You’re cold,’ she said. ‘Let’s get walking.’

The sun, though, even at midday, seemed suddenly to have lost its ability to warm. They reached the top of the hill by dogged determination alone. Giuli realized she was like Wanda in her attitude to walking, or perhaps she just didn’t like the idea of having the freedom to think her own thoughts forced on her.

‘I’d better get back,’ said Wanda, fretting as they looked down at the city. The river shone lazily below them, a wide green band. Some sunbathers were stretched out along the fishing weir, distant specks.

‘All right,’ said Giuli reluctantly. The story haunted her, its ugly meanings circling with menace, just out of reach. It could be anything: it could be hormones, chemicals cooking up their own stories in Flavia’s bloodstream, the baby sending out its own warning signals before it knew anything of the world it would enter.

‘There was nothing else?’ she said as they set off back down, almost as an afterthought. ‘Just the dream.’ As if the dream wasn’t enough.

Their steps crunched on the gravel, the increase in speed as they headed downhill lending a sense of urgency they hadn’t felt on the uphill climb. Faster, faster they went, chasing something down.

‘There was something else,’ said Wanda, and she stopped abruptly. ‘Actually, there was. Just a small thing.’

*

He would be angry, thought Chiara. The dress hung on the back of the wardrobe, like her pale peach ghost, crumpled, sweated in under the arms because she’d run in it, running in heels like trying to struggle out of a trap. He wouldn’t like that, either, he wanted her delicate and feminine. She wondered where the iron was: wondered if she should take the dress to the cleaner’s before he saw it. It didn’t feel like it was hers. He’d bought it for her.

She’d had to run: she couldn’t have stopped, couldn’t have talked to Luisa: one word and Luisa would have her skewered. She could deflect her own mother, who so desperately wanted to believe her child, but Luisa had always been able to ferret out the truth. Chiara remembered as a child sitting on her lap, Luisa’s firm hand on her heel as she extracted a splinter, straight in with the needle, ignoring Chiara’s squeal, her writhing: ruthless, focused. Then holding up the splinter: there.

He’d sat in the car waiting for her when she’d gone to get her stuff: she hadn’t asked him up and he hadn’t said he wanted to meet the family. He’d known her dad was in the Polizia di Stato – sometimes she wondered if everyone knew – and what kind of lover wanted to be subjected to that scrutiny?

What kind of lover.

Was he her lover? Not yet. And as she lay still on the bed a sweat broke on her again. She’d run across the river to get away from Luisa and, reaching the other side, hurrying for the bus stop, she’d glanced down a sidestreet and she’d seen him. Leaning into a car window as easy as you like, as if he’d known the person inside for ever. The woman looking up at him from the driver’s seat, sly and certain. He’ll leave me, thought Chiara suddenly. Unless I do the things he wants.

‘I’ll show you,’ he’d said.

Chapter Nineteen

‘I
’
M SORRY
,’
SAID
V
ESNA
, looking around fearfully. ‘I’d better check first. That Calzaghe’s not back, I mean. He won’t allow it, you see.’ Although Sandro thought she seemed as much afraid of Niccolò as she was of her boss.

They’d waited fifteen minutes, he and Niccolò Rosselli, inside the rusted gates to the silent hotel, time to reflect that it wouldn’t take long for nature to reclaim the Stella Maris, its flaking shutters and unkempt laurels and weed-clogged gravel. There was something about Rosselli’s dark, relentless misery that muddied Sandro’s own thoughts; his head was already back in Florence, pondering the significance of a police raid in the dark alleys of the Oltrarno. He had completely forgotten the errand Vesna had offered to run for him until he’d seen her hurrying along the wide sunny street towards them.

‘OK,’ she said now, coming back out of the hotel’s dark lobby. ‘He’s not here.’ Her eyes darted again from Rosselli to Sandro. There was something she wasn’t sure she should say, in front of the husband. ‘Quick, quick, come in.’

She looked different without her overall: she looked like any girl in the street, she looked free. You could imagine her just taking off, running for the train without a bag. That was what Flavia had done. Had it felt like escape? Or the opposite – capture? Running into a brick wall, the end: that would always be how someone like Sandro viewed suicide.

The staircase led up to a long, light-filled landing and rooms leading off it.

‘I suppose we’d better not touch anything,’ said Vesna, fishing a key from her pocket and unlocking the door. The police hadn’t left tape up; perhaps they’d thought there’d be no need, with the hotel closed. Vesna pushed the door with a fingertip and, before they had a chance to decide who would be the first to enter, Rosselli stepped purposefully forward and through the doorway.

Even in the room’s shuttered dimness you could tell it was a mess. Vesna had her arms wrapped across herself in distress: even leaving aside that she’d found the body, her job, supposed Sandro, whenever she came into a room like this, would be to restore order to it, and the mess left behind after a death was disorder like no other. Possessions whose owner has gone, things once of value to someone, now worthless. Meaning drained from them.

Rosselli moved through the room before them. He stood and looked down at the bed first, the sheets creased and limp, pulled roughly back up; stood there a long time, it felt to Sandro, who was averting his eyes from the imprint of a dead woman’s body. The door to what must be the bathroom was ajar, but the shutters would be dosed there, too. Then Rosselli moved, stepped across to the small cheap wooden desk, with its writing set. The policeman had said Flavia took a piece of paper and set it on the blotter; she’d held the pen because it had her fingerprints on it. But nothing had been written.

Behind Sandro, Vesna stepped over to the long French doors and, taking a handkerchief from her pocket, turned the handle. ‘She had a balcony,’ she said. ‘One of the nicest rooms.’ She sounded apologetic. She pushed the shutters outward and a band of light widened in the room: Niccolò Rosselli’s face, grey and blinking, turned towards her.

‘They were open,’ Vesna explained. ‘The shutters, the window, they were open when I came in.’

‘Open?’ Rosselli seemed galvanized, lit up by the shaft of sun. ‘The door was locked, they said. The door to the room, as if that meant no one could have been in here, no one could have—’

‘You told the police?’ said Sandro swiftly, wanting to shut down that note he heard in Rosselli’s voice, of a kind of desperate hope.

‘Yes,’ said Vesna, ‘Of course. I told them I hadn’t changed anything.’

‘You’re sure you didn’t open them yourself?’ Sandro was intent. ‘Don’t you do that when you go into rooms to clean them, throw open the window first?’

‘I do sometimes,’ she said slowly. ‘But I knew something bad had happened. Even before – when she didn’t answer the door. I knew not to touch – I – I don’t know why. I just knew.’

‘And you told them that?’ She nodded uncertainly. ‘I heard them round the back, afterwards. The police, I mean. They went looking to see – if anyone might have—’ She stepped on to the balcony, Rosselli shoving abruptly ahead of Sandro to follow her, then the three of them were out there.

The balcony was generous but shabby, the paint on the balustrade flaking and loose, and about four metres from the ground. Rosselli stepped to the balustrade: Sandro came alongside him and they both looked down into a patch of tangled vegetation and the contrastingly neat garden of the condominium behind, where two swinging garden seats and four substantial loungers were set tidily around a handsome table. Sandro glanced at Niccolò Rosselli’s face, but it registered no emotion, only a kind of intentness.