A Darkness Descending (32 page)

‘Do you know something about Rosselli?’ she’d said. ‘Is that what you’ve been working on? Is that why – why—?’ Why you’ve kept away, was what Luisa wanted to say, from your oldest friend?

Pietro had shaken his head, tight-lipped. ‘Not Rosselli,’ he’d said. ‘They haven’t – no one’s got anything on Rosselli as far as I know. But Bastone? The lawyer. Do they think he fought his way up from nothing? Chiara calls the police corrupt. His family owns some nice building land, a sizeable parcel down near Scandicci, as a matter of fact.’ And he looked at her. ‘A sale is being negotiated. I’ve spent a bit of time at the land registry lately.’

Where the mall was being built. Dimly she remembered the couple in the bar talking about Rosselli’s collapse, the man saying something about backhanders. Bastone. Sandro had thought him nothing more than a bumbler, a hopeless idealist, out of his depth.

Luisa had tried to get more out of Pietro then but he wouldn’t elaborate, and seeing him there, uneasy in his ill-fitting jeans, looking around as if he was being watched, she had let him go.

They’d been looking at her askance in the shop even before Maria Rosselli turned up. She hadn’t been a minute beyond the hour for lunch, but truthfully her mind hadn’t been on the job after meeting Pietro. Gazing out of the window, fighting to make sense of it, she’d tried to picture him, this older man Chiara might have been drawn to, this authority figure. Chiara had always been such a determined little thing, it had pained Luisa to think of her subdued by some – some controlling arsehole.

Language.
What had got into her?

No, Maria Rosselli had just been the last straw. Parking what she called the perambulator in the busy street without a backward glance and marching her strong-boned features into the shop, looking at the colour-coordinated rails and high heels with incredulity.

‘Have you heard from them?’ she’d barked without preamble, and at the sound Beppe had appeared at the top of the stairs, startled.

Maria seemed to have aged ten years since she’d had sole charge of the child, and to have grown angrier.

‘You can’t leave the baby out there,’ Luisa had said.

‘Well, I can’t bring him in here, can I?’ Maria had said, looking around herself with a kind of contemptuous disbelief. And it was true. Even if the great, ungainly, sprung baby carriage would have fitted through the glass doors, it would have looked as out of place as a spaceship inside the shop.

At the till Giusy had made an ushering gesture: they’d gone outside.

The baby had been asleep, but judging by his flush and the dried tears on his fat cheeks, it had been a struggle. Maria Rosselli had followed Luisa’s gaze impatiently.

‘Obstinate,’ she’d said. ‘Like his mother. And look where that got her.’

Giusy had stuck her head round the door then. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘Beppe says, Why don’t you head home?’

Luisa had stared at her, taken aback. Affronted even.

Giusy had given her a meaningful glance. ‘We can manage.’ And then a quick glance at Maria Rosselli, telling Luisa, Get her out of here. Luisa had looked from Giusy to Maria Rosselli, but it had been the baby, at whom she did not look again, that had done it. How could she have left him to this woman’s tender mercies?

‘All right,’ she’d said, and Giusy’s head withdrew. Then to Maria Rosselli, ‘Perhaps you’d walk back with me?’ Maria Rosselli had looked at her with haughty suspicion. ‘As we’ve both been abandoned.’ And before the woman could have taken umbrage at that, Luisa added, ‘I’ll get my bag.’

They had walked in silence for at least half the way, side by side in stately progress. You had to walk in the street with such a baby carriage: it was too wide for the pavements. It had seemed to Luisa entirely typical of Maria Rosselli to refuse to make any concessions in the matter. A small electric bus had trundled patiently behind them the length of the Via del Corso without even a toot.

In the pram between them the baby had slept on, despite the jouncing of the springs on the paving slabs. A number of questions had occurred to Luisa as they’d walked: she’d dismissed each of them in turn.
Who will look after the baby? Will Niccolò find another woman? Or will you, Maria, move in with him
? But they had all seemed to suggest an answer that would only seal the poor child’s fate.

‘Carlo Bastone,’ she’d said, instead. ‘Have you known him all his life?’

Maria Rosselli had stopped walking, and Luisa had realized with satisfaction that she’d succeeded in surprising her. ‘Yes,’ she had said warily. ‘He was at school with Niccolò.’

‘So he came to the house? You – you approved of their friendship?’

Still wary, Maria Rosselli had shrugged. Tightened her grip on the pram’s handle and resumed walking.

‘He wasn’t a particularly intelligent child,’ she’d said. ‘Not like Niccolò. I felt sorry for him.’

Luisa had found it hard to believe that Maria Rosselli had ever felt pity in her life. They’d arrived now in the sunlit expanse of the Piazza Santa Croce, pigeons strutting around the stone benches, the frescoed façades of the south side in the shade. One bench sat empty in the sun a hundred metres from them.

‘Shall we sit down?’ she’d suggested reluctantly. Maria Rosselli had pursed her lips, but sat.

‘Is he married?’ Luisa had asked. ‘The lawyer, I mean?’ She couldn’t have said why she wanted to know, only that an unmarried man had no checks on him, no woman to moderate him. Would Rosselli – would the Frazione – survive with Flavia gone?

Maria Rosselli had looked at her with contempt. ‘No,’ she said. ‘At least he had sense enough for that. I don’t suppose any decent woman would have him anyway.’ Luisa had wondered how she’d define
decent:
she herself had only been able to conjure up the image of an iron-jawed matriarch on her hands and knees, scrubbing.

She’d sighed. Get to the point. ‘His family was wealthy?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Maria Rosselli had said. ‘Very well off. But of course I wasn’t impressed by his family.’

I bet you weren’t, Luisa had thought, getting the picture. She would allow her bespectacled son a single friend, the class’s other misfit, someone she could look down on despite his money. Condescension, of course, might be confused with pity but was not the same thing. Sandro said she’d barged into Bastone’s office as if she owned the place.

‘You were widowed so young,’ she had said, changing tack. ‘It must have been difficult.’

‘My husband was always an invalid,’ Maria Rosselli had said stiffly. ‘My life was never easy. But we managed.’

‘There was never any difficulty – with Niccolò’s best friend being from a privileged background?’

Maria Rosselli’s mouth had turned down. ‘None at all,’ she’d said. ‘My son can acquit himself in any company. If you ask me, Carlo was envious of Niccolò, not the other way around. I’m sure you know how that is in those friendships? One person simply wishes to become the other, wants everything they have.’

Such as? Luisa wanted to ask but the woman had carried on. ‘And Carlo’s family were not of that vulgar kind, that spends freely.’

Right, Luisa had thought. Tightwads, then.

And suddenly she’d had enough of this lot, the Florentine reserve, the chilly, closed-off snobbishness of Maria Rosselli and, no doubt, Carlo Bastone’s miserly landowner family too. She had stolen another glance at the sleeping child, without whose existence she’d happily never have exchanged another word with either Rosselli. They were tough, weren’t they, babies? They could survive all sorts, that’s what people said. She had sat, looking down at the golden sleeping face … and looking at its features the same thought had come to her that she’d had the day before, only more insistent this time.

‘It’s his, you know.’ Maria Rosselli’s harsh voice had broken in on her, as if its owner had read her mind. Luisa had looked from the child to his grandmother. ‘Niccolò’s the father. I know what you’re thinking. But it’s in the file.’

‘In the file?’ Luisa had found herself at a loss: she could only repeat the horrible old woman’s words.

‘In the medical file. They had to crosscheck his DNA to rule out … some syndrome or other. When he was just born.’

‘Well,’ Luisa had said, repelled. ‘I suppose that’s useful information.’

The other woman had said nothing more and abruptly Luisa had got up and brought their encounter to a close. ‘I’ll let you know,’ she’d said, glancing down at Maria Rosselli’s set face and noting something new in the stone-grey eyes looking up at her – an ebbing of that ferocious, hostile certainty and the beginnings of something that might be fear. ‘When Sandro calls.’

The apartment was cooler now and Luisa moved through the rooms, opening windows, letting in the ripe smells of Santa Croce’s restaurants and dumpsters, along with the warmer air of the streets. She was filling the coffee pot, to distract herself, when the house phone rang.

She knew before he spoke that it would be Sandro, the only person in Italy, and possibly the world, who still believed in the landline.

‘You were right,’ he said, and her heart filled at the sound of his weary, familiar voice. ‘I was driving. We’re on our way home.’

*

Slowly Enzo walked down the alley that led from the Frazione’s offices to the Via Sant’Agostino. Behind him Carlo Bastone was still in there, talking among the ransacked filing cabinets and empty desks to three policemen who stood around him like sentries: from they way they’d gone on, Enzo had thought for a moment that they might detain them both. He took deep breaths.

The alley stank. It had never bothered Enzo before, he was accustomed to the smells of the city. But this evening, as the sky faded overhead, the day’s heat seemed to be concentrated in the narrow space, and the staleness of the air was suffocating. He increased his pace, resisted breaking into a run. How would that look, if the police officers emerged and saw him pelting like a pickpocket for the Via Sant’Agostino?

On the corner he stopped. A tall man in a suit and tie stood against a wall opposite with his arms folded, a windowless wall that stretched between a bakery and the fag-puffing neon-jacketed drivers outside the ambulance post, the
misericordia.
There was graffiti behind the man.
Frazione
=
Merda. Frazione = Shit.

Enzo weighed his mobile in his hand.

The man in the suit watched him: there weren’t many suits seen down here, south of the river. He had a crew cut and a briefcase that he carried as if unused to it. There was something rough about him, something hard-edged; he might have been an ex-con trying to better himself.

Enzo felt as though the city was shifting around him, drafts and eddies, roads dug up, traffic diverted, police on the doorstep: things were moving out of focus and for a second he had the distinct impression that he might one day look up and not recognize where he was.

He began to compose a text message.

*

In Sandro’s office, Giuli sat alone at the computer. She’d opened the windows when she let herself in because the place seemed stale and stuffy: she could hear the shrill sounds of children playing in the Piazza Tasso and the low murmur of voices passing in the street.

She’d typed ‘Interpretation of Dreams’ into the search engine, and had come up with a whole load of mystical, Tarotreading nonsense, home-made websites referencing crystals and poltergeists. Giuli scrolled down looking for something more convincing, all the while only becoming more and more sceptical: if dream interpretation was not a science but the equivalent of palm-reading, she wasn’t interested. Her phone bleeped with the arrival of a message and, frowning, she pushed it away. Concentrate. At last she got an online encyclopaedia entry, and settled back to read it.

Within ten minutes she was fidgeting on her chair, as if she was back in school. What was wrong with her, that facts just didn’t go into her stupid head? Partly it was because something else was in there, bouncing around, trying to make her hear it. Her meeting with Wanda Terni: what had it meant? The dream, the park’s long, empty alleys, and the rest. How well, after all, did Wanda know Flavia? Giuli had started out with a niggling envy, that Flavia had had this decent, thoughtful woman as a friend, that they’d gone for walks together: she’d had to tell herself, Luisa’s your friend now. Stop dwelling on the past, stop thinking everyone’s got it better than you. Even this poor dead woman. And then the envy had fallen away, because in the end Flavia hadn’t been able to tell her friend about whatever it was that had been eating at her.

But she’d told the nurse.

At the computer, Giuli sat up straight with the certainty: Flavia had told Barbara. Barbara might have refused to say what she knew, but that didn’t mean she knew nothing, and it didn’t mean Giuli had learned nothing from the exchange. Good. She looked back at the screen but she couldn’t bring it into focus; her mind was elsewhere, sifting through what she’d learned from Barbara and Wanda, deciding what was significant and what wasn’t.

‘A small thing,’ Wanda had said uncertainly. ‘But it was never something I associated with her, you see. That’s why it startled me. I’d never heard that sound before when I was with her, and when she got it out and looked at it, I thought, Wow, so Flavia Matteo’s joined the modern world.’

Back at the search engine, slowly, Giuli typed in, ‘palace dream interpretation’. Nothing useful. She typed in, ‘sword’.

Again the mystical websites: DreamMoods, WhatsYourSign. No thanks. She tracked her eyes down the page and it jumped out at her, a reference back to the online encyclopaedia:

Jung cautioned against blindly ascribing meaning to dream symbols without a clear understanding of the client’s personal situation. He described two approaches to dream symbols: the causal approach and the final approach. In the causal approach, the symbol is reduced to certain fundamental tendencies. Thus, a sword may symbolize a penis, as may a snake. In the final approach, the dream interpreter asks, ‘Why this symbol and not another?’ Thus, a sword representing a penis is hard, sharp, inanimate, and destructive. A snake representing a penis is alive, dangerous, perhaps poisonous and slimy. The final approach will tell you additional things about the dreamer’s attitudes.