A Darkness Descending (43 page)

And then the three women were in front of the screen. Luisa felt Enzo step back, as if out of deference or perhaps shame. He was in the corner, clutching the little mobile and the piece of paper, his shoulder half turned to them like a child sent to the corner in school, busying himself. Like one of those children who can’t look you in the eye, who distract themselves from their fears with some small mechanical activity.

‘This is the number,’ he said, but no one was listening. ‘It matches this one. It says
Anna K
.’

It’s the man who covers his face. But not always out of shame.

In the image on the screen, the white expanse of bed, the lines of the mirror, the pale soft body spread as though a doctor had given instructions, Luisa noticed three things.

A man. Standing, leaning against the mirrored wardrobe: the camera had been angled so that his face could not be seen. He was tall, and he was clothed; a forearm the only flesh visible, in the attitude maybe of the thinker. Watching.

A line ran from Flavia Matteo’s navel downward, the dark line that pregnancy left behind on a body.

‘She didn’t sleep with him,’ said Giuli, choked. ‘It’s in the book. In the messages: she wrote them all down. She didn’t sleep with him because she couldn’t do it: he said he loved her, then. But later he changed tack: he began to say other things. To imply that she wasn’t a real woman, that she was – frigid. So she went to this place, this apartment, after the child was born. No more than a few weeks ago: a last attempt maybe. And then the messages ended.’ She bobbed her head down. ‘He said he wasn’t enjoying himself any more.’

And something else. Luisa put her face close to the screen. ‘Can you blow this up?’ she said. She pulled back and Giuli moved in, deftly sliding something to adjust the image.

This was a room where no woman washed the sheets, this was a room meant only for this kind of liaison, where women came and went, under the tacky pastel of a child over the bed, the ugly mirrored wardrobe. Under the eye of the camera.

‘A laundry mark,’ Luisa said, her face close to the screen. ‘Verna, it says. Lavanderia Verna.’ She turned back and they were all staring at her now, even Enzo, who seemed to have been interrupted halfway through forming a declaration of his own. ‘I must have passed the Lavanderia Verna a hundred times,’ she said. ‘It’s on the Via Pisana. On the road to the seaside.’

‘Through the Isolotto,’ said Gloria, bewildered. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘This is Flavia Matteo. We’re talking about her, not Chiara, in the Isolotto. Aren’t we talking about her?’

‘Perhaps we’re talking about both of them,’ said Luisa.

*

Chiara lay on the wide bed and saw herself reflected in the mirror: saw her girl’s arms, her narrow calves too slender as they emerged from under the pale pink silk. I’m nineteen, she told herself. I’m only nineteen. All of her strained to listen for him: through the window she could hear the old women’s voices on the balcony below. Now she knew what that warning was, that she had always heard in the voices of women older than her. Sometimes you don’t know, they were saying. You think it’s what you want, but you don’t know. You think you’re in control, but sometimes they’re too strong for you.

A car pulled up outside.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

W
AS THAT WHAT
SANDRO’S
old brain had been trying to find a place for, ever since that morning when he’d sat in the car and watched the traumatized insurance claimant smoking on the balcony? That name. 3 September, 3.20 p.m., the first Friday of September last year. Two cars behind the accident, a good citizen had given his name and a witness statement – although his female passenger had not been named. They had been on their way to the seaside.

Had it frightened Flavia Matteo, on her way to that luxurious hotel with a near-stranger? A car accident: it must have seemed like fate. A narrow escape.

The two men stood outside the barracks, the eye of a surveillance camera on them. They’d spoken their piece into the intercom but the doors were still closed: Pietro stood with his fists clenched as if he would need no persuasion to begin battering on the door.

Giuli had been as cool as a cucumber on the phone: that’s my girl, Sandro had thought as she’d delivered her evidence, piece by piece.

‘I’ve seen him,’ she’d said. ‘He’s in the photographs. Enzo’d saved everything on those computers on his USB key, two weeks ago. He does it routinely.’ She’d taken a breath. ‘I’ve seen the man, and I’ve read his messages. I wouldn’t recognize him in the street, because he keeps his face hidden, but I know what novels he reads. I know how he thinks. I know what he thinks of us. Of women. I’ve got his number: and I’ve got it literally, too. I know his phone number: she called him Anna K.’

And when the name had come to him, and the face attached, it had been as though Sandro had known it all along.

He wasn’t sure he should have told Pietro. That was a worry, looking at his old friend’s clenched fists now, his face almost unrecognizable, almost deranged.

But how could Sandro not have told him?

‘They think it’s the same guy,’ he’d said. ‘Luisa and Gloria – and Giuli too. It was Gloria saw it first, Giuli said. Your Gloria, she said,
And now they’re trying to get to Pietro.
Through Chiara.’

They wouldn’t have gone for his wife, would they? Not for Gloria. She wasn’t damaged like Flavia Matteo, she hadn’t spent her life repressing anything, she wasn’t at a dangerous age. So they went for little Chiara, the bold, rebellious child everyone knew and loved, that member of the new generation of girls who thought they could handle it all. Maybe each new generation thought that.

‘Looks like he’s got a place in the Isolotto,’ Sandro had said. ‘Do you think that might be where Chiara’s living now?’

And with a dark look of pulverizing, murderous rage, Pietro had shoved past him without a word and out of the Bar dell’Orto, almost shattering the glass door as he flung it violently open. Sandro had thought he might scream something in the quiet street. But instead it was Pietro’s turn to ask the same question Sandro had asked him. ‘Never mind
they.
I want to see this bastard’s face.’

Was it the sword that had given him the answer? Not the copy
of Anna Karenina –
Anna K? – not the bust of Aristotle, not the description of him leaning against the mirrored wardrobe, tall and lean, an older man. An arrogant bastard, Giuli had said, with contempt.

Yes: the sword. The man Flavia had dreamed of, the man who cut women into pieces, the man who pursued her down the city’s dark, luxurious streets.

And that photograph of a man in full dress uniform standing on the shelf in his office alongside the Tolstoy and the philosophy and the chessmen. The soldier’s hand resting on the pommel of a sword. Sometimes in a dream a sword is just a sword.

He would be up above them in his room now, with his long legs stretched out as he contemplated his victory over the left-wing rabble.

The barracks door swung inwards.

‘I’m sorry,’ said the soldier in fatigues whose name Sandro only in that moment remembered as Canova and who stood now blocking their path with his careless good looks and his unassailable indifference.

Even before he finished speaking, the heavy door was beginning to close steadily between them. The soldier stepped back into the shadows as it moved.

‘I’m afraid that Colonello Arturo has left for the day.’

Sandro and Pietro could only watch as the door closed, and they were on the outside again.

*

‘They’ll find her,’ said Giuli, looking into Gloria’s golden eyes, her pale face contracted with terror. On the other side, Luisa held her friend’s hand.

‘You have to leave it to her father,’ she said. They’d closed the lid of Enzo’s laptop but the images hadn’t left anyone’s head. ‘He needs to be the one.’

‘They’ll find her,’ repeated Enzo, from his corner, clutching the mobile. ‘Those two – if anyone can do it.’

Were they all thinking the same thing? wondered Giuli as she heard the uncertainty in his voice, and no one spoke. That there comes a time when those we’ve always looked up to, the all-powerful parents, are suddenly too old, too slow, too late?

‘Can you give me that?’ she said, and obediently Enzo handed her the phone. She looked down at the name, and the number attached to it.

‘It was the novel she was reading,’ Giuli explained. ‘One of the books Flavia left with Wanda Terni, along with her notebook.
Anna Karenina.
Anna K.’

And then there was a silence. Not just in the room between them but outside, something like a vast collective intake of breath and a sudden hush that was almost suffocating after the rising din, as though a great blanket had been thrown over the crowd.

‘Niccolò,’ said Enzo. ‘I knew he’d go out there.’ He looked at Giuli, and she saw he was afraid. ‘What will they do to him?’

She held up a hand: she was dialling. She felt the adrenaline rise in her, in her throat, as she waited to hear his voice, at last.

*

Chiara had put the little case in the kitchen so he wouldn’t see it, but he knew as he came through the door. Even though she was wearing what he’d told her to wear, lay where he wanted her to lie, on the white bed under the ugly painting. She made sure not to look in the direction that would give her away.

He came through the door, his head tilted to one side, long and lean and handsome in his off-duty clothes. She’d never seen him in his uniform, but he’d told her about it. He’d told her with pride that he even had a sword. ‘Of course, it’s meaningless,’ he’d said in a throwaway manner: she’d believed him, then. She’d thought when he began talking to her in that way of his – all that lulling, deep-voiced insistence brought to bear on her, Chiara thinking herself so sought out in the university cloister – that here was a man at the heart of the old order who had only contempt for it. ‘Just pen-pushing,’ he’d told her with his lazy, amoral smile. ‘I don’t fancy a war zone.’ Together what might they not overthrow? But at the same time, buried somewhere deep, she’d liked the idea of that sword too, of that uniform. She’d wanted it all.

The way he held his head, the half-smile on his face, the pause in the doorway. He knew.

‘Darling,’ he said, smoothly amused, and she saw his gaze flick up to the camera she’d found, behind the painting, a tiny eye. She gazed steadily at him, not following his glance: she felt a great surge of misery. Had she still been hoping that this was her own paranoid imagination? That they were still twined souls in rebellion? That he loved her? But it wasn’t her imagination. This was a horrible dirty story, an old, disgusting story about a stupid girl and a wolf, a virgin and a Bluebeard, a house full of locked doors. She was a fool.

He stepped towards the bed and his hand was on her thigh under the silk: his face came close to hers and she smelled the onion on his breath.

His mobile rang.

The smile fixing on his face, he pulled back and reached into a pocket for the phone. His face over hers stilled as he looked away from her and down, at the cellphone’s screen.

‘No,’ he said, his expression darkening.

‘No,’ she said, lifting herself from the pillow, with her eyes fixed over his shoulder on the little eye of the camera and with her hand groping for the only weapon she had, hidden under the pillow, her last resort, no time to call for Dad. Downstairs someone was shouting her name.

*

They had to leave the car at the end of a long private parking lot, and vault the locked gate: with difficulty, in Sandra’s case.

They’d driven in near-silence until they got to the Viadotto dell’Indiano, the viaduct that would lead them in a wide overhead curve around the congested centre and to the Isolotto. The sedate rows of apartment blocks flanking the river rose to greet them through their canopy of trees: so calm, so secluded, so private.

‘The Oltrarno’s gridlocked,’ Pietro had said. ‘The Frazione Verde are demonstrating. As if that’ll make any difference.’ His mouth was set in a line.

‘The Isolotto’s a big place,’ Sandro had said, despairing, and Pietro had looked at him.

‘D’you think I don’t know where to find my own daughter?’ And when Sandro had just stared, Pietro had turned his face away and said stonily, ‘I ran a trace on her mobile phone through the computers the morning after she left.’

‘You knew where she was,’ Sandro had said. ‘All along, you knew? And you didn’t come after her?’

Pietro had stared at the road ahead as he’d answered: a lorry was blocking their exit, moving horribly slowly. ‘I didn’t make the connection,’ he said. ‘I was watching the Frazione, my daughter had grown up and left me. They were different things. Do you seriously think that if I’d had the slightest inkling she’d got involved with this guy –
this
guy – I’d have let it lie?’ Ahead the lorry began to move.

Sandro looked at his friend’s tormented face. ‘No,’ he said, his chest tight.

‘I had to let her go,’ Pietro said, still not looking at him. ‘What, sit in a car outside in the street, watching her? Fascist dad. Big Brother. What if she saw me? Or
he
did?’

‘You didn’t even come and get a look at him?’

‘I didn’t know!’ Pietro had said in anguish, and his hands had gripped the steering wheel. ‘I thought I had to let her go. But I had to know where to come for her, when the time came.’

And the time had come.

Now, though, ten years younger than him, Pietro was pulling away from Sandro as they ran through the parking lot.

Chiara!

An old woman in black looked over her balcony at the sound, at Pietro bellowing like a maddened bull in the orderly, shrub-lined grounds below her. Looking up, Sandro saw something in her beady, dark eyes, a kind of satisfaction: recognition. She turned her head to look along the block and up, and pointed.

They ran under the elevated building to a liftwell, and pressed all the bells in turn at the locked door. A click came, and they were through. ‘Third floor,’ said Pietro, and he was on the stairs before Sandro could even think about the lift. Sandro’s lungs were burning before they got to the first floor, he was dizzy with the effort and with wondering, which door?