A Darkness Descending (8 page)

‘You mean his – his wife?’ Maria Rosselli had turned her deepset dark eyes on Giuli when she’d spoken, assessing her all over again. Giuli had raised her chin and bravely continued. ‘Niccolò’s – your son’s wife has left him?’

‘They were never married,’ the mother-in-law had said with blunt contempt. ‘She has no rights. I said that to him.’

Sandro had turned his head to ease the stiffness he’d felt building up as he’d tried to take in what Maria Rosselli was saying. ‘The selfishness,’ she’d said coldly. ‘The neglect of duty, the weakness. It’s unforgivable. You can see what it’s done to him. He can’t sleep, he doesn’t eat. The child cries.’

The child cries. In the dim, dusty room the words had hung in the air, changing things.

Sandro felt a chill now as he felt Luisa’s eyes on him: gave himself a little shake. In the wide Piazza del Carmine something was going on, over beyond the church. Banners bobbing up and down in the soft darkness, and a groundswell of voices.

‘She left the child behind,’ said Luisa slowly, and Sandro saw something in her face he didn’t want to see. The conclusion he didn’t want to draw, about the only thing that would keep a mother from her child.

Their waiter – a slightly stooped, elderly man with shiny patches on his ancient black trousers – was circulating between the tables on the crowded terrace; abruptly Luisa nodded to him, and he shuffled over in a parody of haste. Luisa brought that out in people.

‘Coffee,’ she said, in response to his ingratiating recital of desserts. ‘And the bill.’ The sound of the demonstrators in the square was getting louder; they were singing the ‘
Internazionale
’, to Sandro’s astonishment.

‘How old is the child?’ Luisa said when the waiter had gone.

‘Young,’ said Sandro, suddenly unwilling to think about Niccolò Rosselli’s situation, and unwilling also to evoke the nearly newborn for Luisa, who for years – more than a decade after her own child died – had not been able to look at babies. But clearly in this case the presence of a newborn was the key: the unanswered question. ‘A – a baby.’ Luisa turned her hard stare on him. ‘Six weeks,’ he said obediently.

‘Six weeks.’ Her face was calm, immobile. ‘That’s a dangerous time.’ He looked at her. ‘Isn’t it supposed to be? A difficult time for a woman, they can behave uncharacteristically. Become violent, all sorts of things. For those first weeks after a baby’s born.’

Sandro hardly dared speak: after their daughter had been born, with a syndrome that had meant she lived a bare thirty-six hours, Luisa had descended into a state of bleak, impenetrable withdrawal from which he had feared she would never emerge. For some time he had thought that his vivid, energetic, sharp-tongued wife might sit with dull eyes at the kitchen table for the rest of their life together. He still marvelled at her recovery, one spring morning, when she’d got out of bed, put on lipstick and gone back in to work.

Calmly, she went on. ‘Post-partum psychosis, isn’t that what they call it? You should get Giuli to talk to the woman’s midwife, the people at the Centre.’

‘I don’t know if she was treated at the Centre,’ he mumbled. ‘I’d have to find out.’

Luisa nodded, apparently still serene. Could it be that she no longer connected that phrase – post-partum – with herself? She spoke.

‘Giusy – in the shop. She knew he had a baby, a wife. She was at school with Rosselli. Can you imagine that?’

‘They were never married,’ said Sandro. ‘Rosselli’s mother seemed to think that was significant.’

‘More significant than the child? They’d been together how long?’ He was surprised by her calmness, her tolerance; for some reason he had thought Luisa approved of the institution of marriage as much as Maria Rosselli seemed to. But then he was regularly prepared to believe that he could assume nothing at all about his wife of thirty-odd years.

She smiled at him. ‘If you ask me, I don’t think Maria Rosselli ever wanted them to get married. No one could be good enough for her Niccolò.’

‘It sounds like they’ve been together more than twenty years,’ said Sandro. ‘That must have been tough.’ Remembering the curl of Maria Rosselli’s lip, as though twenty years might still count as an aberration. As though she’d spent all that time waiting for her son to extricate himself from an unsuitable relationship.

‘Yes,’ said Luisa.

The coffee was set down in front of her just as the untidy rabble of demonstrators came alongside the restaurant terrace, chanting cheerfully now. Most of the diners smiled back: it was all very amicable. Sandro tried to see what it said on the posters: LEAVE SCANDIGCI ALONE. NO TO MORE ROADS. Hardly contentious stuff. The banners had the crude insignia of the Frazione Verde pasted to their corners, a green lightning bolt across a representation of the Duomo’s cupola. He smiled to himself: the protesters all looked so young, so disorganized, they could hardly even chant in time. Had they just assembled themselves, in the absence of Niccolò Rosselli, their figurehead? How long ago had this little march been organized? He wanted to take one or two of them by the elbow and ask about the Frazione, what it meant to them. But it wasn’t part of the case: the case, now, was finding Rosselli’s wife, and never mind his political activity.

‘She’s obviously taking charge,’ said Luisa. ‘The mother. She’s the one who’s paying? For you to track the wife down.’

Sandro shifted anxiously. ‘We need to talk about it,’ he said. ‘I don’t even know – she hasn’t even talked to her son about it yet. She seemed just to decide, on the spur of the moment.’

Out of spite: he’d seen the look Maria Rosselli gave Carlo Bastone as she made the announcement. ‘Get her back,’ she’d said, drawing herself up under the high, dark, coffered ceiling of the lawyer’s office, looking down at them as though they were all pygmies. Focusing on Sandro. ‘Find her and bring her back to face the music. I won’t have her treat him like this. I’ll pay.’

‘That could be tricky.’ Luisa spoke thoughtfully.

‘She said, come round tomorrow morning,’ Sandro said, his eye drawn back to the square as the demonstrators moved on. ‘She said I could talk to him then.’

‘Better make sure she’s out of the way first.’

‘Hmmm,’ Sandro said, evading the issue. He couldn’t imagine how one would go about telling Maria Rosselli what to do. ‘I might need you for that,’ he said vaguely.

‘And what about the insurance claim?’ Luisa said, eyeing him with exasperation. ‘When are you going to fit that in, a bit of proper paid work?’

Sandro passed a hand over his forehead and found it moist: the evening was still warm. She was right, of course. ‘I’ll fit it in,’ he said. He’d probably only need to clap eyes on the man to know if he was scamming them. You could tell trauma, real trauma. Talk to the neighbours. ‘First thing maybe, get the lie of the land.’

Luisa made a sceptical sound, and he looked out into the darkness, avoiding her eye. An army vehicle was following the demonstrators slowly around the wide piazza, between the parked cars. A tiny thing, the soldiers inside it seemed to fill it right up, heads knocking on the roof, the driver hunched awkwardly over the wheel, like something out of the Keystone Cops. Not in their brief surely, though Sandro vaguely remembered something Bastone had said about Rosselli lobbying them over road permissions: he must have got their goat. Watching it all come to a halt, the procession and the vehicle in its wake, Sandro wondered: if the military had turned up here, who else could be keeping tabs on the Frazione Verde … the carabinieri?… the Polizia di Stato?

A movement along the terrace alerted him, he couldn’t have said why. A big man was sitting there smoking: he’d raised his hand for the waiter. On the little table in front of him, next to an untouched glass of grappa, lay an open notebook. A journalist? Did reporters still use pen and paper? The waiter was leaning down to him now, they were exchanging a joke, the tall man gesturing with his cigarette at the crowd. Sandro wondered if this man had written the article on Rosselli’s collapse that he’d read this morning, had been responsible for the amused, sly tone of the piece. The man seemed to detect the interest from their direction, and Sandro looked back at the soldiers.

When he had been a police officer they’d kept files on certain extremists, mostly right-wingers but once a communist who had a record for arson. It could only be justified if there were evidence of any criminal activity, in theory. As for AISI – Agenzia Informazioni e Sicurezza Interna, the secret service – well, they were a law unto themselves. Would they bother with a little bunch of Oltrarno hippy agitators? You never knew. If they thought those same hippies were in danger of actually getting something done, they might.

The door of the army vehicle opened and its occupants emerged untidily, crumpled by their confinement, adjusting their caps … three, four. One of them lit up a cigarette, holding it discreetly under his palm as he leaned against the car. Sandro couldn’t remember if that was allowed these days. He got to his feet, stretched.

‘Where are you going?’ asked Luisa, sitting back in her seat.

‘Nowhere,’ he said. ‘Just
due passi
, a little wander. I want to see what this is about. Hang on.’ He stepped down off the terrace.

There was an air of lazy ease about the small group of soldiers as he approached them: the procession seemed to have diffused into something harmlessly amateurish and had in fact stopped proceeding anywhere. Sandro felt a stab of pity for Giuli and all her passion. Roads had to be built, didn’t they? He assumed that the tallest soldier, turning at his approach, would be the senior officer, and so it turned out: he recognized the badge of a colonel. The man looked at him with that air of stern seriousness he knew well, cultivated in the army, city hall, even the police, to disguise the fact that one’s time was largely spent doing not very much at all.

‘Good evening,’ said Sandro easily, with a little nod in deference to the man’s uniform and token authority. He had, in fact, almost no respect for the army, but they could be decent company. ‘Sandro Cellini,’ he said. The officer barely inclined his head, and didn’t bother to supply his own name: why would he?

What the hell? thought Sandro. ‘I’m an investigator,’ he said, and the colonel frowned. ‘Looking into the Frazione.’

‘Really?’ said the man, and Sandro was taken aback by his eagerness, a sudden lively amusement in his eyes. ‘Well, that’s interesting. We’re looking into them ourselves.’ He smiled lazily. ‘Daft bunch, really, but it’s part of the job.’ This with a sidelong defensive look. ‘And there’s some – well – some funny types in the Frazione, I can tell you.’ The colonel put his hands in his pockets. ‘If we can be of any help,’ he said vaguely, turning back to look at the demonstration, which had now dwindled into no more than an affable crowd, their placards placed on the pavements while they chatted amongst themselves.

‘Well,’ said Sandro. Perhaps the offer had been no more than a courtesy, but that was no reason to let it lie. ‘That’s very kind of you.’

‘Of course,’ said the man, without turning back, eyeing the heads in the crowd again. ‘Honoured to be of help.’ Irony in his languid voice that Sandro couldn’t help but find appealing. ‘You know where we are? Behind the Botanic Gardens.’

Feeling himself dismissed, Sandro turned away, thinking. From the restaurant’s terrace Luisa was looking at him with mingled impatience and anxiety. What’s up now, he thought, what have I done now? Raising a hand in apology, he hurried back.

Picturing himself turning up at the barracks, his heart sank. What would they really tell him? Nothing. But the colonel – why hadn’t he even asked the man’s name? Since when had he been so timid in the presence of a uniform? – had offered possibilities. Sometimes these officials were bored enough to let stuff slip.

He sat back down beside Luisa, and again he wondered, if the army were monitoring the Frazione out here in the open, who else might be involved?

He could ask Pietro.

‘I’ll have to ask Pietro,’ he said, hardly aware that he was speaking out loud.

‘Pietro?’ said Luisa, setting down her coffee cup with sudden agitation. He looked at her expectantly.

‘What?’

‘I think you’ll find Pietro’s got other things on his mind,’ she said.

‘Oh, yes?’ said Sandro warily. So there
was
something going on. Some secret police operation and Pietro couldn’t talk about it. God knew, it could even be surveillance of this bunch, the Frazione. It all made sense to him now. There’d been silences: he’d always known the time would come, and the wedge would be driven between them. He couldn’t expect—

‘Gloria came to see me today.’ And Luisa sighed.

*

In the small bright white kitchen, Enzo was cooking. It was late, but it had taken both of them a while to realize that this was their life now. They could eat when they wanted. Fresh from her shower, Giuli leaned out over the waist-high balcony and looked into the trees around their apartment building. They’d moved in three months ago, at the beginning of the summer, and Giuli still couldn’t quite believe it.

From behind her the hissing of the frying chicken, the smells – lemon and thyme, Enzo had told her patiently, Giuli knowing nothing about what smelled of what in the kitchen – Enzo’s slow, considered movements around the compact space, the steamy warmth, all represented a kind of comfort Giuli could never quite bring herself to believe was hers. It was why she was looking out of the window; she could hardly contemplate the new life that had arrived for her, out of the blue, for fear it would disappear. But leaning out into the feathery canopy of acacias, she could smile and smile and smile into the evening air at her good fortune, and no one would see.

‘Oh,’ Enzo announced to her. ‘He called. Sandro called. While you were in the shower.’

Giuli turned back into the room, frowning. In his white apron, his idiot’s fringe pushed up and out of the way, as he smiled at her Enzo looked – perfect. His looks had never worried her: he was an oddball, for sure, round-faced, earnest, wore clothes his mother had bought him ten years ago just like he still let her cut his hair. (Let me do it, next time, Giuli had pleaded, and he’d just looked shy and mumbled something.) But over their year together, and particularly since they’d moved in together, he’d begun to look positively handsome to Giuli. She liked his ears, for example, neat and funny. She liked his eyebrows. She blushed. Enzo frowned.