The Gospel Of Judas (26 page)

The magistrate nodded as though she understood everything. She called for water and a plastic cup and she waited while he drank. And then she went on: ‘You had sex with her and when it was all over you killed her and threw her body over into the alleyway behind the
palazzo
, and then made your way to the airport? Was that it?’

Some part of him, a small, fragmented part watched all this from a distance and knew that he ought to laugh. It was a joke, an uproarious, absurd joke. He should have roared with laughter, wept with laughter, wet himself with laughter. It should have hurt his sides and made his ribs ache. He just shook his head. There were tears there, of course; but they were not tears of laughter. He saw his tormentor through a blur of tears, as though she was painted in watercolours and the paint had run in the rain. ‘Of course I didn’t kill her,’ he said quietly. ‘This whole thing is mad. I didn’t kill her. I love her.’

‘But you didn’t expect her to take her own life, did you?’

‘Does anyone expect such things?’

‘Apparently her husband did.’

‘So why don’t you listen to him?’

‘Because my job is to listen to everyone.’ She paused, considered the papers in front of her, considered the man in front of her, considered matters of guilt and innocence. ‘I would like you to make a formal statement,
signor
Newman. You are obliged by law to state what you know of the events surrounding the death of Mrs Madeleine Brewer. You are, of course, entitled to have a lawyer present if you wish.’

‘I don’t need a lawyer,’ Leo said.

‘Are you sure of that?’

‘Yes, I’m sure.’

‘Very well. I suggest you begin from the very start, when you woke up.’

And so they rehearsed the trivial, intimate events of that morning once more. Yet again he moved through the flat getting his breakfast, getting things ready, listening for a footfall on the landing outside the front door. Yet again Madeleine fitted her key in the door and opened it and walked into the apartment. Yet again she greeted him with a flat ‘Good morning’ and took his hands in hers, kissing the tips of his fingers, touching them to her face. They talked, they went out on to the terrace, he followed her back in. ‘Love me,’ she whispered once more. ‘Love me.’

‘Can you tell me the time that this happened?’ the magistrate asked.

Leo cast around vaguely. ‘About eight o’clock. My plane was at midday. She came about eight, I think. I hadn’t expected her so early.’

‘Why not?’

‘I didn’t know what time she’d come.’

Again she took his hands and led him into his bedroom. Again they lay down on the bed and her hands held him,
drew him towards her, drew him into her. Not like that first time, not the awful fumbling and the shame. This time she held him there while the small explosion took place inside her, his explosion and hers: a small organic miracle. The keys pattered at his back. ‘There,’ she whispered to him. ‘There.’ He felt her breath in his ear, felt the small impulse of air as much as he heard the words. ‘There,’ she said. ‘You’ve loved me.’

‘And what time did you leave the apartment?’

‘After ten o’clock. I remember hurrying. I remember hurrying Madeleine because we would be late. I think perhaps …’

‘What do you think?’

What did he think? He thought perhaps he had killed her. ‘I think perhaps she wanted me to.’

‘To what?’

He raised his voice in anger: ‘To be late. To miss the flight. I think perhaps she wanted me to miss the flight.’

And then the drive, the sudden change of mood, from the small, intimate triumph, to silence and withdrawal. She didn’t speak much on the journey, didn’t speak much at the airport, stood silent beside the check-in desk as he went through the business of ticket and passport, watched him with a neutral face as he disappeared beyond the metal detectors and the television screens.

‘That was the last I saw of her.’

‘What time was that?’

‘About eleven o’clock. I don’t remember exactly but it was about eleven o’clock. Eleven-fifteen. We were late for the check-in.’

The keys fell silent. A printer whirred back and forth and rolled out four pages of typescript. Leo read through words that were a mere skeleton of that morning, a mere
simulacrum of reality, a mere shadow of Madeleine’s presence there in the flat beside him, her body on his, her mind enveloping his.
She fucked other men
, said Jack.

‘I must ask you to surrender your passport, Mr Newman,’ the magistrate said as he signed the document. ‘You must not leave the country until such time as the preliminary investigation is at an end.’

The entrance hall of the ministry was a space of marble and travertine. It had the atmosphere of a station concourse. There was the same shifting crowd, some people with purpose – a train to catch, a hearing to attend – others with nothing to do but hang around to see what might happen. There was the same sense of randomness, of strangers thrown together by the arrogant and ridiculous hand of chance.

‘You are Mr Newman?’ One stranger amongst many, a young man with a sharp nose and a prominent Adam’s apple. He spoke English of a kind.

Leo frowned. ‘How do you know that?’

‘Press,’ the man said. ‘
Il Messaggero
. You can tell me of the woman’s death? The wife of the English diplomat? You can tell me?’ He brandished a small tape recorder. Leo saw wheels turning within the thing. He brushed the youth aside. ‘I can tell you nothing.’

The man hurried after him: ‘You can confirm the things that are being said?’ And suddenly, from nowhere that Leo could see, there was the stark magnesium flash of a camera.

He hurried through the huge doors, out into the dazzling light, down the steps to the pavement. Buses trundled by, swirling round the square pursued by shoals of mopeds.

He walked across the river. The water slid beneath the
bridge in a soft and pungent organic flow. There was the smell of asphalt and exhaust fumes, a miasma like the shifting mists of Hades or Sheol or wherever it was that the dead went. Madeleine walked beside him, his own image of Madeleine, Madeleine sharp and acerbic and normal, not a hysterical woman who would throw herself at men or from rooftops. She accompanied him through the narrow streets of the old city, all the way to the Palazzo Casadei where she slipped quietly away from him as he went into the entrance. From his glass box the porter watched. Leo climbed slowly up to the attic and let himself into the flat. The place was as desolate as it had been on that first occasion when he had looked it over with Madeleine. But then she herself had filled it, made it bright with her presence. Now it was as empty as a tomb.

He found her photograph, the one she had given him before she took him to the airport. It had taken on a strange votive power, the potency of an icon. He placed it on the table. It was like one of those pictures on a gravestone, a solemn image of a person who never was, a Madeleine he had never known. There was nothing else, that was the problem. He wanted her to walk in the door and greet him in her manner. With a kind of panic he even tried to imagine the event, the key turning in the lock, the door opening, Madeleine appearing there in the sudden space. But she had no face.
She fucked other men
. She had no face. Not the face of the half-smiling woman in the photograph, not any face at all. He had lost her and he had lost even the memory of her.
She fucked other men
. He picked the freesias out of their vase and threw them away. They were faded and withered and the water was foul.

The tyranny of the telephone. It rang throughout the day,
bleating like a tiresome child. Would he confirm that …? Did he deny that …? Voices sounding across a spectrum that ran from perfect English to native Italian with all the hybrids in between. Was he available for interview …? Was it true that …?

In the evening Goldstaub called. ‘Is it true?’ he asked.

‘Is what true? Can’t I have a moment of peace?’

‘Madeleine, Leo. It’s all over the English newspapers. Is it true?’

‘If you mean, is she dead? then the answer’s yes. I don’t know what else you may have been reading.’

‘Christ alive, Leo—’

‘I doubt it, I truly doubt it.’

‘Stop trying to be clever. Is there some kind of problem?’

‘The authorities seem to think I may have killed her.’

‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘The ridiculous is what they deal in.’

Later Jack called. His voice was dull and expressionless. ‘You’d better get hold of the English papers tomorrow,’ he said.

‘Why? What are they saying?’ But Jack had already hung up.

Next morning he found the letter. It was there in his postbox beside the porter’s lodge, the envelope addressed in unfamiliar handwriting and franked with a Rome postmark. He tore it open, thinking that it might be anything, a letter from a sympathiser, a letter from an accuser (plenty of phone calls from that kind already), a letter quite unconnected with the matter of Madeleine’s death. He never really expected a letter from beyond the grave. The expert in the handwriting of two thousand years ago, of the uncial
and the minuscule, could not even recognise Madeleine’s handwriting.

I’ve tried this before
, she had written.

An unpleasant sensation. A sensation of nausea, just below the breastbone; and dizziness, and a chattering in his mind as though a dozen voices were speaking to him all at once, a dozen whispers on the edge of audibility. He looked round for somewhere to sit, there in the shadowy entrance archway of the Palazzo Casadei with the porter watching curiously from his glass cabinet. It was easier to go through into the courtyard beyond, into the pool of daylight and the faint dribble of the fountain where papyrus grew green and bright. He sat on the step of the pedestal and peered at the page.

I’ve tried this before. Oh yes, I’m practised in this kind of thing, didn’t I tell you? That’s being disingenuous. I
didn’t
tell you because I didn’t want to frighten you away. This may be just another practice, in which case I’m writing it for no one but me. I want to apologise, of course. I want to ask forgiveness for imposing on you (who else can forgive but a priest?) and I want to say I’m sorry. You mustn’t blame yourself, that’s all. You mustn’t blame yourself. Just tell yourself it’s better like this. Good, clean break. Snap
.

Maybe I won’t be brave enough. Maybe I’ll sneak round and retrieve this letter before you see it. I’ve done that before. There’s a lot you don’t know, I’m afraid
.

M

He almost laughed when he read it. Through the mess of emotion he almost laughed. Certainly he smiled. But it really posed more questions than it answered, for still he could not find a reason within the words of her scrawl (written awkwardly in her car, he guessed, shortly before
she bought a bunch of freesias and took them round to his flat). Why hadn’t she left the note in the flat for him to find? Another part of the joke? Did you joke when you were about to kill yourself? What did you feel? Leo Newman, ex-priest (let’s be honest about it now), ex-lover, ex-everything, felt no inclination to kill himself, so why did Madeleine Brewer, who had so much – husband, children, friends, even a lover should she have wished to continue that little diversion – why should she? And not he?

He, who had always been able to answer every question, argue every point, suddenly had no answers at all.

He delivered his evidence to the investigating magistrate by hand. He was forced to wait for almost an hour to see her because she was in court. ‘There’s this,’ he said when finally she received him and she took it from him and read it with difficulty, being unfamiliar with both the English handwriting and the language.

‘What is this word?’ she asked, pointing.

‘Disingenuous.’

She tried it in Italian –
disingenuo
– and seemed to find sense in it. She read on down as far as the final, ironical salutation. ‘And it is certain that this is from the Englishwoman? This is her handwriting?’

‘I can vouch for the fact that it is not mine. You’d better ask an expert to say whether it is hers.’

‘This must be deposited as evidence. It must be examined. We must obtain attested examples of her writing.’

‘It means that she killed herself,’ Leo said.

The magistrate smiled on him as though he was being naïve. ‘It means there is further evidence in the case. What the evidence
means
is another matter altogether.’

*     *     *

In the dead time of the afternoon he went out to the nearest newspaper stall. The English newspapers were just in. He tucked them under his arm and returned home, where he sat at the table in front of the photo of Madeleine and rifled through the pages until he found it, down at the bottom of an inner page, a different photograph of her looking quizzically out of the past, questioning him from beyond the grave, beneath a headline that said:

SCROLL SCHOLAR PRIEST AND DIPLOMAT IN LOVE TRIANGLE

It was like one of those children’s games, a tongue-twister. Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pepper. Scroll scholar priest. The authorities were still making enquiries. There was no evidence to say whether it was an accident, or suicide, or worse. The article was carefully evasive. Body fluids were under forensic examination. And the article used that phrase beloved of English journalists but used nowhere else in the entire Byzantine edifice of the language:
Foul play has not been ruled out
, it said.

Later that day there were reporters camped outside the Palazzo Casadei, a small clutch of them with tape recorders and cameras. The next morning the story really broke, a synergy of stories, the sexual and the theological conspiring to make front-page news in the British papers: self-righteous outrage amongst the tabloids implying that they were guardians of the true faith no less than the Holy Father himself; a thoughtful leader in the
Times
that betrayed sophistry and priggishness in equal measure; sober, salacious details in the
Daily Telegraph
along with a photograph, snatched from some family album, of a smiling, faintly freckled face which had not the slightest hint of the wanton about it. S
CROLL EXPERT COVETS HIS NEIGHBOUR’S WIFE
, ran
the headline. Below it came the photograph of Leo, captured as he stepped out of the gates of the ministry, appearing to glare suspiciously at the camera when in fact he had merely been surprised by the flash.