The Killing Room (13 page)

They’d opened the suitcase in the back of the police van in the end. Donato heard sounds coming from inside the vehicle and a man had climbed out grey-faced. The case was big and very heavy: it had slid out of their hands and hit the pavement with a crunch when they’d lugged it out.

He had no idea how long it might have been in the compartment. When they’d asked him the question, Donato had thrown a sidelong glance at Joe, and answered truthfully. Joe just gibbered. Might have gone on at Pisa, at Vespucci, or here at Santa Maria Novella. People walked up with their suitcases, put them on, hung about smoking and chatting, then got inside when the bus was ready to leave. Some made a fuss about positioning their luggage, others just shoved it in. Their business.

Donato had seen the dreadlocked guy, with his dogs and his teenage girlfriend wriggling up beside him, all the while sitting there rolling a cigarette as cool as a cucumber as the policeman leaned down to ask him questions.

He might have been driving around for three, four days with it in the hold. Leaning against the long fence around the pound, in the flickering yellow of the streetlight, his bus sitting somewhere in there in the dark, Donato lit another cigarette.

*

It had seemed like a good idea at the time. At the first shafts of thin grey dawn, Elena turned over in the stuffy bedroom and groaned.

In the growing light Elena rolled over in her bed and buried her face in the pillow. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, but somewhere in the night the tide had turned, hadn’t it? At two in the morning, not yet able to sleep, it had still seemed exhilarating, the things she had said entertaining enough to make her smile in the dark. But around three-thirty, in her sleep, perhaps even dreaming, her body, or some deep cortex of the brain, informed her that she’d behaved like a fool.

‘It’s all right,’ Lludic had said. ‘I don’t intend to take advantage of you.’ And then in the next breath, ‘But come and see my room, why don’t you?’ And his broad face split in a grin. ‘Just to give the old biddies something to gossip about?’

It had seemed like a good idea at the time.

The pillow still smelled unfamiliar and suddenly Elena sat bolt upright in the gloom, pulling at the sheet. No. No. Straining to see.

Her heart slowed: she was in her own bed. She climbed out of it, one hand to her forehead to stave off the dull throb behind her eyes. She pushed at the shutters, letting in a crack of soft
grey light; the streetlights must have blinked off, the air was misted and the pavement slick with the night’s rain. Had it all been a dream? Not all.

He had kissed her: that much really had happened. At least he hadn’t done it in front of all those stuffed shirts in the library, though he might as well have done, parading her through their midst as they pretended not to watch. Standing back as he pressed the button to the lifts, making sure they could see.

Standing at her window now, Elena turned her face into her shoulder and smelled him on her skin – along with something else. Her head ached. On the threshold of his rooms he’d kissed her too hard, she hadn’t liked it. But then he’d let her go, abruptly, and had turned to flick on the lights.

You could just about see that his apartment had started out all white and cream like the rest of the place, a lot of tasteful reproduction furniture, a vast bed and some floor-to-ceiling swagged curtains across two long windows. But the pale good taste of the place was pretty much obscured by around fifty unframed canvases stacked around the walls, oil abstracts that might have been lines or skies or horizons or breaking waves, of varying colours both muted and violent. She stared, putting a hand to her mouth to feel where his mouth had been. She could taste blood.

‘Don’t tell me what you think of them, please,’ he said roughly. He was at a small table in a corner of the room and she heard a chink and splash as he poured.

She thought they were beautiful. She had said nothing. Now at her own window she leaned a little forward on the windowsill and breathed in the moist grey morning air.

He’d given her a glass of something strong; she thought it was something like whisky only sweeter. She’d hardly drunk it, did little more than feel the burn in the back of her throat, but she’d stood as close to the door as she could with the glass in her hand.

He watched her a minute then suddenly, like the sun coming out, he grinned broadly again, back to the man he’d been earlier: a bit of an idiot, a bit of a show-off, sheepish with it. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Bad habit, I suppose. Just in case someone might be passing, you have to give them a show.’

He meant the kiss. Elena looked at him, trying to work him out, but the smile got her in the end. She turned to shut the door behind them.

‘You don’t paint them in here?’ she said, thinking of the mess. They stood on spattered dustsheets, but she could see that the spilled paint was largely dry flakes.

‘They’re for show,’ he said, downing his drink and pouring another one, holding out the decanter to her across the room.

‘For girls like me,’ she said, shaking her head.

‘You’re not a girl,’ he said. ‘You’re a woman.’ She couldn’t tell if he was insulting her or praising her: she concentrated on keeping her expression indifferent.

‘Are they recent?’

‘Some of them,’ he said. ‘Do you want to talk about art? Really?’ He went to the window and pushed it open. ‘Maybe you want to go?’ He sounded suddenly weary, and a little unhappy. Perhaps he was a tortured artist, after all. The pictures at least were real.

‘Walk back past that lot in the library on my own?’ She’d
crossed the room to stand beside him in the window. ‘Let’s give it an hour or so.’ And he’d put an arm around her shoulders, light for all his bulk, and brotherly.

Nothing happened.
As if she was explaining herself to her uncle – or to John.
We just talked.

What they’d mostly done was gossip, or rather, she’d listened to him, idly.

‘Athene’s next door,’ he’d said, pointing along the façade. ‘The old woman – I mean, the very old woman. She was a poet, did you know that? Very well known. A hundred lovers, she told me. She said she’d asked to be put in the apartment next to me, because she’s not easily shocked. A hundred lovers, and I don’t know if she’s ready to call it a day, either.’ He’d poured himself another glass.

Elena had craned her neck. The old woman’s windows were open and light flooded out, but there was nothing to see. What a life, she thought. Did a hundred lovers make you happy?

On the terrace people were talking, low and civilised. It was late now, they must have come back from their dinner. Somewhere further off someone was having an argument, hissed furious words: the Australian and his wife.

Further down, a figure occupied the canvas lounger. All that was visible of her by the light of the candle almost guttered down to nothing in its glass funnel, was a smooth calf, gleaming very white, and a finger – her finger, with a long, dark, pointed nail – moving absently up and down.

‘It’s Therese,’ said Danilo next to Elena. ‘You’ll have seen her. Pretty as a picture.’ Therese was talking to someone: as they watched, a man’s hand came out under the parasol and
took hers as it moved, holding it still. Elena had turned away from the window then.

He’d showed her his pictures, one after the other, in a near silence she hadn’t liked to break, once or twice simply mentioning where he’d been when he’d painted something. He spent a lot of time in the Maremma, he said. He liked the Etruscan caves. What could she say, anyway?
They’re lovely.
She could see him in some underground lair somewhere, painting with a stick.

She didn’t know what time it had been when she’d left, but the Palazzo San Giorgio had subsided into silence. The corridor lighting was dimmed, the cream and gold softened to dove grey.

‘I’d better take you,’ he’d said, carelessly, ‘or you’ll get lost, and I’ll get into trouble again.’

Then what? In the half dark of the early morning, Elena turned from the window to fumble in a bowl on her dressing table for a foil packet of painkillers she knew was there somewhere. She swallowed two dry. She felt cold suddenly, and pulled a sweater at random from a drawer. An awful feeling came over her, the knowledge of having done something really stupid.

The doorman had been nowhere to be seen – it must have been past midnight, although there were still voices from the garden – and Elena wondered if he slept here, or had a home to go to. Lludic had pressed a button to the side of the big door and then he’d just stood there, smiling faintly in the dimmed lights.

The heavy door had closed behind her, noiseless on oiled hinges until it clicked to, and she’d lingered on the street. The flawless façade of the Palazzo San Giorgio loomed, not golden on this side but grey, splashed here and there with the garish
streetlighting. It stood blank and closed against her, and Elena had the distinct impression, quite suddenly, that it was hostile. That behind it was a place where violence collected like dust in neglected corners; and with that thought the memory of what it was like to pass through those long, noiseless, cushioned corridors came back to her with a sense of dread. The last thing, the very last thing she would want, Elena realised, was to be locked in there for the night with the wealthy couples, listening to their muffled sounds. She thought of Lludic’s shadow on the walls of the corridors as he paced back to his rooms, like the minotaur in his labyrinth, and then, as if on cue, she heard something, inside. No more than the squeak and grind of a shutter being closed, slowly and firmly, but she stood quite still, for some reason her heart pounding as though she’d been witness to something awful.

And then there was silence. As it grew, a kind of relief washed over her like jubilation, that she was on the outside.

There was home, three steps away. It seemed so odd to Elena as she stood there, that her little bedroom and the Palazzo San Giorgio’s featureless corridors should be so close, but worlds apart. No wonder John had stood there watching, wondering.

Jingling her keys in her pocket, she’d stood by the dumpster where on her way over to the unveiling she’d dropped the last of John, the CDs. Did she hate him? At that strange hour – one, two? – in the soft darkness nothing had seemed cut and dried. All that she knew was, he had disappeared, and it was all she had left of him. She’d stood on the bar that opened the dumpster’s lid, it had come up with a gust of garbage stench and there was the supermarket bag under a couple of pizza
boxes. Elena had reached in and pulled it back out, holding it to her as she looked around. No one to see her, fishing around in other people’s rubbish.

And now as the dawn brightened, she heard the tortured groan of the garbage truck’s lifting mechanism. She turned over at the morning sound, the distant clatter of a dumpster being upended, and buried her face. Another couple of hours and the thing would have been emptied, gone forever. Which was, of course, what should have happened.

There was something about the pre-dawn light: it made you face the worst. John would say he was one place, when he was somewhere else; he would come in after she was in bed and she’d hear him moving around, removing things from his pocket, sending messages. There could have been someone else, while he was with her, and she had just refused to see it. John had used her as a stepping point. Her window was all he wanted.

He found us all so interesting
, the Englishwoman – Juliet Fleming – had said, sipping her whisky. John hadn’t been her lover, he’d been a sniper commandeering an innocent family’s bedroom, or a spy moving in next door to his mark. What had he been after in the Palazzo San Giorgio?

Slowly Elena took off her clothes, and stepped under the shower until the water ran cold.

Chapter Thirteen

T
HE ALARM SOUNDED IN
Sandro’s dream, a dream in which he’d been standing with his head back, gazing upwards to a high window from which a woman was letting her hair down for him to climb. She wore rectangular glasses and smiled down at him sadly.

He opened his eyes a crack and winced, putting out a hand to feel for his wife. But Luisa’s side of the bed was empty. His head hurt.

Sandro sat up gingerly, and something fell to the floor with a thud. Leaning over, he saw that it was his briefcase.

‘Sweetheart?’ His mouth felt dry and furry, and he had a nasty feeling in his gut, of dread, or shame. He tried again. ‘Darling?’

Luisa appeared in the doorway, in her good suit and stockinged feet, a glass of water in her hand.

‘You were snoring,’ she said, eyeing him. ‘Like a boar.’

‘What time is it?’ Sandro said, humbly. ‘I’m sorry about the snoring. I think I had too much—’

‘To drink,’ she said, and handed him the water. ‘Yes.’ But her expression softened, just enough. ‘I’ve got to get in early,’ she said, and sighed. ‘Frollini has something up his sleeve.’

Sandro realised they hadn’t talked all yesterday.

‘I heard what happened,’ she continued, arms folded. Reading his mind again. ‘To your predecessor. Coffee’s on.’ And she turned and padded into the kitchen.

Sandro drank the water, then refilled the glass, standing in his undershorts at the kitchen tap. He rubbed a hand over his chin. Things to do.

‘It all happened very quickly,’ he said, sitting down in front of his coffee. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t talk to you. I needed to get to grips with it myself, and I thought we’d go over it when I got back, but then,’ Sandro ended lamely, ‘things got away from me.’ He felt hollow, and realised he hadn’t eaten anything last night except peanuts.

With another sigh that marked the thaw proper, Luisa sat down beside him. Downing the cup, Sandro felt the coffee enter his system. Things were improving.

‘How about I tell you what I know,’ said Luisa. ‘And then you can tell me what you were doing till two this morning.’

He looked at her, hangdog, and took another sip in answer.

‘Scardino and his wife were in yesterday, her spending his money. But I wouldn’t say she wears the trousers, not by a long chalk. He said something about . . .’ She frowned. ‘Competition? Vito introducing an element of competition?’ She shrugged. ‘And Marina Artusi—’