The Killing Room (2 page)

It was all right for Luisa, she knew what these occasions were for, she just got down to work. He’d been cut loose.

*

Marina Artusi was a prize bitch – mostly on the subject of her only son and his foreign fiancée – but unlike most of the Florentine nobility at least she was entertaining. She didn’t waste any time on the usual insincere praise, and within five minutes Luisa had heard her scathing opinion of her future daughter-in-law’s fashion sense, fat English legs and performance in bed. ‘I can hear them at it!’ Marina said, outraged. ‘She spends all the time bossing him about.’

Guiltily Luisa tried and failed not to be amused, looking around to make sure that Sandro was not in earshot. This kind of conversation would have him squirming in shame.

To her mixed feelings he seemed to have disappeared. When she turned back, Marina Artusi was practically on tiptoe as she strained to get sight of something. Catching Luisa’s surprise, she drew herself back down.

‘Looking for someone?’ said Luisa, and an expression she hardly recognised appeared on Marina’s face: a soft, flushed
look. Luisa glanced from the glass in the woman’s hand – still full – across to the heads where her gaze had been directed.

‘Oh, someone I knew years ago,’ Artusi said, as if trying to catch her breath and affect composure at the same time. ‘You know we were in Damascus? Carlo and I. Oh, twenty-five years back at least.’

‘Yes?’ said Luisa, who had not known that. She was trying to find a face worthy of Marina’s besotted expression. All she could see was a sea of middle age, but then twenty-five years was a long time.

‘I heard he’d signed up for this place,’ said Marina. Then, carelessly, ‘With his wife, of course. I knew her too.’ Her aristocratic nose wrinkled.

Luisa looked up at the façade: they’d done a good job, no expense spared. For as long as she could remember, the palace had sat there crumbling away above the city, a blighted place. And – oddly, because Luisa wasn’t one prone to shivery intimations – she felt the creep of fine hairs rising at the nape of her neck, as though a draught had escaped from the building’s cellars and found its way to her.

‘There! There he is!’ Marina’s hand was on her arm, the other one pointing.

The man Luisa saw – stocky, square-shouldered, sixtyish – looked completely unexceptional to her. But he did have a full head of hair at least, even if it was grey, and she grudgingly admitted that most men looked good in a dinner suit. The James Bond effect. He leaned down a little to listen to something someone concealed from view on his other side was saying.

Marina Artusi let out a little sigh. ‘Martin,’ she said. ‘Martin
Fleming. I believe he has one of those British honours now.’ She spoke lightly, but Luisa wasn’t fooled. Marina had obviously been stalking the man. ‘A
cavaliere?
Sir Martin. He was something at the British Embassy. I never found out what he actually did, but we went to an awful lot of cocktail parties there. That English restraint.’ Her eyelids quivered. ‘Carlo couldn’t stand him, of course.’

Of course. Marina’s husband Carlo had been a stranger to restraint: he had died of a heart attack in the arms of another woman ten years earlier. As they looked, a woman stepped out from behind Sir Martin, a small person with chopped-off grey hair and a sallow complexion – and Luisa saw that he was holding her hand. The snort of impatience that escaped Marina Artusi then was much more characteristic of her.

‘He got away then?’ said Luisa, before she could check herself.

Marina Artusi turned, a look of narrowed derision on her face. ‘They were childhood sweethearts,’ she pronounced, contemptuous. Then, with satisfaction tinged with shock, ‘My God, she’s aged.’

At that moment, almost as though despite the hubbub he might have heard the exchange, the man glanced in their direction. To Luisa’s dismay, Artusi immediately raised a hand. At her age, thought Luisa (meaning, our age).
No, no
.

But immediately the man – this Martin Fleming – smiled back. He even took a step towards them. Marina Artusi took several steps in his direction, tugging Luisa behind her, and they were brought up close.

‘Marina,’ he said. ‘After all this time.’ And, addressing his wife, ‘You remember Marina, darling?’

What struck Luisa first was that after twenty-five years he had remembered Marina’s name without hesitation. But then he turned to Luisa and, seeing his smile, his crinkled eyes close to and focused on her, she couldn’t help but smile back, and she abruptly understood exactly what Marina Artusi meant. Charm, or something. Luisa turned hastily away and found herself looking instead at Martin Fleming’s wife, the small greyhaired woman whose hand he still held. She seemed distinctly amused.

Beside Luisa, Marina Artusi cleared her throat in annoyance.

*

Out of sight of Luisa and feeling quite adrift, Sandro turned with a start when a hand fell on his shoulder. The young man with the big jaw who’d been listening to the Professor was now flashing a broad smile that did not quite distract Sandro from the bulge of trapezoid muscle pushing the line of his expensive suit out of shape at the shoulder.

‘Sandro Cellini?’ said the young man, the smile earnest and widening.
‘The
Sandro Cellini?’

Sandro laughed with disbelief. ‘I don’t know about that,’ he said warily. ‘It’s my name.’

‘How modest,’ said the man – not much more than a boy, he seemed to Sandro, for all his muscle. There was an eagerness about him, like a well-trained schoolboy. ‘You tracked down that English girl, a couple of years back. And wasn’t there a fraud case? The murdered bank manager? Not to mention that political sabotage business.’ He held out his hand. ‘Giancarlo Vito.’

‘You’re well informed,’ said Sandro. ‘It’s not always so eventful.’ The days spent staring out of the window, or recording a young wife’s visits to the hairdresser, for her paranoid husband.

‘I know,’ said Vito, clasping his hands behind his back, standing to attention like a cadet. The stance made his shoulders look impossibly broad, and made Sandro feel like his grandfather. He straightened. ‘I’m in the same business,’ said Vito. ‘So it’s kind of a professional interest, you might say. Not that I’m my own boss, like you.’ He almost bowed. ‘I work for the Stella d’Argento.’

The investigations agency whose emblem was a sheriff’s badge, advertised on billboards out towards the airport and in all the professional circulars.

‘Mostly cybercrime, the bread and butter stuff,’ he went on apologetically. ‘I’m sat behind a computer. Not very exciting.’ Vito looked around with a young man’s hunger, the glitter of the evening reflected in his eyes.

Sandro opened his mouth to ask what he was doing there, then closed it again. One superannuated old-school detective with rounded shoulders, one handsome young cyber-expert standing to attention.

‘And you’ve got an elegant wife, so I hear,’ said Vito, turning back to Sandro politely. ‘You see, you’re ahead of me there, too.’

All this self-deprecation was beginning to niggle. What was he after? Sandro was aware of the charm, the open smile, throwing up a smokescreen, but it worked all the same. The boy got away with it.

‘Yes,’ said Sandro, looking around for her. ‘I’m a lucky man. Five years married by the time I was your age. At least.’ But
turning back he caught the first sign on Giancarlo Vito’s face of something underneath the charm: a fleeting sly look of pleasure and calculation, of the anticipation of conquests.

On the terrace below them someone was tapping on a microphone, ascending a podium. A crowd was gathering. Without looking, Sandro knew that the speaker would be Bottai.

‘Better get down and show willing,’ said Vito, patting Sandro on the shoulder. ‘Catch you later, perhaps? I’d love to hear your stories.’ And he and his smile were gone, leaving behind them the whiff of doubt, and Sandro’s mood sinking like a pricked balloon.

His stories, indeed. What had that been about? Sandro shifted on his feet, the warm champagne glass in his hand. With the boy’s disappearance the evening felt like a net drawing tighter around him in the dark, all these wealthy people in their satin-lapelled dinner suits and their jewels nothing more than shiny fish. That draught from the cellars had been the start.

It came back to him that the builders had found something during the works on this place, a piece of gossip that had dissipated almost as soon as it appeared. Bones? Sandro doubted it. Human remains weren’t easily hushed up. Something archaeological, maybe. You couldn’t put a spade in the ground here without turning up a Roman brothel.

Turning away, Sandro saw a bar which had been set up under some bougainvillea beneath the illuminated façade, and headed straight for it. Feeling the champagne sour his stomach, he asked for a beer. A big dishevelled man, so ungroomed he might have been a gatecrasher, stood at the other end of the long zinc counter. He was talking to a young woman Sandro recognised as part of
the well-bred rent-a-crowd. The man’s big paw came to rest on her slender knee; she looked down at it, debating her next move. Before she could make it, Sandro reached between them, setting his glass down on the bar. They looked at him, united in affront.

‘Sorry,’ said Sandro. The girl adopted the faintly bored expression she probably reserved for the bumbling elderly. Sandro turned to the big scruffy man. ‘Sandro Cellini,’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘I’m so sorry. I’m not used to these occasions. Formal occasions.’ He grimaced apologetically. At his shoulder the girl evaporated.

‘Thanks for that,’ said the man, offering neither his hand nor his name as he watched her go.

‘I’m so sorry,’ said Sandro, affecting innocence. ‘I’m sure she’ll be back.’

The bearded man grunted sourly. ‘There’ll be another one,’ he said, then groaned. ‘Christ, here they come,’ he muttered, and, sliding heavily off his stool, gestured to the barman, who handed him a beer without a word.

He must belong here, then. Sandro looked to see who had ousted him. A middle-aged couple, certainly foreign, were making their way up the steep path that led up the side of the garden from the lower levels. The man, climbing doggedly in the candlelight, was wiry, with the lined skin of an Anglo-Saxon who has spent too much of his life in the sun. The woman was pale and unmade-up: she had a country look about her, standing there awkwardly brushing at her silk dress as if she’d just taken off an apron. Sandro turned to look back after the big man, glimpsed him lumbering down through the garden. Maybe it’s me, thought Sandro, with dour pleasure.

‘I’m damned if I’ll listen to that PR rubbish,’ the new arrival was saying tersely, oblivious to Sandro, though it seemed to him the wife, if wife she was, was trying to catch his eye. ‘He’s got my money, hasn’t he?’ The man was talking in English, with an accent. American? No, thought Sandro, Australian. Paid-up residents. ‘I’m not boring myself to tears into the bargain, I’ve listened to enough bullshit in my time. They’re not our sort.’ The woman murmured, distressed, but the husband just turned his back on her and called the barman impatiently.

These people were so wealthy: why were they so discontented? Only a young man like Vito would hanker after what they had.

Down below them on the terraces the booming voice had stopped. Sandro peered down. From the far side of the stage a camera flashed, and Sandro blinked. He hoped there wouldn’t be a picture of him in
La Nazione
tomorrow. He rubbed his eyes. He saw the usual faces, the Florentine nobles and freeloaders, and distinct from them the incomers, the foreigners. Prospective residents of the Palazzo San Giorgio. A big woman, very old but still imposing, with cropped fine white hair and a strong profile; and a handful of couples. Average age early sixties: on the cusp of retirement, he supposed, although he knew the wealthy often got there early.

Sandro watched as the Professor ducked his high forehead to dodge the trailing jasmine above him on the pergola and raised a hand. Had they opened the floor for questions already? Maybe the end was in sight.

‘What kind of get-out clauses are you offering, Gastone?’ The Professor spoke drily, familiarly. At his elbow his wife smiled
a little, provocative. Her hair, Sandro thought, momentarily fascinated, was extraordinary, dark red-gold. There’d been something in the way she’d looked at that young man with the broad shoulders. Vito. She put a hand to her hair as if she knew Sandro was watching. A titter ran along the back

‘It’s all in the literature, Professor Scardino,’ Bottai said smoothly. ‘Why? Has your lovely wife already spent it all in the Via Tornabuoni?’ The titter faded, then resurfaced, and Sandro looked for the woman. Her head was thrown back, her mouth open in a full-throated laugh. Men were staring at her.

Behind Sandro at the bar the Australian wife’s sniffling became audible and he turned. Feeling the husband’s pale eyes settle on him, Sandro held out his hand. ‘Welcome to Florence,’ he said in English. ‘Sandro Cellini. I’m a . . . I’m here with my wife.’ As if that explained everything. He tilted his head, looking at the woman. ‘Are you . . . is everything all right?’ He felt the husband looking at him with flat hostility.

‘Marjorie Cameron,’ she said, holding out a limp hand. ‘From Melbourne. We’re here for a year. My husband – this is my husband, Ian – he’ll be retiring soon, and we thought it would be a nice base for me. He works all over the world, you see, an engineer. Something in my eye.’

The non-sequitur took Sandro aback until he realised she was explaining her pink-eyed look. ‘There’s a lot of pollen, too,’ he said and gratefully she began to talk about allergies. She’d been pretty once, he registered as she brightened.

‘I would never have chosen Italy,’ said the engineer, interrupting her. Looking at his tough, lined face, his gingery eyebrows, Sandro reflected reluctantly that the Anglo-Saxons
often seemed rude to start with. You couldn’t condemn them straight off. ‘But the ladies like it.’

Sandro was about to consider that statement when a noise started up somewhere far down the garden, a shrill yelping overlaid with a woman’s cries of distress: a sound of panic and fear. It reverberated through the evening; heads turned, the tenor of the conversation changed. And then a man’s voice, raised and blustering. Sandro took advantage of the diversion to edge away from the Camerons and head downhill, following the sound.