The Monster of Florence (17 page)

“Surely she wouldn’t have made the accusation if—”

“That’s what she told my wife. She was in tears. She said, ‘I didn’t want to sign it but they made me. I didn’t want to go to prison, that’s why I signed it.’ Of course, as I say, she’s not right in the head.”

“No.”

“And no wonder with a father like that. What she must have gone through. They ought to take her away.”

“Are we going?” Noferini asked, impatient of the barman’s diatribe.

“Just a minute. There’s something I want to buy. You get in the car and I’ll be right with you.” He’d spotted a glass counter behind which were little stockings full of presents for the Epiphany, chocolates and whistles and plastic cars and coal made of sugar for when they’d been naughty. But would they arrive in time? And wouldn’t anything so flimsy get crushed in the post? Would Teresa already have bought them? Did it matter if she had since he was far away? Were they getting too old? If they were, they might be offended—in any case, he suddenly remembered, they’ll be back on the sixth of January because school would be starting.

“Have you decided?” the barman asked, poised.

“Nothing …” the Marshal muttered. “Nothing …”

A quarter to twelve. What was the use? He’d lain there for hours trying to get to sleep, or even pretending he was asleep, but it was hopeless. He was too old for this sort of thing. Only young people can fall asleep at the drop of a hat or stay in bed after a late night. Once you get past a certain age, you’re awake at your usual time no matter what. And as for trying to go to bed at nine in the morning …

The light … that might be the problem. He got wearily out of bed and closed the shutters behind the white curtain.

“That should be better …”

He got back under the blankets and tried again, reaching out across the empty space beside him. He felt unbalanced on his own in the wide bed and unconsciously pulled at Teresa’s pillow until it turned and occupied her place. He was so tired that his body ached and his eyes hurt. And he was hungry. He only noticed it now that he was settled there in the dark. He shouldn’t be hungry, not at twelve, because he never had lunch before about two. Nevertheless, his stomach rumbled and a sharp pain stabbed him in the middle. Would he sleep if he ate something? Got something down him with a big glass of warming red wine? The thought of moving put him off, not to mention the thought of cooking. There was no bread, of course, so he couldn’t make a quick sandwich. What was there? The last bit of sauce for pasta. He’d never stay on his feet until the water boiled. He could fancy something tasty, though … If he’d thought on he could have bought a couple of those toasted sandwiches Noferini always ate from that bar this morning. They’d have been ready in two ticks and with that cheese and salty ham inside them they’d have gone down very nicely with a glass of red.

The more he thought about it the more acute his hunger became and the more his tiredness tried to fight it down. Mentally, he went through the motions of getting up, getting dressed and going out to buy either sandwiches from a bar or bread from a baker’s, but even the thought exhausted him. He sighed and burrowed deeper into his pillow in the hope that the oblivion of sleep would bring escape from the mouth-watering menus he couldn’t drive out of his head.

“I’m on a diet!” he suddenly said aloud, and the machinations of his stomach lurched to a stop. Infuriated with himself he hauled over on to his left side and slammed his head down on the pillow. That settled that.

“Blast!” was the last thing he said aloud before falling asleep without prior notice. He’d barely had time to try and explain to a puzzled Teresa why he hadn’t just told her if he wanted something to eat when the phone rang and woke him up again. It was ten past twelve.

“Mario!” It was the voice of a very old and fractious woman.

“This is not—”

“Mario! Why didn’t you ring home last night?” A very old, very fractious woman from Calabria.

“Signora, you’ve got the wrong number.”

“Who are you?”

“Signora, you’ve—”

“What are you doing in my Mario’s house?”

After a while he gave up on her and replaced the receiver. He was now wide awake and as fractious as his caller. He turned the bell off on the private phone, leaving only the army phone on. Then he stumped into the kitchen and put on a pan of water to boil. While he was waiting for that he got dressed and remade the bed with military precision. He would just have to have an early night.

“The dog’s food …”

“What about the dog’s food?”

“He …”

With almost every question it was the same. She’d manage half an answer perhaps and then stop. It didn’t help to prompt her. They waited in silence, a silence as loud as a scream. She resembled her father, short and stocky. Her legs dangled like a child’s from the chair and she seemed sometimes to stretch her foot, trying to reach firm ground but barely touching the floor with the toe of her dusty shoe. She clutched the edges of the plastic chair as tightly as she could, her knuckles white with the strain.

“He made us eat it.”

“The dog food? Dog food out of a tin?”

“No. It was lungs and stuff, boiled up. And old bread … He said …”

“What did he say?”

Another silence. Then: “He said it was good enough for me and my mum. He said we were stupider than the dog.”

“He was fond of the dog?” The unaccustomed effort of keeping his voice down and his tone unaggressive was beginning to tell on
Simonetti. They had heard more silences than words from this poor creature in the last hour, but he had clearly no intention of letting up. The others, including the Marshal, would be almost as glad as the girl herself when this interview came to an end.

“What sort of dog was it?”

“It was brown. Not so big.”

It was lucky for Simonetti that he had the transcripts from the trial at the end of which the Suspect had been condemned for abusing his daughter. It meant he knew the answers. All he was doing was rehearsing the girl in his selection of the questions he thought relevant. How long must this have taken the first time round, the first time she’d had to tell these things?

“Was it a hunting dog?”

“Yes, he used to hit it with a stick and make it scream.”

“And did he hit you with a stick, too?”

“Sometimes.”

“Not often?”

Silence.

“Did he hit you with a stick every day?”

“Once he did when I didn’t do my homework.”

“And the other times?”

“The other times he used his fists.”

“Why did he do that? Can you remember?”

“When I wanted to go out.”

“And the other reasons?”

Nothing. They could hear their own breathing as they waited and waited. Her face, behind thick glasses, showed no sign of her inner struggle but her dangling feet made jerky little movements and sometimes she accidentally kicked herself in the ankle. Her wrinkled stockings showed the dirty mark this left each time. She was twenty-six, but it was impossible not to think of her as anything other than an ageing child. Of course, in real terms, that was exactly what she was. When she spoke after these lengthy pauses it was, quite normally, as though there had been no gap in the conversation at all.

“Sometimes he hit me because I didn’t want to go in his bed.”

“Was that at night?”

“Not always at night. He used to wake me up sometimes when I was asleep in the night or else in the morning.”

“And what happened when he did that?”

Silence. Her hands tightened even more on the chair.

“You have nothing to be frightened of here. We’re all your friends. If there are things you don’t like saying, you can just answer yes or no. When he made you get in his bed did he force you to have oral sex?”

“No.”

“He didn’t? What did he do? Did he do something else?”

“Yes.” Another long silence and the twisting, kicking feet. “He …”

The room had grown far too hot. There was no reason why they shouldn’t take their jackets off, the Marshal thought, but he didn’t move. It was impossible to break the tension her silences and sudden brief bursts of speech had caused to accumulate.

“He made me put his … thing … in my mouth.”

“I see. Can you remember how old you were the first time that happened?”

“Nine. Once my mum told him to give over, but he said shut up.”

“She was very frightened of him, wasn’t she? Did he hit her a lot, too?”

“He always hit her when he got mad at her and once he said he’d slit her throat.”

“Was that because she tried to stop him touching you?”

“No. It was because she spilt his pasta on the floor. There was something wet on the floor and she slipped and it spilt out of the dish and he ate her dinner and she had to eat the stuff that had spilt.”

“Did he once throw an axe at your mother?”

“Yes, but he missed her and it stuck in the door. It was because of the eggs.”

“What eggs? Did she break some and he was angry?”

“No. It was the countess brought them. She said I didn’t eat enough and she told my mum off because we had all those chickens and she never gave me any eggs or chicken to eat.”

“And why didn’t she?”

“They were for selling, they weren’t for us, so the countess brought us a dozen eggs and my mum made some tagliatelle. He thought they were his eggs and she’d pinched them so he threw an axe.”

“And did the countess ever bring you anything again?”

“Yes. A lot of things, but my mum never took them.”

“Because she was too frightened?”

“Yes.”

“How long did your father go on making you go to bed with him?”

“Until I was about nineteen. Then I left home and lived in the flat.”

“Signorina, you’ll have to forgive me for asking you this because I know how upsetting it is for you, but it’s very important that these people here today understand how your father treated you when you were small. Do you understand that?”

“I think so …”

“To make it less embarrassing for you, you can just answer yes or no if you want to.”

Remembering the failure of his last attempt at this, he kept it simple.

“Did your father, when he forced you to go to bed with him, put any objects inside you?”

“He put … he …” Her face burned and she pressed her thighs together, trying to stop it happening even now. “Cucumber.”

“Thank you. Do you know what a vibrator is?”

“Yes. A rubber ‘thing’ as well. He made me use a rubber ‘thing.’ He said if he let me go out I’d be doing it with anybody and I’d get pregnant. He said I was safer with him.”

“Tell me about the vibrator.”

“He made me use it.”

“On yourself?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes on him. You can’t get pregnant that way.”

“You’ve never been pregnant?”

“No. When I was late that time it was only because I wasn’t so well.”

“But you had to have a little check-up at the hospital, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“And you knew they would ask you if you might be pregnant?”

“He said they’d ask me. He said I hadn’t to tell them about him touching me. He said to tell them I’d been with boys.”

“But you hadn’t?”

“No. I’d never do that because of Father Damiani. Father Damiani—”

“Of course you wouldn’t. I know you’re a good Catholic and you go to church every Sunday.”

“I used to go every morning before I went in hospital.”

“Now I want to go on to something else. You can go on answering yes or no if you prefer. Did these things with your father sometimes happen outside your home, in the car, for instance?”

She opened her mouth but only a faint moan came out. The feet began jerking rapidly.

“Just take your time.”

Another little moan. Her breathing became audible. Even then, the eyes behind the thick glasses might have been blind they were so devoid of expression.

“Signorina?” Why didn’t he leave her be? Couldn’t he see by now that any break he made in the silence doubled its length?

After a further long wait she made another attempt that ended in a whimper. The next effort produced, “The car.”

“He took you out with him in the car? And your mother?”

“Both of us.”

“Did he take you to the woods?”

“Yes.”

“At night?”

Some sort of assent. A faint noise, a nod.

“Can you tell us what happened when he took you both to the woods?”

But her whimpers now were meaningless, there was no way of telling whether she was agreeing or protesting. Then even these
noises ceased. She fell totally silent. Only her feet moved and some small beads of moisture formed in the down on her upper lip. Her fear was the biggest presence in the room. The Marshal recognized it, the smell of it. A very particular odour of sweat which he associated with prison and with certain moments just before an arrest. And the asylum. He’d been trying to think where else he’d smelled it. It was in the asylum.

“She’s not right in the head, and no wonder …”

The barman at Pontino had said it.

“One of you would be in the parked car with him and the other would get out? Or sometimes he would get out? Was that because somebody had to keep watch? Did he make you take all your clothes off?”

There was no point in going on with this. Why didn’t he give up? She was paralysed with fear. How had she done it? Families like hers, though not criminal, regard the police as a threat rather than as protection. What could have got into this terrified, incoherent creature that made her get up one morning, years after it was all over, and present herself to the police to tell from scratch this story that was choking her now? The Marshal couldn’t see her doing it. And yet she’d done it, and not to the Marshal of carabinieri in her own village which would have been more comprehensible. He, at least, was a familiar figure, seen every day of her life, seen in the bar, in the grocer’s, chatting at the market in the square. That’s where you’d expect her to go—of course, she might have done that first and then the thing had snowballed.

“He used to take pornographic magazines along, didn’t he?”

“Can you tell us about that?”