The Rain Beat On the roof of the car and Sandro sat inside, listening, alone. He needed to be on his own, to get things in the right order.
Luisa had known that; it was one of the many good things about Luisa, that she could read the runes. ‘Come on, Giuli,’ she’d said briskly to the girl, hauling her to her feet. ‘Let’s make ourselves scarce. Let’s go find Cat Lady.’ Giulietta had been going over it all again and again until Sandro’s head hurt. ‘So it was him?’ she said, after the waiter had left.
All Sandro could think, his heart going down like a stone, was no, no, no. But he had no reason to doubt what Beppe DiLieto had said.
Sure, he was a dubious sort, but, then, seasonal waiting staff always were, drifters, barely employable. Watching the man talk, Sandro had noticed that DiLieto’s eyes were a different colour, one a faded grey-blue and the other yellowy hazel; there was a breed of cat, he dimly remembered, with the same combination. It lent him an otherworldly air. The hands shook a little, he combed his thinning hair over, he was on the camp side but that was neither here nor there, waiters often were. He’d been decent; he’d come all the way over to Nello on his day off, hadn’t he? When Luisa called, and never mind if a whole season of unemployment yawned ahead of the man now the rain had come.
Sandro was sitting in the car on the Via Romana, outside the gate to the Boboli, parked between two dumpsters, opposite the darkened window of the Galleria Massi. Through the grey skein of pouring rain he could see the dark stretch of woodland; he stared up at it, as if willing it to give him an answer, but it gave nothing back.
There had been a time, such as the occasion he’d gone looking for a murderer in a godforsaken corner of the city’s outskirts between highways and electricity substations and trailer parks, and had found him there, that Sandro had had a spark of instinct for a terrible place. He was a rational man, but he couldn’t quite shake off his primitive belief that violence left its mark behind it, as if somehow it turned the air bad. From this stretch of green alleys and ancient trees, though, he felt nothing.
The rain battered out its tattoo on the car roof; you have no time left, it told him, no time to lose. No time to sit here waiting for that worn-out old instinct to finally kick in and say, here. Somewhere across the street a light went off.
What was the hurry? The girl was almost certainly dead by now, if she hadn’t been dead for days, hastily buried under the dust and gravel on the hillside above him. They’d find her eventually. It was the answer he’d been avoiding for days, since he saw that photograph in the paper.
They’d showed it to Beppe DiLieto and his face crumbled, just a little, with self-reproach. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘I should have said something earlier, shouldn’t I?’
No need to ask why, or where he’d been when the Carabinieri had been asking questions – from the moment Beppe DiLieto, scarecrow-thin, lifted his tremulous hand to correct Sandro’s order, four coffees, to say, ‘And I might have a little something in mine, if you please,’ you could see that he was a bit of a drinker. Laid off for the winter and crawling home with a box of cheap booze, he’d only resurfaced to go back to the supermarket, probably; what would he be doing reading newspapers?
Sandro had been patient with him, felt a tug of fellow feeling for a man long past his best. He let him drink his coffee that was more grappa than coffee, then beckoned for another one. The old padrone had looked mistrustfully at Beppe DiLieto, but Luisa had given him a pleading smile. ‘A favour,’ she said, ‘just another fifteen minutes?’ and he relented, though when he set DiLieto’s little cup down it rattled disapprovingly.
Then at last the trembling hand was still, and the coffee gone. He gazed into the dregs, his two-coloured eyes watery.
‘I served them, yes, I served them,’ DiLieto began. ‘It was a beautiful day, I think I was serving five, maybe six tables on the terrace when he arrived. He arrived first, you see; she came about five minutes after. The other tables were mostly Americans, one Japanese couple.’
All foreigners, thought Sandro. No Italian would sit outside in November, even if the sun was shining.
‘I was surprised when he sat down,’ said the waiter, as if he’d read Sandro’s thoughts, ‘because it wasn’t that warm. Of course, when she arrived – the situation was clearer. When I saw that she was English.’
‘What did you think of them?’ said Sandro, curiously.
‘What did I think?’ DiLieto sighed. ‘I don’t know if I. . .’ He wrinkled his papery forehead in an effort to retrieve what he had thought. He nodded and when he spoke it was with care. ‘I thought at first he was a grandfather, or a more distant relative, even a guardian, perhaps. And she was a foreign girl who had to be polite to an old man.’
Fair enough, thought Sandro, I can live with that. But DiLieto went on.
‘Of course, after – what happened, that went out of the window.’
Here it comes, thought Sandro. ‘What do you mean?’ he said carefully. ‘Do you mean – the newspaper report? So you did see it in the paper, about the girl?’
Beppe shook his head, ‘Not really, I mean, I might have glanced at it, but I didn’t realize it was that girl. No. I meant, after what happened, later. What he did to her – I mean –’
‘Take this step by step, please.’ Sandro felt hope ebb away. He prompted; ‘You served them.’
Again DiLieto seemed to be making an effort to be methodical. ‘He had a small glass of Four Roses.’ He paused. ‘And she had a glass of champagne.’
‘Huh,’ said Sandro, thinking, at eleven-thirty in the morning? And before he could stop himself, ‘That must have been expensive.’
‘He paid,’ said DiLieto, and Sandro nodded; a gentleman.
‘Did he – seem to be prompting her to take alcohol?’ he asked.
Slowly DiLieto pondered. ‘I wouldn’t say so,’ he said. ‘She seemed to be full of high spirits, it seemed to me that they were drinking because they were celebrating. Almost as if – well, young couples on holiday do it, honeymooners.’ His eyes were distant, as if trying to recall an occasion on which a morning drink was innocent.
Iris March had said that Veronica Hutton had already had some wine before she left the apartment, hadn’t she? She must have been close to drunk, after a third, maybe a fourth glass?
‘Did you hear any of their conversation?’ said Sandro.
‘Snatches,’ said the waiter, still distant. ‘You know, I had other tables to serve.’
‘But you heard some of what they said?’
‘Yes.’ He hesitated. ‘That was when – the last table, the one next to them, I – this woman sat there and she took her time ordering, so in fact I did hear what they were saying then. They were talking about art.’ He frowned. ‘Yes, that’s true, they were talking about art. She was getting out a sketch book to show him, very innocent.’
He spoke resentfully, as if the innocence was an affront.
‘But in fact not innocent?’ Sandro prompted him. The hand was trembling on the table again, but Sandro didn’t want to buy him another drink, not yet.
The waiter seemed to have shrunk into himself at the table. He shrugged. ‘Florence is full of old men who take advantage of young women, by talking to them about art,’ he said. ‘You know this. She was full of excitement, she’d had a bit to drink.’
‘And he – what?’ Sandro wanted at all costs not to lead this man with his questions. ‘He took advantage of her?’
‘He wasn’t in a rush to do it,’ said Beppe DiLieto, in a voice rich with disillusion. ‘I was there long enough – the woman who – the woman on the next table wanted a camomile, she said, then wasn’t sure if she wanted lemon, typical Florentine artistic sort of skinflint. And he got out his own sketchbooks, showed her some of his stuff, was telling her about the commissions he’d had.’ He paused. ‘I lingered a bit, because I thought they might want another, while I was there.’
‘And you wanted to be sure of the kind of man he was?’
DiLieto shrugged. ‘I wanted to see which way it would go, yes. Because he didn’t strike me as that kind of guy, to begin with. Just goes to show.’
‘She was – she’s a pretty girl, isn’t she?’ Luisa said quietly.
‘Yes,’ said DiLieto, ‘I suppose she was. And she had her hand on his arm, maybe that’s what did it.’
‘Did what?’ Sandro wondered what effect that might have on him, under the influence of a glass of whisky, on a bright November morning, when the end of his life had just come into view.
‘That’s how it goes, I’ve noticed,’ said Beppe. ‘Give a girl a drink, she loses her bearings a bit. She was excitable, anyway.’
On her way to meet her lover, thought Sandro. He was refusing to believe all this; he needed to be more objective. He pushed on.
‘So she put her hand on his arm. And then what?’
‘I was on my way in to get the orders,’ DiLieto said, ‘and that’s when he made his move.’ He was sitting back in his chair, fleshless as a ventriloquist’s dummy under the cheap suit.
Sandro saw Giulietta shift in her seat, but she didn’t say anything. They were keeping pretty quiet, for once, the women.
‘What move?’ Something in Sandro’s mouth tasted sour.
‘Touched her up,’ said DiLieto. ‘A hand in the wrong place. She might have given him a peck on the cheek, and he misinterpreted it.’
‘Might have?’
‘Well, I did see her lean up and put her face near his, like she was going to give him a kiss, when she had her hand on his arm. Just as I was going back inside.’
Sandro leaned in. ‘What did you see, exactly?’ He was clutching at straws. ‘Sounds like it was her making the move, not him.’
DiLieto had that funny, sad, watery look in his eyes. ‘I wasn’t going to hang about staring; we get all sorts doing all sorts in public, American honeymooners are the worst. None of my business.’ Out of the corner of his eye, Sandro saw Luisa nodding.
‘Perhaps not,’ said Sandro. Around them the empty restaurant was hushed and dark; outside the light was almost gone under the leaden sky.
‘And a peck on the cheek, well – I can’t say I thought anything of it. Except –
‘Except I just caught a look of something on his face. Like he’d gone blank, like he wasn’t sure who she was, or who he was. Then I went inside.’
He sighed, reluctant, dragged himself on. ‘But he must have made the move just as I turned my back because the next thing I knew there was a great racket behind me, one of the chairs went over – and they’re cast iron, you know, weigh a ton, the devil to get back up. So I came back out and the camomile tea lady was on her feet and shouting, saying how disgusting it was, shouldn’t be allowed, filthy old man, get your hands off her, she said.’
Sandro’s tired brain grappled hopelessly with it, the worst-case scenario, and surrendered.
‘And then?’
‘And then the girl ran off, down the alley towards the vineyard, and he went after her.’
‘But no one intervened? No one stopped him?’ Giulietta spoke at last, her face ashen, although Sandro didn’t know if it was in horror at what nice old Claudio had done, or a story of her own she was re-enacting.
DiLieto turned towards her, his face crumpled with shame. ‘It all happened so quickly,’ he said. ‘And then they were gone and I was left with my tray and a camomile tea, no lemon and the barman shouting at me because they hadn’t paid.’
‘What about the other customers?’ said Sandro, despairing.
‘Well, the camomile tea woman, of course, she had a go, set off after them – she was the type – but they were out of sight, she wouldn’t have caught up with them, would she?’
‘Hold on,’ said Sandro, ‘hold on – who was she? This camomile tea woman? What did she look like, where did she come from?’
Beppe looked uncomfortable. ‘I can’t – I can’t really remember that well, you know? I was looking at the old man and the girl while I was taking her order, if the truth be told. She was wearing something over her head, scarf or something. Sort of a duster coat, light-coloured. Arty Florentine type, like I said; I only got an impression.’
‘Italian, then,’ said Luisa quietly. Beppe turned to look at her, and nodded. She looked thoughtful. ‘Did you get the impression – did she know either of them, the girl and the old man? Or vice versa?’
The waiter began to shake his head, then stopped, and shrugged. ‘Well, the girl had her back to her but, you know, I did see the old man look across at the woman, when she was giving me her order, sort of bewildered for a second. Like he might know her from somewhere, he just couldn’t be sure.’ He scratched his temple. ‘And with the scarf – well. There wasn’t much of her to see.’
‘She didn’t come back?’ She must be on camera somewhere, thought Sandro, but without much hope. Their solitary witness.
Beppe shook his head, grey in the face. ‘And the rest of the customers –’ he sighed, ‘well, they just looked the other way, foreigners, on holiday. Perhaps they thought we are all like this, Italians, always shouting, making drama. I just got on with clearing off the tables. I wasn’t to know. . .’ and he drew in a breath. ‘The expression on the old man’s face, though, when the girl leaned over and kissed him.’ He put a hand to his own face as if he might find it there, and Sandro saw the tremor. ‘He looked bad.’
‘You should ease up on the drinking,’ he said softly, and saw panic in DiLieto’s eyes.
There hadn’t seemed any point in going on torturing the man after that.
‘You’ve got my number?’ the waiter kept saying to Sandro. ‘Anything I can do, you can call me?’ Sandro knew with leaden certainty that DiLieto would call him again, possibly at regular intervals for the rest of his life, when he didn’t have the price of a drink. He’d patted him on the arm, slipped him ten euro. ‘Wouldn’t mind talking to that camomile tea lady,’ he said, more to comfort the man than because he had any expectation. ‘If you spot her in the street, say.’
‘Will do, maestro, will do,’ said DiLieto, with dismal gratitude, and they let him go. It had been awfully quiet, after he went; they’d slid out of the restaurant, the padrone’s farewell a great deal more muted than his welcome. Luisa overtipped, out of guilt.
‘So what’s next?’ Giulietta had said cheerfully, on the street outside Nello in the rain. Was this like a game to her? All Sandro had been able to think of was that he had to tell Lucia Gentileschi what he’d discovered. Then he remembered that he’d been supposed to meet Paolo Massi at his gallery and suddenly he was filled with rage at the man, the smooth, greedy fake. Anger that he should have been directing elsewhere, no doubt, but of all the characters he’d encountered in the preceding three days, it was Paolo Massi that was drawing his anger.
‘I’d better go and talk to Lucia Gentileschi,’ he said, mentally booting Paolo Massi out of the picture.
‘Do you think that’s wise?’ Luisa had asked, her head tilted like a bird’s. ‘I mean, what can you tell her? What did he actually see?’
‘It happened, though, didn’t it? Claudio lost the plot and groped a girl. Even if Beppe didn’t see it, there was a witness; witnesses, no doubt, a whole terraceful. God knows who might come forward when – well. If it turns into a different kind of investigation.’ He shied away from saying the word, murder. ‘And I don’t want Lucia to hear it from them.’
Luisa persisted, bravely. ‘But it’s a bit of a leap from a grope to – I don’t know, doing away with the girl?’
He put his face in his hands. ‘There were dark places,’ he said, ‘in Claudio’s past, in his mind, too. We don’t know what he might think, where he might think he was.
‘If only we could find her,’ he said. ‘Alive or dead.’ He looked up. ‘She’s out there somewhere.’
‘So give yourself a bit more time,’ said Luisa gently. ‘Talking to Lucia won’t get you to her.’ She smiled faintly. ‘And are you going to just let Massi off the hook? Because if you don’t go and stick pins into him, I will. If he’d come forward when she didn’t turn up for their rendezvous instead of just scuttling off home to his wife and saying nothing, then we’d be in a very different position now, wouldn’t we?’
Sandro looked at her with admiration; she was a slow-burner, all right, Luisa, his little glowing furnace of a wife, but she sent out sparks. He felt one of them kindle and take. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘You always are.’
So now she and Giulietta were off to the Via dei Bardi on their wild goose chase after the mad old cat lady, and he was sitting here in his parked car staring at the Boboli, as if it was going to tell him all the answers.
Sandro shifted his gaze, and found himself staring instead into the darkened windows of the gallery, where Paolo Massi had spent all day working. There in the window was a desk, a great ostentatious carved thing, right in the window so that everyone could see the great man at his labours, and he in turn could amuse himself by watching the passing trade.
Luisa was right; he needed to get Paolo Massi in front of him. He’d seen men like him before; a slimy little wife-batterer from Prato who’d had an alibi for the time his wife was pushed down the stairs; a businessman who’d paid a market-stallholder to kill his wife for the insurance. He’d nailed them both, and others like them, because if there was one thing Sandro knew how to do, it was take a liar and shake him upside down until the truth came out.
Why did he hate Paolo Massi? Sandro felt his adrenaline rise as he surrendered to the feeling. Massi, so apparently high-minded, so noble-looking, but underneath it all, only interested in money. And sleeping with his students too, it seemed. But mostly money. Pietro hadn’t liked him either, and neither had Lucia Gentileschi. Only Claudio had been taken in by him, it seemed; they must have had some kind of relationship, however sporadic – why else would Massi’s wife have called on Lucia with her condolences? Poor Claudio.
Why couldn’t it have been Massi, not Claudio, up there molesting Veronica Hutton? In his head Sandro assembled a makeshift series of events, the girl finding out about another woman, perhaps, and threatening to expose his affair with her, threatening to bring the business down? The business he’d snatched back from under the noses of the Guardia? But he’d been in the gallery all day, even if she’d probably walked right past it on her way to the Boboli. Had that been why she came through this gate? Now, that was an interesting idea.
But there was the wife and her alibi; would she lie for him? There was Antonella Scarpa. Somewhere in his head a clangour set up, of things wrong, things discordant.
His train of thought was derailed as a fire engine roared past, so close in the narrow street that the car wobbled, then another; and it dawned on Sandro that he’d been hearing the blasted things for hours now, in the distance while they’d sat in Nello, but closer now. The clamour of the fire engine bells, police sirens. What was going on? Wearily Sandro pushed open the door and climbed on to the pavement.
Up ahead the fire engine was stuck in the narrow canyon of the Via Romana. Behind the fire engines a car in the pale blue livery of the Polizia Statale had come to a halt; ahead the fire engines had been held up by a truck up on the pavement, and someone was sounding a horn with relentless aggression. Sandro walked the few steps to the stationary police car, leaned down and tapped on the window. He didn’t recognize the man who turned an expressionless face up to him from the passenger seat.
‘What’s going on?’ he asked humbly. ‘All these sirens.’
The man looked away from him, through the windscreen, and seeing that they weren’t going anywhere condescended to answer. ‘There’s some flooding,’ he said warily. Sandro ducked his head further and saw that he recognized the officer beyond him at the wheel, vaguely, what was his name, Roberti? Alberti?
‘Commissario Gioberti?’ he said tentatively, and the man turned his head, gave a microscopic nod.
‘They’re closing the bridges,’ the senior officer said curtly. ‘A part of the weir at Santa Rosa has disintegrated, washed away. Water’s coming up under the Uffizi and they’re trying to pump it out, and the Rowing Club’s under water.’ He expelled a breath explosively. ‘Hope you’re not in a rush to get home, Cellini, because you won’t get back to Santa Croce tonight, not unless you can call up a helicopter.’
Ahead of him the truck lumbered off the pavement and the fire engines lurched ahead; the two policemen in the car turned their heads away and his interview was terminated. Closing the bridges? Stuck in the Oltrano, south of the river? He tried to get his head around the idea, and didn’t know where to start. He called Luisa.
When Iris emerged on to the Piazza Signoria, Jackson close behind her, it was as she’d never seen it: completely deserted. On the far side a temporary barrier had been set up across the entrance to the great galleried space of the Uffizi.
‘We could go to your place,’ said Jackson hopefully. ‘No danger of flooding there, huh?’
‘Oh, no,’ said Iris, shaking her head. ‘I’ve got stuff to do.’ And ignoring him she got out her phone, removed Ronnie’s sim card, wrapped it, replaced it with her own. Laboriously she tapped in a message while he watched, then she put the phone away.
‘Who was that to?’ he said, and she frowned.
‘None of your business,’ she said.
‘Listen Iris,’ said Jackson, and this time he wasn’t cocky or wheedling or angry, just desperate. ‘Don’t be that way. If this is about Sophia – I – she – she wasn’t anything. We were just –’
‘Just fooling around, yeah,’ said Iris, angry more than anything because he thought she cared. He thought all this was about Sophia. ‘Why don’t you tell Sophia that she wasn’t anything?’ She folded her arms across her body. ‘Look,’ she said, relenting, because why would she even let him think she was angry? She wasn’t angry. ‘Look, can’t you understand that this isn’t about that stuff? It really isn’t. We’re in a mess, this is too serious for us to be just playing around trying to be detectives. There are things we know that the police should know, simple as that.’
‘They look kind of busy,’ said Jackson, nodding towards a Carabiniere vehicle parked under the statue of Neptune, an officer leaning on the side under a military raincape and talking urgently into his radio.
‘You’re making excuses,’ said Iris. He looked at his feet.
‘OK,’ he said quietly, ‘I’ll go,’ but she went on as if he hadn’t spoken.
‘And I know that whatever her mum thinks, Ronnie’s probably dead. . .’ and although she planned to say it in that casual, hard way, she found she couldn’t, and she had to swallow. ‘But we need to find her. I need to find her. She’s my friend.’
Jackson looked up at her, his face frozen with reluctance. ‘I still think it would be better if you came with me,’ he said stubbornly.
‘I think maybe you should take the sim card, too,’ she said, ignoring him to fish in her purse for it.
‘Jeez, no,’ said Jackson, alarmed. ‘How’m I going to explain that? Oh, I just found it lying around? They’re going to think I had something to do with it.’ She looked at him patiently.
‘Jackson,’ she said, ‘come on. You can’t go on running away. I – I’ve got my stuff to do. Take it.’ He took it.
‘Are you going to be OK?’ he asked, ducking his head. ‘I don’t think you should go on your own.’
She held up the message she’d sent. ‘Sandro’ll meet me there,’ she said. ‘He’s a good guy. Look, you take his number, yeah?’ His shoulders lowered in defeat, Jackson took out his phone, no longer so magical to Iris, and tapped in Sandro Cellini’s number.
‘So you know where the Carabiniere station is, yes? At the Boboli?’
‘OK,’ he said, hands shoved in his pockets, scruffy backpack slumped over his shoulder, grungy waterproof, hair already plastered flat under the rain. Iris almost felt sorry for him. ‘I’ll call you?’ he said quietly. ‘Later?’
‘Maybe,’ she said, and he sighed. As she watched him trudge away she infuriated herself by thinking, He probably hates me now. Bossy bitch. Can’t be helped.
Jackson didn’t look back to watch her go; he wanted her to believe in him. It made him feel more – resolute, was that the word? Just to look ahead. He turned off the darkening and empty Piazza Signoria towards the Via Por Santa Maria, the main drag from the Ponte Vecchio to the Duomo, to head across the bridge.
Only there was a police barrier, and the other side of it, where the Piazza Signoria had been deserted, the Via Por Santa Maria was thronged, as packed as a cattle pen. He reached the barrier and was allowed past, though he had no idea how he was going to get any further. Wondering what the hell was going on, Jackson felt his blood stir; this was something after all? This was a challenge. Jackson worked his way to the corner, with a lot of apologizing for his backpack; it was more or less dark by now, and the rain was still coming down. He had to fight his way through umbrellas and as he made his painfully slow progress he could tell that the crowd was half excited, half turning to frustration and anger. ‘Cazzo!’ he heard an Italian man grumble, as Jackson trod on a foot, and an angry face turned towards him.
‘Sorry, sorry,’ he said, gee, sorry,’ He looked left, down towards the Ponte Vecchio, and saw that it was empty, the passage blocked. It didn’t make sense. He could see a carabiniere on a horse, upright under the rain in a raincape, and thought hopelessly of his mission. They really were kind of busy just now, weren’t they? Could there be another Carabiniere station this side of the river?
Someone must have heard his American English, because at his elbow he heard a voice say, quietly, ‘They’ve closed the bridges.’ He turned his head.
‘Some kind of precaution,’ said Sophia, six inches away from him. Her face was washed out, he thought, like she’d been crying, but she looked steadily at him. The Japanese girl – Hiroko? – was standing next to her. They looked at him, unsmiling, his judge and jury.
‘Right,’ he said humbly. ‘I’ve got to get to the Carabiniere station, or some kind of police station. Iris – we found some things out.’
‘It’s not going to happen, Jackson,’ said Hiroko, and he thought, clutching at straws, that he heard the trace of kindness in her voice. ‘We heard on the radio the Uffizi was flooding and we came down to see what we could do.’ The crowd jostled them, but Hiroko held her ground patiently. ‘Look around you,’ she said. ‘Who’s going to have time to listen to you?’
‘I’ve got to get to the police station,’ said Jackson stubbornly, and for the second time that day, he felt like crying. Only this time he didn’t.
‘Lets get out of here,’ said Sophia; her voice was different, wasn’t it? Grown-up. ‘We can’t do anything stuck here. Let’s find somewhere to sit down, and you can tell us, instead of the Carabinieri.’
‘OK,’ said Jackson, giving in. ‘Why not?’