Chapter Twelve

BADIANI’S WAS FULL TO bursting, another warm September dusk bringing in the customers. Back from their holidays and wanting to prolong the summer just another day or two, they were pressed four, five deep against the long glass cabinet filled with bright-coloured mounds of ice cream. Mango, fig, raspberry, chocolate – thirty flavours or more, along with the celebrated vanilla custard and cream Buontalenti for which the place was famous. Giuli hovered in the doorway, waiting for Enzo.

She hadn’t had the heart to say she wasn’t really in an ice-cream mood. One of the big advantages of a job on the roaring Via dei Mille, according to Enzo, was its proximity to Badiani and what he held to be the best ice cream in the city. There was something of the big kid about Enzo, only child of doting, hardworking parents, but it was also a serious matter, his ice-cream fetish.

‘I’ll bring a kilo or two back on Saturday,’ he’d said eagerly on the phone ‘For dessert. For Luisa and Sandro.’

She’d hardly dared say that Luisa couldn’t eat ice cream, it hurt her teeth. ‘And maybe some of their little cakes,’ she’d ventured, but her heart wasn’t in it, not after her lunch with Clelia Schmidt.

A restrained sort of scuffle broke out at the glass cabinet, following a bit of flagrant queue-jumping. An elderly woman – dressed, bizarrely, in a fur coat – was the culprit, and Giuli watched as she effortlessly defeated her rival for the attention of the unflappable gelataia, and marched away with a towering concoction – marrons glacés, chocolate and Buontalenti in a big sugar cone. Some people, she reflected, were born to win.

The woman strutted like a small, fur-clad bird, out on to the pavement and the roaring viale in the twilight, tucking in to her ice cream with unashamed pleasure. She’ll live for ever, that one, thought Giuli, and her thoughts returned, as they had all day, to poor dead Flavia Matteo.

It wasn’t even as if Giuli had known Flavia: she’d seen her around in the ten years or so she’d been a Santo Spirito resident herself, she’d exchanged a greeting with her on occasion. She was what you’d call distinctive, even if – and this gave Giuli pause, she hadn’t formulated the thought before – there was something about Flavia that was the opposite of the old woman smacking her lips in her fur coat and not caring who saw her. Flavia Matteo had not wanted to be distinctive, had not wanted to be beautiful, had played it down to the point of dowdiness. She had wanted to be invisible.

She’d worn a headscarf like a woman of her mother’s – or grandmother’s – generation, hiding the flaming hair. No make-up, the amber-coloured eyes indistinct in her freckled face – indistinct, that is, unless you got close, which Giuli had once or twice, when you could see the flecks of gold in them. At a metre or so’s distance she could look plain, even ugly. She could hide.

Why did a woman do that? Giuli, abused child and ex-hooker from the Via Senese, knew one or two reasons to refuse the male gaze in the street. Did they apply to Flavia? It seemed to her that this woman – more like a nun than anything else, she reflected – could not have anything in common with Giuli herself. So her diffidence wasn’t born out of shame, nor out of guilt or rejection, but perhaps modesty, or political principle, feminism and the like? Her mind simply set on higher things. Still, Giuli mused, and didn’t feel quite convinced. Felt her frustration rise that she had never known Flavia Matteo, and now it was too late.

‘Sweetheart!’ Enzo’s voice broke in on her thoughts, anxious and out of breath. ‘Sorry I’m late.’

Giuli refocused, and his broad features were there, filling her frame of vision, his arm was right around her and squeezing. Then she felt him stop, mid-squeeze. ‘You all right?’ Taking in her expression his face fell, and she felt guilty.

‘I’m fine.’ And stopped herself from sighing and spoiling it all. ‘There’s just – well, I’ll tell you later. Let’s get your ice cream.’

Enzo looked miserable. ‘No need. It was stupid of me. It’s been an awful day, awful news. I – I—’ He was examining her face earnestly, trying to make amends, trying to work her out, poor guy. And she understood: no one was more distraught than he was about Flavia Matteo. He was trying to soothe himself, all this kids’ stuff, ice cream and normality, and he was looking miserable because he suspected it wasn’t going to work, this time.

‘No,’ she said. ‘We’re here now.’ And shoving with gentle insistence, shoulder to shoulder at the long counter, she did feel better. A bit better.

On the street, they leaned against the shopfront and watched the evening traffic, eating in silence. Six o’clock, and the sun was already down. The air was still warm, but cooling, and Giuli experienced all at once that mixture of wistfulness and relief that comes with the end of summer. The end of those seemingly endless months of heat, the unbearable nights without sleep, of the long days of pleasurable boredom on the beach, skin warm and rough with sand and salt, the feeling of a body peeled and new after a week by the sea. The ice cream was delicious, and Giuli felt a moment’s sisterly feeling for the greedy, selfish old lady. Sometimes it was fine to enjoy something.

‘It’s pretty good,’ she said, lifting her tiny plastic spoon in tribute, and although Enzo smiled she could see that he was down, that the ice cream hadn’t quite done the trick. She didn’t know if she should tell him. But how could she not?

She eyed him as he ate with a slight frown of contemplation. He was wearing his work clothes, trousers and a short-sleeved shirt, plus a vest now that summer was almost past; his pristine nylon laptop bag at his feet on the pavement. Enzo was a magician of the laptop: she loved to watch him work on the computer, any computer, their workings as natural to him as breathing. Giuli might be more computer-savvy than Sandro, to whom the machine was a goad and a torment, but she still had regular moments of panic when she pressed the wrong button on the neat little laptop Enzo had bought her last Christmas, or it started making a weird noise. Enzo had grown to recognize her panic in the ether and would be there before she had made a sound, a hand on her forearm to calm her, his voice carefully explaining.

If only, she sometimes thought, there’d been teachers like him at school. If only there’d been someone like him when she’d hit fourteen and a very different sort of boy had come around. Of course she had him now, but now might be too late.

‘Clelia Schmidt told me something,’ she began carefully. His frown deepened; carefully he stuffed the paper napkin inside the remains of his cone, took Giuli’s paper cup and put them both in the swing bin outside the gelateria. He took her arm and they began to walk along the wide pavement, the traffic roaring and honking beside them. ‘The midwife,’ said Giuli, feeling herself unbend just a little at the feel of his arm in hers. ‘I had lunch with her. I wanted – well, she felt guilty about Flavia. I had to break it to her gently.’

*

‘I know it’s difficult for you to talk about this,’ she’d said as soon as the waitress was gone, trying to catch Clelia’s lowered gaze across the table. ‘I know it feels wrong, but—’

‘I shouldn’t have known about it myself,’ Clelia had said quickly, interrupting her. ‘There’s confidentiality between – well, between certain specializations, unless it’s pertinent.’ She’d frowned then, as though something had only just occurred to her. ‘And it should have been – actually. I should have been told. Although …’

Giuli had grappled with her meaning. ‘Certain specializations?’ Then she’d understood. ‘Oh. You mean, the other clinics?’ Obvious. ‘Right,’ she’d said. ‘Like, the STD clinic, for example: you’d need to know if a pregnant woman had something that might be transmitted to the baby.’ Clelia lifted her face abruptly. It was white.

‘Flavia didn’t have an STD,’ she’d said, horrified. ‘I do that testing, if the woman’s pregnant. With permission, of course. She gave me permission.’

‘I see,’ Giuli, who did, had said. She knew about that stuff. But something had occurred to her. ‘She reacted – how? When it came up? The testing, asking for permission? What d’you check for?’

Clelia had frowned. ‘She – she was fine. Composed.’ The frown had deepened. ‘We test for syphilis routinely, HIV on request, other stuff on request. She had the test most people have, just the syphilis. Negative, obviously.’

‘Obviously,’ Giuli had said mildly. The waitress had come back then, with the two thick white bowls of pasta. Clelia had taken a gulp of the wine Giuli had ordered for her and stared down at the food until the waitress was gone. And then she had said it.

*

Now, in the humid dusk, Enzo took Giuli’s hand. They were walking to where he knew she’d have left her motorino, a spare helmet for him in her pillion box. He came in on the bus.

‘So what did she tell you?’ he asked, disengaging his arm when they reached the scooter and facing her.

Could she be sure? Could Clelia be sure? Giuli didn’t want to see the look on his face when she said it. She told herself, a disease would be worse, surely? If Flavia had a disease. And all Clelia had seen was Flavia going into a consulting room.

‘She was visiting the Addictions clinic,’ Giuli said, holding his gaze. ‘Flavia was seeing somebody about an addiction.’

The truth was, she didn’t know what would be worse. She’d been there herself, and it wasn’t straightforward, it wasn’t just a matter of poisoning the body. It was the whole package: it was the dealers, it was the desperation, the going to places you shouldn’t go, it was the brain cells dying and the danger disregarded and the friends lost and the self-respect – if there’d ever been any. She saw Enzo looking at her and that gulf was there between them again. She knew – she knew too much – and he didn’t.

Giuli was the one who looked away first.

*

He rang as she was locking up. Luisa could tell from his voice that it had been grim. It didn’t escape her that worse was to come.

Locking up wasn’t a five-minute affair. There was so much stock in the shop at this time of year you had to be extra careful, and there was a set routine. Steel shutters had been fitted on the bays in the cellar stockroom, where the high-value items were kept: padlock those, then double-lock and bolt the back door. Shut the electrically operated metal grilles on the windows. Set the alarm and, finally, attend to the three locks on the front entrance, Beppe waiting behind her on the pavement since the raid seven years ago when Luisa had – stupidly – been on her own one wet November night, reaching up for the top lock, when someone grabbed her from behind and held her while an accomplice pushed into the shop and snatched a couple of thousand euros’ worth of handbags from the window display. They’d just been opportunists, but crime levels in the city had hardly improved since.

No chance of that this evening. It was eight o’clock and the Por Santa Maria was busy. As she kneeled down to turn the last key, Luisa could hear laughter behind her in the street; there was a good mix of people, locals happy to be back in the city after the tourist-haunted desert of the summer.

Then the phone rang, her heart jumped in her chest and the laughter behind her sounded suddenly wrong. Luisa scrabbled in her bag and Beppe kneeled beside her with a questioning look: she gestured to him to finish off and stood up, stepping away with the phone held to her ear. She could see the girl who was laughing in a small group – young, underdressed, breasts gleaming under the streetlighting – slyly registering the look she was getting from a boy in the little gang as she laughed. The young used to make Luisa smile, but some days now, the sight of a kid like that only made her feel anxious.

‘Caro,’ she said, knowing it would be him. She tried not to sound worried, and failed. ‘How’s the traffic?’

Sandro sighed, long and heavy, and something about the quality of the background sound told her that he wasn’t in the car. ‘I’m not coming back,’ he said.

‘What?’ For a single, lunatic second Luisa heard her husband tell her he was leaving her: she saw herself alone in the hospital waiting room, not out of choice but because she had no one.

‘I mean, we’re not,’ Sandro added, correcting himself but oblivious to any possible misintepretation of what he’d just said. ‘He can’t face it, not tonight. We’ve got a hotel. He says he’ll pay.’

Luisa’s world now righted itself. ‘Don’t let him pay,’ she said quickly. ‘So it was her. Was it – how awful was it?’

‘Pretty bad,’ said Sandro, and she heard the strain in his voice. ‘Rough. It was her, all right.’ He stopped, she heard him swallow. ‘She cut her wrists and lay in the bath. She’d been there probably two days.’

Luisa’s mouth dried. She blinked. She turned slightly and saw Beppe looking at her, his neat-bearded, handsome face furrowed just a little with concern. She shook her head in a gesture of smiling impatience she knew he’d recognize. Bumped a kiss from her fingers to wave him off and held out her hand for the keys. Sandro, she mouthed. After a second’s hesitation he dropped the keys in her open palm, straightened his waxed jacket fastidiously and, with a wave, headed off towards Gilli where he would, she knew, enjoy a Campari topped up with prosecco, and a handful – no more – of salted nuts. Beppe looked after his figure. She thought with longing of that other world, where people had routines and lived by rules, and were content with small things.

Two days. ‘Oh, God,’ she said. ‘Poor man. Poor man.’ She thought of that beautiful woman softening to nothing but water-swollen flesh in a bathtub; she thought of the rosy swaddled child.

‘Yes,’ said Sandro. Luisa thought of the night he was going to have.

‘You got two rooms?’ she asked, and there was another sigh. ‘There was only a twin left,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know the seaside was so lively in September.’

‘When the weather’s still this good,’ Luisa replied, but her mind was elsewhere. Sandro had booked himself into the same room because he didn’t want to leave the grieving husband alone, she could read him like a book. Even though he wouldn’t get a wink of sleep himself. ‘Don’t let him pay,’ she repeated.

‘He wants to – to engage me now,’ said Sandro, his voice leaden.

‘Engage you? As a detective? What for?’

‘I don’t even know,’ said Sandro. ‘Look, he doesn’t know what he’s doing. It’s a kind of denial or a distraction, or something. I expect in the morning he’ll have changed his mind. People do. I was there from the beginning, he’s leaning on me. It’s difficult.’ Another sigh. ‘But of course I won’t let him pay for the room.’

Under the uplit vaulting of the Straw Market, where the stalls were packing up and being rolled away, something caught Luisa’s eye: a profile. The smooth crow’s wing sweep of shiny black hair. Then a little bobbing group of Japanese tourists all talking in their own language, all nodding and turning their heads with that distracting foreignness of theirs, came into her line of vision, and whatever it was – whoever it was – was obscured. Absently Luisa stepped to one side to avoid a market trolley and get a better look, but someone barged into her and awkwardly she had to disengage herself.

‘You all right?’ said Sandro, hearing her intake of breath, her fumbled apology.

‘Yes, yes – I just thought – I thought I saw—’ She stopped. Best not.

‘So,’ he went on, filling the silence. ‘I’ll keep an eye on him tonight. I think – well, it depends. I’ll be back some time tomorrow, for sure.’

He didn’t sound sure. ‘I suppose he’s spoken to his mother?’ Luisa was thinking out loud. ‘She’ll have the baby for the night.’

‘I – I don’t know.’ She could almost hear him cogitating: a puzzle. Sandro liked a puzzle to solve. When he spoke again, his voice was just a little brighter. ‘He doesn’t have a mobile phone of his own, can you believe that?’ She couldn’t. ‘But he did wander off a while back, after we’d checked in, went downstairs. He might have called her from the lobby.’

‘I’ll give her a ring,’ said Luisa decisively. ‘Offer – oh, I don’t know. Help, or something.’

‘Right,’ said Sandro, and she could tell he was still in puzzle-solving mode. ‘I wonder if the old woman’s got anything to do with it.’

‘What?’ said Luisa, startled.

‘Well, would you fancy being her daughter-in-law? But no, you’re right. She’s an old bitch but she’s not bad enough for – for that.’

Luisa didn’t know what he was suggesting. That the woman deliberately drove her daughter-in-law to suicide? ‘I don’t suppose she helped matters,’ she said. Sighed. ‘Have you talked to Giuli and Enzo? They knew Flavia, didn’t they?’

‘Giuli,’ he murmured, and she could sense him receding. ‘She – I think Enzo knew them better. But Giuli was asking around. The midwife.’

He petered out: Christ, thought Luisa. It’s thirty years ago, I can stand the word midwife. She said nothing.

When Sandro spoke again his voice was different. ‘Right, look, yes. I’ll call Giuli.’ And for a second she thought he was going to hang up on her without saying goodbye. But he caught himself in time. ‘Don’t worry about me, sweetheart. I’ll call later, before you go to sleep.’

After he’d gone Luisa stood there a moment, feeling oddly dazed, people moving past her in a blur. She hadn’t even asked him if the police had spoken to them. Rosselli wanted to take him on as a detective and she had the strongest feeling, quite suddenly, that no good would come of it.

But then, when the one you love chooses to disappear without explanation – and with that thought Luisa raised her head, a small herd of tourists moved en masse out of her way, and she saw Chiara.

Luisa opened her mouth to call but she made no sound. Because what would she say? Chiara was on the far side of the small square marketplace with its high vaulted stone roof. Talking to someone Luisa couldn’t see because a stall was in the way. Chiara looked – different.

Partly it was the clothes. Every time Luisa had seen Chiara since she hit thirteen, she’d been in jeans. Skintight or loose and low-slung, darkwash, stonewash, there’d been a black phase … but it had still been jeans; Gloria had smiled indulgently and Luisa had despaired. They sold jeans in the shop and Luisa knew you couldn’t fight it, but as it moved down the generations she wondered what feminity would come to if women grew old wearing jeans. And not to mention it encouraged fat on the hips, it lost them their waist, they just let it all hang out – but no one listened. Beppe could never hide a smile when she started her rant about jeans.

Framed in the arch, one hand on her hip and a proper handbag slung over her arm, Chiara was wearing a dress. Not just a dress but a pale silk dress, the colour something between cream and peach, with short fluted sleeves, a tie at the neck, a nice fit over the waist that only came, Luisa’s practised eye recognized, at a price. And heels: four-centimetre heels in pale flesh colour: even at this distance Luisa could tell they were good shoes. Where did she buy all that? was Luisa’s first thought. And, why didn’t she come to me? was her second. But wherever she’d got the stuff, Luisa had to admit, she’d made good choices. Or someone had.

The girl’s hips swayed just a little as she talked, the handbag swung. She was different, and it wasn’t just the clothes. The pose, the unselfconscious sensuality, even the way her hair had been done, they belonged to an older woman than the Chiara Luisa knew. A man eating a filled roll at the tripe stall behind her was eyeing the girl’s legs appreciatively. Then whoever it was Chiara was talking to shifted position and she saw him, or at least the quarter-profile and a back view of a stocky youngish man. They made an odd pair because although he was decently enough dressed and probably a couple of years her senior, the boy seemed too young next to her, too gauche, his hands stuffed in his pockets.

The street was emptier, quieter now, and Luisa took a step forward, but just as she did so Chiara’s gaze shifted a fraction away from the man, and Luisa’s movement drew it across the thoroughfare, and their eyes met. Chiara froze.

Raising a hand to greet her, or delay her, or to calm the sudden panic in the girl’s eyes, Luisa took a step towards the market. Chiara, all her new poise departed, took a step back, half stumbling in the heels. Luisa saw the man put out a hand quickly to catch her arm before she went over altogether, saw him begin to turn to see what had alarmed Chiara, and then a trolley laden with cheap leather goods rounded the corner at reckless speed and came to a stop in front of Luisa, almost on her toes.

‘Hey, watch it,’ bellowed the beefy stallholder, hauling on the iron handle, his swarthy face in Luisa’s. ‘Some of us have work to do.’

Where were they?

Leaning on the soft pale stone of a pillar for a moment, Luisa wondered if she’d crossed over to the wrong bay: in front of her now the market was almost cleared away, but there was no sign of them. Not of Chiara, nor of the man she’d been talking to. She was in the right place, all right; there was the tripe stall. The man who’d been looking at Chiara’s legs was pushing the paper wrapping of his sandwich into the refuse bin and reaching for a paper towel.

‘Excuse me,’ said Luisa, breathless from hurrying towards him. ‘Did you see where she went?’

Had she ever been bothered by losing male interest? The look the man gave her was a world away from the look he’d been giving Chiara. Why would Luisa care? One breast down, but still alive. ‘The – the girl in the dress? Did you see which way she went?’

He studied her, wiping his hands, wondering if he could be bothered, whether he cared if this woman had seen him eyeing up a girl young enough to be his daughter. But then he jerked his head towards the narrow alley that led south, down to the Via delle Terme. Raising her head, Luisa thought she heard the click of heels on the stone: they could hardly have got far.

‘Thank you,’ she said, but he was already turning away.

Almost immediately Luisa knew it was a lost cause: that gloomy alley – and perhaps, she thought in a paranoid moment, the man at the tripe stall had chosen it for that very reason – had four possible exits. They might have slipped left and back to the Por Santa Maria while she was distracted, right and right again to the marble arcades in front of the post office, along the Via delle Terme to the Via Tornabuoni, or through a crooked alley crossing down to the dark, high-sided canyon of the Borgo Santissimi Apostoli.

Luisa plumped for the last option – it was the most sneaky somehow – but once she was on the Apostoli, it became obvious she’d got it wrong. The street was empty bar a dumpy tourist couple holding hands and looking in a jeweller’s window. In vain Luisa listened for that particular sound of high heels on rough Florentine flagstones but instead the air seemed to be full of all kinds of other noises: scooter engines, raised voices, the wooden wheels of the traders’ trolleys.

The tourist couple were looking at her with interest. Luisa knew what she must look like, for this frowsty pair to wonder about her: jacket unbuttoned, wild-eyed, pale and panicky. But she didn’t much care.

‘Chiara!’ she shouted, ignoring them, instead turning in a circle on the spot and looking – down the Santissimi Apostoli, back up the alley, towards the Por Santa Maria. ‘Chiara, it’s all right.’ She waited as the muffled, uneven echo from the rough stone of the tall façades died away, mocking her. ‘I just wanted to say hello.’

There was no answer.