Chapter Eighteen

VESNA MADE HER WAY slowly up the wide, cool boulevard that stretched from the sea front to the station, in the shade of the big-leaved mulberry trees. There was movement overhead through the green canopy, no more than the flick of a tablecloth, the flash of a well-upholstered pink housecoat, and a tiny shower of crumbs arriving on the pavement as Vesna passed. She heard a volley of bad-tempered domestic exchanges as she sidestepped the dusting of breadcrumbs, and was content, briefly.

Content to be single, to be independent: even the imminent possibility of unemployment meant freedom – from Calzaghe, from all the small indignities of life here as a woman, and a foreign woman at that. Vesna had a degree in biology from Sarajevo University, she had read Tolstoy, in Russian. Calzaghe had never read a book in his life as far as she knew, and his understanding of biology was strictly limited to his afternoon viewing, at his mother’s apartment.

She comforted herself with the thought that she would escape this life, this awful present: he would not.

The Pizzeria Venere came into view on the far side of the road, a low, ugly and garish building with tables set outside on the broad pavement in the sun. A sunburned northern European couple were already seated: there were place-settings and tall glasses of beer in front of them. When did their holiday season end, these people? Sooner or later, they’d have to go home.

She stopped in the last of the shade and looked around, unobserved, and tried to remember what she’d heard, on Monday morning, standing on the landing above the foyer. Calzaghe had spoken to Flavia Matteo in that insinuating voice of his, the one he didn’t waste on married lady guests in the presence of their husbands. Perhaps he thought he was sounding charming, kindly: to Vesna he’d sounded slimy. Viscido, slimy like a snail trail, that was the Italian word for a creep like Calzaghe. Had he thought he had a chance with a woman like Flavia Matteo? The thought turned Vesna’s stomach.

What had Flavia been doing here, alone? The question tormented Vesna, who’d learned how to protect herself. Flavia Matteo had been an Italian woman and she should have known better, but she had no such protection. She had been, from the moment she stepped into their lives with no luggage save for a battered handbag, as irresistibly thin-skinned and vulnerable as a worm was to birds.

On one side of the Pizzeria Venere there was an expensive wine shop, with a tasting bar just visible through the open door, a vast empty champagne bottle with a pink foil top leaning across the window display. On the other side an electrical goods shop, a window full of travel irons and hairdryers, a dusty microwave. The kind of thing people on holiday or furnishing a second home would need to buy, last minute. What would a woman contemplating taking her own life go in search of – champagne, or an electric carving knife?

Perhaps she hadn’t been contemplating suicide then: perhaps there’d still have been time to stop her. Vesna shivered and rubbed her upper arms briskly in the wind off the sea. A man appeared in the doorway of the wine shop and she stepped off the pavement and walked towards him in the sun.

*

Luisa was eating her lunch at Giacosa. Filled this lunch hour and every other with mature vendeuses like herself, wealthy Russian women, old-school Florentine matriarchs with lacquered hair and knuckledustered with diamonds … the old-fashioned bar was guaranteed to restore Luisa’s equilibrium under any circumstances, to set her squarely back among her sisterhood.

Any circumstances, it seemed, but today’s. She could hardly taste the food – which was always good – and she hardly registered the cheerful respect of the handsome barmen, or the new egg-sized sapphire on the owner’s wife’s hand. Luisa hadn’t spoken to Sandro since last night and she didn’t like it. Things were falling apart: babies left motherless, daughters not talking to their parents. And then she realized, setting her empty dish back on the counter, that the man she’d been vaguely focusing on through the side window of Giacosa, standing in a doorway on the Via della Spada and talking to another man, was Pietro.

He wasn’t in his uniform, but wearing jeans: Pietro never wore jeans. And a polo shirt. There was something weirdly unrecognizable about him that explained why she hadn’t seen it was him straight away. The other man – younger, perhaps thirty-five, good-looking from his profile at least and also rather oddly dressed, to Luisa’s eye, in an unseasonable hooded raincoat – was moving restlessly from foot to foot, as if warming up to run somewhere.

As she watched, she distinctly saw Pietro put something in the man’s hand and then, looking quickly around as if – exactly as if – to make sure he hadn’t been seen, his eyes rested on Luisa, through the glass. Immediately he raised his hand and patted the man he’d been talking to sharply, twice on the upper arm, in what might under other circumstances have been a kind of hearty greeting but in this case seemed to Luisa like a signal. Because the man turned away instantly – as he moved the sleeve of his raincoat rode up fractionally and she saw the shadow of something revealed, at the wrist – and then he was off down the street without a backward glance or a goodbye. The whole exchange was so unmistakably clandestine Luisa just stared, trying to make it mean something else and failing.

Opposite her Pietro held her gaze a moment from the doorway, and then he stepped off the pavement and was inside, bringing the cool breath of the street in with him and as instantly out of place among the jewelled women, it seemed to her, as a Nigerian street vendor with a trayful of lighters. He took her by the arm, and they moved into a corner, leaning against a small high table.

‘What are you up to?’ she said, bluntly. Then as something occurred to her: ‘It’s not about Chiara? You’re not – he’s not—’ Pietro was staring at her, and she stopped speaking. He’d lost weight. The reliably pouchy, contented face she’d seen grow older for the preceding twenty years, had a sunken look. There were bags under his eyes.

‘You’re wearing jeans,’ she said, changing tack. ‘Who was that man?’

Pietro opened his mouth, closed it again, then signalled to the muscled barman for a coffee.

‘It was work,’ he said abruptly, nodding into the street to indicate the transaction she’d just witnessed. He obviously wanted to talk about Chiara even less than he wanted to discuss giving money – or something else – to some dubious character in the street.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Luisa. ‘If you say so.’ It felt strange, standing in a bar talking to Pietro: that was Sandro’s job. Well, obviously not his real job, not any more. Pietro was looking at her with an odd, tense expression.

‘How long is it,’ she said, as it occurred to her that it had been a while, really quite a while, ‘since you and Sandro last got together?’

‘It’s been hectic,’ said Pietro, half turning away from her. ‘There’s a lot on.’

A lot he wasn’t going to tell her about.

‘He misses you,’ she tried: Sandro would sooner be garrotted than admit to such a thing, but it would be true all the same. ‘You know – he doesn’t want to make things difficult for you, using you. Putting you in a difficult position. He knows how things are.’

‘It’s appreciated.’ Pietro spoke gruffly, still not looking at her. ‘I don’t know if he does know how things are, though. There really is a lot on.’ He set the cup back down carefully.

‘It’s not – Chiara then?’ Pietro flinched – so subtly Luisa felt it rather than saw it – but he said nothing. She went on. ‘You know, you could talk to him about that. That’s not business, is it? If you’re getting some dodgy contact to go after her and not Sandro, who’s a private investigator – well. There’s nothing he wouldn’t do for you, you know that.’

‘I told you,’ said Pietro fiercely, jerking his head towards the street and the doorway where she’d spotted him. ‘That back there, that was work, a – a covert operation.’ He shot a glance at her from under a deep frown, gauging to see if she believed him. ‘I can do my own investigating of my own daughter.’

His knuckles were white against the edge of the high table. Luisa, who had known him twenty years, had never seen Pietro like this, ever: no trouble at work had made him so much as raise his voice to a woman. He was the gentlest and most reasonable man she’d ever known: gentler than her own husband, and an awful lot more reasonable.

‘I saw her, you know.’ The words sprang to Luisa’s lips before she knew where they’d lead her. Pietro’s head jerked up.

‘You saw her?’ His voice cracked, and looking into his face she saw the tears in his eyes.

‘Outside the shop,’ she said, wishing she’d kept quiet. ‘Yesterday evening. She looked so pretty. She was wearing a dress.’

‘Chiara, wearing a dress?’ He tried to laugh but it came out strangled.

‘She looked fine, honestly.’

Had she, though? Luisa recalled the soft shade of the summery dress and the pale shoes, but also that the face itself – Chiara’s strong, familiar features – had seemed blurred, as though with late nights, or tears.

‘Did you talk to her?’

‘I – I tried.’ Should she say, Chiara took one look at me and bolted? Should she tell Pietro about Giancarlo? She could picture Pietro seizing the boy by the shoulders and trying to shake information out of him. Fathers, Luisa knew only too well, should not do their own investigating: it was a cardinal rule and breaking it had cost Sandro his job.

But no one was going to murder Chiara. In the warm fug of the Giacosa, Luisa felt a sweat break on her upper lip.

‘I’d better get back to work,’ she said.

It was as though a shutter came down in Pietro’s face.

‘Right,’ he said stiffly.

There was a silence, but she didn’t move, and then as if her staying put one second longer had given him licence, the floodgates opened.

‘What you mean is, you’re not going to tell me. You talked to her and you’re going to tell me nothing? How long have you known me, and you’re treating me like this? Everyone’s pussyfooting around me.’ Pietro raised his hands to his temples in frustration, and as his arms came up she saw how much weight he’d lost, the torso no longer stocky, the jeans loose. Was Gloria worried?

‘What do you all think I’m going to do, murder the man? He hasn’t got the decency to climb the stairs and shake my hand, he waits in the car. He knows I’d see through him, that’s why. Or maybe she’s told him I’m some kind of Nazi.’ Pietro snorted in disbelief. ‘If only she knew. Why don’t they trust us to be the good guys? I’m her father.’ And, rising, his voice cracked again.

Luisa remembered what Giancarlo had said about Chiara’s new man: an authority figure. A father figure? It made her uncomfortable: this was one piece of information she would not be able to pass on to Chiara’s parents. She resisted the temptation to put out her hand to Pietro: he’d probably shove her on to the floor if she tried. People weren’t looking at them yet, and Luisa didn’t want them to start.

‘I didn’t talk to her,’ she said quietly, and he stared at her with that policeman’s look, searching for a lie. Not finding one, his shoulders dropped. She went on. ‘I came out of the shop, and she disappeared. Perhaps she saw me: perhaps she knew I’d react – just like you.’

‘Like me?’

‘Worried.’

He was grey-faced: ‘worried’ didn’t begin to cover it.

Luisa went on. ‘Of course you want to look the man in the eye, get the measure of him. Of course you do. Have your permission asked even, why not? It’s not being a Nazi. But kids – well.’ She took a breath. ‘There are times when they don’t see us as we are,’ she moved on before he could say ‘Us?’ to remind her she didn’t have kids of her own. ‘She needs to know you can be reasonable, I suppose. You need to show her that.’

‘You mean I need to shut up and leave her to it,’ he said, and began shaking his head, and then she dared put a hand out and stay his arm.

‘You’re the most reasonable, level-headed man I know,’ Luisa said. ‘It’s not me you need to convince. You need to show her you can leave it.’

Pietro looked over his shoulder, along the bright, busy street, one way and then the other, like a hunted man. Along the front of the bar the usual row of tiny round marble tables, the elegant smokers gossiping: what danger could they represent? And in the Via della Spada a handsome, ambling elderly couple, arm in arm. For an instant Luisa glimpsed the possibility that the stress had unhinged Pietro: she saw him pacing the city’s cool, narrow streets after dark, looking for his daughter.

‘I can’t leave it,’ he said, and the anger in his voice gave way to sorrow. ‘She needs me. She still needs her father.’

*

‘She walked here every day?’

The gravel path was steep, winding through the dark, grey-green trees with the view all behind them, and Giuli was beginning to feel puffed out. She’d have to ease up on the cigarettes: she hadn’t had one yet today but she could feel last night’s in her lungs.

Wanda nodded, drawing on her own cigarette. Short-legged, she had a particular walking style that seemed compatible with chainsmoking. She marched doggedly: there was nothing leisurely about it. ‘All year round,’ she said. ‘It’d have to be pouring with rain to stop Flavia – although sometimes they close the park, in high winds and that kind of thing. Then she’d go along the river.’ She shoved her hands in her pockets and raised her head, squared her shoulders, imitating a taller, more romantic figure. ‘Like this, face front, into the wind.’

‘On her own.’

Wanda nodded. ‘Mostly. She’d ask me to come, like I told you, now and again, but she knew I wasn’t a walker.’ She made a face. ‘Hate it. I’ll walk through the city as much as you like, on my way here or there, but walking for its own sake?’ She shook her head. ‘And besides, I think she preferred to be on her own, thinking her thoughts, in her own world.’

What world would that be? thought Giuli. Daydreaming? Flavia Matteo was the last person you’d imagine it of, but everyone dreamed, didn’t they? Of a different life, of how things might have been, or might still become. Wanda had fallen silent and Giuli wondered if her mind were running along the same lines.

‘But when you did come along with her, that was when you and she – talked?’

There were footsteps approaching, coming around the winding path and down the hill towards them on the gravel: Giuli glanced up, then back at her own feet. The tall man kept on without breaking his long stride, past them and down the hill, although his head turned to watch them as he went.

‘I suppose,’ said Wanda. ‘At school we talked, in the breaks, about this and that, mostly school work. But it’s hard to say anything that means anything much in a place like that. The kids, the staff, the constant racket.’

‘Flavia liked it, though?’

‘She did.’ Wanda frowned. ‘The noise didn’t bother her. The kids loved her. She was so serious with them, and so beautiful, they quietened down, just to see her.’ She sounded surprised: Giuli looked at her and saw not a trace of resentment in her square, plain face. What was beauty? Giuli thought of Farmiga then, good-looking but a bitch, all the way through. She took a breath.

‘You said – there was something. Flavia told you something.’

Wanda stopped, and turned. Spread out in front of them was the red-roofed expanse of the city at high noon, the sun sparking off windows, the hazy air glittering with heat and exhaust fumes. The big red dome of the cathedral off to the right, the dark green double hill of Fiesole, all the façades of the city’s great churches turned towards the southern slopes, like sunflowers to the sun.

‘Yes,’ said Wanda, frowning. ‘I – well. The truth is, I’d forgotten it myself. Like you forget your own dreams, you know?’ Giuli didn’t understand what she meant. ‘You wake up and they’re so real for a bit, you think they really happened, then – pouf!’ She threw up her hands. ‘They’re gone.’

‘Right,’ said Giuli, still not understanding.

‘It was a dream she told me about,’ said Wanda patiently.

‘Oh.’ Giuli couldn’t disguise her disappointment.

‘Dreams have their own logic,’ Wanda said earnestly. ‘That’s why they seem real – aspects of them are real. They’re related to reality, they mean something.’

‘Right,’ said Giuli. All this way for a dream? She wiped her forehead with a sleeve.

Wanda persisted. ‘But obviously their logic doesn’t stand up in the real world, so they evaporate, they don’t leave a trace, except maybe in the subconscious. Unless you retell them, of course, then they become fixed. They’re stories, really. Stories our minds tell us to explain – the inexplicable. Or the unpalatable.’

‘I thought you taught maths?’ Giuli could hear herself say, the surly, boneheaded student, back of the class.

Wanda sighed. ‘Yes, among other things’ she said, deflated. ‘But I’ve read Jung. He’s interesting. Do you want to hear Flavia’s dream? Or do you think I’m wasting your time?’

With an effort Giuli relaxed. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It just makes me uncomfortable, this analytical stuff. So much bullshit, a lot of it.’ She picked at the chipped varnish on a fingernail. Wanda Terni didn’t need to know she’d had her share of mind-doctoring, and had resisted it all the way to the wire. Guili sighed. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘Dreams do mean something. So tell me.’

Without a word the teacher looked around and set off for a stone bench, tucked into the trees. They sat down, half hidden from the path: below them the park was empty now, the loping figure long gone.

‘In a way the most significant thing about it was that she told it to me at all. Of course, in our early days, when we first knew each other, she’d never have talked about such things.’ Wanda shrugged. ‘Perhaps she didn’t have a lot of dreams, or didn’t want to remember them, but if she did, she’d have kept them to herself. This one – well. It was like she had to get it out. Had to tell it.’

Giuli shifted, the stone cool under her backside.’ So it was when you were still talking – when everything was fine?’

Wanda bit her lip. ‘It was when I asked her if she was ill. She sort of blurted it out to me, but it was clear she regretted it straight away. It might have been one of the reasons she stopped talking to me.’ Wanda frowned. I think she must have been pregnant then, though she hadn’t told anyone yet.’

‘You’d forgotten this?’ Giuli was incredulous, and Wanda flushed.

‘Not exactly,’ she said. ‘It just seemed – so private. The subconscious, you know, so private you don’t even understand it yourself. I didn’t say because – well. It felt like I’d be betraying her.’

Giuli exhaled, exasperated. ‘Why do I get this from everyone?’ she said. ‘Flavia committed suicide … privacy doesn’t come into it. You were her only friend, it seems to me. Don’t you want to know what drove her to it?’

Wanda gazed at her. ‘I suppose you’re right,’ she said uncertainly.

‘I am right,’ said Giuli. ‘So tell me.’

The teacher took a deep breath. ‘I can’t remember all of it myself,’ she said slowly. ‘But it was extraordinary. It had everything. It was like the perfect dream. Symbols, emotion, danger, archetypes, revelation: the lot. You might have made it up, it was a perfect narrative.’

Wanda paused. ‘There was a palace,’ she said then, slowly.

Giuli sat quiet, mesmerized. It was just like a story. A ghost story, or a murder story. A big, dark palace – like the Pitti Palace, set up above a city like their own. A faceless man with a sword, hacking people to pieces and leaving them in bloody heaps, finds his way inside the palace. Flavia Matteo goes running through its corridors saying she has to find her baby before the killer does. Then there was something garbled about stockings and blue glass all over the ground stopping them catching the killer, but always, even in Wanda’s halting retelling of it, it was completely gripping. The chase, the terrible faceless man, then the revelation.

‘He got the baby?’ Giuli said. ‘He killed the baby? That’s pretty extreme.’

‘Dreams are extreme,’ said Wanda, with an effort. ‘Pregnancy hormones can do pretty extreme things too. Women dream of blood and destruction all the time. We’re not the gentle creatures people imagine us to be, are we?’

‘No,’ said Giuli, thinking of Flavia Matteo cutting her own wrists, thinking of the sinew and veins, of the deep breath you’d have to take before you made the first cut. Thinking of Sandro viewing the body. And Flavia dreaming of a baby cut to pieces.

Wanda was looking at her. ‘There was something else,’ she said.

‘What else?’ said Giuli, with dread.

‘She said, “He made me dance for him, to save the baby, and then I saw his face, before he killed the baby.” She said, I knew him.’ Wanda Terni’s own face was pale and tense, her eyes wide.

‘And who was he?’ The teacher shook her head. ‘Flavia wouldn’t tell me that.’ She squeezed her eyes shut. ‘It was as though she had to get to the end, to tell me what had happened in the end, and only when she got there did she realize she might have given something away. She said, “No, I didn’t mean he was a real person, no, no.”’

‘But she was lying.’

Wanda nodded. ‘I think she was.’

‘You were here,’ said Giuli, ‘when she told you?’

Wanda nodded again and Giuli shivered suddenly. ‘There’s no palace here,’ she said. ‘Could she have been thinking of, I don’t know, the Quirinale, of government buildings, city hall? Of what would happen when – if – Niccolò got to power?’

‘There are palaces everywhere,’ Wanda said, frowning with concentration ‘This city’s like one big palace. Have you never thought the streets are like dark corridors? You never know who’s around the next corner.’

Giuli saw the raised hairs on her forearm. ‘You’re cold,’ she said. ‘Let’s get walking.’

The sun, though, even at midday, seemed suddenly to have lost its ability to warm. They reached the top of the hill by dogged determination alone. Giuli realized she was like Wanda in her attitude to walking, or perhaps she just didn’t like the idea of having the freedom to think her own thoughts forced on her.

‘I’d better get back,’ said Wanda, fretting as they looked down at the city. The river shone lazily below them, a wide green band. Some sunbathers were stretched out along the fishing weir, distant specks.

‘All right,’ said Giuli reluctantly. The story haunted her, its ugly meanings circling with menace, just out of reach. It could be anything: it could be hormones, chemicals cooking up their own stories in Flavia’s bloodstream, the baby sending out its own warning signals before it knew anything of the world it would enter.

‘There was nothing else?’ she said as they set off back down, almost as an afterthought. ‘Just the dream.’ As if the dream wasn’t enough.

Their steps crunched on the gravel, the increase in speed as they headed downhill lending a sense of urgency they hadn’t felt on the uphill climb. Faster, faster they went, chasing something down.

‘There was something else,’ said Wanda, and she stopped abruptly. ‘Actually, there was. Just a small thing.’

*

He would be angry, thought Chiara. The dress hung on the back of the wardrobe, like her pale peach ghost, crumpled, sweated in under the arms because she’d run in it, running in heels like trying to struggle out of a trap. He wouldn’t like that, either, he wanted her delicate and feminine. She wondered where the iron was: wondered if she should take the dress to the cleaner’s before he saw it. It didn’t feel like it was hers. He’d bought it for her.

She’d had to run: she couldn’t have stopped, couldn’t have talked to Luisa: one word and Luisa would have her skewered. She could deflect her own mother, who so desperately wanted to believe her child, but Luisa had always been able to ferret out the truth. Chiara remembered as a child sitting on her lap, Luisa’s firm hand on her heel as she extracted a splinter, straight in with the needle, ignoring Chiara’s squeal, her writhing: ruthless, focused. Then holding up the splinter: there.

He’d sat in the car waiting for her when she’d gone to get her stuff: she hadn’t asked him up and he hadn’t said he wanted to meet the family. He’d known her dad was in the Polizia di Stato – sometimes she wondered if everyone knew – and what kind of lover wanted to be subjected to that scrutiny?

What kind of lover.

Was he her lover? Not yet. And as she lay still on the bed a sweat broke on her again. She’d run across the river to get away from Luisa and, reaching the other side, hurrying for the bus stop, she’d glanced down a sidestreet and she’d seen him. Leaning into a car window as easy as you like, as if he’d known the person inside for ever. The woman looking up at him from the driver’s seat, sly and certain. He’ll leave me, thought Chiara suddenly. Unless I do the things he wants.

‘I’ll show you,’ he’d said.