Chapter Three

Roberto Falco had never photographed a dead woman. A dead ox once, yes, before it was spitted and roasted. A dead woman, no. She lay inside his camera, upside down and in miniature—only four inches by five—and he found it impossible to look away. As he stalked around the smashed body on the ground with his Graflex in his hands, winding the shutter cloth on its internal spools and popping up the viewfinder on the back, he was disgusted to find himself relieved that she wouldn’t move. He didn’t want her to spoil the shot.

It was only when he lowered the camera to change the film sheet and looked at the scene with his naked eye that the horror of it gripped his guts and he felt a wave of sorrow for the dead woman. She was spread-eagled on her front. Her head hung down several steps lower than her feet as she lay there in her black garments. Limbs snapped in fifty places. Bones poking up through flesh. Yet the fingers of one hand were curled in a tight fist as though she’d made one last desperate attempt to cling to life before she hit the steps.

There was blood. Of course there was blood. He dragged his eyes from her body, removed the film holder from the camera, and replaced it with another from his leather equipment case with practiced skill. His fingers worked smoothly despite the shakes. He craned back his head, squinting up at the milky-white tower, assessing the exposure he would need—most likely 1/20 second at f/16 and the Schneider wide-angle lens. The tall white building rose sharp and menacing against a backdrop of windswept sky, but as he stared at it the tower seemed to lean over the sad little scene at its foot, watching the people in the square below with satisfaction. Roberto took an instant dislike to it.

What made her do it?

A young woman, judging by the skin of her hands. Yet so eager to embrace death. Why would she do such violence to herself?

There must be someone who knew. Someone, somewhere, whose world would be rocked to its core by this supreme act of selfishness. In death he felt the force of her, and it filled the sun-drenched piazza in a way she could never have done in life. Roberto knelt and brushed his fingers against the unknown woman’s clenched hand, full of regret for a life thrown away.

“Falco! Get away from there,” a man’s voice snapped.

Roberto’s hand recoiled. Abruptly he became aware of people and sounds around him. A crowd had gathered on the steps, voices wailing: a woman sobbing quietly, a man on his knees praying, and others crossing themselves in the presence of death. The click of rosary beads started up.

“Falco! Give me that camera!”

Roberto turned to see a large fleshy man in a well-cut suit advancing on him, chest first, shoulders back, his broad shadow leaping ahead of him as if it couldn’t wait to get its hands on the camera. Signor Antonio Grassi, chairman of the local Fascist Party. Roberto rose to his feet with no intention whatever of giving up his camera. It would be like giving up a limb.

“Chairman Grassi,” he acknowledged with a cool nod of his head. “A tragic incident here on your own doorstep.”

Grassi’s arrogant brown eyes did not even glance at the woman on the steps as he held out his hand.

“Give me that camera,” he ordered again.

“I think not,” Roberto replied softly. This was not the moment for a shouting match over a camera. “The carabinieri need to be informed.”

“I am already here, signor fotografo.”

A uniformed figure, thin as a blade, stepped out from behind Grassi, and Roberto had to suppress a shudder at the sight of the dark blue uniform with silver braid on collar and cuffs, and the distinctive red stripe of the carabinieri police down the side of the trousers. The wide bicorn hat gave his head the look of a cobra as it flares its hood ready to strike.

“Hand over the camera to Chairman Grassi.”

“Colonnello Sepe, it’s not necessary. I am just doing my job as official fotografo of Bellina—taking photographs.”

Behind him police officers were beginning to push back the crowd to the bottom of the wide steps and take up positions like a dark blue wall around the body.

“Signor Falco, you are employed by me,” Chairman Grassi pointed out with irritation, “to record the creation of this new town. Not to take ghoulish pictures of death.” The volume of his voice was rising.

Roberto let his gaze fix once more on the black smear of life that had been ended on the steps of the Fascist headquarters. He was under no illusion as to why Chairman Grassi wanted no photographs of it. He flipped up the catches on his Graflex and, cursing under his breath, removed the film holder from the back of the camera and held it out at arm’s length to Grassi. The chairman took it from him and ripped it open, exposing the film on both sides to the light.

At that moment a tall man walked briskly through the crowd. He was dressed in a long winter coat and was carrying a medical bag. The doctor had arrived with that ineffable air of distinction that seemed to stick to members of the medical profession closer than their own shadow, but he was too late to be of the slightest use. Roberto’s eyes were drawn to the woman’s mane of untidy hair that still seemed to shimmer with life as the doctor knelt at her side.

He snapped shut his own equipment case and before Chairman Grassi thought to ask for possession of any of the other film holders in there, he moved away. The taste in his mouth was sour, and with a sudden change of direction he headed for the door to the tower.

Roberto stood in silence on top of the tower, his heart beating fast from the climb. Before him stretched the long narrow flatlands of the Pontine plain, bare and bleak, all vegetation uprooted. A few kilometers off to the west glinted the silvery ribbon of the Tyrrhenian Sea, while inland to the east of the plain rose the purple ridge of the Lepini mountains with the ancient trade route of the Appian Way.

A sluggish wind from the sea was stirring the air that hung heavy with dust over the town of Bellina. Though only thirty kilometers south of Rome, it was a barren and godforsaken place in Roberto’s opinion. Flat and lifeless, as well as too hot and humid in summer.

But he had to admire Mussolini’s audacity. His gross arrogance. His sheer strength of will in believing that he could succeed where Roman emperors, popes, and even Napoleon had failed before him. It was a mammoth task—to drain the malarial swamp that was the Pontine Marshes. The trouble was that the dunes along the coast lay at a higher level than the ground at the foot of the Lepini mountains to the east. This meant that the rivers that drained off the mountains had pooled and stagnated on the plain for centuries and turned it into an unhealthy mosquito-ridden marshland. Not only was Mussolini draining the marshes, but he was also replacing them with the construction of six perfect new towns on the reclaimed land. It took breathtaking hubris and yet Il Duce was succeeding against all the odds. Delegations flocked from all over the world to inspect this eighth engineering Wonder of the World, and Roberto was obliged to photograph each one of them who came.

Bellina was the first of the new towns to emerge from the swampy ground. God help the thousands of peasants who were being rounded up from the north, from Veneto, Friuli, and Ferrara, and shunted on trains down here to be cooped up in the little blue farmsteads like experimental mice in glass cages. They would be watched. Every move they made.

Roberto pictured the woman breathing in the dusty air, drawing it deep into her lungs, trying to calm her nerves as she stood on the tower. What made her jump? Had her spirit been torn out of her, the way the heart of the marshes had been torn from the land?

Not long ago this land had seethed with animal life, with wild boar sharpening their tusks on a dense forest of trees. Dangerous brigands used to hole up here for the winter, and shepherds brought their sheep and goats down from the mountains to graze during the winter months, when the mosquitoes were dormant. But for most of the year the swampy plain had been impenetrable because of the vast suffocating clouds of mosquitoes that infested the swamps, as black and vicious as the shadow of death itself.

They were anopheles mosquitoes. One bite and the bastards could pump tertian malaria into your blood and you’d be dead and buried within forty-eight hours. Or if you were really lucky, you’d get one of the slow kinds of malaria that crept up on you as silent and stealthy as a Medici assassin, with bouts of fever and an inexorable poisoning of the liver. The mosquitoes had to go, Mussolini was right about that. Il Duce was intent on dragging Italy to the forefront of modern Europe, hand over fist, whether it wanted it or not, and in his great Battle for Grain there was no room for this black plague.

The parapet of the tower was chest height, and Roberto ran his hand over the warm white marble edge. He pictured it, the woman hauling herself up on top of it, her feet scrabbling to find a toehold. Will it hurt? That thought must have stuck in her head, that question pounding against her skull as she balanced on the edge. Will the fall feel like forever?

Who was she? What had driven her to this?

Roberto flipped open his camera case, slipped a new film holder into the Graflex, and took his time focusing on the spot on the bare white wall where there were definite scuff marks. Then he looked down over the edge of the parapet and immediately wished he hadn’t. The drop was giddying. What kind of desperation did it take to leap off solid stone into nothingness?

An ambulance had pulled up at the base of the steps. Roberto snatched the Leica from his case—it was less unwieldy than the Graflex, though the picture quality was nothing like as sharp—and focused it on the scene below, where the body was being shuffled onto a stretcher. The church bell abruptly started to toll at the far end of the piazza, sounding slow and regretful, as a figure in loose black robes appeared on the steps of the church. It was a priest, standing in front of his plain and angular house of God. Even from this distance Roberto could feel the mood down below change as the priest’s shadow spread its arms in the shape of a cross and stretched out into the square.

“What the hell are you doing up here?”

Roberto swung round to find a burly middle-aged policeman behind him on top of the tower. “Taking photographs, of course. That’s what Chairman Grassi commissions me to do.”

“No one is allowed up here, Colonnello Sepe’s orders.”

The officer was beetroot red in the face, sweating and short of breath from the long climb up the tower steps. He glanced around at the ten-meter-square space with its bell house at the center, as if hoping for a chair to sit on. He removed his bicorn to cool his head but the sun slapped straight down on his bald patch, and the hat was rapidly replaced.

“There’s nothing here to see,” Roberto told him. “No sign of the woman. She’s left no imprint.”

“That’s for Colonnello Sepe to decide, not you.”

Roberto inclined his head. “Of course.” He had no wish to cause trouble.

“So clear off, fotografo.”

“I’m just packing up.”

He started to place the Leica back in his camera box, but to his surprise the policeman stumbled over to the far corner and vomited. He remained bent over, his chest heaving. Roberto abandoned his camera box, strode over, and placed a hand on the uniformed shoulder.

“Are you all right?”

A grunt and a spit of sulfurous bile, and then the man righted himself and wiped the back of his wrist across his mouth. His eyes looked anguished, but he shook off Roberto’s hand.

“I’m all right,” he muttered. “It’s just that I’ve never seen a woman’s body damaged like that before. She’s no older than my own daughter and the thought of anything like that happening . . .”

“Do they know who she is?”

“No.”

“No identification on her? No purse or . . . ?”

“Nothing.” The policeman shook his head weakly and propped himself against the parapet. “What the hell makes a person do such a thing?”

The question hung in the air high above the steps below.

“A desire to punish,” Roberto said softly, more to himself than to the police officer. “To punish herself or to punish someone else.”

“She’s beyond pain now.”

Roberto felt a need to get away from this place, so he picked up his camera box, hitching its strap over his shoulder, and headed for the steps.

“One thing,” he said briskly. “Tell Sepe to look at her right wrist.”

The policeman suddenly became a policeman again. “Why? What’s on it?”

“A scar.”

White. Shiny. The width of a flat knife blade.

“A burn,” he elaborated. “By the look of it, not recent.”

The policeman snorted. “Women are always burning themselves on the stove.”

Roberto shrugged and ducked into the cool silence within the tower. But as he hurried down the spiral steps, his left thumb could not keep from sweeping over the smooth shiny bar of skin inside his own right wrist.