The Drowning River (2 page)

That was unfair, clearly it was. He still saw his old comrades now and again in the city; they’d nod and exchange a word in the street; he thought they’d stand him a coffee if he ever found himself back in the bar on the
viale
they used to frequent. But what conversation would they have? ‘Sorry, mate’? The murky old Caffe Tramvai – there’d been trams running past the Porta al Prato once, before Sandro was
born – with its Formica tables and sixties décor, and the best
trippa alla fiorentina
in the city. He thought of those lunch-breaks now and again, when his guard was down; they would all crowd in there at twelve-thirty and stand eating the ragout out of little bowls, steaming, sweet, garlic and tomatoes and tender fragments of meat. But that friendly shared coffee was never going to happen, was it? Sandro had avoided the place like the plague since the day of his departure on a cold, dark January day nearly two years ago.

Sandro was no longer a police officer. At least, he considered gloomily, he had not been discharged, dishonourably or otherwise; at least he had been allowed early retirement. It had been more than a face-saver; it had meant he could work, because the opportunities for a disgraced policeman were limited. If there’d been any sympathy for his offence among his colleagues, Sandro didn’t seek it out; he didn’t want to be forgiven. The offence of relaying confidential information to the father of an abducted child.

The child’s disappearance had come at a bad time; if you believed in astrology, at some disastrous conjunction of planets, it had always been inevitable that further tragedy could only follow from it. It had been a long time ago, with Luisa the wrong side of forty, and the possibility that they would never have children of their own was turning to stone-dead certainty for both of them. The girl – nine years old – had disappeared from a crowded pool, her body found at a bend in a river in the Apennines a week later, caught in reeds.

No arrest had been made, though they’d had their suspect all right, and Sandro had kept in touch with the child’s father. Why? It was obvious why, people sometimes said to him, it was the human impulse, it was out of sympathy, but Sandro had offered no excuses at the disciplinary hearing; he had remained silent when they were asked of him. He had merely admitted that he had, yes, kept the bereaved, the now childless father, informed; had supplied him eventually with the name and whereabouts of the chief suspect in his daughter’s murder, with every scrap of information. And when, fifteen years later, the suspect – against whom no charges had ever been brought – was found murdered, the whole thing unravelled. Sandro had known immediately
that he was responsible for the paedophile’s death, whoever had in fact held the knife against his throat.

The dead man had been guilty, they knew that now, but it had still been wrong. One little breach in the rule of law and the whole thing comes apart at frightening speed; the murderer is murdered, and one of his victims ends up with blood on her own hands. And once you have lied to a man who trusts you, to your partner of more than a decade, you cannot be sure he will ever trust you again.

And that was how Sandro came to find himself adrift. But thirty years in the police leave their mark; it was too late for him to become anything else.

Pietro was still a friend, of course, his partner of thirteen years and as close to a marriage as you can get. Pietro still called at the apartment every other Thursday, religiously, to haul Sandro out for a drink, to talk about football and Fiorentina’s death plunge down through the divisions, a grumble about the new
commissario
seconded from Turin, nothing too close to the bone. They didn’t talk about Sandro’s disgrace, and though Sandro felt the warmth of Pietro’s sympathy he shied away from voicing his gratitude; it wasn’t the relationship he wanted.

Thirteen years in the same grubby fug of their allotted police vehicle, you get to know the smell of another man’s socks, his aftershave, what he eats for breakfast. How he takes his coffee.
Caffè alto,
for Pietro, down in one then another on its tail, to kickstart the day; there are some questions that don’t need asking, after thirteen years. Sometimes now, taking his coffee alone, Sandro had to close his eyes so as not to wish it all back again.

Perhaps Luisa had always been in charge. Sitting in the thin sunlight, eyes closed, Sandro felt curiously comforted as he mused on that possibility. Those long years of quiet unhappiness together during which each had shouldered his own burden – the lack of children, the ugliness of daily police work, the shrinking of expectations – Luisa had been in charge all along. Biding her time for the moment when her superior skills would be called for.

Over those four days in the Via del Leone he did come to the conclusion that Luisa knew what she was doing, all right. He’d come
with her to see the place, and he hadn’t seen its potential; if truth be told, he’d been downcast by it. Luisa had found out, through the usual mysterious means, that it was about to come on the market, a second-floor walk-up, two rooms and a tiny kitchen inhabited by an exhausted-looking elderly couple and their disabled daughter, who were about to be rehoused in ‘more suitable’ accommodation. That should have given him the hint; public housing was hard to come by, and the
comune
didn’t step in lightly. The disabled daughter turned out to be middle-aged, brain-damaged and quadriplegic since birth, parked in a tiny kitchen in a wheelchair. The apartment had no bathroom, a fact that did not dawn on Sandro until they left.

‘My God,’ he’d said in the street below, thinking of all those years carrying their helpless child up and down the stairs, while she turned into a middle-aged woman. Luisa had squeezed his hand. ‘It’s a sad place,’ she said. ‘I think that’s why they haven’t been able to find a tenant.’

That and the builder’s yard below the window, currently full of orange plastic tubing, maybe. But there was a sliver of a view of the back of Santa Maria dell’Carmine, if you were disposed to concentrate on that instead, on the frescoes inside that Sandro hadn’t seen since he was a boy, the Adam and Eve, Eve with her hand up to her mouth. These things all settled in his mind in those idle hours. He wondered where they were now, that couple and their ageing daughter, and whether they missed their view. Nonsense, Luisa would say briskly. Modern bathroom, ground-floor access, lifts and bars and all sorts after forty years hauling the grown child up two flights of stairs? Nonsense. It’ll make a good office, and they’re better off where they are.

Day two, just before lunch, Sandro found himself looking down into the street again; he saw the woman with her dog, and realized he was watching for the girl. Out of police habit, getting the lie of the land, or because she’d been pretty? He turned tail, unable to give himself the benefit of the doubt. She
had
been pretty.

Safely at the back of the building Sandro had spread his copy of
La Nazione
out on his desk and went through it as though that was his job, reading every story in the paper. He stared at the big stories first,
national news. Garbage collection in Naples, dioxins leaching into the food chain from toxic waste. A new book out on the Camorra, and a piece about Calabrian gangsters buying up property in Tuscany. His stomach felt sour and leaden; my country, he thought, staring at the page; there’d been a time when it had been his business. Out at Porta al Prato, buckling on his holster, slapping the peaked cap on his head, jostling out through the door with Pietro, they’d laughed bitterly at their dismal clean-up rate, at all the shit still out there waiting for them, but it hadn’t felt like this.

He worked his way down to local stuff: illegals employed on building the extension to the Uffizi; a hit and run on the
viale,
involving a child. A doctor found to be a member of a satanic cult drowned in Lake Trasimeno. Sandro worked his way right through to the end before he closed the paper, impotent.

In the afternoon Sandro went out into the street, so as to have something to tell Luisa when he got home. The food in the nearest bar was lousy; a stale roll and some dried-up ham, and the floor was dirty. It had turned chilly, too; after a brisk turn down to the Piazza Tasso and back – on the corner seven candles had been lit for the Virgin this afternoon; Sandro resolved to keep a proper eye out one day for the devout, his future informers – he hurried back to the flat, where the ancient radiators were clanking loudly to keep pace with the cold.

Climbing the draughty stairs Sandro had tried to imagine the place in July, when San Frediano, built for the street sweepers and humbler artisans, the carpenters and stonemasons, had the reputation for being a sun-bleached desert, without high stone facades and deep eaves to protect its inhabitants from the heat of the sun. Did people need private detectives in July?

And, as Sandro found himself reminded once again that that was what he was now, a private detective, he had to fight the urge to put his face in his hands, and groan.

There Were Hoardings Along the motorway out by the airport, advertising the agencies. A picture of a young man in a peaked cap, toting a holster, or a Pinkerton’s-style badge. A Discreet and Thorough Service, Any Investigation Undertaken. Financial, Personal, Professional. Experts in Surveillance. They had laughed at them, when Sandro was in the force, though the laughter had been uneasy. Some private detectives were borderline criminals themselves, and smart with it; some of them were close to conmen, some were lazy, some were stupid. But it was others – the
laureati
with their degrees in IT and control engineering: modern, computer-literate, hardworking – that inspired the unease, a kind of envy, in those embedded in the creaking old machinery of the state police.

Where was the room for someone like Sandro, a village idiot where computers were concerned, old school, a one-man band, among this lot? It was a shark tank, a snakepit. It had, of course, been Luisa’s idea.

‘You’re brilliant at your job,’ she said, to his silence. ‘You’ve got the basics on computers.’ True enough; he might be old school, but even the Polizia Statale had been computerized. ‘You speak a bit of English.’ Sandro grunted at this. His English had hardly been honed to perfection during twenty years of taking down notes from tourists
on their stolen purses, struggling to interpret a dozen different accents, Louisiana, Liverpool, London. ‘I could help you with that, anyway,’ Luisa said, thoughtfully.

Sandro had made an effort, asking mildly, ‘Do you really think there’s a – what d’you call it, a market? For a one-man operation?’

Head on one side, Luisa said firmly, ‘Yes, I do.’ He waited. ‘Look,’ she said earnestly. ‘The old ladies.’ Them again. ‘The – I don’t know, the grannies, the individuals, I’m not talking about big corporations,
caro,
though I suppose there’s money in that and I don’t see why. . .’ But seeing his face at the thought of selling his services in some boardroom somewhere, she changed tack, frowning. ‘Real people, little people, who can’t get anywhere in the system.’ Despite himself, Sandro had nodded at that. There were such people.

She leaned forward, encouraged. ‘And the foreigners. Not maybe tourists, they’re only here a couple of days, a week at most. But the ones who live here, the ones who would like to live here? The expats?’

Sandro’s shoulders dipped again. ‘What would they need a private detective for?’ he said. ‘Don’t be daft.’ And almost immediately regretted it. Luisa was on her feet then, striding round the kitchen table, her little heels clicking on the
pavimento.
She had just come in from work, still wearing what he thought of as her uniform. Had she been thinking about this all day on the shop floor? She’d barely taken her coat off, she was so fired up.

‘You have no idea, Sandro,’ she said. ‘No idea at all.’ She had raised her voice without thinking; Sandro glanced at the window, open in the September heat, and that seemed to annoy her even more. ‘For example,’ she said, holding up a finger to get his attention, ‘a client came into the shop, a very nice old lady, English, has lived here for years. Fifteen years at least. Her landlord is saying things about her because he wants her out of the flat. He accuses her of subletting her rooms, he is tampering with her heating to freeze her out. He refuses to carry out renovations. She is helpless.’ Shamed, Sandro chewed his lip. Of course, these things happened. But a private detective?

‘Any number of divorce cases, infidelities,’ Luisa went on hurriedly, knowing this would not appeal to Sandro. ‘A couple who were sold a
house in the Chianti with six hectares only to discover none of the land belonged to the seller, and it was too late to recover their deposit? Two hundred thousand euro?’ That was the deposit? Sandro’s eyes popped at the figure.

‘Don’t you see?’ she said, taking his hands in hers. ‘They get married, they buy property, they start a business, just like us. They need help more than us, they don’t know the system. You could advertise, in the free papers, the little magazines for foreigners. And for locals, in
La Pulce,
that kind of thing. You don’t even have to call yourself a private detective, if you don’t want.’

Sandro studied their hands together on the table, Luisa’s pale and puckered with washing, clean, short nails, her plain gold wedding ring. He should have bought her an engagement ring, shouldn’t he? But they had never had the money. He thought about what she had said. A niche, that was what she was talking about, and he had to admit, he didn’t object to the word. And, as Luisa was too kind to say out loud, what else was he going to do?

Taking a deep breath and without knowing if it was true, Sandro said, ‘I don’t mind that. It says what it means, doesn’t it? I don’t mind being a private detective.’

First thing on day three, Giulietta Sarto turned up, like a bad penny, he thought with something like affection. ‘Oi,’ she shouted into the intercom. ‘Only me.’

She was looking better these days, though Giulietta could hardly have looked worse than she had two years ago when, emaciated from living on the streets, she’d stabbed her abuser and so played her part in the story that had ended with Sandro losing his job. She’d been placed in custody, of course, and put through the mill, but they’d got her off on mental health grounds, then Luisa had taken an interest. Giulietta had put on some weight and was living in public housing, Sandro dimly remembered, not far from here. San Frediano, he thought gloomily as he heard her quick footsteps on the stairs, public housing and old ladies. It’s not going to pay for Luisa’s engagement ring.